Latest / The Death Of Journalism / Episode One Hundred Eight: Where In The World Is Matt Lauer?

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Episode One Hundred Eight: Where In The World Is Matt Lauer? · The Death Of Journalism

• 0:00
  Welcome to episode number one hundred and eight of the Death of Journalism podcast.
• 0:05
  My name is John Zigler. I'm your host on today's show, The Liberals
• 0:08
  Sports Media steps in It going after a kid of the Kansas City Chiefs game,
• 0:13
  we preview the Gavin Newsom Ron Desanti's debate, Tiger Woods re emerges,
• 0:19
  and I finally fully explained the bizarre story behind my extraordinary history with former Today
• 0:25
  Show host Matt Lauer. I'm known as the Dutch Digital marketing Man. I'm
• 0:30
  a digital advertising SEO and EMIL marketing specialist that also happens to be a big
• 0:36
  fan of John Zigler and the Death of Journalism. Do you need help preaching
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  and the best channels for your business. Please visit my website, the Dutchdigitalmarketingman
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  dot com and let me help you tell your story. The website is the
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  Dutchdigital Marketingman dot com. Want to grow your business? Peter can help.
• 1:00
  That's the Dutch Digital Marketingman dot com. And hey, thanks for sponsoring the
• 1:07
  show. Arguably, the two biggest stories in the news media mean specific to
• 1:14
  the news media and how it's operating in the modern era. This week have
• 1:19
  come in the realm of what might be considered sports media, but really have
• 1:23
  absolutely nothing to do with sports, and are actually related to stories and issues
• 1:27
  that are far, far bigger than just sports. The first I'm referencing deals
• 1:34
  with an outlet called dead Spin. Now, dead Spin is not what dead
• 1:40
  Spin used to be, although philosophically it seems to be the same. But
• 1:44
  dead Spin really came of age about fifteen years ago where they became very very
• 1:49
  popular as a contrarian, cutting edge, youth oriented, very liberal, sports
• 1:57
  oriented website. And I have a great deal of disdain for what dead Spin
• 2:05
  was and what they seem to be in this current version of what they have
• 2:09
  become in most recent years after basically declaring bankruptcy. My first interaction with dead
• 2:17
  Spin occurred during the whole Penn State Joe Paternal Jerrysondusky scandal, and I will
• 2:23
  never ever forget or forgive the reality that it really was dead Spin, and
• 2:30
  we discussed this in with the Benefit of Hindsight podcast at great length. It
• 2:35
  really was dead Spin that shifted the narrative of that entire Penn State Joe Paternal
• 2:42
  Jerrysondusky story in a very wrong direction in the first couple of days when the
• 2:49
  story first broke in November of twenty eleven. I do this day believe that
• 2:54
  if dead Spin did not exist, it's possible that the entire Penn State story
• 3:00
  turns out very differently, because the narrative shift in that first thirty six forty
• 3:07
  eight hours was so incredibly important that it was dead Spin that shifted the focus
• 3:13
  on to Joe Paterno. It was dead Spin that was the first to predict
• 3:16
  that Joe Paterno would be fired from Penn State in the wake of the arrest
• 3:22
  of former coach Jerry Sandusky, and in the ensuing years, their coverage of
• 3:28
  the Penn State scandal was probably the worst of any quote unquote major media outlet,
• 3:34
  and they went after me on a couple of different occasions in you know,
• 3:38
  ridiculous and hilarious fashion. I've had extensive conversations with multiple reporters who were
• 3:46
  working a dead Spin of the time. They were completely clueless. Of course,
• 3:52
  all young kids, all having no idea about the concept of journalism.
• 3:58
  It's all about virtue signaling. It's all about clicks and popularity and they think
• 4:04
  they know everything and they don't actually know anything at all. That was my
• 4:09
  first experience. My second experience occurred in the Steubenville High school football scandal,
• 4:15
  which I've always referred to as the son of the Penn State scandal. I
• 4:19
  believe that without a Penn State scandal, there was no Stubenville High school sex
• 4:24
  abuse scandal that became a huge news story for about a year in the wake
• 4:30
  of what happened at Penn State. And the reason why I have a connection
• 4:32
  to that is that not only was I a TV sportscaster many many years ago
• 4:38
  in Steubenville, Ohio, home of the famous Big Red football team, but
• 4:42
  I spent an entire year with that team writing a book about that legendary coach,
• 4:47
  Reno Sukosh called Dynasty at the Crossroads. Don't Worry, you can't find
• 4:53
  It. And that was an extraordinary experience. And I got to know the
• 4:58
  coach obviously, very very well, and he and I had a very very
• 5:02
  roller coaster like relationship, and he got embroiled largely because of dead Spin in
• 5:11
  this national scandal. And I'll never forget dead Spin when they were in their
• 5:16
  effort to try to destroy Reno Sukosh, this legendary high school football coach.
• 5:21
  They had at the top of their website the headline fire this asshole. That
• 5:29
  was the actual headline, and then it was Reno Suckosh's photograph underneath the headline.
• 5:34
  And I called Reno, and this did not surprise me at all,
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  given what I know about Reno, who really had no clue about technology,
• 5:43
  didn't spend any time on the internet, couldn't get his email to work when
• 5:46
  we were trying to create statements in response to the original news stories, because
• 5:50
  I was actually making trips back to Stupenville to try to help him through this
• 5:55
  because of my media experience and largely because of my experience in the Penn State
• 6:00
  case. And I told Reno. I asked, Reno, have you seen
• 6:05
  what dead Spin is doing? And in typical Reno fashion, he says to
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  me, what the fuck is dead Spin? And bizarrely, Reto not only
• 6:15
  survived, but prospered, won a state championship a few years later. They
• 6:18
  won another regional championship this year for like the twentieth time in the last twenty
• 6:25
  five years or something crazy like that. He's the winningest coach in the history
• 6:28
  of Ohio high school football and somehow still hasn't retired. So in that particular
• 6:33
  regard, dead Spin lost. They won on the Penn States story, they
• 6:38
  lost on the Studentville Big Red story. And so I have enormous disdain for
• 6:44
  dead Spin and I think at least what they used to be represented everything that
• 6:47
  was wrong in the modern sports media, as well as the media in general,
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  because while they were technically a sports site, they did deal with a
• 6:56
  lot of things that didn't directly deal with sports. Well, They've been in
• 6:59
  the news this week in a huge way because they ran an article going after
• 7:05
  a kid at a Kansas City Chiefs football game Monday night football game, and
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  there was a kid who was dressed in costume a Chiefs fan. He was
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  wearing, ironically enough, a Travis Kelcey Kansas City Chiefs jersey and a Native
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  American Indian headdress, and he was wearing face paint, and dead Spin put
• 7:29
  out an article with a photograph of the kid with the headline, the NFL
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  needs to speak out against the Kansas City Chiefs fan in blackface com a native
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  headdress. They're doubling up on the racism. Are you going to say anything?
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  Roger Goodell. Now, this was written by a writer by the name
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  of Karen Phillips, who happens to be African American male, And first of
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  all, there's so many problems with what happened. He. First of all,
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  you go after a kid in costume at a football game, and this
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  had obvious echoes, and I think was probably at least in part motivated by
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  a story I told you about a couple of weeks ago out of San Diego
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  where this poor white middle middle school kid was going to his local high school
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  football game, just supporting the team, and he was wearing a lot of
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  black paint on his face, and he was wearing it in a war paint
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  type of motif, more like a Halloween costume. We're trying to emulate what
• 8:37
  some players now use as what you might call war paint. His whole face
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  was not covered in black paint. It was obviously not having anything to do
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  with racism. And that kid got suspended from school for a couple of days
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  and banned from attending all athletic events, which is just as crazy as the
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  suspension. Now there's a conservative group that's come to his defense, and I
• 9:03
  don't have an update on that story. I'm hopeful that that eventually will be
• 9:07
  rectified and that will be expunged to the suspension will be from his record.
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  But that was an absolute outrage, and it got some attention at least in
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  the right wing media eco system. But this one really exploded, and and
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  exploded bigger for a couple of reasons. One because it happened at an NFL
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  football game, and two because the photograph that dead Spin used was so blatantly
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  and obviously an act of malpractice. Because the photograph they used only showed the
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  kid from one side, and on that side it looked like his face was
• 9:48
  indeed fully painted black. Now I want to stop there for a second.
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  I don't even understand what the point of that even would be. Let's pretend
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  his whole face was paid black. He's portraying a Native American Indian, obviously
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  at a Kansas City Chiefs game, where he's wearing a Chief's jersey. So
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  what blackface have to do with any of this? Blackface is supposed is deemed
• 10:18
  now to be racist, even though many prominent liberals have worn blackface in the
• 10:24
  past, including Jimmy Kimmel and Trudeau in Canada. And I mean other There's
• 10:31
  been many others who are almost all tend to be liberals, who have in
• 10:37
  the past have been shown to wear blackface, whether it's related to Halloween or
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  whatever. But now it's just automatically racist. I mean, it's partly why
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  Megan Kelly got bounced from NBC in the Today Show because she effectively defended blackface.
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  But I don't even understand. Even if you accept, let's just accept
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  for the sake of argument, the idea that blackface is in him parently racist,
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  what does that have to do with portraying a Native American Indian? I
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  mean, those are completely different things, especially in the context of attending a
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  football game where you're a cheese fan. But okay, fine, all right,
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  I don't I mean, I'm always trying to figure out what are the
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  new rules that liberals have created for our society. You know, even if
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  I understand them and accept for the sake of argument that they are legitimate,
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  I still don't even understand in this case what's the violation. But then there's
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  the other part of this story, which is that when you look at the
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  kid from the other direction, half his face is not painted black, it's
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  painted red. Now in the conservative world, this exonerates the kid completely because
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  it's proof that obviously he was simply using the colors of the Kansas City Chiefs,
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  although I don't really understand and that part either, because I don't see
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  black as being part of the Kansas City Chiefs color scheme. But okay,
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  whatever red obviously is. You could also argue that back to the Red Skins
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  situation, which I think was a seminal moment both in the NFL and in
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  our culture. Getting rid of the storied Washington Redskins really was a shot across
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  the bow and should have been seen by everyone as the reality of where we
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  were headed in our PC culture. I mean, the idea that you got
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  rid of Redskins and now we're just going to pretend that the Redskins never even
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  existed when it was perfectly fine for many, many decades is just bizarre to
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  me and completely wrong. And so much else flows from the elimination of the
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  Redskins, because once you can get rid of the Redskins, an all,
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  that's a very clear slippery slope, And of course the Indians and Cleveland have
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  gone by the wayside. Somehow the Chiefs have been able to hold the line.
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  The Braves were able to hold the line. Florida State Seminoles have been
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  able to hold the line and still have their their war chant, all of
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  which should be perfectly fine, especially since inherently, I want to make this
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  very clear. Inherently, if you're making something your mascot or you know,
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  you're naming your team for that entity, it's inherently a compliment. This should
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  not be a difficult concept. My young daughters will understand this very, very
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  easily. There's nothing derogatory about making something your logo or your mascot or your
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  team name. Inherently you're complimenting that you want to emulate that. So okay
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  that putting that aside, you know. Frankly, I think if they had
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  taken the picture of the kid from the other side with the red paint,
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  they probably would have had a larger scandal. I don't know why they chose
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  the side of the kid with the black paint, because I guess I guess
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  in their thinking that that's more inherently racist, because we've established that blackface is
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  wrong, but I guess we haven't established that redface is wrong, even when
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  it comes to a Native American. I don't even I don't understand what the
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  rules are, and someone please tell me what the rules are here. But
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  here's the bottom line. The bottom line is that because dead Spin seemed to
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  be deceptive in the photograph of the used not to mention going after a young
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  kid at a football game who was obviously in costume, the backlash to this
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  was massive and immediate and monumental, and I think very much killed the story
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  and maybe maybe I would have a chilling effect going far when it comes to
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  other liberal media outlets duplicating this. I mean, this got so big.
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  Elon Musk shared a community note that Twitter put on the original article referencing this
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  as deceptive media coverage. And as of this taping, Elon Musk's tweet that's
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  just one one element of this story has over twenty nine million views. And
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  that's the power of Elon Musk on Twitter. But it's also the nature of
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  this story and how much backlash Dead's been received for this, and rightfully so,
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  because regardless of the color of the paint being used, and what's right,
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  what's wrong with the rules are this kid did nothing wrong and there's even
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  and I haven't been able to confirm this but there's at least somewhat credible reporting
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  out there that the kid's family actually is Native American. Unlike Elizabeth Warren,
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  the kid actually does have a lineage that is Native American. I can't prove
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  that, but that's out there in some sort of semi credible ways. So
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  the bottom line of this story is it was absolutely wrong. But it was
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  the reaction to this that was really giving me some level of optimism for where
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  we are that you know, I always say, when there's outrage, there's
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  hope, and this created enormous amounts of outrage and further diminished dead spins already
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  very much waning credibility. I mean, dead Spin barely exists in comparison to
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  what it was in its heyday, which was back as I told you in
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  the Penn Stag Joe Paternal Jerryson Dusky days. So I was very happy to
• 16:48
  see the reaction to this particular story, and hopefully this has not been a
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  horrendous episode for this kid. I'm hoping that maybe the celebrity was actually good
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  for him. It'll be interesting to see when all of these shows up at
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  a Chiefs game in the future in similar garb. Now there was another story
• 17:08
  related to the sports media that has to do with Sports Illustrated. Now,
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  Sports Illustrated, Boy, there's probably no legacy media organization, at least not
• 17:19
  in sports, that has had a greater fall from grace than Sports Illustrated.
• 17:25
  Because if you're a sports fan in my generation or older, I mean,
• 17:30
  Sports Illustrated was a massive part of your life, and I think it played
• 17:37
  a huge role in the entire sports media ecosystem. I think it played a
• 17:42
  huge role in just the entire way that sports was run. I mean because
• 17:49
  on a weekly basis, who got on the cover of Sports Illustrated was a
• 17:55
  huge deal. It was back in the day. It was a career making
• 18:02
  moment, maybe a life making moment for somebody if they made it on the
• 18:07
  cover of Sports Illustrated, because for that week, they were the focus of
• 18:11
  attention of a massive amount of the sports world, and you look forward to
• 18:18
  that every single week. I mean back when you actually got stuff in the
• 18:22
  mail. I mean, it was a huge moment when you got the Sports
• 18:26
  Illustrated issue for that particular week. And of course, as a teenage boy,
• 18:30
  when you got the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit edition in the middle of winter that
• 18:33
  was a really big week, But Sports Illustrated was a massive part of the
• 18:40
  sports media ecosystem. It drove a lot of narratives and it really was the
• 18:45
  focus of everything. And to me, the one of the most important things
• 18:49
  that Sports Illustrated did is that on a weekly basis, it focused everyone's attention
• 18:57
  on basically the same things. Everyone in the sports world was essentially on the
• 19:02
  same page that no longer exists today, and nobody has suffered more from fragmentation
• 19:10
  than Sports Illustrated now. As has happened in many other elements of the media,
• 19:15
  and I've mentioned many of them before on this podcast, I've actually had
• 19:19
  a personal interaction with Sports Illustrated on a number of fronts, at least two
• 19:26
  fronts that are relevant to this story that made news this week. The first
• 19:32
  is I think I've told this on the podcast before, so I'll be brief
• 19:34
  in my retelling of the story. But this would have been about twelve years
• 19:41
  ago, and I think it was around twenty ten. There was an event
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  being put on by the photography editor at Sports Illustrated near where my wife and
• 19:51
  I were living in southern California before we moved to where we currently are.
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  This was just after we got married, and this was an event, you
• 20:02
  know, typical Los Angeles event. Not a lot of people there, but
• 20:04
  there were some prominent people there, including bizarrely, Michael Dukakis. I have
• 20:08
  no idea why he was there, but the former nineteen eighty eight Democratic presidential
• 20:12
  nominee. He was there. But long story short, this was a presentation
• 20:18
  about the photography at Sports Illustrated, how important it is to the magazine.
• 20:23
  And after that event, I went up to this particular guy because he was
• 20:27
  very excited about what was going to happen with regard to the online version of
• 20:33
  Sports Illustrated and that this new era of technology was going to be great.
• 20:37
  And I told him, you've just destroyed the magazine and he thought I was
• 20:42
  crazy. I know this has happened before many other ways with people I've had
• 20:47
  conversations with who were in positions of power where I tell them you're doomed and
• 20:52
  they don't believe me. And my point was that as soon as you go
• 20:56
  focusing everything on digital online, then the magic of the cover is gone because
• 21:03
  in a traffic driven world, you're never gonna hold the line for an entire
• 21:08
  week with the same cover photograph. See, they thought, they thought that
• 21:14
  they could do the magazine basically online, where they would be a cover for
• 21:19
  the internet version of Sports Illustrated that would stay up there for a full week.
• 21:25
  That was I think their vision said, there's no way you're gonna be
• 21:29
  able to do that, because in this day and age, where the news
• 21:32
  cycle is fifteen minutes long, you're gonna have by the time it becomes the
• 21:36
  cover, you know, in a couple of days. It's ancient history.
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  And sure enough I was right, And sure enough, the actual physical version
• 21:45
  of the magazine has been reduced to a pamphlet, and Sports Illustrated is nothing
• 21:51
  compared to what it used to be. It has no real influence within the
• 21:56
  sports media anymore. It's lost all all of its power. By the way,
• 22:00
  the swimsuit edition has gone completely woke and is a joke, although they're
• 22:07
  seemingly trying to correct that now, probably too little, too late. And
• 22:11
  the reason why I'm mentioning all this is that this week Sports Illustrated got caught
• 22:17
  in a scandal that I think has far more significance than having anything to do
• 22:22
  just with Sports Illustrated or the sports media, and that is that there was
• 22:29
  an outlet that I've never even heard of before called Futurism that reported that Sports
• 22:34
  Illustrated has been using AI artificial intelligence to write some of their articles, and
• 22:42
  that the writers of these so called articles were fictitious people, that they were
• 22:49
  AI created, that the names were AI created, and their profile photographs were
• 22:56
  AI created, and this created, I guess, for about a half a
• 23:03
  day, a huge online story and scandal for Sports Illustrated. Interestingly, I
• 23:08
  think the dead Spin story that I started the podcast with kind of blew this
• 23:14
  off of the radar, and I think Sports Illustrated is very happy about that.
• 23:19
  But this story is a bit complex, and I want to state before
• 23:25
  I again into the details that I have another conflict of interest here when it
• 23:29
  comes to Sports Illustrated, because I have a bit of a relationship with the
• 23:34
  wife of the top executive at Sports Illustrated. I want to make clear not
• 23:38
  a romantic relationship, although that's come up with the podcast many times before in
• 23:44
  different stories. But I've never met this woman, although I've spoken to her
• 23:48
  on the phone. I've spoken to her husband on the phone, and it
• 23:52
  all deals with the fact that she became a huge fan of the with the
• 23:56
  benefit of Hindsight podcast, and so it was in that context that she reached
• 24:02
  out to me and wanted me to speak to her husband. Well, he
• 24:06
  was very very busy this week because of this AI scandal. And there's some
• 24:12
  things I know about this that I don't feel comfortable talking about because of my
• 24:15
  interaction with the wife of this executive. But I will say that I'm pretty
• 24:22
  much convinced that the original story was a bit overblown and that Sports Illustrated really
• 24:30
  wasn't responsible for this. They made a mistake. They had a third party
• 24:37
  vendor that was responsible, an outlet called ADVON, which I've also never heard
• 24:42
  of before. But this Advon group had been hired to do some really minor
• 24:48
  work within the Sports Illustrated family of websites, and they did things that they
• 24:56
  should not have done. Apparently there were no articles that were actually written via
• 25:02
  artificial intelligence, but for some reason ADVON made up these writers and these profile
• 25:07
  pictures. So Sports Illustrated immediately fired ADVON. And what was maybe the most
• 25:14
  interesting and ironic element of this whole story is that the original article in Futurism
• 25:19
  did not include the very important detail that, oh, by the way,
• 25:26
  the company that owns Futurism had until very recently been working with Advon. Now
• 25:33
  I can't prove this, but it certainly seems as if that might have been
• 25:37
  why Futurism was even tipped off to what Advon was doing under the Sports Illustrated
• 25:45
  umbrella. So holy hypocrisy, Batman, and so I think that's another reason
• 25:51
  why this story hasn't exploded as much as it might have. And the reason
• 25:56
  why at first this story seemed very combustible is because this seemed like a test
• 26:03
  case for what's going to be a huge issue going into the future, which
• 26:07
  is this use of artificial intelligence. And I have to say, much like
• 26:15
  the dead Spin story, I think there's some hope here because the outrage and
• 26:21
  the backlash to the idea of Sports Illustrated. Even though Sports Illustrated is nowhere
• 26:26
  near much like dead Spin, nowhere near what it used to be, it
• 26:30
  still has, you know, a name that has cachet, especially with people
• 26:34
  over the age of say fifty. It still matters to people like me,
• 26:40
  but in the real world it doesn't have nearly the influence. But there was
• 26:44
  so much backlash and so much outrage and the reaction from Sports Illustrated was so
• 26:48
  swift and dramatic and from the Sports Illustrated union that I think this was a
• 26:55
  positive situation. I think this was a test. This was a test of
• 26:59
  the emergency c AI system, and I think we largely passed that test where
• 27:04
  you need there to be outrage at anything like this, because as soon as
• 27:12
  a company gets away with something like this, then we have the slippery slope
• 27:18
  because it's only going to grow and grow and grow, and then we're done.
• 27:22
  Because this AI issue is going to be huge, and I have not
• 27:26
  spoken a lot about it on this podcast, partially because I like to be
• 27:30
  educated before I speak on any topic, and it's a very complex topic one
• 27:37
  that there's a lot of unknowns, but clearly artificial intelligence is going to be
• 27:45
  the issue of the next decade or so when it comes to media, news,
• 27:48
  media, sports, media, entertainment, academia, and politics. I
• 27:53
  had a very interesting conversation with a brother in law of mind over Thanksgiving,
• 28:00
  as a college professor who is in the camp that this is the biggest issue
• 28:03
  that's ever hit academia, especially since in his situation not all the students are
• 28:10
  in person, and so therefore it makes it basically impossible, especially when the
• 28:14
  students have all the power in the modern era to crack down on the use
• 28:18
  of AI when it comes to writing essays. I have no idea how schools
• 28:23
  are going to do this when it comes to applications where the essays are so
• 28:27
  incredibly important, and it's so easy to use AI to come up with something
• 28:33
  to respond to any particular prompt, and it's getting more and more difficult on
• 28:37
  a daily basis to be able to discern this. There are ways that they
• 28:41
  can figure out if there's a good chance that AI has been used, but
• 28:45
  because of the power dynamics, at least according to my brother in law,
• 28:49
  he's not able to do very much of anything about it. And so in
• 28:55
  academia this is going to be huge. And I happen to think in this
• 28:57
  twenty twenty four election is gonna rear its ugly head for sure, For absolute
• 29:03
  sure, there are gonna be probably multiple situations where AI is gonna be used
• 29:11
  to make it appear as if I would suggest both Biden and Trump and maybe
• 29:15
  their vice presidential candidates have said things that they didn't really say because it's gonna
• 29:22
  be so easy, and especially when it comes to online social media, things
• 29:27
  are able to spread so quickly that it is inevitable. Inevitable. I mean,
• 29:33
  it's almost ridiculous to even predict it, because it's so obvious that there's
• 29:37
  gonna be situations where probably millions of people are gonna believe that one of the
• 29:44
  major candidates said or did something that they didn't actually do, because it's gonna
• 29:48
  be so convincing that this was real, when in fact it was artificial intelligence.
• 29:55
  We're already seeing signs of that in the last few days. I've seen
• 29:59
  multiple videos involving Tucker Carlson. By the way, Tucker Carlson is on the
• 30:06
  UFO thing again. I mean, this is the most recent episode of his
• 30:08
  podcast is about how the US government is covering up UFOs, an alien surmounter
• 30:15
  space. And I'm like, oh my god, it's just it's unbelievable what
• 30:18
  has happened to Tucker Carlson. And I think I've called it better than more
• 30:22
  accurately and faster than anybody else has. When it comes to the whole issue
• 30:27
  of Tucker Carlson and also his significance in Trump being the presumptive twenty twenty four
• 30:33
  Republican presidential nominee. But I've seen multiple examples in just the last few days
• 30:41
  where Tucker Carlson's voice is being used to say things that in one case he
• 30:48
  actually did say them, but the voice was ai created, and in another
• 30:52
  situation where he had absolutely nothing to do with the content whatsoever. And I
• 30:56
  think it's interesting that it's Carlson's voice being used one because he's a recognizable figure.
• 31:03
  His voice is recognizable. He's associated with obviously Donald Trump, but he's
• 31:11
  no longer working at Fox News Channel. So in my thinking, maybe I'm
• 31:15
  giving too much credit whoever's doing this, they're thinking that it's a little easier
• 31:19
  to get away with this because Tucker is independent now and he's not working for
• 31:23
  this massive corporation who might be able to crack down on this immediately. But
• 31:30
  and there's also not as much media imperative to correct it because Tucker is now
• 31:37
  independent. But this is just a small example of things that I'm seeing on
• 31:41
  Twitter and TikTok where they're going to be duplicated, and they're very, very
• 31:47
  good, and it's not even difficult to do this. That's what's really the
• 31:52
  scariest part. You can do this pretty easily and fairly convincingly, and I
• 31:59
  think I'm pretty decent at being able to figure out what's real and what's fake,
• 32:01
  and even sometimes I'm having a little bit of trouble deciding which is what.
• 32:07
  And so this is going to be a major major issue in the twenty
• 32:12
  twenty four presidential campaign. But I will say that when it came to Sports
• 32:16
  Illustrated, I'm pleased with the reaction because this is the way it's got to
• 32:22
  go down. There must be a zero tolerance policy for this kind of shenanigans,
• 32:29
  because as soon as this horse leads the barn, there's no catching it.
• 32:34
  And who the hell knows where it's going to lead other than it's not
• 32:37
  going to lead to any place good, that's for damn sure. Now,
• 32:42
  one other story that certainly is in the realm of sports that is near and
• 32:46
  near, near and dear to my heart, and that deals with Tiger Woods.
• 32:51
  Tiger Woods is back in action this week, playing in a basically a
• 32:54
  silly season event at the end of the PGA Tour event he hosts in the
• 33:00
  Bahamas. And the part of the reason I'm mentioning this, other than the
• 33:05
  great news that Tiger Woods is now back playing is that I am very willing
• 33:10
  to admit and actually proactive in admitting when I am wrong about something. I
• 33:16
  make a lot of predictions on this podcast. Many of them turn out to
• 33:19
  be true, some of them turn out not to be true. And I
• 33:22
  made a prediction involving Tiger Woods that is largely been shown to be false in
• 33:30
  relation to the PGA Tour Live merger situation. Now, you may recall if
• 33:35
  you're an avid listener to this podcast, and if you're not wire, you're
• 33:37
  not. But I digress. I made a prediction that when Tiger Woods finally
• 33:44
  would speak, because I knew it would be a while because he's been injured,
• 33:47
  hasn't been playing, and hasn't had any media accessibility, that when he
• 33:52
  finally spoke in the wake of the discussions between the PGA Tour and the Live
• 33:59
  Golf Tour were in what is being called a merger or something that was announced
• 34:04
  back in June of this year. I said that I thought that Tiger was
• 34:08
  gonna basically lay down the hammer on Live. He finally spoke this week and
• 34:15
  he did not do that. Now that doesn't mean that he is in any
• 34:20
  way, shape or form in favor of Live or is excited about the idea
• 34:25
  that Live the Live Golf Tour could continue and be part of the PGA Tour
• 34:30
  theoretically depending on how these negotiations play out. And I think that there is
• 34:36
  a good reason for why Tiger Woods didn't say anything negative about Live and that
• 34:40
  is because these negotiations are not only ongoing and reaching their most intense point,
• 34:46
  because they're supposed to end by the end of the year, although it's becoming
• 34:51
  more and more clear that that's going to be delayed. But here's the most
• 34:53
  interesting and significant part of what Tiger Woods said and did not say in his
• 35:00
  conference before this tournament that he's playing in this week. Of course, the
• 35:05
  golf media is a bunch of morons and so they didn't fully understand what was
• 35:07
  happening here. But the way I interpreted what Tiger did say specifically about the
• 35:15
  PGA Tour Commissioner Jay Monaghan, where he made it very very clear he was
• 35:21
  not at all happy with the fact that the players, including himself, were
• 35:24
  not in the loop before this decision was made to engage in heavy negotiations regarding
• 35:30
  a merger with Live Golf. What I interpreted when you put this all together.
• 35:37
  Tiger's saying this after he has taken a position on the PGA Tour policy
• 35:44
  Board. So Tiger's now on the policy board, and the players now have
• 35:49
  a majority on that board. So if you just do the basic math and
• 35:52
  use your brain, Basically, what Tiger Woods was saying this week is I'm
• 36:00
  the captain. Now, I'm in charge. I run the PGA Tour,
• 36:07
  and Jay Monahan basically serves at my pleasure. Now, he didn't say anything
• 36:10
  close to what I just told you, but effectively, I believe that that
• 36:16
  is now what is happening, and it was obvious from this press conference.
• 36:22
  He made it very clear that he supports Monahan, but that Monahan will not
• 36:28
  be doing what he did back in June. Ever, again, Tiger said
• 36:31
  that like three times, and just use your brain. Tiger Woods being in
• 36:38
  a room with other board members where the players have a majority, There's not
• 36:45
  a player on the planet that's going to go against Tiger Woods unless Tiger says
• 36:51
  something completely insane, which he's not prone to doing because he's actually a very
• 36:57
  very smart guy. I trust Tiger's view on this more than I trust Monahan's,
• 37:02
  and I've been supportive of Monahan's intention. I made the theory or I
• 37:07
  still believe there's something to this theory that Monahan basically took one for the team,
• 37:13
  realizing that they were in an untenable situation going up against all this Saudi
• 37:17
  money and live golf, and made himself look bad in an effort to try
• 37:23
  to win this war. Lose the battle, win the war. And I
• 37:28
  think Tiger probably understands that, which is why he's still publicly supportive of Monaghan.
• 37:35
  But he's also in charge, and it's it's obvious that this is a
• 37:39
  huge part of his priority system, where his time is going, where his
• 37:45
  focus is even as he's trying yet another comeback on the course. But I
• 37:51
  found Tiger woods press conference this week to be fascinating and very very significant when
• 37:58
  it comes to the situation the PGA Tour and live golf, and for all
• 38:04
  intentsive purposes, at least until these negotiations are done, Tiger Woods is in
• 38:08
  charge. I really do believe that nothing that Tiger is strongly against is going
• 38:15
  to happen. That seems very very obvious at this point, and you know
• 38:19
  what, I'm fine with that He's earned that. Right now. The biggest
• 38:24
  political story of this week is in all likelihood going to be the long awaited
• 38:30
  debate between California Governor Gavin Newsom and Ron de Santis the Florida The Florida governor
• 38:38
  and the guy who, unfortunately is not going to be the Republican presidential nominee,
• 38:43
  even though I've been supporting him for well over the last year plus as
• 38:47
  the guy who had the best chance to beat both Trump, beat Biden and
• 38:52
  save America. But unfortunately we don't live in that country anymore. And I'm
• 38:58
  very nervous about this debate for a number of reasons I've stated them previously,
• 39:02
  including the fact that the moderator of this debate is Sean Hannity and that it's
• 39:07
  happening on Fox Now. The first problem that this creates is that it gives
• 39:14
  Newsome an odd advantage, and that advantage is in perception and expectation, because
• 39:22
  Newsom is going to get the benefit of being perceived as going into the lions
• 39:28
  Den. Wow, Newsom is so brave. He's going on to Fox and
• 39:31
  he's going to take on Hannity and DeSantis at the same time. So therefore
• 39:37
  the expectations are lower, and anything that Newsom does, unless he gets completely
• 39:44
  destroyed, is going to seem at worst, at worst like it's a draw.
• 39:50
  And so that concerns me. And it concerns me also because Sean Hannity
• 39:55
  is a moron who's a Trump supporter. Now, the fact that Hannity is
• 40:00
  a Trump supporter doesn't bother me as much now as it did when this whole
• 40:05
  thing was announced several months ago, because I think Hannity fully realizes that Trump's
• 40:10
  going to be the nominee. De Santis really isn't a threat anymore, and
• 40:15
  so I think that the incentive that Handity might have to sabotage DeSantis is greatly
• 40:21
  reduced. That doesn't mean it's not gonna happen. I just I don't see
• 40:24
  it as an obvious incentive for Hannity anymore because there's nothing really to gain here.
• 40:31
  Trump's already going to win. You don't need to kneecap DeSantis against Newsome.
• 40:37
  However, there's another conflict here when it comes to Hannity. The one
• 40:42
  there, you know, his Trump connection, to the fact that he's an
• 40:45
  idiot and won't ask the right questions. I'll get to that in a second.
• 40:49
  But number three is that he has now a pretty well documented bromance with
• 40:55
  Gavin Newsom. The La Times actually did an inn you with Sean Hannity about
• 41:00
  his bromance with Gavin Newsom. I just don't get it. I have to
• 41:06
  say, you know, I'm as on record as anybody with how much I
• 41:09
  have anger and hatred towards Gavin Newsom, and I believe him to be at
• 41:15
  least in part evil. But here you have this incredibly odd situation, and
• 41:21
  a lot of this has to do with Newsom's first wife, Kimberly Guilfoyle,
• 41:27
  who is now the fiance of Donald Trump Junior. So you want to talk
• 41:31
  about you and a party, and a lot of people think that Democrats and
• 41:36
  Republicans are all, you know, part of one party. Well, there's
• 41:38
  certainly the elites are part of a club. There's no question about that.
• 41:44
  The elites are part of a club. And somehow, people like you know,
• 41:49
  Donald Trump Junior, and Donald Trump himself, who is also praised Newsom,
• 41:53
  says he can't hit him because Newsom's so nice to him, which should
• 41:58
  have been a major problem for Trump in this Republican presidential process. But we
• 42:02
  don't live in a rational world anymore. So how the hell is it that
• 42:06
  Newsom is charmed? You know, he's married, he was married to Kimberley
• 42:09
  Guilfoyle, who's now the fiance savor Donald Trump Junior. He's charmed Donald Trump
• 42:14
  Senior. He's charmed. Sean Hannity, who's saying all sorts of nice things
• 42:19
  about how awesome Newsom is in the La Times, I just don't. I
• 42:24
  don't get it, other than the fact that the takeaway here is that it's
• 42:30
  all a show. It's all a show. I always go back. One
• 42:34
  of my favorite lines in the history of movies is from Rocky One, where
• 42:37
  Apollo Creed's trainers in the corner and he's screaming at Apollo Creed because Rocky is
• 42:44
  hanging in there, and he says he doesn't realize it's a damn show.
• 42:47
  He thinks it's a damn fight. Well, I've always been in that latter
• 42:52
  category. I've always been in the category of it's a fight. This is
• 42:57
  for real. We're battling for our way of life here. This is about
• 43:01
  what America is going to be like in the future for our kids. This
• 43:05
  is not a show. So I'm in the it's a fight. It's a
• 43:08
  damn fight category. Well, to be successful with today's media, it's a
• 43:13
  lot easier to think it's a damn show and to play nice with the people
• 43:17
  you want to play nice with. And it's also a lot of it's like
• 43:21
  high school too, where you know the famous people, the popular people,
• 43:24
  they all the powerful people. They're all part of a club. And I've
• 43:28
  seen this firsthand. I've never been invited to the club, but I've been
• 43:31
  to a few meetings, and this is exactly the way that it works,
• 43:37
  and it's disgusting. I mean, I'm not saying you can't get along with
• 43:40
  people to disagree with you. I did that a lot. You know.
• 43:45
  I used to be very good friends with the Democratic Chairman of the House Budget
• 43:50
  Committee in the House of Representatives, John Yarmouth, until COVID happened, and
• 43:53
  we haven't spoken in the last couple of years, but that was a relationship
• 43:59
  to a lot lot of people. Took a lot of hope in and I
• 44:02
  took a lot of pride him because we disagreed on virtually everything. We were
• 44:06
  very good friends. However, I think there are certain lines, and I
• 44:10
  also think that when it comes to what Newsom's doing, I don't know how
• 44:16
  you could possibly be friends if you're a true Conservator. I don't know how
• 44:21
  you could possibly be friends with a guy like Gavin Newsom. Of course,
• 44:24
  with Hannity, it's difficult to discern because he's so dumb. I mean,
• 44:28
  does he not realize this Hannity not realize and does Donald Trump not realize the
• 44:34
  Gavin Newsom is the reason why Donald Trump lost a twenty twenty election. I
• 44:40
  mean, that's not hyperple it's not exaggeration. It's Gavin Newsom that shut down
• 44:46
  the country in March of twenty twenty on a flat out fucking lie, and
• 44:52
  that was the first massive domino to fall that created the circumstances that led to
• 44:59
  Trump losing. Now, you could argue, you know, it could have
• 45:02
  happened anyway, but there's a direct line between what Gavin Newsom did in California
• 45:08
  with regard to COVID and Trump losing that election. And yet somehow Trump is
• 45:15
  charmed by him, and Handity is charmed by him, and obviously at one
• 45:20
  point Kimberly Gilfoyle was charmed by him, and who knows what Donald Trump Junior
• 45:23
  thinks of him. It's just absolutely bizarre. And so that's another part of
• 45:29
  this debate that concerns me. So you've got the perception that Newsom's going into
• 45:35
  the lions, then you got the fact that Hannity is having this bromance with
• 45:40
  Gavin Newsom, and then you have the fact that Hannity's an idiot. And
• 45:45
  I think that the questions are going to be all wrong. In my view,
• 45:50
  this debate ought to be at least mostly about, if not entirely,
• 45:54
  about COVID and the COVID response. I don't believe that's going to be even
• 46:00
  remotely the case. I don't think. I don't think that's what's gonna happen
• 46:05
  here. It would not shock me if COVID barely came up. As insane
• 46:08
  as that is. By the way, I've been remiss in not mentioning this,
• 46:15
  but in the first three Republican presidential debates, there has not been one
• 46:21
  question in three debates, not one question directly about the COVID response. It's
• 46:28
  come up indirectly a couple times. But how was that possible? How can
• 46:32
  we possibly be living in a country where you have three Republican debates and not
• 46:39
  one direct question about the response to COVID which was the most significant thing that's
• 46:45
  happened in the modern history of the country. It's just mind blowing, and
• 46:52
  so to me, I mean, especially if I'm DeSantis, I want this
• 46:55
  to be as much about COVID as possible, and it would be. The
• 47:00
  other stuff is all academic, not just in their importance, but also in
• 47:06
  how much influence each of these two men, Newsom and Dessanta's had over the
• 47:12
  actual implementation of the COVID response. They had huge influence. COVID was unique
• 47:20
  in that regard, especially here in California, where Newsom literally declared himself a
• 47:24
  king, where we did not have democracy. So all these decisions, although
• 47:29
  he's trying to claim that's not the case now for obvious reasons, especially when
• 47:32
  it comes to school closings, but all these decisions were being made directly by
• 47:38
  the governors and by Gavin Newsom, and so therefore there's no ambiguity. And
• 47:44
  the way that California handled COVID and the way that Florida handled COVID, especially
• 47:50
  after the first couple of months, could not possibly be more different. And
• 47:57
  weirdly, ironically and suspiciously, Rona Santis actually just got a huge media break
• 48:07
  from none other than the Los Angeles Times. And I cannot believe that The
• 48:12
  Times is doing this without some understanding of the timing being very very odd.
• 48:19
  I mean, here we are, DeSantis and Newsom are about to do a
• 48:22
  very high profile debate, very very rare in this day and age on Fox
• 48:28
  News Channel. Clearly, you had gotta think COVID's at least going to be
• 48:31
  on the agenda, and the Los Angeles Times put us out a very substantive
• 48:37
  article with the headline California versus Florida The surprising answer to which handled COVID better?
• 48:50
  Huh, the surprising answer to which handled COVID better. Now, if
• 48:55
  you have a brain, you look at that headline, you're going If the
• 48:59
  LA Times thinks it surprising, that that must mean that they're saying that Florida
• 49:05
  handled it better. At the very least it was a tie, And that's
• 49:08
  essentially what they're saying. Now. I've talked about these statistics before, and
• 49:16
  you know, when it comes to COVID, you can come up with almost
• 49:19
  anything you want for a lot of different reasons, partially because of the cyclical
• 49:23
  nature of it, partially because the death numbers mean different things in different states.
• 49:30
  I mean, there's all sorts of different reasons why the data is messed
• 49:31
  up. I've made the argument the California benefits when it comes to the COVID
• 49:37
  data for two reasons that the media never mentions. Number one is very obvious,
• 49:40
  which is that COVID was in California for many months before we even started
• 49:45
  counting, and so therefore, in a weird way, data wise, the
• 49:50
  California kind of got a head start. A lot of deaths that would have
• 49:52
  been counted never were in California, and so if you think about it as
• 49:57
  running its course, California basically had three or four months where there was no
• 50:01
  data, where COVID was probably at its worst and nobody even noticed it,
• 50:07
  and then it probably ended here sooner if you just use basic logic. And
• 50:12
  then there's the other element of the fact that we have over twice as many
• 50:15
  Asians in our population as the rest of the country does on average, and
• 50:22
  it's clear from the data worldwide that for whatever reason, Asian populations were less
• 50:27
  vulnerable to dying with or of COVID, and so those two reasons alone are
• 50:32
  an explanation for why California might do a little bit better in the data when
• 50:38
  it comes to COVID deaths than for instance, Florida. But to the La
• 50:42
  Times credit, they went deeper than that, and what they found is basically,
• 50:47
  there's there's no way to discern who did better. Here's two paragraphs from
• 50:53
  the article. A separate calculation, which adjusts for age in a database run
• 50:59
  by the CDC, had Florida with the with a slightly worse ranking than California,
• 51:04
  the thirty fourth highest age adjusted COVID mortality rate versus the thirty eighth highest
• 51:10
  In the words, basically, California and Florida were the same, back to
• 51:15
  the La Times. A third analysis published in the medical journal The Lancette earlier
• 51:21
  this year looked at COVID death rates through the end of July of twenty twenty
• 51:25
  two, and calculated Florida's having a forty three percent worse unadjusted death rate than
• 51:31
  California, but when adjusted for differences in age, rather important given the nature
• 51:38
  of Florida, the gap was narrower, with a twelve percent worth worse death
• 51:45
  rate in Florida when also factoring in how Florida's population as a whole is unhealthier
• 51:52
  than California. In addition to the age adjustment, the roles were reversed,
• 52:00
  and California had a thirty four percent worse adjusted death rate. All right,
• 52:06
  bottom line. First of all, kudos to the LA Times were at least
• 52:09
  being fair about this, because they're as invested as Newsome is in the idea
• 52:15
  that California did better than in Florida when it came to COVID. But I
• 52:21
  have said time and time again, I don't know who did better or worse.
• 52:24
  But here's what I do know. No matter how you slice it,
• 52:29
  there's no way, shape or form that the massive restrictions were justified by a
• 52:35
  situation where you can't even tell who did better. To justify what happened for
• 52:42
  two years, the enormous amount of seemingly unintended consequences and repercussions of these actions,
• 52:52
  the difference in the death rate would have to be dramatic, it would
• 52:57
  have to be obvious, it would have to be pronounced, and by the
• 52:59
  way, if any of these restrictions actually worked, it would be because over
• 53:06
  a two year period of time, the stark difference in the way that California
• 53:09
  handled the reaction to COVID and the way that Florida handled, it would show
• 53:15
  up hugely in the data. You wouldn't need a microscope, you wouldn't need
• 53:22
  to cherry pick your data, which is what Gavin Newsom does. And if
• 53:25
  I was advising the DeSantis campaign, which unfortunately I'm not, I would absolutely
• 53:31
  use the line in this debate. If I was Rhonda Santis. Mark Twain
• 53:37
  once said there are lies, there are dan lies, and there are statistics.
• 53:44
  Well, if he met Gavin Newsom, he would add, and then
• 53:46
  there are Gavin Newsome statistics, because this is his number one tactic. He
• 53:53
  always cherry picked statistics in a way that he knows the moderator or whoever is
• 54:00
  there with him, the interviewer isn't possibly going to know what the hell he's
• 54:02
  going to talk about, or what he's saying, or how illegitimate or how
• 54:07
  cherry picked those stats are. And you know he's going to get away with
• 54:12
  it, and in a live debate, it's very easy to do that.
• 54:15
  He never justifies anything he does with any philosophy or rational argument as to why
• 54:22
  what he did worked or why arguments that what he did didn't work are not
• 54:25
  true. He never does that. It's all about these bogus cherry picked statistics
• 54:32
  with when it comes to COVID are very easy to come up with us The
• 54:37
  LA Times just documented. I mean, you can come up with almost anything
• 54:40
  you want except for a legitimate justification for these restrictions. Because it wasn't just
• 54:49
  about forcing people to be masked or being a pain in the ass for two
• 54:53
  years and not being able to do certain things. There were enormous long term
• 54:59
  ram of ations for this economically. That's why we have the inflation today.
• 55:05
  It's all because of what happened with the COVID lockdown. And when it comes
• 55:07
  to the school closings, as I've said many times before, we're going to
• 55:13
  be paying for this, especially here in California, for decades to come at
• 55:17
  least because of the catastrophic learning loss as well as all the new rules that
• 55:24
  have been created in society. I mean, the rate of kids not going
• 55:30
  to school has exploded post COVID, just as I predicted it would. Why
• 55:35
  because we told an entire generation of kids and parents to guess what, going
• 55:39
  to school is not that big of a deal. We can cancel it.
• 55:43
  No big deal for a virus that doesn't have any real impact on kids.
• 55:47
  And it turns out that healthy teachers don't die either. I mean, so
• 55:52
  the reality here is this is an issue where DeSantis should, and I believe,
• 56:00
  for the future of the country, must destroy Newsome on it. And
• 56:04
  here the La Times just handed Newsome a huge loss and handed DeSantis a huge
• 56:12
  weapon. And I'm hoping that handed he's at least gonna let DeSantis use this
• 56:17
  weapon. I don't have any confidence that he will, one because he's an
• 56:22
  idiot, and two because as a Trump supporter, he's almost as invested in
• 56:27
  the COVID response as Newsom is. Because you can't separate. Well, you
• 56:31
  can try, especially if you're a Trump fan. You can try to separate
• 56:37
  what Trump did and what Newsom did, but you really can't. And even
• 56:42
  Trump's own words and Newsom's own words say this that they were on the same
• 56:46
  team for all intensive purposes when it came to the COVID response. This is
• 56:52
  the number one reason why Trump should never be president again, among many others.
• 56:57
  So I'll be watching this debate, but I'll be very, very concerned.
• 57:04
  I see bad outcomes, as you know, I know, I know,
• 57:07
  I'm a pessimist by nature, but I see a lot of peril here,
• 57:10
  especially since this is not really DeSantis's best format. I'm still hopeful that
• 57:16
  there's gonna be some significant points scored by Desanta's but I'm sure i'm gonna be
• 57:22
  disappointed. I'm preparing myself for disappointment when it comes to the DeSantis and Newsome
• 57:30
  debate, and we'll have coverage of what actually happens in episode number one hundred
• 57:35
  and nine of the Death of Journalism podcast. So I'll hope for the best,
• 57:38
  but i will brace for the worst. There's been another story that I
• 57:45
  want to talk to that's going to lead me into story time with Zig for
• 57:49
  the second half of this episode of the podcast. The story that I think
• 57:52
  you're gonna want to stick around and listen to, and that deals with something
• 57:54
  that's happened in New York over the last year that I think is absolutely outrageous,
• 58:00
  and of course the media has completely and totally blown and that is this
• 58:07
  really outrageous and bizarre thing that New York State did when it came to the
• 58:14
  statute of limitations on pursuing lawsuits for sex abuse allegations. Now, the statute
• 58:23
  of limitations is an incredibly important concept in all crimes, but especially and uniquely
• 58:31
  when it comes to sex abuse cases. For a lot of different reasons,
• 58:36
  but especially since we've now basically changed the rules when it comes to evaluating sex
• 58:43
  abuse cases. The burden of proof used to be on the person making the
• 58:49
  accusation. We've now essentially flipped that burden of proof onto the person who's being
• 58:54
  accused, especially if they're a famous person who doesn't have a great repute.
• 59:00
  And in the wake of Me Too, which exploded in late twenty seventeen,
• 59:07
  the New York female governor decided we're gonna have a free for all that for
• 59:15
  a year, we're gonna let anybody sue anybody they want in New York State
• 59:21
  for very old sex abuse allegations that are beyond the statute of limitations. And
• 59:29
  surprise, surprise, guess what happened. A ton of people have come forward
• 59:34
  to sue prominent people with money. Now, this shouldn't be a shock.
• 59:38
  I've said from the beginning that they might as well call this thing the last
• 59:45
  chance to get your revenge and maybe some money from that famous guy you once
• 59:49
  satissexual encounter with act. I mean, that's basically what this is. It's
• 59:53
  a free for all, and it's it is ripe, it is ripe for
• 59:59
  fall allegations against prominent people. Well, shockingly, that's exactly what's happened.
• 1:00:06
  The Associated Press reported on the end of this one year period, which happened
• 1:00:10
  last week, in a way that I found to be both interesting and outrageous.
• 1:00:15
  They're headline celebrities, politicians among those named in sex abuse suits filed under
• 1:00:22
  New York's Adult Survivors Act. That's what they called it, the Adult Survivors
• 1:00:30
  Act. Now, that implies that these are situations where people were abused as
• 1:00:37
  young children and just never had the strength to be able to come forward till
• 1:00:43
  many, many years later when they were adults. I would have a problem
• 1:00:45
  with that, for very solid and logical reasons, but at least that would
• 1:00:52
  make some sense given the name. But that's not what's happening here. It's
• 1:00:54
  not close to what's happening. The vast majority of, not all of these
• 1:00:59
  are situations where people are alleging that they were abused many many years ago,
• 1:01:04
  decades ago, as adults, and now its last call to try to get
• 1:01:09
  some money or some attention, or to who knows all sorts of possible motivations.
• 1:01:15
  Maybe some of these are true. I have no way of knowing that,
• 1:01:17
  but I'm very, very suspicious of almost all of them, for I
• 1:01:22
  think reasons that are rather obvious. But here's how the Associated Press reported on
• 1:01:27
  this. For a year, New York's Adult Survivors Act suspended the usual legal
• 1:01:35
  deadlines to give sexual assault victims one last chance to file lawsuits over misconduct that
• 1:01:43
  occurred years or decades ago. By the time the law expired last week,
• 1:01:50
  more than thirty seven hundred legal claims had been filed, with many of the
• 1:01:55
  last few coming against big name celebrities and a handful of politicians. Now let
• 1:02:04
  me go through some of the names that are being accused of sex abuse in
• 1:02:08
  brand new lawsuits that would not have been able to be filed without this bizarre
• 1:02:14
  suspending of the statute limitations in New York. Donald Trump is one of those
• 1:02:20
  Diddy combs, Harvey Weinstein, Jamie Fox, Steven Tyler, Bill Cosby,
• 1:02:27
  Russell Brand, Axel Rose, Mike Tyson, Andrew Cuomo, and Rudy Giuliani.
• 1:02:36
  By the way, when I looked at that list, one of the
• 1:02:38
  first things I thought was, Hmm, isn't that odd? Where's Matt Lauer?
• 1:02:46
  On that list now lived in New York, worked in New York for
• 1:02:52
  decades. We were told after he was fired in twenty seventeen as the host
• 1:02:57
  of The Today Show, and then a couple of years later, when Ronan
• 1:03:00
  and Pharaoh wrote a book claiming that he raped a woman from NBC, we
• 1:03:02
  were told by everybody in the news media that Matt lower is a serial rapist.
• 1:03:08
  He had a he had a rape button in his office. My god,
• 1:03:14
  how is it possible that when the statute of limitations was eliminated in New
• 1:03:21
  York that there are not multiple women coming forward to make allegations of sex abuse
• 1:03:28
  against Matt Lauer. A guy who has no ability to defend himself in the
• 1:03:31
  mainstream news media. He's presumed to be guilty by everybody in the news media.
• 1:03:37
  He's got lots of money that you can get access to by suing him,
• 1:03:42
  and even heck of it, even if it's not true, why not
• 1:03:45
  give it a shot. You might be able to find a jury that's you
• 1:03:49
  know, so so biased against him, or a judge that so biased against
• 1:03:53
  him that you might be able to get some money or a settlement out of
• 1:03:57
  the deal. Hmm, that's really odd. Of course, it's even odd
• 1:04:00
  or that not one person in the news media, the same news media that
• 1:04:03
  crucified Matt Lower, will even mention that it's incredibly strange and in total contradiction
• 1:04:12
  with their narrative that Matt Lower is not on that list. I'm going to
• 1:04:15
  get to Matt more directly in a second here, but I just want to
• 1:04:17
  address this really important issue of the statue limitations, because you know, there's
• 1:04:25
  so many reasons why the statue limitations matters, but we're now living in this
• 1:04:30
  very incredibly dangerous world where in the prior incarnation of these allegations, and I'm
• 1:04:40
  a big believer in the pendulum theory of life, you know that there are
• 1:04:44
  things that need to be corrected, and unfortunately, in many realms we overcorrect.
• 1:04:49
  And so I'm sure that there was a time thirty forty years ago when
• 1:04:56
  there were sex abuse allegations that were real that people were sincerely afraid to come
• 1:05:01
  public about because no one would believe them, because we lived in an era
• 1:05:08
  where the presumption was on innocence and there was a very high burden of proof
• 1:05:14
  because we understood that if you accuse somebody of sex abuse, that that's very
• 1:05:20
  dangerous. You're going to destroy their life, and a false allegation would be
• 1:05:27
  devastating. And so the reality wasn't Part of this was because we were living
• 1:05:30
  in a male dominated society. I'm not naive, So obviously men had more
• 1:05:34
  of an incentive to make sure we didn't have total chaos in this realm.
• 1:05:41
  And so I'm sure that there were many situations where real sex abuse victims either
• 1:05:46
  were afraid to come forward or were not believed, and it was always presumed
• 1:05:51
  that an old allegation was inherently less credible than a contemporaneous alley or a fresh
• 1:06:00
  allegation. That makes sense, right, I mean, especially if you're an
• 1:06:02
  adult, the number one question should be Okay, why haven't you said any
• 1:06:08
  thing about this for years or decades. That's a problem. That's it should
• 1:06:13
  be an inherent credibility problem. But we've now morphed from that situation to basically
• 1:06:21
  the opposite, where it is now far more difficult to defend yourself against an
• 1:06:29
  ancient allegation of sex abuse. Then it would be a contemporaneous allegation of sex
• 1:06:35
  abuse. Think about how crazy that is. That's nuts. In other words,
• 1:06:42
  you're in a much better position, especially when things like the Statute of
• 1:06:45
  Limitations are just being arbitrarily disregarded. In a state as large as New York,
• 1:06:51
  you're in a much better position defending yourself. If a woman and you
• 1:06:56
  say you're innocent, obviously, is a woman I meetiate comes forward and makes
• 1:07:00
  an allegation of sex abuse, you can combat that because, first of all,
• 1:07:05
  you can prove where you were. For instance, we now have cell
• 1:07:11
  phone data. If you get the accuser's cell phone and the person who's being
• 1:07:15
  accused cell phone right there, it's going to give you ninety percent of the
• 1:07:19
  story as far as their locations and communications and what have you, and it's
• 1:07:25
  all right there. It hasn't been lost to history. Well, if you
• 1:07:30
  have an old allegation, first of all, there weren't cell phones when many
• 1:07:34
  of these allegations were being made, so there's all sorts of potential evidence that
• 1:07:41
  is nonexistent. Plus, it's much much more difficult to prove or disprove where
• 1:07:45
  you were decades ago, because now basically the only way you can prove your
• 1:07:49
  innocence is if you somehow could prove you weren't in the place where the person
• 1:07:55
  said that you were. And then it gets even worse than that because many
• 1:08:00
  of these old allegations, and we saw this in the Jerry Sandusky case time
• 1:08:03
  and time again, there's now such a presumption that the accuser is telling the
• 1:08:10
  truth that not only can you have an old allegation of sex abuse, you
• 1:08:15
  don't even have to give a date or even a remote date, because it's
• 1:08:19
  presumed, you know, well, we can't expect that that would be too
• 1:08:23
  much to expect from from the accuser. How can they possibly remember exactly when
• 1:08:27
  this happened twenty thirty years ago? Well, okay, fine, but then
• 1:08:32
  you can't accept the allegation as true, and you're making it impossible for someone
• 1:08:39
  to defend yourself. How do you defend again, something that happened at an
• 1:08:43
  unknown date twenty twenty five thirty years ago. And I'm not exaggerating. Some
• 1:08:48
  of these allegations are even older than that in this in these lawsuits in New
• 1:08:54
  York. It's literally absurd, and the media is just going, oh,
• 1:08:58
  yeah, I guess all these people really, So which is it? Media?
• 1:09:01
  Are all the names that I just listed are are they all rapists?
• 1:09:06
  Or are people making false allegations? Because we've created rules that incentivize that.
• 1:09:11
  Why is this not a topic of conversation in the news media, Well,
• 1:09:15
  because they don't want to touch this because they all know. They all know
• 1:09:18
  that the reality is most, if not all, of these are largely or
• 1:09:25
  totally false allegations. And there's a reason why these particular people I mentioned were
• 1:09:30
  targeted. They're all prominent people. Almost all of them have bad reputations,
• 1:09:34
  but they have enough money that it's worth going after them for now. Is
• 1:09:39
  it possible some of them are legitimate? Yeah, but there has to be
• 1:09:43
  some semblance of due process here. We have to at least vet these allegations
• 1:09:48
  to some degree. Now, I don't know, you know, how many
• 1:09:51
  of these are actually ever going to go to trial. My guess is most
• 1:09:55
  of them are hoping for a settlement out of court. That way, they
• 1:09:59
  don't have to prove their allegation in any way, shape or form. But
• 1:10:00
  even if they get to court, they only have to prove it with a
• 1:10:04
  preponderance of the evidence. And my concern is that we're now living in a
• 1:10:09
  world where juries, you know, if they understand what preponderance means, are
• 1:10:13
  gonna make it very very easy for the accuser. I was one sued for
• 1:10:17
  defamation. That's a whole other story that maybe I'll tell before this podcast ends
• 1:10:24
  the next few months. It's maybe my best story that I ever told fully
• 1:10:28
  in public. But I was one sued for defamation as a radio host in
• 1:10:32
  Louisville, Kentucky, and very famously. I mean, this is a very
• 1:10:35
  famous situation in Louisville, Kentucky where I ended up winning on all counts unanimously
• 1:10:43
  by a mostly female jury that shocked the hell out of our own jury consultants.
• 1:10:47
  They thought we had no chance based upon the makeup of the jury.
• 1:10:51
  Fortunately, the most of the jury seem to hate my accuser more than they
• 1:10:57
  hated me. But this is this amazing story I will tell at some point
• 1:11:00
  later in the next few months of the remaining time in this podcast, if
• 1:11:05
  events allow that, because it's really if there's ever been a movie about my
• 1:11:10
  life, in one episode, this would be the movie. And what I
• 1:11:14
  the reason I'm mentioning it now is I truly believe if the exact same situation
• 1:11:19
  happened today, exact same facts, and I was totally innocent by the facts,
• 1:11:24
  by the law, by everything, it was a joke that it even
• 1:11:28
  became a trial, but I'm convinced that the exact same circumstances happened today,
• 1:11:32
  I would probably be found libel on at least some of the counts, simply
• 1:11:39
  because psychologically the rules have changed in our society and that the effectively the burden
• 1:11:45
  of proof has been changed. Now that, to be clear, had nothing
• 1:11:48
  to do with sex abuse. That was about defamation, although there were issues
• 1:11:54
  related to the fact that I had dated the woman in question, who was
• 1:11:57
  a morning show host of the Fox affiliate in Louisville, Kentucky. But as
• 1:12:00
  I said, that's another story for another day. So the major issue here
• 1:12:04
  is it's just amazing to me that the news media is so in the tank
• 1:12:10
  where they have they have basically created, They're the ones that created and facilitated
• 1:12:15
  this entire me Too panic, and now here we are six years later,
• 1:12:20
  and we're still seeing these situations come about in ways that make you question everything
• 1:12:28
  that's occurred in the last six years. Because if you're using your brain and
• 1:12:32
  you're going through and you going wait a minute, hold on, all these
• 1:12:35
  guys are getting sued, do we really believe they're all rapists? Or is
• 1:12:39
  it possible that maybe we went too far here. Well, this is this
• 1:12:43
  is a story that's really not something we should touch. This is one of
• 1:12:45
  those one of those crimes better left unsolved. Really, it's a quote spinal
• 1:12:50
  tap, I mean, because the media has no interest in delving deeply into
• 1:12:55
  what's really going on here, because even though we've seen many cases, I
• 1:12:59
  mean, the media never focuses on them. But we've seen many, many
• 1:13:02
  cases of false allegations in the several years since the Me Too movement exploded in
• 1:13:09
  late twenty seventeen. And that leads me now to Matt Lower, because not
• 1:13:15
  only has Matt not been named in any lawsuits despite the fact that you're now
• 1:13:20
  allowed to sue for anything in New York for the past year, no matter
• 1:13:24
  how old the allegation is, which I think is evidence of absence to the
• 1:13:29
  degree that basically proves that Matt Lower never raped anybody. But I've already known
• 1:13:32
  that for a very long time because I've had an extraordinary relationship and interaction with
• 1:13:39
  Matt Lower. And this also happens to be the sixth anniversary of Matt Lower's
• 1:13:44
  firing as the host of the Today Show, and I've never while I've alluded
• 1:13:49
  to Matt and my relationship with him and his story. Many many times,
• 1:13:53
  I've never really told anything close to the full story, which I intend to
• 1:13:58
  do now arshly because we're kind of doing a clearance going out of business sale
• 1:14:02
  as we intend to end this podcast probably sometime in early February, barring some
• 1:14:08
  sort of cataclysmic event, and so we have the New York story. And
• 1:14:14
  you know, I will always associate the post Thanksgiving period with the firing of
• 1:14:18
  Matt Lauer because it made a huge influence on my life, and I think
• 1:14:24
  it was a seminal moment in the history of the news media. And my
• 1:14:30
  interaction with Matt has been beyond bizarre. And so I want to tell most
• 1:14:35
  of that story now. And it actually begins way way back in nineteen eighty
• 1:14:43
  eight, believe it or not. In nineteen eighty eight, I spent the
• 1:14:46
  best summer of my life in Boston, Massachusetts, because I was an intern,
• 1:14:51
  both a news and a sports intern, and between my junior and senior
• 1:14:57
  years at Georgetown University at what we he was then known as WNVTV, the
• 1:15:01
  CBS affiliate in Boston, which was the third place news station in Boston,
• 1:15:09
  and the station happened to be owned by the Newland Patriots owner. He wasn't
• 1:15:12
  the Patriots owner at the time. Robert Kraft, and my father had done
• 1:15:17
  some business with Robert Craft, and so Craft got me this amazing internship,
• 1:15:25
  and it really was a remarkable internship. I was so lucky, not just
• 1:15:29
  to get the job through Craft, but because of the timing. I mean,
• 1:15:32
  there was so much going on in Boston that year. I mean,
• 1:15:35
  the Red Sox went on an amazing run that I was covering almost every night
• 1:15:40
  at Fenway Park and Michael Ducaucas what to Michael Decaccus mentions in this episode of
• 1:15:46
  the podcast. Michael Decaccas, who was the governor of Massachusetts, was the
• 1:15:51
  Democratic presidential nominee. And I was interning on the news side with a guy
• 1:15:58
  by the name of Ned Cole who would have ended up being an NBC News
• 1:16:01
  correspondent. And the sports department. This was back in the glory days of
• 1:16:05
  local TV news. The sports department was amazing. The US Open golf tournament
• 1:16:11
  was in Boston that particular summer, so it's the best summer of my life.
• 1:16:15
  And I really got a tremendous education in really what was still journalism.
• 1:16:21
  At that time, even though we were the third PlayStation, there was real
• 1:16:26
  journalism being done. It was taken very, very seriously, so seriously that
• 1:16:31
  there was a morning show on WNV that was looked at with such disdain by
• 1:16:40
  the news department that there was like this unwritten it might even been written somewhere
• 1:16:45
  rule that the host of this very cotton candy like morning show should never be
• 1:16:53
  allowed in the newsroom. And you know, we should not even be considering
• 1:16:58
  that that morning show has any thing at all to do with the news department.
• 1:17:00
  We don't want people to confuse this, this very lightweight morning show with
• 1:17:06
  what we're doing in the news department. I'm not exaggerating this. This was
• 1:17:11
  a real thing. Well, the host of that morning show was none other
• 1:17:15
  than wait for it, Matt Lower And I've always found it to be a
• 1:17:21
  really incredible indication of just how far news has fallen, where at the beginning
• 1:17:27
  of my career, Matt was seen as somebody who the news department felt like,
• 1:17:32
  you know, they didn't even want to touch because they didn't want their
• 1:17:36
  credibility to be sullied, to the point where a few decades later, his
• 1:17:43
  firing was a huge blow to what was left of real journalism at the national
• 1:17:49
  level on television. And that's not an exaggeration, but that's what's happened now.
• 1:17:54
  Part of that's the development of Matt. Part of that's the destruction or
• 1:18:00
  the de evolution of journalism when it comes to television news. So it was
• 1:18:06
  with that backdrop that it became very interesting that I would end up as a
• 1:18:14
  guest, you would call it, an adult in my professional career, having
• 1:18:17
  numerous interactions with Matt Lauer, including three very high profile appearances on The Today
• 1:18:26
  Show. Now Here we are six years out and the world has changed a
• 1:18:30
  lot in the six years since Matt Lawer was fired suddenly as the host of
• 1:18:34
  the Today Show. So I think it's important for context to understand just how
• 1:18:40
  important the Today Show used to be in the media ecosystem, and just how
• 1:18:46
  important Matt used to be at the Today Show. The Today's Show was at
• 1:18:51
  the top of the news media pyramid. And I'm not exaggerating this, and
• 1:18:59
  I don't think that we can even fully understand that's given the context to today's
• 1:19:03
  media environment, because there is no pyramid anymore. The pyramid has been destroyed,
• 1:19:11
  it is disintegrated, but back in the time period when I first went
• 1:19:16
  on the Today Show, which was after my movie Mediam mauntpractice how Obama got
• 1:19:20
  elected about the two thousand and eight election came out so early in two thousand
• 1:19:25
  and nine. Back in two thousand and nine, there was a structure to
• 1:19:30
  the way this worked. If you were in the prime time seven point thirty
• 1:19:35
  am slot on the Today Show, which was their most highly rated portion of
• 1:19:42
  the Today Show. That's when you know most people are watching from seven point
• 1:19:46
  thirty to eight o'clock. If you were in that section of the Today Show,
• 1:19:51
  you were considered by the rest of the major news media to be the
• 1:19:58
  most important thing that what's happening that day. Now, obviously it would depend
• 1:20:01
  on the other news headlines, but as far as a guest was concerned,
• 1:20:08
  you were on the radar of every other major media outlet, and there was
• 1:20:14
  a pecking order that was very very well established and accepted by all the other
• 1:20:21
  media outlets. So if you went on the Today Show in that prime slot,
• 1:20:26
  you would then be asked to come on the other media major media outlets.
• 1:20:32
  You know, there would be an order of it. If you did,
• 1:20:34
  you know, the Today Show, then you might do Fox News,
• 1:20:38
  and then after you did Fox News, you might do CNN, and then
• 1:20:41
  after you did CNN, you might do local New York TV, or you
• 1:20:45
  might do radio around the country. This was all very much accepted, partially
• 1:20:49
  because the Today Show had a massive audience, it was the number one morning
• 1:20:55
  news show, but also because it was the most respected and there was still
• 1:21:00
  in that era, there was this pyramid, there was an order, this
• 1:21:03
  pecking order that was respected by the rest of the news media. By the
• 1:21:10
  way, sometimes it was a little weird. I mean, it's almost strange
• 1:21:14
  to think back, and it wasn't that long ago that other media outlets would
• 1:21:17
  just accept that this is the way things work. But that's the way it
• 1:21:21
  worked, and that gave the Today Show enormous power. And because it wasn't
• 1:21:28
  just getting on the Today Show, it meant everything that came with that,
• 1:21:31
  and that also gave Matt enormous power. Matt was the most highly paid network
• 1:21:39
  host or whatever you want to call him, co host of the Today Show,
• 1:21:44
  and in my view, he was the most powerful person in media,
• 1:21:47
  more powerful than even news anchors. Because news anchors don't really have the ability
• 1:21:53
  to exert their power very much. They can in subtle ways through bias in
• 1:22:00
  the news stories. But Matt had this amazing power because you know, while
• 1:22:06
  he wasn't in complete control, he could give you a slot on the Today
• 1:22:11
  Show if he wanted to interview you, and a slot on the Today Show
• 1:22:15
  had ridiculous amounts of power. At the time. I'm doing this podcast from
• 1:22:20
  a house that was largely paid for almost entirely by proceeds from my movie Medium
• 1:22:27
  Outpractice How Obama got elected, which debuted on the Today Show. Now,
• 1:22:33
  was it all because of the Today Show that we made enough money for me
• 1:22:36
  to buy a house in the middle of the housing crisis. No, but
• 1:22:42
  that played a huge role in this. And so in my view, the
• 1:22:46
  Today Show was the most powerful outlet outlet in news, and Matt Lower was
• 1:22:53
  the most powerful personality. And that's partially why I targeted the Today Show for
• 1:23:00
  or these three interviews that I ended up doing over a several year period of
• 1:23:03
  time, first in two thousand and nine, then in twenty thirteen, then
• 1:23:08
  in twenty fourteen. And each of these three appearances that I did with Matt,
• 1:23:13
  in my view, went variously poorly from my perspective, maybe in order
• 1:23:19
  they went progressively poorly. The first one, I felt like I was forced
• 1:23:24
  to kick a field goal because we had a technical problem with the DVD of
• 1:23:28
  the movie. Matt wasn't even able to see the movie. And in my
• 1:23:31
  view, and I probably overthought this, I thought that, you know,
• 1:23:34
  he had this nuclear weapon that he could destroy me with at any moment by
• 1:23:38
  just saying, you know, I can't tell you about the movie because your
• 1:23:41
  DVD didn't even work. I don't know whether or not he ever would have
• 1:23:44
  gone there anyway, but he could have. And that really kind of had
• 1:23:47
  two hands tied behind my back. Also, I thought my good friend Andrew
• 1:23:51
  Breitbart and I had a plan for what was going to happen post Matt Louer
• 1:23:57
  Today's show interview and Andrew who took a dive on that he claims because he
• 1:24:01
  was in a fight with Matt Drudge, who he was working with on the
• 1:24:05
  Drudge Report at the time. I don't know if that was true. I'll
• 1:24:08
  never know because Andrew's no longer with us. But I have my suspicions that
• 1:24:13
  Andrew had set me up because he was very concerned that I might be usurping
• 1:24:17
  his position as a white male conservative, anti media guy out of Los Angeles.
• 1:24:24
  I can't prove that, but I believe pretty strongly that's a large part
• 1:24:28
  of what happened. And so while the first Today Show interview didn't go horribly,
• 1:24:33
  it didn't go nearly as well as I had hoped, and I mean
• 1:24:38
  it did lead to all sorts of other interviews ms I went on MSNBC that
• 1:24:42
  day and told Nora O'Donnell she should have been fired twice for her coverage with
• 1:24:46
  Sarah Palin. She's now the evening host the of the s CBS Evening News,
• 1:24:53
  which is quite kind of amazing. But anyway, I was not happy
• 1:24:59
  with that first Today's Show interview and it haunted me. It haunted me because
• 1:25:03
  I felt like this was my one shot. This was you know, I
• 1:25:08
  was Luke Skywalker going to the Death Star. I had one shot to blow
• 1:25:12
  up the Death Star and I failed to do it. I did not take
• 1:25:15
  full advantage of the opportunity. And I cannot stand having regrets in life,
• 1:25:20
  and this was a massive regret that I had, and I blamed myself in
• 1:25:26
  large part. And obviously there were circumstances involved that I've already discussed that were
• 1:25:30
  also significant here and so I was haunted by that for several years, and
• 1:25:35
  then the Jerry Sandowski interview came about. I interviewed Sandusky in prison for basically
• 1:25:43
  at first three and a half hours, partially in prison, partially on the
• 1:25:46
  phone. Long story short, I had maintained contact with the Today Show people,
• 1:25:53
  though not with Matt, and they wanted me to come on to share
• 1:25:58
  some of the interview. And this was a situation that was even worse than
• 1:26:02
  the original medium malpractice related Today's Show appearance because I made a very stupid and
• 1:26:12
  overly optimistic decision because I was interviewed by a producer pre interview. Matt had
• 1:26:20
  already agreed to do this, and I thought it was a done deal,
• 1:26:24
  and I thought I was just going through the motions, and I happened to
• 1:26:27
  mention that I was going to name who the boy in the shower was in
• 1:26:30
  the Mike mcquarie episode, something that Malcolm Gladwell was able to do without controversy
• 1:26:35
  in a major best selling book years later, but we weren't to that point
• 1:26:40
  yet. Long story short, the appearance almost got canceled. They decided they
• 1:26:46
  were going to tape it, which almost never happens, and so Matt Lower
• 1:26:50
  had to come in an hour earlier than normal and do that interview, and
• 1:26:59
  he did me no favors. During the interview, I was I was restricted
• 1:27:02
  by all sorts of rules about what I was allowed to say about this so
• 1:27:06
  called victim number two, a guy by the name of Alan Myers, that
• 1:27:11
  I was able to figure out who he was and should have had no problem
• 1:27:14
  saying his name because he didn't even testify at trial. But this was These
• 1:27:17
  are the bizarrow rules that the media has created when it comes to these sex
• 1:27:23
  abuse allegations, which makes it very, very difficult to defend yourself. And
• 1:27:29
  something, you know, really interesting happened after that taped interview occurred. Again.
• 1:27:33
  I was not happy with the way that it went. I thought Matt
• 1:27:36
  did me no favors because he was bringing in my critics who didn't even know
• 1:27:42
  what the hell I was going to say, to criticize what I was saying
• 1:27:45
  before I even said it, and that was really bad. But just as
• 1:27:50
  the Today's Show was about to start live, so we taped my segment and
• 1:27:55
  then they're doing They're going live. All of a sudden, all these NBC
• 1:28:00
  lawyers scurry out of the control room and it's clear that they're very agitated,
• 1:28:03
  and they go up to Matt and it's obvious to me that they're talking about
• 1:28:09
  me and my segment, and it becomes clear that they're telling Matt that they
• 1:28:15
  think that I may have given away the identity of victim number two, which
• 1:28:20
  I know I had. I had not done, and I had done exactly
• 1:28:25
  what I told him I was going to do, and I did exactly what
• 1:28:28
  they said the rules were for what I was allowed to say. And to
• 1:28:32
  Matt's credit, he called me over. He was sitting on the Today Show
• 1:28:36
  desk. He called me over, said, John, come over here,
• 1:28:41
  and he, you know, he said, basically, I heard out what
• 1:28:45
  the lawyers were saying. And I responded, I did exactly what you guys
• 1:28:49
  told me to do. And Matt one hundred percent took my side and said,
• 1:28:55
  he's right. He said exactly what you guys told him, he could
• 1:28:59
  say, were running it. And of course then the lawyers scurried away.
• 1:29:03
  And that had a weird psychological effect on me, because even though I was
• 1:29:10
  getting royally screwed by the larger situation, it felt a little bit like a
• 1:29:15
  prison warden tossing me an extra piece of bread for dinner or something, because
• 1:29:23
  I felt weirdly grateful to Matt for doing that, and I felt like I
• 1:29:29
  got a little bit of a window into his soul that, Okay, this
• 1:29:31
  guy at least cares about the truth and he's true to his word, and
• 1:29:36
  you know, you learn a lot about somebody when you're in a foxhole like
• 1:29:40
  that, because he easily could have screwed me over and the whole thing would
• 1:29:44
  have been killed, which may or may not have been a bad thing in
• 1:29:47
  retrospect. But at that moment, I had made all, you know,
• 1:29:50
  this trip to New York and gone through all this rigmarole, and even though
• 1:29:55
  I was very upset with the rules that I was being given for what I
• 1:29:59
  was allowed to say and the fact that the interview was taped for no good
• 1:30:02
  reason, I didn't want the thing killed because I was going to be publicly,
• 1:30:06
  publicly humiliated if that was the case, and so I remembered that that
• 1:30:14
  played a big role in how I perceived Matt. Lower. Of course,
• 1:30:18
  I still was very suspicious of Matt because I believe that someone who has that
• 1:30:24
  level of celebrity basically has a disease. I truly do believe that celebrity is
• 1:30:30
  a disease, and when you're at the level that Matt Lower was, that
• 1:30:33
  disease has enormous impact. I mean, I'll never forget the first time I
• 1:30:40
  ever met Matt during that two thousand and nine interview. We're sitting down getting
• 1:30:45
  ready to do the interview, and we talked about I think I can't remember
• 1:30:49
  who, who has who what, But we start talking about our weekends and
• 1:30:54
  the fact that we're both golfers, and Matt Lower says to me with a
• 1:30:58
  straight face, well, you know, I was a little bit disappointed yesterday
• 1:31:01
  because I was supposed to play Augusta National and my tea time got delayed because
• 1:31:09
  of a frost situation, and I'm like, boy, rough life, Matt.
• 1:31:17
  My weekend wasn't quite the same. Now, now I've gotten the no,
• 1:31:23
  Matt, I now wonder whether he was actually fucking with me. I
• 1:31:27
  know the story was real because we've talked about it, but he has such
• 1:31:30
  a dry sense of humor that I'm now I now perceived that situation a little
• 1:31:36
  bit differently. At the time, I'm like, what an asshole, what
• 1:31:40
  a clueless bubble boy where he thinks that it's you know, a problematic situation
• 1:31:46
  that that you're rounded AUGUSTA National was delayed because of a frost delayed. I've
• 1:31:55
  chied it about him since, and he says, oh, are you kidding?
• 1:31:58
  That's a big deal, because then you're late for lunch, and the
• 1:32:00
  lobster sandwich is totally different when you're late for Anyway, the point is that
• 1:32:06
  Matt's a guy living in a completely different world than I am, and my
• 1:32:12
  second appearance on the Today Show gave me at least some semblance of Okay,
• 1:32:15
  there's something about this guy that I respect. And that became relevant because in
• 1:32:24
  twenty fourteen, when Donnie Sandusky finally decided that she was willing to come forward
• 1:32:29
  and tell her story with me alongside her, I took it to Matt Matt
• 1:32:35
  Lower and Matt was and his producer had stayed in touch with me and indicated
• 1:32:41
  that if Dottie ever wanted to talk, they would be very interested. And
• 1:32:45
  you know, Matt had enough trust in me, which is amazing in retrospect,
• 1:32:49
  to not just interview Dottie Sandusky, but come from New York City to
• 1:32:54
  State College, Pennsylvania to do the interview at my request from Dottie's home.
• 1:33:00
  That's unheard of, unbelievable for a story that really wasn't that hot at the
• 1:33:04
  time in twenty fourteen, for the wife of the most hated man in America,
• 1:33:10
  Jerry Sandusky. But that was all me, and that was largely because
• 1:33:15
  of the trust that Matt and I had built up in our two previous appearances,
• 1:33:18
  even though he had done me no favors on the air at all.
• 1:33:21
  In either of those two interviews, and the third interview, I was a
• 1:33:27
  small part of this. It was mostly about Dottie, but I was sitting
• 1:33:30
  next to Dottie and I did participate in the interview, but Dottie basically choked.
• 1:33:35
  She was much much better in the interview that was done with CNN the
• 1:33:39
  next day. But I have each each progressive interview with Matt lower I have
• 1:33:45
  a perception that's worse and worse, because in my view, the Dotty Sandusky
• 1:33:50
  interview was largely a disaster, and I had very little to do with that
• 1:33:55
  other than I probably in retrospect, didn't do a good job prepping Dottie Sandusky.
• 1:34:01
  I was very much concerned about over prepping her. In fact, the
• 1:34:04
  first thing Matt says to me when he gets to Dottie Sandusky's house, is
• 1:34:10
  you know, I know you've prepped her, but I hope you haven't prepped
• 1:34:13
  her too much, because I said, look, Matt, I know you
• 1:34:15
  wanted to cry. I think that's going to happen. I have not over
• 1:34:19
  prepped her, but I know I'm paraphrasing what I said. But you know,
• 1:34:23
  obviously we have our side of the story that we want to be told.
• 1:34:27
  And she did cry, and NBC was very happy with with the Dottie
• 1:34:31
  Sandusky interview. I was not. In fact, they even brought me back
• 1:34:36
  to the NBC Today Show studios the next day, and that's how I met
• 1:34:42
  Donald Trump, because Donald Trump happened to be on the show that day and
• 1:34:45
  we were in the green room together, and that's when I had my very
• 1:34:50
  brief conversation with Donald Trump about penn State, Joe Paterno in the state of
• 1:34:55
  Pennsylvania, which I had no idea it would become very important two years later
• 1:35:00
  when he won Pennsylvania to win the presidency. So that was the backdrop my
• 1:35:06
  relationship with Matt Lower. It was very complex and it was dripping in regret.
• 1:35:15
  It was a huge part of my life that I thought, you know
• 1:35:17
  what, all three of those situations did not go nearly as well as they
• 1:35:21
  should have, and I am at least partially responsible for all three of them.
• 1:35:28
  And it was particularly frustrating because Matt was the only interviewer that I'd ever
• 1:35:31
  gone up against that I didn't feel like I could control or get the better
• 1:35:36
  of. And I had been against all the best. I had been on
• 1:35:40
  The O'Reilly Factor, a couple times of Bill O'Reilly, I'd been on the
• 1:35:44
  view with Barbara Walters, you know, with her shaking finger being stuck in
• 1:35:48
  my chest as she and I argued with the horrified Elizabeth Hasselback sitting between the
• 1:35:54
  two of us and Barbara Walters was nothing. And I felt like I can
• 1:36:00
  handle Bill O'Reilly with no problem, and many other interviewers. But I never
• 1:36:04
  got the better of Matt Lower, mostly because one he's really good and two
• 1:36:10
  because the circumstances did not allow it. And so this was always a large
• 1:36:15
  part of my mindset. It was a big element of remorse and regret as
• 1:36:23
  I was looking back on how I had gotten myself into the situation I was
• 1:36:26
  in regarding my career and I never had any real contact with Matti. I
• 1:36:31
  had a little bit of contact with Matt Zimmerman, who was Matt Lower's booker
• 1:36:36
  at the Today Show, and that became relevant because just after Me Too hit
• 1:36:44
  in late twenty seventeen with the whole Harvey Weinstein's story, which had a really
• 1:36:49
  significant NBC connection, which was I think integral to when understanding what really happened
• 1:36:56
  with Matt Lower, which I'll get to momentarily. But the way this all
• 1:37:00
  went down, I think is interesting and important because I was in a pretty
• 1:37:03
  unique position, very far away in Los Angeles, having had no contact with
• 1:37:10
  Matt Lauer for several years. All of a sudden, post Harvey Weinstein and
• 1:37:15
  post me Too explosion, I see the news story that Matt Zimmerman, Matt
• 1:37:20
  Lower's booker, has been fired for what seemed like a me too situation,
• 1:37:28
  and I thought, row Matt Lower is gonna get fired. That was literally
• 1:37:34
  my first reaction, that the idea that Matt Lower could not protect Matt Zimmerman
• 1:37:44
  from what I presumed to be at least a mostly bogus me too situation because
• 1:37:50
  I knew Matt Zimmerman pretty well, and I would later find out that my
• 1:37:54
  instincts were right on that that Matt Zimmerman had been told, hey, look
• 1:37:59
  we gotta change all the rules. Now I'm paraphrasing, but you know,
• 1:38:02
  you had this relationship with a coworker. This is you know, a problem
• 1:38:05
  going forward. Just don't do it again. And then a couple of days
• 1:38:10
  later, they came back to him and said, sorry, you're fired.
• 1:38:13
  So something had changed at NBC and they were cleaning house and they were,
• 1:38:19
  you know, dotting all their eyes, crossing, all their te's, going
• 1:38:23
  overboard to make sure that they were not perceived as going against this whole me
• 1:38:29
  too narrative. Because again, remember the Harvey Weinstein story by Ronan Faroh that
• 1:38:34
  began the whole Me Too panic was originally an NBC story. NBC didn't go
• 1:38:41
  with it, so Ronan Pharaoh went elsewhere. So NBC was exceedingly vulnerable,
• 1:38:47
  and the first sacrificial lamb was Matt Zimmerman. Matt Lowers, booker and very
• 1:38:54
  close producer. And again, sometimes when you're very far away from a story,
• 1:39:00
  it's a little easier to see. To this day, Matt Lower does
• 1:39:03
  not believe that Matt Zimmerman's firing had anything to do with him. And maybe
• 1:39:08
  I'm wrong about this, But the weird thing is I was right at the
• 1:39:11
  time, and I still think Matt might be Matt Lower might be being a
• 1:39:15
  little bit naive because he was in a bubble. I mean, when you're
• 1:39:18
  being treated like Matt Lower is being treated, then I mean you think everybody's
• 1:39:25
  your friend, you think you're basically untouchable. I mean, this is a
• 1:39:27
  guy who NBC is paying for a helicopter to take him from New York City
• 1:39:33
  to his home in the Hamptons on a daily basis, a helicopter to avoid
• 1:39:40
  the traffic. So everybody around NBC's his buddy, his pal, all the
• 1:39:45
  executives, and I'm sure he's not thinking that he's vulnerable. But to me
• 1:39:51
  from three thousand miles away, I'm like, we everybody knows Matt Lower gets
• 1:39:58
  around when it comes to Rome answers that had been widely documented in the tabloids,
• 1:40:02
  and it certainly seemed to me to be true. And so this was
• 1:40:06
  a ticking time bomb in my view for Matt Lower. And I told my
• 1:40:11
  wife as soon as Matt Zimmerman got fired, I said, I think Matt
• 1:40:14
  Lower is getting fired, and this was just before Thanksgiving. And I'll also
• 1:40:18
  never forget that that year when the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade ended, we were
• 1:40:24
  watching it on television, Matt signed off as the co host, and I
• 1:40:29
  joked with my wife, I'll bet Matt Matt is giving a huge sigh of
• 1:40:32
  relief, because you would think that if he was going to get fired over
• 1:40:36
  me too, he would have been fired before the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade,
• 1:40:42
  because in my mind, this was kind of like a you know, a
• 1:40:45
  boiling point or a pressure point, kind of like the Nebraska game was with
• 1:40:49
  the Penn State Joe Paternal situation. If there wasn't the Nebraska game that weekend
• 1:40:56
  that Joe Paternal got fired at home on ESPN, I don't think that Penn
• 1:41:00
  State would have panicked as much and fired Joe Paterno. So in my mind,
• 1:41:04
  the Thanksgiving Day Parade was kind of like the point where Matt was probably
• 1:41:11
  in the clear. And my wife and I laughed about this, well,
• 1:41:14
  it was literally like three or four days later, six years ago today,
• 1:41:17
  as we tape this, that Matt actually ends up getting fired, and I
• 1:41:24
  was obviously not shocked. My wife was kind of amazed, how did you
• 1:41:27
  know this was going to happen? I told you why this was going to
• 1:41:30
  happen again. To be clear, Matt Lower does not agree with my assessment
• 1:41:36
  of how this went down, with the at least when it came to the
• 1:41:40
  Matt Zimmerman situation being a tell and this was in late twenty seventeen, six
• 1:41:46
  years ago, and you know, not much happened after that. I mean
• 1:41:51
  NBC threw Matt under the bus completely. He becomes, you know, goes
• 1:41:57
  from being the most powerful person in the news media by far, the best
• 1:42:00
  interviewer in the news media, to being completely canceled. You know, he
• 1:42:06
  disappears from the landscape. The media floodgates open with all sorts of BS stories
• 1:42:15
  about rape buttons that he had in his office. Let me let me,
• 1:42:17
  by the way, address the rape button situation. Because this because after Matt
• 1:42:23
  gets fired and because everyone knew he had all these affairs and we're in the
• 1:42:27
  middle of this me too, panic there becomes is free for all in the
• 1:42:31
  news media. I mean, everybody has jealousy over Matt. He's been decapitated.
• 1:42:36
  He can't fight back. There's there's all this pent up energy to get
• 1:42:43
  Matt Lower and so now all of a sudden, you have these unnamed sources
• 1:42:46
  with nothing to fear to go after him, and there becomes this narrative of
• 1:42:51
  the rape button. To this day, there are so many people that think
• 1:42:56
  that Matt Lauer had a rape button in his office and NBC. It's just
• 1:43:00
  absurd. On every level. There was a button underneath his desk that everybody
• 1:43:08
  in NBC at his level had. If you had his level of office,
• 1:43:13
  you had this button. All that it did was it locked the door from
• 1:43:17
  people coming in. It did not lock people on the inside from getting out.
• 1:43:26
  That's number one. Number two, just how absurd is the entire concept
• 1:43:30
  of a rape button. So Met's in his office, Matt lower a guy
• 1:43:36
  you know every woman in the industry won the sleep with basically on and off
• 1:43:44
  air, and and he's what He's got to lock people in his room,
• 1:43:48
  keep them from getting out so that he can rape them. And this never
• 1:43:53
  becomes public. This is just insane, but it's also it's nonsense. It's
• 1:44:00
  also not true. But this becomes a narrative, and there's no way for
• 1:44:05
  Matt to fight back, and he actually didn't even really want to fight back
• 1:44:09
  because he just wanted to go away and hide, and because he was completely
• 1:44:15
  taken by surprise by by what happened. I mean, one of the more
• 1:44:18
  amazing things that I've learned through hundreds of hours of conversations with Matt is that
• 1:44:28
  when he was told to come in to meet with NBC brass, he didn't
• 1:44:34
  even have a lawyer. He did not have a lawyer ready to go.
• 1:44:40
  He met his lawyer for the first time on the sidewalk in front of thirty
• 1:44:45
  Rockefeller Center going into the meeting that day. That was the first time they
• 1:44:51
  ever met. That's how shocked he was by this whole situation. And I'll
• 1:44:58
  get into what actually did transpire and how it is. I know Matt never
• 1:45:02
  raped anybody, but I want to tell the story here in kind of chronological
• 1:45:08
  order. So so from my perspective, you know, I'm just disappointed that
• 1:45:13
  Matt Lauer is no longer on TV because I thought he was a great interviewer.
• 1:45:15
  And I think morning television is much worse because of it, and I
• 1:45:19
  think our entire media ecosystem is worse because now there's nobody that newsmakers are forced
• 1:45:27
  to go to. In other words, you know, the Today Show had
• 1:45:30
  so much leverage that if you were in trouble, you basically had to go
• 1:45:34
  on the Today Show and you had to face questioning for Matt Loward, he
• 1:45:38
  wasn't going to let you off the hook. Well that's completely gone, and
• 1:45:41
  the Today Show's position at the top of the pyramid is gone. There is
• 1:45:45
  no even pyramid anymore. It doesn't exist. And you know, podcasting has
• 1:45:48
  taken over and everything is so fragmented, and there's so many different options for
• 1:45:56
  celebrities and newsmakers to go to that they can get very soft questioning because they
• 1:46:00
  get to choose who's going to be their interviewer. That that was not the
• 1:46:05
  case when Matt Lawer was the host of the Today Show. So the story
• 1:46:11
  kind of fades away through twenty eighteen, and then in twenty nineteen, Ronan
• 1:46:16
  Pharaoh, who began the Whole Meat Too panic with his story on Harvey Weinstein,
• 1:46:21
  he writes a book. Now, if you're Ronan Pharaoh and the Harvey
• 1:46:27
  Weinstein story, you know has played itself out of this point, you need
• 1:46:31
  you know, you're going to write a book about the Whole Meat Too situation,
• 1:46:34
  but you need something new. That's the most important thing. You need,
• 1:46:39
  you need something new, and Ronan Pharaoh decided that the best way to
• 1:46:46
  sell this book and get news coverage for it is to have a rape allegation
• 1:46:53
  against Matt Lower. And that's not even an I believe that's really what happened.
• 1:46:58
  I don't believe that that's hyperb or an exaggeration. I believe that Ronan
• 1:47:01
  Pharaoh effectively proactively manipulated a woman into claiming that she was quote unquote raped by
• 1:47:12
  Matt Lower, even though there's no way possible that that's actually what transpired.
• 1:47:18
  And when the book came out, I was inherently suspicious of the allegation of
• 1:47:27
  rape against Matt Lauer, partially because I knew Matt a little bit, partially
• 1:47:30
  because I knew of Ronan Pharaoh a little bit, especially since we had already
• 1:47:35
  gone through the whole Brett Kavanaugh situation. And I think that Brett Kavanaugh situation
• 1:47:42
  basically exposed Ronan Pharaoh for the fraud that he is, because he basically bought
• 1:47:48
  into an entire, you know, bogus situation at at Yale that I believe
• 1:47:57
  was an urban legend. Positive that what happened with Brett cavanaught Yale, that
• 1:48:02
  Ronan Pharaoh reported on was an urban legend that did not actually happen, or
• 1:48:05
  if it did, it didn't involve Brett Kavanaugh. So I wrote this article
• 1:48:11
  for Media It as a senior columnist there very very skeptical of what Ronan Pharaoh
• 1:48:15
  was reporting because the narrative didn't make any sense to me. And I was
• 1:48:19
  even already suspicious that Pharaoh had basically convinced this woman by the name of Brooke
• 1:48:27
  Nevills, former NBC staffer who never worked directly for Matt Lauer, at least
• 1:48:32
  not when any sort of romantic situation occurred between the two of them, that
• 1:48:41
  he had convinced Brooke Nevills that what happened between her and Matt was in fact
• 1:48:46
  rape. And I didn't know, you know, any of the real details
• 1:48:50
  at that time. I was just going by my instincts and what was being
• 1:48:56
  reported in the news about the allegation, as well as my little bit of
• 1:49:00
  knowledge about who Matt Lower was. And I was sitting around one morning and
• 1:49:06
  all of a sudden, I got a call on my cell phone from an
• 1:49:11
  unknown caller. Now, you know when you get a call from the an
• 1:49:15
  unknown caller and you're in my business. That usually means that it's an important
• 1:49:19
  call. And I answered the call and it's Matt Lower and my wife happened
• 1:49:29
  to just be waking up at that time. She was she was a little
• 1:49:33
  bit stunned, although uh, this is a woman who you know has uh.
• 1:49:39
  When we first started dating, there were answering machine messages from Sarah Palin
• 1:49:44
  And when the O. J. Simpson Uh situation in Las Vegas happened,
• 1:49:47
  the guy he stole the stuff from was calling me constantly, and so she's
• 1:49:53
  kind of gotten used to this, these kind of things happening in my life.
• 1:49:56
  But you know, when I started talking to Matt on the phone,
• 1:50:00
  she was more than the bit shocked and very very interested. And long story
• 1:50:03
  short, this began what would end up being probably hundreds of hours I'm not
• 1:50:11
  exaggerating here, hundreds of hours of phone calls between Matt and me about this
• 1:50:17
  entire situation involving the Ronan Pharaoh book. Now, at first, our discussion
• 1:50:26
  centered around the idea of me doing some sort of an interview with Matt for
• 1:50:32
  mediaite, and I don't want to get into the inside baseball of it all,
• 1:50:36
  but you know, he didn't want to go on the record, and
• 1:50:40
  Mediite didn't want to pay for me to go across the country, which shocked
• 1:50:44
  the hell out of Matt. And Matt was still in such a bubble.
• 1:50:45
  He thought, this is the way everybody in the news media works. Well,
• 1:50:47
  you're just going to get on a plane and fly and come see me,
• 1:50:50
  right. Well, well, no, there's an expense problem. This
• 1:50:55
  is a guy, of course, is used to NBC paying for his helicopter
• 1:50:58
  rides from work to home, so that was a big problem. But what
• 1:51:03
  was most I think significant about those original phone calls between Matt and me was
• 1:51:10
  I was very tough on Matt. I think this is maybe the greatest misperception
• 1:51:15
  people have about me when I get involved in these situations, whether it's Sarah
• 1:51:18
  Palin or Jerry Sandusky or all sorts of other people who are under attack that
• 1:51:25
  I tend to defend, Especially initially, My first conversations are very direct and
• 1:51:32
  very tough, and basically my philosophy is if they can't hack it, then
• 1:51:36
  this isn't going to work in the long run anyway, so we might as
• 1:51:40
  well find that out right off the bat. And I told Matt that I
• 1:51:46
  thought that he had gotten into this situation because he was an alpha male and
• 1:51:51
  that he was losing in this situation because he's acting like a beta male.
• 1:51:57
  That's a direct quote from what I said. It really pissed him off,
• 1:52:00
  by the way, but I think he probably understood what I was saying.
• 1:52:03
  And the result of all this was I decided, on my own dime,
• 1:52:09
  by the way, that I would come out to the Hamptons and hear Matt
• 1:52:14
  Lauer out. I wanted to find out his version of this story, that
• 1:52:17
  Ronan Pharaoh, this media god who had changed the world by facilitating the me
• 1:52:23
  too panic. I wanted to find out Matt Lower's version of the truth,
• 1:52:27
  and I suspected that he probably was telling the truth. And it was significant
• 1:52:30
  to me one because you know, I think it's relevant as to whether or
• 1:52:34
  not Matt Lower was really a rapist, but more importantly, is Ronan Pharaoh
• 1:52:39
  a fraud? So I went out and made the trip to the Hamptons,
• 1:52:45
  which is not easy from Los Angeles. It's literally about as far away as
• 1:52:48
  you can get. And Matt and I sat down at his kitchen table for
• 1:52:55
  about five or six hours. And what was the most remarkable about this was
• 1:53:01
  he had not read a syllable of what Ronan Pharaoh had written in this book
• 1:53:08
  alleging rape against him. In fact, he would not even let me put
• 1:53:14
  the book on his kitchen table. That's the level of disgust he had with
• 1:53:20
  what Ronan Pharaoh had written in the allegation of rape. Because you've got to
• 1:53:27
  remember, this is a guy who had the world at his feet. Everything,
• 1:53:31
  you know, couldn't have been better from a professional standpoint. He's got
• 1:53:34
  three at that point, you know, fairly young kids. His marriage gets
• 1:53:40
  destroyed, which was his fault, which he's fully acknowledging of with his infidelity.
• 1:53:45
  But he loves his kids. They love him. They're all at vulnerable
• 1:53:49
  points in their life. So he not only gets fired and loses everything,
• 1:53:55
  but now he's being accused of rape, so holy insult, injury, and
• 1:54:00
  he knows he's innocent, and he's also knows that Ronan Pharaoh is not what
• 1:54:05
  Ronan Pharaoh is being cracked up to be. Because he had a very strong
• 1:54:11
  relationship with Ronan Farao. He tried to mentor Ronan Faroll and when Ronan Paraoh
• 1:54:16
  had the Harvey Weinstein story at NBC, NBC correctly decided that Farah did not
• 1:54:26
  have the story nailed, and so they passed on it. And then once
• 1:54:30
  he goes to The New Yorker and it explodes and creates me too. NBC
• 1:54:36
  is in this incredibly vulnerable position because now it looks like they're part of the
• 1:54:41
  Harvey Weinstein cover up. What all they were really doing was, and Matt
• 1:54:45
  Lower supported this at the time. All they were doing was trying to support
• 1:54:49
  journalistic standards that the story hadn't met the threshold. And by the way,
• 1:54:56
  you know the media won't tell you this in large part, but a out
• 1:55:00
  of what Rodan Farroll originally reported on Harvey Weinstein was never substantiated in court and
• 1:55:06
  had very little to do with the actual criminal convictions in Harvey Weinstein's case,
• 1:55:13
  and some of it has turned out to be not substantiated at all. So
• 1:55:17
  I think that in some ways NBC has been vindicated by that decision, but
• 1:55:24
  that decision had an enormous ripple effect, and especially when it came to Matt
• 1:55:30
  Lower. So Matt and I do this off the record interview where he tells
• 1:55:36
  me the full story. And what's most fascinating is I'm literally telling Matt Lower
• 1:55:43
  what's in the book. He has no knowledge of this. He just knows
• 1:55:47
  he didn't rape anybody, so he has no knowledge of the details. And
• 1:55:51
  the more I'm telling him, the more outraged he's getting, the more he's
• 1:55:58
  realizing what a load of crap this whole thing is. And so I leave
• 1:56:03
  the Hamptons and I write a story about my off the record interview with Matt
• 1:56:11
  Lauer for Mediaite. I get interviewed by a few people, including Billy Bush,
• 1:56:15
  the host of the entertainment show Extra. Now, Billy Bush is a
• 1:56:20
  really interesting character in all this because you know, you probably know Billy Bush
• 1:56:26
  from the Donald Trump Access Hollywood tape where he got completely screwed in that whole
• 1:56:30
  situation, Billy Bush was literally in the bar in Soshi, Russia during the
• 1:56:39
  twenty fourteen Olympics, the night that Matt and Brook Nevills have their initial sexual
• 1:56:46
  encounter. In other words, Billy Bush literally was there, along with a
• 1:56:50
  whole bunch of other NBC people, when Matt Lawer and Brook Nevills first to
• 1:56:56
  get together romantically. And so it's I think very telling that Billy Bush,
• 1:57:00
  who has no love for Matt Lower because you know, Billy has told me
• 1:57:05
  that he thinks that matt didn't do him right. I don't know if that's
• 1:57:11
  true or not, but that's the perception that Billy has. But Billy was
• 1:57:15
  still willing to hear Matt Lower's side of the story and has expressed skepticism on
• 1:57:21
  Extra about Ronan Pharaoh's version of this event that he was essentially about as much
• 1:57:30
  of a witness to as you could possibly get. Well, when I was
• 1:57:32
  interviewed by Billy Busch, Billy asked me whether or not Matt Lower had gotten
• 1:57:36
  emotional during our very long, off the record interview, and I didn't know
• 1:57:44
  how to respond, and I really didn't know where my relationship with Matt Lower
• 1:57:48
  was going, and I stupidly said that Matt Lower had gotten weepy during one
• 1:57:57
  portion of my interview with him, which was, I guess technically true,
• 1:58:00
  although weepy was a stupid word on my part to use. He had gotten
• 1:58:04
  teary. I should have said teary eyed, or gotten emotional or something.
• 1:58:10
  I don't know, but for some reason, the word weepy comes out,
• 1:58:14
  and my memory serves me he was talking about his kids at the time that
• 1:58:20
  he got emotional, And so now to this day, Whenever I'm talking to
• 1:58:26
  Matt Lower and something happens that is a negative or something that you can get
• 1:58:31
  upset about in a very dead pan fashion, Matt Lower will ask me,
• 1:58:36
  but did you get weepy over it? Matt's a very funny guy, Matt.
• 1:58:43
  Matt actually is a funnier guy than Bob Costas, which I find is
• 1:58:45
  kind of amazing because I've always thought Bob Costas was pretty hilarious in his sportscasting
• 1:58:51
  days. And I've gotten to know Bob a little bit, not nearly as
• 1:58:54
  well as I've gotten to know Matt over the last several years, and I'll
• 1:58:59
  be on the record saying that as funny as Bob Costa, Matt Lower is
• 1:59:01
  funnier. Though I can't share with you most of the things that Matt has
• 1:59:05
  said to me over the years that are falling into the realm of humor.
• 1:59:10
  But the point of this is that I now become associated with Matt Lawer's version
• 1:59:16
  of the story. And at a certain point, Matt decides he wants to
• 1:59:20
  do a formal response to Ronan Farrell because he's gone from not wanting the Ronan
• 1:59:27
  Pharaoh book on his kitchen table to now devouring every word of the book.
• 1:59:34
  And this is when no joke, at least one hundred to two hundred hours
• 1:59:42
  are spent on the phone between me and Matt Lower deconstructing every sentence of the
• 1:59:48
  Ronan Pharaoh book alleging that he raped this woman brook Nevilles. And the purpose
• 1:59:55
  of all this is for Matt to respond in some sort of formal, in
• 2:00:00
  depth way. Now, Matt had asked me how he should respond, and
• 2:00:06
  you know, obviously Matt's a TV guy. You would think that the natural
• 2:00:12
  way to respond would be for him to do a TV interview, because he's
• 2:00:15
  obviously exceedingly well versed and skilled in how that goes down. But in my
• 2:00:23
  opinion, there was no proper venue for that to happen. There was no
• 2:00:27
  interviewer. And Matt had been bombarded with all sorts of interview requests from Oprah
• 2:00:31
  on down, but there was no interviewer that would both have credibility on the
• 2:00:38
  issue, which because you basically need a woman, but who also would be
• 2:00:42
  fair. And so I said to him, Matt, as much as I'd
• 2:00:45
  love for you to do a TV interview, I think you need to do
• 2:00:48
  this yourself. I think you need to write this and see where we can
• 2:00:54
  publish it, or you can publish it. And I'd said, I'd be
• 2:00:57
  happy to help you with it in the research and what have you, but
• 2:01:00
  obviously you're gonna be the one that writes this, and he agreed, and
• 2:01:03
  he decided that's what he wanted to do. So that was why we were
• 2:01:09
  doing these marathon sessions on the phone, and he would write I don't know
• 2:01:14
  how many different versions, probably a dozen different versions of a very in depth
• 2:01:18
  response to the Ronan Pharaoh book. But there were all sorts of problems with
• 2:01:28
  when and how he was going to respond. I've already mentioned that he has
• 2:01:32
  three young kids at that time, you know, two of them were in
• 2:01:35
  high school and trying to figure out where they were going to go into college,
• 2:01:40
  and so Matt was very, very very concerned about creating further backlash for
• 2:01:45
  them and creating further trouble in their lives because this had basically died down and
• 2:01:51
  then all of a sudden, the whole Ronan Pharaoh rape allegation a kurd.
• 2:01:56
  Although he always said that his kids were supportive of him correcting the record because
• 2:02:00
  they knew he wasn't a rapist and they were, you know, they're very
• 2:02:04
  loving of him and vice versa, which I think is very telling given the
• 2:02:09
  nature of this story. But I digress. So we had all sorts of
• 2:02:15
  things happen, all sorts of delays, and then as we head into the
• 2:02:20
  twenty twenty COVID hits and you know, that of course changes everything. So
• 2:02:27
  now you know, how the hell are we are we going to do this?
• 2:02:30
  How the hell are you going to respond to this old now allegation of
• 2:02:35
  rape by Ronan Pharaoh and Brooke Neville's working together when we're in the middle of
• 2:02:41
  this worldwide pandemic. But we kept working at it. And the way that
• 2:02:45
  I would describe Ronan Pharaoh's type of journalism and why it's so insidious and why
• 2:02:54
  it's so dangerous, is that Ronan Pharaoh uses a tactic that's very effect but
• 2:03:00
  also incredibly deceitful, but it's very very good when it comes to fooling the
• 2:03:05
  news media. What he'll do is he will report on something using all sorts
• 2:03:13
  of tiny details, I mean sometimes minute details to create the impression of great
• 2:03:23
  reporting, because the presumption is, oh my gosh, if Ronan Farrell has
• 2:03:28
  reported this to such the degree that he knows this little detail or that little
• 2:03:34
  detail, then obviously he's got the bigger picture of this story nailed. And
• 2:03:41
  I can kind of understand why this is so effective in fooling the media.
• 2:03:46
  But it's a smoke screen. It's a fraud. It's you know what it's
• 2:03:51
  like. It's a little bit like a scam where someone pretends to be rich
• 2:04:00
  by throwing a whole bunch of money around and having nice clothes and fancy jewelry
• 2:04:04
  and riding in a limo and you know, talking a big game, and
• 2:04:10
  you think, wow, this person must really be rich. But it's a
• 2:04:14
  front. There's nothing behind it. It's a scam, a smoke screen.
• 2:04:21
  And that's what Ronan Farrow does. And there was there were so many examples
• 2:04:26
  of this in the book that he wrote alleging that Matt Lauer had raped this
• 2:04:30
  former NBC producer. By the way, it should be pointed out that not
• 2:04:36
  only did they have this sexual encounter in Soshi, Russia, but by her
• 2:04:41
  own admission, they had continued this affair back when they got to you know,
• 2:04:45
  to the United return to the United States after the twenty fourteen Olympics,
• 2:04:49
  and that the affair had gone on for several months, and yet somehow it
• 2:04:55
  all began with something that she was then calling rape that occurred this night in
• 2:05:00
  Sochi, Russia. Well, one of the details that Ronan Pharaoh uses of
• 2:05:05
  one of the many, many details almost all of which are wrong, that
• 2:05:10
  Matt knew were wrong, and some of which he could prove were wrong,
• 2:05:15
  you know, dealt with this situation in Soshi, and one of them was
• 2:05:19
  that Ronan Pharaoh had written that Matt Lower's sweet that he was staying in his
• 2:05:26
  hotel suite and Soshi, Russia was palatial and expansive and very intimidating. Because
• 2:05:33
  that's the whole point of this is, you know, the whole idea was
• 2:05:36
  that the power differential between Matt Lauer and brook Neville's was inherently evidence of rape.
• 2:05:44
  That's what the leftist want to do when it comes to the sexual dynamics
• 2:05:48
  between men and women. If there's an inherent, massive power disparity, ipso
• 2:05:55
  facto, any sex is rape. That's essentially the view of Ronan Pharaoh,
• 2:06:00
  who, by the way, happens to be a gay man who comes from
• 2:06:02
  a family that where his name is literally dictated by an allegation of sex abuse
• 2:06:08
  against Woody Allen and his mom, Mia Pharaoh. So how in the world
• 2:06:13
  Ronan Pharaoh ended up becoming the arbiter of what is right and wrong between men
• 2:06:18
  and women when it comes to sex. It's absolutely mind blowing. And I
• 2:06:21
  think that's very relevant to who Ronan Pharaoh is and why he's not credible in
• 2:06:27
  these situations because he has an inherent bias on the issue of sex abuse and
• 2:06:31
  he happens to be a gay man. So I don't think you can fully
• 2:06:34
  understand the dynamics between men and women when it comes to sex. But this
• 2:06:39
  is what they're trying to do. They're trying to create these rules that if
• 2:06:42
  there is a massive power disparity, it's almost inherently rape. And part of
• 2:06:47
  this power disparity was that Matt Lauer was so powerful and so famous and so
• 2:06:55
  well treated by NBC that he had this massive suite in Soci where he was
• 2:07:00
  hosting the Olympic coverage on NBC. And Matt said, wait a minute,
• 2:07:06
  my suite in Soshi was not large at all, and he even called up
• 2:07:12
  He called up the hotel in Soshi in like five minutes and found out the
• 2:07:17
  exact dimensions of his hotel suite, and I don't remember what the exact dimensions
• 2:07:21
  were, but he was right. It was not nearly as large as Ronan
• 2:07:27
  Pharaoh had depicted it as being in his book. But I said, Matt,
• 2:07:31
  we got a problem here. I don't think it's a good idea politically
• 2:07:35
  for you, Matt lower super rich celebrity to be complaining about the size of
• 2:07:41
  your hotel suite in socie not being big enough. And he kind of understood
• 2:07:46
  where I was coming from that, and that ended up not making it into
• 2:07:49
  the final version of the story, I think largely because of what I just
• 2:07:55
  stated, but also mainly because the final version of his story, which you
• 2:07:59
  can google and find it, was published on media item in mid twenty twenty.
• 2:08:05
  By the way, a lot, there is a ton of stuff that
• 2:08:07
  got on the cutting room floor of that story that didn't make it for various
• 2:08:13
  reasons, not because they weren't accurate, but because the story was so long,
• 2:08:16
  because there were so many obvious problems with Ronan Farrow's reporting here. And
• 2:08:22
  that was just one example of a detail that makes it sound like Farroh really
• 2:08:26
  did his homework, but he didn't. And I'm only mentioning that because it
• 2:08:31
  was the funniest of the details. There were many, many other examples of
• 2:08:37
  this, and it goes to the way that Ronan Farroh runs his scam,
• 2:08:43
  and Matt in response to all this, did some real reporting. He actually
• 2:08:48
  spoke to the people that were alluded to in Ronan Pharaoh's version of events,
• 2:08:54
  including two of brook Neville's the accusers ex boy friends who work at NBC,
• 2:09:03
  who contradicted the claims in the book and back up Matt Lower's version of events.
• 2:09:11
  Now, that was extraordinary, extraordinary Here, Matt Lawer's disgraced ex host
• 2:09:16
  with absolutely no power at all anywhere in the media, but especially at NBC.
• 2:09:22
  You got people who are still working in NBC who used to date brook
• 2:09:26
  Nebles, by the way, have an incentive, especially in one case,
• 2:09:31
  to be very romantically jealous of Matt Lower, because effectively brook Neviles was cheating
• 2:09:37
  on them with Matt Lower. And yet they were willing off without using their
• 2:09:43
  names, to go on the record, so to speak, to contradict the
• 2:09:48
  claims of Pharaoh and Nevills in this book. And again you can find out
• 2:09:52
  for yourself all the details if you google Matt Lower and mediaite and Ronan Pharaoh.
• 2:09:58
  So Matt did an extraordinary job of doing basically research into the story about
• 2:10:05
  himself that was done by Ronan Farrow and debunking it, deconstructing all of it.
• 2:10:11
  There were many versions of this story that Matt wanted to put out there
• 2:10:16
  in the public. We weren't sure exactly how and when to do it,
• 2:10:20
  and obviously the pandemic was complicating things. But then the New York Times,
• 2:10:26
  with a writer by the name of Ben Smith, happened to contact me because
• 2:10:31
  they were doing a story on Ronan Pharaoh in general, and the headline of
• 2:10:37
  that story would eventually be is Ronan Pharaoh too good to be true? And
• 2:10:43
  Ben Smith knew that I had done this reporting on Ronan Farah, and I
• 2:10:48
  guess he wanted my thoughts on this. I don't even know if he wanted
• 2:10:50
  to quote me, But I said, you know what, Ben, I
• 2:10:56
  got an idea because I was looking for a hook, a looking for a
• 2:11:00
  hook for Matt Lawer to get his story out into the public. And so
• 2:11:03
  I said, I got an idea. What if I was able to get
• 2:11:07
  you Matt Lower on the record talking about Ronan Pharaoh. Would that be helpful?
• 2:11:13
  He said, of course, it would be so in my vision.
• 2:11:16
  This is one of the very few things where my vision actually came to fruition
• 2:11:20
  almost exactly as I had hoped. And this is usually the only time where
• 2:11:24
  I'm effective is when it's completely behind the scenes and my fingerprints on it aren't
• 2:11:30
  on it publicly, at least not at the time in which it happens.
• 2:11:33
  But in my vision, I said, Okay, Matt Lower, here's the
• 2:11:37
  deal. I think we got our hook. If you can be quoted in
• 2:11:41
  a story at the New York Times about whether or not Ronan Pharaoh is too
• 2:11:46
  good to be true, then guess what we have our hook for you to
• 2:11:50
  be able to publish your story with the detailed response to Ronan Pharaoh's book,
• 2:11:56
  and we can do it on Mediaite, which is obviously where I worked,
• 2:11:58
  and where I knew that the powers of be at Media, including Dan Abrams,
• 2:12:03
  were going to be supportive of this, because they had been supportive of
• 2:12:07
  me doing my own journalism on this whole story. And Matt agreed and said,
• 2:12:11
  okay, So he did an interview with Ben Smith, he was quoted
• 2:12:16
  in that article, and then I think it was two days later Mediaite put
• 2:12:20
  out what was really the shortest version of all the versions of the rebuttal against
• 2:12:24
  Ronan Pharaoh that Matt Lauer had written, and it's very, very good,
• 2:12:28
  and it's very convincing and compelling if you have an open mind. Of course,
• 2:12:31
  the mainstream news met he didn't know what the hell to do with it,
• 2:12:35
  because they are deeply invested in me too, and they're deeply invested in
• 2:12:39
  the mythology that they had created about Matt Lower. And I think it proves
• 2:12:45
  that Matt Lower never raped anybody. Again, He's taken all sorts of responsibility
• 2:12:50
  and experienced great pain because of the mistakes that he's made in his marriage.
• 2:12:54
  He had many affairs, and he hasn't pretended that's not the case. I's
• 2:13:00
  been There's all sorts of affairs in the media business that Matt Lauer has been
• 2:13:03
  involved with, but none of them involved anything close to rape. And what
• 2:13:07
  I really think happened. Here's what I really think happened with this story.
• 2:13:11
  And this is another area where I'm going to start off with something that I
• 2:13:16
  don't think Matt Lawer agrees with. But I thought this at the time,
• 2:13:20
  and so I'm just going to throw this out as a theory just the way
• 2:13:22
  the world really works. But if you recall the twenty fourteen Winter Olympics in
• 2:13:28
  Soshi from a media perspective, were probably most well known for the fact that
• 2:13:33
  Bob Costas got pink eye. Now, how the hell does that relate to
• 2:13:39
  the story? I think it relates to the story quite directly, because when
• 2:13:45
  Bob Costas got pink eye, after a couple of nights, they decided to
• 2:13:50
  give Bob a rest. Now, if you don't know anything about Olympic coverage,
• 2:13:54
  being the evening host of the Olympics is one of the most difficult hosting
• 2:14:01
  jobs in all the media. It might be the most difficult. I mean,
• 2:14:07
  I think doing play by play for Olympic hockey would probably be the most
• 2:14:11
  difficult morning event to actually cover. But that's play by play. As a
• 2:14:15
  host, especially for the Winter Olympics, being the evening host is an exceedingly
• 2:14:20
  difficult job, one that takes an enormous amount of preparation. You cannot just
• 2:14:26
  jump in there, you know, like a substitute teacher and do that job
• 2:14:30
  for a couple of days unless you're really, really good. And that's why
• 2:14:33
  they kept Bob on there with the pink eye. Well, eventually they took
• 2:14:37
  him off for a couple of nights and they replaced him with Matt lower And
• 2:14:43
  so Matt was in this very extraordinary situation of doing both the evening show and
• 2:14:48
  the morning show in a very strange time zone in Soshi, Russia for NBC
• 2:14:56
  during the Olympics. That's a lot. That's a lot to put on anybody.
• 2:15:00
  And I'm not justifying the infidelity part of this at all. I'm just
• 2:15:03
  looking at this from the standpoint of the way humans work and the way men
• 2:15:07
  work. My guess is Matt was feeling pretty good about himself that when you
• 2:15:13
  pull that off, when you know, with no preparation and you're doing the
• 2:15:18
  evening hosting and the morning hosting for NBC during the Olympics, you might engage
• 2:15:22
  in activity that you wouldn't ordinarily engage in. That's just my theory. Again,
• 2:15:28
  Matt Loward does not sign off on that theory. But the reality is
• 2:15:35
  he had an affair with Brooke Neville's one night while they were all in Soci,
• 2:15:39
  Russia. Now that's kind of the environment that these Olympic Games foster,
• 2:15:46
  both among the athletes and the media members. I mean, you have a
• 2:15:50
  whole bunch of very passionate, usually attractive, ambitious people, all stuck together
• 2:15:58
  for several weeks far away from home. It's very much of a you know,
• 2:16:03
  what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas kind of mentality. Again, I'm
• 2:16:05
  not justifying at all at all, but they had a sexual encounter that night,
• 2:16:11
  and they continued the affair for a couple months when they returned home.
• 2:16:16
  What ended up getting Matt Lower fired after this me too situation hits in twenty
• 2:16:24
  seventeen, is that brook Nevills, now we're a couple of years removed from
• 2:16:28
  the affair which has ended, decides that she wants to make an a not
• 2:16:33
  an allegation of rape, but an allegation that Matt had sex with her in
• 2:16:39
  his dressing room, which is, you know, on company property. Well,
• 2:16:46
  that's a violation of company policy, it's a violation of Matt Lower's contract.
• 2:16:52
  And she makes that claim to hr at NBC. NBC comes to Matt
• 2:16:58
  Lower, they say is this accurate? He says, yes, we did
• 2:17:03
  so, and effectively NBC changes the rules on Matt Lower. Matt had been
• 2:17:07
  doing something that was technically a violation that but because he was Matt lower,
• 2:17:11
  he was allowed to get away with but post me too. All of a
• 2:17:16
  sudden, we're gonna change all the rules after the game has been played.
• 2:17:20
  Again, I'm not justifying Matt's behavior. I'm just telling you what happened,
• 2:17:24
  so all of a sudden, the rules get changed. NBC is, as
• 2:17:28
  I've said previously, particularly vulnerable because it's being perceived that they killed the Harvey
• 2:17:35
  Weinstein Ronan Pharaoh story. So they need a scalp. NBC needs a scalp,
• 2:17:41
  and I think Matt Lauer was the perfect scalp because Matt was being paid
• 2:17:46
  a ridiculous amount of money, like over twenty twenty five million dollars a year,
• 2:17:52
  a contract that was quickly becoming antiquated with the new broken business model of
• 2:17:58
  the networks. They had overpaid for a whole bunch of contracts as the media
• 2:18:03
  business was rapidly changing and they were realizing that the world was never going to
• 2:18:09
  be the same, that our business model is in grave jeopardy, and that
• 2:18:13
  these were contracts based upon a reality that no longer existed. And when I
• 2:18:20
  look back at twenty fifteen, I use twenty fifteen, because at this time
• 2:18:24
  period, just two years before the Meet Too Panic Hits, NBC had a
• 2:18:30
  stable of live content stars. They I think we're all very, very talented,
• 2:18:39
  and I don't think you could even argue that. In twenty fifteen,
• 2:18:41
  the names I'm about to give you were the most important live content stars on
• 2:18:48
  the entire NBC network, and they were as follows, Matt Lower, Brian
• 2:18:54
  Williams, Chris Matthews, Bob Costas, Almke and Johnny Miller, the golf
• 2:19:01
  announcer. I think it can make a very strong argument, and put Jay
• 2:19:05
  Leno in there too. Put Jay Leno in there too as the host of
• 2:19:09
  the night show. In twenty fifteen, those were the stars at NBC.
• 2:19:15
  Loward, Williams, Matthews, Costas, Michaels, Miller, and Leno.
• 2:19:18
  Now what do they all have in common? All straight white males with big
• 2:19:24
  contracts who were on the downslide of their careers to various degrees. Within a
• 2:19:31
  few years, within a few years, all of them were gone, all
• 2:19:37
  of them, none of them under perfect circumstances. Now, they were all
• 2:19:41
  gotten rid of in various ways. You know, some of them got semi
• 2:19:46
  soft landings, retirements, but most of them went in very awful ways.
• 2:19:52
  They were all just jettisoned. And I don't think that's a coincidence. That's
• 2:19:56
  too many to be a coincidence. That's a philosophy, that's a strategy.
• 2:20:03
  Let's get rid of all our straight white males with big contracts because we need
• 2:20:07
  to change the entire culture of the network. We're too much straight white male.
• 2:20:16
  We need to add color, we need to add you know, females.
• 2:20:20
  We need to get rid of big contracts. And so this again,
• 2:20:24
  I doubt there was ever a memo at NBC that this happened. But you
• 2:20:28
  can't tell me that that can happen in such a short period of time and
• 2:20:31
  all be a coincidence. And Lower was an incredibly important domino to fall there,
• 2:20:37
  because once you get rid of Matt Lower, then by god, you
• 2:20:41
  know what one of the biggest impacts of getting rid of Matt Lower is if
• 2:20:45
  you're NBC, is that now all of a sudden, every single other star
• 2:20:50
  you have in your stable is scared out of their mind and they're going to
• 2:20:54
  do whatever you say. Because now nobody's sacred. Anything can happen to anybody.
• 2:21:01
  And so that increases dramatically the control that the network bosses have, and
• 2:21:07
  it also, by the way, makes you have a great deal of negotiating
• 2:21:13
  leverage in the future, because no one's bigger than the network. I've talked
• 2:21:18
  before about how ESPN has basically started this philosophy of no stars. Well,
• 2:21:24
  that's essentially what all the networks have adopted to a certain degree. The stars
• 2:21:30
  aren't worth it, they're not worth the money, they're not worth the hassle,
• 2:21:33
  So get rid of them. And there's nothing that corporate executives like more
• 2:21:39
  than sticking it to the stars on air, because they're incredibly jealous of them
• 2:21:43
  by and large, and so I think it's very obvious that NBC saw an
• 2:21:50
  opportunity here to get rid of Matt Lower very quickly and easily get themselves a
• 2:21:54
  me too scalp. By the way, Matt has never even contested his contract
• 2:22:01
  being violated. He just accepted it and you know, like a big boy,
• 2:22:05
  and went his separate ways and never filed a lawsuit against NBC, which
• 2:22:09
  I think he actually would have had a very strong lawsuit against NBC, especially
• 2:22:15
  given what I just told you about this. This entire cadre of straight white
• 2:22:20
  males who all got bounced at basically the same time at NBC. And so
• 2:22:28
  you know, Matt has gone on is and tried to be a good dad
• 2:22:33
  and rectify the mistakes that he's made, and I actually considered to be one
• 2:22:39
  of the happiest people I know. But the most important part of this whole
• 2:22:43
  thing is he didn't rape anybody. The story that Ronan Pharaoh told is bullshit,
• 2:22:50
  and I am more convinced than ever that and Pharaoh basically admits this.
• 2:22:56
  He admits that in conversations he had with Nevill's that she came to believe in
• 2:23:03
  hindsight. In hindsight, this is a quote. In hindsight, her sexual
• 2:23:09
  interaction with Lauer was one of violence, even though she kept having an affair
• 2:23:13
  with him when they returned to the United States, even in his own dressing
• 2:23:18
  room. It's bullshit. It didn't happen. It was a manipulation by Ronan
• 2:23:26
  Pharaoh who needed a headline for his new book. And I urge you if
• 2:23:33
  you're all interested in this, because I've done an enormous amount of reporting on
• 2:23:35
  this for Mediaite, and I'd like you to read what Matt wrote as well
• 2:23:39
  for Mediaite. Just google those names, Matt Lower, Ronan Pharaoh, mediaite,
• 2:23:46
  John Zigler, whatever, It'll all come up, because it's a fascinating
• 2:23:50
  tale of how it is this Mira media hero who has enormous influence to this
• 2:23:56
  day. Ronan Farah is a fraud who who reports lies that are accepted now
• 2:24:03
  as gospel truth by the news media. Now, in the years since this
• 2:24:07
  has all gone down, there's been at least one subtle effort by a major
• 2:24:15
  media outlet to kind of come to Matt Lower's defense, and that is The
• 2:24:20
  Morning Show on Apple TV. This is a show that stars Reese Witherspoon and
• 2:24:26
  Jennifer Aniston and had clearly, in at least in his first two seasons,
• 2:24:33
  Steve Carrell play what was obviously the Matt Lower character. If you never watched
• 2:24:39
  The Morning Show, the only reason I did was because I knew Steve Carrell
• 2:24:43
  was playing the Matt Lower character, and I kept watching it not just because
• 2:24:48
  it was somewhat interesting to see how they dealt with Matt Lower through Steve Carrell,
• 2:24:54
  but because literally I was Matt Lower's only source of information on the Morning
• 2:24:58
  Show. I'm not making this up. Matt has never watched an episode of
• 2:25:03
  the Morning Show, and all he knows of it, to my knowledge,
• 2:25:07
  is from me, which people probably don't even believe. Right, how could
• 2:25:13
  you not watch a TV show that's clearly about you, or how could other
• 2:25:16
  people close to you not mention it to you? I'm telling you this has
• 2:25:20
  been my experience with people who are in a bubble, especially famous people,
• 2:25:24
  throughout my entire career. I can't tell you how many times I've been in
• 2:25:30
  situations where I have told people people like Sarah Palin or the Sandusky's or other
• 2:25:37
  prominent people that I've been involved with, Reno, Suckoch and Steubenville. So
• 2:25:41
  many times where I have told people who are in these bubbles things that are
• 2:25:46
  happening, major things that are happening publicly on national television that they have no
• 2:25:52
  idea of. And Matt's really not that even interested in it. He's mildly
• 2:25:56
  interested only when you know, I can tell him something funny that's happened with
• 2:26:01
  regard to the Steve Carrell character. By the way, they killed off the
• 2:26:05
  Steve Corral character. And so I stopped watching the show at that point because
• 2:26:11
  my friend Matt Law was not involved anymore. And I never really thought the
• 2:26:15
  show was that great to begin with. There are so many things that Matt
• 2:26:18
  and I have talked about obviously over the years, with hundreds of hours of
• 2:26:22
  phone conversations and several meetings. We've played golf together three different times, and
• 2:26:30
  I'm struggling here as to what I can say and what I can't say.
• 2:26:33
  The one area that I would really love to talk about that I don't feel
• 2:26:39
  comfortable talking about, and it's entirely deals with stories that Matt has told me
• 2:26:43
  about his celebrity friends and how they have reacted to what happened to him.
• 2:26:48
  Now. I want to be clear here. People would be surprised not just
• 2:26:52
  about how close he is to his kids and vice versa, but also how
• 2:26:58
  well connected Matt still is in the media industry. Matt is exceedingly well connected
• 2:27:05
  to some very powerful people, and he's still part of what I call the
• 2:27:09
  Hampton's media mafia, which is a real thing. I've seen it firsthand having
• 2:27:13
  visited Matt in the Hamptons a couple times now. There really is a Hampton's
• 2:27:18
  media mafia, and Matt's still very much a part of that. But as
• 2:27:22
  you might imagine, there were a lot of big celebrities who did not do
• 2:27:28
  themselves any favors and really kind of showed who they really are when it comes
• 2:27:31
  to their reaction to Matt. I'm not going to leave it at that.
• 2:27:35
  And the two people that I lost the most respectful, not that I had
• 2:27:39
  a lot of respect for either of them, especially given the way one of
• 2:27:41
  them handled COVID, But I never really liked either of these two people to
• 2:27:46
  begin with, but now I have great disdain for them based upon my conversations
• 2:27:50
  with Matt. Lower are Katie Kuric is former Today's Show co host, and
• 2:27:56
  Howard Stern. And I would actually put Stern at the top of that list.
• 2:28:03
  I believe Howard Stern to be a really horrible, demented person, I
• 2:28:09
  don't even want to say human being. I have enormous disdain for Howard Stern
• 2:28:16
  and I think something is very wrong with Howard Stern. And maybe COVID played
• 2:28:22
  a role in that. I don't know, because he's clearly gone off the
• 2:28:26
  deep end when it came to his reaction to COVID, and he's the exact
• 2:28:28
  opposite of everything that made him famous to begin with. But I'll just leave
• 2:28:33
  it at that. I do not like Howard Stern nor Katie Kirk based upon
• 2:28:39
  what I've learned about this situation involving Matt Lower. But you know, Matt,
• 2:28:46
  in my view, imperfect person. We all are. It's a shame
• 2:28:52
  he's no longer on television because he was a great interviewer. I think TV
• 2:28:56
  and news have suffered because of that. But I think he's a good guy.
• 2:29:03
  I have a daughter now eleven, Grace, fifth grade, who is
• 2:29:09
  obsessed with celebrity, and this was a couple of years ago. This would
• 2:29:13
  have been I guess two years ago. You know, Matt was coming here
• 2:29:20
  and we were going to play golf, and I asked him to have lunch
• 2:29:24
  with my wife and daughter because Grace knew Matt used to watch Matt when he
• 2:29:28
  was on the Today Show when she was a very little girl. But the
• 2:29:31
  main thing that I was thinking about was this was kind of stupid on my
• 2:29:35
  part, but it was well intentioned, typical of me. The main thing
• 2:29:39
  I wanted was I wanted Matt to tell Grace about his experience with celebrities to
• 2:29:48
  try maybe to dissuade her from being so obsessed with celebrity. This was one
• 2:29:54
  of those ideas that was better in theory than it was in practice. So
• 2:30:00
  I just asked Matt I met at some point during our lunch with Grace and
• 2:30:07
  Alison. I know Grace is going to ask you a bunch of questions,
• 2:30:11
  but can you just give her kind of the rundown on your experience with celebrity
• 2:30:20
  and why it might not be something that you know she should value so much.
• 2:30:24
  And he said, sure, no problem. And so sure enough Grace
• 2:30:28
  asks a very good question about celebrity, and I thought Matt knocked it out
• 2:30:33
  of the part. I was very happy with the way that Matt had handled
• 2:30:39
  Grace on this, and I thought, maybe, just maybe that he had
• 2:30:43
  made an impact, you know, because he was basically the first big celebrity
• 2:30:48
  that Grace had ever met. I thought that he had made an impact with
• 2:30:52
  Grace. Well, it turns out that it had exactly the opposite effect.
• 2:30:56
  And in fact, in the years since, Grace is actually mocked me for
• 2:31:01
  thinking that I could have Matt Lauer dissuade her from liking celebrity. I think
• 2:31:07
  in her mind or her words, she has said to me, So,
• 2:31:11
  Dad, you decided it was a good idea to take a guy who has
• 2:31:18
  two boats and a massive ranch in New Zealand and millions of dollars and famous
• 2:31:26
  friends to tell me just how bad celebrity is. It's almost a direct quote
• 2:31:31
  from Chriscet. I thought, Okay, you know what, maybe that wasn't
• 2:31:35
  as great an idea as I thought it was, So it wasn't effective.
• 2:31:39
  But the important part is that from the standpoint of who Matt Lower is as
• 2:31:43
  a person, he did a great job with it, and I appreciated that
• 2:31:48
  and so and I've also appreciated the way that Matt has handled this this personal
• 2:31:54
  situation I've been going through for basically the last two years that I alluded to
• 2:32:00
  in great detail in episode number one hundred of this podcast, where I've had
• 2:32:03
  this situation hanging over my head, where I've been told that my life is
• 2:32:09
  going to change dramatically, and yet there's no evidence that that's actually going to
• 2:32:13
  happen. That I'm going to get this amazing job in the major media.
• 2:32:18
  I don't believe that's going to occur, and that's partially why I've decided we're
• 2:32:22
  going to end this podcast sometime early next year. But Matt, who has
• 2:32:28
  a very strong connection theoretically and probably in five minutes could find out what really
• 2:32:33
  has been going on here, and I have not asked him to do that.
• 2:32:37
  In fact, I've asked him not to do that for various reasons that
• 2:32:41
  maybe I can talk about in the future. But Matt has been spectacular,
• 2:32:46
  spectacular throughout this entire process. I don't know that I could have made it
• 2:32:50
  through the last almost two years of this insanity without Matt Lauer. He has
• 2:32:56
  been exceedingly supportive. He's almost as interested. He's more interested in the situation
• 2:33:03
  than my wife is. My wife doesn't want to talk about it at all,
• 2:33:05
  for understandable reasons, but Matt finds the whole thing fascinating. In fact,
• 2:33:11
  he's even volunteered to play a role in the movie if anyone ever makes
• 2:33:16
  a movie about this in incredibly insane situation I've been dealing with, which I
• 2:33:20
  doubt'll ever happened, but it would make a hell of a movie. But
• 2:33:24
  you know, look, I consider Matt to be a friend. He's an
• 2:33:26
  imperfect guy. He's a sweet guy. He's a funny guy. I wish
• 2:33:31
  he was still on television. He's not a rapist. He made a lot
• 2:33:37
  of mistakes in his marriage. He suffered for them greatly, but he has
• 2:33:41
  handled that adversity better than anybody else I'm aware of who has ever been canceled,
• 2:33:46
  certainly at his level. I've talked before about how I met Jimmy the
• 2:33:50
  Greek Snyder just before he died, who had gotten canceled in pretty much as
• 2:33:56
  dramatic a way as Matt Lower did when he was a huge presence on CBS's
• 2:34:01
  sports coverage for the NFL in the nineteen seventies and nineteen eighties until he made
• 2:34:07
  a rather innocent comment that got deemed to be racist, and that whole situation
• 2:34:11
  destroyed Jimmy the Greek in every possible way, destroyed him at his core,
• 2:34:18
  and the exact opposite has happened with Matt Lawer. Matt Lauwer is a very
• 2:34:22
  happy guy, probably the happiest person I know, and I respect the hell
• 2:34:26
  for how he has been able to handle this adversity, because going from that
• 2:34:31
  level of celebrity to being completely canceled cannot be easy, especially when you got
• 2:34:37
  a family with three young kids and it's all as public as it has been,
• 2:34:41
  So I have a lot of respect for how he's been able to handle
• 2:34:45
  that. So that is as I'm trying to get these stories on the record
• 2:34:48
  before we end the podcast. That is the essence of my history with Matt
• 2:34:54
  Lower. I find it interesting. I'm sure there are people who probably have
• 2:34:58
  been thinking I'm exact reading this situation. If anything, I think I've been
• 2:35:03
  under selling it, because it really is a remarkable situation, and I do
• 2:35:07
  think it tells you an awful lot about the news media. If nothing else,
• 2:35:11
  it tells you what a fraud Ronan Farrow is. That's for damn sure.
• 2:35:13
  Maybe that's the headline of this whole situation. Now. In the next
• 2:35:18
  episode of the podcast, we will be reviewing what happens in the Gavin newsom
• 2:35:22
  Ron de Sandist Sean Hannity debate, and we will also be having an interview
• 2:35:28
  with Stuart Stevens, who is a very interesting guy. This is an interview
• 2:35:33
  I've already taped you're not gonna want to miss because he's a longtime Republican political
• 2:35:37
  consultant who's now a part of the Lincoln Project and has a new book out,
• 2:35:41
  and he and I like each other and have respect for each other.
• 2:35:45
  But boy, oh boy, fireworks go off in this particular interview, especially
• 2:35:50
  when it comes to the issue of how many people who are in the anti
• 2:35:58
  Trump quote unquote conserve tribe. I don't even think their conservatives anymore, have
• 2:36:03
  actually now become everything that they despise, and he and I go at it
• 2:36:07
  pretty good, So make sure you listen to that. That's coming up in
• 2:36:11
  episode number one hundred and nine. Until then, thanks so much for listening.
• 2:36:15
  Please share this podcast with other social share it on social media. Please
• 2:36:20
  tag me and I'll share it as well. Until then, my name is
• 2:36:22
  John Zickler. This has been episode number one hundred and eight of the Death
• 2:36:26
  of Journalism podcast