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Episode One Hundred Nine: Go "F" Yourself · The Death Of Journalism

• 0:00
  Welcome to episode number one hundred and nine of the Death of Journalism podcast.
• 0:04
  My name is John Zigler. On today's show, Elon musk unleashes on Disney
• 0:10
  and on behalf of free speech. The Newsom DeSantis debate goes better in some
• 0:15
  ways than I feared. Matt Lauer responds to my deep dive into how he
• 0:20
  got railroaded, and the college football playoff selections further prove just how screwed the
• 0:26
  sport really is. I'm known as the Dutch Digital marketing Man. I'm a
• 0:31
  digital advertising SEO and email marketing specialist that also happens to be a big fan
• 0:36
  of John Zigler and the Death of Journalism. Do you need help reaching your
• 0:41
  target audience? Let me help you develop the right messaging and confated messages and
• 0:46
  the best channels for your business. Please visit my website, the Dutchdigital Marketingman
• 0:51
  dot com and let me help you tell your story. The website is the
• 0:56
  Dutchdigital Marketingman dot com. If you want to grow your business, Peter can
• 1:00
  help. That's the Dutch Digital Marketingman dot com. And hey, thanks for
• 1:07
  sponsoring the show. I have discussed often on this podcast about how I am
• 1:11
  more conflicted by Elon Musk than probably any other prominent character in the news these
• 1:19
  days, And without going into great detail as to why I'm so conflicted,
• 1:23
  it's basically because I think Elon has some really tremendous attributes and has done a
• 1:29
  lot of really great things. But I also think he has a lot of
• 1:32
  weaknesses, and he often says some crazy things, and he actually does some
• 1:37
  things that I'm not particularly happy about, specifically when it came to the failed
• 1:42
  launch of the Desantas campaign, as well as him doing numerous things to help
• 1:47
  enable the Trump campaign and people who are supporters of Trump, like Tucker Carlson.
• 1:53
  And so it is with that backdrop that we discuss the most remarkable interview
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  of the year. And that's really saying something, because there have been some
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  interesting interviews this year. I thought until this one that the Bizarro World Michael
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  Strahan Damar Hamblin interview at the beginning of the year, just after the Super
• 2:14
  Bowl, where they completely just ignored the elephant in the room about what really
• 2:21
  happened to Tamar Hamlin, that was the craziest interview of the year. But
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  that has been usurped now because Elon Musk, as you probably know by now,
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  did a very public event that was aired on live cable network television,
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  an event hosted by The New York Times. One of these get togethers for
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  big wigs, this one for people in the media where they get interviewed in
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  all the other big wigs ooh and ah about how intelligent everybody is, and
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  they navel gaze and they pat each other on the back. Except Elon Musk
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  didn't sign off on that version of the way the things were going to go
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  down in this particular event, and he basically said some things that were reverberated
• 3:07
  around the entire world and provided a couple of sound bites that will be played
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  probably forever because they're just that memorable. You might even say they're just that
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  awesome. Most memorable was his response, although it was not the only memorable
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  thing he said during this event, but by far the most memorable thing was
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  in response to this issue of the advertiser boycott, the most recent advertiser boycott
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  of Twitter now known as x and all of this transpired because of a completely
• 3:43
  trumped up controversy. We'll get into further details and Musk's response to the controversy
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  itself, but just for context, this all had to do allegedly, not
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  really, with a very sloppy response that m gave on Twitter to someone who
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  made a statement that could be perceived as anti Semitic, and Musk didn't do
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  his due diligence, didn't really think about it, which, by the way,
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  is one of his weaknesses. He's so busy and doesn't have anyone to
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  vet anything that he does that he's prone to mistakes like this, which he
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  immediately clarified that he was not being anti semitic at all. He was talking
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  about the Anti Defamation League, which he has very substantive issues with, and
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  somehow it has become synonymous with anti semitism to be against a very liberal group
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  that must believes, and I agree with him, is actually anti white,
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  but is perceived as being a defender of those who are attacked with anti semitism.
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  And so it's a lot like everything that happens in the realm of race.
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  Once you build up enough force field protection, you're not even allowed to
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  be criticized because otherwise it's inherently racist. During this case anti semitic, which
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  is just not the real situations, not the reality, but that's the media
• 5:02
  perception. And so the interviewer from The New York Times ask Musk specifically about
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  the advertiser boycott from Disney, and I'm sure you've heard this by now,
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  and I'm going to play a longer version of the clip than what I perceive
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  has been seen and heard by most people, because symbolic of my entire perception
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  of Elon Musk. I'm even conflicted about this answer. The part that got
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  the most play, which is the go fuck yourself part, is obviously amazing
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  and one of those things that makes you want to cheer, even if you
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  don't necessarily agree with them on the issue. You're just like, absolutely,
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  if anyone who's telling Disney to go fuck themselves, I'm on board. It
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  doesn't really even matter what the issue is. However, that was not the
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  full statement. There is another part of the statement where Frankly, Musk gets
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  a little weird and starts basically acknowledging that this advertiser boycott is going to destroy
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  Twitter. But then he goes into this thing about how he's going to inform
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  the people of Earth about what happened and somehow they will respond. I don't
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  know how they're going to respond to Twitter's gone already, by the way,
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  I don't know if they're going to find out about it if Twitter is gone
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  already. But you can decide for yourself what it is that Musk really means.
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  But I want you to think about this clip basically in two different parts.
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  The first part is the one that got all the play, and audio
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  doesn't do it full justice. It does a little bit because frankly, the
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  silence after the first time Musk says go fuck yourself to Disney and Bob Iger,
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  the head of Disney, is really golden. I mean it is golden
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  silence. And I think Musk was a bit surprised by the silence because again
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  these this is a room full of big wigs, very important people, at
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  least in their own minds, and there was no reaction. There was just
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  shot stun silence to the first time that Musk says go fuck yourself. So
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  he decides to repeat himself with hand gestures and with a different cadence to emphasize
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  the point, all of which is just off the charts awesome. But then
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  he gets a bit weird, and so this is the longer version of the
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  clip heard around the world. From Elon Musk. Now, obviously you know
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  that there's a public perception that you're clarifying this now, but there's a public
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  perception that that was part of a apology tour, if you will, That
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  this had been said online. There was all of the criticism, there was
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  advertisers leaving. We talked to Bob iyenised, you hope to advertise. You
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  don't want them to advertise. What do you mean if somebody's going to try
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  to blackmail me with advertising, blackmailing with money, go fuck yourself, but
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  go fuck yourself? Is that clear? I hope it is. Hey,
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  Bob here in the audience, Well, well let me ask you then that's
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  how I feel that advertise. How do you think that about the economics of
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  X if part of the underlying model at least today, and maybe it needs
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  to shift, maybe the answers it needs to shift away from advertising. If
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  you believe that this is the one part of your business where you will beholden
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  to those who have this view, what do you do? Why? I
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  say that, But there's a reality too, right, Yes, no,
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  no, I mean we know Yakarino's right here and she's got to sell advertiser.
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  Absolutely so no, no't tell you. So no, Actually, what
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  what this advertising boycott is is going to do it. It's going to kill
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  a company. And you think that and the whole world well know that those
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  advertisers killed the company, and we will document it in great detail. But
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  there are those advertisers, I imagine, are going to say, they're going
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  to say, we didn't kill the company. Oh yeah, they're going to
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  say to tell it to Earth. But they're going to say that. They're
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  going to say, Elon, that you killed the company because you said these
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  things and that they were inappropriate things and that they didn't feel comfortable on the
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  platform. Right, That's that's what And let's see how Earth responds to that
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  something. Okay, this then this now the first part of that. I'm
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  absolutely with the vast majority of people, especially concernedervatives, who are like you,
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  go Elon, Absolutely, that's awesome. Someone is showing some balls and
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  not going to be intimidated by advertiser boycotts. And you know, it's obviously
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  extremely memorable. You want to cheer him. My two daughters, unfortunately have
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  they must have said that go fuck yourself. In Elon musk Cadence, at
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  least a dozen times each in the days that followed this event, because this
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  became an issue in our house, and I'm sure it was an issue in
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  a lot of houses, and it was especially since it's Disney, and my
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  daughters, who are big Disney fans, are well aware of the issues at
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  the Disney Company and our problems with the Disney Company, and so I'm sure
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  there are lots of kids who are now learning all about go fuck yourself from
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  Elon Musk. In the bigger picture, I do think that this is symbolic
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  of and representative of something that's happening maybe worldwide, which is a real desire
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  for balls, a real desire for someone to fight back against the madness,
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  to not be intimidated, to take the fight to the bullies, and to
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  stand up for things that matter, like in Elon Musk's mind, free speech.
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  And I think that this is something that we've seen in elections in Argentina
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  and elections in the Netherlands and in other areas of the world. There seems
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  to be some signs of people wanting there to be a rebirth of manhood,
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  balls t stosterone fighting back, and I think Musk has tapped into that,
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  maybe even purposely so I think this absolutely plays into the Donald Trump narrative.
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  I've discussed this before, where rightly or wrongly, Trump is perceived as the
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  guy who's the fight, the guy who has balls. Now those balls disappeared
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  and maybe never existed during the entire COVID panic. But I digress. The
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  reality is the perception is reality, and this phenomenon helps Donald Trump, especially
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  when it comes from someone like Elon Musk, who's become now a hero of
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  the right in the United States of America. Now, the second part of
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  the clip, though I didn't really know how to interpret it, felt very
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  odd and odd might be putting it lightly. I think that there's potentially a
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  lot going on in that second part. I think that Musk feels very pessimistic
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  about the future, not just of Twitter, but a free speech and maybe
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  the world. I think he's getting a bit apocalyptic in his mindset, and
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  maybe he has reasons to believe that. It could be based upon his belief
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  about where we're going with artificial intelligence or just the direction that humanity is heading.
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  I mean, heck, I'm as pessimistic as anybody, but even I
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  don't think is quite I don't think I am quite as apocalyptic when it comes
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  to the entire world and humanity as it appears. Elon Musk may be.
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  And so I don't really know for one hundred percent certainty how to interpret that
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  last part, But his sense essentially is acknowledging that this advertiser boycott will destroy
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  Twitter, and I don't follow his logic. And when you start talking about
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  the people of Earth revolting against the destruction of your company, it feels delusional
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  to me. Forget about the logistics of Okay, well, which comes first.
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  Is Twitter still around to be the communication platform for this movement or what?
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  I don't know. Maybe I'm just not understanding the timeline in Elon's head.
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  But on the one hand, he's saying, go fuck yourself, and
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  on the other hand, it seems like he's saying, yeah, we're fucked.
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  So I don't know which it is. I honestly don't. And I'm
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  a little bit more than concerned about Elon Musk's mentality, one because he might
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  be right, and two because it does at least seem somewhat consistent with the
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  idea that there might be something wrong with him. I've theorized the same kind
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  of thing about Tucker Carlson, who I perceive as a similar character, both
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  highly intelligent, both now heroes of the right wing, and very much allied
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  on Twitter. I mean, Elon Musk has gone out of his way to
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  promote and support Tucker Carlson in his post Fox News Channel period of his career
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  here where he's now basically a Twitter star for all intents and purposes. So
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  I'm concerned that first, the first part of the clip had me cheering.
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  The second part had me scratching my chin and going rut row, what the
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  heck is really going on there? And I don't have a really good answer
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  to that. Now, there were other elements of this interview that we're worth
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  playing as well, one of which was where Musk I thought, again going
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  back to my theme of being conflicted about Elon Musk, I thought was very
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  introspective on the part of Musk where he talks about the mistake he made which
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  handed these left wing corporations a weapon. Let's be clear, it has nothing
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  to do with what really happened on Twitter. These advertising boycotts by Disney and
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  now Walmart has jumped on board, and there's other major companies as well that
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  are doing this purely because they think it's an excuse, And of course it's
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  a hilariously hypocritical excuse, because all these left wingers have actually been far less
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  supportive of Israel, far less than Elon Musk has been. But this is
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  the upside down world in which we now live. But here is Musk talking
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  in detail about the mistake he made and how it all went down and what
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  it all all means, at least from his perspective. Once in a while,
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  I will say something foolish, and I have, and I would certainly
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  put that comment, as you said, the after truth, among perhaps one
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  of the most foolish, if not the most foolish thing I've ever done on
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  the platform. And I did do my best to clarify afterwards that you know,
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  I certainly do not mean anything anti Semitic in that the nature of the
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  criticism was simply that the Jewish people have been persecuted for thousands of years.
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  There is a natural affinity therefore for persecuted groups. This has led to the
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  funding ofganizations that essentially promote any persecuted group or any group with the perception of
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  persecution. This includes radical Islamic groups. Everyone here has seen the massive demonstrations
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  for Hamas in every major city in the West that should be jarring. Well,
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  a number of those organizations received funding from prominent people in the Jewish community.
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  They didn't expect that to happen. But if you generically without condition sort
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  of fund, if you fund persecuted groups in general, some of those persecuted
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  groups unfortunately want your annihilation. And what I meant by that, when I
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  subsequently clarify it is is that it's unwise to fund organizations that support groups that
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  want your annihilation. Is this coming across really? Yeah, Mike, I
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  question to you, though, I think logically this makes a lot of sense.
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  Is there any part of you I just tell me what happens though,
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  when once all this happens, Let's say you fund a group and that group
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  supports the US who wants you to die, perhaps you should not fund them.
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  Now. I agree with Musk on the actual substantive nature of the alleged
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  mistake. I've said that on this episode already, I've said it in previous
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  episodes of this podcast. I don't think he did anything wrong. He was
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  sloppy, clumsy, and the Left took advantage of it. They saw an
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  opening that could work for them to try to take out Twitter, because they
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  now see Twitter as a threat. Twitter has gone from a bastion of left
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  wing narrative dominance and the ability to literally censor those on the right, and
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  now it's gone from that to a bashed in a free speech where you know,
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  the marketplace of ideas actually has a chance to work and seems to now
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  be largely dominated by the right wing. I mean, it's absolutely astonishing that
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  in a pretty short period of time, basically, you know, a couple
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  of years, Twitter has gone from a left wing machine to now being dominated
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  by the right with the most important person by far, by far, has
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  been Elon Musk, not just because he owns it and because he's in charge
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  of the people who set up the algorithms and everything else, but simply by
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  the virtue of all of his followers. I mean, but with literally the
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  touch of his phone, he can instantaneously take any story and breathe lif life
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  into it, and breathe huge life into it, or put more fuel into
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  a fire that he thinks needs to burn more brightly. If Elon Musk tweets
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  or retweets any sort of story, you're going to get tens and tens of
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  millions of views and everybody in the news media is going to be aware of
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  it. That's an extraordinary power, which usually, though not always back to
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  my conflict theme with Elon Musk, Elon Musk does generally use those powers for
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  good and not for evil. But then there's the other side of Elon Musk,
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  where while he is a fighter for free speech, I'm not sure he
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  fully understands free speech, or at least he has a different definition of it,
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  or a more self serving definition of free speech than I have. Because
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  the interviewer from The New York Times holy conflict of interest here asks Musk about
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  the idea that The New York Times seems to have been deamplified on Twitter,
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  and Musk doesn't really even deny that, but says, look, you got
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  to pay your subscription. If you don't pay your subscription, if you're not
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  verified, then you're not going to be amplified. Amplified meaning that it's more
• 21:19
  likely that people see your posts and you get more engagement and more retweets and
• 21:25
  likes, and you get you know, promoted in certain ways. There's all
• 21:30
  sorts of different things that Twitter can do where X can do to either amplify
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  or deamplify an account. And I have no doubt, especially based upon this
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  answer you're about to hear, the Elon Musk has made it clear that news
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  organizations he doesn't like who don't pay the subscription fee are not going to get
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  any amplification and are probably going to be suppressed in some way, shape or
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  form. And I have a bit of a problem with that one because,
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  as I think, there's a bit of hypocrisy, but also this idea that
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  there's a difference between commercial speech and free speech, clearly from a First Amendment
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  standpoint, and the idea that Musk seems to believe that you are obligated to
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  pay the subscription fee in order to qualify for your full free speech on Twitter,
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  that just seems again hypocritical, odd and really not in keeping with what
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  I perceive to be free speech, because obviously he's saying free speech isn't free
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  only literally says that in this clip that you're about to hear. And here's
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  what that sounded like. The New York Times Company and the New York Times
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  newspaper it appeared over the summer to be throttled. What did the New York
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  Times. Well, we do require that everyone has to buy a subscription,
• 22:49
  that we don't make exceptions for anyone. And I think if I want The
• 22:53
  New York Times, I have to pay for a subscription, and they don't
• 22:57
  give me a free subscription. So I'm not going to give them a free
• 23:00
  subscription. But were you but were you throttling The New York Times relative to
• 23:04
  other news organizations, relative to everybody else? It was? It was?
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  It was it specific to the to the Times. They didn't buy a subscription
• 23:12
  only costs like one thousand dollars a month. So if they just do that,
• 23:17
  then then they they're back in, back in the settle. But but
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  but you are saying that it was throttled. You know what I'm saying.
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  I mean, was there a conversation that you had with somebody You said,
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  Look, you know, I'm unhappy with The Times. They should either be
• 23:30
  buying the subscription, war I don't like their content or whatever whatever. Any
• 23:36
  organization that refuses to buy a subscription is not going to be recommended. But
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  then what does that say about free speech? Well, it take about like
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  a amplifying voices free. It costs a little bit, But that's it.
• 23:55
  But that's an interesting you know, it's it's like an uh South Park when
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  they say, you know, freedom isn't free of costa Buco five or whatever,
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  so but it's pretty cheap. Okay, it's low cost freedom. Now,
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  while the go fuck yourself Disney and Bob Iger understandably got by far the
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  most attention of all the things that Elon Musk said, in my opinion,
• 24:26
  it was the second best thing that he said in this entire presentation, this
• 24:32
  interview. The best thing he said had to do with virtue signaling. Now,
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  he doesn't use the phrase virtue signaling, but it's pretty clear to me
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  that that's what he means, and in no uncertain terms, very declaratively,
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  he makes it very clear that he considers virtue signaling to be a massive problem,
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  not just on Twitter but in the world in general, especially among people
• 25:00
  in powerful positions. And I could not agree with him more on that.
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  I think virtue signaling was at the heart of almost every bad thing that happened
• 25:11
  during COVID. It was a lot about control, don't get me wrong.
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  Control was a big part of it. Politics played a role, but on
• 25:19
  the human level, on the everyday citizen level. It was mostly about virtue
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  signaling, especially when it came to masks, but you almost were not able
• 25:32
  to Certainly in a place like California, you were not able to fight back
• 25:36
  against the insanity because you had no moral high ground. You were considered to
• 25:41
  be the bad guy. You were in favor of the virus. The people
• 25:44
  that were in favor of masks and all the other insanity, they had signaled
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  their virtue. They were the virtuous ones, even though they were the ones
• 25:52
  doing evil. And we were the ones, the small group of us here
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  in California who were fighting for freedom and our children educations. And so here's
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  what it sounded like when Elon Musk took on that particular issue. What what
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  I care about is the reality of goodness, not the perception of it.
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  And what I see all of the place is people who care about looking good
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  while doing evil. Fuck them. Okay, well amen to the fuck you
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  on that one. I could not agree more. And I think that this
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  is one of the worst phenomenon in our entire society, this idea that people
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  are masking bad actions and the curtailing of freedoms under the guise of virtue.
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  When in fact, as Musk says there, it's doing oftentimes evil or bad
• 26:47
  or things that are not good. It's the opposite of the way things should
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  be. It's the upside down world. The people that want to prove to
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  you how good they are are actually often evil. Gavin Newsom, governor of
• 27:02
  California, might be a really good example of that. We're going to get
• 27:04
  to him and that the Santus debate in just a second. But I really
• 27:11
  think that that's an important point. Virtue signaling is at the heart of so
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  much that is wrong in America. And I don't even really know how this
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  happened, but we have seen it explode, especially in the last few years.
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  So the bottom line on the Elon Musk presentation is that he is a
• 27:32
  bigger right wing figure now than he even was before that, which I actually
• 27:37
  am a little sad about. I'm a little sad that in the big picture
• 27:41
  here Elon Musk, who I consider to be a brilliant man, who's an
• 27:47
  important voice, a very vital voice when it comes to free speech, regardless
• 27:51
  of when not his interpretation of free speech this is a bit different than mine.
• 27:55
  But what he has done in purchasing Twitter is a remarkable and monumental achievement,
• 28:03
  even though he's you know, he's gonna lose billions and billions and billions
• 28:06
  of dollars on this regardless of how Twitter or x turns out for him,
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  and by the way, it's possible. The part of what's happening in his
• 28:14
  mentality is that he's trying to rationalize how and why he's losing tens of billions
• 28:21
  of dollars on this deal. That could be the case. I mean,
• 28:25
  it's so hard to tell because Musk literally has fuck you money. I mean,
• 28:29
  it's literally fucked you money, and so he may not really care that
• 28:33
  he's going to lose tens of billions of dollars, at least on Twitter,
• 28:37
  that he grossly overpaid for it, and it was obviously grossly overpaid for it.
• 28:41
  Is his ego trying to come up with a justification for why he made
• 28:47
  a bad business deal. Is he pretending that there's a much larger issue,
• 28:52
  that he's trying to save humanity here and that this is basically just a loss
• 28:56
  leader for him in that effort. I don't, Oh no, I have
• 29:00
  never met the guy, never spoken to him. I'm just guessing based upon
• 29:06
  having watched him pretty carefully for the last several years. But here was a
• 29:10
  guy up until now where he's now labeled forever as a far right winger and
• 29:15
  as a target of destruction by the left establishment. I mean, he had
• 29:19
  been effectively a made man in the left wing mafia. Here's the guy who
• 29:26
  who made the electric car what it is. He's a big believer in global
• 29:30
  warming, climate change. He used to be essentially a hero of the left,
• 29:37
  and for him to go from that position to now being persona and on
• 29:41
  grada on the left, toxic on the left, I think it's a shame
• 29:48
  and I don't think it's particularly healthy. Yeah, it feels great if you're
• 29:51
  a right winger, if you're conservative like I am, to have somebody like
• 29:53
  him most of the time, not all, but most of the time on
• 29:57
  our side. But I I think his value has decreased a bit because he's
• 30:03
  no longer seen as this guy in the middle. He's now seen as a
• 30:08
  right winger. And there's so very few people who had that kind of power,
• 30:15
  that kind of voice, that kind of platform, who could bridge the
• 30:19
  gap between left and right, and that, in my opinion, is how
• 30:23
  you bring in a lot of these independent voters who may not even realize they
• 30:29
  aren't really liberal, who are uncomfortable with how insane the Democratic Party has gotten
• 30:37
  or how liberals have gotten, and would like to find a new home,
• 30:41
  but they don't have anybody that they feel comfortable in believing because they don't trust
• 30:47
  right wingers, and Musk with somebody maybe the only person in this category of
• 30:52
  somebody who's very famous, obviously very rich, has credibility as a very smart
• 30:57
  guy, and has left wing street cred who was potentially willing and able to
• 31:03
  bring some people over. Well. I think his ability to do that has
• 31:07
  been largely lost, if not completely destroyed. And we'll see what happens with
• 31:12
  Twitter, because it really is all going to come down to, is Musk
• 31:18
  really willing to say, go fuck yourself? Is that as far as he's
• 31:22
  willing to go, it doesn't matter how much money I lose here, because
• 31:27
  this is what's good for humanity, this is what's good for the United States,
• 31:33
  among other places. I don't know. I would love it if I
• 31:37
  could trust him to say, you know what, I'm the richest man in
• 31:41
  the world. I can afford to take this one on the chin and see
• 31:45
  what happens with it. Because my career, if nothing else, has been
• 31:49
  a testament to how inconsistent the truth is, or at least my version of
• 31:56
  the truth is, to being commercially successful. It's almost inherently contradictory those two
• 32:02
  goals. In this day and age, it's almost impossible to use the advertiser
• 32:08
  model, especially if you're a right winger, and be financially successful. This
• 32:15
  is why so many people are going to the subscription model, which I hate
• 32:19
  because if you have subscribers, inherently you feel like you're obligated to tell you
• 32:23
  subscribers what they want to hear and not say things that they don't want to
• 32:28
  hear. So you got two models that have massive problems. The advertiser model
• 32:35
  gives, especially if you're going with mainstream advertisers, gives the left wing way
• 32:38
  too much power over what you can say and do. And the subscription model
• 32:45
  turns you effectively into a cult leader that you don't want to do anything to
• 32:49
  piss off the cult. And that's how we get Donald Trump being the Republican
• 32:53
  nominee for a third straight time. It looks like and so it's very frustrating
• 33:00
  that the business model for the media is now so broken that these are basically
• 33:05
  the two options. And I don't think that Twitter can or should go to
• 33:09
  a full subscription model because you're going to lose massive numbers of users. The
• 33:16
  whole beauty of Twitter is how many people use it, how ubiquitous it has
• 33:22
  become, growing all the time, even under Elon Musk, much against the
• 33:28
  predictions of the left who thought that Twitter was gonna, you know, implode
• 33:32
  almost immediately after Musk took it over, that has not happened at all.
• 33:37
  And so this is really all going to come down to what is Elon Musk's
• 33:44
  threshold for pain or financial humiliation. And I just don't have an answer to
• 33:50
  that question as of yet, but I'll certainly be very very curious in what
• 33:53
  that answer is, because it might be it might be integral to understanding the
• 33:58
  future of the country. The stakes here are very very high, especially when
• 34:01
  it comes to free speech. Now, the stakes were also, I think,
• 34:07
  very high when it came to the debate between California Governor Gavin Newsom and
• 34:13
  Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, which occurred last week on Fox News Channel hosted by
• 34:19
  Sean Hannity. Now, if you did not hear my preview of the debate,
• 34:22
  I would say that I was I'd give myself a bee in my preview
• 34:28
  because I was right about a lot of things, but I was overly pessimistic
• 34:32
  about the big picture. I was right on a couple of very important things,
• 34:38
  one of which was that Sean Hannity is an idiot. Never forget that
• 34:43
  Sean Hannity is a fucking moron, and he never showed that more dramatically than
• 34:50
  during this debate, even though the next night he basically spent his entire show
• 34:54
  patting himself on the back and having Newt Gingrich come on to pat him on
• 34:59
  the back, out to say what an amazing job Sean Hannity did. Seohan
• 35:02
  Handy did a terrible job, as bad a job or even worse in hosting
• 35:10
  this debate than I anticipated. There were two major things that Hannity did wrong.
• 35:17
  I'll do the second one first because it ended up in a weird way,
• 35:22
  working out well for Rond de Santis. Actually, both the things that
• 35:28
  Hannity did wrong kind of worked out for Rond de Santis. The second one
• 35:30
  was, you know, the number one thing is the host of any live
• 35:35
  event, especially a debate would be to know when and how you're going to
• 35:42
  end the debate. That's really pretty much right at the forefront of what your
• 35:46
  job is. So when are we ending this? And how should I end
• 35:52
  this? And can I land this plane on time and in a way that
• 35:55
  makes any sense. Hannity did not do that. The debate went longer than
• 36:02
  had been previously anticipated. It did not appear to have any clear vision of
• 36:09
  how it was going to end. There was no closing statements, there was
• 36:14
  no last question that made any damn sense. And then Hannedy just ended it.
• 36:21
  He just ended it because it had gone on too long. They were
• 36:24
  about, I don't know, at least five or ten minutes over their previously
• 36:29
  anticipated deadline for ending the debate. But then all of a sudden, haphazardly,
• 36:36
  Hannity says to Newsom and Desandas, Hey, are you guys cool?
• 36:40
  But was sticking around, let's continue this after the commercial, And it appeared
• 36:45
  as if both Newsom and the Sanders had agreed to that, and I just
• 36:49
  thought, Wow, what a disorganized shit show this is. I mean,
• 36:54
  Andy's questions have been pretty bad, especially the lack of a COVID question,
• 36:59
  which I'll get you momentarily, but not being able to finish this thing in
• 37:05
  anything close to a clean or sensible fashion is just embarrassing. But I thought,
• 37:09
  Okay, this is interesting. I'm curious what's going to happen after the
• 37:14
  commercial. So they come back after the commercial and the Sanders and Newsomb are
• 37:19
  gone, and Hannity cryptically says, well, we found out during the commercial
• 37:23
  break that both candidates had to leave, and so we're just gonna wrap this
• 37:29
  up with some post debate analysis now. Immediately, my spidery senses were up
• 37:34
  because I'm like, how was that possible? How is it possible that both
• 37:38
  candidates just simply decided during the commercial break, you know what, I got
• 37:43
  something better to do, you know, late in the evening on the East
• 37:47
  coast. How does that make any damn sense? Well, as it turned
• 37:52
  out, it didn't make any sense because multiple media outlets, including NBC News
• 37:58
  no fan or supporter of Ron de Santis in any way, shape or form,
• 38:02
  and generally very supportive of Democrats and Gavin Newsom. Specifically, NBC had
• 38:09
  multiple sources that said that what really happened was that Gavin Newsom's wife had come
• 38:17
  in and waived the white towel, throw in the towel. She literally almost
• 38:22
  literally threw in the towe during the commercial breg and reportedly said, we're done,
• 38:28
  We're out of here now. There's not been a lot of reporting that
• 38:32
  I've seen as to what was her motivation. Was she pissed off about how
• 38:37
  Hannity handled the debate? Did she think her husband was getting the crap beat
• 38:43
  out of him? Who knows, But that's not good. I mean,
• 38:46
  that's literally about as bad a result as you can possibly get. For the
• 38:52
  way for a debate to end is for haven't been reported that your wife pulled
• 38:58
  you off the stage because because it seemed like you were getting your ass kicked?
• 39:02
  And to me, that's you know, if nothing else, if nothing
• 39:07
  else came from that debate, just having that story be out there, to
• 39:12
  have the asshole that is Governor Poosam, as my daughter is still referring to
• 39:16
  him to this day, To have Governor Poosam be humiliated in that way,
• 39:22
  To have it be perceived reality or not that his wife had to pull him
• 39:28
  off the stage because he was getting his ass kicked, is just awesome.
• 39:34
  It's just so rich and I almost don't even care whether or not it's fully
• 39:37
  true or not. I'm taking it. This is one of those rare occasions
• 39:43
  where I don't even need to find out what the real truth is because that's
• 39:46
  what i want to believe, and that's what I'm sticking to. And anybody
• 39:52
  else can to use the words of Elon Musk, go fuck themselves, because
• 39:55
  that's just too great that it doesn't get any better than that. Big bad
• 40:00
  Gavin Newsom being pulled off the debate stage by his wife, who, by
• 40:06
  the way, Ron de Santis had referred to his wife's father earlier in a
• 40:14
  way that was fantastic where he referenced his wife is the in laws, Newsome's
• 40:21
  in laws obviously his wife's parents, having moved from California to Florida basically during
• 40:28
  the COVID panic for all the reasons that I've stated previously. Although I've never
• 40:32
  spoken to them, I don't know why they did so, but seemingly for
• 40:37
  all of the stereotypical reasons that people left California during that time period. And
• 40:43
  DeSantis did a great thing in raising that and did a very good job of
• 40:46
  doing so, and that issue at least was tangentially related to COVID. Unfortunately,
• 40:54
  if it had not been for Ron DeSantis forcing the COVID issue, I'm
• 41:00
  not sure Sean Hannity ever would have asked a specific question on COVID. And
• 41:04
  this was another one of my correct predictions when it came to previewing this debate.
• 41:09
  I thought Hannity, being an idiot and being in the tank for Trump,
• 41:15
  was probably going to avoid the COVID issue like the plague, and I
• 41:20
  was essentially right about that. He put up a list of topics at the
• 41:24
  start of the debate, and I looked at the topics and I'm like,
• 41:28
  oh, no, COVID isn't even on the list. Nothing even close to
• 41:32
  COVID is on the list, which is utterly insane. I mean, how
• 41:37
  do you have a twenty twenty three debate between the governor of Florida, the
• 41:44
  state which saved the United States from almost permanent COVID lockdowns thanks to Ron de
• 41:50
  Santis getting it. Didn't get it immediately, but as soon as the data
• 41:52
  came in, he got it on COVID and shifted course more quickly and dramatically
• 41:58
  than anybody else did other than maybe Georgia, but you know, Georgia and
• 42:02
  Florida obviously border each other. And so you've got Ron Desandis on one end
• 42:08
  of the COVID divide, and then you've got Gavin Newsom on the other side
• 42:14
  of the COVID divide, where literally it was Gavin Newsom that shut down the
• 42:17
  country. That's not an exaggeration, that's not hyperbole, that is a fact.
• 42:23
  It was Gavin Newsom that was the first state to lock You first governor
• 42:29
  to lock his state down in California, did so on a blatant lie,
• 42:32
  a lie. I have documented dozens and dozens of times on this podcast and
• 42:38
  elsewhere, lying saying that twenty six point five million Californians would get COVID in
• 42:45
  the next eight weeks. Nothing remotely close to that happened, even in the
• 42:49
  next three and a half years, forget about eight weeks. And it was
• 42:52
  that first Domino that caused the entire shutdown of the United States of America,
• 43:00
  and ironically enough, probably Donald Trump losing re election, and Hannity didn't even
• 43:07
  have that on his agenda. Now, DeSantis, I think, I think
• 43:13
  DeSantis saw that list and thought the same thing that I did, which was,
• 43:17
  Okay, I can't count on there being a COVID question, so I'm
• 43:22
  going to force the issue, and he brought COVID up on his own in
• 43:27
  a way that caused you know, Newsom understandably to get his panties all in
• 43:30
  a bunch and that started a fight between the two of them. And then
• 43:35
  Handedy said, okay, all right, I was gonna ask about this later,
• 43:38
  but I'll do it now. Who knows if he really was or not,
• 43:42
  but he asks a very half hearted question about COVID, and and DeSantis
• 43:47
  did a really good job, not great, not as great as I would
• 43:52
  have liked, because I have a very high stander on this issue. You
• 43:55
  know, you know, he went after Newsom on the school closings and on
• 44:00
  the French laundry thing where Newsom was in a restaurant without a mask when nobody
• 44:06
  was allowed inside, and you know, masks were mandated everywhere, and it's
• 44:10
  a very expensive restaurant, and it was symbolically, you know, very theoretically,
• 44:15
  a very powerful thing. It may have caused the recall election to happen
• 44:20
  of Gavin Newsom, but it was not powerful enough for him to even come
• 44:22
  close to losing that recall election during the COVID panic. But you know,
• 44:29
  so I'll give I gave myself a B in my pre debate predictions. I'll
• 44:32
  give the Santus a B maybe a B plus on the COVID issue if it
• 44:37
  had been me. See, I think the better way to handle this thing
• 44:42
  on Newsom was not really about his specific policies, because in that format,
• 44:49
  he's just going to try to claim with his bullshit statistics that somehow California did
• 44:53
  better than Florida. And I'll give Handity a little bit of credit where he
• 44:57
  put up a graph that basically showed that there was no real difference between the
• 45:00
  death rate in California and the death rate in Florida. But if I had
• 45:05
  been advising the Desantas campaign, I would have tried to get the Santis to
• 45:10
  go back to the beginning and make a bigger picture argument, one that you
• 45:15
  could actually use to go after Trump indirectly while seemingly defending him. What I
• 45:23
  would have done was I would have said, Governor Newsom, you are the
• 45:29
  person that shut down America. You did so on a lie. And then
• 45:35
  I would have told the twenty six point five million people getting COVID in an
• 45:38
  eight weeks lie. And I would have said, you duped President Trump,
• 45:45
  and you caused the rest of the country to panic, and everything that happened
• 45:52
  after that is on you. And you didn't reverse course when the data proved
• 46:00
  that you were wrong. I did reverse course, because that's what a good
• 46:05
  leader does. I admitted when I was wrong, and I took the right
• 46:10
  path, and freedom won the day. And Florida didn't suffer at all from
• 46:17
  a medical perspective because of the freedoms that we allowed our citizens to get back,
• 46:23
  the ones that you took away from most of the country because of the
• 46:28
  domino effect of California shutting down. To me, the big picture, the
• 46:34
  big picture there would have been much more effective, and I do think it
• 46:37
  might have planted the seed in at least a few people's minds that they wait
• 46:42
  a minute, Hey Trump did get duped, and boy yo, he's never
• 46:49
  criticized Newsom. Newsom seems to like Trump. What's that all about. That's
• 46:52
  why I was so incensed when right after DeSantis announced he was running and Trump
• 47:00
  offered up these two amazing issues on a golden platter, one claiming that Andrew
• 47:05
  Cuomo did a better job in New York with COVID than Ron de Santis did
• 47:08
  in Florida and then praising Gavin Newsom on Fox News Channel. I mean,
• 47:15
  that should have been everything for the Desantas campaign. That was the issue that
• 47:21
  should have been manna from heaven for the reasons that I just stated. But
• 47:23
  they've never made that big picture argument because it goes to DeSantis's courage, and
• 47:31
  it goes to Trump being co opted, having been duped, having not been
• 47:39
  up to the challenge, being too cozy with liberals like Newsom and like Cuomo,
• 47:47
  and they didn't go there. And so I can't give the Santas an
• 47:52
  a on that. I will give him an a for the whole poop map
• 47:54
  thing, which I particularly love because, as I've said, my daughter's referred
• 47:59
  to Governor news Him as Governor Poussam on their own. But you know,
• 48:04
  Dessanders took out a map of San Francisco which indicates where there is more human
• 48:09
  feces that has been found, and it's been called now the poop map.
• 48:14
  He got a lot of credit for that, even by some Trump fans like
• 48:17
  Glenn Beck. But I don't think that the Sander's got enough credit for that.
• 48:22
  I mean, I remember I've saw on Fox News Channel. The general
• 48:27
  consensus after the debate was, well, Dessanders did a nice job. He
• 48:31
  did well for himself. He won the debate, but there were no fantastic,
• 48:37
  memorable moments, nothing that was a game changer. Handed to the next
• 48:42
  night on his show said you know that nothing has really changed in the race.
• 48:46
  The needle didn't get dramatically moved between Trump and DeSantis. And I'm like,
• 48:52
  wait a minute, what more do you want than the poop map?
• 48:57
  I mean, can you imagine? This is where the double standard said?
• 49:00
  Can you imagine if Trump for small Trump would never have the guts to go
• 49:04
  up against Newsom. If he did, he would have gotten clobbered by Newsom.
• 49:09
  But can you imagine that if if Trump had been on that stage and
• 49:13
  pulled out a poop map, Oh my god, the right wing media would
• 49:17
  have almost literally masturbated instantaneously. Would have been the greatest debate moment in history.
• 49:25
  But that's how they evaluate Trump in comparison to how they evaluate DeSantis.
• 49:30
  So the Santis will get some credit. I think it certainly solidifies second place
• 49:37
  for DeSantis. It probably blunts Nicky Haley's momentum and trying to catch him for
• 49:43
  second place. I don't know of this taping. There's been no major polling
• 49:47
  on the Republican race after the debate between DeSantis and Newsom. But I don't
• 49:54
  think that DeSantis is gonna make any great gains. They're still DeSantis fans who
• 50:00
  are delusional about the state of the race and think that there's still plenty of
• 50:02
  time and that people haven't made up their mind yet and that he's gonna win
• 50:06
  Iowa and that's going to change everything, and blah blah blah, and I
• 50:09
  don't buy any of that. And the debate ratings were good. There were
• 50:15
  over five million viewers on Fox News Channel for the debate. That's excellent for
• 50:22
  you know, a Hannity show. That's way, way, way above normal,
• 50:24
  like three times his normal audience. But that's not an earth shattering number.
• 50:30
  That's not a game changing number. It's actually a little bit low for
• 50:34
  what I would have expected. I actually heard a lot of buzz about this
• 50:37
  online and even in real life, and so you know, I was expecting
• 50:42
  a little bit more than five and a half million or whatever the final number
• 50:45
  ended up being. So this was a good moment for DeSantis. It probably
• 50:52
  helped him save face in this entire campaign, even if he ends up flaming
• 50:59
  out and maybe even withdrawing after Iowa, if he comes in a distant second
• 51:04
  place there, I have no idea if he's going to do that or not.
• 51:06
  He may try to stay in as long as possible because of Trump's legal
• 51:09
  problems. But there's absolutely no question that in perception and in reality, DeSantis
• 51:15
  won the debate and that Newsom was humiliated, and he even tried to claim
• 51:21
  that that Hannity and DeSantis cheated, which is a sure sign you lost.
• 51:25
  And like I said, when you have reports out on NBC News that your
• 51:31
  wife had to get you off the debate stage during a commercial breakout, you
• 51:36
  agreed to keep going. That's pretty much the deadlock since that you lost the
• 51:42
  debate. And I hope that this ends. And DeSantis himself implied this the
• 51:46
  next day when he was asked whether or not this he thought Newsom would be
• 51:51
  the Democratic nominee in twenty twenty four, and he said not after last night.
• 51:55
  So I kind of got where DeSantis was going with that, because I've
• 52:00
  been in the camp while I fear Newsome because he is evil, and I
• 52:05
  get why people might find him to be attractive because he's a decent talker,
• 52:10
  and he's a good looking guy, and he, you know, is a
• 52:13
  brazen liar, and he spews these bullshit statistics that the media never calls him
• 52:19
  on, and he gets away with a lot of stuff. In California,
• 52:22
  I have never really feared Newsome as a national figure. I never have.
• 52:30
  And and the more I see him in that situation and on that plat,
• 52:37
  in that platform and in that light, the less fearful I am of him.
• 52:42
  Now, look, you know, a lot of the country has gone
• 52:45
  far to the left, but I think Newsom is pretty easily uh defeated.
• 52:51
  I think he's easily defined. I don't think he's that likable except among a
• 52:57
  very small group of Americans. I don't think he appeals to African Americans particularly
• 53:01
  well. And the polling data doesn't indicate that he's someone that should be feared
• 53:07
  by Republicans, and even his approval rating in California, it doesn't. They
• 53:12
  don't take his approval rating very often here because there's no real point since we
• 53:15
  only have one party rule in California. But the last poll, which was
• 53:20
  about a month or so ago here in California, showed that he was underwater
• 53:23
  in his approval rating even in California. People even here are getting tired of
• 53:29
  him. I mean, and so again, I hate to be optimistic.
• 53:36
  I always get very nervous when I'm optimistic. But I think that that debate
• 53:42
  which Newsom had bragged had bragged to Elick Michaelson, who we've had on as
• 53:47
  a guest, the main anchor person that the Fox affiliate here in southern California,
• 53:52
  Los Angeles, Newsom had bragged to Michaelson that he had baited DeSantis into
• 53:58
  the debate. Well, be careful what you ask for, asshole, because
• 54:01
  you got it and you lost. And I think that the shine is definitely
• 54:07
  off the idea of Gavin Newsom being a savior for the Democratic Party in any
• 54:13
  sort of national election anytime soon. Now that being said, he should not
• 54:16
  be. You know, we should not be in a situation where we aren't
• 54:22
  fearful of Gavin Newsom. We have to be vigilant, we have to keep
• 54:27
  an eye on him because he's very, very, very dangerous if he ever
• 54:31
  got elected. I'm just saying that there are major problems to Gavin Newsom ever
• 54:37
  winning a national election, and I think they were exposed in that debate with
• 54:42
  Ron DeSantis. Now I mentioned earlier in this podcast Tucker Carlson, who much
• 54:51
  like Elon Musk, is a guy who I used to have a lot of
• 54:54
  respect for Tucker, and now I have mostly disdain. And there are two
• 55:00
  stories I want to talk about with regard to Tucker Carlson. One kind of
• 55:05
  relates to the Elon Musk free speech issue. Because Greg Guttfeld, who's a
• 55:10
  longtime host on Fox News Channel, I used to do his late night comedy
• 55:15
  show. I don't know, I must have done it four or five times,
• 55:19
  many many years ago. I never really I guess I wasn't very good
• 55:22
  on it. Althewise, they would have kept asking me on I never really
• 55:27
  fully understood what you were supposed to do on that show. I thought Greg
• 55:30
  is a talented guy, a funny guy. I've met him once or twice.
• 55:35
  He was very very close to Andrew Breitbart when Andrew and I were still
• 55:38
  close friends. But I've never fully trusted Greg Guttfeld, and I certainly don't
• 55:45
  know where he's coming from today. But he decided, when talking about this
• 55:51
  issue of free speech, to drop on Fox News Channel the idea that Tucker
• 55:58
  Carlson was a victim of the speech police, presumably at his employer, on
• 56:07
  the very cable news outlet that he was speaking, Fox News Channel, which
• 56:12
  is kind of an extraordinary thing for anyone to do, regardless of whether you're
• 56:15
  right or wrong, to be that gutsy in this day and age where everyone's
• 56:19
  trying to protect the gig is rather extraordinary, remarkable, and worthy of mention.
• 56:24
  So I would probably be playing this clip even if there was not another
• 56:29
  element to it. But here was Greg Guttfeld, after a couple introductory remarks,
• 56:35
  talking about this issue of free speech, and then dropping the Tucker Carlson
• 56:40
  bombshell. You're not supposed to really even mention someone who's been fired that dramatically
• 56:45
  and not openly with that much fanfare on the network on which you're working.
• 56:51
  But he not only did that, but he very strongly implied that it was
• 56:55
  his own employers who were censoring Tucker Carlson and silencing him, I presume,
• 57:02
  by firing him. And here's what it sounded like when Greg Gutfeld did that
• 57:06
  on Fox News Channel. It's like extorting Jerry Nadler with salad or blackmailing sports
• 57:15
  fans. By threatening to cancel PBS. The fact is Musk may be the
• 57:21
  last man standing between real freedom of speech and the suffocating block of the censorship
• 57:27
  industrial complex, which is made up of government, media, and tech forces.
• 57:30
  He realizes that advertisers have no spine and could be easily cowed by special
• 57:36
  interest groups incahoots with political allies. If you don't believe me, I got
• 57:40
  two words for you, Tucker Carlson. Oh wow, look at that room.
• 57:52
  Now. I don't really like this idea of turning Tucker Carlson into a
• 57:55
  martyr. I don't know how to interpret what Greg Gutfeld was trying to do
• 58:00
  there. I'm always at least somewhat respectful of anybody showing some semblance of balls
• 58:07
  on a cable news outlet, because that's so very rare, and like I
• 58:10
  said, everyone's always trying to protect the gig. But this idea that Tucker
• 58:15
  Carlson is a martyr to free speech, I think is wrong and dangerous.
• 58:22
  And Tucker himself has been trying to forward this narrative, and he did so
• 58:28
  again in an interview bizarrely enough, with Roseanne Barr. Now how this happened,
• 58:32
  I have no idea Roseanne apparently has a video podcast, and Tucker Carlson
• 58:37
  did an interview with her in person. Again, that's strange enough to me,
• 58:43
  but that we're living in very strange times. And I want to play
• 58:46
  two clips from this interview that Tucker Carlson did with Roseanne Barr. The first
• 58:52
  is where talker talks about the issue of January sixth, and he very strongly
• 59:00
  implies that that was really the reason why he got fired at Fox News Channel.
• 59:07
  He talks about how Fox News Channel was not happy with his coverage of
• 59:10
  January sixth. Remember, at the beginning of this year, he got fed
• 59:15
  the tapes from then speaker McCarthy, and he basically did a very strong,
• 59:22
  some would say a strong or effective effort to try to redo the January sixth
• 59:29
  narrative. Now I didn't really buy that. I thought some of the video
• 59:31
  was interesting, but I don't think that he proved a negative by trying to
• 59:37
  claim that somehow January sixth is all bullshit. I think it's very much overblown
• 59:42
  by the left wing media and by the Democrats. I've talked at length about
• 59:45
  how I think people were over punished on January sixth, that the Democrats overplayed
• 59:50
  their hand. That Ashley Babbitt is the only one that was actually murdered that
• 59:53
  day, and everyone should know her name, and hardly anyone does because the
• 59:57
  left wing media is a bunch of hypocrites on that issue. She's a white
• 1:00:01
  woman who was unarmed, who was shot by a black police officer. And
• 1:00:05
  you know, if you use those set of rules normally in the left wing
• 1:00:08
  media, you reverse the causes and the races. And Ashley Babbitt is a
• 1:00:13
  household name like George Floyd became, but that didn't happen. So I have
• 1:00:17
  problems with everybody. But the evidence that or the logic that January sixth was
• 1:00:22
  an inside job, in my view, is scant at best. I've never
• 1:00:27
  heard a plausible, full argument for how that makes any damn sense, and
• 1:00:32
  there would be massive evidence of that, and it would be an extraordinary conspiracy
• 1:00:37
  that is so far beyond comprehension. I mean, you mean to tell me
• 1:00:40
  that somehow the FBI did this for no real reason while Trump is being ousted
• 1:00:46
  from office, and they just want to embarrass Trump and his supporters, and
• 1:00:52
  they somehow managed to do this without one Trump supporter being willing and able to
• 1:00:57
  blow the whistle with all the goods on this. I mean, that just
• 1:01:00
  seems impossible not to mention. Like I said, the logic seems to fail
• 1:01:06
  at every level. But this is something that Tucker has latched onto because it
• 1:01:09
  fits a very convenient narrative for him justifying his firing. And look, everyone
• 1:01:16
  in this business and probably every business does this. This is human nature.
• 1:01:20
  You want to come up with the best narrative for why you got canned,
• 1:01:23
  especially from a job that was as high paying and as obviously his high profile
• 1:01:30
  as Tucker Carlson's was on Fox News Channel. And so instead of Tucker being
• 1:01:36
  willing to admit that the real reason he got fired was that he called is
• 1:01:40
  essentially his female boss the sea word, and then when the lawyers at Fox
• 1:01:45
  News Channel offered to try to cover that up for him related to the Dominion
• 1:01:51
  Voting System's lawsuit, he essentially told him, no, please, I want
• 1:01:54
  everyone to know I called her the sea word because she is I'm paraphrasing here,
• 1:02:00
  that's a fireable offense. I'm sorry in twenty two, twenty twenty three,
• 1:02:05
  calling your female boss and wanting that to be public when you're in that
• 1:02:08
  position, calling her the C word. That's a fireable offense. Now.
• 1:02:13
  I'm sure that there were lots of whether contributing factors to Tucker Carlson getting fired.
• 1:02:17
  I've talked about them previously. He wasn't as generating as much ad revenue
• 1:02:22
  as he might have normally given his ratings because of a Twitter like advertiser boycott
• 1:02:29
  of the Tucker Carlson Show. The Left had done a very good job of
• 1:02:32
  making his show toxic and therefore making big time advertisers fearful to advertise on his
• 1:02:38
  show, which then drove down the rates that they could charge for advertising on
• 1:02:45
  Tucker's show, and so he didn't have as much leverage as his audience would
• 1:02:50
  normally indicate that he would have. I also agree, I have no problem
• 1:02:53
  believing that the January sixth issue contributed to this, but it wasn't because of
• 1:03:00
  some sort of cover up at Fox News Channel. I think largely it was
• 1:03:06
  because one they weren't buying in the news department. There wasn't buying. We
• 1:03:10
  talked about this on this podcast at the time. The rest of Fox News
• 1:03:14
  Channel ignored what Tucker did on January sixth with those videotapes, and I think
• 1:03:21
  they ignored them for a couple of reasons. Number One, there was no
• 1:03:23
  evidence behind what Tucker was saying, and the counter narrative makes no damn sense.
• 1:03:30
  And I think Fox News Channel just wanted to be done with this move
• 1:03:32
  on. This is not helpful for us in any way, shape or form.
• 1:03:37
  I also think, because I'm not naive, I also think at that
• 1:03:42
  time, at the beginning of the year, it still looked like the Santas
• 1:03:45
  might be the guy, and that Trump was far from a lock for being
• 1:03:50
  the Republican nominee, And at that time, Fox News Channel was still trying
• 1:03:54
  to decide whether or not they were done with Trump, and getting back on
• 1:04:00
  the Trump train in order to support his view of January sixth was just not
• 1:04:05
  something that was in the interest of Fox News Channel. So even Hannity and
• 1:04:11
  Laura Ingram to big Trump supporters, did not jump all over Tucker Carlson's January
• 1:04:16
  sixth reporting. They did hardly anything on it, and we documented that on
• 1:04:21
  this podcast. I thought it was very telling. So I'm sure that when
• 1:04:26
  you combine all these things together, you combine the fact that Tucker was getting
• 1:04:30
  too big for his breeches, that he was causing problems on January sixth,
• 1:04:34
  that he had called essentially one of his female bosses the C word and wanted
• 1:04:40
  the world to know about that all these things combined or why he got fired.
• 1:04:45
  But that's not a narrative that really fits what Tucker wants to believe or
• 1:04:49
  he wants the public to believe. So instead, this is much more about
• 1:04:54
  January sixth, And this is what it sounded like when he talked with Roseanne
• 1:04:58
  Barr about this topic. Well, it's just yeah, if you felt remember
• 1:05:02
  I sent you that video when you got fired about it was you and it
• 1:05:05
  was a guy with your head head but he was tap dancing and he was
• 1:05:09
  getting thrown out and then he starts flying. Remember that, do you?
• 1:05:13
  I do remember flying? Well? I was I mean, I was not
• 1:05:17
  surprised. I mean, of course I was surprised. I didn't expect to
• 1:05:19
  get you know, my show canceled Monday morning, But I wasn't. If
• 1:05:24
  I took three steps back, I was not surprised at all. First of
• 1:05:27
  all, television's like that people get fired. There are all kinds of lines
• 1:05:30
  that no one will explain explicitly. I'm a very literal person, so I
• 1:05:34
  would totally happy. If you know, if I acknowledge they just I would
• 1:05:38
  always say, just write it down for me. Oh I can't say,
• 1:05:40
  just because send me a text. I've got a bad memory. That's what
• 1:05:43
  I say too. Oh I can't. I can't be conservative on a conservative
• 1:05:45
  TV channel. Just just write that down for me, if you would,
• 1:05:46
  just so I could have it as a reference point. Oh well, you
• 1:05:50
  know the lines. I really don't because I'm kind of stupid. So if
• 1:05:56
  you could, just so I knew on a gut left like I knew,
• 1:06:00
  they were very nice to me. I should say that and be clear about
• 1:06:01
  it. They were very nice to me the entire time I was there.
• 1:06:04
  But I could feel that they strongly disagreed in the War Ukraine stuff. Do
• 1:06:09
  you think that's what it was? I mean, I don't know. I'm
• 1:06:11
  just speculating, but they really didn't like that at all. The January sixth
• 1:06:14
  stuff they really didn't like. I think a bunch will quit over that.
• 1:06:18
  And mostly I would say mediocre. You know, Chris Wallace should not be
• 1:06:21
  on television, or Jonah Goldberger, so you know what I mean. These
• 1:06:25
  are people who obviously the audience hated and shouldn't have been there in the first
• 1:06:28
  place. But they were so outraged because I said, you know, it
• 1:06:31
  seems like there are probably a lot of Feds in the crowd January sixth,
• 1:06:35
  And now it turns out, of course, there were way more, even
• 1:06:38
  than I imagined. The whole thing was a complete setup. The whole thing
• 1:06:41
  was a lie, and it was used to put people in prison for expressing
• 1:06:44
  their constantship protected one a three time Purple Heart winner. Oh I know.
• 1:06:48
  Now there's a second clip from that Tucker Carls in Roseanne Barr interview that I
• 1:06:53
  think is more important than the January sixth audio that you just heard, because
• 1:06:59
  it dovetails with something that I have said numerous times in this podcast and about
• 1:07:05
  which I was on fire when it first happened in the spring of this year,
• 1:07:12
  you may recall, and I even went on News Nation with Dan Abrams
• 1:07:15
  immediately and my hair was almost literally on fire because I saw the future.
• 1:07:23
  I saw that what Tucker Carlson was doing after the first Trump indictment, which
• 1:07:30
  was bogus, the one out of New York. But he was doing this
• 1:07:31
  with the help of Glenn Beck, who went on a show with a red
• 1:07:34
  Maga hat that they were creating a narrative that was lethal, lethal to anyone
• 1:07:42
  else winning the Republican presidential nomination, and that narrative was, We're not really
• 1:07:48
  voting for Trump. We're voting for something bigger than Trump. We're fighting for
• 1:07:55
  a cause bigger than Trump. If they are allowed to do this to Trump,
• 1:08:00
  then we don't have a country anymore. We don't have a republic anymore.
• 1:08:05
  So we must rally round Trump, we must make him the nominee,
• 1:08:11
  and we must make him the president. Now I'm not sure those words were
• 1:08:15
  ever said, but it was very clear what the message was. I was
• 1:08:18
  getting the message, and I saw immediately how powerful that message was going to
• 1:08:24
  be to the average Republican voter, who at that moment was on the fence.
• 1:08:28
  We were in unprecedented times on so many different levels, including the fact
• 1:08:31
  that the former president was running for the office again had never gone through a
• 1:08:36
  primary season as a formerly elected president. Not to mention we have an indicted
• 1:08:43
  president for the first ex president for the first time, so there's all sorts
• 1:08:46
  of unprecedented situations here. People are trying to figure out how are we going
• 1:08:50
  to react to this? And Tucker Carlson on the number one show on Fox
• 1:08:55
  News Channel again with the help of Glenn Beck. I'll never forgive him for
• 1:08:59
  this. Considered Glad to be a friend at one point, you know,
• 1:09:01
  he goes on there in that red Maga hat, and that's their message.
• 1:09:06
  And it's very obvious to me at least that this is a strategy. This
• 1:09:13
  is a strategy by Tucker Carlson and maybe by Beck, although with Beck I'm
• 1:09:17
  never one hundred percent sure, but certainly with Carlson, this is a strategy
• 1:09:21
  to be able to justify why we're now so fervently on the Trump train when
• 1:09:30
  previously we were not. After all, it was in the Dominion Voting Systems
• 1:09:33
  lawsuit that Tucker Carlson was famously quoted as saying that he passionately hates Donald Trump
• 1:09:40
  couldn't wait to stop talking about him. That was at the after the twenty
• 1:09:45
  twenty election. Well, in this interview with Roseanne Barr, Tucker Carlson talks
• 1:09:51
  about how he allegedly came to change his mind about Trump, and it all
• 1:09:58
  deals with the the actions of law enforcement against Donald Trump, and he references
• 1:10:05
  the raid on mar A Lago, which happened in the middle of twenty twenty
• 1:10:10
  two. And that date is interesting for a reason that I'll get to after
• 1:10:14
  you listen to this clip. But here is Tucker Carlson admitting that he's a
• 1:10:18
  Trump supporter, and how and when that actually happened, I guess for a
• 1:10:25
  second time, but I became an active Trump supporter when they rated mar A
• 1:10:28
  Lago last summer, the summer of twenty twenty two. That can't stand.
• 1:10:32
  No, that can't And I agree with Trump on a lot. Even if
• 1:10:35
  I disagree with Trump on a lot, I'd still be a Trump supporter because
• 1:10:39
  you cannot allow that. You cannot allow the you know, the regime,
• 1:10:43
  the president of the United States to use the Justice Department to knock the front
• 1:10:46
  runner out of the race. You can't do that. No, you can't
• 1:10:48
  do that. Now, my first problem is the date, because it's well
• 1:10:55
  after that that Tucker Carlson agrees to host a event where he is interviewing all
• 1:11:05
  the other Republican presidential candidates. Now Trump ducked that event. Tucker showed up
• 1:11:12
  the next day in Florida at at a competing Trump event. But this this,
• 1:11:17
  ironically enough, was an event that was I think it was sponsored in
• 1:11:23
  part by the Blaze and Glenn Beck. But regardless, Tucker Carlson was hired,
• 1:11:30
  agreed to interview all these candidates under the guys that Tucker was as independent
• 1:11:39
  as a guest. He's no longer with Fox News Channel, he's no longer
• 1:11:43
  bound by the you know, the big brother, the big corporate entity.
• 1:11:46
  He's free as a bird. He's objective. You know, he said negative
• 1:11:51
  things about Trump in the past. He's supposed to be an objective arbitrator,
• 1:11:59
  an objective to host. Well, here he is admitting that that's not what
• 1:12:03
  happened at all, that he was already a Trump supporter at that point,
• 1:12:09
  and so, you know, that's the type of stuff that used to matter
• 1:12:12
  in the media. I mean, how the hell, how the hell did
• 1:12:15
  you do that event without at least admitting that you're a Trump supporter. And
• 1:12:20
  then there's the whole issue of the fact that he's a Trump supporter, which
• 1:12:23
  is insane. I mean, it's absolutely insane. The guy does not like
• 1:12:26
  Donald Trump. He knows he's a buffood. That's why he said what he
• 1:12:30
  did in the Dominion Voting System's lawsuit discovery. I mean, it's just an
• 1:12:35
  absolute abomination and a joke that Tucker Carlson is publicly pretending that he's a real
• 1:12:41
  Trump supporter. It's just in his self interest at this time to be a
• 1:12:45
  Trump supporter. But even more important than that, in fact, much more
• 1:12:47
  important than that, is this whole idea of why, and it's the why
• 1:12:55
  that is going to be the number one reason that Trump is the nominee and
• 1:13:00
  why these four indictments against him backfired so spectacularly, unless, of course,
• 1:13:05
  the motivation was actually to make Trump the Republican nominee, which is, I
• 1:13:10
  guess, theorectly possible, though right now the polls wouldn't indicate that that may
• 1:13:14
  backfire too, because it's quite possible that Trump might beat Biden depending on what
• 1:13:18
  happens in the next eleven months. But the reality here is that way before
• 1:13:26
  anybody else did. And I've often said that if I have a talent or
• 1:13:30
  a skill or a special ability, this is it is to see domino effects
• 1:13:36
  and bad outcomes. And I saw this one immediately. I was like,
• 1:13:43
  ret row, if this thing holds, if this narrative holds, then that
• 1:13:48
  is gonna make Trump the nominee. Because there are a lot of people who
• 1:13:54
  kind of like Trump, but they understand the downside of Trump. They understand
• 1:13:59
  he can only or of one term. They understand he's high maintenance. They
• 1:14:01
  understand he says a lot of stupid things. They understand that he's lost a
• 1:14:05
  lot of elections that he might lose again. But they like him, and
• 1:14:11
  they love for there to be a high minded excuse to vote for him.
• 1:14:16
  That's what they want. They want an excuse. They want to be able
• 1:14:21
  to feel good about themselves when they go ahead and do what their gut wants
• 1:14:29
  them to do, or maybe their loins want them to do something other than
• 1:14:32
  their brains wants them to do, which is to vote for Donald Trump.
• 1:14:36
  And this narrative that you're not really voting for Trump, or that you're voting
• 1:14:41
  for something bigger than Trump does exactly that. And Tucker understands that. And
• 1:14:47
  Tucker has been at the forefront of the creation of that narrative. And you
• 1:14:51
  know, there was an article in The Blaze, ironically enough that it was
• 1:14:56
  saying exactly what I just said to you, in reaction to Tucker's statements to
• 1:15:01
  Roseanne Barr that yes, Tucker's right, I'm paraphrasing this Blaze article. Tucker's
• 1:15:06
  right, voting for Trump is much bigger than just about Donald Trump, and
• 1:15:15
  I'm sorry, you can't beat that. If people are convinced to that,
• 1:15:17
  and the right wing media has done a hell of a job of establishing that
• 1:15:21
  narrative as being legitimate, then then you're cooked. Because there's too many people
• 1:15:27
  in the Republican Party, especially since Trump has now presumed to be the nominee
• 1:15:31
  and is perceived is so popular and perceived is beating Biden. Then you know,
• 1:15:36
  now it's Katie bar the door. There's no That's why I said,
• 1:15:40
  you cannot let Trump break containment. As soon as he breaks containment, it's
• 1:15:44
  over. And that's why I've been so confident that this thing is over and
• 1:15:48
  why Desanta's people are so upset with me because they think I'm, you know,
• 1:15:54
  a whimp, or I'm not a fighter, or I give up easily.
• 1:15:57
  Are you kidding? You know who I am, you know my history.
• 1:16:00
  I'll fight till the end, even when there's no hope. And I'm
• 1:16:04
  still hoping that something good will happen to this, but it's going to take
• 1:16:08
  beyond a miracle, and as I've said many times, barring death or physical
• 1:16:13
  imprisonment, Donald Trump is going to be the nominee. And if there was
• 1:16:15
  one reason, I would state as to why, it's because of this narrative
• 1:16:19
  that there's something larger at stake. It's not true, it's not true,
• 1:16:27
  but that is a very enticing narrative for people who like Trump and want an
• 1:16:31
  excuse for voting for him, and Tucker was more than happy to give them
• 1:16:38
  exactly that. Now, moving on to other stories, there have been a
• 1:16:41
  lot of very high profile deaths in recent days. Let's go through them quickly.
• 1:16:46
  Sandrade O'Connor, first female Supreme Court justice appointed by Ronald Reagan. She
• 1:16:51
  passed away. Charlie Munger, legendary financial figure, he passed away, Roslind
• 1:16:57
  Carter, the wife of Jimmy Carter. She passed away. Jimmy Carter appears
• 1:17:02
  as if he's going to do so in very short order. And Henry Kissinger,
• 1:17:06
  former Secretary of State for Richard Nixon. He also passed away at the
• 1:17:12
  age of one hundred. And I was never a huge Henry Kissinger fan,
• 1:17:16
  but you know, I certainly don't hate the guy, but boy, the
• 1:17:20
  left hates him. And I just have to mention because this was one of
• 1:17:25
  those examples of where the news media has completely left the gravitational pull of any
• 1:17:32
  rationality at all. I mean, here is a guy who was very well
• 1:17:39
  respected, did a lot of theoretically good things, and did some bad things
• 1:17:42
  as well. But this is how Rolling Stone magazine. Now, granted it's
• 1:17:45
  Rolling Stone, but they try to pretend to be a legitimate news organization from
• 1:17:49
  time to time. This was their actual news story on the death of Henry
• 1:17:57
  Kissinger under the I guess you would call this a headline good riddance, good
• 1:18:04
  riddance Henry Kissinger, war criminal beloved by America's ruling class finally dies. That
• 1:18:14
  was the headline in Rolling Stone. The infamy of Nixon's foreign policy architect sits
• 1:18:20
  eternally beside that of history's worst mass murderers. A deeper shame attaches to the
• 1:18:28
  country that celebrates him. That's from Rolling Stone. Now, when I saw
• 1:18:32
  this, I honestly thought it was gonna go viral, and it did to
• 1:18:38
  a certain degree like viral in a way that people were ratioing Rolling Stone and
• 1:18:43
  saying, what the fuck, how is this remotely legitimate? How is this
• 1:18:47
  credible? I mean, if you're a news organization, you don't have to
• 1:18:50
  write a glowing obituary for the guy. But Henry Kissinger, war criminal beloved
• 1:18:57
  by America's ruling class, finally dies under the headline good riddance. I mean,
• 1:19:01
  come on, stay classy, Rolling Stone. Are we really to that
• 1:19:08
  point now where we're that divided? Were because politically you disagree with somebody,
• 1:19:14
  that's the way you report on their death at one hundred years old. I
• 1:19:20
  was astonished and almost as astonished that it didn't make a bigger imprint online.
• 1:19:27
  I really thought there was going to be outrage over this. Maybe people just
• 1:19:29
  think, well, it's Rolling Stone, who cares? Or maybe just so
• 1:19:31
  ridiculous it's not even worth getting upset about. But I thought it was worthy
• 1:19:35
  of mention on this podcast. Now. In the last episode of the podcast,
• 1:19:41
  I went into one of my deep deep dives story time with Zig as
• 1:19:45
  I like to call it, where at the last minute I did not prepare,
• 1:19:50
  and that's going to be part of why I'm talking about it again.
• 1:19:54
  I did not fully prepare for this story time with Zig in episode number one
• 1:19:58
  hundred and eight because there was a news story that provoked me into finally telling
• 1:20:03
  most, although not all, most of my remarkable interaction over many years with
• 1:20:10
  former NBC Today's Show host Matt Lower, and if you haven't heard episode one
• 1:20:15
  hundred and eight, I urge you to do so. I spent about ninety
• 1:20:18
  minutes detailing two things, basically my relationship with Matt Lower, which I guess
• 1:20:26
  really began in two thousand and nine when I made my first appearance on the
• 1:20:30
  Today Show being interviewed by him after my movie Mediam Malpractice, How Obama got
• 1:20:35
  elected came out and has continued sporadically with numerous years in between, to the
• 1:20:45
  point where now I consider him to be one of my best friends. That
• 1:20:48
  was part of the story time was the other element of this was the story
• 1:20:55
  of him getting railroaded, which I'm one hundred percent sure he was at NBC
• 1:21:00
  where he was fired in a panic that was related to the whole me Too
• 1:21:05
  situation, the Harvey Weinstein circumstance, which NBC was very, very vulnerable on
• 1:21:11
  because they had had passed on the Ronan Pharaoh story on Harvey Weinstein, so
• 1:21:15
  NBC needed a scalp, and a woman by the name of Brooke Neville's came
• 1:21:19
  forward, not with an allegation of abuse or rape, but she was not
• 1:21:24
  happy at NBC. She was going through a lot of things in her own
• 1:21:27
  life. She seemed like she thought she might be able to get some money
• 1:21:30
  out of NBC, and she told them about the fact that she had had
• 1:21:34
  sex in Matt Lower's dressing room with him, and that they had had sex
• 1:21:41
  while they were both working on the Associate Olympics in Russia in twenty fourteen,
• 1:21:45
  although she was not working for Matt or even close to the Today Show at
• 1:21:51
  that time, a completely different portion of the NBC broadcast company, and so
• 1:21:57
  Matt had no actual power over her. And so I decided to do this
• 1:22:01
  for a couple of reasons in episode number one and eight, because, as
• 1:22:06
  you probably know, it is my plan to end this podcast sometime in early
• 1:22:12
  February in all likelihood, and I've got this warehouse of remarkable stories, some
• 1:22:17
  of which I have never told fully in any long form, and I want
• 1:22:24
  there to at least be a record of some of this stuff, assuming that
• 1:22:27
  I do end the podcast as planned in basically a couple of months. And
• 1:22:31
  so I've been looking for an excuse to tell the Matt Lower story. And
• 1:22:36
  one of the reasons why I have never told the full Matt lower story.
• 1:22:41
  And there are many reasons why, but one of them is that I knew
• 1:22:45
  that the State of New York had done this very insane thing where they had
• 1:22:51
  suspended the statute limitations for all sex abuse allegations for one year. No words,
• 1:23:00
  anybody can sue anybody in New York for sex abuse, it doesn't matter
• 1:23:03
  how old the allegation is. And obviously Matt had worked in New York most
• 1:23:08
  of his career and lived on the Hampton's for most of his adult life.
• 1:23:13
  And so you know, in theory, even though I knew there was nobody
• 1:23:15
  who had a legitimate claim, and he knew there was nobody that had a
• 1:23:18
  legitimate claim, there are lots of very famous people who are getting sued in
• 1:23:23
  New York by people who realized that you know, basically, it's a free
• 1:23:27
  for all, and you've got a year to come forward with a very old
• 1:23:30
  allegation which is very difficult to disprove, and who knows you might be able
• 1:23:35
  to get a jury to give you some money. And so a lot of
• 1:23:40
  very famous and rich people are getting sued in New York for things that are
• 1:23:43
  probably mostly not totally bogus. And so I saw an article in the middle
• 1:23:49
  of last week. I think it was like the night before I tape this
• 1:23:54
  podcast, I saw an article where that time period had officially ended hours name
• 1:24:00
  was not on the list of people who had been sued, and so I
• 1:24:02
  thought, Okay, here's my newshok And it just happens that just after Thanksgiving
• 1:24:09
  is the anniversary of when Matt was fired from NBC. And I even stayed
• 1:24:14
  in in episode number one hundred and eight that Thanksgiving has always been kind of
• 1:24:17
  related in my mind to Matt's firing because rightly or wrongly, and Matt would
• 1:24:23
  say wrongly. I had told my wife just before that Thanksgiving in twenty seventeen
• 1:24:30
  that Matt was going to get fired for reasons that I go into in episode
• 1:24:34
  number one hundred and eight, And we even joked as Santa Claus came down
• 1:24:41
  the Macy's Thanksgiving Day parade and Matt signed off on that parade in twenty seventeen,
• 1:24:45
  that Matt must have been sighing relief, because in my impression or my
• 1:24:50
  perception, that was a good moment to get passed. If you were in
• 1:24:55
  the middle of a meat too panic and you were worried about someone making an
• 1:24:58
  allegation against you that if you got past the Macy's Thanksgiving Day parade, maybe
• 1:25:01
  you were in the clear. Well I was wrong about that, because Matt
• 1:25:04
  got fired just a few days later. So anyway, the point of this
• 1:25:09
  is that I did that episode number one hundred and eight without really any preparation.
• 1:25:15
  I did it all on memory. And I also didn't tell Matt that
• 1:25:19
  I was doing this, and it occurred to me, you know, I
• 1:25:24
  probably should tell my friend I'm doing this now. In my defense, I
• 1:25:30
  had previously planned to do this many months before, and then something occurred that
• 1:25:36
  prevented that from happening as planned. So in my mind, I already had
• 1:25:42
  not that I needed permission, But he had already been informed that it was
• 1:25:45
  my intention to do this, and he was basically okay with it. But
• 1:25:48
  I also knew that he was at least a little bit concerned about provoking somebody
• 1:25:55
  into suing him for some bogus allegation. Well, now that time period has
• 1:26:00
  ended in New York, and we had the anniversary of Lowur's firing, and
• 1:26:04
  then we have the podcast coming to an end, and so that night I
• 1:26:08
  basically made an executive decision. Okay, I'm gonna do this. So I
• 1:26:12
  taped episode number one hundred and eight, and then it occurred to me,
• 1:26:15
  you know, I probably ought to tell my friend that I did this.
• 1:26:19
  So I tell Matt first, rather casually. Hey, I wanted you to
• 1:26:24
  know because of these because of the anniversary of your firing, and because of
• 1:26:27
  this article in New York. Because I'd even sent him the article in New
• 1:26:30
  York, joking about the fact that no one had sued him, and you
• 1:26:34
  know, I want you to know that I had told the full story of
• 1:26:38
  both our relationship and how you got railroaded. Well, I guess I should
• 1:26:43
  have anticipated this, but Matt was instantly very curious about what I had said,
• 1:26:48
  and which I was fine with. Although I did not do that episode
• 1:26:53
  of the podcast thinking that he was gonna hear it, I never even really
• 1:26:57
  thought about it. You know, we're in a kind of a weird situation
• 1:26:59
  where you're talking about a news story, but you're talking about a friend,
• 1:27:01
  right, so the lines kind of get blurred a bit, and so I
• 1:27:05
  didn't when I did it, I certainly did not do it with any thought
• 1:27:10
  that, you know, Matt might hear this, and so I want to
• 1:27:13
  make sure that I shape the narrative of what I'm saying to not upset a
• 1:27:17
  friend. That's not at all what happened. In fact, if you've listened
• 1:27:21
  to episode number one hundred and eight, there are many things in there that,
• 1:27:25
  if you're Matt Lauer, might piss you off a bit. So Matt,
• 1:27:29
  of course says, well, can I hear it? I said,
• 1:27:30
  okay, fine, So I sent episode number one hundred and eight to Matt
• 1:27:34
  and he immediately started listening to it, and much like Matt is prone to
• 1:27:41
  do because he's a journalist at heart, he started taking notes and he listened
• 1:27:45
  very very carefully, and I'm thought, oh, no, this is going
• 1:27:49
  to be bad, because I'm sure that in ninety minutes, going completely off
• 1:27:55
  the cuff by memory, I'm going to say things, especially as opinion of
• 1:27:59
  it as I am, and when I have theories on things that I know
• 1:28:03
  he doesn't necessarily agree with that, there's going to be some problems here.
• 1:28:09
  I don't know how big a problem there's going to because I'm pretty confident that
• 1:28:12
  what I said was consistent with the facts and was more than fair. But
• 1:28:15
  I was a little bit concerned about, Okay, how's this going to go
• 1:28:19
  down. So Matt calls me and he goes through his critique of what I
• 1:28:27
  had said about both our relationship as well as his railroading, and overall he
• 1:28:32
  thought it was very, very good. But he had a couple things that
• 1:28:35
  he wanted to mention. So I want to share those with you now,
• 1:28:40
  because I guess you would classify these as corrections or points of emphasis that after
• 1:28:48
  talking with Matt, I agree I should have made in the original version of
• 1:28:54
  the story. The first is I neglected to add I should have I neglected
• 1:29:01
  the mention that not only was Matt not sued despite New York State basically putting
• 1:29:09
  out a welcome Matt and saying please sue all year old celebrity sexual encounters.
• 1:29:15
  That's essentially what this suspension of the statue of limitations is. But also there
• 1:29:21
  was a huge news story after Ron and Pharaoh's bogus book claiming that Matt Flower
• 1:29:29
  raped this woman by the name of brook Neville's, an allegation that she came
• 1:29:32
  to quote unquote in hindsight years later after she had engaged in a month's long
• 1:29:39
  relationship with Matt Lauer after they came back from the sociate Olympics that NBC very
• 1:29:48
  dramatically allowed anybody who was under a non disclosure agreement to come forward and tell
• 1:29:57
  their story because there was a controversy after Ronan's book, And this was so
• 1:30:02
  typical Ronan Pharaoh, and so typical of how broken the news media is,
• 1:30:06
  because Pharaoh needed an excuse for why he didn't have more sources and more people
• 1:30:12
  on the record, and so he claimed, well, it's because everyone's under
• 1:30:16
  non disclosure agreements that they signed with NBC for NBC to make them go away
• 1:30:20
  and not tell their stories about Matt Lwer and others. Well, Matt knew
• 1:30:25
  that was bogus. He knew because he would have known had there been somebody
• 1:30:29
  who signed an NDA who had made an allegation against him, because he knew
• 1:30:32
  no would made an allegation against him, that NBC would have even had any
• 1:30:36
  reason to have them sign an NDA four. So he knew it was completely
• 1:30:43
  bogus. And Ronan Parall might have even thought it was bogus, But it
• 1:30:46
  was a good smoke screen for why his book was so poorly sourced, especially
• 1:30:51
  when it came to Matt Lauer. Well, you know, Megan Kelly jumped
• 1:30:57
  all over this, which really irritated the hell out of me, because I've
• 1:30:59
  had some connection with Megan Kelly. I've had connections with her her lawyer from
• 1:31:04
  the Michael Jackson case, and she gets it on Michael Jackson, but she
• 1:31:09
  doesn't get it on Matt Lower at all. And here's a case it's a
• 1:31:13
  lot like the Tucker Carlson firing. Megan Kelly got fired from essentially the NBC
• 1:31:18
  Today Show, And so Megan Kelly not only has a bone to pick with
• 1:31:24
  NBC, but she is also, like Tucker, looking for a narrative that
• 1:31:29
  makes her feel better about that firing. Of course, I'm sure she feels
• 1:31:31
  pretty good because she got paid a lot of money to leave NBC. It
• 1:31:34
  was a terrible fit, absolutely one of the worst media fits I've ever seen,
• 1:31:39
  for her to go to the NBC Today Show and not talk about politics
• 1:31:44
  and purposely not talk about politics, because she claimed to the time that she
• 1:31:47
  was done with politics. Well know that that's just what NBC wanted. So
• 1:31:51
  she jumps all over the Matt Lower thing because that's a good narrative for her
• 1:31:57
  to explain why she didn't make it an NBC because it was still you know,
• 1:32:00
  the patriarchy and the men were dominating and it was just a terrible environment.
• 1:32:06
  Of course, it also doubtails with her Fox News Channel story because you
• 1:32:10
  know, she's a character in the Roger Ayles movie about sex abuse at Fox
• 1:32:15
  News Channel. So this all fits with Megan Kelly's self interest, and she
• 1:32:20
  was one of those that was, you know, making sure that people were
• 1:32:26
  aware of this NDA issue, and she was one of those who was saying
• 1:32:30
  that NBC ought to do the right thing and let people out of their NDAs.
• 1:32:32
  Well. They did. NBC let people out of their NDAs, and
• 1:32:36
  nobody came forward to make a claim about Matt Lower. There was not one
• 1:32:41
  person who did an interview because I'm I'm out of my NDA. Let me
• 1:32:45
  tell you about how Matt Lawer abused me. So that never happened, and
• 1:32:50
  I should have covered that more thoroughly. I thought I had done so with
• 1:32:55
  regard to the issue of not being sued. But I agree that the NDA
• 1:32:59
  issue is even more telling than the lack of a lawsuit issue, mainly because
• 1:33:03
  it goes to what a fraud ronan pharaoh is. And there are a couple
• 1:33:10
  other things I want to mention that were related to me in my conversation with
• 1:33:15
  Matt about what I did in episode number one hundred and eight, One of
• 1:33:18
  the things I talk about is how, in my perception that quote unquote,
• 1:33:26
  the rules changed after the Ronan, Pharaoh, Harvey Weinstein, me Too,
• 1:33:31
  panic. And I can see where what I said in episode number one hundred
• 1:33:38
  and eight would be perceived as a situation where NBC knew that Matt was having
• 1:33:45
  all of these affairs and that he may have been breaking company policy and his
• 1:33:51
  own contract by, for instance, having sexual relations with a fellow employee of
• 1:33:57
  NBC on quote unquote campus that NBC somehow knew about this and that they just
• 1:34:03
  disregarded it, and it was only after Me Too that suddenly they changed the
• 1:34:10
  rules. They decided to finally enforce the rules, and what had been previously
• 1:34:15
  deemed to be okay because you're Matt Lower, now all of a sudden,
• 1:34:19
  it's not okay, and we're going to fire you for the same behavior that
• 1:34:24
  you would have gotten away with before. Harvey Weinstein, run and Pharaoh and
• 1:34:28
  me too. That's essentially what I said, And I can see where that
• 1:34:32
  would imply that NBC was well aware that Matt was engaged in this behavior.
• 1:34:40
  There's no evidence of that, and I agree that, as Matt told me,
• 1:34:45
  that didn't happen. Now, I guess there's a fine line here between
• 1:34:49
  what did NBC know for sure and what would NBC maybe have suspected. But
• 1:34:55
  I agree that there's no evidence that NBC knew for sure. Brook Nevill's came
• 1:35:00
  forward in the midst of the me too panic just after Thanksgiving at twenty seventeen
• 1:35:05
  that this had actually happened, mainly because the women that Matt was engaged in
• 1:35:12
  this behavior with had an incentive to keep quiet themselves. And I think there's
• 1:35:17
  an interesting dichotomy between on air people and off air people, that women who
• 1:35:24
  were on air were probably far more incentivized to keep this between themselves and Matt
• 1:35:30
  than off air people are. And this person, Brooke Nevill's, that Matt
• 1:35:33
  had an affair with, and so she was a producer, and I think
• 1:35:38
  that's a small part of the equation here. But I agree that there's no
• 1:35:44
  evidence that NBC knew for sure that Matt had done this. It's not like
• 1:35:48
  they had had people come to them previously and they said, oh well,
• 1:35:53
  let's not worry about it. It's Matt. We got to protect Matt until
• 1:35:56
  then all of a sudden, the world changed with me too, however,
• 1:36:00
  and this is what I said to Man, I said, but Matt,
• 1:36:01
  effectively what I said is still true because the rules did change. They changed
• 1:36:09
  in brook Nevill's mind. See, this is what's so important about these panics.
• 1:36:15
  Brook Nevills. I guarantee you never thought that she could have a claim
• 1:36:19
  against NBC for having had consensual sex for months with Matt Lower until me too
• 1:36:28
  hit. And that's why you see the floodgates open, not just against Matt
• 1:36:32
  Lower, but against all sorts of other people. Because the rules had effectively
• 1:36:38
  changed. It never occurred to women like brook Neville's that wait a minute,
• 1:36:44
  I can get some money out of this, or maybe some attention out of
• 1:36:45
  this. I can be a victim. Even though I had consensual sex with
• 1:36:49
  a celebrity and I was thrilled to be engaging in that, well, it
• 1:36:53
  was happening, and I was pissed off when he ghosted me after our affair
• 1:36:58
  ended after a few months. That was never part of the rules until Ron
• 1:37:04
  and Pharaoh, Harvey Weinstein and me too. So I think Matt Lower and
• 1:37:10
  I have a distinction without a difference there when it comes to the rules.
• 1:37:14
  A couple of more substantive things that I do want to correct the record on,
• 1:37:17
  and this one, I knew when I said it that what I was
• 1:37:21
  saying was not strictly accurate, and I guess I was talking in hyperbole,
• 1:37:27
  and I got to understand why Matt mentioned it. But I referenced that Matt
• 1:37:31
  used to take a helicopter from thirty Rockefelller Center in New York City and Manhattan
• 1:37:40
  out to where he lives in the Hamptons, which is very, very difficult
• 1:37:43
  to get to, especially during rush hour. It's you know, several hours
• 1:37:46
  of driving. And so NBC would occasionally, not all the time, which
• 1:37:51
  is what I basically said, would pay for Matt to come back to the
• 1:37:57
  Hamptons in a helicopter. I may have said I didn't go back and listen
• 1:38:01
  to it, But according to Matt, I said that that happened all the
• 1:38:03
  time, or every day or whatever. I knew it didn't happen every day,
• 1:38:08
  because I had talked to Matt about this previously. By Matt's recollection,
• 1:38:12
  it happened about every other week, so you know, once every two weeks
• 1:38:16
  or thereabouts. And he also wanted to mention that he occasionally, about half
• 1:38:21
  the time, he believes he paid for the helicopter himself, it was not
• 1:38:26
  paid for by NBC. Of course, I'm not sure how that really changes
• 1:38:30
  the equation much. He also wanted me to know that it was not possible
• 1:38:35
  to take a helicopter from the Hamptons back to Manhattan because the Today Show tapes,
• 1:38:42
  you know, obviously goes live at seven am, and they have to
• 1:38:45
  get into the studio at five five thirty, which means you'd have to get
• 1:38:47
  a helicopter at like four four thirty in the morning in the Hamptons. And
• 1:38:51
  they don't have helicopters in the morning in the Hamptons at four four thirty,
• 1:38:56
  So it was only in one direction. Of course, I did rebut this
• 1:39:00
  by saying, okay, so when you didn't take a helicopter from New York
• 1:39:06
  City to the Hamptons, how did you get there? And eventually he was
• 1:39:13
  essentially forced to acknowledge that he was in a limo. So I'm like,
• 1:39:17
  okay, this is the real first world problem you had here. And the
• 1:39:19
  whole point of that, the whole point of that was to show the kind
• 1:39:25
  of world that these people live in, especially Matt Lower, when he was
• 1:39:29
  at the height of the media game, really right until the moment that he
• 1:39:32
  got decapitated, fired, canceled, what have you in late twenty seventeen.
• 1:39:40
  So from a strictly factual basis, I was incorrect to say that Matt Lower
• 1:39:45
  took a helicopter every day or anything close to every day from New York City
• 1:39:50
  to the Hamptons. Much more importantly, and I think this is the most
• 1:39:56
  significant factual error I made, and it's going to sound like a small error,
• 1:40:02
  and to call it an error is a little bit I think unfair to
• 1:40:05
  me because I can't believe I didn't know this, and I think it's it's
• 1:40:10
  a testament to what happens when you talk to somebody as many times as I
• 1:40:15
  have with Matt Lower about this whole situation. I mean, we've spoken for
• 1:40:20
  well over one hundred hours on the phone and many hours in person, and
• 1:40:25
  we've done so over an extended period of time. Sometimes the most important or
• 1:40:29
  the biggest issues get lost because you think you've covered them or you think you
• 1:40:33
  know them, so there's no reason to clarify or to even dealve any deeper.
• 1:40:40
  And what I'm referring to here is the infamous rape button situation. Now
• 1:40:45
  I knew that the rape button thing, which is still to this day a
• 1:40:48
  huge part of the Matt Lauer narrative. You ask the regular person, you
• 1:40:53
  know, what's the evidence that Matt Lower was a rapist? And the one
• 1:40:57
  hundred percent going to mention the so called rape button, this button that was
• 1:41:00
  underneath his desk at NBC in his office that supposedly, it was originally reported,
• 1:41:06
  would lock people in and out of his office. And that was always
• 1:41:11
  insane to begin with. I mean, first of all, I always wondered,
• 1:41:15
  so what do people think happened that Matt would like, would chase these
• 1:41:19
  women around his office and they try to get out, and they couldn't get
• 1:41:23
  out, and they'd be screaming for help, and you know, and by
• 1:41:27
  the way, you know, there were lots and lots of women that were
• 1:41:30
  very, very happy to have affairs with Matt Lower in the media business.
• 1:41:32
  I can assure you that. And so what was Matt doing then raping them
• 1:41:38
  as they were trying to get out of the office but they couldn't because he
• 1:41:41
  had magically locked the door. From the inside with his rape button. I
• 1:41:45
  just never even understood what the fuck the narrative was supposed to be, so
• 1:41:49
  I knew that was both ridiculous and false. What I thought the so called
• 1:41:55
  button did was locked the door to the outside. In other words, you
• 1:42:00
  can get out of it, you just couldn't get in. And Matt said,
• 1:42:03
  actually, John, that's not even accurate. It's way worse than that.
• 1:42:08
  I said, what basically the door that the so called rape button didn't
• 1:42:14
  even lock the goddamn door. What it was was there was a magnet on
• 1:42:19
  the door, and if the door was a jar, let's say it was
• 1:42:23
  you know, either mostly open or partially opened. And Matt wanted some privacy,
• 1:42:28
  which everybody at his level at NBC had the same mechanism underneath their desk.
• 1:42:33
  He pressed a button and the magnet activated and closed the door. It
• 1:42:40
  did not lock the door. It simply closed it. So it was still
• 1:42:45
  open from the inside and open from the outside, so anyone, if need
• 1:42:49
  be, could come in and out. They would just you know, obviously
• 1:42:54
  be breaking an unwritten rule that, Hey, I closed the door. I
• 1:42:58
  want some privacy. But it's not like the or it was locked either.
• 1:43:00
  The people coming in to save these women from being raped, or the women
• 1:43:04
  who were being allectionedly raped, which they weren't somehow getting out of the office
• 1:43:10
  through the door that was always on locked, regardless of whether or not the
• 1:43:13
  button was activated. So I was stunned by that. I was like,
• 1:43:15
  I cannot believe I don't know that here I am here, I am the
• 1:43:19
  guy who knows more about this story than anybody other than Matt Lower. And
• 1:43:26
  even I got that one wrong, which just shows you just how pervasive that
• 1:43:29
  bullshit narrative really is. One other, I guess you would call this disagreement
• 1:43:35
  that Matt and I had, which I found to be fascinating because in the
• 1:43:40
  end, I think we're on the same page, but for different reasons,
• 1:43:45
  has to do with the circumstances surrounding the Socio Olympics in twenty fourteen. If
• 1:43:51
  you listen to episode number one hundred and eight full throughout the full story that
• 1:43:57
  I told about Matt Lower, I positive the theory that bizarrely, one of
• 1:44:05
  the many factors that led to Matt engaging in this relationship and his ultimate downfall,
• 1:44:13
  was that Bob costas the host of the Winter Olympics at Soshi had gotten
• 1:44:17
  pink eye during the Olympics, and long story short, they tried to keep
• 1:44:23
  him on for the air for a couple of days, but it was so
• 1:44:25
  awful it became a literal joke online and they just had to get him off
• 1:44:30
  the air, and so they put in Matt Lauer in that position. So
• 1:44:35
  Matt for a couple of days during the Olympics was hosting both the evenings and
• 1:44:41
  the mornings on NBC, which is unprecedented, an extremely difficult task for anybody,
• 1:44:45
  and Matt did a really good job with it. Because he's a professional.
• 1:44:49
  He was one of not the best at what he did when he was
• 1:44:54
  at NBC, and he's not even you know, he's a big sports fan,
• 1:44:57
  but he was no Bob Costas. And doing the Olympics is very very
• 1:45:00
  difficult, especially a Winter Olympics. I mean, it's one of the toughest
• 1:45:03
  jobs, you know, all of broadcasting. And I said on the podcast,
• 1:45:08
  and I this was a situation where I, because I had not fully
• 1:45:13
  prepared and gone through all my notes, I kind of wung it and I
• 1:45:17
  came up with a narrative that was in the right church and the wrong pew.
• 1:45:23
  And I said that, you know, it's my theory that Matt was
• 1:45:26
  feeling pretty good about himself, as most men might. And when when men
• 1:45:30
  feel pretty good about themselves in a situation where it's basically what happens in Vegas
• 1:45:34
  stays in Vegas, which is the atmosphere of a Winter Olympics halfway across the
• 1:45:39
  world in Soci Russia, that they their decision making might be Often they might
• 1:45:43
  do things that they didn't you know, want to do, or they might
• 1:45:46
  later regret. They might not use their best judgment, especially if alcohol was
• 1:45:50
  involved. And that was part of my theory of what went down. It
• 1:45:58
  wasn't a big part of it. It was more of a you know,
• 1:46:00
  isn't that weird the way the world works? That if Bob Costas doesn't get
• 1:46:04
  pink eye, then maybe this whole thing doesn't even happen, certainly not in
• 1:46:08
  the way that it did, because it was in that episode in Soshi that
• 1:46:13
  Ronan Farah would later claim ludicrously in his book in twenty nineteen that Matt Lauer
• 1:46:18
  had raped this woman Brook Nevils, which did not, in any way,
• 1:46:23
  shape or form, actually happened. Well, Matt said, well, I
• 1:46:26
  don't think that was the case, and I understand why Matt doesn't think that.
• 1:46:30
  But then Matt did say something that I had had somewhere in my the
• 1:46:35
  deep recesses of my memory, but I wasn't confident enough to say it without
• 1:46:41
  fully preparing on the podcast, and so I think I kind of did an
• 1:46:45
  ad lib and went with the male ego scenario when actually it was a scheduling
• 1:46:50
  issue. And Matt acknowledged. He says to me, well, John,
• 1:46:55
  I don't think that was anything to do. You know, Bob Costas is
• 1:46:58
  pink I didn't have anything to do with what's transpired, except for the fact
• 1:47:00
  that if Bob hadn't gotten pink eye, I would not have been in the
• 1:47:04
  bar that night because my schedule would have been different. And I said,
• 1:47:08
  Matt, that's what I'm saying. I mean, other than that, Missus
• 1:47:13
  Kennedy, how was the trip to Dallas, Because if Bob Costas doesn't get
• 1:47:16
  pink eye, you're not in that bar, you don't get drunk, she's
• 1:47:19
  not there, You don't, you don't don't, you don't end up with
• 1:47:21
  her in your room. And this episode never happens. And Ronan Farrow certainly
• 1:47:28
  never eventually calls it a rape, and who knows, maybe the relationship never
• 1:47:31
  happens and you're still at NBC. All that is obviously just pure speculation,
• 1:47:36
  but it's just it's weird. I'm I. You know, the interconnected,
• 1:47:41
  you know, intercognectivity or connectivity of life is fascinating to me. And I
• 1:47:46
  do think that there is a connection between Bob costas is Pink Eye and Matt
• 1:47:51
  Lawer's downfall many years later, although it may have happened in a significantly different
• 1:47:58
  way than what I said in episode number one hundred and eight, that it
• 1:48:01
  was much more about the logistics and the scheduling than it was about Matt's mentality.
• 1:48:08
  But who knows, it may have been somewhere in between one other.
• 1:48:12
  Last I guess you would call it a correction, and this is a factual
• 1:48:15
  correction, and I can understand why Matt was wanting me to get this corrected.
• 1:48:23
  Although it's not a big deal. It's very much an inside baseball thing.
• 1:48:27
  But I told the story of how it is that I had helped the
• 1:48:30
  New York Times write a story about Ronan Faraoh called is Ronan Pharaoh Too Good
• 1:48:36
  to be True? And that my motivation for doing so. In this reporter
• 1:48:42
  by the name of Ben Smith. I had hooked Ben Smith up with Matt
• 1:48:46
  Lower because I wanted Matt to be part of that article so that Matt could
• 1:48:53
  then immediately finally release his expose on Ronan Pharaoh on media which is where I
• 1:49:00
  was working as a senior columnist at the time. So we were in the
• 1:49:03
  middle of COVID and we needed a news hook for why the heck we're going
• 1:49:08
  to do this story or Matt's going to finally release his version of what really
• 1:49:13
  happened and why Ronan Pharaoh's book was a piece of garbage. And I thought,
• 1:49:16
  Okay, this is a perfect excuse, this is a great opportunity.
• 1:49:20
  I'm going to hook up Ben Smith with Matt Louer. And I said on
• 1:49:24
  the podcast that Matt actually did an interview with Ben on the record, and
• 1:49:30
  that's not what happened. What actually happened was that Matt had spoken to Ben
• 1:49:36
  off the record, and that Ben ended up verifying some of the facts in
• 1:49:43
  Matt's Mediaite story, specifically when it came to these people that Ronan Farrow had
• 1:49:49
  referenced in his book that he never really fully contacted or even spoke to,
• 1:49:55
  including two former boyfriends of brook Nevill's who worked at NBC, who very significantly
• 1:50:02
  contradicted her story, and that became part of his New York Times story.
• 1:50:09
  It mentioned Matt lower, it mentioned verifying his reporting, and that was then
• 1:50:14
  the perfect hook two days later for Matt to release his version of events on
• 1:50:20
  media. And I think the reason why, other than the technical accuracy of
• 1:50:26
  the record, which is always important, I think the reason why Matt found
• 1:50:30
  that worthy of mention was that Matt has never done and on the record interview
• 1:50:36
  about any of this, which is really remarkable, especially in this day and
• 1:50:41
  age, and he might be, it might not even close, the most
• 1:50:45
  high profile celebrity to ever be completely canceled to never do any interview of any
• 1:50:55
  kind on the record. Now, I've done, you know, an off
• 1:50:58
  the record interview with him for about five hours at his home after the Ronan
• 1:51:01
  Pharaoh book came out, and I wrote extensively about that, But I've never
• 1:51:05
  done an on the record interview with Matt for a lot of reasons. Now,
• 1:51:10
  he and I a few years ago agreed, we agreed, both of
• 1:51:15
  us that we would go into a studio and put something down on tape.
• 1:51:21
  We never agreed that we would make it public, and I really wanted to
• 1:51:26
  do that because one it would you know, in my opinion, it would
• 1:51:30
  been at the right time. It would have been newsworthy and significant, especially
• 1:51:33
  for the record, and it's an amazing story. But I also truly believe
• 1:51:39
  that if Matt and I ever sat down for whatever it would take two three
• 1:51:43
  four hours and did a no holds barred interview, it would be the greatest
• 1:51:47
  interview about the media in the history of the media. And that's not hyperbole,
• 1:51:54
  that's not exaggeration, and I'm positive of that, and so that's something
• 1:51:58
  I would really like to do, but I would only like to do it
• 1:52:00
  under the right circumstances. We've never taped anything, and we've never taped anything
• 1:52:05
  for a couple of reasons. Some of it's logistical because he lives in the
• 1:52:10
  Hamptons most of the time, although he travels all over all over the world
• 1:52:14
  where visiting his various children in various places for school and his ranch in New
• 1:52:18
  Zealand, and I mean, he's basically traveling all the time, but he
• 1:52:23
  does occasionally come to Los Angeles. So we could do this if it was
• 1:52:26
  a high enough priority, but I've never pushed him on it, partially because
• 1:52:30
  we've become better friends over the years, but also because I know how important
• 1:52:36
  his children are to him, and his children are still at a stage in
• 1:52:42
  life where they're at least potentially vulnerable to this becoming a news story again,
• 1:52:47
  and I know that Matt would very much prefer to just let it go at
• 1:52:51
  this point. I mean, he's very vehement about the record being set,
• 1:52:56
  which is why he did that whole media et piece. But I don't know
• 1:53:01
  that he's ever going to do an interview. I mean, if the right
• 1:53:03
  person in the right platform came around, I think he probably would, especially
• 1:53:10
  you know, once his kids get out of college. But then he's gonna
• 1:53:13
  have another kid in high school coming out of high school, So who the
• 1:53:15
  hell knows that if the opportunity would ever actually present itself. But it's not
• 1:53:19
  because he doesn't want to tell his story or this story isn't compelling. I
• 1:53:24
  think he's just moved beyond it, which I have an enormous amount of respect
• 1:53:27
  for. I mean, it's just amazing to me how happy he is given
• 1:53:31
  all that he had taken away, obviously through mistakes of his own, but
• 1:53:36
  one of those mistakes was not raping another raping a woman that did not happen,
• 1:53:42
  and he's I believe, suffered much more than he deserved, and his
• 1:53:45
  kids loved the heck out of him, and vice versa. I've seen it
• 1:53:48
  firsthand, which I think is very telling and about this entire story when you
• 1:53:54
  think about it, and so he's very, very, very sensitive the idea
• 1:53:58
  of not putting them in another awkward position. So I think he'd just rather,
• 1:54:02
  you know, let sleeping dogs lie. He's got plenty of money and
• 1:54:06
  lots of friends and lots of places to visit and young kids, and he's
• 1:54:11
  very happy and I think, you know, while he's certainly not happy with
• 1:54:14
  the way it all went down, I think he's handled that adversity in an
• 1:54:18
  extraordinary fashion that is deserving of respect. He has my respect over that's for
• 1:54:25
  sure. Would I still like to do an interview with him, Absolutely,
• 1:54:28
  if I ever thought it was in his self interest and there was the right
• 1:54:30
  platform to do it on, I would absolutely ask him. I would hope
• 1:54:33
  that he would do it. I know it would be spectacular. But I
• 1:54:38
  also think that there's a little bit of mistique now, the fact that Matt
• 1:54:42
  has never done it on the record interview. I mean, it's so unusual
• 1:54:45
  in this day and age, especially when there's so many different avenues and options
• 1:54:50
  for a celebrity who gets in trouble. I mean, this is a guy
• 1:54:54
  who was asked by everybody from Oprah on down to do an interview, and
• 1:54:59
  he never did it. And I think within certain media circles there's still a
• 1:55:03
  lot of intrigue. I don't know that the public still cares very much because
• 1:55:06
  it's been six years, but I still think within the media there's some intrigue
• 1:55:11
  like, how dare you not do an interview after we destroyed you? How
• 1:55:15
  dare you go on with your life and not really seem to care. He's
• 1:55:19
  kind of taken since this is the Christmas season, He's kind of taken the
• 1:55:21
  Whoville perspective, you know, from the Grinch who Stole Christmas. You know,
• 1:55:28
  when the Grinch steals Christmas and the people of who will still wake up
• 1:55:30
  on Christmas Morning with no gifts and they're singing around the Christmas tree seemingly unaffected.
• 1:55:36
  To a large degree, That's been Matt Lower's philosophy when it comes to
• 1:55:42
  his reaction to all this, and I think there's a lot to be said
• 1:55:45
  for that, and so I respect it. And I've never put him in
• 1:55:47
  a position where he would be forced to say no or And like I said,
• 1:55:51
  I would never ask him unless I thought it was in his self interest
• 1:55:56
  to do so. Whether he would do it at that time, I have
• 1:55:58
  no idea, but those are I guess you would call it the clarifications or
• 1:56:01
  the res or the corrections that Matt Lauer himself had when listening intently to episode
• 1:56:10
  number one hundred and eight of the Death of Journalism podcast. One other topic
• 1:56:16
  I want to talk about. I've not talked anything about sports, which is
• 1:56:19
  kind of unusual since I've discussed sports quite a bit in recent weeks. But
• 1:56:25
  I have to at least briefly mention what happened with the college football playoffs this
• 1:56:30
  past weekend. This was the final weekend for the college football regular season the
• 1:56:35
  conference championship games, and in episode number one hundred and seven, I did
• 1:56:41
  a deep dive about why I think college football has lost its way, lost
• 1:56:45
  its essence and eventually, whether it's ten, fifteen, twenty years from now,
• 1:56:50
  is going to basically suffer for having killed the Golden Goose, much like
• 1:56:55
  the Disney Corporation did and killing what made them great to begin with. And
• 1:56:59
  if you interested in the topic, I urge you to listen to episode number
• 1:57:01
  one hundred and seven. I have to at least a reference though, that
• 1:57:08
  there's been a major controversy involving the college football playoff and it's related to what
• 1:57:14
  I discussed in episode number one hundred and seven, and this all has to
• 1:57:17
  do with how many teams make the playoff, and without getting too deeply into
• 1:57:21
  it, the controversy basically revolves around whether or not Alabama or Florida State deserved
• 1:57:28
  to be the fourth playoff team. Alabama lost one game this year, but
• 1:57:31
  they beat the number one team in the country, Georgia, and the SEC
• 1:57:34
  Championship game. Meanwhile, Florida State went undefeated. They won the ACC Championship,
• 1:57:40
  but Florida State did not get selected as the fourth team. They got
• 1:57:45
  bounced out of the playoff in favor of Alabama, and this has caused a
• 1:57:50
  lot of outrage. And this is a classic situation where I can see both
• 1:57:56
  sides. It depends really on what your definition is of a playoff team.
• 1:58:00
  If you're looking for the best teams. Right now, it's clear that Alabama
• 1:58:04
  is a better team, largely because Florida State lost its star quarterback to injury.
• 1:58:09
  But if you're looking at who had the better and more deserving season,
• 1:58:13
  it's obviously Florida State. They went undefeated, their schedule wasn't quite as tough
• 1:58:16
  as Alabama, but their results in in my opinion, were every bit is
• 1:58:20
  good and sometimes better than Alabama's. And so to me, you have to
• 1:58:28
  respect the undefeated season. So if it's really what are you asking for,
• 1:58:31
  the best team, it's Alabama, the better season, it's Florida State.
• 1:58:36
  Well, they went with Alabama, and I think they did so mainly because
• 1:58:40
  they want to protect the TV games because last year there was this disastrous National
• 1:58:45
  Championship game where TCU got absolutely bulldozed by Georgia, and they don't want another
• 1:58:53
  potential, you know, dog shit game where it's a blowout early on and
• 1:58:59
  the TV ranning tank. So I think that's partially the TCU situation may have
• 1:59:02
  been the deciding factor for why Florida State did not get in. But here's
• 1:59:08
  the part that I want to mention, because I am so big into the
• 1:59:14
  law of undertended consequences as well as the domino effect and what happens when you
• 1:59:21
  change the incentive structure and you create perverse incentives, and how you're going to
• 1:59:28
  end up getting really bad results. And again, without getting too deeply into
• 1:59:31
  it, I am just beside myself with what ESPN put out about what would
• 1:59:39
  be the situation next year under the twelve team playoff system, which I think
• 1:59:45
  is going to be the end of college football as we know it. What
• 1:59:48
  would happen if the same circumstances occurred this year next year? And I talked
• 1:59:56
  a lot in episode number one hundred and seven about we're giving all this up
• 2:00:00
  and what are we getting in return? We're giving away everything that was good
• 2:00:04
  about college football, So what are we getting in return? And I said
• 2:00:09
  in episode one hundred and seven, basically we're getting eleven playoff games and four
• 2:00:13
  conference championship games. And the conference championship games this year were not particularly great.
• 2:00:18
  There was, you know, other than the Georgia Alabama game that there
• 2:00:21
  was really no game that was all that compelling. So and that's generally the
• 2:00:27
  case, for whatever reason, those conference championship games are not that fantastic.
• 2:00:30
  So I've never been a big believer that you know, all right, we're
• 2:00:33
  gonna throw away everything in favor of these fifteen games, four championship games on
• 2:00:39
  the conference level, and then eleven playoff games in a twelve team playoff.
• 2:00:43
  So ESPN put out this graphic where they projected if the exact same thing,
• 2:00:50
  you know, happened next year, or if they took next year's system and
• 2:00:55
  used it this year, what would we be getting in return for selling out
• 2:00:59
  all that was good about college football, specifically the end of the rivalries and
• 2:01:03
  the traditions and the incentive structure and all that. Well, this is just
• 2:01:08
  astonishing to me because this is what we would get in exchange for selling off
• 2:01:14
  of everything that was good for college football. The four first round games if
• 2:01:19
  the system from next year was used this year would be as followed. One
• 2:01:26
  first round game would be Liberty against Florida State, the team that got bounced
• 2:01:32
  from the top four so they were in the fifth position out of twelve.
• 2:01:36
  They would play a twelve seed Liberty, who's barely a Division one team,
• 2:01:43
  had the worst schedule in all of Division one football, but they happened to
• 2:01:46
  go undefeated. And because basically the system wants to avoid a lawsuit and doesn't
• 2:01:54
  want to have a situation where they could be claimed to be part of a
• 2:01:59
  cabal or a monopoly. They have to allow these smaller schools, the schools
• 2:02:02
  not in the major conferences, to have a path to get in. So
• 2:02:06
  under that scenario, you'd have Florida State playing Liberty, which is a game
• 2:02:12
  I wouldn't even bother to put on if it was a regular season game.
• 2:02:15
  It's a joke. Then you get a Missouri Oregon. Okay, fine,
• 2:02:18
  you know, two decent teams, but I don't really care about that very
• 2:02:23
  much. And then you get old Miss Georgia and Penn State Ohio State playing
• 2:02:27
  against each other. Both of those matchups would be rematches of games that were
• 2:02:31
  already played this year and sucked ass. So this is what we're giving everything
• 2:02:39
  up for Liberty, Florida State and two rematches of shitty games that would be
• 2:02:45
  the first round, and then the winners would then play those four teams that
• 2:02:49
  are going to play in the playoffs this year, Alabama, Michigan, Texas,
• 2:02:54
  and Washington. It's just pathetic to me how much is being given up
• 2:02:59
  in exchange for basically nothing. And I just thought it was worthy of mention
• 2:03:03
  given the fact that I had done that deep dive on the state of college
• 2:03:06
  football and episode number one hundred and seven. One last very brief sports note
• 2:03:13
  that I want to make because I don't know when I'll have an opportunity to
• 2:03:15
  tell this very quick story ever again. But Jim Leland, a legendary baseball
• 2:03:21
  manager who managed numerous different baseball teams, including, in my experience, the
• 2:03:26
  Pittsburgh Pirates in the later eighties in the early nineteen nineties, has been inducted
• 2:03:31
  finally into the Baseball Hall of Fame, which I think is great. And
• 2:03:36
  I have had a very unique career in a lot of ways. But also
• 2:03:40
  my sportscasting career, while it was short, had a lot of very interesting
• 2:03:45
  experiences that shaped who I am as a person, as a broadcaster and as
• 2:03:49
  a journalist, and at least one of those, although probably more than one,
• 2:03:55
  involved Jim Leland when he was the manager of the Pittsburgh Pirates. This
• 2:03:59
  is a very quick story I hope, hope you'll find to be interesting and
• 2:04:03
  rather telling about the nature of a lot of different things. So I'm at
• 2:04:09
  a Pittsburgh Pirates baseball game in the early nineties it was a regular season game
• 2:04:15
  and it wasn't even a playoff game. I don't even know why we were
• 2:04:16
  there that day because we didn't cover the Pittsburgh Pirates that often, although we
• 2:04:19
  were pretty close by and Steubenville, Ohio, just over the river from Pennsylvania,
• 2:04:25
  where I was the NBC sports anchor reporter along with Lizabee, who was
• 2:04:30
  the news anchor reporter at the NBC affiliate in stuben Ville, Ohio, Wheeling,
• 2:04:33
  West Virginia. This was back in the early nineties. So I'm covering
• 2:04:38
  this baseball game for the Pirates or of the Pirates, and Jim Leland gets
• 2:04:42
  ejected from the game, which was not that unusual, but a little unusual,
• 2:04:46
  and this was a very dramatic ejection. I mean, he was really
• 2:04:50
  pissed. I don't even remember what happened. Obviously, it was upset at
• 2:04:54
  some sort of umpire call. He argued it vociferously, and he got kicked
• 2:04:58
  out of the game. So the game ends, the Pirates lose, and
• 2:05:01
  we go in for the postgame press conference and Leland sits down at his desk.
• 2:05:08
  It's about I don't know a dozen or so media people there, TV,
• 2:05:12
  newspaper, radio, and the first thing Leland does is he very very
• 2:05:16
  gruffly, and still clearly very angry. He tells all of us no questions
• 2:05:23
  about the ejection, all right, none? And he made that very very
• 2:05:27
  clear. And I'm like, well, why do we care about anything other
• 2:05:31
  than the ejection? The ejection is the only story that matters. This is
• 2:05:35
  a regular season baseball game. The Pirates lost, and all anyone cares about
• 2:05:42
  is what Leland's going to say about the ejection. But of course the sports
• 2:05:45
  media all being a bunch of wusses, and everyone being afraid for their jobs
• 2:05:49
  or not wanting to piss off the Pirates manager, everyone just goes basically okay.
• 2:05:56
  So they ask Leland some stupid question about the game, which Leland answers
• 2:06:01
  the first question, and I'm thinking, are we really gonna do this?
• 2:06:04
  Are we really not going to ask him about the ejection? And someone else
• 2:06:10
  then asks the second question, and again it's about the game. It's innocuous,
• 2:06:14
  it's meaningless, it's not about the ejection. So I'm still looking around,
• 2:06:18
  going are we really gonna do this? Guys? Are we really gonna
• 2:06:21
  let Jim Leland dictate the fact that we're not allowed to ask about him being
• 2:06:26
  ejected from the game. So he's answered two questions non the script. There's
• 2:06:30
  nothing usable in anything that he said. There's a pause and there's silence,
• 2:06:38
  and so I decide, all right, fuck it, I'm going to ask
• 2:06:41
  him about the ejection. So I asked Jim Leland about why he got ejected,
• 2:06:46
  and he goes off on me, stomps off, immediately ends the press
• 2:06:54
  conference, never to be seen again. I don't remember if he gave me
• 2:06:59
  a literal musk go fuck yourself, but that's what it felt like Jim Leland
• 2:07:05
  had done, and effectively, that's what Jim Leland had done. But of
• 2:07:09
  course the only clip anybody used on the news that night was Jim Leland getting
• 2:07:15
  pissed off at me for having asked a question that he declared was off limits
• 2:07:19
  at the beginning of the press conference. And one of the things that I
• 2:07:24
  learned in that episode is, my god, these media people are just so
• 2:07:29
  woosified. And this was back in the early nineties when you were still allowed
• 2:07:32
  to have at least some testicular matter when it came to the media in general,
• 2:07:36
  on the sports media in particular. So I'll always remember that about Jim
• 2:07:42
  Leland. One of many stories I have about Jim Leland, but that's probably
• 2:07:45
  the best one, and so congratulations to him for making the Baseball Hall of
• 2:07:48
  Fame. One of the last guys in the baseball world that had balls.
• 2:07:53
  You ever get a chance, check out the video him going after Barry Bonds,
• 2:07:57
  one of my least favorite players who ever covered with the Pittsburgh Pirates during
• 2:08:01
  spring training one year. It's absolutely amazing and never what happened today, but
• 2:08:07
  that's the way the world used to work. That'll do it for this episode
• 2:08:11
  of the Death of Journalism podcasts. By the way, I had promoted an
• 2:08:13
  interview with Stuart Stevens, former Republican political consultant, for this episode, but
• 2:08:20
  I did not anticipate Elon Musk going off, and I did not anticipate Matt
• 2:08:24
  Lower having all these critiques of episode number one hundred and eight. So I'm
• 2:08:28
  gonna save that for our next episode, barring nothing else unforeseen happening in the
• 2:08:35
  news. So that'll happen in the next episode of the podcast. Until then,
• 2:08:37
  thanks so much for listening. My name is John Zigler. This has
• 2:08:41
  been the Death of Journalism podcast