Latest / The Death Of Journalism / Episode One Hundred: Lightning Strikes

Transcript

Episode One Hundred: Lightning Strikes · The Death Of Journalism

• 0:00
  Welcome to episode number one hundred of the Death of Journalism podcast. My name
• 0:04
  is John Zigler. I'm your host on today's show. We celebrate our one
• 0:09
  hundredth episode with a major update on where this podcast is going and not going,
• 0:15
  and I answer your questions for ask John anything. I'm known as the
• 0:20
  Dutch Digital marketing Man. I'm a digital advertising SEO and email marketing specialist that
• 0:27
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• 0:31
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• 0:40
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• 0:45
  your story. The website is the Dutch Digital Marketingman dot com. If you
• 0:51
  want to grow your business, Peter can help. That's the Dutch Digital Marketingman
• 0:56
  dot com. And hey, thanks for sponsoring the show. A normal episode
• 1:00
  of the Death of Journalism podcasts, we would be talking extensively about the remarkable
• 1:04
  development in the House of Representatives, where, against my most recent predictions,
• 1:11
  the Republicans have somehow finally found a way to get a candidate for Speaker of
• 1:15
  the House to get two hundred and seventeen votes. His name is Mike Johnson.
• 1:21
  He's the fourth Republican who was named as the guy, and he finally
• 1:26
  got across the finish line, much to my surprise. I know basically nothing
• 1:32
  about Mike Johnson at this taping, other than the fact that he got a
• 1:37
  tepid endorsement from Donald Trump. He's definitely a maga guy, a name like
• 1:41
  Mike Johnson and no apparent scandals to his name. That's about as generic as
• 1:47
  you can possibly get. He's a white male, and so I guess it
• 1:51
  seems like the Republican caucus finally decided that enough was enough and this is the
• 1:56
  best we're going to do. I'm stunned that rationality finally one out, But
• 2:00
  based upon what I currently know, this is a good development because it ends
• 2:05
  this issue at least for now. Of course, with only a five vote
• 2:08
  majority, Johnson can be ousted at basically any time if the same eight assholes
• 2:14
  who ousted Kevin McCarthy decide to do the same thing to Mike Johnson. So
• 2:17
  we'll see what happens. But as of right now, we have a speaker
• 2:22
  of the house. I'll have further analysis of that in the next episode of
• 2:25
  the podcast. Because this episode is a special episode, this is episode number
• 2:30
  one hundred. It's also basically our one year anniversary. So we're going to
• 2:35
  be doing things a little bit differently in this edition of the podcast. And
• 2:38
  so as we hit the one year mark, which is basically where we are
• 2:44
  with the Death of Journalism podcast and because I have been hinting for quite a
• 2:47
  while that there's going to be a major change in the future of this podcast,
• 2:53
  I want to start off this episode by addressing this very directly and very
• 3:00
  clearly, and then get to answering your questions for ask John anything. So
• 3:05
  this will be a very different kind of episode of the Death of Journalism Podcasts.
• 3:09
  And let me preface all this by saying that I fully acknowledge that very
• 3:15
  few people really give a damn about the future of this podcast. We have
• 3:17
  a very nice, loyal audience that I think is very intelligent and has been
• 3:23
  very supportive. But I am in no way, shape or formed delusional about
• 3:30
  the significance of this podcast. In fact, I think the most important element
• 3:35
  of what I'm going to tell you, they're basically two one is I think
• 3:38
  a lot of this is emblematic of larger realities of our media and the state
• 3:43
  of our country. But also because as is often the case on this podcast,
• 3:47
  I'm going to at least tease an amazing story that I've never told before.
• 3:53
  Now, I'm not going to be able to get into all the details,
• 3:54
  even close to all the details. I will hope to do that at
• 3:58
  a later date on this podcast, but it's a blow your mind kind of
• 4:02
  story that has really had a very significant impact on my life over the last
• 4:06
  couple of years and absolutely has an impact over the future of this podcast.
• 4:13
  So let me start this analysis of the podcast itself as we do some navel
• 4:18
  gazing and basically outline this as by saying that there are three major factors in
• 4:27
  what goes into this podcast and our plans for it and whether or not it's
• 4:31
  going to continue and how it's going to continue into the future. The first
• 4:36
  is the state of the country and the world. Because I'm someone who is
• 4:43
  motivated by different things than most people in the media industry. I'm a truth
• 4:46
  guy. I'm not motivated by money. My wife is very, very frustrated
• 4:53
  by this. I am someone who very much cares about the future of the
• 5:00
  country, largely for my two children, but also because I have lived most
• 5:04
  of my life loving this country very very much, and I fear for its
• 5:10
  future and I want to do anything I possibly can, even the little bit
• 5:14
  that I can, to try to help save it from what seems to be
• 5:18
  its imminent destruction. And I do believe that the country is going to be
• 5:24
  imminently destroyed. I was not kidding when I started this podcast along with Lizabebe
• 5:31
  back a year ago in two thousand and two, when I said that the
• 5:36
  future of the country really depends on whether or not Rond de Santis runs for
• 5:41
  president and can beat Donald Trump for the Republican nomination. That wasn't just something
• 5:46
  I said. Now, I really believe that, not that Rond de Santis
• 5:50
  is perfect, but Trump needed to be defeated. The country cannot survive another
• 5:57
  Trump Biden election, a rematch that nobody wants. It cannot, not,
• 6:03
  at least not in the way that we've always thought of the country. And
• 6:09
  I was very sincere when I said that about the Santas and unfortunately months ago
• 6:15
  I predicted and basically called the race that it's over. There's barring death on
• 6:19
  Trump's part or physical imprisonment, Donald Trump's going to be the Republican nominee.
• 6:26
  It's not going to be Rhonda Santis. And so that has left me with
• 6:30
  a very big problem because I don't see a path. I don't see a
• 6:36
  path that's viable for the country in the long run. Now what that means,
• 6:43
  I don't know. I don't know how this is going to go down.
• 6:46
  Exactly when it's going to go down, I don't know. I've used
• 6:50
  the nine to eleven Twin Towers analogy before, where I kind of think that
• 6:57
  this is the state of the country right now. We are on nine to
• 7:00
  eleven and both towers have been hit. The first tower was hit by trump
• 7:06
  Ism and COVID, and then the second tower got hit with wokeism and equity.
• 7:15
  That's over simplification, but you know that I think is a pretty good
• 7:19
  analogy. And a lot of people still aren't fully realizing the magnitude of what
• 7:26
  has happened. Some are, but not nearly enough. And from my perspective
• 7:31
  here in California, where I think I see it more clearly because these things
• 7:35
  are happening faster and sooner and more dramatically in California. I'm looking at those
• 7:42
  two towers kind of as I did on September eleventh, and it was obvious
• 7:46
  to me they were coming down. Now, I didn't know when they were
• 7:47
  coming down and what that would look like when they did come down, But
• 7:53
  they're coming down. And that's the way I feel about the country right now.
• 7:57
  Those towers are coming down. I don't know when. I don't know
• 8:01
  what's exactly, what it's going to look like, what's going to provoke it.
• 8:05
  You know. I'm still trying to hold out some semblance of hope,
• 8:09
  but I don't see much of it. I really don't. And so that's
• 8:16
  kind of my state of the country as I look at it from the standpoint
• 8:20
  of all right, well, why am I commentating twice a week for two
• 8:24
  hours each episode on the state of journalism? Well, because I think the
• 8:30
  state of journalism is critical to trying to salvage the country. I think a
• 8:35
  large part of why we are in such a precarious position in this country is
• 8:39
  because journalism died, because the truth is no longer paramount. We are no
• 8:43
  longer a country where truth is the coin of the realm, and in fact,
• 8:50
  lies often are far more lucrative and far more popular than the truth is.
• 8:56
  In fact, almost always that is the case, and an unpopular truth
• 9:01
  has no chance against a popular lie, and that has become exaggerated in this
• 9:07
  modern media environment where journalism is dead. And so that's kind of been my
• 9:13
  passion. It's also my expertise having been in various elements of the news media
• 9:18
  for decades. No one knows the ins and outs of this business from more
• 9:24
  different directions and angles than I do. I've lived every part of this.
• 9:31
  I've done almost everything there is to do in some way, shape or form
• 9:35
  when it comes to the media, and I know a lot of these people.
• 9:39
  I've dealt with them, usually from a position of lacking leverage, which
• 9:43
  is when you're really going to find out about who people really are. And
• 9:46
  so I have a unique perspective and a unique insight into these issues, and
• 9:54
  obviously I have a great passion for them, but I also reach a point
• 9:58
  where I think, what the hell's the What is the purpose of this?
• 10:03
  What am I doing? There's nothing I could do about this. Even if
• 10:05
  this was the most popular podcast in the world, which it's clearly not.
• 10:11
  What can anybody really do? And I'm not suggesting that I would have to
• 10:15
  be in a position to be able to fix it for me to continue doing
• 10:18
  what I'm doing, but I would like there to at least be some semblance
• 10:22
  of hope and that this was at least in some way, shape or form
• 10:26
  fixable, and that I could participate in fixing that. And it's really really
• 10:33
  difficult to make that argument, very difficult. And I'm also to the point
• 10:39
  now where I even wonder, and I haven't come to this conclusion, but
• 10:43
  I even wonder is it even worth it to try to salvage this, Not
• 10:46
  just because it's a hopeless battle, but I got to tell you, there's
• 10:52
  not a whole lot I really love about this country anymore. I mean,
• 10:56
  I grew up as a massive patriot, and until I was the most patriotic
• 11:01
  person I know, like I mean, or at least among them, and
• 11:05
  post COVID, I now kind of think of this country as largely a fraud.
• 11:11
  That we're not what we pretended to be. We're not what we thought
• 11:13
  we were. Maybe we never were, and we're not you know, we
• 11:18
  don't care about freedom and liberty and bravery and all the things that we claim
• 11:24
  to be in our national anthem and in all our founding documents. We're not
• 11:28
  that country. Maybe we weren't ever, I don't know. That's still something
• 11:31
  I'm curious about figuring out. But we're certainly not now. And we don't
• 11:37
  believe in equality. We're now a country of equity, A quality of opportunity
• 11:41
  has lost, equity of outcome is now overtaking it, largely thanks to the
• 11:46
  news media. And you know, we believe in all sorts of discrimination now,
• 11:50
  which I never thought we would ever believe in as a country. And
• 11:54
  I can't stand our culture. I mean, our culture is more broken,
• 11:58
  maybe even in our government is. And so there's nothing to love about this
• 12:03
  country's culture. And so, you know, while I would do anything to
• 12:09
  try to save what I thought America was, it's becoming more and more difficult
• 12:13
  for me to look at what's going, what's happening, and what I see
• 12:16
  happening, not just here in California but around the United States of America and
• 12:20
  go, you know what, that's worth doing everything you possibly can, suffering
• 12:26
  as much as you have to in order to try to do anything to save
• 12:31
  it. I question that I'm not one hundred percent there yet, But I
• 12:35
  greatly question that, and I think things are only going to get worse in
• 12:41
  twenty twenty four, especially when it comes to the issue of commentating on the
• 12:46
  news of the day. I dread twenty twenty four in a huge way because
• 12:54
  unless I'm catastrophically wrong, which I would be thrilled to be, Donald Trump
• 13:00
  and Joe Biden in all likelihood, or maybe even worse, Gavin Newsom are
• 13:03
  going to be running for president, and we're going to have a war in
• 13:09
  the Middle East, and two horrible candidates running for president, and probably a
• 13:15
  nutty third party candidate and Robert Kennedy Junior. I mean, this is going
• 13:20
  to be the worst combination of candidates you could possibly ever have. We're coming
• 13:24
  off an election that thirty percent of the country thinks was rigged or fixed or
• 13:30
  stolen. We're not even to have debates. We're gonna have Trump undergoing multiple
• 13:37
  criminal cases, all of which have merit at least to some degree, and
• 13:41
  all of which are shady politically at least to some degree. You're gonna have
• 13:46
  impeachment inquiries if the Republicans ever find a new speaker into Joe Biden regarding corruption
• 13:54
  allegations, which are credible but not proven. It's all gonna be so murky.
• 14:00
  It's all just going to be incredibly depressing. There's going to be no
• 14:05
  good guys, only bad guys. There's no going to be no good resolutions,
• 14:09
  no even theoretical path to something good happening. And in my mind,
• 14:16
  I dread twenty twenty four. I really do. I don't want to deal
• 14:20
  with twenty twenty four in the way that it is shaping up in any way,
• 14:24
  shape or form, but I would. I would absolutely do so if
• 14:30
  the situation made sense for me personally, that I felt like I was having
• 14:35
  any even semblance of an impact, or if it made sense in my own
• 14:39
  personal life, you know, if it made my life more bearable or my
• 14:46
  career more viable, or even if it was just appreciated by enough people that
• 14:54
  it made some semblance of sense that there was some positive to it, there
• 15:00
  was a net positive to it. Doesn't even have to be a big net
• 15:03
  positive, just any net positive. I would endure all that. I am
• 15:07
  very good at enduring torture. I am married with two young daughters, basically
• 15:13
  unemployed, so I am very good at enduring torture. I've done it many
• 15:18
  times in my life in my career, if there is a good cause to
• 15:24
  do it, a good enough cause to warrant enduring the torture, and if
• 15:28
  there's an end date for the torture, I'm really good at that. You
• 15:31
  give me an end date for the torture, and give me a purpose for
• 15:33
  the torture. I can take just about anything. I'm a big boy.
• 15:39
  You take away the purpose and the end date, and it becomes very,
• 15:41
  very difficult for me to rationalize, Okay, why exactly am I doing that.
• 15:48
  So that's the state of the world as it relates in the country,
• 15:52
  as it relates to the podcast. Obviously, the content is out there to
• 15:58
  do this podcast anything. One of my biggest surprises in doing this podcast for
• 16:03
  two hours an episode twice a week is that there's always more than enough content,
• 16:10
  even during allegedly slow news periods. This issue is so large and so
• 16:15
  rich that that's never a problem. And when it comes to this podcast itself,
• 16:19
  I would say that the content that we have done over the last year
• 16:25
  has been outstanding. Especially if you knew the very meager resources we have and
• 16:32
  the circumstances under which we do this podcast, you would really I think be
• 16:37
  impressed by how excellent the content is. The content is even better than I
• 16:41
  had hoped. I think that we have done some of my best work in
• 16:45
  my entire career in the last year. It has been to absolutely no benefit
• 16:52
  to the podcast because we live in a world we're telling uncomfortable truths, especially
• 16:57
  before people are prepared for them. Is actually countered to the goal of gaining
• 17:03
  a large enough audience to be economically viable. That's one of the many,
• 17:07
  many problems, ironically enough, with journalism itself in this day and age.
• 17:12
  But the content here has been great, and I thank our producer, Mike
• 17:17
  Gagavino for putting this all together and promoting it and supporting it and being our
• 17:25
  editor and funding it to a large degree. He's been very supportive during this
• 17:30
  entire process. I also thank Lizabebe. Now we go back to when this
• 17:36
  all began a year ago. Lizabebe was my co host, and I never
• 17:41
  wanted to do this alone. That was never my intent. The idea of
• 17:45
  talking to myself in episodes where we don't have guests for two hours into a
• 17:52
  microphone in front of a computer does not appeal to me. I had obviously
• 17:57
  done with the benefit of Heindz site with Lizabebe. That was an extraordinary experience
• 18:03
  and very very positive, and we worked really well together. We've known each
• 18:07
  other on and off for over thirty years. You know, we'll may even
• 18:11
  know each other too well in some ways, but at its best, our
• 18:15
  chemistry is fantastic. And I was hopeful that Liz and I would be able
• 18:22
  to do this long term, unfortunately partially because of scheduling and logistics and technical
• 18:29
  issues. I mean, the platform I do this podcast on is really not
• 18:33
  built for two people in different locations to do a podcast together. They can
• 18:41
  do an interview together where one person asks a question, they stop, the
• 18:45
  other person answers, they stop. That works okay on this particular platform,
• 18:51
  but Liz and I like to interrupt each other and that just doesn't work on
• 18:56
  this platform. And then there were some philosophical issues as well, which Liz
• 19:00
  and I have talked about publicly, which just prevented that from going on much
• 19:06
  longer than it did, which was only a few months. And so when
• 19:11
  that didn't work out, I was still hopeful that we would find another co
• 19:15
  host, and there was some talk about that, but it never got very
• 19:19
  serious. And it never came to fruition, so that left me doing this
• 19:26
  alone, which, by the way, some people like I having nothing to
• 19:29
  do with Liz. I think they just like the simplicity of it and not
• 19:33
  having people talk over each other and when one person does it, especially the
• 19:38
  way my brain works, you know, I can see exactly where I want
• 19:42
  to go for two hours, and there seems to be more clarity, and
• 19:48
  we don't get sidetracked. It's inherent when you have two people, you're going
• 19:51
  to get sidetracked. With one person, it's generally you're able to stay on
• 19:56
  the on the tracks, and so you know, from a content stampo,
• 20:00
  apparently there's some good element of that. Although I can't imagine that it's not
• 20:03
  better to have a second voice, I know from my standpoint it's it's better
• 20:07
  to actually be speaking to someone, play off with someone. It's a lot
• 20:11
  easier to be funny that way. I can assure you that, and also
• 20:15
  it's it's just more interesting. But okay, it is what it is.
• 20:21
  You know, I'm able to do it. I think I do a pretty
• 20:23
  good job of it. I mean, I have to say, you know,
• 20:26
  in my defense, you know, people need to understand. You need
• 20:32
  to understand. But if you care at all about this podcast, you will
• 20:34
  be interested to know that the way I do this is, to my knowledge,
• 20:41
  truly unique. What I do is I get in front of a microphone
• 20:45
  and for basically two hours twice a week, with one sheet of paper with
• 20:52
  just subjects on it, just subjects, not even anything more detailed than that,
• 20:57
  just subjects. So it's you know, basically a dozen or so different
• 21:03
  bullet points. I start talking and generally there's only a handful of edits before
• 21:12
  the final product that you hear on the podcast. Now, to my knowledge,
• 21:18
  that's unheard of. That's that's not the way podcasts are done. Now,
• 21:22
  there are advantages to this. One of the advantages is that it's much
• 21:26
  easier from a reduction standpoint. It doesn't take nearly as long. There's not
• 21:30
  you know, stops and starts, And I think that it also helps the
• 21:36
  continuity of the thought process we even leave in where I screw up and make
• 21:41
  mistakes and try to correct myself for authenticity's sake and what have you. Now
• 21:49
  that's the positive of it. The fact that I can do that and usually
• 21:53
  do it in a coherent fashion, is you know it's a skill. It's
• 21:59
  not a skill, well it apparently hasn't be any value, but it's a
• 22:02
  skill. But the downside is that takes an enormous amount of preparation and concentration.
• 22:12
  It is personally extremely grueling. It is grueling, and again I don't
• 22:19
  care about the grueling part. I will take that every day of the week
• 22:23
  if there's some reason for what I'm doing. But I also have to acknowledge
• 22:29
  that it is depressing because in order to do the preparation, I have to
• 22:36
  immerse myself in the news of the day, usually by being on Twitter and
• 22:41
  TikTok constantly, in a fashion that because of the nature of the news and
• 22:47
  the nature of the news media, it really gets me down. Not in
• 22:52
  a clinical fashion. I actually mentally think I'm in great shape right now what
• 22:56
  I've endured. When you're gonna hear what I've endured over the last year or
• 23:00
  two, I can endure just about anything. Mentally, that's not the issue.
• 23:04
  It's just the normal moraise of malaise. Say I made a mistake.
• 23:11
  There, normal malaise of having to deal with all this insanity and knowing that
• 23:19
  there's no way to correct it. Other than you know on my little podcast.
• 23:26
  That definitely gets me down that there's a stress involved with that, and
• 23:30
  there's no other way to do that. You can't avoid that because if I
• 23:36
  don't immerse myself, since I don't have a show producer and I don't have
• 23:41
  a co host, if I don't immerse myself to that degree, there's no
• 23:47
  way the podcast can continue its high standard of content. I have a very
• 23:52
  very high standard of content, and I can't do that without total immersion within
• 23:59
  the new use. So the preparation is depressing and the actual presentation of the
• 24:07
  podcast is grueling as hell. When I am done with a podcast, I
• 24:14
  am mentally and sometimes even physically fried, completely fried, and it impacts me
• 24:22
  really for at least the rest of the day in a way that can have
• 24:26
  negative consequences in a lot of different areas of life. But again that's you
• 24:32
  know what, that's life. There are things that are difficult. Anything worth
• 24:37
  doing is difficult to do. And again I am personally more than capable of
• 24:42
  doing that and enduring that if there is a good reason to do so.
• 24:49
  So in this situation, most of the time in which I do the podcast,
• 24:56
  it is personally very painful. I mean it is painful. I mean
• 25:03
  sometimes stick a needle in your eye painful from a mental or psychological standpoint.
• 25:10
  That's how intense my level of concentration has to be in order to be able
• 25:15
  to pull this off in the way that I do it. And unfortunately,
• 25:21
  there's basically zero reward. Now I'm not looking for a huge reward, but
• 25:26
  there's basically zero reward. I mean, you know from a I don't do
• 25:30
  any of this for attention. But the only real feedback I ever get from
• 25:37
  the various sources that provide feedback for this are criticisms. You know, I'm
• 25:42
  the one mistake I made or the name I mispronounced, which I'm sure I
• 25:45
  do all the time. That's what people notice and point out. And so
• 25:52
  you know, all I get is negative. Almost only all I get is
• 25:56
  negative response to the podcast itself, or I pissed somebody off with a take
• 26:03
  that they don't like, or the Santist people get upset because I'm telling them
• 26:07
  the truth that they're not going to beat Trump. And I turn out to
• 26:11
  be right time and time again, and no one gives a damn that I'm
• 26:15
  right. They only criticize me for basically being a trader, I guess to
• 26:21
  the cause, and so all I'm doing is getting criticism, and I'm increasing
• 26:26
  the chances that I'm going to get in a fight with my wife or my
• 26:30
  kids or whatever somebody else due to exhaustion and irritation. But again, I
• 26:37
  could deal with that. There are other ways in which you get reward here.
• 26:42
  One of them in an ideal world, is that there's some financial reward
• 26:48
  for what you're doing. Now. Finances, as I've mentioned, are never
• 26:51
  been a big priority for me, although I have to say with the inflation
• 26:56
  the way that it has been over the last couple of years, it's much
• 26:57
  more of a priority than it used to be. My wife works, She's
• 27:02
  the primary breadwinner in our house, but our expenses, like everybody else,
• 27:07
  have gone through the roof in the last couple of years. And now you
• 27:11
  know, I have basically miscalculated where I thought we would need to be in
• 27:17
  order to maintain our standard of living. And you know, the situation with
• 27:22
  his podcast is I make very little money from this podcast. Mike Ggavino,
• 27:27
  our producer, is actually losing money on this podcast, not a lot,
• 27:32
  and he's more than willing to endure that, which I appreciate, I don't
• 27:37
  fully understand, but I appreciate. And it's not a lot because our expenses
• 27:41
  are are very low. But the financial aspect of this podcast has not been
• 27:48
  nearly as successful as was anticipated or what I was indicated would be the case.
• 27:55
  And it's not all because of the nature of the audience. Again,
• 28:00
  sature of the audience is pretty much as I expected that it would be.
• 28:03
  But the nature of podcasting, and it's becoming more and more the case is
• 28:08
  really feast or famine. I mean, if you're in one of the very
• 28:11
  top podcasts, you're making boatloads of money. If you're not, you make
• 28:18
  nothing, basically, And that's the vast, vast, vast majority of podcasts,
• 28:23
  and that's where we are now. You know, the reality of life
• 28:29
  is you got to earn it. And the way you earn it in a
• 28:32
  podcast generally, unless you're a massive celebrity where you're going to have huge promotion
• 28:40
  and you're with a major podcast company, you need some sort of a lightning
• 28:44
  strike. You need something to happen in order to facilitate your podcast becoming large
• 28:51
  enough to be quote unquote successful from a financial perspective. Well, that is
• 28:57
  particularly difficult in my situation because I have a unique history. I have like
• 29:07
  basically the worst history you can possibly have when it comes to hoping for a
• 29:12
  lightning strike to your podcast, because I've always been controversial. I've always been
• 29:19
  contrarian. I am not a celebrity. I am not part of a cult,
• 29:26
  which is a huge problem, especially politically in this day and age.
• 29:30
  You have to be part of some semblance of a cult if you're not a
• 29:36
  huge celebrity. So basically I have strikes in every possible direction here. Not
• 29:44
  a celebrity, not part of a cult, you know, and as somebody
• 29:48
  who you know is also very, very toxic personally. Now I'm not in
• 29:55
  real life, but that's the perception of me. And the biggest detriment to
• 30:00
  this effort is clearly the fact that when anyone finds out anything about me,
• 30:07
  what they immediately find out is that I am the most well known Joe Paterno
• 30:12
  and Jerry Sandusky supporter that there is. And obviously this is how we ended
• 30:19
  up with the podcast with the benefit of hindsight, and I fully understood when
• 30:25
  I got deeply, deeply immersed into the Penn State, Joe Paterno Jerry Sandusky
• 30:30
  story, that this was going to have massive implications for my career. In
• 30:37
  fact, when I transitioned, if you will, from not just defending Joe
• 30:42
  Paterno, but to defending publicly Jerry Sandusky in the spring of twenty fourteen,
• 30:48
  and when on The Today Show with Dottie Sandusky in an interview at the Sandusky
• 30:53
  home with NBC then Today's Show host Matt Lower, I realized that that was
• 31:00
  it for me. In fact, Matt, who bizarrely is now a good
• 31:03
  friend of mine, very politely declared on the Today Show that my career would
• 31:08
  be over because of this. That's not exactly what he said, but that
• 31:11
  was the clear implication, and I fully understood what he was saying at the
• 31:17
  time, because I think I even suggested that to him, and because that
• 31:22
  was the reality. I mean, I was taking an incredibly unpopular and toxic
• 31:26
  position, a position that I know with one hundred percent certainty was both morally
• 31:34
  and factually correct, and that in a rational world would be worthy of praise.
• 31:41
  But we live in the upside down world now, where rationality and truth
• 31:47
  don't matter, and instead I am painted forever with the toxicity of somehow being
• 31:56
  a truther, a Penn State truther, or a pedophile enabler or some other
• 32:02
  bullshit that is not accurate, and in fact it's the opposite of the truth.
• 32:08
  But perception is reality, and I knew full well what I was getting
• 32:15
  myself into. Now I will say that I thought and in retrospect, and
• 32:22
  I've thought about this a lot. Obviously I knew that that was by far
• 32:25
  the most likely scenario this would effectively end my career. But I think at
• 32:31
  the time I thought, I talk about a lot, how the only time
• 32:37
  I'm ever wrong is when I'm overly optimistic about things, and I was probably
• 32:42
  even as pessimistic as I was, I was probably a little overly optimistic thinking
• 32:47
  that there was at least I don't know, five percent chance that somehow the
• 32:52
  Sandusky matter was going to be fixed. And eventually I realized that that was
• 32:58
  a greatly overly optimistic projection, that the circumstances were such that that was never
• 33:06
  going to happen. And in fact, if you if you're a listener to
• 33:08
  the With the Benefit of Hindsight podcast, you know I said, at least
• 33:13
  on one or two occasions that one of the most demoralizing elements of my evolution
• 33:19
  on the Sandovsky case was I even came to believe, and still believe to
• 33:22
  this day, that even if the miracle of all miracles happened and Jerry Sandowski
• 33:30
  got exonerated, right, which would you would think in a remotely sensible world,
• 33:34
  would mean that, you know, I would be vindicated and elevated,
• 33:37
  and my career would be fundamentally changed, and I'd have all sorts of opportunities.
• 33:43
  I have come to the conclusion that no, that's not what would happen
• 33:46
  at all. Number One, somebody else would jump in and take the credit.
• 33:52
  And two, I would probably be more likely to get blamed than credit,
• 33:58
  because they would the media would need a scapegoat for why they weren't listening
• 34:01
  to the truth. And what they would do is they would say, you
• 34:05
  know, that Ziggler guy, if he just hadn't been such a nutjob,
• 34:07
  or if you had been nicer about it, or if he had been a
• 34:09
  celebrity, then you know, maybe we would have listened to him, or
• 34:14
  we would have listened to him. It wasn't our fault. It was Ziggler's
• 34:15
  fault. And I'm being totally serious about that. And so I realized long
• 34:22
  ago that there was no hope on that front, that my career was dead
• 34:28
  from that standpoint, and I will fully acknowledge that. Knowing that made my
• 34:36
  position on Donald Trump far easier. I have never tried to claim any sort
• 34:43
  of great courage when it came to being ardently anti Trump, you know,
• 34:52
  consistently from twenty fifteen to today. Now, I do think I deserve a
• 34:55
  little bit of credit for my consistency, because there were opportunities to sell out,
• 35:00
  and I also have defended him when he deserved to be defended. So
• 35:04
  my record on Trump, I think, is fantastic. I have zero regrets
• 35:08
  on anything that I have ever done regarding Donald Trump. However, when twenty
• 35:15
  fifteen twenty sixteen came around and I was hosting a nationally syndicated, at least
• 35:20
  partially nationally syndicated weekend talk show, it was a lot easier for me.
• 35:25
  Knowing the nature of my career and how damaged it was by the Sandusky matter,
• 35:30
  I had a lot less to lose by taking the principal position on Donald
• 35:36
  Trump. Now, it wasn't remotely contrived, It's what I really believed,
• 35:39
  But I didn't have the same economic pressures as other people did, because I
• 35:45
  had less to lose, and so I have been consistent in my position on
• 35:52
  Donald Trump, defending him when he deserved it, but by and large being
• 35:58
  very anti Trump, never having voted for him, never having supported him in
• 36:01
  any way, shape or form. And that has massive consequences as we go
• 36:07
  into twenty twenty four, because once again Trump is going to be the Republican
• 36:10
  presidential nominee, barring death or barring physical imprisonment, which once again puts me
• 36:17
  in a very toxic position as a conservative libertarian. And so that's the state
• 36:24
  of the podcast. And when it comes to this lightning strike that would need
• 36:31
  to happen on this podcast to make it successful, it makes that very very
• 36:37
  difficult, if not impossible, almost statistically impossible, because there really were only,
• 36:45
  in my mind two possibilities. Either Sandusky somehow gets vindicated, right,
• 36:53
  that's number one, And I have long ago realized, as I've already implied,
• 36:59
  that wasn't going to happen, and I really realized that wasn't going to
• 37:01
  happen once Franco Harris died almost a year ago, Pittsburgh Steeler, great and
• 37:07
  good friend of mine, that ended a lot of this For me. Franco's
• 37:12
  death had a massive impact on me psychologically, not just because I lost a
• 37:17
  friend, but because in my mind that ended that crusade from a realistic standpoint,
• 37:23
  mainly because, frankly, part of what motivated me was was if we
• 37:29
  ever became victorious in that fight, being able to share that with Franco,
• 37:32
  and Franco also was a warrior, our only real warrior with regard to that
• 37:40
  battle, and with him gone, I realized one our chances of success were
• 37:45
  even lower than they previously were, and two the spoils for somehow winning were
• 37:52
  a lot less too. But also Sandusky became It became clear to me that
• 37:55
  Sandusky was afraid to go into federal court, and that was his only chance
• 38:00
  because the entire state of Pennsylvania is very very deeply invested against him, and
• 38:07
  for whatever bizarre psychological reason, he's afraid to go into federal court and lose
• 38:10
  and then have nothing else to live for while in prison. So he keeps
• 38:15
  going back to state court, and he keeps, you know, being Charlie
• 38:19
  Brown, trying to kick the football out of Lucy's hold and basically becoming humiliated
• 38:25
  each and every time, and it just deja vous all over again, Groundhog
• 38:30
  Day. So nothing's going to change there. So that possibility was over.
• 38:37
  And you know, I was hopeful that DeSantis might actually have a chance to
• 38:39
  beat Trump to eliminate that part of this equation, but that's not going to
• 38:44
  happen. So there was really only one other theoretical possibility for a lightning strike
• 38:52
  that I never even fully contemplated, but I guess it was always out there,
• 38:59
  and that is that somehow somebody in a position of power is aware of
• 39:04
  what I do and finds what I do to be valuable enough to hire me
• 39:08
  in a significant position. Now I knew full well that there's no way possible
• 39:17
  that I could ever be hired, especially before any sort of Sandusky vindication by
• 39:22
  any sort of major media outlet, by a so called manager, someone who
• 39:30
  is hired to hire and fire other people, manage other people, someone who's
• 39:37
  you know, in charge of a media outlet or a news outlet. That
• 39:40
  would never in a million years happen because those people are far far too vulnerable.
• 39:46
  They are all they care about is keeping their jobs. There's no risk
• 39:50
  reward ratio, The criticism would be too great there's nothing in it for them.
• 39:55
  These people have no balls to begin with, so it's never even in
• 40:00
  my mindset as that being a possibility. The only other scenario would be that
• 40:07
  there would be someone in an ownership position who might somehow come to the conclusion
• 40:15
  that something they own would be benefited by including me on their team. That
• 40:23
  was, I guess, a theoretical possibility, but you know, seemed like
• 40:29
  more unlikely than an actual lightning strike until almost two years ago, when I
• 40:37
  got approached by somebody who I knew and have a good relationship with and had
• 40:47
  done some projects with successfully and I had trust in although I had people in
• 40:55
  my orbit who did not have trust in this person to the degree that I
• 41:01
  have had trust in them, and understandably so. But I'm someone who believes
• 41:07
  in evaluating everybody based upon my own interactions with them. I'm aware of reputation,
• 41:14
  but I you know, to me, if if you're solid in my
• 41:19
  interactions with you, that goes a lot longer way than any sort of reputational
• 41:23
  situation. And this person contacted me at the beginning of twenty twenty two and
• 41:32
  indicated that there was an emerging situation where I would be wanted in a major
• 41:40
  media outlet, and we did a zoom call together and I was pretty stunned
• 41:47
  by this, but I had absolutely nothing going on at that time. We
• 41:52
  would thought about doing this podcast during that time period because we're coming off of
• 41:55
  with the benefit of hindsight, but there were delays in that that were very
• 42:00
  very frustrating, and I was very much looking for anything for my next project.
• 42:06
  And I thought, okay, well, all right, humor me.
• 42:09
  You know, this doesn't sound plausible for all the reasons I've already stated,
• 42:15
  you know whatever, I'm all ears, tell me what's going on here.
• 42:19
  And so this situation, well, it never seemed logical because I didn't know
• 42:27
  very much at all about what was theoretically happening, and a lot of it
• 42:30
  was theoretical because it was an emerging situation. I played along with it and
• 42:38
  it never really went anywhere. And there were supposed to be some phone calls
• 42:44
  with people in charge and that never happened. And this would have been in
• 42:49
  the summer of early late spring, early and summer of twenty twenty two,
• 42:53
  and it was very very frustrating. But I eventually almost forgot about it.
• 43:00
  I mean, like in my brain I'm like, this was never a likely
• 43:04
  scenario anyway. This is not the way the world works. It's kind of
• 43:07
  wow. I knew Rhonda Santis was not going to be president. This is
• 43:12
  not the way the world works anymore. Things like this don't just happen out
• 43:15
  of thin air. We don't have great things anymore. And you know,
• 43:19
  while I've had I've had a very very weird life. I think that's part
• 43:22
  of the context of this. That's important. I've had enormously good luck at
• 43:28
  times and enormously bad luck at times, and so I think that psychologically played
• 43:34
  a role in me thinking, well, Okay, maybe maybe we're maybe we're
• 43:38
  gonna get some karma in the right direction here. At least that's possible.
• 43:44
  It didn't seem likely, but it seemed possible. And as I said,
• 43:47
  I forgot about this until at the very end of last year, I got
• 43:52
  told definitively, definitively, this is happening, and it will likely happen very
• 44:00
  soon. And and basically, you know, what I was was told was
• 44:10
  that this was going to be almost a dream job for me, a job
• 44:15
  that was designed specifically for my skill set in a major media operation. And
• 44:23
  I thought Okay, this this is There's just no way this is actually happening.
• 44:31
  But I'm being told by someone I trust that definitively this is going to
• 44:37
  happen. And it was vague, and you know, I signed a couple
• 44:44
  of non disclosure agreements, and it seemed as if things were you know,
• 44:50
  it was kind of a hurry up and wait situation where you know, we
• 44:52
  hurry up and then we wait for the next shoot drop. And there was
• 44:58
  supposed to be meetings, and there were dates for meetings, and you know,
• 45:04
  one thing after another kept getting delayed and delayed, and the stress of
• 45:09
  this was extraordinary. I mean, I for basically the last I'd say eleven
• 45:19
  months of my life, I have been, if not on full alert,
• 45:22
  at least partial alert that any day I'm going to get told to, you
• 45:30
  know, either hop on a plane or later on take a phone call that's
• 45:36
  going to change my life and potentially even you know, theoretically do an enormous
• 45:42
  lot amount of good things for the industry of journalism and maybe even the country
• 45:47
  as a whole, and change my family's dynamic financially. I mean, these
• 45:53
  are and I mean even there have been many times when I've been doing the
• 45:58
  podcast. During the podcast, I always have my I've had my phone on
• 46:04
  while I'm taping this thing, where I've gotten important messages or theoretically important messages
• 46:09
  about this situation during the podcast. And as time went on, I mean
• 46:16
  I was always I'm a skeptical person to begin with. I was always very
• 46:21
  very skeptical about whether this was ever really going to happen, partially because I'm
• 46:28
  a big believer that if something huge and extraordinary and earth shattering, and I
• 46:36
  can assure you that as I'm going through this, I'm realizing, if what
• 46:40
  I'm being told is true and this is a done deal and this is going
• 46:44
  to happen, this is going to create a public shit store. I mean,
• 46:47
  there was absolutely no question about that that things that are in that realm
• 46:52
  have to happen in a fairly quick order otherwise somebody's going to rethink it.
• 46:59
  I mean, it's just the nature of humanity. And so as time is
• 47:01
  going on, I'm getting more and more agitated, more and more frustrated.
• 47:07
  The stress is building, and I'm always very skeptical about what is happening.
• 47:15
  We're not happening, And I guess the major issue here the story I'm telling
• 47:22
  you is is very much abbreviated, and the real story is just jaw dropping.
• 47:30
  Let me just give you a sense of how crazy this is, and
• 47:35
  these are actual quotes. Former NBC Today's Show host Matt Lower, who has
• 47:38
  been fantastically supportive during all of this the last almost two years, has almost
• 47:46
  seriously, at least half seriously, volunteered to star in the movie about the
• 47:52
  story that eventually I will hopefully be able to tell you. Matt volunteered that
• 47:58
  I want to play this particular part in the movie. Dan Abrams of News
• 48:01
  Nation TV has said this is absolutely worthy of a movie. Our executive producer,
• 48:06
  Miket Gavino has said this is the craziest thing he's ever seen or heard
• 48:09
  of in his life. And so, unfortunately I can't get into all the
• 48:14
  details of all this right now for reasons that I'll explain shortly, but it's
• 48:21
  important to the context of where we're going with this podcast, and basically what
• 48:28
  I was dealing with during most of the last ten to eleven months is that
• 48:35
  the scenario I was being given, as crazy as it was, was less
• 48:39
  crazy at times than the scenario that it's not going to happen. So I
• 48:45
  was just dealing with complete insanity at every level. So I'm weighing constantly which
• 48:53
  scenario is less insane, the one where this is going to happen or the
• 48:59
  one where this just happened. And I would say that I never got to
• 49:09
  a point where it was over fifty percent in my brain that this was going
• 49:15
  to happen. I did get to about eighty percent, maybe even a little
• 49:22
  bit more than that, that this was very much real and had a legitimate
• 49:29
  chance of happening. And I would say that the height of that occurred over
• 49:34
  this past Labor Day weekend. And It's important to point out that I was
• 49:38
  getting information and have been getting information from two different sources. It wasn't just
• 49:45
  this person I referenced at the beginning that I've had a good relationship with and
• 49:51
  had trust in. There was apparently a second source, although that second source
• 49:57
  was like something out of a spine, which, when I tell you the
• 50:02
  whole story eventually is going to make at least some sense once you know who
• 50:07
  all these figures are. Well over Labor Day weekend, I started getting very
• 50:16
  seemingly credible messages from both sources that okay, Finally, all all the you
• 50:23
  know, all the forces are aligned. Now, finally, all this very
• 50:28
  complicated situation that had to be taken care of in order for this your situation
• 50:35
  to come to fruition has happened, and we're ready to finally act. That
• 50:38
  was basically the narrative that I that I was given, and as strange as
• 50:45
  it was, it actually made a bit of sense. And there were things
• 50:46
  happening that were consistent with this in the national news and times. I was
• 50:55
  seemingly even getting a heads up about things that were going to happen in the
• 51:00
  national news, which gave obviously a lot more credibility to what I was being
• 51:06
  told. And so I allowed myself, I would say, over that Labor
• 51:13
  Day weekend period to start to actually think about, all right, if this
• 51:19
  really does happen, what is this going to mean? And I allowed myself
• 51:24
  to start thinking about all the good that I could do if this actually happened,
• 51:30
  in all sorts of different ways. And I knew that that was a
• 51:35
  dangerous thing to do, because one I was never convinced that it would happen,
• 51:39
  but two also because once you start dreaming about it, then you become
• 51:45
  invested in it, and then also your defenses I think start to come down
• 51:51
  a bit, not as much for me as for other people, because I'm
• 51:54
  very much aware of this. I talk all the time about how if I
• 51:58
  want something to be true, I hold it to a much higher standard.
• 52:01
  On the other hand, I had made it, even with my cynicism.
• 52:06
  I had made a deal with myself that I was going to go through this
• 52:09
  process, as crazy as the process was, without blowing it up, as
• 52:16
  much as I wanted to blow it up, because it was incredibly frustrating and
• 52:20
  didn't make sense and there were red flags. I knew that if there was
• 52:24
  any hope for salvaging my career, that this had to be the only path,
• 52:32
  the analogy that I would use for how I have I've tried to deal
• 52:37
  with this, and I don't want to demean the issue of missing children because
• 52:45
  I have two young daughters myself, But I've often thought that the situation I've
• 52:49
  been dealing with for the last almost two years is very much like what I've
• 52:54
  always considered to be the worst possible scenario for a parent, which is you
• 53:00
  have a missing child and you intellectually know that they're gone forever, but you
• 53:07
  don't have a body. And you know, when my wife and I watch
• 53:12
  Datelines or twenty twenties, these are always the worst stories because you know,
• 53:15
  there's always that one percent or less than one percent chance that something miraculous has
• 53:20
  happened and they're still alive and they're going to come back to you, And
• 53:24
  but intellectually, you know that's very, very unusual. Well that's how I
• 53:30
  viewed my career post Sandowsky, post Trump. Right, the child has been
• 53:36
  lost, and I was being told, no, no, the child hasn't
• 53:40
  been lost. In fact, we found the child, and we're going to
• 53:44
  bring the child back to you better than it's ever been. That's essentially what
• 53:49
  I was being told, at least in my in my mind, and so
• 53:52
  even if I never fully believed that that was likely, I was going to
• 53:57
  do everything I possibly could and everything I needed to do, as any parent
• 54:00
  would, to make sure that you don't blow that up. You endure whatever
• 54:07
  torture you have to. If someone is credibly telling you they're going to get
• 54:12
  you your kid back, you do what you have to do. And that's
• 54:15
  what I was doing during this entire process. And I was quite proud of
• 54:22
  myself and still am to this moment, very proud of myself as to how
• 54:24
  I have somehow endured all this. I have not endured it perfectly. The
• 54:30
  stress on my family and specifically my marriage has been dramatic. I cannot believe
• 54:37
  as of this taping that my wife is still married to me, because,
• 54:40
  as I think you can understand, this has been an unbelievably stressful and tortuous
• 54:47
  situation. And to be very clear, I was not told this was a
• 54:52
  maybe situation. I was told by both different sources, this was one hundred
• 54:54
  percent done. Deal in extreme detail, extreme detail, just a matter of
• 55:04
  time, just a matter of time, and this is going to happen,
• 55:07
  and I would say it's been within the last month, and there's reasons for
• 55:15
  this that will become clear when I tell the full story. I have become
• 55:20
  much more cynical about what is and is not happening on this front. And
• 55:28
  those percentages that I talked about where I was fifty to fifty this would actually
• 55:32
  happen and eighty percent that this was definitely real and you know, just a
• 55:40
  very weird situation have gone down very very significantly. I don't know what they
• 55:45
  currently are, but frustratingly they're not zero because as of this taping, I'm
• 55:53
  still being told this is happening. I have no solid reasons to believe that
• 56:01
  this is happening. I have told my primary source that I have no reason
• 56:08
  to believe this is happening, and they have not provided me with any reason
• 56:15
  to believe that this is actually happening. But to use the missing child analogy,
• 56:23
  I still don't have a dead body, and that was always the scenario
• 56:29
  in this situation that scared me the most. How am I gonna deal with
• 56:37
  this almost two year long ordeal ending in gut wrenching disappointment and not even knowing
• 56:47
  for sure because of the incredibly bizarre nature of the process, not even knowing
• 56:54
  what was real and what was not. And I am coming very quickly to
• 57:01
  the conclusion that I have no choice but to somehow deal with that. And
• 57:06
  I don't know that I'm going to be capable of doing that, partially because
• 57:12
  I imagine myself, or allowed myself to imagine what it would be like,
• 57:17
  which was a big mistake on my part, especially now that I no longer
• 57:24
  believe that this is going to happen, but that I'm not yet at zero
• 57:30
  percent chance that it's going to happen. Not to be overly dramatic about it,
• 57:36
  but you know, there's the famous song in the musical lay Miz,
• 57:39
  I dreamed a dream, with the lyrics, you know, saying, you
• 57:45
  know, there are dreams that cannot be, and there are storms we cannot
• 57:50
  weather. And that's kind of the way I feel right now. There are
• 57:53
  dreams that cannot be, and there are storms we cannot weather. Even I
• 57:58
  cannot weather what has happened over the last almost two years with not just a
• 58:06
  gut punch but basically a massive concussion in a way that leaves me in a
• 58:13
  very very difficult position in trying to move forward again, partially because I don't
• 58:21
  yet have the dead body. Now, maybe this episode is going to force
• 58:23
  me to get the dead body. I don't know. If it does,
• 58:29
  and there's a dead body to be had, I'd rather have that scenario than
• 58:34
  the scenario that I've articulated previously, which is the worst of all time,
• 58:37
  where you're never sure and you never have any closure. But quite obviously,
• 58:44
  you know this was and was told to be to me on numerous occasions from
• 58:50
  multiple sources in no uncertain terms. The lightning strike that was going to change
• 58:57
  everything. And you know, the best part of this, in my mind,
• 59:01
  was going to be I was going to be in a position to really
• 59:05
  make a difference. And I no longer believe that that's the case. And
• 59:12
  so that now has created a further problem in light of everything else that I've
• 59:17
  mentioned in the first hour of this podcast with regard to what we do with
• 59:22
  the death of journalism, because there's there ain't going to be no lightning strike
• 59:27
  in my view and in any rational view, And a large part of why
• 59:32
  I've been hanging on and doing this was because I was anticipating the lightning strike.
• 59:37
  I was trying to keep myself in the public and viable to do TV
• 59:42
  appearances on News Nation, which apparently was part of this equation for why this
• 59:49
  outlet was interested in me, and so I felt like I needed to keep
• 59:54
  this going. Also, I wanted to be prepared for the coming lightning strike,
• 1:00:00
  which would theoretically help Slash save the podcast. Well, now that that's
• 1:00:05
  not going to happen, what do we do. Well. Our producer,
• 1:00:07
  Mike got Gavino, has been incredibly supportive. He wants to continue doing this.
• 1:00:12
  I've told him there's there's no way under the current circumstances that I can.
• 1:00:16
  He's tried to figure out a way to change those circumstances, and I
• 1:00:22
  really appreciate him trying to do that, But Mike is notoriously over the optimistic
• 1:00:27
  about everything in our entire relationship through the podcast, with the benefit of hindsight
• 1:00:31
  and with and the death of journalism, that's almost been one hundred percent accurate,
• 1:00:37
  where if he's on the optimistic side and I'm on the pessimistic side,
• 1:00:42
  I'll be the one that's that's correct. And it's just his nature. There's
• 1:00:45
  good and bad to that. But I don't believe that Mike's going to be
• 1:00:50
  able to come up with a way to make this make sense in the long
• 1:00:54
  run. But I also don't want to end the podcast immediately, and so
• 1:01:02
  we've kind of come to this agreement that I'll continue to do the podcast probably
• 1:01:09
  through January of twenty twenty four, where at that point, in all likelihood,
• 1:01:15
  Donald Trump will essentially officially be the Republican presidential nominee. And you know,
• 1:01:22
  from I've already referenced torture, you know, I can take any form
• 1:01:25
  of torture if it's got an end date to it, and it's not that
• 1:01:30
  long, and I can. I think I can make it to the end
• 1:01:35
  of January. Now, there may be a few more off days. There
• 1:01:38
  may be a few weeks we don't do two episodes. The Christmas break might
• 1:01:43
  be a little bit longer, or Thanksgiving or whatever. I got a golf
• 1:01:45
  tournament I qualified for coming up in early November. I'll probably take that whole
• 1:01:50
  week off, you know, so that kind of stuff. But as of
• 1:01:53
  right now, the full intention, from at least from my perspective, and
• 1:01:59
  I understand from Mike's as well, is that we will do this podcast as
• 1:02:04
  it currently exists through the end of January. I'm willing to commit to that
• 1:02:07
  now. I'm not even one hundred percent sure I'm going to be able to
• 1:02:09
  do that from a morale standpoint, but I think I can, and so
• 1:02:16
  I'm committed to that now. I will always acknowledge that weird things happen in
• 1:02:23
  life, and that things could theoretically change, but they would have to be
• 1:02:29
  dramatic for my plan to and the podcast at the end of January of next
• 1:02:35
  year to be altered. Let me give you some examples. I'll make the
• 1:02:38
  following pledges if Donald Trump passes away before the end of January, I will
• 1:02:45
  keep doing the podcast in all likelihood. If OJ Simpson kills somebody again,
• 1:02:52
  I'll continue to do the podcast for the foreseeable future in all likelihood, And
• 1:02:59
  if OJ Simpson kills Donald Trump, I am definitely continuing with the podcast,
• 1:03:04
  no questions asked, whether Mike wants me to or not. So that's the
• 1:03:08
  level of black swan event that would have to occur for this podcast to continue
• 1:03:16
  past January of twenty twenty four. Now, there's some bright side to this
• 1:03:22
  development or this announcement, and that is that I do think that the nature
• 1:03:27
  of the content will probably shift in our last twenty or so episodes, and
• 1:03:31
  it'll be much more flexible. I'll probably tell more stories. I'll be even
• 1:03:37
  less restricted than I previously was in what I can say and what I can
• 1:03:39
  talk about, and so I'm anticipating that the last twenty or so episodes of
• 1:03:45
  the podcast will be even more entertaining and fun than the previous ninety nine episodes
• 1:03:52
  of the podcast have been. I will say though, that I'm very sorry
• 1:03:55
  to the big supporters of my work and the podcasts that we've done specifically the
• 1:04:03
  group of supporters in the Penn State Joe Paterno Jerry Sandusky case. Who have
• 1:04:09
  you know, there's a small band of people who have been very very,
• 1:04:13
  very very committed to that story and that case, and I'm sorry I could
• 1:04:18
  not get it to the finish line there. You know, they have been
• 1:04:21
  fantastic and I appreciate their support more than I could possibly imagine. For other
• 1:04:31
  people who were upset about this, or maybe you know a handful of you
• 1:04:34
  that are upset that this podcast is very likely going away at the end of
• 1:04:39
  January twenty twenty four, I apologize to you. I certainly invite you to
• 1:04:44
  apply for a full refund. Full refund will be coming your way because the
• 1:04:49
  podcast is ending at the end of January. By the way, I do
• 1:04:54
  want to mention and this may theoretically upset people more than the end of the
• 1:04:59
  podcast. I'm also going off with social media at the end of January twenty
• 1:05:03
  twenty four. I'm going off the grid. I am leaving public life.
• 1:05:08
  That is my plan because I have no interest in anything having to do with
• 1:05:15
  twenty twenty four and I can't stand Twitter as it is the only reason why
• 1:05:18
  I'm as active on it as I am. Is one to prepare for this
• 1:05:23
  podcast, and two to help formulate the audience for this podcast by gaining followers
• 1:05:30
  to my account and spreading the message of the podcast itself well that no longer
• 1:05:36
  is of any need after the podcast is over, and there's absolutely no question
• 1:05:42
  that being on Twitter is far more painful than it is worth, especially in
• 1:05:47
  the year that's coming up, that is twenty twenty four. So this is
• 1:05:50
  an all or nothing situation. And I always knew during this bizarre circumstance that
• 1:05:58
  I just referenced that I never talked about before that was hanging over my head,
• 1:06:00
  especially for the last eleven months. That's why there was so much stress,
• 1:06:04
  because it was all or nothing. I mean, this was a really
• 1:06:08
  unique situation. I've never heard of a job situation where it's either you're going
• 1:06:14
  to be a very prominent person in the national dialogue or you're going away forever.
• 1:06:18
  And those were the two options, and I knew those were the two
• 1:06:21
  options during this entire process. I mean, that's I've never heard of anything
• 1:06:26
  like that before. But that absolutely increased the tension, the stress, the
• 1:06:30
  stakes, all of it, because this was not hey you're in a grade
• 1:06:35
  B job and you're going to get a great a job. This was you
• 1:06:40
  know, you're off the grid or you're you know, in the major leagues
• 1:06:45
  all of a sudden, and unfortunately, it very much looks like it's going
• 1:06:50
  to be off the grid for me, barring some sort of black Swan event
• 1:06:55
  between now and January of twenty twenty four. So, as I said,
• 1:07:00
  I do anticipate at some point before the end of this podcast telling you the
• 1:07:04
  real full story of that job circumstance, which is off the charts. I
• 1:07:12
  just can't do that right now. So instead, what I will do is,
• 1:07:15
  as promised, I'll get into Ask John Anything. Now. I got
• 1:07:19
  a lot of questions for Ask John Anything, and I'm trying to streamline the
• 1:07:24
  process so that this is not a four hour episode of the podcast, so
• 1:07:28
  the answers will not be as extensive as they were the first time we did
• 1:07:32
  Ask John Anything, which was after our fiftieth episode. But let me just
• 1:07:38
  get to those in as quickly as quick an orderly a fashion as I possibly
• 1:07:44
  can. I'll start with Steve. Steve asks, assuming Trump gets the nomination
• 1:07:48
  and then loses the general election, do you think that's the end of the
• 1:07:51
  Trump era, or will he try to run again in twenty twenty eight or
• 1:07:55
  push Donald Trump Junior forward as a replacement. If so, would that actually
• 1:08:00
  work? Value your predictive ability? Obviously, that depends on whether that Trump
• 1:08:06
  goes to prison or not. I think if Donald Trump is able to avoid
• 1:08:10
  prison and he's healthy, and he loses in anything other than a massive blowout,
• 1:08:16
  which is possible with Trump, you never know, but as of right
• 1:08:19
  now, you wouldn't think it would be a massive blowout given the polling in
• 1:08:23
  begetting he might actually beat Joe Biden. I think that if Trump is healthy
• 1:08:28
  and out of prison, he is the favorite to be the twenty twenty eight
• 1:08:32
  Republican nominee. As insane as that sounds, you know, a lot of
• 1:08:36
  it depends on his health. But as if he is healthy, I'm good
• 1:08:41
  luck beating him because especially if it's remotely close against Joe Biden. I hope
• 1:08:47
  I'm wrong about that, but I think that that's very likely the case.
• 1:08:54
  Anonymous acts asks if you could go back in time twenty five or less years,
• 1:09:00
  what is the one thing you would change if you had been in a
• 1:09:02
  position of power, Something that you personally could have done to altered where we
• 1:09:06
  are. Well, boy, that's a great question, although it's a little
• 1:09:10
  open ended, and since I'll go back, I'll use the twenty five years
• 1:09:14
  ago that would have put us in the late nineteen nineties. So I'm kind
• 1:09:17
  kind of cop out and use the timetable here to answer the question. I
• 1:09:24
  believe that if Bill Clinton had been convicted in his impeachment trial, that that
• 1:09:31
  would have done a lot to keep us on the rails as a country.
• 1:09:36
  Now, in retrospect, what Bill Clinton was accused of doesn't seem like that
• 1:09:40
  big of a deal. Perjury, obstruction of justice, and trying to cover
• 1:09:44
  up cheating on his wife as part of a sex abuse lawsuit against him with
• 1:09:53
  the Monica Lewinsky situation, I think what he did was very, very serious,
• 1:09:58
  especially for a president of the United States. But to me, the
• 1:10:00
  biggest problem there was once Clinton got away with it. I mean, he
• 1:10:05
  not only was able to dodge and not impeachment. He was impeached, but
• 1:10:11
  he dodged the Senate verdict. He was declared not guilty, but his approval
• 1:10:15
  ratings ended up growing because of that entire scandal in the end, and that
• 1:10:23
  to me sent an incredibly devastating message to all of society, and that is
• 1:10:28
  that the truth doesn't really matter. Lying doesn't really matter. And a lot
• 1:10:32
  of it was subconscious, but it was real, and to me, the
• 1:10:36
  loss of truth value in our society is one of the most devastating things that
• 1:10:43
  has occurred in the last few decades. That was a seminal moment, and
• 1:10:46
  had Clinton, what should have happened is that Clinton resigned. I mean,
• 1:10:50
  there was no reason why Bill Clinton shouldn't have resigned as soon as it was
• 1:10:56
  clear that he had perjured himself and committed obstruction justice. You know, a
• 1:11:01
  president with any moral culpability at all for the good of the country would have
• 1:11:08
  resigned. But Bill Clinton was too selfish to do that, and unfortunately,
• 1:11:12
  in defeating the attempt to remove him from office, he effectively diminished the value
• 1:11:19
  of truth and the negative value of lying, and that had a huge consequence
• 1:11:26
  on the country. Justin asks will you do an interview with Sarah Gonzalez regarding
• 1:11:30
  Jerry Sandusky. I'd be happy to, but I don't see any reason why
• 1:11:34
  Sarah Gonzalez of The Blaze, who we interviewed a couple episodes ago, because
• 1:11:38
  she did a great job with the Trevor Bauer accused it would have any interest
• 1:11:42
  in doing that. She did interview me about the Jim Jordan situation, which
• 1:11:45
  I had pitched to her because that obviously made sense for her show because Jordan
• 1:11:51
  was a major candidate to be Speaker of the House. There's nothing newsworthy about
• 1:11:57
  the Jerry Sandusky case anymore, don't I mean, I wouldn't even want to
• 1:12:00
  ask Sara Gonzalez if she's interested in doing it. I haven't pitched anybody on
• 1:12:04
  Jerry Zandusky in years because it's not a it's not in their minds. It's
• 1:12:13
  not a legitimate story. There's no hook to it. Once we passed the
• 1:12:16
  tenth anniversary, you know, there's really no there's no further news hooks for
• 1:12:24
  that story, which is why we tried the time with the benefit of hindsight
• 1:12:28
  to the tenth anniversary, and unfortunately that didn't work out very well from a
• 1:12:31
  media perspective. Brian asks, I was entering college in fall of two thousand
• 1:12:36
  and seven and majoring in mass communications at my community college. It was said
• 1:12:41
  at the time journalism was dying in social media. Wasn't that big yet?
• 1:12:45
  What five year stretch did things change before two thousand and seven. It's a
• 1:12:53
  good question. I mean, I think this was a situation that was gradual
• 1:12:58
  and then it became dramatic. I use the analogy of leaving the gravitational poll
• 1:13:02
  of the rational Earth a lot. I coined that phrase, I think in
• 1:13:06
  the early two thousands when I was a talk show host at KFI in Los
• 1:13:10
  Angeles. I saw it happening there, and it's kind of like leaving the
• 1:13:14
  gravitational poll. Right at first, that's very difficult, because the gravitational poll
• 1:13:18
  still has a lot of impact on you as you're leaving it. But the
• 1:13:23
  further you get away, the less poll the gravitational force has, and so
• 1:13:28
  then it becomes easier and easier to pull away from where you once were.
• 1:13:32
  It's not a perfect analogy, but I think you understand where I'm going with
• 1:13:36
  this, And so at first it was very, very gradual, and then
• 1:13:41
  all of a sudden, it was very dramatic. And it's interesting that you
• 1:13:45
  say two thousand and seven, because to me, two thousand and seven was
• 1:13:48
  the moment when I realize we have left the gravitational poll of the rational Earth,
• 1:13:55
  when it came to journalism because that was the birthing of Barack Obama presidential
• 1:14:00
  candidacy two thousand and seven. What the news media did at the end of
• 1:14:04
  two thousand and seven was to put an unqualified candidate for president who hadn't even
• 1:14:12
  served one full term in the Senate, about whom we knew basically nothing,
• 1:14:16
  We knew nothing about its history, who had done nothing at all, and
• 1:14:20
  simply because he was a good speaker and he was multiracial, and because they
• 1:14:25
  were bored with Hillary Clinton, they lifted him on their shoulders and they made
• 1:14:30
  him both the Democratic nominee and the president of the United States. And I
• 1:14:38
  did a movie about that called Medium Malpractice, How Obama got elected and Pallin
• 1:14:41
  was targeted. You can still find it online for free. Check it out.
• 1:14:45
  That was when I realized, Holy col we have reached a completely new
• 1:14:50
  level of absurdity. There was always extreme bias, and the bias kept getting
• 1:14:57
  more and more dramatic in my view, especially when it came to presidential elections.
• 1:15:01
  But that's when it was, you know, Katie barred the door.
• 1:15:04
  And then once social media became prominent, it was over because then it's all
• 1:15:10
  about speed and popularity, two things that are antithetical to the entire concept of
• 1:15:16
  journalism. The business model was starting to break for the news media before two
• 1:15:21
  thousand and seven, which is partially why they went in for Obama. But
• 1:15:26
  the business model was still viable then. It was not viable more so in
• 1:15:31
  twenty sixteen, which is why they allowed and facilitated the nomination of Donald Trump,
• 1:15:36
  because he was very, very good for all of them. Sherry asks,
• 1:15:41
  you seem too sure that the Santas will not beat Trump, But if
• 1:15:44
  you turn out to be right, what's the number one reason why. Well,
• 1:15:48
  there are a lot of reasons. It's a perfect storm, which I've
• 1:15:50
  discussed previously on the podcast, But I would say the number one reason is
• 1:15:54
  that the national news media did not give Rhonda sand Does his due when it
• 1:16:00
  came to the response to COVID, and so his national footprint was not nearly
• 1:16:06
  large enough to withstand the attacks by Trump. In if they had given DeSantis
• 1:16:14
  the Obama treatment, or even close to the Obama treatment, which he deserved
• 1:16:17
  because he actually did something in saving the country during COVID, if he had
• 1:16:24
  gotten the coverage he deserved for being right when everyone else was wrong, not
• 1:16:28
  immediately, but eventually right when everyone else, including the media, was wrong.
• 1:16:31
  If he had gotten that, then I think he would have been in
• 1:16:34
  a much stronger position. But outside of Florida and people who very much followed
• 1:16:41
  the COVID panic like me, which was a very small portion of the population,
• 1:16:45
  believed or not, he was not that well known and what he did
• 1:16:48
  was not that well known, which is why Trump was able to lie about
• 1:16:53
  his COVID record because I think, much to the surprise of the Santas campaign,
• 1:17:00
  majority of Republicans weren't that familiar with it. They just knew he was
• 1:17:03
  the governor of Florida and he had won a big victory in twenty twenty two,
• 1:17:08
  and everyone else had not done as well as expected, and the red
• 1:17:12
  wave never materialized, and so you know, he seems good and young and
• 1:17:17
  got a great family. That's all they knew. That was the media's fault.
• 1:17:21
  And it's also because and I warned people about this early on, the
• 1:17:26
  COVID issue had faded away once the restrictions were lifted. People forgot about it
• 1:17:31
  incredibly fast, which to me was very very depressing and a very very bad
• 1:17:38
  sign for the future of the country because we were essentially telling the powers that
• 1:17:43
  be they can get away with just about anything, and we'll just forget about
• 1:17:46
  it. I mean, you can be wrong about everything, you can torture
• 1:17:50
  our children, you can put them behind the eight ball academically for the rest
• 1:17:56
  of their lives for no reason. You can cancel all sorts of once in
• 1:18:00
  a lifetime events, funerals, weddings, you know, major football games,
• 1:18:05
  and there's no implications for this, no accountability, and we're just gonna forget
• 1:18:11
  about it. And I think that that is a huge part of the why
• 1:18:15
  Desantras's poll numbers have diminished that the way that they have, it's been very
• 1:18:20
  gradual. It wasn't overnight. It was bit by bit, piece by piece
• 1:18:27
  erosion, partially because of the Trump attacks. Partially because as every week went
• 1:18:33
  by, COVID was more and more in the rear view mirror. And then
• 1:18:38
  of course Trump lied about Desandras' COVID response, and somehow the guy who shit
• 1:18:45
  the bed during COVID, which was Donald Trump and was really a big reason
• 1:18:47
  why we had the panic, is criticizing the guy that saved the country from
• 1:18:55
  the insane COVID response, and he's getting away with it and benefit in the
• 1:19:00
  polls, which is, you know, insane making, but that's the reality
• 1:19:03
  of it. Tony asks, is there an endorsement aside from Trump, of
• 1:19:08
  course, that you think could have an impact for DeSantis if he were to
• 1:19:12
  pick it up. No, I don't think there's any endorsement. I don't
• 1:19:16
  think we live in a world where endorsements really matter anymore. This question reminded
• 1:19:23
  me of a conversation I had with Steve Cortes recently, who just left Never
• 1:19:27
  Back Down the Rhonda Santis Political Action Committee, former Trump aid and good friend
• 1:19:31
  of mine. I don't remember which one of us posited. I think it
• 1:19:36
  was Steve who said, you know, I don't know if Jesus could beat
• 1:19:42
  Trump, and you know that's what happened. He said, I don't know
• 1:19:45
  that Jesus could beat Trump in the Republican not amending process. And I said,
• 1:19:48
  well, I think Jesus would win Iowa. He probably then lose New
• 1:19:53
  Hampshire over you know, his abortion band plan, and then I think because
• 1:20:00
  Haley and and Scott wouldn't get out, Trump would probably beat Jesus in South
• 1:20:05
  Carolina and Trump would eventually win the nomination. And I was only being slightly
• 1:20:11
  facetious with Steve, but he got a kick out of that. And using
• 1:20:14
  the Jesus analogy, I think if Jesus came down and endorsed ron DeSantis,
• 1:20:21
  he would win Iowa. I do think that if Jesus did that, Jesus
• 1:20:27
  Christ came down from heaven and endorsed Rond de Santus, he would win Iowa.
• 1:20:31
  But I still think Trump would win it out in the end. I
• 1:20:34
  mean, Trump would go on a rampage against Jesus. You know, you'd
• 1:20:40
  learn about how he wasn't really born in Bethlehem, the whole birth stories of
• 1:20:45
  fraud. You know, Jesus has been gone for so many years, where
• 1:20:49
  the hell was he? All these things he let happen, The marriage feast
• 1:20:54
  of Cana was a fraud. These are all things that Trump would would post
• 1:20:59
  on true social I'm not a fan of people that got crucified. That would
• 1:21:03
  probably be a big hit if Jesus ever endorsed DeSantis, and frankly, I'm
• 1:21:10
  sure it wouldn't even stop there. I mean, Jesus would surely have to
• 1:21:15
  say something about Biden winning the twenty twenty election, and once he did that,
• 1:21:21
  you know he would be in big trouble with the MAGA base. He
• 1:21:26
  would also probably make some sort of statement about the Trump indictments being credible that
• 1:21:31
  would really hurt his approval numbers among Republicans. And then, of course,
• 1:21:35
  the coupdi gra, the coupdi gra when it came to Jesus's endorsement of dessandas
• 1:21:42
  would be, Jesus would get totally caught up in the entire Israeli Hamas conflict.
• 1:21:48
  I mean, Trump would clearly point out that this guy is a Jew
• 1:21:53
  who grew up in Palestine. He's not to be trusted, He's got dark
• 1:21:58
  skin, I mean, all all guns would come ablazing from Trump to destroy
• 1:22:02
  Jesus' credibility, and before long Jesus' endorsement of DeSantis. After it probably would
• 1:22:10
  give DeSantis to win in Iowa, it would soon dissipate in its value and
• 1:22:15
  even with Jesus' endorsement, DeSantis would not be able to beat Donald Trump.
• 1:22:20
  David asks, can you release an archive of your iconic radio interviews and infamous
• 1:22:26
  confrontations from back in the KFI days, specifically your run in with OJ Simpson
• 1:22:31
  at the autograph signing. You know, I know that those things exist,
• 1:22:39
  and they We actually shut down John Zigler dot com a while ago because people
• 1:22:46
  don't think realize there's fairly significant expense and keeping websites alive even if you're not
• 1:22:54
  actually doing very much with them. And my webmaster, a god mainamed Ken
• 1:22:58
  Pollard, has been great to me for many many years, has basically retired
• 1:23:02
  and moved away from California, and he was doing all of that basically gratis
• 1:23:10
  and then he wasn't able to do that anymore, so we shut down John
• 1:23:15
  Zigler dot com. But the content still exists somewhere on Ken's I don't know
• 1:23:21
  if you called it was hard driver or a system or whatever it is,
• 1:23:27
  but I don't know how difficult that would be to find. I also,
• 1:23:30
  I know it was great at the time at KFI, but I just don't
• 1:23:34
  know that it would hold up all these years later, because we're now living
• 1:23:38
  in a video era and that, you know, it's a shame that that
• 1:23:41
  happened. That would have occurred in like two thousand and six, and so
• 1:23:47
  not everything was video then and audio today just doesn't really cut it, even
• 1:23:54
  though obviously this is an audio podcast, So I don't know that that's going
• 1:24:00
  to happen. I know that it exists. I'm sorry that it's probably not
• 1:24:03
  going to be something that's worth going through the aggravation. But I'll ask Ken
• 1:24:09
  as to how difficult it would be for that to happen. Perry asks,
• 1:24:13
  did you ever call out the rest of your family at your grandfather's funeral?
• 1:24:17
  It's one of the few stories from your KFI days. I don't remember you
• 1:24:23
  ever finishing, and I'm not one hundred percent sure I know what Perry is
• 1:24:28
  talking about here. I do know that I did talk a lot about my
• 1:24:32
  grandfather at KFI. I was very very close to my grandfather, my mother's
• 1:24:36
  father, and she looked at him almost as a godlike figure through her life.
• 1:24:44
  She died before him in a car accident. And I do remember talking
• 1:24:48
  about how I had prepared for my grandfather's funeral. I'd even created a song.
• 1:24:53
  I had a professional singer create a redo of Dan Fogelberg's leader of the
• 1:25:00
  band for my grandfather's funeral, and I had even interviewed my grandfather about the
• 1:25:08
  song. I had my sister bring the song because I was in California and
• 1:25:12
  he was in Philadelphia. I had my sister bring the song to him so
• 1:25:16
  he could hear it he had very bad hearing, and then record his reaction
• 1:25:23
  to it. And so when he did die, and he died like the
• 1:25:28
  day after I did the Sarah Palin interview that created so much news in two
• 1:25:32
  thousand and nine January two thousand and nine, So that timing was just terrible.
• 1:25:36
  But so I was in the midst of this massive media firestorm and my
• 1:25:41
  grandfather dies. And this this is a whole, long, long, long
• 1:25:47
  story. This could probably a book in and of itself, but basically what
• 1:25:53
  happened was, as we were making the funeral preparations, there had been tensions
• 1:25:59
  between my mother's children and the other and her siblings. There have been tension
• 1:26:08
  dealing with the state issues and my mother's death, and they had offered us
• 1:26:13
  basically one speaker to do a eulogy, and I had presumed that that was
• 1:26:20
  going to be me, you know, one, because I'm a public speaker
• 1:26:25
  too, I was by far the closest to my grandfather. Three, I'm
• 1:26:28
  in the midst of this massive media, national media firestorm where I'm on every
• 1:26:33
  national news television show, and so I'm thinking, this is clearly going to
• 1:26:41
  be me. Well, and I didn't even think that much about it.
• 1:26:45
  Well, for some reason, my sister volunteers that she wants to do it,
• 1:26:49
  and she was never very close to my grandfather, and I thought,
• 1:26:55
  okay, that's really weird, but I'll be the good guy and I'll let
• 1:26:59
  her do it if she I mean, I gave her every opportunity to back
• 1:27:01
  out, and she refused, and so she wanted to do it, and
• 1:27:05
  so I thought, okay, well, we'll do a compromise. You can
• 1:27:10
  do the eulogy and then we'll play my song with our grandfather's reaction to it.
• 1:27:17
  And that was approved. That was okay, fine, and I didn't
• 1:27:23
  feel great about it, but I thought, maybe my sister will be a
• 1:27:25
  great do great job. She really wants to do this. There must be
• 1:27:29
  some reason why she really wants to do this, and you know, I'm
• 1:27:31
  fine with it. And so we get there and it's a complete disaster.
• 1:27:38
  Number one. My sister decides to talk about herself for like five to ten
• 1:27:42
  minutes whatever it was. And I'm not exaggerating, even praising my father who
• 1:27:47
  divorced my mother, the daughter of the person whose funeral it was, which
• 1:27:56
  was really crazy. And so I was very not thrilled with my sister's eulogy.
• 1:28:01
  And then they play the song, which wasn't properly introduced I people didn't
• 1:28:06
  fully understand it. And then this is the kind of a comedy or dark
• 1:28:12
  comedy. You start to hear my grandfather's voice responding to the song. So
• 1:28:16
  it's his voice at his own funeral at a church that is built on land
• 1:28:24
  his father once owned, in a building that's named for his family, the
• 1:28:30
  Trainer family Trainer Hall. I mean, so this is a church that is
• 1:28:35
  in existence because of my grandfather and his siblings and his father. The priest
• 1:28:43
  cuts off the recording of my grandfather talking at his own funeral, and as
• 1:28:51
  you might imagine, I was a little pissed off, and I let that
• 1:28:55
  priest have it after the funeral is over. So that's what happened at my
• 1:29:00
  grandfather's funeral. I know I never talked about that because publicly because I was
• 1:29:05
  not at KFI anymore at that time. But I'm not one hundred percent sure
• 1:29:11
  that's what the question is referring to. But I think that that's probably a
• 1:29:15
  decent enough answer. But that I have always can I consider myself a recovering
• 1:29:19
  Catholic for quite a while, but that ended any semblance of Catholicism in my
• 1:29:26
  bloodstream after that particular situation, And unfortunately that was just the beginning of many,
• 1:29:32
  many other problems that cascaded down within the family and then definitely exacerbated those
• 1:29:42
  problems because of what happened at that funeral. Mark asks, Hey, John,
• 1:29:46
  thanks so much for continuing to podcast. I hope he still feels that
• 1:29:49
  way. You're one of a kind. Your work on the Penn State situation
• 1:29:54
  has brought me peace of mind. You seem to have nerves of steel.
• 1:29:58
  Can anything make you nerve nervous? I'll answer that psychologically, nothing can make
• 1:30:04
  me nervous. I mean, you know, like most golfers, I got
• 1:30:09
  a little nervous in the first tea, but not nearly as much as I
• 1:30:12
  used to. Heights make me nervous. I'm not a big I'm not big
• 1:30:15
  into heights. But from an intellectual standpoint, I don't get nervous because I've
• 1:30:19
  endured just about everything that there is to endure. When you've been in humiliated
• 1:30:24
  publicly as much as I have, you start not to fear things for better
• 1:30:29
  for worse. So being fearless is not a problem I have, or being
• 1:30:33
  fearful is not a problem I have, because I am psychologically, mentally,
• 1:30:38
  intellectually, indeed pretty fearless. But he also asked, what has or is
• 1:30:43
  your family dynamic been like with your parents and siblings? And I don't really
• 1:30:48
  know what they're referencing, but since I just kind of answered that question,
• 1:30:56
  you know, my father and I get along fine. We're not super close,
• 1:31:00
  but you know, we talk on a regular basis. He lives in
• 1:31:03
  the Boston area. He's actually going to be moving into an assisted living facility
• 1:31:10
  with his wife, although I don't think they really need to. It's basically
• 1:31:14
  a resort. My father's very well off financially, and so they're basically moving
• 1:31:19
  into a resort in the Massachusetts area. And I don't know how that's going
• 1:31:26
  to impact our interaction. It's quite possible I may never see him again,
• 1:31:30
  depending on, obviously in his eighties, how things go from here, because
• 1:31:35
  of the three thousand miles between us, and I don't think they're going to
• 1:31:40
  be capable of traveling out here to see the grandkids anytime soon. As far
• 1:31:45
  as my siblings, I am largely estranged from my siblings, I'm totally a
• 1:31:49
  strange for my brother. I have some contact with my sisters, but not
• 1:31:56
  any significant contact, and it all as a result of that situation with my
• 1:32:02
  grandfather and the estate and all sorts of things that occurred because of that.
• 1:32:06
  Maybe between now in January, I'll tell that story because it's a really tragic
• 1:32:12
  and fascinating story, and it deals with family dynamics and trying to avoid taxes
• 1:32:19
  and what happens once people die and how loyalties change, and it's very very
• 1:32:26
  sad, But that's the situation there. Someone else asks, or maybe this
• 1:32:32
  is Mark. I'm not sure how much money and political cover? Oh,
• 1:32:35
  this must be somebody else, you know, Maybe it's Mark. You know
• 1:32:39
  what it's Mark asking a second question, how much money and political cover would
• 1:32:43
  it take for a truthful and accurate Netflix mini series to be made in release
• 1:32:46
  based upon your work on the Penn States and Dusky Paterno's story? Could this
• 1:32:51
  ever exist? Then he says, sorry for the multiple questions. So this
• 1:32:56
  is Mark. Yeah, we're talking Elon Musk level money that would have to
• 1:33:02
  be involved here, and this is a classic catch twenty two. As far
• 1:33:08
  as political cover, this would never happen unless Sandusky was exonerated in a court
• 1:33:13
  of law, then I'm sure it would happen. But Sanduski will never be
• 1:33:16
  exonerated in the court of law, especially in Pennsylvania, without something like this
• 1:33:20
  happening first. And so therefore you have the catch twenty two that there's no
• 1:33:27
  way to make it happen. And there have been numerous efforts. I've been
• 1:33:30
  a part of, Mike got Gavino has been a part of, other people
• 1:33:33
  have been a part of. Cyrus Nerosta, screenwriter friend of mine who's been
• 1:33:38
  on the podcast before, has tried to be a part of. There have
• 1:33:41
  been numerous attempts to try to pitch to very major media outlets the contrarian view
• 1:33:48
  of the penn State Paterno Sandusky story. And we've never really gotten that close.
• 1:33:51
  We've gotten in the ballpark, but we've never come close to getting to
• 1:33:59
  home plate, uh or around home plate. We might have gotten to first
• 1:34:01
  base once or twice, but that's about as close as it's gotten. And
• 1:34:05
  it's not going to get any closer from here without some sort of a miracle.
• 1:34:10
  And like I said, which came first, the chicken or the egg,
• 1:34:13
  It's never going to happen. Unfortunately. Anonymous asks to find your hope
• 1:34:17
  for America and if that hope has been redefined after personal life experiences. Boy,
• 1:34:23
  that's an open ended question. It's kind of how I started today's episode.
• 1:34:26
  I don't have a lot of hope for America. I don't know how
• 1:34:30
  it's going to look or when it's going to happen. You know, are
• 1:34:34
  we going to divide into different countries? I do think that that's eventually going
• 1:34:41
  to happen. Obviously, something has to occur to spark that. I my
• 1:34:46
  greater fear is though, that we just ceased to become America as we thought
• 1:34:51
  it was. We still call it America, but we're not that country anymore,
• 1:34:57
  and I think we're already on the verge of that. The analogy I
• 1:34:59
  would use is tackle football. I've been talking a lot about tackle football recently
• 1:35:03
  and how the NFL I think, is destined to go flag football. You
• 1:35:08
  know, it's possible that they never actually call it flag where they never actually
• 1:35:11
  bring the flags out, that they just slowly eviscerate the sport to where it's
• 1:35:15
  something unrecognizable from what it was previously or was ever intended to be. But
• 1:35:19
  it still is called tackle football, it's still called the National Football League.
• 1:35:25
  They still have the helmets and the pads. I don't know. So no
• 1:35:29
  one's ever going to admit that it's over, but it's over. And I
• 1:35:34
  think that's very similar to what's going to happen with America. By the way,
• 1:35:38
  that's the best case scenario. The worst case scenario is, you know,
• 1:35:41
  we have a deadlocked election in twenty twenty four, we have a civil
• 1:35:44
  war, and which almost had in twenty twenty. We were very close to
• 1:35:47
  a civil war in twenty twenty because we were forty four thousand votes in three
• 1:35:51
  states away from a two sixty nine to two sixty nine electoral college tie,
• 1:35:56
  which would have made January sixth look like a picnic. And so you know
• 1:36:00
  that the nonviolent end of America is, I mean, where the violent end
• 1:36:06
  of America is still I think very much a possibility. I have never pretended
• 1:36:12
  to know exactly how or when this is gonna go down, but it's going
• 1:36:17
  to happen, and unfortunately, it's likely going to happen in my natural lifetime.
• 1:36:23
  Pete asks, just because American and European leftists have completely politicized climate science,
• 1:36:30
  that doesn't necessarily mean that the science is complete bunk. The atmospheric carbon
• 1:36:35
  dioxide concentration is indeed increasing, and CO two is widely understood to be a
• 1:36:42
  greenhouse gas. Question, Suppose it has proven to your satisfaction that the rising
• 1:36:47
  worldwide CO two concentration is actually causing the average atmospheric temperature of the Earth to
• 1:36:55
  rise. What sort of national policies or programs with John Zig support on a
• 1:37:00
  long term basis to deal with the effects. Well, I appreciate the questions,
• 1:37:04
  Pete. I mean I'm someone who revers science. I talked about my
• 1:37:09
  mother's family with my grandfather. My father's family with my grandfather is very steeped
• 1:37:17
  in science history. My grandfather on my father's side was a literal rocket scientist,
• 1:37:24
  a rather well known one. He was most well known for his role
• 1:37:30
  in how it is that we got satellites into space and we're able to power
• 1:37:33
  them. He came up with the idea of solar panels for satellites, and
• 1:37:39
  he did so against an enormous amount of criticism and pushback from the US Navy.
• 1:37:44
  There was no NASA at this time. My grandfather came over an operation
• 1:37:46
  paper clip from Germany with Von Brown, which is now somehow a controversial thing.
• 1:37:53
  They're trying to turn an Operation paper Clip into a Nazi organization, which
• 1:37:57
  is ridiculous. My grandfather was an asshole, but he was not a Nazi
• 1:38:01
  anyway. He is very much credited with the US Army's effort to make sure
• 1:38:10
  that we had solar panels on our satellites because regular batteries were not going to
• 1:38:14
  work. The US Navy said, oh, you're crazy. All we need
• 1:38:16
  is these batteries. They compromise. They put the solar panels on there and
• 1:38:21
  the first satellites and the batteries went dead almost immediately. The solar panels work
• 1:38:26
  perfectly, and the rest is history. That's my grandfather, Hans K.
• 1:38:30
  Ziggler. Look it up, so you know. And it's interesting because satellite
• 1:38:33
  technology plays an incredibly important role in climate science here. I mean, people
• 1:38:40
  forget that we only had forty to forty five years of satellite technology giving us
• 1:38:45
  our current method for determining global temperature, which is nothing. It's nowhere near
• 1:38:50
  enough time to be able to determine what the hell's happening with the temperature.
• 1:38:54
  But let me address peats very legitimate question but it's based upon a falsehood.
• 1:39:00
  Falsehood Pete is somehow that an increase in CO two is causing temperature increase.
• 1:39:09
  It's exactly the opposite. The science and doubta on this is clear throughout the
• 1:39:15
  history of the globe. And you know who inadvertently admits it, Al Gore.
• 1:39:21
  Go watch al Gore and The Inconvenient Truth. There's a very famous scene
• 1:39:27
  in that movie where to his crowd of supporters he shows a graph from a
• 1:39:31
  distance that shows temperature and shows CO two level, and those two lines seem
• 1:39:40
  very much correlated. And he laughs. He says, anyone's see a connection
• 1:39:45
  here, and the audience chuckles, Oh, of course there's a connection between
• 1:39:51
  CO two level and temperature. But there's a problem, one that even al
• 1:39:58
  Gore alludes to but successfully dodges. He says in the movie, well,
• 1:40:05
  the relationship is complicated. It's complicated. He says, that's a quote.
• 1:40:11
  It's complicated. It's not actually not that complicated. It's complicated for his theory
• 1:40:17
  because if you leave that graph up long enough for people to actually take a
• 1:40:23
  look at it, what you realize is that if there is indeed correlation and
• 1:40:29
  causation between CO two level and temperature. It's actually the exact opposite that by
• 1:40:36
  about eight hundred years throughout the history of the globe, according to the records
• 1:40:43
  that we have, or we think we have. You know, obviously no
• 1:40:45
  one was keeping records at the time, but you know, going through ice
• 1:40:48
  core and what have you, what we've believed to be the record of the
• 1:40:54
  globe is that, by about eight hundred year margin COO two increase follows temperature
• 1:41:03
  increase follows, not precedes. Therefore, if there is a causational relationship,
• 1:41:13
  it is in exactly the opposite way that an increase in temperature, which can
• 1:41:17
  happen for a number of different reasons, then causes an increase in CO two.
• 1:41:26
  So that's a massive hurdle to Pete's proposition. However, if it was
• 1:41:32
  ever proven. To me, I mean, there's so many different elements to
• 1:41:38
  this story that are nonsensical. But to me, there's so many hurdles you
• 1:41:43
  got to get over before you get to the point where we start to try
• 1:41:46
  to do something about this. Is it real? Are we causing it?
• 1:41:51
  If we're causing it, is there anything that we can do to change it?
• 1:41:54
  Like, for instance, there's a new story out that the Antarctic ice
• 1:41:59
  can no longer be saved. But essentially that's the new study, that it
• 1:42:02
  is inevitable, that it's it's gonna disappear, which I don't nessarily agree with
• 1:42:08
  because my understanding is that there's been the last year or so there was a
• 1:42:12
  massive underwater volcano that would be the cause for increasing temperatures in that area of
• 1:42:19
  the globe, and that that may be a significant reason for ice melting.
• 1:42:23
  But okay, whatever the point is, if in fact we my point there
• 1:42:29
  is, Oh so, if it's inevitable, why the hell are we worried
• 1:42:30
  about it? There's nothing we can do. If you're saying it's inevitable,
• 1:42:35
  there's nothing we can do about it. So we got to be the cause.
• 1:42:40
  It's got to be real, there's got to be something we can do
• 1:42:43
  about it, and then it's got to be worth doing the you know,
• 1:42:47
  the the benefits have to outweigh the costs, and the costs that are being
• 1:42:55
  talked about here are enormous in every way, shape or form, not just
• 1:42:59
  financially. But I'm our way of life, and so to me, no
• 1:43:03
  one has ever I don't. I can't even get the first base on the
• 1:43:08
  whole global warming climate change situation. No one's even come close to getting home,
• 1:43:13
  and it's absolutely been politicized. I'm glad Pete acknowledges this. And while
• 1:43:18
  it's a different grade of scientists, the entire industry of science showed its ass
• 1:43:27
  during COVID in a dramatic fashion. So I don't know why anyone would trust
• 1:43:30
  anyone, you know, in the entire realm, because all of science became
• 1:43:35
  politicized clearly and obviously, and they were wrong, And so why the hell
• 1:43:42
  would we trust anything this realm of life is telling us, especially when they've
• 1:43:47
  been wrong so often. I mean, every single prediction that the climate scientists
• 1:43:51
  make of doom has always been wrong, I mean remarkably wrong. So for
• 1:43:58
  me to get the first base, I need some predictions to start being right
• 1:44:02
  in a consistent way, and I need a rational theory as to how we
• 1:44:09
  could ever change this. My favorite counter argument is, Okay, so you
• 1:44:13
  want us to reverse the warming trend of the globe, assuming that's real.
• 1:44:16
  I'm not even one hundred percent sure it's real, because I think there's explanations
• 1:44:19
  for why the way we're measuring temperature is not reliable. But Okay, whatever
• 1:44:26
  you know. If in fact that's the case, you want us to reverse
• 1:44:30
  warming, how do you know we're not going to reverse it too much and
• 1:44:33
  it's not going to get too cold again. I mean, what's the perfect
• 1:44:35
  temperature? What's the perfect climate? Tell me what year? Please? Someone
• 1:44:40
  tell me what the year was of this perfect climate. It does not exist.
• 1:44:44
  It's all nonsensical and it's overtly political. All right, Anonymous asks,
• 1:44:48
  I've been a fan of yours since the KFI days. I'm amazed how many
• 1:44:51
  people remember me from KFI in Los Angeles. I was only there for less
• 1:44:56
  than four years, just about four years, and it was long, long
• 1:45:00
  time ago. Down I left there in late two thousand and seven. You
• 1:45:03
  stuck out like a sore thumb over there in a good way for me,
• 1:45:06
  and I always wondered how you got along with all those guys over there,
• 1:45:10
  especially Bill Handle, and what made you leave? All Right, I'm not
• 1:45:15
  gonna go too deeply into this because most people don't know about KFI and Los
• 1:45:17
  Angeles at the time was the number one talk station in the country. Bill
• 1:45:20
  Handle was the morning show host there. Here's my story with Bill Handle.
• 1:45:25
  When I got there, Bill Handle I think saw me as the future of
• 1:45:30
  the station because I had been hired by the program director there, and I
• 1:45:35
  was the youngest guy on the lineup, and I was doing late evenings,
• 1:45:41
  and then I came into early evenings after the John and Ken show, and
• 1:45:44
  so he tried to befriend me, even took me to bizarrely enough, since
• 1:45:48
  I'm not Jewish, he took me to a satyr I think at doctor Laura's
• 1:45:55
  house, Doctor Laura the radio legend. I know doctor Laura was there.
• 1:45:59
  I can't remember was in his house. It might have been at his house
• 1:46:01
  and Doctor Laura was invited. Anyway, I'd never been to a sader before,
• 1:46:06
  and you know, he tried to be very nice to me. I
• 1:46:10
  filled in for him occasionally and we got along. I mean, he was
• 1:46:14
  a funny guy. I think he had some talent or has some talent.
• 1:46:19
  I didn't agree with him on everything, but we had a good relationship.
• 1:46:24
  He invited me to a party one time at his house, a different occasion
• 1:46:29
  other than a sator. And then in two thousand and six, I got
• 1:46:32
  in a fight on the anniversary of nine to eleven with John Cobalt, the
• 1:46:38
  afternoon host. I didn't get a fistfight. It was an on air which
• 1:46:43
  in my view, was perfectly appropriate battle over John flipping on the Iraq War.
• 1:46:47
  John Cobalt, the afternoon host with Gominam Ken Champeau. John and Can
• 1:46:54
  had been huge proponents of the Iraq War and then they completely flipped for ratings
• 1:46:58
  purposes. And it's a long story. Maybe I'll tell that before the end
• 1:47:03
  of the podcast in January of twenty twenty four, because I do think it
• 1:47:08
  tells a lot about the nature of talk radio. But we had a fight
• 1:47:13
  off the air verbally, and then it spilled on the air, and John
• 1:47:17
  had said something to me just before we went back on the air that was
• 1:47:20
  completely and totally racist, I mean full on racist, and I was stunned
• 1:47:25
  and shocked, and I think John knew he had stepped in it, and
• 1:47:29
  that's partially why he targeted me for destruction. But on the air, I
• 1:47:34
  stupidly thought that making a joke about it would would do good, and instead
• 1:47:40
  it provoked John to absolutely go ballistic on me on the air, and I
• 1:47:45
  thought I handled it as professionally as possible when my show then started, because
• 1:47:50
  we would do this tease from the end of his show to the beginning of
• 1:47:54
  mine, and unfortunately his fate would have it. Ken was off that week
• 1:47:57
  and John was cranky and tired, and long story short, I was supposed
• 1:48:04
  to go to a party at Bill Handle's house that weekend and like the next
• 1:48:11
  day after this fight, and I got punished for this. I think I
• 1:48:15
  got taken off the air for two days or something. And so once I
• 1:48:18
  got taken off the air, it was a clear message, right that the
• 1:48:21
  station was siding with the big dog, you know, John Cobalt over me,
• 1:48:28
  because he made a hell of a lot money, more money for the
• 1:48:30
  station than I did. And Bill Handle sent me an email like one line
• 1:48:36
  like, in light of what happened with you and John, I'd ask you
• 1:48:43
  please don't come to the party this weekend. Now. Bill Handle hated John
• 1:48:46
  Colebalt's guts, hated, hated with extreme passion, probably more than I hated
• 1:48:53
  John Colebalt. And when I got the email, I literally thought it was
• 1:48:57
  a joke. I didn't know how to resp Oh, is he fucking with
• 1:49:00
  me? Is he like is this his way of haha? You know,
• 1:49:05
  you know, clearly this is such a big deal. You shouldn't come to
• 1:49:09
  the party because I didn't even know that John would be invited to the party,
• 1:49:12
  or I don't even think John was. I think somehow I was just
• 1:49:15
  that toxic all of a sudden that Bill didn't have anything to do with me.
• 1:49:17
  So that was, to my recollection, the last time I ever had
• 1:49:21
  any contact with Bill, because I think I realized he was serious, and
• 1:49:27
  I'm like, what an asshole, what a complete and a fraud. But
• 1:49:30
  that's the nature of talk radio people, and that's that was a big moment
• 1:49:34
  in my life for realizing what a fraud talk radio was in general, and
• 1:49:38
  also prepared me for what happened in twenty sixteen with the conservative media and Donald
• 1:49:44
  Trump, because I knew firsthand these people are all frauds and assholes and sellouts,
• 1:49:49
  and they're going to go for Trump because he's he's in their best interest,
• 1:49:55
  and that's exactly what happened. Brian asks, have you ever come on
• 1:50:00
  the Tim Donahey story. You mentioned in the last episode that you don't believe
• 1:50:04
  that anyone is fixing sports games, but Donnahey exposed that things can happen to
• 1:50:12
  at least move the line. This is in the NBA. He's referring to
• 1:50:15
  an NBA official. I think you're right about the Philadelphia Kansas City Super Bowl
• 1:50:19
  prediction. I'd give it a fifty to fifty chance for sure. It's interesting.
• 1:50:24
  I've never spoken to Tim Donahey, my webmaster that I've referenced for many
• 1:50:29
  years. Ken Pollard is apparently friends with him and has offered him up as
• 1:50:35
  an interview subject or somebody I might even want to do something with or on.
• 1:50:42
  It never really interested me that much. I do think it's an underrated
• 1:50:45
  story in the sports media that an NBA official is fully acknowledging that basically he
• 1:50:49
  was fixing games, at least from a line perspective. And I do think
• 1:50:55
  that the NFL is very very vulnerable to this, and I don't think NFL
• 1:50:59
  games are going to be fixed. With regard to the Chiefs. I just
• 1:51:00
  think that the momentum of the Taylor Swift situation is going to create a self
• 1:51:05
  interest for everyone involved that's going to end up with the Chiefs being very,
• 1:51:09
  very very difficult to beat, and that there's too much money to be made
• 1:51:13
  with a especially Kelsey brothers going against each other for a second time with Taylor
• 1:51:17
  Swift in attendance scenario, and I hate that I'm even speculating about that,
• 1:51:21
  but human beings are human beings, and I do think that matters. So
• 1:51:27
  but I've never really commented on the NBA thing. I'm not an NBA fan
• 1:51:30
  anymore. To me, the NBA's a joke and so I barely even ever
• 1:51:35
  watch it anymore, And which is a shame because I was a huge NBA
• 1:51:40
  fan back in the seventies and the eighties and even into the nineties with Alan
• 1:51:45
  Iverson and the Kimba Mtumbo when they both got to play for the Philadelphia seventy
• 1:51:50
  six ers, which was my favorite team growing up, and both of them
• 1:51:54
  were georgetowners. Paul asks, I know you hate Trump, but if you
• 1:51:58
  were advising him whom to tell him to pick as his vice presidential candidate,
• 1:52:02
  who would it be? Yeah, that's pretty laughable, you know, I
• 1:52:06
  don't know. I mean, if his goal is to win, and I
• 1:52:12
  know this is not going to help or please a lot of Trump fans,
• 1:52:16
  but if i'm him, I'm looking at the polling. I picked Nikki Haley.
• 1:52:20
  She's a female. She actually does very well against Joe Biden in the
• 1:52:26
  polling. Some polls in the case she does better against Joe Biden than Donald
• 1:52:28
  Trump does. She's attractive, she's intelligent. You an ambassador. Obviously,
• 1:52:33
  with the Israeli Hamas War potential expansion of that, that's going to be a
• 1:52:39
  significant issue in twenty twenty four. Foreign policy experience is important. I do
• 1:52:44
  think it's important to have a woman on the ticket, so that would be
• 1:52:47
  probably my first choice, but I'm not totally committed to that, and I
• 1:52:51
  also don't think necessarily that he's gonna do that. He's actually made some disparaging
• 1:52:57
  remarks about her during this campaign, although that doesn't necessarily stop Trump from doing
• 1:53:00
  anything when it comes to picking a vice presidential nominee or anything else for that
• 1:53:06
  matter. Joe asks if there was one person not in politics you would want
• 1:53:12
  to get into it, whom would that be. Well, that would definitely
• 1:53:15
  be Tiger Woods. I doubt that'll ever happen. I used to think before
• 1:53:21
  the big sex scandal that Tiger was a lock to be president someday. I
• 1:53:28
  would still love for that to possibly be the case. I mean, he's
• 1:53:30
  not anywhere near perfect, but I do think he's very very smart, and
• 1:53:35
  he obviously has the celebrity and the street cred with a wide swath of potential
• 1:53:43
  voters, and I think he would probably be a Republican. I know he
• 1:53:47
  used to think of himself as a South Park Conservative. Making as much money
• 1:53:53
  as he does, it's hard to consider him being a full on liberal.
• 1:53:57
  His value system seems to be conservative. Obviously, golf is considered to be
• 1:54:01
  mostly a conservative sport. He would, I'm sure, portray himself as a
• 1:54:06
  moderate, but he probably just doesn't have the inclination or the interest in doing
• 1:54:12
  it. But that's the person I would pick if I could magically make that
• 1:54:15
  happen. Chris says, congrats on episode number one hundred. What do you
• 1:54:18
  think our founding fathers would say about the current condition of our republic and our
• 1:54:24
  government? And if you could go back in a time machine to Philadelphia seventeen
• 1:54:28
  seventy six, what would you suggest that they add or subtract from the Constitution.
• 1:54:33
  Well, I think it's pretty obvious our founding fathers would be completely flummixed
• 1:54:38
  and horrified by what this country has become, specifically the size and the power
• 1:54:42
  of government. They literally fought a war of independence against this kind of government.
• 1:54:49
  They put their lives and reputations and fortunes on the line. Many of
• 1:54:54
  them died because of it, and you know, we've turned the government to
• 1:55:00
  this monstrosity. I think that if there were two things that were part of
• 1:55:03
  our constitution and that were respected as part of our constitution actually abided by,
• 1:55:11
  that would have curtailed a lot of what happened. Number one would have been
• 1:55:15
  very simple, a balanced budget amendment that the budget has to be balanced.
• 1:55:21
  It's been attempted many, many times, but and in some people actually think
• 1:55:28
  that, you know, that's why we have the debt ceiling controversy every once
• 1:55:31
  in a while, because there is technically these obligations to meet the debt.
• 1:55:36
  But it had there been a balanced budget amendment, that would have changed everything
• 1:55:40
  if it would done properly. And similarly to that, I think that they
• 1:55:45
  should have been because they were not living in a world where citizenship meant the
• 1:55:50
  same thing that it does today. One because there weren't freebies to hand out
• 1:55:56
  from the government. But also we didn't have the same kind of migration and
• 1:56:00
  into the country as exists today. I mean, obviously the whole world is
• 1:56:04
  very very different than it was when the country was founded. So to me,
• 1:56:09
  there should have been, as California passed many years ago and then the
• 1:56:14
  courts eviscerated it proven there should have been some provision in there that if you're
• 1:56:19
  not a citizen, you can't get benefits from the government, state, local,
• 1:56:26
  or national, whatever way you're going to word it. There's if there
• 1:56:30
  had been some sort of serious constitutional amendment in that regard, I think it
• 1:56:34
  would have kept the sovereignty of the nation, and it would have it would
• 1:56:41
  have made citizenship matter, and we wouldn't have been invaded from foreign countries like
• 1:56:47
  we have when it comes to illegal immigration. So that's what I would have
• 1:56:51
  done in retrospect, and I've been there, and of course I'm sure I
• 1:56:56
  would have been laughed at, because no one would have understood why I cared
• 1:56:59
  about these things. Robert asked for the twenty twenty presidential election, do you
• 1:57:04
  think Joe Biden would have won the election if Republican Trump haters had voted for
• 1:57:09
  Trump? Well, I don't think that's a fair question, because, as
• 1:57:14
  you know, that's on Trump. That's not on the Republican vote Trump,
• 1:57:17
  Haeters, that's on Trump. There's a reason why there were Republican vote haters
• 1:57:24
  from Republican Trump haters who voted for Joe Biden. That's that's not their fault,
• 1:57:29
  that's Donald Trump's fault. But I yeah, I'm sure you can make
• 1:57:33
  an argument that if people who if every person who considered themselves a Republican,
• 1:57:39
  if none of those people had failed to vote for Trump instead of Biden.
• 1:57:45
  And I haven't taken a look at the data recently, but I mean,
• 1:57:48
  he only lost three states by forty four thousand votes, and that would have
• 1:57:54
  gotten us a two sixty nine two sixty nine tie. So it would be
• 1:57:58
  kind of absurd to claim that there weren't forty four thousand votes in Georgia,
• 1:58:01
  Arizona, and Wisconsin, and that would have if they had flipped. Would
• 1:58:08
  not have, you know, been there among Republicans who were Trump haters who
• 1:58:14
  didn't vote for him. I mean, that's that's clearly there's enough of those
• 1:58:17
  people in that category, although I'm not sure it would be overwhelming. So
• 1:58:20
  I guess the answer to your question is is yes, but I don't really
• 1:58:24
  know what the significance of that is. Interestingly, I think we're heading for
• 1:58:28
  a very similar situation in twenty twenty four. If the anti vax people vote
• 1:58:33
  all for Donald Trump instead of Robert Kennedy Junior. Trump's gonna win. That's
• 1:58:41
  not a possible thing to have happened. But if you tell me right now
• 1:58:45
  that the candidates are Biden, Trump and Robert F. Kennedy Junior on every
• 1:58:49
  ballot in the state of every state of the country. They're on every ballot,
• 1:58:55
  you tell me those are the three candidates, and that magically the people
• 1:58:59
  who only care about out the anti vax issue all voted for Trump, and
• 1:59:02
  then whoever else was still an RFK junior fan voted for him. Trump would
• 1:59:08
  win. And I'm certain about that, and it might not even be that
• 1:59:13
  close under the scenario of a three person race. But that's not really relevant
• 1:59:17
  because that's not the way that's not the way things work. Kelly asked,
• 1:59:23
  do you regret the time and effort that you put into the investigation and research
• 1:59:26
  done on the Jerry Sandusky case. If so, what would you have to
• 1:59:30
  change to make you say it was worth it. That's a tough question,
• 1:59:35
  one that I have thought about a lot. I would say probably yes,
• 1:59:42
  I do regret. I don't regret the time and effort because time and effort
• 1:59:47
  is not a problem for me. I mean, if I believe in something,
• 1:59:49
  I'll give it everything I have to the very very end. It's going
• 1:59:55
  down that path to begin with. And obviously the point of no return was
• 2:00:01
  when I came out in favor of Jerry Sindusky's innocence and the second Today Show
• 2:00:06
  appearance in twenty fourteen with Dottie Sandusky and Matt Lower. That was the point
• 2:00:12
  of no return. And I knew that that was a point of no return,
• 2:00:16
  but I don't think I fully one percent accepted that to the level that
• 2:00:24
  I should have. And so given what has happened as a result, I
• 2:00:30
  mostly regret doing that. It's ironic because it's the best work I've ever done.
• 2:00:33
  It's the best work I know of anybody that has anyone has done in
• 2:00:38
  this area in the modern history of the media. I mean, doesn't that
• 2:00:42
  tell you everything you need to know about the death of journalism. The best
• 2:00:45
  work I've ever done, the best work that I'm aware of any journalist doing
• 2:00:50
  in the modern history, at least in this country, is something I one
• 2:00:56
  regret, and too, the worst thing that's ever happened in my career.
• 2:01:00
  I mean, if that doesn't prove the death of journalism. I don't know
• 2:01:01
  what does I mean? That's an upside down world. You can't have journalism
• 2:01:08
  in a world where that exists. Because, by the way, I'm sure
• 2:01:11
  there are other people who have looked around and seen me as an example on
• 2:01:14
  this and other cases, and god, I don't want to be John Zigler,
• 2:01:15
  and I don't blame them, And so it has a chilling effect,
• 2:01:19
  and it manifests itself in other cases, and we talked about one in the
• 2:01:27
  last episode, and the George Floyd case. It seems to me as if
• 2:01:30
  there was a massive injustice with the murder conviction of the police officer in that
• 2:01:33
  case, Shavin. And so these things keep happening because people are afraid to
• 2:01:39
  go up against the freight train. Well, I can tell you the freight
• 2:01:42
  train running over you is no fun. But I don't fully regret it because
• 2:01:48
  one, I learned a lot. Two, I'm actually more prepared now to
• 2:01:54
  analyze real life cases and politics and new stories than I ever happened before,
• 2:02:01
  and in many cases way more equipped than anybody else. I really think it's
• 2:02:04
  why I was way out of the curve on COVID, because I lived the
• 2:02:09
  Jerry Sandusky case, and the COVID situation was remarkably similar, except obviously COVID
• 2:02:14
  was real and sex abuse allegations against Jerry Sandusky were not. And so I'm
• 2:02:20
  a better man and a better commentator because of all this, and we did
• 2:02:26
  some great work. I made a lot of mistakes. I made so many
• 2:02:29
  mistakes, which I acknowledge and admit to in the podcast with the benefit of
• 2:02:33
  hindsight. But you know, I do think that I've gotten some benefit from
• 2:02:40
  knowing what really happened in that story. Not a lot, but it would
• 2:02:45
  have bothered me not knowing what really did happen. So I got to the
• 2:02:49
  truth of that. And I do take some solace in the fact that there
• 2:02:53
  are thousands I don't know how many thousands, but there are thousands of people
• 2:02:57
  who also now know what really happened in that story that feel better about it
• 2:03:02
  weirdly because of that knowledge. So there's benefit to that. Plus, you
• 2:03:09
  know, I've had some relationships because of it. Our producer Mac Agavino,
• 2:03:15
  I likely never would have met without that, We certainly never would have done
• 2:03:17
  with the benefit of hindsight together, or there probably wouldn't be the death of
• 2:03:21
  journalism. Consequently, my relationship with Liza Beebe would not have been reignited.
• 2:03:29
  I never would have become friends with frank O Harris. There are other relationships
• 2:03:33
  I've made along the way that have been have had at least some benefit to
• 2:03:38
  them. There's also been some relationships along the way that have had negatives attached
• 2:03:44
  to them that were not beneficial in utality. So there's been a lot of
• 2:03:47
  pain and anguish involved. But if you take a look at it in the
• 2:03:51
  big picture, I think I probably wouldn't do it again. I'm not sure
• 2:03:59
  about that. The story's not one hundred percent over yet because Jerry Sandusky is
• 2:04:03
  still alive, Graham Spanner's still alive, Gary Schultz still alive, Tim Curley
• 2:04:06
  still alive. So it's a little bit like the situation I referenced previously,
• 2:04:12
  where we don't have we literally don't have dead bodies yet, and so there's
• 2:04:15
  not full closure, even though intellectually I know that what's going to be the
• 2:04:19
  result that it's not going to be anything good. It's a very similar situation,
• 2:04:24
  and and so I'd like to hold off in any pronouncements on that,
• 2:04:30
  at least as of yet. But right now I'm probably leaning towards regretting doing
• 2:04:35
  the whole thing. Jason asks, how do you and your wife intend to
• 2:04:42
  raise your daughters to avoid the problems that you repeatedly and rightfully lament about today's
• 2:04:46
  youth. Well, that's a great question. You know, I am not
• 2:04:55
  a great father. However, I'm a good enough father to know that I'm
• 2:05:01
  not a great father. I'm good enough to know the mistakes I'm making,
• 2:05:05
  and boy, I'm making a lot of them. And well, I don't
• 2:05:10
  think I'm a bad father, and I know my wife does a great job
• 2:05:14
  of being a mother. It is so difficult in this day and age to
• 2:05:17
  be a good father. And I think that's really kind of what it comes
• 2:05:23
  down to, is I'm just aware of all the mistakes I'm making. Let
• 2:05:27
  me give you a story that just happened over the last couple of days,
• 2:05:30
  which might tell you a lot about my life and about being a dad in
• 2:05:36
  this era. I think this story will tell you a lot. So my
• 2:05:42
  wife just celebrated her fiftieth birthday. She doesn't look anything close to fifty,
• 2:05:46
  and understandably this psychologically was having a big strain on her. It's understandable fiftieth
• 2:05:53
  birthday especially for a woman, is a big deal. And my wife's a
• 2:05:56
  very beautiful woman and that's been a big part of her persona for most of
• 2:06:00
  not all of her life. And you know, you hit fifty, even
• 2:06:03
  though she's in phenomenal shape, it looks great. You know, you start
• 2:06:08
  to think that that's fading, and you start to get down and depressed.
• 2:06:14
  And I knew, because I know my wife very well, that the fiftieth
• 2:06:16
  birthday was going to be a problem. And as part of that celebration,
• 2:06:21
  we had a two day trip that we took down to Knottsbury Farm, which
• 2:06:28
  is an amusement park which is in the realm of Disney. It's a lot
• 2:06:32
  less expensive Ofney than Disneyland. It's based a lot in the Peanuts characters Charlie
• 2:06:38
  brown Snoopy and all that. It's much much, much, much much more
• 2:06:41
  conservative than Disneyland. They even not only allowed guns, they actually embraced guns,
• 2:06:46
  fake guns. But you know, it's very it's a much more conservative
• 2:06:53
  minded place than Disneyland has become. And we're season pass holders there and so
• 2:07:00
  we went down there for two days to celebrate my wife's fiftieth birthday. All
• 2:07:04
  right, So there's four of us, my two young daughters and my youngest
• 2:07:10
  daughter. Diana is physically afraid of nothing, but psychologically she gets spooked by
• 2:07:16
  certain things which don't even make sense. But she got spooked by a particular
• 2:07:23
  ride, not even a very scary ride at all. Of course, they
• 2:07:26
  have everything very halloweened out famously so at Not's very farm. But this was
• 2:07:30
  during the day. We didn't even understand why Diana was all that scared,
• 2:07:36
  but she was scared. And my wife and Grace, my older daughter who
• 2:07:41
  was eleven, they wanted to go on the ride again and Diana didn't want
• 2:07:45
  to go. And I'm like, Okay, here's what I'll do. I'll
• 2:07:49
  take care of Diana while you guys go back on the ride. You know,
• 2:07:54
  it's my wife's birthday, you know. I basically my role here is
• 2:08:00
  be the caretaker and you know, ride with Diana whenever my wife and Grace
• 2:08:05
  want to go on a ride she doesn't want to go on or you know,
• 2:08:07
  I'm just I'm just the caddy basically during this entire endeavor. And I
• 2:08:13
  don't even really like these rides very much, but I'm there to try to
• 2:08:16
  just help facilitate the whole thing, and I'm there, you know, just
• 2:08:20
  for show, because not being there would obviously not be good, it would
• 2:08:24
  not be positive for the family, and especially since it's my wife's fiftieth birthday.
• 2:08:31
  So my wife and Grace go back on the ride and now I got
• 2:08:35
  to figure out how I'm going to kill fifteen to twenty minutes with my daughter
• 2:08:39
  Diana. So we start walking and we walk past a few of these arcade
• 2:08:45
  games. Now these are games we actually to pay extra money. They're not
• 2:08:48
  free, but you can get prizes. And Diana's big into Pokemon and the
• 2:08:54
  main prize for this whack a Mole game was where Pokemon dolls or stuffed animals,
• 2:09:03
  whatever you're gonna call them. And she saw that and she was excited
• 2:09:07
  and she basically asked, can we do that? And it wasn't very crowded.
• 2:09:13
  And so basically what these games do is, you know, they try
• 2:09:16
  to get as many people to pay the six dollars per person to play the
• 2:09:22
  game at one time, and then depending on how many people are playing the
• 2:09:24
  game, the winner gets a bigger prize. Like so if you get all
• 2:09:30
  six people that there were six different sections that you could play. If six
• 2:09:35
  people show up at the same time, it's a bigger prize, and if
• 2:09:39
  only two people play at the same time, it's a smaller prize. But
• 2:09:41
  the smaller prize was pretty decent, and Diana really wanted it, and I
• 2:09:48
  thought about the idea, Okay, if I do this, then you know
• 2:09:52
  she's gonna benefit from being a scaredy cat, and that's not very good.
• 2:09:56
  But she really wanted to do it, and it was going to ke and
• 2:10:01
  it seemed like a good idea at the time. But boyle boy, was
• 2:10:03
  it not a good idea because here's what happens. So there's no one else
• 2:10:07
  around and it's just the two of us. So I pay the twelve dollars
• 2:10:13
  to the person in charge of the whackam Mall game, six dollars for me,
• 2:10:16
  six dollars for Diana, knowing that one of us is gonna win and
• 2:10:22
  that'll get us the prize, which Diana had already seen, the one that
• 2:10:26
  she wanted and she really had her heart set on it, and so we
• 2:10:31
  start the game. Well, this whackam Mall game was actually much more difficult
• 2:10:33
  than I anticipated, and Diana, who I was trying to let win,
• 2:10:39
  was not doing as well as I had anticipated, So this was taking quite
• 2:10:43
  a while because I was trying not to win. I wanted her to win,
• 2:10:48
  her to get the ding ding ding and the bells and whistles, and
• 2:10:54
  her to win the prize. It didn't matter that if I won the prize,
• 2:10:56
  I could give it to my daughter, because I knew that wouldn't I
• 2:11:00
  mean very much to her. I just the nature of humanity, and I
• 2:11:03
  know my daughter well enough. So I took a dive. It took quite
• 2:11:07
  a while for me to lose this game of Whackable, but I eventually lost
• 2:11:11
  the Game of Whackable, and Diana got the prize she wanted and she was
• 2:11:15
  super excited. So we then go back to meet my my wife and my
• 2:11:20
  daughter. And as I was walking back, I'm realizing this is not going
• 2:11:24
  to go well with Grace, my older daughter, because Grace is eleven,
• 2:11:28
  but she's sometimes six and she's sometimes sixteen, and the six year old in
• 2:11:33
  her is going to be jealous as hell that Diana got this Pokemon stuffed animal
• 2:11:41
  because she was a scaredy cat and didn't want to go on the ride again,
• 2:11:45
  and Grace was going to freak out. I even called my wife trying
• 2:11:50
  to warn her about what I had done, but she didn't pick up the
• 2:11:52
  call because they were on this ride, I guess. So we wait for
• 2:11:58
  my wife and great to get off the ride, and sure enough, Grace
• 2:12:03
  sees what happened with Diana and she freaks out. And that's wrong on Diana.
• 2:12:09
  On Grace's part, her behavior was wrong. But it's my wife's fiftieth
• 2:12:13
  birthday, so I'm trying to keep peace. I don't want there to be
• 2:12:18
  conflict. I'm deciding this is not the time to draw a line in the
• 2:12:22
  sand and you know, punish Grace's behavior, especially since she kind of has
• 2:12:26
  a legitimate point that Diana got something she didn't get, you know, because
• 2:12:33
  she was too afraid to ride a ride. And so, like an idiot,
• 2:12:39
  I got the idea of, okay, why don't we have Grace play
• 2:12:43
  the same Wackamall game because she wanted a similar prize to what Diana wanted.
• 2:12:48
  So we go to the Wackamall game, the four of us, and I
• 2:12:52
  had already explained to my wife that I had let Diana win in great detail
• 2:12:58
  because I were joking about it because I couldn't believe how long it took because
• 2:13:01
  Diana was super excited that she had won the game and that she had earned
• 2:13:09
  the Pokemon doll. And I thought my wife understood this. I thought this
• 2:13:15
  was all very clear. So when we got to the whackamole game, I
• 2:13:22
  said, Grace said, okay, Dad, you want to play against me?
• 2:13:24
  I said, why don't you let Mom play against you? Because Diana
• 2:13:28
  had played against me? And I'm thinking Mom is on board with what's going
• 2:13:31
  down here. Now. I know that Mom is not happy with the fact
• 2:13:35
  that I spent twelve dollars on a Pokemon doll that was probably worth four or
• 2:13:41
  five dollars. And you know, that goes back to the whole job situation.
• 2:13:46
  If if our finances weren't the way they are, she wouldn't give a
• 2:13:50
  shit about the twelve dollars because it would be well worth it because Diana was
• 2:13:54
  thrilled. But you know, because we have to watch every dollar, this
• 2:13:56
  is a source of tension. So the fact that I can tell my wife
• 2:14:01
  is pissed off at me for having spent the twelve dollars on the Pokemon doll,
• 2:14:05
  this is now creating an effort on my part to get my wife involved
• 2:14:11
  and have her, you know, be invested in this whole thing. So
• 2:14:15
  I say, why don't you play against mom in the Pokemon Fine, so
• 2:14:20
  there's only two of them, so it's twelve dollars and it's the same exact,
• 2:14:26
  same situation. And I actually gave Grace some advice because I realized that
• 2:14:31
  this whack a Mole game there were five holes where the mole comes up and
• 2:14:37
  you try to whack it down. It was very tough. It was much
• 2:14:39
  more difficult than I thought it was going to be, and they come up
• 2:14:43
  very fast, and you can end up in a situation where you don't hit
• 2:14:48
  any of them because you're chasing your tail around. So I told thinking that
• 2:14:52
  my wife understood what we were doing, I told Grace just focus on the
• 2:14:56
  two holes on the left, just keep those two thinking that this will give
• 2:15:01
  her a slow and steady point of cruel and she'll be able to beat my
• 2:15:07
  wife, who is in on the fix. That's my thought. So I
• 2:15:11
  give Grace this advice and the game starts and in like twenty eight seconds,
• 2:15:18
  my wife has won the goddamn prize, and Grace is pissed at me because
• 2:15:26
  she thinks I gave her terrible advice, and I'm looking over at my wife,
• 2:15:31
  going, what the hell was that? What just happened? Because I
• 2:15:39
  thought my wife knew to be taking the dive, because the whole point of
• 2:15:43
  this was for Grace to have the same experience as Diana, so that she
• 2:15:48
  could feel like she won something and that the doll would mean something to her.
• 2:15:54
  And I didn't understand what was happening at me. And I have to
• 2:15:58
  tell you this is where doing this puts me in bad situations, because that
• 2:16:03
  morning I had done the podcast for two hours in our hotel room, and
• 2:16:07
  I was fried and frustrated and irritable and trying, you know, and tired,
• 2:16:13
  and I was trying very very hard to get through a bad situation without
• 2:16:18
  causing a problem in the midst of my wife's fiftieth birthday celebration. Well,
• 2:16:24
  this did not go well, and I tried to withdraw. I mean,
• 2:16:28
  after I said, what the hell happened? That was unbelievable. I was
• 2:16:33
  so stunned that I just withdrew and my wife went on a rampage, and
• 2:16:39
  Grace went bananas and acted like a complete spoiled brat, and there was a
• 2:16:46
  battle over whether or not she even wanted the Pokemon doll, and at first
• 2:16:48
  she didn't want it, and then she wanted it back. I mean,
• 2:16:52
  this became this massive thing, and I at dinner, I tried to take
• 2:16:56
  total blame for the whole thing. I took responsibility. It's all my fault.
• 2:17:00
  I shouldn't have done it with Diana, I shouldn't have done it with
• 2:17:03
  Grace. It's all my fault. Me at Copa, me a cop with
• 2:17:05
  me at Copa. My fault, my fault, my fault, because that's
• 2:17:09
  what dads do, that's what husbands do. Even though I didn't fully one
• 2:17:11
  hundred percent believe that that's what the reality was, I did realize I was
• 2:17:16
  culpable at a certain level, and so I tried to take responsibility. None
• 2:17:22
  of it worked. It all turned into a complete disaster. And a lot
• 2:17:26
  of it is wrapped up in this idea of how difficult it is to be
• 2:17:31
  a dad and a parent in this day and age, how spoiled even non
• 2:17:33
  rich kids are, how the expectations for kids now are completely out of control.
• 2:17:39
  That it's far easier in theory to have these principles that you want to
• 2:17:43
  live by, and then in real life, things like what I just articulated
• 2:17:46
  happen and there's no getting around it, and bad things occur and you get
• 2:17:52
  yourself in bad situations. So I've fully acknowledged that I am not a great
• 2:17:56
  dad, I'm not a great husband. I try, I realize the mistakes
• 2:18:01
  I made. I try to own up to him. That didn't help,
• 2:18:05
  and it was just a complete disaster. The only good part of the whole
• 2:18:09
  thing is I think Grace's reaction probably enhanced this even more dramatically. But Diane
• 2:18:18
  was even more thrilled than ever that she had gotten and won the game and
• 2:18:20
  gotten the Pokemon doll. I mean she took that thing to bed. She
• 2:18:26
  never let it outside of her site for the next day and a half,
• 2:18:28
  as she slept with it last night. I mean that thing was is cherished
• 2:18:33
  to her. I think partially because her big sister was so pissed off that
• 2:18:37
  she didn't get one and didn't earn it the same way that she thinks that
• 2:18:41
  she did. And I eventually spoke to my wife about this once we got
• 2:18:45
  home, once the birthday and a birthday celebration was officially over, and that
• 2:18:50
  didn't go well either. You know, my wife thinks I completely misinterpreted what
• 2:18:54
  she did. She says she was just having fun, and I'm like,
• 2:18:58
  how the hell did you not know what the assignment was? And again,
• 2:19:01
  because of the tension overhanging all of this related to the podcast and the other
• 2:19:09
  situation that I discussed earlier in this episode, everything gets exacerbated. Everything is
• 2:19:16
  worse than it should be. If that situation had come to fruition as it
• 2:19:20
  was supposed to, everything would be different. We'd be laughing about all this.
• 2:19:24
  We'd be laughing about all this. Instead, it's a major catastrophe and
• 2:19:30
  a further indication that I'm a crappy dad and a crappy husband. Despite my
• 2:19:35
  best efforts to not be as I anticipated, I've gone over time when it
• 2:19:39
  comes to the responses to the ask John Anything. So what I'm going to
• 2:19:45
  do, which is what I did after episode number fifty we did an episode
• 2:19:48
  fifty one where we had more Asked on Anything questions. What I'm going to
• 2:19:52
  do is I'm going to hold off the rest of these questions because there's still
• 2:19:56
  some good ones until episode number one hundred and one. And what we'll do
• 2:20:01
  is we'll do the news at the top of number one hundred and one,
• 2:20:07
  and then I'll answer the remainder of the ask John Anything questions on the back
• 2:20:11
  end of number one hundred and one. So that'll do it for this episode.
• 2:20:16
  Number one hundred are essentially one year anniversary of the Death of Journalism podcast.
• 2:20:20
  I hope you have found this rather narcissistic episode of the podcast to at
• 2:20:26
  least be interesting because I've tried to be as transparent as possible, basically opened
• 2:20:31
  up a vein as much as I can under the current circumstances to let you
• 2:20:37
  know exactly what is happening, and I think if taken in as proper context,
• 2:20:43
  you will at least now have a better understanding of where this podcast is
• 2:20:46
  and where it is likely to go and why I have come to that decision
• 2:20:52
  on a very rational basis, again with the caveats that if there is some
• 2:20:56
  sort of black Swan event, it is possible that that plan could change,
• 2:21:01
  but that seems rather unlikely given the way the world actually works. So as
• 2:21:05
  always, thanks so much for listening. Please remember subscribe, rate, and
• 2:21:07
  review, and share this podcast with others. If you share it on social
• 2:21:11
  media, make sure you tag me and I'll be happy to share it with
• 2:21:15
  my followers on Twitter and friends on Facebook. Until next time. Thanks so
• 2:21:20
  much for listening. This has been the death of journalism podcast. My name
• 2:21:22
  is John Zigler.