Latest / The Chuck ToddCast / Full Episode - Chuck’s Experience At The Correspondents’ Dinner Shooting + America Is A Tinderbox… In More Ways Than One

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Full Episode - Chuck’s Experience At The Correspondents’ Dinner Shooting + America Is A Tinderbox… In More Ways Than One · The Chuck ToddCast

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1:46
Speaker 2: Well.
1:46
Speaker 1: Happy Monday, and welcome to another episode of the Chuck Podcast.
1:52
Speaker 1: Needless to say, what what I thought I was going
1:56
Speaker 1: to be focusing on with this episode has changed quite
1:59
Speaker 1: a bit, But let me give you a quick rundown. Look.
2:01
Speaker 1: I'm going to give you my first hand account of
2:03
Speaker 1: what happened at the White House. Correspondence dinner from my
2:06
Speaker 1: point of view, Yes, I attended as a guest of
2:09
Speaker 1: National journal I will literally share all the details on
2:14
Speaker 1: that and then take a step back and just sort
2:16
Speaker 1: of talk about this moment that we're living in politically
2:19
Speaker 1: basically through my through my political anthropologist glasses here, because
2:26
Speaker 1: I think, you know, there's no doubt that we don't
2:29
Speaker 1: have the political leaders to deal with the moment that
2:31
Speaker 1: we need to be dealing with at the moment. So
2:33
Speaker 1: and I will get into all of that, but we
2:35
Speaker 1: just this is a this is this is the worst
2:38
Speaker 1: set of political leaders that we could have to meet
2:41
Speaker 1: the moment that we need, which is why we need clearly,
2:45
Speaker 1: we need new leadership in this country collectively. And this
2:49
Speaker 1: is across the board, left, right, center, et cetera. We
2:52
Speaker 1: will get I will get into that. My interview today
2:55
Speaker 1: is actually with a meteorologist that the cheap one of
3:00
Speaker 1: the senior meteorologists that works for an incredible news resource
3:07
Speaker 1: called watch Duty, which monitors wildfires around the country basically
3:10
Speaker 1: trying to get better data out there for newspeople, local
3:15
Speaker 1: news all over. And it's a fascinating conversation about where
3:21
Speaker 1: we're at the technology that's necessary, how hard it is
3:24
Speaker 1: to prepare for wildfires, and frankly, I don't think we
3:28
Speaker 1: fully appreciate just how bad it could be out west
3:31
Speaker 1: in general. But here's the deal with wildfires. This isn't
3:34
Speaker 1: just a California issue. This is an issue that is
3:38
Speaker 1: in more than a dozen states at right at this
3:40
Speaker 1: moment as you're listening. So it's a and Pete just
3:46
Speaker 1: want to you know. This isn't an eat your vegetables
3:48
Speaker 1: though interview. Pete is just a tremendous, tremendous character. Frankly
3:55
Speaker 1: started as a firefighter, went to school's meteorologist. It just
3:59
Speaker 1: his stories interesting. It is definitely worth your time. Of course,
4:02
Speaker 1: this is Monday, which means I have a new time
4:04
Speaker 1: Machine segment and we are we are going back to
4:13
Speaker 1: a story that would eventually help create the name for
4:21
Speaker 1: one of the most popular bands of my generation. So
4:25
Speaker 1: there's your clue. There's your clue to what historical event
4:30
Speaker 1: I will be taking a deep dive in with the
4:32
Speaker 1: time Machine this week, and of course we will do
4:34
Speaker 1: questions from you, and yes, despite the events of the weekend,
4:40
Speaker 1: I do have a few thoughts in my compartmentalized brain
4:44
Speaker 1: on sports, the draft and all things from there. But look,
4:48
Speaker 1: let me start with I figure the best thing I
4:51
Speaker 1: can do is just sort of take you through, take
4:56
Speaker 1: you through what I did with dinner, and it really
5:03
Speaker 1: my evening begins at six pm Eastern time. I'm walking
5:07
Speaker 1: out of the house, and just to give you a
5:10
Speaker 1: full picture, I had planned to go to the after party.
5:12
Speaker 1: My friends at ms now had invited. My wife and
5:15
Speaker 1: I did the after party, there after party, and we
5:17
Speaker 1: were planning to attend. I was attending the dinner itself
5:23
Speaker 1: as a guest of National Journal. I've been doing a
5:24
Speaker 1: lot of work with them lately. National Journal, for many
5:27
Speaker 1: of you know, as my former is a former employer
5:29
Speaker 1: of mine, I've been we've been doing doing some brainstorming
5:35
Speaker 1: together and we're we're in this collective world. And so
5:39
Speaker 1: that's that's why I was attending. That's the that's who
5:42
Speaker 1: whose guest I was. My wife was going to meet.
5:46
Speaker 1: She did this was one ticket, so she was gonna
5:48
Speaker 1: we were gonna meet essentially at the at the after
5:53
Speaker 1: party about eleven PM. And as I'm leaving the house
5:57
Speaker 1: in the uber at six pm, I turned to my
5:59
Speaker 1: wife and I I hope I'm not making a mistake
6:02
Speaker 1: and What did I mean by that? Right, I just
6:05
Speaker 1: said it out loud, and I had a lot of
6:07
Speaker 1: sort of trepidation about going. I hadn't been to the
6:12
Speaker 1: dinner in probably four or five years. I used to frankly,
6:16
Speaker 1: when I had a job on Sunday morning. Some of
6:18
Speaker 1: you might might know, so I had stopped doing these
6:21
Speaker 1: Saturday night dinners. Sometimes I would go for basically like
6:23
Speaker 1: the first hour and leave early, frankly, just to get
6:27
Speaker 1: a tiny bit of rest before the next morning. Sometimes
6:29
Speaker 1: I didn't go at all. It just, you know, it
6:32
Speaker 1: just it's just a it can be. It's a it's
6:37
Speaker 1: a I used to joke with when I was in
6:40
Speaker 1: my twenties the dinner was fun, when by my forties
6:44
Speaker 1: it became work. But I was going, look, I'm doing
6:48
Speaker 1: a lot more in the media entrepreneur space, and this
6:50
Speaker 1: is a so there's certainly a lot of interesting people
6:55
Speaker 1: that I am working with I'd like to be working with,
6:57
Speaker 1: and I thought this would be as good of a
6:59
Speaker 1: time as any to connect with some people. But I
7:02
Speaker 1: knew that there was going to be a lot of protests.
7:03
Speaker 1: I knew there was going to be a lot of tension,
7:08
Speaker 1: and so when I said that to my wife. She
7:10
Speaker 1: was like, why did you know? She sort of haunted
7:13
Speaker 1: her as I laughed. And then of course we all
7:15
Speaker 1: thought about it a lot after the incident itself. And
7:19
Speaker 1: I'm not going to sit here and say I thought
7:21
Speaker 1: violence was going to happen. You know, I didn't know
7:23
Speaker 1: if it was going to be just you know, was
7:25
Speaker 1: I walking into something that I didn't really want to
7:28
Speaker 1: be a part of. It is probably a better way
7:30
Speaker 1: to describe it, right, I think I told you, I
7:35
Speaker 1: think I expressed earlier. I thought all the Look, this
7:38
Speaker 1: is one thing people need to understand. This is not
7:40
Speaker 1: the president's event. This is the This is the White
7:43
Speaker 1: House Press Association's event. He is an invited guest. It
7:46
Speaker 1: is tradition to invite the president, hardstop. He chose to
7:49
Speaker 1: come for the first time. This is not his event.
7:51
Speaker 1: And this is an important point because this is not
7:53
Speaker 1: an event to be held at the White House. If
7:55
Speaker 1: he doesn't feel comfortable coming, then he doesn't come, right.
7:57
Speaker 1: This is a trade associatiation event for White House Press,
8:00
Speaker 1: for members of the White House Press Corps. At the
8:03
Speaker 1: end of the day, so I sort of I've found
8:06
Speaker 1: the sort of hand ringing about you know whether press
8:10
Speaker 1: should attend or not. This is not the president's dinner. Look,
8:13
Speaker 1: everybody made their individual decisions about who they invite, right
8:17
Speaker 1: and that's a different decision. And you can hold individual
8:21
Speaker 1: organizations accountable for who they choose to invite or not.
8:23
Speaker 1: But at the end of the day, we're journalists and
8:26
Speaker 1: I just wanted a story. You have to have good
8:29
Speaker 1: sources in order to report, period, And so I understood
8:36
Speaker 1: the criticism of those that say, oh, don't give them
8:38
Speaker 1: a platform, don't do this, don't do that. At the
8:41
Speaker 1: end of the day, it was his choice to come,
8:43
Speaker 1: and you know, the press can. To me, a good
8:49
Speaker 1: journalist should be able to handle handle that situation and
8:54
Speaker 1: should be comfortable going in. You don't, you know, nobody's
8:57
Speaker 1: asking you to become a maggot cheerleader or a left
8:59
Speaker 1: wing activists. If you're going there to be an activist,
9:03
Speaker 1: don't go right that. You know, if if you're if
9:06
Speaker 1: you're more interested in in in being an activist, then
9:09
Speaker 1: you shouldn't have gone. But look, I'm not I you know,
9:12
Speaker 1: I thought all of that was overrated on that front.
9:15
Speaker 1: So but I you know, I wasn't. I knew the
9:21
Speaker 1: protests were going to be large, and I've certainly been
9:23
Speaker 1: to that hotel so many times. I knew that there
9:26
Speaker 1: were alternative ways to get into the hotel, so I
9:30
Speaker 1: was very careful where I had the Uber drop off.
9:33
Speaker 1: In fact, I knew I was going to decided I
9:35
Speaker 1: was going to basically, for those of you familiar with
9:37
Speaker 1: the Hilton, go in the back way, go in the
9:39
Speaker 1: other you know, don't come in on Connecticut Avenue. I
9:44
Speaker 1: basically came in behind sort of between. Essentially it's dropped
9:49
Speaker 1: off not quite at the corner of Florida Avenue and
9:52
Speaker 1: in Columbia excuse me, an eighteenth but close ish. It's
9:58
Speaker 1: basically like nineteenth Florida. Because I knew I could walk
10:02
Speaker 1: now with those terrible tuck shoes, I even double socked,
10:07
Speaker 1: knowing I was probably going to be walking more than
10:09
Speaker 1: usual in order to Little did I know how much
10:11
Speaker 1: I was going to end up walking. After the event,
10:14
Speaker 1: says it was so look, I was pretty you know,
10:17
Speaker 1: I get dropped off by the Uber, walk in, get
10:20
Speaker 1: in the essentially the back way, without without going through
10:23
Speaker 1: any of that protest or stuff that was taking place,
10:27
Speaker 1: which was on the other side of the hotel, which
10:30
Speaker 1: is Basically it where Florida in Connecticut come together, which
10:34
Speaker 1: is essentially where the Hilton Washington Hilton is. And if
10:40
Speaker 1: you're wondering and getting into the Hilton, you know there
10:42
Speaker 1: is no magnetometer to get into the hotel itself. This
10:48
Speaker 1: is Look, there's a reason why this dinner is always
10:51
Speaker 1: held at this hotel. They have a unique situation where
10:53
Speaker 1: you really can take the ballroom sections and essentially secure
10:58
Speaker 1: it away from everything else, which is what they have done.
11:02
Speaker 1: In my experience, I've been going to these dinners. I
11:05
Speaker 1: think the first one I went to was probably in
11:06
Speaker 1: nineteen ninety five, nineteen ninety six, something like that, and
11:10
Speaker 1: it is it is. You know, this is why there's
11:14
Speaker 1: been chatter about moving it to the convention Center or
11:16
Speaker 1: moving it to some other places. But this really is
11:18
Speaker 1: sort of a unique ballroom. You know, every comedian has
11:21
Speaker 1: come in. I can't believe this is at a Hilton,
11:23
Speaker 1: like sort of mocking the idea that it's at a Hilton.
11:25
Speaker 1: No offense to my friends at Hilton, but it's always
11:27
Speaker 1: been kind of a bud of jokes that this fancy
11:29
Speaker 1: black tie dinner is at a Hilton, but this ballroom
11:33
Speaker 1: setup is an incredibly unique setup. After the Reagan assassination attempt,
11:37
Speaker 1: they even created more secure areas. They basically it. They
11:44
Speaker 1: they have some of the easiest ways for a highly
11:48
Speaker 1: secure individual to be brought in and out of the hotel,
11:51
Speaker 1: more so than really any other hotel in the city,
11:54
Speaker 1: especially with a ballroom like that of that size that
11:57
Speaker 1: they can do. So it is, it is why it's there,
12:03
Speaker 1: and they've always the hotel itself has always sort of
12:05
Speaker 1: been divided like that. When this dinner is here, so
12:09
Speaker 1: you can just like walk into the lobby, which is
12:11
Speaker 1: where I went. You just go into the lobby, and
12:13
Speaker 1: I was going to the pre cocktail parties National Journal's
12:16
Speaker 1: cocktail party to go most a lot of times, if
12:19
Speaker 1: you're an invited guests, that's how you pick up your ticket,
12:21
Speaker 1: is you go to your sponsoring organizations pre pre dinner event.
12:27
Speaker 1: It's sort of been what a lot of news organizations do.
12:32
Speaker 1: So so you ignore all that. And it was you know,
12:37
Speaker 1: you could tell, I mean it was pretty heavy the protesters.
12:39
Speaker 1: The rain probably made it. It was did I bring
12:42
Speaker 1: up it was raining at that point in time, So
12:45
Speaker 1: everybody is sort of you know there with your hairdos
12:47
Speaker 1: and stuff like that on that front. So we get
12:51
Speaker 1: into the dinner and it's the usual. Everybody is mag
12:54
Speaker 1: that you before you can get to even the ballroom area,
12:58
Speaker 1: there is a set of magnetometers that everybody goes through
13:01
Speaker 1: and essentially just about everybody not You'll not only go
13:06
Speaker 1: through a magnetometer, but if there's anything that pops up
13:09
Speaker 1: in the magnetometer, you get one. You get the wand
13:13
Speaker 1: and it's pretty If you've ever been to any presidential events,
13:17
Speaker 1: it's very similar to that. It's if you've ever been
13:22
Speaker 1: to even a sporting event where the president was going
13:24
Speaker 1: to be there, you'll notice it. Sometimes there's a little
13:26
Speaker 1: bit more extra security. You go through magnetometers and there's
13:29
Speaker 1: a person wanding. This was the same setup. And then
13:34
Speaker 1: the dinner itself you go down a set of staircases,
13:38
Speaker 1: yet another sent it's sort of almost like a sunken
13:40
Speaker 1: You come in at one level and the ball room
13:42
Speaker 1: itself is like further down, and you walk down it's
13:46
Speaker 1: two sets two flights of stairs. This is important because
13:51
Speaker 1: I don't the attacker, the gunman did not get even
13:55
Speaker 1: down one flight of those stairs. It's two flights of
13:58
Speaker 1: stairs to get into the ballroom area. Itself. So we're
14:04
Speaker 1: in the ballroom, they serve, they're serving the salad first,
14:08
Speaker 1: and everybody was done with a salad. And the timing
14:12
Speaker 1: I was fascinating because it's so the shots ring out
14:18
Speaker 1: right about one minute after the There was probably two
14:22
Speaker 1: hundredweight staff that all came out at the exact same time.
14:27
Speaker 1: This was sort of a bit of an orchestration, and
14:29
Speaker 1: it's almost it's the server ballet, if you will, that
14:32
Speaker 1: we've we've it's always it's very impressive how it's done,
14:36
Speaker 1: where essentially every table is cleared and every table is
14:39
Speaker 1: served pretty much simultaneously. Right, It's an incredibly quick turnover.
14:44
Speaker 1: So you have this rush of people come out, so
14:47
Speaker 1: my initial thought. And then so this rush of people's
14:49
Speaker 1: coming out and you see and you know, the tables
14:52
Speaker 1: are all close together, and it's pretty crowded anyway because
14:55
Speaker 1: people are it's still early in the dinner, so there's
14:57
Speaker 1: still a little socializing. People are doing a little table
15:00
Speaker 1: hopping to see to catch up with people. You know,
15:03
Speaker 1: you might get a text. I'd gotten a text from
15:04
Speaker 1: a friend of mine. It was two tables over that
15:06
Speaker 1: I didn't see until after the incident itself. So so
15:09
Speaker 1: We're sitting at the dinner, everybody's finishing the salad, and
15:13
Speaker 1: you know, they just they had just finished the head
15:17
Speaker 1: table introductions. President of WIDLSE correspond Association basically said Okay,
15:22
Speaker 1: now we're gonna now we're going to serve dinner, so everybody.
15:25
Speaker 1: So it was actually gonna be a quick pause in
15:26
Speaker 1: the program. I think as far as timing events is
15:30
Speaker 1: the minute dinner was served that it was going to
15:33
Speaker 1: be pretty soon after that that we were going to
15:34
Speaker 1: hear from the president. So the rush of white staff
15:42
Speaker 1: floods the ballroom and it's about a minute later in
15:47
Speaker 1: my recollection that I hear you hear the pop, pop pop,
15:51
Speaker 1: And that's what I heard, pop pop pop, some of
15:53
Speaker 1: you saw. I did a preliminary Instagram last night that
15:56
Speaker 1: went on a few of my socials just to give
15:58
Speaker 1: you a quick sense of what I saw. So here
16:00
Speaker 1: this pop pop pop, And I was just be honest.
16:02
Speaker 1: At first, you know, you're not you don't expect to
16:06
Speaker 1: hear gunshots, and so you don't automatically assume that's what
16:09
Speaker 1: you heard, and I didn't. Within you know, it's sort
16:13
Speaker 1: of like within two seconds do you sort of realize Jesus,
16:16
Speaker 1: I think that was gunshots. But that like the first
16:19
Speaker 1: thing in my mind was, oh what just what accident
16:22
Speaker 1: just happened? I mean, as the President himself said, did
16:24
Speaker 1: somebody drop our tray? It just just felt like an accident,
16:27
Speaker 1: because again this is the case where your visuals in
16:31
Speaker 1: your audio can sometimes be in conflict. What were we
16:34
Speaker 1: all seeing. We were seeing this rush of people of
16:37
Speaker 1: white staff coming to essentially do this, do the appetizer
16:41
Speaker 1: plates clearing and the entree survey, and so that's in
16:46
Speaker 1: your head. So any noise you hear, I think automatically,
16:50
Speaker 1: you're just associating with what you see, and then you
16:53
Speaker 1: realize pop pop pop, And then somebody heard shots, and
16:57
Speaker 1: then you saw a whole bunch of people just drop
17:00
Speaker 1: to the ground, including all the white staff. I will
17:03
Speaker 1: confess I was a little slow getting to the ground.
17:05
Speaker 1: I was like continuing to just try to and even
17:09
Speaker 1: even when I knelt on the ground, my table mates
17:11
Speaker 1: were like, get down, and then I like poke my
17:14
Speaker 1: head up to try to get a sense because I
17:18
Speaker 1: was trying to. I generally heard where I I you know,
17:21
Speaker 1: where I heard Where I thought I heard the shots
17:23
Speaker 1: from turned out to be exactly where the shots came from,
17:25
Speaker 1: which is it felt like it was coming from behind
17:29
Speaker 1: the entrance to the ballroom, And the question was with
17:32
Speaker 1: these shots had fired in the ballroom, And it's now
17:34
Speaker 1: pretty obvious to me because of the why they weren't
17:37
Speaker 1: loud loud. They were loud enough to hear the pop,
17:39
Speaker 1: pop pop, But then you realize it was not in
17:42
Speaker 1: the ballroom, right, So everybody's just we're first looking around here,
17:45
Speaker 1: do we hear anybody screaming to you? Do you see
17:47
Speaker 1: any paramedics? And then you realize, Okay, nobody was shot
17:50
Speaker 1: in the ballroom. It was clearly coming from the quest
17:54
Speaker 1: At this point in time, I don't know whether it
17:57
Speaker 1: is right outside the doors where they come in, down
18:00
Speaker 1: those two flights of stairs I was talking about, or
18:03
Speaker 1: if it was further up the two flights of stairs,
18:05
Speaker 1: sort of where the magnetometers are before you go walk
18:09
Speaker 1: down after you've been cleared of security. And again, I'm
18:12
Speaker 1: just trying to put you in my shoes at this time.
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Speaker 1: And yes, I too, am a customer. Now. One of
19:57
Speaker 1: my witnessing is we're on the floor. There's a few things.
19:59
Speaker 1: One is a obviously you see you start to see
20:01
Speaker 1: a parade of security detail. First of all, there was
20:05
Speaker 1: security everywhere, and in fact, it's probably pretty clear that
20:09
Speaker 1: there were a handful of tables where they were undercover security. Right,
20:13
Speaker 1: there was just too many people in that room not
20:14
Speaker 1: to have something like that. You immediately see probably one
20:19
Speaker 1: hundred law enforcement throughout the ball room, me essentially just
20:23
Speaker 1: trying to clear everything, right. Everybody had guns drawn. They're
20:26
Speaker 1: trying to clear everything. And then you have these security details,
20:29
Speaker 1: and I think most of these people were associated with
20:32
Speaker 1: a security detail. I don't know this yet for a fact,
20:34
Speaker 1: but it seems that way because you'd start to see
20:37
Speaker 1: this parade first, you know, I think I saw hag
20:40
Speaker 1: Seth get escorted out. I saw Scott Bessant get escorted out.
20:44
Speaker 1: I saw Mike Johnson get escorted out. I saw Steve
20:47
Speaker 1: Scalise get escorted out. And so you started to see
20:51
Speaker 1: those folks getting escorted out. Then there's a lockdown in
20:54
Speaker 1: the room right as you might expect, as they're now
20:58
Speaker 1: in hindsight, it's because the the main entrance to the
21:01
Speaker 1: ballroom was a crime scene. So you know, I think
21:05
Speaker 1: they were trying to make a quick determination to see
21:08
Speaker 1: if this was some sort of conspiracy. I could tell
21:10
Speaker 1: you what I first thought is, oh, did this person
21:12
Speaker 1: come in with the weight staff? And then use that moment,
21:15
Speaker 1: you know, I probably watched too many movies, right, you know,
21:18
Speaker 1: you have too many movies in your head and you
21:19
Speaker 1: start thinking about different things. Although there's a there is
21:22
Speaker 1: a weird movie Life Imitates Art aspect to the uh
21:28
Speaker 1: the alleged assassin who apparently got a room in the hotel, which,
21:34
Speaker 1: by the way is a security loophole, which I'm going
21:36
Speaker 1: to get to in a minute. So at this point,
21:41
Speaker 1: everybody and it looks like we're sealed in and then
21:43
Speaker 1: you're then the question is and you know everybody's comfortably,
21:47
Speaker 1: you know, starts popping their head up, and we're all
21:49
Speaker 1: trying We're all trying to work, you know, I mean
21:52
Speaker 1: everybody you know is just trying to We're all trying
21:55
Speaker 1: to find out what happened. You have a room full
21:57
Speaker 1: of reporters plus self important people plus actually important people,
22:03
Speaker 1: and everybody want everybody wants to know what the hell
22:06
Speaker 1: is going on, and everybody's trying to figure out what's
22:07
Speaker 1: going on. And you know, at first, it's just simply
22:12
Speaker 1: everybody trading. Did you hear gunshots? What did you see?
22:16
Speaker 1: Did you see anything? Did anybody get hit? And that
22:18
Speaker 1: was just sort of the determination was there any in anything,
22:21
Speaker 1: anybody hurt within the ballroom? You know, trying to figure
22:24
Speaker 1: out if anybody had gotten in, you know, was it
22:26
Speaker 1: somebody who took a shot? You know, did the shots
22:30
Speaker 1: come into the ballroom? Right? And that is you know,
22:33
Speaker 1: now it's like I said, the sound was not loud
22:37
Speaker 1: enough to have been in the ballroom, which is why
22:39
Speaker 1: it wasn't one hundred percent convinced it was gunshots right away.
22:44
Speaker 1: Now I know exactly what I heard. I heard the
22:47
Speaker 1: gunshots based on behind closed doors two flights up, but
22:51
Speaker 1: within earshot of where we were right, So now I understand.
22:56
Speaker 1: Now I couldn't process why they were, you know, sort
22:59
Speaker 1: of heard, but not just dominant as far as the
23:07
Speaker 1: audio in that the audible nature of the South. So
23:12
Speaker 1: then they about it's pretty fast that they make the
23:16
Speaker 1: determination that they can open the doors. And then the
23:20
Speaker 1: minute they opened the doors, they decide it's let's evacuate,
23:25
Speaker 1: but they don't. They just basically encourage everybody to leave.
23:28
Speaker 1: I will be honest with you. When I saw that
23:30
Speaker 1: there was a door open and people were starting to
23:32
Speaker 1: trickle out before they made the announcement, I was like,
23:35
Speaker 1: first of all, you know, the table I was at,
23:39
Speaker 1: we sort of just in our own little like well,
23:42
Speaker 1: we all looked at each other. We toasted and we
23:45
Speaker 1: were like, well, we're never going to forget this dinner.
23:48
Speaker 1: And so it was just one of those things we
23:49
Speaker 1: all realized we sat there together and that we will
23:52
Speaker 1: never forget. I was sitting next to a woman named Nicole,
23:57
Speaker 1: who I knew a little bit through an old friend
24:02
Speaker 1: of mine back in the day of sitting next to
24:05
Speaker 1: another gentleman named Maduardo, who had not met before. But
24:08
Speaker 1: we're all we're all connected now, Jeff to four of
24:13
Speaker 1: National Journal, the editor in chief, was at the table.
24:16
Speaker 1: He did a fine update, by the way, on newsphere
24:19
Speaker 1: last night. I hope you caught that, so you have
24:23
Speaker 1: that sort of We did have that little bonding moment
24:25
Speaker 1: as a table, and I think other of my guesses,
24:27
Speaker 1: other tables did the same thing. It's this is such
24:29
Speaker 1: a real thing that you're with. And then it was
24:31
Speaker 1: sort of like, all right, good luck everybody. And at
24:37
Speaker 1: that point, I'm ready to evacuate, and it looks like
24:40
Speaker 1: everybody's going in one direction, and I'm like, if they
24:43
Speaker 1: really want us out of this building, you know. And
24:46
Speaker 1: finally one of the security folks says, look, go follow
24:49
Speaker 1: exit signs, and it was like, you don't have to
24:51
Speaker 1: tell me twice. So I end up going through the kitchen.
24:56
Speaker 1: At some point I was like just following around the
24:59
Speaker 1: hotel staff. Somebody recognized me, was really nice and basically
25:04
Speaker 1: help help me navigate through the kitchen. At that point
25:08
Speaker 1: I think I was there was just all sorts of
25:12
Speaker 1: security personnel back there, just sort of huddling, and I
25:16
Speaker 1: was kind of the first one through the doors, and
25:19
Speaker 1: there was clearly going to be a whole slew of
25:21
Speaker 1: people on me, and I ended up coming out of
25:23
Speaker 1: an exit of course that I've never been out before
25:26
Speaker 1: at the Hilton. So the hotel backs up against why
25:29
Speaker 1: I believe it's Wyoming I think it's Wyoming Avenue, sort
25:32
Speaker 1: of where T Street and Wyoming Avenue go behind it.
25:34
Speaker 1: And I end up there, and I just decided, all right,
25:36
Speaker 1: I'm going to walk as far away from the hotel
25:39
Speaker 1: as I can and go find an uber. So that's
25:42
Speaker 1: my plan. I walk up about a half a block
25:44
Speaker 1: and all you do is you start running into groups
25:47
Speaker 1: of people in tuxedos. Right and formal were all trying
25:52
Speaker 1: to debate what to do. Right are they're going to
25:54
Speaker 1: reopen the dinner? As far as I was concerned, I
25:57
Speaker 1: was done with the dinner. You know, this was not
26:02
Speaker 1: I was not going to be in the closed end event.
26:04
Speaker 1: I've been through enough of this. I've had enough death threats,
26:08
Speaker 1: and you know, my feeling is, I'm not getting very
26:10
Speaker 1: close anymore to to to that world until we sort
26:14
Speaker 1: of get to a better place as a country. But
26:17
Speaker 1: I'll get to that in a few minutes. And so
26:20
Speaker 1: I'm like, well, it may be hard to get a
26:23
Speaker 1: ride out of here if I stay too close to
26:24
Speaker 1: that area, so I'm walking. I ended up running into
26:28
Speaker 1: the Fetterments on the corner. I think it was at
26:31
Speaker 1: the time. I think we were on the corner of
26:33
Speaker 1: Columbia and Wyoming. As you know, John Fetterman is not
26:38
Speaker 1: hard to miss, and it was just him and his wife.
26:40
Speaker 1: They were on a corner, and so I went up.
26:43
Speaker 1: You know, he recognized me and he waved over, and
26:48
Speaker 1: he was they were looking. They had they had had
26:50
Speaker 1: a driver, which was not surprising. Many US senators do
26:53
Speaker 1: have somebody that they're you know, they get a driver
26:55
Speaker 1: for the night, or maybe it's a driver all the time.
26:57
Speaker 1: But that's so he was looking. They are looking for
27:00
Speaker 1: their ride. He, by the way, couldn't have been nicer.
27:03
Speaker 1: He was trying to he was trying to convince me,
27:05
Speaker 1: don't know, we can give you a ride. I'm like,
27:06
Speaker 1: I'm good, I'm gonna I'll walk up, walk up a
27:09
Speaker 1: couple more blocks, and I'm just gonna get home. I
27:12
Speaker 1: had suddenly I had my kids wondering what the hell
27:14
Speaker 1: was going on, and my wife was so at that point,
27:17
Speaker 1: I'm trying to keep them up to date. Everything's okay,
27:20
Speaker 1: I'm fine, you know, this is not about me. We're
27:23
Speaker 1: all good. And then it was in and in fact
27:29
Speaker 1: where I did. I filmed my video as I was
27:32
Speaker 1: waiting for my uber there at the corner of Columbia
27:35
Speaker 1: and Adams Mill is sort of as you're walking towards
27:38
Speaker 1: Woodley Park and that Woodley Park area. What's interesting is
27:43
Speaker 1: the uber driver picks me up and he goes, hey,
27:44
Speaker 1: were you at the dinner? What happened? And so he goes,
27:47
Speaker 1: I just listen to this eerie thing. He goes, I
27:50
Speaker 1: just dropped off an elderly woman who was going to
27:52
Speaker 1: the dinner who was telling me this whole story about
27:55
Speaker 1: being there when Reagan was shot. And it's just like
27:57
Speaker 1: and so he was just sort of processing his own
28:00
Speaker 1: that own sort of weirdness, if you will. So that
28:07
Speaker 1: was my that was my experience. I ended up getting
28:13
Speaker 1: home about ten o'clock, nine o'clock. We decided that, you know,
28:25
Speaker 1: I didn't care whether the after parties were on or not.
28:27
Speaker 1: It was like, you know, I think we're good, right,
28:31
Speaker 1: I'm not interested. The best now was going to be
28:33
Speaker 1: in the Dupat Circle underground. It's like, don't know if
28:36
Speaker 1: I want to be underground right in sort of a
28:38
Speaker 1: a guarded space like that a little bit, because we
28:42
Speaker 1: are I think we are living in a were we're
28:45
Speaker 1: living in a tinderbox, and that's and that's the thing. So, look,
28:50
Speaker 1: this is what it felt like being in that room, right,
28:52
Speaker 1: That's what it sounded like, and that's how fast it
28:54
Speaker 1: all happened, and so you know, that's that's the instinct
28:59
Speaker 1: I had last night, was simply to describe it and
29:04
Speaker 1: then perhaps start to move on, right, you know. Unfortunately
29:07
Speaker 1: we've become used to this. This is weirdly normal now,
29:13
Speaker 1: and if it were just an isolated event, I think
29:15
Speaker 1: it'd be easier to move on. But the truth is
29:18
Speaker 1: this doesn't feel isolated anymore. And the fact of the
29:22
Speaker 1: matter is we know we are living through something different.
29:26
Speaker 1: It's not just more political anger. We've had angry periods before,
29:33
Speaker 1: and it's not just more division. We've had that too.
29:38
Speaker 1: What feels different now is a growing comfort with the
29:40
Speaker 1: idea of violence. We're normalizing it, not just the act itself,
29:45
Speaker 1: but the idea that it just sort of, hey, it's
29:47
Speaker 1: a part of it. It's a part of politics. You
29:50
Speaker 1: just have to accept it. I'm not there, but we do.
29:56
Speaker 1: We have the willingness to imagine it. Now we have
29:59
Speaker 1: the willingness to to fire it, to talk about it
30:02
Speaker 1: as something that exists just one step away. That's what
30:06
Speaker 1: feels new. That's why before I walked out of the door,
30:10
Speaker 1: I wondered if I was making a mistake, not because
30:16
Speaker 1: of what the dinner could or should be. But we
30:21
Speaker 1: know we're living in We're not living in normal times.
30:25
Speaker 1: So I can tell you this from experience. I've covered
30:27
Speaker 1: politics for decades now, going back to the nineties, early
30:30
Speaker 1: nineties campaigns, presidencies, moments of real national tension. After nine
30:34
Speaker 1: to eleven, I worked in an office right across the
30:37
Speaker 1: street from the Saudi Embassy at the Watergate, and yet
30:42
Speaker 1: I've never dealt with anything like this, not in terms
30:46
Speaker 1: of threats, not in terms of the volume, and not
30:50
Speaker 1: in terms of the tone. That is, until about ten
30:54
Speaker 1: years ago. Sometime in twenty fifteen, things started to change
31:01
Speaker 1: the start of the Trump era. And once it started,
31:05
Speaker 1: and it didn't stay contained at first, it felt targeted
31:09
Speaker 1: in one direction. Right when my face was on the
31:13
Speaker 1: back of the pipe bombers van that they found in Miami,
31:19
Speaker 1: when I had FBI agents visiting me to let me
31:21
Speaker 1: know I was a target of this. Nobody in the administration,
31:25
Speaker 1: by the way, cared called any of these reporters at
31:27
Speaker 1: the time that I digressed. So then it felt targeted
31:34
Speaker 1: one direction. Then it spread, and now, let's be honest,
31:37
Speaker 1: it feels ambient. It's everywhere, like it's just a part
31:40
Speaker 1: of the environment, violence and politics going hand in hand.
31:45
Speaker 2: Not in America.
31:46
Speaker 1: That wasn't the way it was supposed to be in America.
31:50
Speaker 1: Now many people are asking did Donald Trump caused this?
31:57
Speaker 1: And I understand the instinct. I'm there's no doubt. I'm
32:01
Speaker 1: making the case that he's responsible for the era. But
32:05
Speaker 1: it is the wrong question because we can argue it forever.
32:11
Speaker 1: Supporters will say it's the rhetoric against him. We're already
32:13
Speaker 1: seeing that, right. There's this determination by his most devoted
32:17
Speaker 1: supporters to just say, Hey, the assassination's a leftist, this
32:21
Speaker 1: is the left, it's all the Democrats fault. Right critics
32:26
Speaker 1: of Trump will say, it's his rhetoric. This is the
32:29
Speaker 1: guy that introduced political violence and mainstreamed it. The point is,
32:33
Speaker 1: we're going to spin in this loop all day and
32:35
Speaker 1: we're not going to get anywhere. All we're going to
32:37
Speaker 1: do is foment more violence. It's not going to solve
32:41
Speaker 1: the problem, but that doesn't mean we can't identify it.
32:45
Speaker 1: How this got normalized. So that's the better question. We
32:48
Speaker 1: need to be asking what has been normalized and how
32:53
Speaker 1: are we going to get out of this? Because presidents
32:55
Speaker 1: don't just govern, they set the tone. They set the
33:00
Speaker 1: tone for the country. They define the boundaries of acceptable behavior.
33:07
Speaker 1: It is a choice to pardon violent extremists that attack
33:11
Speaker 1: the capital. That's a choice, and over the last decade
33:14
Speaker 1: these boundaries have shifted quite a bit. You can hear
33:17
Speaker 1: it in the rhetoric. Let's go back to the beginning.
33:20
Speaker 1: Donald trumpet rallies in twenty sixteen, talking about wanting to
33:24
Speaker 1: punch protesters, suggesting they should be carried out on stretchers,
33:28
Speaker 1: offering to pay the legal fees of anybody prosecuted for
33:32
Speaker 1: violent political violence on his behalf. At the time, it
33:35
Speaker 1: sounded like WWE inspired bullshit performance, right, crowd work if
33:42
Speaker 1: you will. But the language matters, right, Most people may
33:48
Speaker 1: hear it just as idle rhetoric innocent rhetoric, but not
33:53
Speaker 1: everybody because over time what starts his performance becomes a
33:58
Speaker 1: permission slip and then fast forward to just the last
34:02
Speaker 1: few months. After the death of Robert Muller, the President
34:06
Speaker 1: of the United States actually posted the following quote, Robert
34:10
Speaker 1: Muller just died good. I'm glad he's dead. That's not ambiguous.
34:19
Speaker 1: That's the President of the United States celebrating the death
34:22
Speaker 1: of somebody he believed was a political adversary. I say
34:26
Speaker 1: he believed because all Robert Muller wanted to do is
34:28
Speaker 1: to get to the frickin truth of what the Russians
34:31
Speaker 1: did and whether any Americans helped. Or how about earlier
34:38
Speaker 1: this year when he just posted a whole civilization will
34:41
Speaker 1: die tonight, never to be brought back again. It's not
34:46
Speaker 1: normal American political rhetoric. It's not normal political rhetoric period,
34:51
Speaker 1: but certainly not the behavior that we should expect from
34:55
Speaker 1: an American president. It's existential language, and even in moments
34:59
Speaker 1: of tragedy, mocking the death of someone like Rob Reiner,
35:04
Speaker 1: suggesting his death was somehow tied to his political views. Again,
35:09
Speaker 1: this is the president. This is the tone being set
35:11
Speaker 1: by the President of the United States. And there's another
35:16
Speaker 1: shift that's happened at the same time, and it's just
35:18
Speaker 1: as important, and it's this idea that politics is responsible
35:21
Speaker 1: for everything. If you're struggling, it's not your choices or circumstance,
35:28
Speaker 1: it's someone else's fault. It's a political grievance. Blame a politician,
35:32
Speaker 1: Blame a party, Blame the press. Because you can't look
35:36
Speaker 1: yourself in the mirror and realize you made bad decisions,
35:40
Speaker 1: you need someone else to blame. Donald Trump never does
35:43
Speaker 1: self reflex, always has to blame someone else. And once
35:47
Speaker 1: you start to believe that, once you internalize this idea
35:50
Speaker 1: that your problems are caused by all these other people,
35:55
Speaker 1: you're not that far from believing they should pay for it.
36:03
Speaker 1: And then you hear something just bizarre, like we heard
36:06
Speaker 1: last night after this incident, when the president chose to
36:08
Speaker 1: have a press conference and then president was asked whether
36:11
Speaker 1: he was the intended target And part of the answer
36:15
Speaker 1: is this idea that he basically said, well, only the
36:19
Speaker 1: great presidents, the great ones, as he said it, have
36:23
Speaker 1: to deal with this. Lincoln Kennedy, he viewed being targeted
36:29
Speaker 1: as kind of a validation, a badge of honor, huh,
36:36
Speaker 1: implying that if you didn't get if you're a president
36:40
Speaker 1: that wasn't targeted for assassination like he's been. Then you're
36:45
Speaker 1: not a successful president. You're not trying to do big things.
36:51
Speaker 1: Think about all this for a second. Is that de
36:53
Speaker 1: escalation that's reframing something dangerous and Unamerican as somehow proof
37:00
Speaker 1: of greatness, turning risk into mythology. This is something we
37:08
Speaker 1: should all be concerned about because if he's basically resigned
37:13
Speaker 1: himself to be martyred, well, then no wonder he took
37:18
Speaker 1: a risk like he has with Iran and essentially is
37:21
Speaker 1: putting all of us in an economically precarious position. And
37:31
Speaker 1: this is but this is where the presidency matters, because,
37:35
Speaker 1: whether intentional or not, the president creates the political weather.
37:40
Speaker 1: Not every storm, but it's the climate. He's very divisive.
37:47
Speaker 1: He thrives on divisiveness. His supporters want the divisiveness. They
37:52
Speaker 1: feed off the divisiveness, and he knows it, and he
37:57
Speaker 1: does it, and it's more and it's more, and you
37:59
Speaker 1: know what happens. People think there's only one way to respond.
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40:00
Speaker 1: in a shift. Behaviorshifts with it. The barrier moves. What
40:05
Speaker 1: once felt unthinkable becomes thinkable, then sayable, and eventually, for
40:12
Speaker 1: a very small number of people, doable. And it doesn't
40:18
Speaker 1: stay on one side. Escalation invites escalation. That's how being
40:25
Speaker 1: a divisive leader works. One side raises the temperature, the
40:31
Speaker 1: other response, and before long you're not looking at two
40:37
Speaker 1: sides anymore. You're looking at reflections sort of out of
40:42
Speaker 1: a funhouse mirror. Same intensity, same language, same sense of urgency,
40:49
Speaker 1: existential threats, just pointed in different directions. And this is
40:58
Speaker 1: where the language matters, again and again and again, because
41:01
Speaker 1: everything now is framed as some existential challenge that we're
41:06
Speaker 1: all dealing with every election, every issue, a battle for
41:11
Speaker 1: civilization itself. Have you seen that? It's the battle for
41:13
Speaker 1: the West? Violence being you know, sometimes you're going to
41:16
Speaker 1: have if you want to save Western civilization. How many
41:19
Speaker 1: people have you seen use ridiculous rhetoric like that. They're
41:25
Speaker 1: part of the problem too, because if everything is existential,
41:31
Speaker 1: then anything becomes justifiable, any rhetoric, any tactic, any escalation.
41:41
Speaker 1: The reality is we are a country of three hundred
41:44
Speaker 1: and fifty million people who agree on some things and
41:47
Speaker 1: disagree on a lot, and for a long time we
41:51
Speaker 1: manage that because we had leaders who didn't lean into
41:54
Speaker 1: being divisive, who backed off when they realized the temperature
41:59
Speaker 1: had been too This president never knows how to turn
42:03
Speaker 1: the temperature down, never even last night, in his attempt
42:07
Speaker 1: to do it. He glorifies the violence as some sort
42:11
Speaker 1: of reflection of his greatness. This is, like I said,
42:19
Speaker 1: he needs that's a separate issue, and maybe this is. Look,
42:25
Speaker 1: he's a human being and he's been targeted multiple times
42:28
Speaker 1: for death, so it might be a coping mechanism and
42:34
Speaker 1: we should have empathy for that. I have empathy for that.
42:43
Speaker 1: But he chose to be the leader of all Americans,
42:47
Speaker 1: and he's pitting Americans against each other on purpose. He
42:52
Speaker 1: has to turn it down. We have one president at
42:55
Speaker 1: a time. No other political leaders have the power that
42:57
Speaker 1: he has to do this. He can't do it. He
43:02
Speaker 1: is incapable of doing this. That's the unfortunate part. But
43:09
Speaker 1: people around him need to restrain him better. Because here's
43:16
Speaker 1: the part that should worry everybody. It only takes one person,
43:22
Speaker 1: one unstable, angry, perhaps isolated person who has absorbed all
43:32
Speaker 1: of this over the last decade, and they decide, Boy,
43:37
Speaker 1: they have no choice but to act. And that's it.
43:41
Speaker 1: So when the broader culture is reinforcing grievance, reinforcing blame,
43:47
Speaker 1: reinforcing confrontation, that person doesn't feel like an outlier. They feel,
43:54
Speaker 1: in some distorted way, like they're acting within the logic
43:57
Speaker 1: of this moment. If we were a healthy political culture,
44:05
Speaker 1: those impulses would be rare, they'd be contained marginal. Right now,
44:10
Speaker 1: they're not. Not because most people believe in violence. I
44:15
Speaker 1: think it's pretty clear most of us don't, but because
44:18
Speaker 1: the environment is no longer clearly rejecting it. And this
44:24
Speaker 1: is where leadership matters the most. Because in moments like this,
44:27
Speaker 1: someone has to step in and lower the temperature. It
44:31
Speaker 1: isn't going to come from the Speaker of the House.
44:32
Speaker 1: It isn't going to come from the Senate Democratic leader,
44:35
Speaker 1: the House Minority leader, the Senate Majority leader, the governor
44:38
Speaker 1: of Colorado or Pennsylvania or California and New York or Florida,
44:41
Speaker 1: whatever it has to be. The president. Someone has to
44:46
Speaker 1: say this is not who we are. But he's built
44:48
Speaker 1: an entire brand claiming this is who we actually are.
44:54
Speaker 1: Someone's got to step in here and say this stops now.
44:57
Speaker 1: We got to turn the temperature down. We got to
45:00
Speaker 1: not govern in the most divisive ways possible. We don't
45:04
Speaker 1: have enough of that. We don't have. Like I said,
45:06
Speaker 1: I don't know if we have the leaders to meet
45:08
Speaker 1: the moment we need. We're going to see. It's what
45:11
Speaker 1: presidential primary is about. I don't know if the two
45:14
Speaker 1: political parties are capable of producing a leader that can
45:16
Speaker 1: meet the moment. I think the leaders exist. I fear
45:20
Speaker 1: the party bases won't allow those leaders to emerge. That
45:26
Speaker 1: is why you've seen me so lean so hard into
45:30
Speaker 1: an independent or third or fourth parties here because we
45:33
Speaker 1: kind of we need to force a reconciliation in these
45:36
Speaker 1: two parties, to just change their ways, starting with the
45:41
Speaker 1: President and the Republican Party. But instead we keep moving
45:46
Speaker 1: forward in this cycle. It's a little more escalation, it's
45:50
Speaker 1: a little more normalization. It's a slightly lower barrier each time.
45:54
Speaker 1: And the question is and whether this will happen again,
45:57
Speaker 1: It's whether we're doing anything to make it less likely,
46:00
Speaker 1: and right now it doesn't feel like we are. And
46:07
Speaker 1: that's the uncomfortable truth about.
46:09
Speaker 2: All of this.
46:12
Speaker 1: Our political culture was certainly had heated rhetoric, but it
46:15
Speaker 1: wasn't this actively violent. Now it's actively violent. It's a
46:20
Speaker 1: regular basis, reporters, members of Congress, and I see that
46:25
Speaker 1: literally we have Congress right now is half filled with
46:28
Speaker 1: people that have been produced by this culture. So they
46:31
Speaker 1: don't even know how to engage in rhetoric to turn
46:34
Speaker 1: the temperature down. Instead, it's escalation, escalation, escalation. And I
46:40
Speaker 1: can hear the what aboutism. I've seen it on the
46:45
Speaker 1: right and I'm seeing it pop up on the left now.
46:49
Speaker 1: But the fact is, looking at this through the lens
46:51
Speaker 1: of being a political anthropologist, this is what happens. You
46:58
Speaker 1: stoke violence, you celebrate violence. You pardon violent actors and
47:04
Speaker 1: violent criminals. You consistently pardon white collar criminals all the
47:09
Speaker 1: time just because they're your friends, and you create you
47:13
Speaker 1: create a world where people don't respect the rule of law,
47:19
Speaker 1: people don't respect the normal barriers of America, of civilization.
47:30
Speaker 1: So I saw one thing. We need some bipartisan commission
47:35
Speaker 1: on political violence. Give me a frickin' break. We don't
47:45
Speaker 1: need a committee or a commission to figure out how
47:47
Speaker 1: this happened. We know how it happened. This era that
47:55
Speaker 1: we live in is being led by somebody who celebrates
47:58
Speaker 1: political violent rhetoric, and it has increased and increased and increased,
48:06
Speaker 1: and you're going to get reactionary politics in response. I
48:13
Speaker 1: set it before. My greatest fear was that the election
48:17
Speaker 1: of Trump a second time was going to have people
48:21
Speaker 1: decide that the normal rules don't apply and it's time
48:26
Speaker 1: to quote fight fire with fire, as you've heard. And
48:30
Speaker 1: there is no worse outcome for our near term politics
48:36
Speaker 1: than a response to this as fight fire with fire.
48:40
Speaker 1: And yet that's the situation that feels like we're in.
48:45
Speaker 1: I would suggest to some of my legacy media colleagues,
48:48
Speaker 1: let's not sanitize this I'm already sniffing a lot of
48:51
Speaker 1: sanitization here. This is not an isolated incident. This it
49:00
Speaker 1: continues to be a culmination of a normalization of violent
49:05
Speaker 1: rhetoric and violent events, pure and simple. A few things
49:12
Speaker 1: about the future of this dinner. Security wise, there were
49:16
Speaker 1: two loopholes this attacker exploited. If we are to believe
49:21
Speaker 1: everything we're hearing from government, and unfortunately, because of the
49:25
Speaker 1: track record of this Justice Department, needless to say, I
49:29
Speaker 1: kind of it is hard to It is hard to
49:34
Speaker 1: find second and third sources when you're dealing with when
49:36
Speaker 1: the government's in charge of all the information. So let's
49:41
Speaker 1: just say I, you know, eighty percent confident in what
49:43
Speaker 1: we're getting, not one hundred, certainly not ninety. But if
49:48
Speaker 1: you if we take to understand that this attacker took
49:54
Speaker 1: trains to get to DC, well, what's the loophole by
49:56
Speaker 1: taking trains? There's you don't put your bags through any
49:59
Speaker 1: X ray machines on the on Amtrak, right if you
50:02
Speaker 1: went from LA to Chicago, hid you just sort of
50:05
Speaker 1: you know, so he could bring everything he wanted to
50:07
Speaker 1: bring and no one was inspecting anything. Right that we
50:11
Speaker 1: don't have any of that via on the train system.
50:14
Speaker 1: There's never been a magnetometer that I've ever gone through
50:17
Speaker 1: getting on amtraked. You can bring anything you want on
50:21
Speaker 1: that Amtrak train. No one's looking at your backs. Yes
50:24
Speaker 1: there is, Yes, there is dogs that you know, sort
50:32
Speaker 1: of sniff around and perhaps they're bomb sniffing dogs and
50:36
Speaker 1: things like that, but they're not there to sniff whatever
50:40
Speaker 1: weapons you might be deciding to pack with you. So
50:44
Speaker 1: there's loophole one, and then loophole two was booking a
50:47
Speaker 1: room at the HILP. Now, when I've traveled overseas and
50:52
Speaker 1: stayed in the same hotel as a president, and I
50:58
Speaker 1: would say about half the time that I traveled with
51:01
Speaker 1: the president when I was a White House correspondent, not
51:06
Speaker 1: even less than half the time did I actually stay
51:09
Speaker 1: at the same hotel as the president. Most of the
51:11
Speaker 1: press course stays at a separate hotel, frankly because of
51:14
Speaker 1: security issues. But the press pool, if you're going to
51:17
Speaker 1: be traveling in the presidential motorcade and on Air Force
51:20
Speaker 1: one in and out, the press pool will does stay
51:24
Speaker 1: at the same hotel. And when you stay at the
51:26
Speaker 1: same hotel as a president overseas, everybody goes through security
51:32
Speaker 1: magnets right at the lobby of the hotel. That has
51:35
Speaker 1: happened to me every time I've traveled overseas or if
51:39
Speaker 1: I've stayed domestically in the same hotel that the president
51:42
Speaker 1: is overnighting. But we don't do that for hotels where
51:48
Speaker 1: the president's just going to be there for an hour
51:50
Speaker 1: delivering a speech. But this is you know, so those
51:54
Speaker 1: are the two security loopholes. But I do want to
51:56
Speaker 1: say from the get go, because there's a lot of
51:59
Speaker 1: people trying this was a security failure. Actually it wasn't.
52:04
Speaker 1: Security worked. Security, the security perimeters worked as intended. He
52:10
Speaker 1: didn't get through the he got nabbed in the first line.
52:14
Speaker 1: Now you may argue that the first perimeter should be
52:17
Speaker 1: further and there's you know, okay, well that probably you know.
52:23
Speaker 1: But how this was secured, it worked. Nobody got hurt,
52:35
Speaker 1: nobody was killed. Yes, we have one secret servisation that
52:38
Speaker 1: that got hurt. Thankfully he's he's survived the because he
52:42
Speaker 1: was wearing a bulletproof vest. But the security perimeter worked.
52:49
Speaker 1: There was not a failure on that front. And I
52:53
Speaker 1: think that's an important fact that we have to just
52:55
Speaker 1: you know, because there's this is everything. There's almost a
52:58
Speaker 1: knee jerk overreaction. Right, well, we got to do this,
53:00
Speaker 1: you gotta do this. It's got to be somebody to
53:01
Speaker 1: blame here. You know this. They're not getting paid and
53:03
Speaker 1: all this stuff, and people want to spend it. We've
53:05
Speaker 1: got to have the presidential ballroom. What are you talking about.
53:08
Speaker 1: This has nothing to do with building the presidential ballroom,
53:11
Speaker 1: and the presidential ballroom is not about security. The White
53:14
Speaker 1: House is a secure space. The building of the presidential
53:18
Speaker 1: ballroom is because he just wants to have giant events.
53:21
Speaker 1: He wants to have much bigger events. He wants to
53:22
Speaker 1: put his stamp in the White House. There's the Truman balcony.
53:25
Speaker 1: He wants the Trump ballroom. All right, it's a vanity project.
53:28
Speaker 1: We all know it's a vanity project. It is kind
53:30
Speaker 1: of gross that that there's this attempt to use this
53:36
Speaker 1: incidents as a rationale to somehow have the government speed
53:42
Speaker 1: up the building of this vanity renovation project. How about
53:46
Speaker 1: going and solving the war of choice you made in Iran?
53:50
Speaker 1: First of all, number one, but number two, this is
53:53
Speaker 1: not and again, this is not a white House dinner.
53:57
Speaker 1: White House state dinners that's on the White House grounds.
54:01
Speaker 1: You know, are we going to never have presidents leave
54:03
Speaker 1: the bunker of the White House anymore? Look, we're a democracy.
54:06
Speaker 1: We've chosen this freedom, which means, and the President himself
54:10
Speaker 1: noted this, you cannot have security if there is no
54:16
Speaker 1: such thing as one hundred percent security from somebody that
54:20
Speaker 1: is determined to do something like this. There's just attempts
54:25
Speaker 1: to minimize the damage that can be done by a
54:29
Speaker 1: lone wolf who snaps. And that's what our that's what
54:34
Speaker 1: the Secret Service does quite well. But it's kind of
54:41
Speaker 1: I just please, this is as dumb and silly a
54:47
Speaker 1: of a a spin attempt to try to use this
54:50
Speaker 1: as a way to rationalize the building of the ballroom
54:54
Speaker 1: for for this for a mythical for this mythical security issue.
55:00
Speaker 1: And please, the White House is a very secure space.
55:03
Speaker 1: The size of the ballroom is not about security. Just
55:07
Speaker 1: realize that. As for look the White House Press dinner,
55:14
Speaker 1: you know this, I wish there were no cameras at it.
55:16
Speaker 1: If there were no cameras out, you wouldn't draw the attention.
55:19
Speaker 1: If it doesn't draw the attention, it's less likely to
55:21
Speaker 1: be a magnet for violence and for protest and for
55:23
Speaker 1: all of these things we don't. The grid Iron dinner
55:27
Speaker 1: wasn't put on camera. I wish the grid iindeer and
55:30
Speaker 1: stayed off the record, but it's not been put on camera.
55:32
Speaker 1: I guess they invited cameras finally one year, which is
55:34
Speaker 1: just a terrible idea. But you know, it's just a
55:38
Speaker 1: trade association dinner. The US Chamber of Commerce throws them
55:44
Speaker 1: Center for American Progress, the Congressional Black Caucus, the Cogrescialspanic Caucus,
55:49
Speaker 1: everybody throws their sort of organizational annual dinner. You know,
55:54
Speaker 1: it is not a crime. It is not some sort
55:57
Speaker 1: of violation of journalistic principles for journalists to get together
55:59
Speaker 1: and dinner and celebrate their their their industry. The celebrification
56:08
Speaker 1: of the event was the miss was the giant, disgusting mistake.
56:12
Speaker 1: And by the way, that's on us as a press corp, right,
56:15
Speaker 1: we allowed it to become this because it became, frankly,
56:19
Speaker 1: a great way to appease advertisers that news organizations were
56:23
Speaker 1: desperate to appease, so that we could keep our newsrooms
56:28
Speaker 1: afloat all. Right, coming up my conversation with Pete Current,
56:37
Speaker 1: he's the staff one of the staff meteorologists at Watch Duty.
56:40
Speaker 1: It's this incredible new resource that was a lifeline to
56:44
Speaker 1: people during the Palisades fire in southern California. This is
56:47
Speaker 1: a national basically weather tracking app just for wildfires. And
56:52
Speaker 1: just to give you a sense, this is not just
56:54
Speaker 1: a California thing. As of right now, I am taping
56:59
Speaker 1: on Sunday afternoon this introduction. Okay, as of right now,
57:03
Speaker 1: according to Watch Duty, there are more than a dozen
57:06
Speaker 1: states with active wildfires in a right at this time
57:09
Speaker 1: at two pm Eastern time on Sunday, Nevada, California, Montana,
57:13
Speaker 1: New Mexico, Colorado, Nebraska, South Dakota, Minnesota, Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Massachusetts,
57:18
Speaker 1: and New Hampshire. Over a dozen states. Okay. You can
57:26
Speaker 1: debate how the climate has changed, you cannot debate that
57:29
Speaker 1: climate has changed. It has changed, and we are dealing
57:34
Speaker 1: with more of these issues around the country, and more importantly,
57:39
Speaker 1: this summer is going to be I talked about America
57:44
Speaker 1: being a tinderbox for political violence. The West is an
57:48
Speaker 1: actual tinderbox and it's going to be a rough, rough
57:51
Speaker 1: summer if we're not careful and if the winds are
57:55
Speaker 1: blowing the wrong way. So we'll sneak at a break
57:57
Speaker 1: when it comes back to my conversation, will peakring. Well,
58:08
Speaker 1: my next guest is fills the role of the staff
58:13
Speaker 1: meteorologist for an organization called Watch Duty. And as many
58:18
Speaker 1: of you know, I've been obsessed with the local news
58:20
Speaker 1: problem that we have all across the country. It doesn't
58:23
Speaker 1: matter media market like I do in Washington or where
58:27
Speaker 1: my guest is in southern California, it doesn't mean that
58:32
Speaker 1: local news is getting the coverage that is necessary. And
58:38
Speaker 1: the focus of the conversation with this organization has to
58:41
Speaker 1: do with wildfires and wildfire season, which of course is
58:44
Speaker 1: such a huge issue in California. Being a Floridian, it's
58:48
Speaker 1: the equivalent of constantly having to be prepared for hurricane
58:51
Speaker 1: season or tropical storms that consumes pretty much everybody's half
58:58
Speaker 1: of everybody's brain in Florida, just like wildfire season consumes
59:02
Speaker 1: about half of everybody's brain in southern California. And I
59:06
Speaker 1: see Pete is nodding along here in agreement. So but
59:09
Speaker 1: what I find fascinating about Watch Duty is it's filling
59:12
Speaker 1: a role that traditional local media wants filled. And we
59:16
Speaker 1: know with all the cuts this is missing and in
59:19
Speaker 1: some ways this might end up being a more trusted
59:21
Speaker 1: and a better way to do this. So part of
59:24
Speaker 1: this is also highlighting something new in the information ecosystem.
59:29
Speaker 1: So let me bring in Pete, current staff, meteoralogists for
59:33
Speaker 1: watch duty. Pete. Nice to meet you.
59:36
Speaker 2: Good to meet you, Chuck, thank you for having me.
59:38
Speaker 1: So look, we're on the I used to ask this
59:43
Speaker 1: of one of my oldest and closest friends, lives in
59:47
Speaker 1: LA and he's now fond of saying, there's no such
59:50
Speaker 1: thing as wildfire season unless you want to call all
59:52
Speaker 1: twelve months of the calendar a season. Do you concur
59:56
Speaker 1: with that these days?
59:57
Speaker 2: Absolutely right. We all know for years that the fire
1:00:01
Speaker 2: season has been getting longer. And if you talk to
1:00:03
Speaker 2: any firefighter and you ask them after it's been a
1:00:08
Speaker 2: tremendously rainy winter, perhaps, and you ask them, what do
1:00:11
Speaker 2: you think about fire season, and they will say, without
1:00:13
Speaker 2: missing a beat, it will be the mother of all
1:00:16
Speaker 2: fire seasons, because there will be new growth and that
1:00:18
Speaker 2: growth will dry out and it will be really bad.
1:00:21
Speaker 2: And if we've had zero rain and it's been a
1:00:24
Speaker 2: really dry winter, and you ask the firefighter what kind
1:00:27
Speaker 2: of a fire season, they will say it will be
1:00:29
Speaker 2: the worst fire season ever. So it's a standard answer.
1:00:32
Speaker 2: That's the way it is. In California. We've when I
1:00:34
Speaker 2: started in the fire service, so that's my background. I
1:00:37
Speaker 2: started as a firefighter. It's been an entire career in
1:00:40
Speaker 2: the fire service. And you know, we used to have
1:00:43
Speaker 2: a regular fire season, right. It used to start, you
1:00:46
Speaker 2: know in southern California. We would start maybe late May
1:00:48
Speaker 2: early June with some grass fires and then as the
1:00:51
Speaker 2: season progressed and the starmer got hotter, but we were
1:00:54
Speaker 2: done with by typically you know, November first, right after
1:00:58
Speaker 2: the Santa Ana's.
1:01:00
Speaker 1: So fire season in California was the equivalent of what
1:01:03
Speaker 1: hurricane season traditionally was, which is June one November thirtieth.
1:01:07
Speaker 1: That was approximately fire season out.
1:01:09
Speaker 2: West there you go, right, and so there was a
1:01:12
Speaker 2: tremendous right all the fire service. There are staffing in
1:01:15
Speaker 2: logistics and resources all based on that. And so now
1:01:18
Speaker 2: it's a change in that for the last obviously decade
1:01:21
Speaker 2: that we've sort of turned into a year round fire season.
1:01:24
Speaker 1: Tell me about Watch Duty. I know where it got
1:01:27
Speaker 1: on my radarduce. One of my producers, Lauren Gardner, he
1:01:31
Speaker 1: lives in la and I remember during the fire in
1:01:35
Speaker 1: California the Palisades in particular, watch duty became just a
1:01:40
Speaker 1: must have app all of a sudden everybody. It was
1:01:44
Speaker 1: one of those you know, it must be an odd
1:01:46
Speaker 1: thing for you guys to say your biggest growth period
1:01:49
Speaker 1: was during one of the worst disasters ever. Right, that's
1:01:51
Speaker 1: never a comfortable place to be. And yet the reason
1:01:56
Speaker 1: you grew is you had information that people found to
1:01:59
Speaker 1: be facts, correct and helpful. Look, you said you were
1:02:04
Speaker 1: a firefighter before. What was the information flow to the
1:02:08
Speaker 1: public pre watch duty in your mind?
1:02:11
Speaker 2: Sure, because one of the roles I filled was is
1:02:14
Speaker 2: a situation in it leader on a incident management team.
1:02:18
Speaker 2: So I can tell you what that information flow was,
1:02:20
Speaker 2: and that is, twice a day, we take a snapshot
1:02:23
Speaker 2: of the incident and that goes through they fill out
1:02:26
Speaker 2: a very official form and that's percentage of containment, how
1:02:29
Speaker 2: many acres, how many resources on the fire. So that
1:02:32
Speaker 2: would be updated twice a day. And so the information
1:02:35
Speaker 2: to the public and the media and everything else would
1:02:37
Speaker 2: happen about six am in the morning at six pm.
1:02:39
Speaker 2: In between those hours, there really wasn't specific information about
1:02:44
Speaker 2: the incident. So now with watch duty, we have an
1:02:50
Speaker 2: army of reporters, of contributors that are looking at this
1:02:54
Speaker 2: incident in real time. They are digesting radio traffic on
1:02:58
Speaker 2: radio scanners, listening to the to the real time information.
1:03:01
Speaker 2: They're looking at cameras, the wildfire cameras that are pointed
1:03:05
Speaker 2: at the the fires. They're looking at satellite imagery of
1:03:08
Speaker 2: hotspots and things like that, so they are able to
1:03:10
Speaker 2: report in real time things like where the fire is moving,
1:03:15
Speaker 2: how fast are there any evacuations. So they vet this information,
1:03:19
Speaker 2: they make sure that it is valid through a number
1:03:21
Speaker 2: of sources before it appears on the app, so only
1:03:24
Speaker 2: vetted information appears on that app as official.
1:03:29
Speaker 1: But for years before this existed, how did you farm
1:03:32
Speaker 1: you know, when you were on these incident teams. Did
1:03:35
Speaker 1: you just have a collection of local media that was
1:03:38
Speaker 1: paying attention you try to have relationships with different TV
1:03:43
Speaker 1: meteorologists or how did it work?
1:03:46
Speaker 2: So there was on every incident management team there's a
1:03:48
Speaker 2: public information officer PIO shop and they may have one
1:03:51
Speaker 2: to twenty people, depending on how big the fire is.
1:03:53
Speaker 2: So those folks would do outreach to the local medias also,
1:03:58
Speaker 2: but they would always have to key only off of
1:04:00
Speaker 2: those official twice a day. ICs two O nine reports
1:04:04
Speaker 2: is what they called, and so they could only sing
1:04:08
Speaker 2: whatever was on those sheets. But yes, previous to Watch Duty,
1:04:12
Speaker 2: it would be the PIOS, but mostly it would go
1:04:15
Speaker 2: to the National Interagency Fire Center, very official places that
1:04:18
Speaker 2: would release this information. The maps that you see, the
1:04:20
Speaker 2: fire perimeter maps, the acreage, that's where it would come from.
1:04:24
Speaker 1: And you guys are fully private. Is it nonprofit? Is
1:04:27
Speaker 1: it NGO? How would you describe it?
1:04:29
Speaker 2: It is fully nonprofit donor supported. At this all started.
1:04:34
Speaker 2: John Clark Mills was in the tech industry Silicon Valley
1:04:40
Speaker 2: around twenty twenty one, purchased a home and then was
1:04:43
Speaker 2: immediately threatened by wildfire, and he found that there was
1:04:45
Speaker 2: no one place that he could go to find out
1:04:48
Speaker 2: about evacuations, to find out about the fire movement, to
1:04:51
Speaker 2: find out about what was happening. And so his thought was,
1:04:55
Speaker 2: shouldn't there be such a thing, this one stop shop,
1:04:58
Speaker 2: and he made it it happen. And that's what Watch
1:05:01
Speaker 2: Duty is.
1:05:02
Speaker 1: So let's talk about this season. There's been all It
1:05:07
Speaker 1: was a wet winter, so that that that, but as
1:05:10
Speaker 1: you said, you know, you can you can spin a
1:05:13
Speaker 1: wet winter means new growth means more fuel for fires,
1:05:16
Speaker 1: or a dry winter means even drier condition more fuel
1:05:19
Speaker 1: for fires. I mean, is it really heads, we lose tails,
1:05:23
Speaker 1: you lose.
1:05:25
Speaker 2: This season it is is pointing in that direction, right. So,
1:05:29
Speaker 2: as you know, we had a pretty wet winter, but
1:05:32
Speaker 2: what we didn't have was a lot of snow. Right
1:05:35
Speaker 2: so even though let's say in California not being snow black,
1:05:39
Speaker 2: we're about right so, and not just in California, we're
1:05:41
Speaker 2: talking about to the entire West Colorado, the lowest snow
1:05:45
Speaker 2: pack ever right throughout the West.
1:05:48
Speaker 1: Man, we've got plenty of your snow, we got plenty
1:05:51
Speaker 1: of that out east. It was crazy. We got more.
1:05:54
Speaker 1: There was a stat Pete, you'll love this. I think
1:05:57
Speaker 1: we had Denver had more days over seventy and we
1:06:03
Speaker 1: had more snow out here. I mean, it was just crazy.
1:06:06
Speaker 2: It's been a crazy season and so right, I mean
1:06:09
Speaker 2: we're seeing things that the handwriting is on the while. Right.
1:06:12
Speaker 2: So in February we had a two hundred and eighty
1:06:15
Speaker 2: thousand acre fire in Kansas. Then in March six hundred
1:06:19
Speaker 2: and eighty thousand acre fire in Nebraska, followed by another
1:06:24
Speaker 2: two hundred and fifty thousand in mid March. When does
1:06:26
Speaker 2: that happen? That never happens.
1:06:28
Speaker 1: So the March, I mean that's supposed to be still winter, right,
1:06:32
Speaker 1: still right, moist and wet.
1:06:33
Speaker 2: Snow in low lying area. So the planes were the
1:06:36
Speaker 2: first wake up call. A six hundred and eighty thousand
1:06:39
Speaker 2: acre fire in mid March is a wake up call.
1:06:41
Speaker 2: Then in California we have the hottest March on record ever.
1:06:49
Speaker 2: Right then we start seeing a marine heat wave caused
1:06:53
Speaker 2: by this this march. Right, so off the eastern Pacific
1:06:57
Speaker 2: we have the hottest. The Scripts Institute is recorded sea
1:07:00
Speaker 2: surface temperatures the hottest they've seen. Now we have what
1:07:04
Speaker 2: last week, a Category five typhoon in the Western Pacific
1:07:09
Speaker 2: in April. Right, So my comment previously was the handwriting
1:07:16
Speaker 2: is on the wall. And if you're a fire manager,
1:07:18
Speaker 2: if you're in this business, if you're a fire behavior
1:07:20
Speaker 2: in US, if you're looking at those fuels and you
1:07:22
Speaker 2: are not realizing these signs, then your head is in
1:07:26
Speaker 2: the sand. It's going to be a very significant season.
1:07:29
Speaker 1: How you know. Look, I'm being an East Coaster. I'm
1:07:35
Speaker 1: you know, like I said, we're all in. If you're Fluoridian,
1:07:37
Speaker 1: you're an amateur meteorology, hurricane expert. We all think we're
1:07:40
Speaker 1: hurricane experts.
1:07:41
Speaker 2: I spent years of the Hurricane Center, you.
1:07:43
Speaker 1: Bet, and so, but I feel very ignorant when it
1:07:46
Speaker 1: comes to fire season and all of that. For again,
1:07:50
Speaker 1: proximity is everything. How hard is it to forecast fire season?
1:07:56
Speaker 1: And I mean and how connected is it to La
1:07:59
Speaker 1: Nina and Al Nino? And I know we're about to do.
1:08:00
Speaker 2: A flip, right, So great question. So as the forecasters
1:08:06
Speaker 2: are looking at this season, what are we looking at right? Well,
1:08:09
Speaker 2: first we're looking at that the things we just talked about,
1:08:11
Speaker 2: the dry snowpack. We know that all of the things
1:08:14
Speaker 2: that burn right, which is what grass brush, timber, those
1:08:18
Speaker 2: things are drying out in record ways Because normally we
1:08:22
Speaker 2: would start fire season with grass fires, but the heavier stuff,
1:08:25
Speaker 2: the timber, would be wet from the snow. Well, guess what,
1:08:28
Speaker 2: we don't have the snow. So now we have a
1:08:30
Speaker 2: scenario where all the fuels are drying out rapidly, and
1:08:35
Speaker 2: we're going to enter into a scenario where we're going
1:08:37
Speaker 2: to start to having these one hundred acre fires, two
1:08:39
Speaker 2: hundred acre fires in California and all of a sudden,
1:08:42
Speaker 2: the timber that wouldn't normally burn, is now going to
1:08:44
Speaker 2: be receptive to burning a month or two earlier than
1:08:48
Speaker 2: it would be. So we're looking at in all areas
1:08:52
Speaker 2: a scenario where throughout the West, throughout the Midwest, even
1:08:55
Speaker 2: of a significant fire season. So we look at these models,
1:08:59
Speaker 2: we look at the weather. Obviously, you know a wildfire
1:09:02
Speaker 2: is driven by slope, topography, fuel, and weather, weather being
1:09:07
Speaker 2: the most difficult to predict, right, So when I go
1:09:10
Speaker 2: to a fire, I'm looking at the winds. I'm looking
1:09:13
Speaker 2: at as their cold front. Are the winds going to
1:09:15
Speaker 2: change direction? Is their lightning?
1:09:18
Speaker 1: Right?
1:09:18
Speaker 2: Typically a lightning bust from a decaying tropical system? Actually, right,
1:09:23
Speaker 2: So we do have tropical cyclones that might come up
1:09:26
Speaker 2: the Baja Spine of Mexico even though the water is
1:09:30
Speaker 2: too cold for them to sustain themselves.
1:09:32
Speaker 1: As they talked about the warm water though, I keep
1:09:34
Speaker 1: like the MIDI you said that, it's like there you go.
1:09:37
Speaker 1: There are we going to see something we've ever seen before,
1:09:39
Speaker 1: like landfall on the west coast of one of these typhoons? Right?
1:09:42
Speaker 2: So, two years ago we had a decaying tropical storm,
1:09:45
Speaker 2: it was still tropical storm as it entered the southern
1:09:48
Speaker 2: US first time ever, but it brought abundant lightning over
1:09:52
Speaker 2: California that started all these fires that went for months.
1:09:55
Speaker 2: So this year, with that hot water, the al Nina,
1:09:59
Speaker 2: the developing issues on the Sea service temperatures, we could
1:10:02
Speaker 2: certainly see tropical activity further north. We're already hearing from
1:10:06
Speaker 2: the fishermen. You want to know about al Nino. You
1:10:08
Speaker 2: talk to the fishermen. If they're catching these big fish
1:10:11
Speaker 2: that they don't normally catch in those waters, that's the
1:10:13
Speaker 2: first sign and that's what we're hearing.
1:10:16
Speaker 1: Well, with a hurricane, there's some preparation, YEP, walk me
1:10:24
Speaker 1: through what you'd be telling. What you are telling people
1:10:28
Speaker 1: in southern California because unlike hurricane there's not a I assume,
1:10:34
Speaker 1: it's not like you can track, well, we know a
1:10:36
Speaker 1: fire may start in this ten day period. You don't
1:10:39
Speaker 1: have that kind of precision like we do with organized storms.
1:10:45
Speaker 1: So you know that, I assume is the hardest part
1:10:48
Speaker 1: to get people to prepare. It's you know, we're the
1:10:51
Speaker 1: human species are procrastinators. I think we've learned this now
1:10:55
Speaker 1: over time one hundred percent.
1:10:57
Speaker 2: So what we're telling the people is and what the
1:11:00
Speaker 2: drum beat has been, right, certainly the LA wildfires in
1:11:03
Speaker 2: twenty twenty five is a wake up call to harden
1:11:07
Speaker 2: your home against wildfire, right, to be ready to evacuate,
1:11:11
Speaker 2: to have a go kit, not unlike you know, a
1:11:13
Speaker 2: tropical scenario, but really, when you're talking about wildfire, and
1:11:18
Speaker 2: we saw this in the LA wildfires, right, the wind
1:11:21
Speaker 2: blows the embers into the built environment, It gets into
1:11:25
Speaker 2: the attics, into the eves. Then you're losing the house.
1:11:29
Speaker 2: It starts the fence on fire, it lights the playground
1:11:31
Speaker 2: equipment on fire, in your backyard, the wood that may
1:11:33
Speaker 2: be stacked. So trying to mitigate those issues is a
1:11:37
Speaker 2: big thing, right, So we call it zero zone, which
1:11:40
Speaker 2: means the four or five feet closest to your home,
1:11:43
Speaker 2: whatever that is, planters, whatever, move all that combustible material
1:11:46
Speaker 2: away from your home. Try to cover up your attic
1:11:50
Speaker 2: vents with a fine enough mesh screen that prevents those
1:11:53
Speaker 2: embers from going in, and basically just be smart. Clear
1:11:56
Speaker 2: your property of anything that's combustible because once those embers
1:11:59
Speaker 2: start flying and going a mile or two beyond where
1:12:02
Speaker 2: the fire is, there's very little right, you've lost control
1:12:06
Speaker 2: of the ability to get out in front of that.
1:12:08
Speaker 2: It's going to light anything on fire that's combustible, So
1:12:11
Speaker 2: that's a real challenge. And trying to get people to
1:12:13
Speaker 2: harden their homes, be ready to go to ready to evacuate,
1:12:16
Speaker 2: that is really the key of moving into fire seats.
1:12:19
Speaker 1: Does dampness matter? You know, you'll see some people hosing
1:12:22
Speaker 1: their backyards if they know a wildfire is coming. You
1:12:25
Speaker 1: know all of that. What is the level of help
1:12:28
Speaker 1: something like that does?
1:12:29
Speaker 2: So you know, if they wet down their roofs, they
1:12:33
Speaker 2: wet down the fuels, it's going to help for a while,
1:12:35
Speaker 2: you bet it might. But as you can imagine, once
1:12:38
Speaker 2: a wildfire is moving into an urban interface, everybody's doing
1:12:42
Speaker 2: that right. The firefighters are trying to tap the hydrants.
1:12:45
Speaker 2: Everybody's on their hose, right, and so that water pressure
1:12:48
Speaker 2: that the firefighters desperately need now is going to go down.
1:12:52
Speaker 1: Can that what happened during the Palace Sades fire?
1:12:54
Speaker 2: Absolutely? And then what happen is as soon as you
1:12:57
Speaker 2: burn a home, right, imagine all that plumbing now is exposed, right,
1:13:01
Speaker 2: the toilet, All of that plumbing now is then you
1:13:03
Speaker 2: have water, and you multiply that in the hundreds and
1:13:09
Speaker 2: then commercial buildings that have commercial sprinkler systems that are
1:13:12
Speaker 2: now flowing because those pipes have burned. So that is
1:13:15
Speaker 2: part of the problem. You have free flowing water and
1:13:17
Speaker 2: you lose water pressure.
1:13:28
Speaker 1: So we've learned that there were resiliency measures and how
1:13:31
Speaker 1: you keep a roof from flying off? And it turns out, hey,
1:13:34
Speaker 1: three inch nails are better than inch and a half nails?
1:13:40
Speaker 1: Do we need? Is it better housing material? Like? What
1:13:43
Speaker 1: what's what's some you know? You know, I'm long enough
1:13:46
Speaker 1: to remember when people worried about whether they're homes in
1:13:48
Speaker 1: California were earthquake resilient. Now it seems as if I'd
1:13:53
Speaker 1: be more concerned about whether my property was fire resilient
1:13:56
Speaker 1: more than I would earthquake resilient. So what is what
1:13:59
Speaker 1: is that you describe the outside? Is there different types
1:14:03
Speaker 1: of building materials? Had I'd be thinking about do we
1:14:05
Speaker 1: want one story not two story? I mean, I just like,
1:14:10
Speaker 1: let's assume we're living in this healthscape now for a while. Okay,
1:14:13
Speaker 1: I mean, you know it is what it is. How
1:14:16
Speaker 1: do we live with this threat in a way that
1:14:19
Speaker 1: won't feel like you're constantly having to evacuate?
1:14:23
Speaker 2: So another great question. So we know that the better
1:14:28
Speaker 2: you could harden your home, and we talked about the outside.
1:14:31
Speaker 2: But I was involved in the in the after action
1:14:33
Speaker 2: analysis the led wildfires, and we went through those communities.
1:14:36
Speaker 2: We saw blocks that were decimated by wildfires, and then
1:14:40
Speaker 2: we saw an entire block untouched standing brand new homes
1:14:46
Speaker 2: built to certain specifications. And so to your point, what
1:14:50
Speaker 2: was that? That was a non combustible roof material? Right,
1:14:53
Speaker 2: So any kind of composite material on your roof that
1:14:56
Speaker 2: doesn't sustain combustion. Right, So the old wood shape, shine,
1:15:00
Speaker 2: those roofs, those are just waiting to catch on fire.
1:15:03
Speaker 1: Should we brand them? Is it something that maybe? I mean, look,
1:15:06
Speaker 1: you're not I'm asking you to be a politician or
1:15:08
Speaker 1: a regulator, but if they were asking your expert opinion,
1:15:11
Speaker 1: we'd be like, you know, this shouldn't even be allowed. Like,
1:15:13
Speaker 1: for instance, in Florida, I don't think you should have
1:15:15
Speaker 1: manufactured housing. I'm not saying manufactured housing doesn't fill a role,
1:15:20
Speaker 1: but if you're in a in an environment that you
1:15:22
Speaker 1: could get fifty or more mile an hour wednds, these
1:15:25
Speaker 1: things blow right over. I don't think it's illegal.
1:15:28
Speaker 2: So let me tell you a secret. It's not so secret.
1:15:31
Speaker 2: But when firefighters go in new a community and they
1:15:33
Speaker 2: have a fire coming into an entire urban interface. They're
1:15:37
Speaker 2: going to send a bunch of fire engines to the block,
1:15:39
Speaker 2: and the first folks in that block are going to
1:15:42
Speaker 2: do an analysis or an assessment within ten minutes of
1:15:45
Speaker 2: which homes have been hardened and which haven't. And those
1:15:49
Speaker 2: homes that I'm that shaped shingle roof that have overhang
1:15:53
Speaker 2: of growth materials, power lines, things like that, combustle materials. Right,
1:15:58
Speaker 2: they know that's a problem house versus the house that's
1:16:01
Speaker 2: got right, a composite material roof, glass that's maybe double
1:16:06
Speaker 2: pane glass. Right. Uh So the external paine of the
1:16:10
Speaker 2: glass cracks in the heat, but the inside maintains. We
1:16:13
Speaker 2: saw that in the in Los Angeles. Uh So other
1:16:16
Speaker 2: things that you can do. We also found that fences,
1:16:19
Speaker 2: wooden fences, they catch on fire. They bring the fire
1:16:22
Speaker 2: to the house because the fence is usually ran up
1:16:24
Speaker 2: to the house. So get a composite fence, right, do
1:16:29
Speaker 2: things say composite that plastic, plastic or right, some some
1:16:35
Speaker 2: sort of metal fence, whatever you want to do. Aluminum
1:16:39
Speaker 2: that that doesn't sustain, because that is what we found
1:16:42
Speaker 2: brought fire to the house that that ended up burning
1:16:45
Speaker 2: the house down. And now it's on video, right, we
1:16:47
Speaker 2: see homes have those cameras. We what can happen in
1:16:50
Speaker 2: real time?
1:16:51
Speaker 1: So let's talk about power companies. What what is the
1:16:57
Speaker 1: level of power line burying in California? How you know,
1:17:02
Speaker 1: I know in Florida, every time there's a you know,
1:17:04
Speaker 1: new construction, they bury power lines. But you know, if
1:17:08
Speaker 1: it's grandfathered in, it's grandfathered in. What's the situation in
1:17:11
Speaker 1: California on that.
1:17:13
Speaker 2: Same situation, so we know it's it's it's no news
1:17:18
Speaker 2: that the power companies have had failures where those lines
1:17:22
Speaker 2: have started fires in California, large wildfires in the past.
1:17:27
Speaker 2: That's certainly not news. And as these are identified and
1:17:31
Speaker 2: they can they bury those power lines. We know that
1:17:34
Speaker 2: that in high winds there's arcing, they have power line failures,
1:17:39
Speaker 2: falls into compustible grass, and so that's what started the
1:17:42
Speaker 2: whole public safety power shutoffs the psps's right. So I'm
1:17:47
Speaker 2: sure you've read that when these red flag warnings, when
1:17:51
Speaker 2: these high winds are expected in high fire danger corridors,
1:17:55
Speaker 2: they will preemptively shut down the power to those areas.
1:17:58
Speaker 2: And so we've been living without for you know, five
1:18:00
Speaker 2: years plus now, and so it is arguably either either
1:18:07
Speaker 2: of the world.
1:18:08
Speaker 1: Doesn't it I was just gonna say, I mean, it
1:18:11
Speaker 1: doesn't feel like it's worked, has it? Uh?
1:18:13
Speaker 2: Well, so hard to say, right, So it depends on
1:18:16
Speaker 2: if they shut it off and they avoided a fire,
1:18:18
Speaker 2: would we know? Yeah, can they shut off? Can they
1:18:22
Speaker 2: shut off the power lines into Los Angeles in the
1:18:25
Speaker 2: middle of a regular business day because those same circuits
1:18:30
Speaker 2: also provide power to the wildline interface, Right, So it's
1:18:34
Speaker 2: a problem for the power companies, I get it. But
1:18:37
Speaker 2: the more they can bury that stuff, the more they
1:18:39
Speaker 2: can harden those areas. And so really I've seen in
1:18:43
Speaker 2: the last five years the power companies they have been
1:18:46
Speaker 2: very trying to be very provactive with fire danger. They've
1:18:49
Speaker 2: hired a lot of meteorologists that do nothing, but they
1:18:51
Speaker 2: put you know, sensors in all their high power transmission towers,
1:18:56
Speaker 2: which is great information to meteorologists.
1:18:58
Speaker 1: Right.
1:18:58
Speaker 2: So that's where we get a lot of our is
1:19:00
Speaker 2: from these utility weather stations that they put up. They
1:19:04
Speaker 2: are trying to forecast fire danger. They're trying to preemptively
1:19:07
Speaker 2: do these public safety power shut offs. But it's still
1:19:10
Speaker 2: a problem. It's still a problem. How do you write?
1:19:13
Speaker 2: Can you ever really just I mean, the real answer
1:19:15
Speaker 2: is just shut off the power when there's a red
1:19:17
Speaker 2: flag boarding, but I don't think the public would like that.
1:19:19
Speaker 1: Well. The real answer, though, is bearing is sort of
1:19:21
Speaker 1: forcing the burial power lines. I mean, I know the
1:19:23
Speaker 1: way you know, even here in Virginia, they the way
1:19:28
Speaker 1: the power company works is if they have a certain
1:19:30
Speaker 1: number of neighbors could say no, then well they're not
1:19:33
Speaker 1: going to bury power lines in this community. It seems
1:19:37
Speaker 1: like at some point it ought at some point it's
1:19:41
Speaker 1: not going to be a choice. Now the question is
1:19:44
Speaker 1: is it something is in an insurance premium that you
1:19:47
Speaker 1: risk seeing quadruple if you don't do it. If your
1:19:51
Speaker 1: neighborhood doesn't have very power lines, everybody's going to pay
1:19:54
Speaker 1: more in homeowner's insurance or not. I mean, you know
1:20:00
Speaker 1: it usually is how you get behavior to change is
1:20:03
Speaker 1: when there's a financial penalty or incentive.
1:20:06
Speaker 2: Absolutely so much like the tropical situation in the southeast
1:20:12
Speaker 2: right every time there's a fire, our insurance rates go up.
1:20:16
Speaker 2: And I believe that it is going to end up
1:20:17
Speaker 2: being like you stated that areas that don't have buried
1:20:22
Speaker 2: power lines that are have exposure to higher potential of
1:20:25
Speaker 2: fire danger, are going to end up putting that bill
1:20:28
Speaker 2: to try to bury those lines, because we're certainly paying
1:20:31
Speaker 2: for it in insurance costs for fire danger. Right now,
1:20:35
Speaker 2: all that stuff is assessed by fire danger. When I
1:20:37
Speaker 2: moved into my house, my insurance said, well we can't,
1:20:40
Speaker 2: We're going to have to cancel your homeowners insurance because
1:20:44
Speaker 2: your house is right up against a wildline area. Are
1:20:46
Speaker 2: high resolution satellite imagery dictated that your house was up
1:20:51
Speaker 2: against Yes, up against ballin And I said, that is
1:20:53
Speaker 2: irrigated association vegetation. Does your satellite differentiate? And then really,
1:20:59
Speaker 2: I go, yes, this is green irrigated vegetation, and they go, okay,
1:21:03
Speaker 2: you're fine then, but that's what we're up against.
1:21:06
Speaker 1: So you had to prove you weren't a fire risk,
1:21:09
Speaker 1: and you could individually make that happen.
1:21:11
Speaker 2: Didn't matter that I was a fire behavior analyst and meteorologist,
1:21:15
Speaker 2: a spinner career in the fire service, and say, listen,
1:21:18
Speaker 2: I know about this, and I'm not in an urban
1:21:20
Speaker 2: wileline interface, but right it's the embers, it's the wind
1:21:25
Speaker 2: speed in the ember cast, It's all they have to
1:21:28
Speaker 2: say is you're within three miles of the urban interface,
1:21:32
Speaker 2: you're exposed to embers.
1:21:34
Speaker 1: So when do you start losing sleep when there's a
1:21:37
Speaker 1: high wind warning? When when you know what is what
1:21:40
Speaker 1: is sort of when you're you know going, I better
1:21:44
Speaker 1: have ready, I better have the coffee going.
1:21:47
Speaker 2: So the answer is yes, when we start seeing the
1:21:54
Speaker 2: fuels that are going to be what we call a
1:21:56
Speaker 2: receptive fuel bed. The probability of ignition. So if the grass, brush,
1:22:00
Speaker 2: the timber, whatever it is, is dry enough and we
1:22:03
Speaker 2: already talked about it that we know it'll catch fire
1:22:06
Speaker 2: if there's an ignition, and then you add some hot,
1:22:09
Speaker 2: dry winds or cold front passage that's not going to rain.
1:22:13
Speaker 2: That's when the red flag warnings go out. That's when
1:22:16
Speaker 2: my role in watch duty is to provide this weather
1:22:20
Speaker 2: information to watch duty so they can proact right in
1:22:23
Speaker 2: terms of staffing, in terms of beefing up the reporters
1:22:26
Speaker 2: that are going to be watching in a certain area,
1:22:28
Speaker 2: so I pinpoint the areas that are going to be
1:22:31
Speaker 2: the highest fire danger, and internally Watch Duty we do
1:22:35
Speaker 2: things to make sure that they're ready for that, so
1:22:37
Speaker 2: they're trying to proact rather than react. To these to
1:22:41
Speaker 2: these high fire danger, fire weather situations.
1:22:44
Speaker 1: We're taping late morning, early afternoon on Tuesday, April twenty First,
1:22:50
Speaker 1: would you say that you're that the danger right now
1:22:56
Speaker 1: is already elevated and it's you're in an ever any
1:22:59
Speaker 1: any day now, we could get you know, the wrong,
1:23:01
Speaker 1: you know, some campfire gone awry because of the conditions
1:23:06
Speaker 1: that because of the conditions you just described over the
1:23:10
Speaker 1: last ninety days.
1:23:12
Speaker 2: I would say that we are maybe not this month,
1:23:16
Speaker 2: but probably a few months away from that.
1:23:20
Speaker 1: So really starting in June is when you think this
1:23:23
Speaker 1: is going to be a really really ugly summer.
1:23:27
Speaker 2: I think, and if you add the potential of maybe
1:23:30
Speaker 2: some lightning from a decaying tropical system. So as soon
1:23:33
Speaker 2: as you know, so we start in the Pacific May fifteenth,
1:23:35
Speaker 2: you guys start June first, we start, you know, a
1:23:38
Speaker 2: couple of weeks earlier. Alls we need is something like
1:23:41
Speaker 2: that to kick off what is certainly going to be
1:23:44
Speaker 2: a very significant fire season. I am very concerned. All
1:23:48
Speaker 2: of my coworkers are very concerned. I think it's going
1:23:52
Speaker 2: to be a very active fire season.
1:23:59
Speaker 1: When it comes to it's to me that you're were
1:24:01
Speaker 1: you firefighter before you were a meteorologist.
1:24:05
Speaker 2: Well, it is an I'm an odd duck in that way.
1:24:08
Speaker 2: And then I came to a backwards so check. You're
1:24:11
Speaker 2: absolutely right. So and that's why I got interested in meteorology.
1:24:15
Speaker 2: So I think you'll find this interesting. So I spent
1:24:19
Speaker 2: I was a firefighter paramedic here in southern California, got promoted,
1:24:24
Speaker 2: and spent really twenty eight years in the fire service
1:24:27
Speaker 2: in southern California. And during that period of time, they
1:24:30
Speaker 2: started sending me as part of these teams to these
1:24:32
Speaker 2: large wildfires. And it was at those large wildfires that
1:24:36
Speaker 2: I realized how weather, how important weather it was, and
1:24:39
Speaker 2: how it basically drove the cadence of the incident. And
1:24:44
Speaker 2: so I started taking a few classes as much as
1:24:46
Speaker 2: I could. I was already a reserve for FEMA, and
1:24:51
Speaker 2: I was considering maybe taking an early retirement and going
1:24:54
Speaker 2: back to school to earn a meteorology degree, which is
1:24:56
Speaker 2: right at that point in my career, was unheard of.
1:24:59
Speaker 2: So I did that. I sold my house, I grabbed
1:25:01
Speaker 2: my then eighty four year old mom, moved lock stock
1:25:04
Speaker 2: and barrel to Miami, Florida. I went to school at FIU,
1:25:09
Speaker 2: entered a meteorology degree while working at the National Hurricane
1:25:13
Speaker 2: Center for those three years. While I was there, get
1:25:15
Speaker 2: to fly through a hurricane. And so as soon as
1:25:18
Speaker 2: I was done with school, I came back went back
1:25:20
Speaker 2: on the same incident management team as I had been
1:25:22
Speaker 2: on as a situation yet leader, but now as the
1:25:25
Speaker 2: incident meteorologist. So I was able to get qualified as
1:25:29
Speaker 2: an I met which is the guy that goes out
1:25:32
Speaker 2: to the fire. I sit in the tent, right, so
1:25:34
Speaker 2: instead of running up and down the hills with the
1:25:36
Speaker 2: back of the hose, all right, I get to be
1:25:39
Speaker 2: briefing the folks on the potential fire danger and making
1:25:43
Speaker 2: sure that everybody stays safe. Because weather is the number
1:25:46
Speaker 2: one issue when it comes to being prepared for wind changes, lightning, thunderstorms. Right,
1:25:52
Speaker 2: it's a it's a you know, it's a big deal
1:25:55
Speaker 2: when I'm out there, and I'm usually out there for
1:25:57
Speaker 2: at least two weeks at a time.
1:25:58
Speaker 1: Well, my daughter's about to graduate with a degree in
1:26:00
Speaker 1: oceanography and a minor in meteorology University of Miami, so
1:26:05
Speaker 1: obviously South Florida pretty good, pretty good haven for weather education.
1:26:13
Speaker 1: Let me ask you, the meteorology front, how many you know,
1:26:20
Speaker 1: a staff meteorologists for a fire department. Now, did that
1:26:26
Speaker 1: exist twenty years ago? Yeah? I didn't think so. Now
1:26:28
Speaker 1: it's normalized position.
1:26:31
Speaker 2: No, it's it's becoming more normal. These large organizations, especially
1:26:36
Speaker 2: state organizations cal Fire and California.
1:26:38
Speaker 1: I seemed like the LA Fire Department, the big fire department,
1:26:41
Speaker 1: are doing this right.
1:26:42
Speaker 2: Yeah, And they have a fire behavior analyst. So that
1:26:45
Speaker 2: is the guy that matches the weather with the potential
1:26:48
Speaker 2: fire behavior in the fuels condition, and so they call
1:26:52
Speaker 2: him an f BAN fire behavior analyst. And so these
1:26:56
Speaker 2: positions now to your point, are endemic in most of
1:27:01
Speaker 2: these large organizations. And so when I go out on
1:27:03
Speaker 2: the fire with the fire team, I sit next to
1:27:06
Speaker 2: a fire behavior analyst. They need my weather information, I
1:27:09
Speaker 2: need their fuels information. We produce the fire weather forecast
1:27:12
Speaker 2: that goes out to all the firefighters. We do that
1:27:14
Speaker 2: twice a day.
1:27:15
Speaker 1: Just to give an example. How much obviously this has
1:27:18
Speaker 1: changed firefighting. It has changed certainly some procedure. You were
1:27:22
Speaker 1: on the front lines before this world existed. Now you
1:27:27
Speaker 1: see it. How would you say, what's been some of
1:27:30
Speaker 1: the best practices that have been created now that meteorology
1:27:35
Speaker 1: and experts like yourself are infused into the firefighting protocols.
1:27:41
Speaker 2: So it's made a huge difference. And sadly, it's taken
1:27:46
Speaker 2: fatality incidents to wildfire incidents in the past to really
1:27:52
Speaker 2: forge that notion that weather is super important to these teams.
1:27:56
Speaker 2: So in the nineties, really we started seeing meteorologists show
1:28:02
Speaker 2: up to wildfires. Now it's unheard of that one of
1:28:05
Speaker 2: these teams would go out to a fire without a meteorologist.
1:28:07
Speaker 2: So we branch what the National Weather Service. We basically
1:28:11
Speaker 2: have them on a constant chat, all right, because they're
1:28:15
Speaker 2: the ones responsible for issuing the watches and warnings, so
1:28:18
Speaker 2: we're in lockstep with them. I'm attending briefings online with them.
1:28:23
Speaker 2: They're saying, hey, do you see this? Do I see
1:28:25
Speaker 2: the winds starting at this time? So I carry that information.
1:28:29
Speaker 2: I hone it the forecast. I write my own forecast
1:28:31
Speaker 2: for the fire, very detailed to the topography that we're
1:28:35
Speaker 2: in because wins and complex topography is not easy for
1:28:38
Speaker 2: the weather models to do. And we hone that forecast.
1:28:43
Speaker 2: But what I really want to say is the fire behavior,
1:28:48
Speaker 2: the fire weather that we've been seeing every year. Every
1:28:51
Speaker 2: year we see more significant fire behavior that we haven't
1:28:55
Speaker 2: seen before. I'll give you an example fire tornadoes. Used
1:29:00
Speaker 2: to talk about a fire tornado, we would all think, well,
1:29:02
Speaker 2: that's a fire world. It's a little rope you know, area,
1:29:05
Speaker 2: but instability. It's maybe a couple feet wide, you know,
1:29:08
Speaker 2: it goes twenty twenty five feet in the atmosphere. And
1:29:10
Speaker 2: then it's because the instability caused by the fire and
1:29:13
Speaker 2: the heat on the ground. Starting in two thousand and nineteen,
1:29:18
Speaker 2: the car fire in Reading, California, half mile wide, rotating, real,
1:29:22
Speaker 2: honest to god tornado caused by a wall fire. I've
1:29:26
Speaker 2: never seen that before. So now we're seeing them every year.
1:29:31
Speaker 2: So fire seasons are getting longer, fire behavior is getting
1:29:34
Speaker 2: more significant, the challenges to firefighters, uh is becoming more significant.
1:29:41
Speaker 2: So you think about the firefighting community, which is where
1:29:43
Speaker 2: I write, I came through that environment, and the way
1:29:46
Speaker 2: we teach our new folks is by the old guys
1:29:49
Speaker 2: teaching the new guys. This is what I saw, this
1:29:52
Speaker 2: is what I did. Now you and in a situation
1:29:55
Speaker 2: where we're seeing fire behavior we've never seen before. So
1:29:59
Speaker 2: that old guy teaching the new guy paradigm is now
1:30:04
Speaker 2: not working anymore because the new guys seeing it for
1:30:07
Speaker 2: the first time, right along with the old guy. Right.
1:30:11
Speaker 2: So that is a challenge to the Fire Service and
1:30:15
Speaker 2: we're having to redefine what that is every year.
1:30:18
Speaker 1: What's a data stream you're not getting that you wish
1:30:20
Speaker 1: you did that would improve your your forecasting?
1:30:24
Speaker 2: Oh, holy caw, you meteor. I'll just live in data,
1:30:27
Speaker 2: you know that, right, So I'll give you an example. Uh,
1:30:30
Speaker 2: we use remote automated weather stations called ras, self contained
1:30:35
Speaker 2: weather stations that we can put in the back country
1:30:37
Speaker 2: that are solar powered. They don't require connectivity in terms
1:30:41
Speaker 2: of you know, any hardwiring, So they broadcast up to
1:30:45
Speaker 2: a satellite and every hour we get temperature, humidity, wind speed,
1:30:50
Speaker 2: wind direction, brent barometric pressure every hour. Well is that
1:30:54
Speaker 2: frequent enough for you?
1:30:55
Speaker 1: Sure? Right? The utility the weather stations.
1:30:59
Speaker 2: Five minute data from the utility stations, five minute data
1:31:03
Speaker 2: from most of the other stations. So one thing we
1:31:06
Speaker 2: could use is more frequent updates. The reason that it
1:31:09
Speaker 2: is the way it is because each one of those stations,
1:31:11
Speaker 2: after broadcast up to a satellite, have a very narrow
1:31:14
Speaker 2: window to do that, and that there's only so much bandwidth,
1:31:17
Speaker 2: if you will. But the technology gets better every year
1:31:21
Speaker 2: now we have a lot of different satellite systems, so
1:31:23
Speaker 2: maybe that will change. But we live and die by data.
1:31:29
Speaker 2: The wildfires in Los Angeles, part of what happened on
1:31:32
Speaker 2: the Eaton fire in the Altadena area was because of
1:31:36
Speaker 2: mountain wave. Would we call a mountain wave phenomenon? So
1:31:38
Speaker 2: when strong winds flow over topography, we get very turbulent
1:31:41
Speaker 2: winds on the lease side of that topography. I would
1:31:44
Speaker 2: love to be able to time that. If we had
1:31:47
Speaker 2: some wind profilers, some light ar microwaves, we could time
1:31:50
Speaker 2: when those were happening. Because the firefighters on the ground
1:31:53
Speaker 2: would say about every thirty and forty five minutes we
1:31:56
Speaker 2: have would violent burst of winds, and then it would
1:31:59
Speaker 2: back offer another half hour, forty five minutes, and then
1:32:03
Speaker 2: we have another one hundred miles an hour recorded on
1:32:07
Speaker 2: that fire. So if we could provide that warning, if
1:32:11
Speaker 2: we could get more into details, save lives. So the
1:32:16
Speaker 2: more data, the better. Meteorologists live and die by the data.
1:32:29
Speaker 1: Look, this is becoming a bigger problem. Is this is
1:32:36
Speaker 1: it changing climate? Is it? How seasonal is it? How cyclical?
1:32:40
Speaker 1: Is it? When it's La Nina? Is it less of
1:32:43
Speaker 1: a concern than when it's al nino. I mean run
1:32:47
Speaker 1: through all of those variables for me.
1:32:49
Speaker 2: So nobody in the scientific community, and I think you
1:32:52
Speaker 2: would agree with this, is denying that there is climate change.
1:32:57
Speaker 2: Nobody in my business is denying that there's global warming.
1:33:02
Speaker 2: We know that for a fact, Right, we can empirically.
1:33:04
Speaker 1: Point at the oceans getting hotter, and every year.
1:33:08
Speaker 2: The temperatures get right every year, right, twenty twenty three
1:33:11
Speaker 2: was the hottest year ever until when until twenty twenty four,
1:33:14
Speaker 2: and then that was the hottest year level, right, So
1:33:17
Speaker 2: every year we're having that hottest year ever. We're certainly
1:33:21
Speaker 2: seeing the effects of that in the wildfires, with the
1:33:24
Speaker 2: lengthening fire season, with that fire behavior that we talked about.
1:33:28
Speaker 2: Now this year we're going to add a strengthening al nino.
1:33:32
Speaker 2: It certainly looks like that. So we already have this
1:33:34
Speaker 2: what they're officially calling the blob, that hot marine area
1:33:39
Speaker 2: in the eastern Pacific of sea surface temperatures. So the blob,
1:33:44
Speaker 2: as they're calling it, is certainly going to help the
1:33:47
Speaker 2: development of the al Nina, which takes place in the
1:33:49
Speaker 2: equatorial Pacific. So if we are headed into what the
1:33:54
Speaker 2: European weather models are calling a potential for a super
1:33:57
Speaker 2: el Nino. What is that that's say over two degrees
1:34:01
Speaker 2: over average warming in that area of the equatorial Pacific.
1:34:04
Speaker 2: So if we're entering into a super Almino, what does
1:34:07
Speaker 2: that mean for the tropical activity in the Pacific? What
1:34:11
Speaker 2: does that mean for wildfire? Does that mean more lightning? Right?
1:34:15
Speaker 2: So lilimate is changing. We're trying to react to it
1:34:18
Speaker 2: as fast as we can, but it certainly has a
1:34:21
Speaker 2: foothold in the wildfires in the West. The fire behavior
1:34:25
Speaker 2: that we're seeing, it's been one year after another.
1:34:33
Speaker 1: We're on our continent. We're used to the western part
1:34:35
Speaker 1: of the continent being the most susceptible to Wildfire's part
1:34:38
Speaker 1: of it is that it's more open, so lightning strikes
1:34:41
Speaker 1: are more likely to trigger them. Are we are you?
1:34:45
Speaker 1: You know what is the increase we're seeing in wildfires
1:34:48
Speaker 1: and other continents and what does that tell you about
1:34:51
Speaker 1: our future on the West coast.
1:34:55
Speaker 2: Well, we know that we're seeing wildfires globally, uh the
1:35:01
Speaker 2: their length, their seasonal fire scenes are growing as well.
1:35:04
Speaker 2: Right Australia, every year in New Zealand every year has
1:35:09
Speaker 2: very significant fatality wildfires. Central America, South America, the Jungles
1:35:15
Speaker 2: we've seen those burning. We know that that's a problem.
1:35:18
Speaker 2: So I think it's the evidence is there that globally
1:35:22
Speaker 2: we are seeing an increase in fire activity and it
1:35:25
Speaker 2: concerns me and our community a great deal. When I
1:35:30
Speaker 2: first started, you would have a firefighter vacancy very seldom.
1:35:37
Speaker 2: We would hire a handful of people every year.
1:35:40
Speaker 1: Because because competitive job, people want to be competitive. And
1:35:45
Speaker 1: now it's a good job, good at people like the hours, flexibility.
1:35:49
Speaker 2: Right, we can't hire enough. Right, we go from one
1:35:53
Speaker 2: academy to the next. As soon as one academy and
1:35:55
Speaker 2: is the next one starting now you.
1:35:57
Speaker 1: Say you can't get enough. Are you still getting an
1:35:59
Speaker 1: increase in people wanting to be firefighters? You just have
1:36:01
Speaker 1: more demand or are fewer people actually wanting to be firefighters?
1:36:05
Speaker 2: A lot of people want to be firefighters. To your point,
1:36:07
Speaker 2: they love the schedule. It's a great job, right, it's
1:36:12
Speaker 2: the right. I delivered babies, I flew in helicopters, I
1:36:15
Speaker 2: you know, did all those things.
1:36:17
Speaker 1: One of my best friends from high school is still
1:36:18
Speaker 1: better that he failed the firefighters examined. See how I
1:36:22
Speaker 1: think he tried it three times? Crazy miss.
1:36:26
Speaker 2: It's a great job, but it gives you a front
1:36:29
Speaker 2: row seat really to seeing all the things that we've
1:36:33
Speaker 2: talked about. So, like I said, in my career, we
1:36:37
Speaker 2: had a finite fire season. Now I'm seeing a fire
1:36:41
Speaker 2: season that doesn't end. Now I'm seeing fire tornadoes. Now
1:36:45
Speaker 2: I'm seeing tropical weather activity in San Diego. Now I'm
1:36:50
Speaker 2: seeing right all of these things that when I started
1:36:53
Speaker 2: heard of and having to demand power to have to
1:36:57
Speaker 2: adjust this. So we know, right, fire season, the way
1:36:59
Speaker 2: that the federal wildfire goes, we follow fire season around
1:37:03
Speaker 2: the nation. Right, So in this time of year, usually
1:37:06
Speaker 2: the southwest, Arizona, New Mexico, Texas Panhandle, that's typically what
1:37:11
Speaker 2: starts burning first, and so the federal resources they focus
1:37:15
Speaker 2: in on those areas. And then typically as soon as
1:37:18
Speaker 2: the monsoonal rains come, maybe in June, then there's a
1:37:21
Speaker 2: shift right and wildfires moves up to the Pacific Northwest,
1:37:25
Speaker 2: and it's Washington, and it's Oregon, and it's northern California.
1:37:29
Speaker 2: And then as we get later into the season, right
1:37:31
Speaker 2: August September, then California right other parts of the West
1:37:37
Speaker 2: start burning. And so the federal government, right, all the
1:37:40
Speaker 2: US Foresters, the Bureau Land Management, all those federal agencies, right,
1:37:45
Speaker 2: the fixed wing aircraft or rotary wing aircraft, all the things,
1:37:47
Speaker 2: the big stuff that everybody needs that gets shifted around.
1:37:51
Speaker 2: So Chuck, my question is what happens if it all
1:37:54
Speaker 2: happens at once.
1:37:55
Speaker 1: And that's a concern you have, and that's.
1:37:57
Speaker 2: A concern I have. If the monsoons don't come on
1:38:02
Speaker 2: time and the Northwest starts burning at the same time,
1:38:05
Speaker 2: then how are we shifting those manpower, staffing, logistics, How
1:38:09
Speaker 2: are we shifting that like we normally do.
1:38:11
Speaker 1: Well, this's a pretty good place to land this plane on.
1:38:13
Speaker 1: So what you're saying is we are not prepared sort
1:38:18
Speaker 1: of federal, state, local, the collective if multiple regions in
1:38:23
Speaker 1: this country experienced fire season at the same time. And
1:38:25
Speaker 1: what you're saying is because of the sort of we've
1:38:29
Speaker 1: got sort of all these conditions that are that are
1:38:32
Speaker 1: coming together at the same time, the likelihood of this
1:38:35
Speaker 1: is what is it ten percent? How would you put it?
1:38:40
Speaker 2: I would put it higher than that, I would put
1:38:42
Speaker 2: it thirty years.
1:38:43
Speaker 1: We're going to have multiple regions on fire at the
1:38:45
Speaker 1: same time, and then this is going to be a
1:38:47
Speaker 1: stretching of resources that maybe we're not prepared.
1:38:50
Speaker 2: For and let's add to that, what do you think
1:38:53
Speaker 2: has happened with those federal wildfire agencies over the past year? Right? So,
1:38:58
Speaker 2: now we stand it right up and expanded, We've shifted
1:39:01
Speaker 2: a lot of things. We were basically taking all the
1:39:04
Speaker 2: federal resources under one roof. Now, how do you think
1:39:07
Speaker 2: firefighters like change?
1:39:10
Speaker 1: Yeah? About as well as all of us do, right man?
1:39:12
Speaker 2: Right, you ask any firefighters are two things they don't
1:39:15
Speaker 2: like the way things are and change?
1:39:18
Speaker 1: Right, Welcome to the American voter. Hey, we need change,
1:39:22
Speaker 1: but I want that change. Okay, exactly.
1:39:24
Speaker 2: So, Yes, I have a concern that we're going to
1:39:28
Speaker 2: have overlapping fire seasons that is going to challenge us
1:39:32
Speaker 2: in terms of our resource and capabilities this year.
1:39:35
Speaker 1: I do, and I think, Look, I'll tell you the
1:39:36
Speaker 1: biggest issue that I worry about, just sort of politically
1:39:39
Speaker 1: on this is that there's this perception this is a
1:39:42
Speaker 1: west coast problem. And you're talking to me about Kansas
1:39:46
Speaker 1: and Nebraska. Last time I checked either one of those
1:39:48
Speaker 1: states around the West coast, Like this is essentially west
1:39:52
Speaker 1: of the Mississippi problem, isn't it.
1:39:55
Speaker 2: This is the year right the wake up call was
1:40:01
Speaker 2: a six hundred and eighty thousand acre fire in Nebraska
1:40:04
Speaker 2: in March. That was the wake up call. If we
1:40:06
Speaker 2: can do that, now, we're really in trouble. So Colorado,
1:40:11
Speaker 2: the state of Colorado.
1:40:13
Speaker 1: They had their season a couple years ago. Yeah, and
1:40:16
Speaker 1: we know.
1:40:18
Speaker 2: Absolutely the least snowpack on record ever to their record keeping.
1:40:24
Speaker 2: The Colorado the state of Colorado are a red flag warning. Right,
1:40:29
Speaker 2: is something that the National Weather Service issues when they
1:40:31
Speaker 2: have significant fire weather. Right. I think the state of
1:40:35
Speaker 2: Colorado has been under a red flag warning. I think
1:40:39
Speaker 2: at least thirty times in the last month and a half.
1:40:42
Speaker 2: So now you're the fire chief. I hate to say that, like,
1:40:44
Speaker 2: what does that do? That numbs people, doesn't it? Well,
1:40:47
Speaker 2: that's my point, That's what I'm going to ask you.
1:40:48
Speaker 2: So if you're the fire chief and I tell you
1:40:50
Speaker 2: that there's a red flag warning and you're going to
1:40:54
Speaker 2: respond to that, do you respond the same way thirty
1:40:58
Speaker 2: times later? It's the same issue that occurred in Los Angeles.
1:41:02
Speaker 1: This happens with hurricane watches versus warnings and how wanting. Yeah,
1:41:08
Speaker 1: you know, I went through her an infamous hurricane called
1:41:11
Speaker 1: Hurricane Andrew and when that hit. One of the reasons
1:41:15
Speaker 1: it was so devastating. Is that South Florida had gone
1:41:19
Speaker 1: through like twenty misses. Yeah, I feel like in my
1:41:23
Speaker 1: childhood and so people just got used to it. How
1:41:25
Speaker 1: we're all experts. You know it's going to turn north
1:41:28
Speaker 1: because they all turned north and then this one didn't
1:41:30
Speaker 1: turn north.
1:41:31
Speaker 2: It only takes one.
1:41:32
Speaker 1: Yell and that's and that's always the case. Well, man,
1:41:35
Speaker 1: I learned a lot here. I don't it sounds like, Look,
1:41:41
Speaker 1: you're not an activist, but if you could sound the alarm,
1:41:44
Speaker 1: you'd like to get more people paying attention to that
1:41:46
Speaker 1: we need. Doesn't sound like we have the resources to
1:41:50
Speaker 1: deal with what we could be facing this calendar.
1:41:54
Speaker 2: I think it's going to be a very significant year.
1:41:57
Speaker 2: I think folks need to prepare, do all the things
1:41:59
Speaker 2: that we talked about. Harden your home, download watch duty one,
1:42:04
Speaker 2: stop shopping back.
1:42:05
Speaker 1: You guys are ination. You're not just a California, right,
1:42:10
Speaker 1: it's a nation.
1:42:11
Speaker 2: It's the COONUS.
1:42:12
Speaker 1: You bet focused on wildfires, correct.
1:42:16
Speaker 2: Currently we're focused on wirefires, but we're probably going to
1:42:20
Speaker 2: expand to other areas. Uh, there's a good chance of flooding, right,
1:42:24
Speaker 2: so we're seeing a lot of.
1:42:26
Speaker 1: Sil Another thing that the forecasting on flooding is not
1:42:29
Speaker 1: as accurate as we wish it were.
1:42:32
Speaker 2: Well, it's a challenge, right, So there's this sort of
1:42:34
Speaker 2: an insidious thing, right, there's a lot of reasons that
1:42:36
Speaker 2: flooding occurs, but we can use the watch duty paradigm
1:42:40
Speaker 2: and machinery and focus on flooding. Also, Yeah, I think.
1:42:44
Speaker 1: It seems like we're pretty good at hurricanes because there
1:42:48
Speaker 1: there are even regular storms because you can track them, right,
1:42:52
Speaker 1: or it's flooding in yeah, yeah, the other stuff, there's
1:42:56
Speaker 1: too many other variables that it's just hard to account for.
1:42:58
Speaker 2: Right. You've got we had the significant flooding in the
1:43:02
Speaker 2: last few days in the Great Lakes region, right, Michigan, Wisconsin,
1:43:05
Speaker 2: major flooding those rivers, right, So they had very slow
1:43:08
Speaker 2: moving thunderstorms that rained some of them two inches an
1:43:11
Speaker 2: hour and sat for days at a time. So they're
1:43:15
Speaker 2: still dealing with very significant flooding. But there's the surprise flooding, right,
1:43:19
Speaker 2: the very unfortunate accident that occurred last year in Texas
1:43:22
Speaker 2: right in the hill country with the fatalities, right, So
1:43:27
Speaker 2: those were slow moving thunderstorms overnight, non moving pausing that.
1:43:33
Speaker 2: So we feel that we can focus our watch duty
1:43:36
Speaker 2: army and kind of help with that same issue.
1:43:40
Speaker 1: Well, regardless of where anybody is on the politics of
1:43:44
Speaker 1: climate change, the issue is we need to do more
1:43:48
Speaker 1: warnings and be able to mitigate and be able to respond.
1:43:53
Speaker 1: And it seems to me that that's I really hope
1:43:56
Speaker 1: it isn't politics that is slowing down the amount of
1:44:02
Speaker 1: resources going into this. I think just as we've never
1:44:04
Speaker 1: had better data, we've never had the ability to be
1:44:07
Speaker 1: better at this than now. We just need the political
1:44:10
Speaker 1: will to fund these entities.
1:44:13
Speaker 2: Right. We need to respond, and we need to not
1:44:15
Speaker 2: be fatigued to buy warnings, and we need to really
1:44:20
Speaker 2: pay attention to what's happening. We have the data, we
1:44:23
Speaker 2: just have to respond to it.
1:44:25
Speaker 1: Pete Current, great to meet you really learned a lot
1:44:29
Speaker 1: and you're pretty good at this. You've got a good metiorology.
1:44:33
Speaker 1: Is also got to be able to communicate the science,
1:44:36
Speaker 1: you know. Thank you speak you speak American, you don't
1:44:38
Speaker 1: just speak English, so I appreciate it.
1:44:40
Speaker 2: I'm used to having to brief firefighters right right, you
1:44:42
Speaker 2: got thirty second attention span. You got to get in
1:44:44
Speaker 2: and get out there.
1:44:45
Speaker 1: You go. Nice work. Good to meet you, Pete.
1:44:48
Speaker 2: Thank you sir. Appreciate it. Thank you.
1:44:49
Speaker 1: Ja. So bottom line download Watch Duty. You know I
1:45:13
Speaker 1: you know I as a hurricane guy, I'm obviously one
1:45:16
Speaker 1: of these amateur meteorologists. Now my daughter's about to get
1:45:19
Speaker 1: a minor in meteorology, so I'm going to have actual
1:45:21
Speaker 1: professional meteorologists in the family. But I'll you know, as
1:45:26
Speaker 1: somebody grew up in Florida more worried about hurricanes than wildfires,
1:45:29
Speaker 1: I've always been more focused on that. And but after
1:45:32
Speaker 1: we're watching what's happening, particularly west of the Mississippi, it's
1:45:36
Speaker 1: pretty clear we need to up our game when it
1:45:38
Speaker 1: comes to attempting to forecast for wildfire dangers. So anyway,
1:45:46
Speaker 1: Watch Duty not a waste your time. Hope you hope
1:45:48
Speaker 1: you downloaded if you live in an area that could
1:45:50
Speaker 1: be under threat. All Right, it is Monday, which means
1:45:53
Speaker 1: we're going to jump into the time machine this week
1:46:01
Speaker 1: in history avoided. We have a lot to choose from.
1:46:04
Speaker 1: I mean, you know, we've the White House Correspondence weekend,
1:46:09
Speaker 1: and there was another infamous White House Correspondent dinner that
1:46:12
Speaker 1: I also attended that Donald Trump also attended, that had
1:46:16
Speaker 1: a huge news event, but we didn't know what was
1:46:18
Speaker 1: happening at the time it was happening, and of course
1:46:20
Speaker 1: it was the famous bin Laden raid. That is actually
1:46:24
Speaker 1: something that happened this week, but it's not the moment
1:46:27
Speaker 1: I am choosing to focus on, and do is our
1:46:30
Speaker 1: history lesson of the week. Instead, we're going to go
1:46:34
Speaker 1: back to the Cold War, to nineteen sixty. Did you
1:46:39
Speaker 1: figure out the clue by the way that the incident
1:46:43
Speaker 1: was the inspiration for one of the most for the
1:46:45
Speaker 1: names for one of the most famous rock bands of
1:46:47
Speaker 1: my generation. Have you figured it out? Have you still
1:46:54
Speaker 1: haven't found what you're looking for? But let me begin
1:46:57
Speaker 1: just months before this week, in nineteen sixty, the Cold
1:47:00
Speaker 1: War looked like something that could be managed. In Moscow,
1:47:04
Speaker 1: Vice President Richard Nixon and Soviet leader Nikita Krushchev stood
1:47:07
Speaker 1: in a model American kitchen, arguing about appliances, about prosperity,
1:47:13
Speaker 1: and about which system worked better. It was a tense confrontation,
1:47:18
Speaker 1: but it was contained. It made the rivalry between the
1:47:22
Speaker 1: two superpowers look like something you could stage. Frankly, but
1:47:26
Speaker 1: within a year, that version of the Cold War would
1:47:28
Speaker 1: start to fall apart, not because of one crisis, but
1:47:32
Speaker 1: because peace by piece the story stopped holding. So it's
1:47:36
Speaker 1: May one, nineteen sixty. President Dwight Eisenhower's preparing for a
1:47:41
Speaker 1: summit with Khrushchev. There's costless optimism, but beneath that diplomacy,
1:47:47
Speaker 1: the real Cold War is still being fought in secret.
1:47:51
Speaker 1: U two spy planes flying deep over Soviet territory, high
1:47:55
Speaker 1: enough to be considered untouchable. One of those planes is
1:48:00
Speaker 1: being flown by a pilot named Francis Gary Powers. Fly
1:48:04
Speaker 1: across the Soviet Union, photograph military sites. Return. That was
1:48:09
Speaker 1: the mission. The assumption is simple. Even if detected, they
1:48:13
Speaker 1: can't stop you. You're just too high in the sky.
1:48:16
Speaker 1: That was until May first turns out a Soviet missile
1:48:21
Speaker 1: reaches that altitude, the plane is hit. Powers ejects. He survives,
1:48:29
Speaker 1: descending by parachute to Soviet territory, and like many pilots
1:48:34
Speaker 1: on missions like this, he's actually carrying something else, a
1:48:38
Speaker 1: coin with a concealed poison needle inside a last resort.
1:48:45
Speaker 1: He doesn't use it. Back in the United States, officials
1:48:50
Speaker 1: lose contact with the plane. They assume the pilot did
1:48:54
Speaker 1: not survive. So the United States, through the CIA, decides
1:49:00
Speaker 1: to tell a story. It wasn't a spy mission. It
1:49:05
Speaker 1: was a weather plane that drifted off course. Plausible, deniable,
1:49:13
Speaker 1: the kind of story governments tell themselves and tell the
1:49:15
Speaker 1: public all the time. But this time the other side
1:49:22
Speaker 1: knows exactly what happened. Khrushchev has the wreckage, and he
1:49:29
Speaker 1: has the pilot alive, but he waits. He lets the
1:49:36
Speaker 1: United States tell the world its story, repeat it, stand
1:49:41
Speaker 1: by it, and then he reveals the truth. The pilot
1:49:47
Speaker 1: is alive. He confesses it was not a weather plane,
1:49:54
Speaker 1: it was espionage. Well, and how her cruse chef summit collapses.
1:50:03
Speaker 1: But the real damage isn't diplomatic, it's credibility. Because the
1:50:09
Speaker 1: issue wasn't the spine. Everyone assumed that each side was
1:50:13
Speaker 1: spying on the other. The issue was the story. More
1:50:18
Speaker 1: so for the public. The United States told one and
1:50:22
Speaker 1: it didn't hold. We're supposed to be the good guys,
1:50:27
Speaker 1: the truth tellers. Well, once that happens, a different question
1:50:31
Speaker 1: starts to creep in. That wasn't true. What else is it?
1:50:37
Speaker 1: And here's what's striking. Remember this doesn't stop there. Within
1:50:41
Speaker 1: a year, the United States backs an invasion of Cuba.
1:50:45
Speaker 1: A force of Cuban exiles lands at the Bay of Pigs,
1:50:48
Speaker 1: expecting support, expecting momentum, and instead it falls apart in
1:50:52
Speaker 1: less than four days, captured, defeated, exposed, and for the
1:50:57
Speaker 1: world watching, including Americans watching at home, there's no ambiguity
1:51:01
Speaker 1: about what it was. It was not a spontaneous uprising,
1:51:05
Speaker 1: was an American backed operation that failed quickly and publicly.
1:51:09
Speaker 1: President John Kennedy goes on television and takes responsibility, but
1:51:11
Speaker 1: by then the image is already set. At the same time,
1:51:15
Speaker 1: the United States is deepening its involvement in Vietnam, not
1:51:18
Speaker 1: all at once, but step by step. Advisors become deployments,
1:51:22
Speaker 1: support becomes commitment, always described as limited, temporary till it isn't.
1:51:30
Speaker 1: And let's not forget this false story lands in a
1:51:34
Speaker 1: country that had just come out of the era of
1:51:35
Speaker 1: Joseph McCarthy, where Americans had already seen claims made with
1:51:39
Speaker 1: certainty and trust stretched too thin to hold. So one
1:51:46
Speaker 1: incident can be dismissed two starts to raise doubts. By
1:51:51
Speaker 1: the third, people aren't just questioning the event, they're questioning
1:51:55
Speaker 1: the explanation sound familiar. The early Cold War wasn't just
1:52:04
Speaker 1: a contest of power. It was also a test of
1:52:06
Speaker 1: credibility and in just a few years. A spyplane shut down,
1:52:12
Speaker 1: a failed invasion for a coup, perhaps a war explained
1:52:18
Speaker 1: one way, but experienced another. The United States didn't just
1:52:22
Speaker 1: face pressure from abroad. It began to lose something at home. Trust.
1:52:29
Speaker 1: By the way, this was all before Watergate. Sometimes a
1:52:32
Speaker 1: turning point in history isn't something that happens. Isn't something
1:52:35
Speaker 1: isn't when something happens. It's when people stop beliezing the
1:52:39
Speaker 1: version of it that they're being told. The trust deficit
1:52:48
Speaker 1: that we're all experiencing right now with government, with institutions
1:52:52
Speaker 1: in general. Sometimes we forget this began even further then
1:53:02
Speaker 1: we realize. So there you go. Now do you know
1:53:08
Speaker 1: what you're looking for? Now? Do you get the clue
1:53:11
Speaker 1: I was giving you out there?
1:53:17
Speaker 2: Ask Chuck?
1:53:20
Speaker 1: All right, let's take some questions. First one, I love
1:53:25
Speaker 1: this Steve Frank, Newport Beach, California, fellow member of the
1:53:28
Speaker 1: two First Names Club. Yes you are, But I bet
1:53:34
Speaker 1: you don't get called Frank Steve right because Steve's not
1:53:36
Speaker 1: the last name. It's like with me, it's like I
1:53:38
Speaker 1: understand getting my last name confused for a first name,
1:53:41
Speaker 1: just like with you, Steve. But where I struggle. It's like, oh,
1:53:44
Speaker 1: wait a minute, do you really think my last name
1:53:46
Speaker 1: is Chuck? It's just like you really think your last
1:53:49
Speaker 1: name is Steve? Right, Like that's the It's always funny
1:53:53
Speaker 1: to me why when people say, well, I'm not sure
1:53:55
Speaker 1: which name it is, Well, which one's least likely to
1:53:57
Speaker 1: be a last name? But anyway, I'm guessing you have
1:54:00
Speaker 1: the same frustrations at times that I do. But hey,
1:54:03
Speaker 1: I turned my head for Chuck Ortodd at this point.
1:54:05
Speaker 1: I'm guessing you turned your head at Steve or Frank
1:54:08
Speaker 1: at this point. All right, here's a question. A huge
1:54:12
Speaker 1: fan going back to the hotline days, and now I'm
1:54:13
Speaker 1: hearing there are Chuck Todd trading cards. I remember you
1:54:15
Speaker 1: mentioning losing your quote new music pipeline after your kids
1:54:18
Speaker 1: left for college, and I'm in a similar spot. My
1:54:20
Speaker 1: daughter and I are even thinking about starting a podcast
1:54:22
Speaker 1: to bridge the gap across generations. I love that idea.
1:54:25
Speaker 1: What advice would you give amateur podcasters trying to turn
1:54:27
Speaker 1: an idea into something real, even if it's just for
1:54:29
Speaker 1: a small audience, Steve Frank, the number one thing is consistency.
1:54:36
Speaker 1: You know, the biggest you know, the reason why most
1:54:39
Speaker 1: podcasts fail is people get tired of doing it after
1:54:42
Speaker 1: two episodes, four episodes, eight episodes, stick to a schedule,
1:54:47
Speaker 1: stick to it. It is one of those if you've
1:54:49
Speaker 1: ever heard of hockey, you know the whole quote unquote
1:54:51
Speaker 1: hockey stick moment. Right. Well, the reason it's called a
1:54:53
Speaker 1: hockey stick moment because, like in any sort of anything,
1:54:56
Speaker 1: you're building, sometimes it's a business, sometimes it's an audience,
1:54:59
Speaker 1: whatever it is, it's like you you know, a little,
1:55:02
Speaker 1: a little, a little, and then boom, right, it feels
1:55:05
Speaker 1: like it all happens at once. Look, I'll be honest,
1:55:09
Speaker 1: As I've been building this audience, it was sort of
1:55:12
Speaker 1: like we were grinding. We were grinding, and we were grinding,
1:55:14
Speaker 1: and then suddenly we about six months in, we had
1:55:16
Speaker 1: our first bike, right, And you know, the key is consistency,
1:55:21
Speaker 1: it is posting. Look, you've got to be platform agnostic.
1:55:25
Speaker 1: You've got to go everywhere. You've got to you know,
1:55:30
Speaker 1: when it comes to music, you've got to be in.
1:55:32
Speaker 1: You've got to sort of be on top of the
1:55:34
Speaker 1: big moments in the that are happening so that you
1:55:39
Speaker 1: can because unfortunately, the way the algorithms work, right, you
1:55:43
Speaker 1: don't get you you don't get you could have a
1:55:48
Speaker 1: great podcast, but if you if you don't make it
1:55:50
Speaker 1: into the algorithm, people aren't going to see it, right,
1:55:52
Speaker 1: It isn't going to get shared. So you've got to
1:55:53
Speaker 1: sort of ride trends when they exist and try to
1:55:58
Speaker 1: be relevant around them. Like a simple thing might be,
1:56:02
Speaker 1: you know everybody's talking about us. You know, maybe there's
1:56:04
Speaker 1: a certain new Tailor swift album, so you know, ride
1:56:07
Speaker 1: the Taylor Swift wave without doing Taylor Swift and you know,
1:56:10
Speaker 1: you know, just do like you know, it's like something
1:56:13
Speaker 1: adjacent so that you can sort of make it into
1:56:16
Speaker 1: the algorithm and get some attention for what you're doing.
1:56:20
Speaker 1: But that's really and there's almost there's different Frankly, it's
1:56:26
Speaker 1: just different ways each one of them work. I Mean,
1:56:29
Speaker 1: my guess is your your daughter might be better at
1:56:32
Speaker 1: it at figuring out which algorithms work best for which audiences,
1:56:37
Speaker 1: et cetera. Look, the other challenge you're going to have
1:56:40
Speaker 1: is music rights, right, so be sure to know you
1:56:46
Speaker 1: know the limitations. You know, YouTube will just not include
1:56:50
Speaker 1: you know, you may post something, but if the music
1:56:52
Speaker 1: if they don't think you have the rights to the music,
1:56:54
Speaker 1: you know, all of a sudden you could get so
1:56:56
Speaker 1: it could cost you traffic. So you do have a
1:56:58
Speaker 1: little bit of an extra challenge lunch on the licensing issue.
1:57:02
Speaker 1: So know your fair use rules very well. You know,
1:57:09
Speaker 1: you could do what my friend Tony Krnheiser does, which
1:57:11
Speaker 1: is he only plays music. People send in and get
1:57:15
Speaker 1: permission from the owner of the license to Eric and
1:57:19
Speaker 1: they're very you know, they're they're very They make sure
1:57:23
Speaker 1: they have permission in writing, you know, they're still waiting
1:57:26
Speaker 1: for Paul McCartney to give them permission. Right, is the joke.
1:57:32
Speaker 1: So you're you, you are going to need to know
1:57:34
Speaker 1: some of those rules, and it is what makes music
1:57:36
Speaker 1: podcasts I think quite difficult because of the of the
1:57:39
Speaker 1: licensing issues, right, because in order to showcase music and
1:57:44
Speaker 1: to share music, you want to play a clip, right,
1:57:47
Speaker 1: so you know, be learning what your clips are or
1:57:49
Speaker 1: you know, things like that. But the but again, I
1:57:53
Speaker 1: go back to the single most important thing is consistency
1:57:57
Speaker 1: of production. You know, if you're going to be twice
1:58:00
Speaker 1: a week, always be twice a week, Always be at
1:58:02
Speaker 1: the same time, and be consistent. Right the minute you
1:58:05
Speaker 1: start being in an inconsistent updat of your podcast. You
1:58:09
Speaker 1: will not build an audience. People will forget, you'll stop
1:58:12
Speaker 1: being in their feeds, et cetera. So it is the
1:58:15
Speaker 1: number one. It doesn't matter what topic you're doing. Consistency
1:58:20
Speaker 1: in a schedule, and frankly, once a week is probably
1:58:24
Speaker 1: not enough if you want to grow grow an audience
1:58:28
Speaker 1: long long term. But if you're going to do it
1:58:30
Speaker 1: once a week, realize it may take upwards of a
1:58:32
Speaker 1: year for you to feel you know, so be sure
1:58:35
Speaker 1: you enjoy doing it for yourself regardless, and just be consistent.
1:58:40
Speaker 1: That's the consistent about updating That matters more than anything.
1:58:44
Speaker 1: Good luck, let me know when you get it up
1:58:46
Speaker 1: and running, we'll promote it all right. Next question comes
1:58:50
Speaker 1: from Patrick in La and he says, hey, Chuck, let's
1:58:52
Speaker 1: say quote asking for a friend on this one.
1:58:55
Speaker 2: How does a.
1:58:55
Speaker 1: Nation apologize to the world. Well, what you do is
1:59:03
Speaker 1: you don't go about just I would. I think this
1:59:07
Speaker 1: is going to be a really tougher for the next
1:59:10
Speaker 1: president than you realize. What I think you have to
1:59:15
Speaker 1: do is just other countries are not going to just
1:59:20
Speaker 1: take our word. It doesn't matter how much they like
1:59:22
Speaker 1: the next president. So it isn't going to be a
1:59:24
Speaker 1: matter of apologizing. It is making agreements and making America's
1:59:31
Speaker 1: word verified, not just trusted, but verified. Right means putting
1:59:37
Speaker 1: pen to paper. It means getting congressional authority when you
1:59:42
Speaker 1: need congressional authority. It means sort of following the rule
1:59:46
Speaker 1: of law as you're going about. I don't if we
1:59:50
Speaker 1: just go around saying sorry for the behavior of our
1:59:53
Speaker 1: last president. Frankly, I think that all that does is
1:59:58
Speaker 1: divide us more we need our ex president. Do not
2:00:00
Speaker 1: divide us. And you know you may disagree. Look, there
2:00:04
Speaker 1: were some tactics that I disagreed with my predecessor and
2:00:07
Speaker 1: how he went about it, but he had the best
2:00:09
Speaker 1: he had the best interests of the United States in mind.
2:00:13
Speaker 1: I just disagree with how he went about doing it,
2:00:15
Speaker 1: and I think he inadvertently alienated allies. Right, That is
2:00:19
Speaker 1: how I would sort of dispassionately say it. And I
2:00:24
Speaker 1: know you're going to have a hard time trusting us.
2:00:25
Speaker 1: So here's what I pledged to you when we signed
2:00:27
Speaker 1: this agreement on Tariff's it's putting here, I'm taking it
2:00:32
Speaker 1: to Congress. Essentially, I'm I'm it's like I'm getting it notarized.
2:00:35
Speaker 1: I'm getting it it's a version of that. Right, we
2:00:37
Speaker 1: don't know notarize, but you get my point, right, is
2:00:40
Speaker 1: it is not just I don't think it's just I'm sorry.
2:00:45
Speaker 1: It's behavioral changes, and it is verifying the trust that
2:00:51
Speaker 1: we're asking for. Right, We've you know the famous phrase trust,
2:00:55
Speaker 1: but verify. We're gonna We're gonna We're not just taking
2:00:58
Speaker 1: the word of the Soviets. We're gonna create a system
2:01:01
Speaker 1: where we can verify that they're keeping their word. And
2:01:04
Speaker 1: I think fortunately America's next president is going to have
2:01:08
Speaker 1: to create a verification process for our allies to know
2:01:11
Speaker 1: that we're going to keep our word, because that's the
2:01:13
Speaker 1: thing that we've got to fix. Yes, apologizing might might
2:01:19
Speaker 1: be politically feel good for your political base, but I
2:01:22
Speaker 1: actually think going about it as a straight up apology
2:01:25
Speaker 1: tours probably self defeating. Nick from Michigan Rights, Hey, I've
2:01:31
Speaker 1: been reading that Republicans are openly hoping that Alito will
2:01:33
Speaker 1: retire from the Superior Court and hopes it will just
2:01:35
Speaker 1: turn out from Republican voters in the midterms. What do
2:01:37
Speaker 1: you think go to Supreme Court vacancy meaningfully increase positive
2:01:40
Speaker 1: outcomes for the GOP the cycle, Well, The answer to
2:01:44
Speaker 1: that is it could. But this is why you have
2:01:47
Speaker 1: some Republicans wanting this now. Because twenty eighteen, which was
2:01:53
Speaker 1: overall a pretty big Democratic year, particularly in the House,
2:01:58
Speaker 1: Democrats actually lost two sentates, and it was Missouri and Indiana.
2:02:02
Speaker 1: Now they were two tough Senate heats to hold two
2:02:04
Speaker 1: incumbents who were sort of kind of accidental winners the
2:02:08
Speaker 1: previous time. Right Claire mccaskell won thanks to Todd aiken
2:02:13
Speaker 1: legitimate rape comments, and Joe donn Lee won because Dick
2:02:17
Speaker 1: Lueger lost the primary to a guy named Murdoch and
2:02:24
Speaker 1: was just considered too offside of the mainstream for Indiana.
2:02:27
Speaker 1: So the next reelection was always going to be hard. Right,
2:02:30
Speaker 1: They sort of were accidental winners in twenty twelve a
2:02:33
Speaker 1: little bit, and it was no doubt they were uphill battles.
2:02:36
Speaker 1: And then the Kavanaugh confirmation turned raw personal, partisan polarizing,
2:02:45
Speaker 1: and Indiana and Missouri are reder states, and it fired
2:02:48
Speaker 1: up a base. Claire mccaskell believes, but for the Kavanaugh hearings,
2:02:55
Speaker 1: if there's no Supreme Court vacancy, there's just no debate
2:02:57
Speaker 1: about a Supreme Court. The Republican base stays demoralized, and
2:03:02
Speaker 1: she might have been able to eat it out. That's
2:03:04
Speaker 1: what she believes. It certainly made it harder for Democrats
2:03:12
Speaker 1: in red leaning areas where the base was fired up
2:03:14
Speaker 1: about Kavanaugh. So that's what this is about. And so
2:03:20
Speaker 1: it means you know, now, I might argue, if you know,
2:03:24
Speaker 1: is it this is where what's good politics might not
2:03:28
Speaker 1: be good politics? Right? So take you know, the left
2:03:32
Speaker 1: is going to want to oppose whatever nominee Trump makes
2:03:35
Speaker 1: to the court on ideological grounds, and there may be
2:03:37
Speaker 1: a good case to make it if you're on the left.
2:03:40
Speaker 1: The question is are you getting anywhere with it? This
2:03:43
Speaker 1: is a conservative every place again conservative right. Alito has
2:03:47
Speaker 1: not exactly been a mainstream justice. He's sort of been
2:03:50
Speaker 1: on the he is, I think in the majority. He's
2:03:54
Speaker 1: not in the majority as often as your Barratts Roberts,
2:03:58
Speaker 1: as your Kavanaughs, as your Kegans. Is you'll learn from
2:04:03
Speaker 1: a terrific conversation and book from Sarah Eskar and so
2:04:10
Speaker 1: I probably so I understand. So what you're seeing is
2:04:13
Speaker 1: Republican hoping to replicate what happened and thinking that all
2:04:18
Speaker 1: they they just want to save this Senate. And when
2:04:21
Speaker 1: you look at what would be seat three or four
2:04:23
Speaker 1: or five for the Democrats and their pickups. You're looking
2:04:26
Speaker 1: at red leaning Ohio, red leaning Iowa, red leaning Alaska. Right.
2:04:31
Speaker 1: This worked in the red leaning states. It didn't work
2:04:34
Speaker 1: in swing areas or blue leaning areas the Kavanaugh outrage,
2:04:38
Speaker 1: but it did work in the red leaning battlegrounds. And
2:04:41
Speaker 1: when you look at the battle for the Senate in particular,
2:04:44
Speaker 1: for Democrats, they have to basically win in red leaning
2:04:49
Speaker 1: areas Ohio, Iowa, Alaska, Nebraska, right, those four, Montana, those
2:04:53
Speaker 1: five all red leaning. And so what the average Republican
2:04:58
Speaker 1: strategies is, Hey, if we can have recreate the political
2:05:01
Speaker 1: environment in October of eighteen, in October of twenty six
2:05:06
Speaker 1: where the right feels marginalized and outraged and by whoever
2:05:10
Speaker 1: the Supreme Court nominee, is that that could save the Senate.
2:05:13
Speaker 1: So I'm skeptical this can work a second time, but
2:05:19
Speaker 1: I understand, but I'm trying to explain why they think this,
2:05:23
Speaker 1: and that's what they're pointing to. And it did work
2:05:26
Speaker 1: for it did work for Republicans in eighteen. Next question
2:05:31
Speaker 1: comes from Jeremy. He goes, Hey, love the podcast and
2:05:34
Speaker 1: appreciate the space you create for political deep dies. I'm
2:05:36
Speaker 1: currently living in Japan, but spends much of my adult
2:05:38
Speaker 1: life in Florida and grew up in Missouri. I'm curious
2:05:41
Speaker 1: how Democrats can regain a foothold in Missouri, which has
2:05:43
Speaker 1: shifted from a swing state to reliably read even as
2:05:45
Speaker 1: voter support progressive politics like marijuana legalization, higher wages, and
2:05:49
Speaker 1: abortion rights. Where's the disconnect? Is it branding, messaging or
2:05:52
Speaker 1: something deeper? And is the Missouri Democratic Party even trying
2:05:55
Speaker 1: to make the state competitive again? Thanks Jeremy, So I
2:05:59
Speaker 1: would answer the last question first. I don't think the
2:06:02
Speaker 1: Missouri Democratic Party is even trying anymore. And I say
2:06:06
Speaker 1: that I'm being a little probably snarky about it, but
2:06:10
Speaker 1: it does feel like a bit of a give up now.
2:06:12
Speaker 1: Part of it is the suburban swing voter in Kansas
2:06:15
Speaker 1: City now lives in the camp in across the state
2:06:19
Speaker 1: lines in Kansas, and I have a feeling that if
2:06:22
Speaker 1: you're blue leaning, suburban nined in Saint Louis, you might
2:06:25
Speaker 1: be on the Illinois side of things now rather than
2:06:28
Speaker 1: in the Missouri side of things. Right, So, whether it's
2:06:31
Speaker 1: on abortion rights right, if that's something you know you're
2:06:34
Speaker 1: gonna live across the river, whether it's whether you're in Kansas,
2:06:40
Speaker 1: whether you're I write both of both states that have codified.
2:06:44
Speaker 1: So there's a small part of me that wonders if
2:06:46
Speaker 1: it's become self selecting over time. Right, I take you know,
2:06:50
Speaker 1: I've been saying that Missouri and Kansas are essentially switching places. Right.
2:06:54
Speaker 1: Missouri was a swing state that kind of had some
2:06:58
Speaker 1: some rural conservative vote. Right. Kansas was the you know,
2:07:03
Speaker 1: home a Bob Dole, Right, mister Republican. And what you've
2:07:06
Speaker 1: seen in the twenty first century is that Missouri has
2:07:09
Speaker 1: become more like a southern you know, it has. It
2:07:13
Speaker 1: is arguably it looks more like a Arkansas or in
2:07:18
Speaker 1: Alabama in its rural areas than it does like a
2:07:24
Speaker 1: Kansas in Iowa or in Illinois. And I just think
2:07:27
Speaker 1: that what you've seen is sort of Missouri was a
2:07:29
Speaker 1: Midwestern state in the twentieth with culturally Midwestern in the
2:07:32
Speaker 1: twentieth century. It is now culturally southern, I think in
2:07:35
Speaker 1: the twenty first century. And then you've seen, like I said,
2:07:38
Speaker 1: the biggest thing is the shrinkage of Saint Louis in general. Right,
2:07:43
Speaker 1: And this is what I think if you're really wanting
2:07:45
Speaker 1: to understand how, you know, essentially Saint Louis being gutted
2:07:49
Speaker 1: as a major city. When I say gut it, right,
2:07:51
Speaker 1: they've had a lot of industries that just sort of disappeared.
2:07:54
Speaker 1: You go to downtown Saint Louis and it just feels
2:07:56
Speaker 1: like a shell of its former self. You know, this
2:08:00
Speaker 1: was a place that was a hub. It was a
2:08:01
Speaker 1: headquarters for a major airline. Twa. Aneer Bush is really
2:08:05
Speaker 1: only symbolically headquartered in Saint Louis anymore, right as IMBEV
2:08:09
Speaker 1: is this huge international poration. I think the CEO is
2:08:12
Speaker 1: actually in New York these days, not in Saint Louis. Again,
2:08:15
Speaker 1: they have the symbolic headquarters of Anheuser Bush and Saint Louis.
2:08:17
Speaker 1: But it is, it is, It is a it is.
2:08:20
Speaker 1: It is literally a shell of its former self. So
2:08:26
Speaker 1: you know, it was a time Saint Louis as a
2:08:28
Speaker 1: city was you know, closer to being Chicago and Dallas
2:08:32
Speaker 1: than it was being Wichita or in Omaha. And I
2:08:40
Speaker 1: don't say that as Knox. It just it's just shrunk.
2:08:44
Speaker 1: It's shrunk in relevance. And then of course you know
2:08:48
Speaker 1: it's it's it had some international it had magnets that
2:08:52
Speaker 1: attracted new people into it. It attracted so as that disappeared,
2:08:59
Speaker 1: you almost had almost like a contraction, certainly of Saint
2:09:02
Speaker 1: Louis and the Saint Louis metro area. So that that's
2:09:06
Speaker 1: kind of what I chalk it up to, like a
2:09:08
Speaker 1: long term that this has just been a long term
2:09:09
Speaker 1: that the the sort of d major fying of Saint
2:09:13
Speaker 1: Louis as a major city. And I kind of think
2:09:16
Speaker 1: Saint Louis needs a revival plan the way Detroit got
2:09:20
Speaker 1: one right. And you know, I remember when I think
2:09:25
Speaker 1: I've said this before. I rememer when the Amazon aid was
2:09:28
Speaker 1: was doing a country wide search for a new place
2:09:31
Speaker 1: for headquarters. I was really pulling for Saint Louis. I
2:09:33
Speaker 1: have family there, I'm very familiar with it from a
2:09:37
Speaker 1: previous previous iteration in my life. And it's a it's it.
2:09:45
Speaker 1: I actually think it's a It's a terrific place to
2:09:49
Speaker 1: put a headquarters in the central part of the country
2:09:52
Speaker 1: that has an easy to get to airport, Like you know,
2:09:54
Speaker 1: it should be easier to get around than a Chicago
2:09:57
Speaker 1: or even a Dallas, but both Chicago go in Dallas
2:10:00
Speaker 1: of just sort of they're they're the central they're the
2:10:04
Speaker 1: central tent poles in the middle of the country now
2:10:08
Speaker 1: for regional stuff or gatherings and things like this, and
2:10:12
Speaker 1: Saint Louis is just sort of given up that. And
2:10:14
Speaker 1: I just think that that, you know, there's sort of
2:10:16
Speaker 1: the downsizing of Saint Louis in general for a variety
2:10:19
Speaker 1: of reasons. Why it has has been probably as big
2:10:23
Speaker 1: of a contributor to moving Missouri out of the battlegrounds
2:10:28
Speaker 1: as anything else. So if I were in charge of
2:10:31
Speaker 1: the national Party for the Democrats, I'd actually be you know,
2:10:34
Speaker 1: you certainly I think that you know, I would be go,
2:10:39
Speaker 1: go solve your Saint Louis problem first, then start worrying
2:10:41
Speaker 1: about the rest of the state. And instead, I think
2:10:44
Speaker 1: Kansas is ready to be a swing state. That's where
2:10:47
Speaker 1: I be invested. Next question comes from Adam B and Charlestown,
2:10:58
Speaker 1: West Virginia. Says, hey, big fan here. Seeing a recent
2:11:00
Speaker 1: interview with former presidents made me reflect on how, despite
2:11:02
Speaker 1: political differences, many still feel a level of respect for
2:11:06
Speaker 1: past leaders. Do you think Donald Trump will continue to
2:11:08
Speaker 1: provoke strong polarized reactions long after his presidency or will
2:11:11
Speaker 1: time soften those divisions? And if not, is that more
2:11:14
Speaker 1: about his leadership style or the modern media environment. Thanks
2:11:16
Speaker 1: for everything you do, Adam be Look, I'm inclined to
2:11:20
Speaker 1: believe it's his leaderships. You know, like anything you get
2:11:24
Speaker 1: out of something that you put into it. Right, if
2:11:27
Speaker 1: you lead with division, you're going to get division as
2:11:32
Speaker 1: a response. If you try to lead with a sense
2:11:34
Speaker 1: of unity, you men, if people don't agree with your
2:11:37
Speaker 1: definition of what unity looks like, you're going to be received,
2:11:41
Speaker 1: at least not positively as someone who wanted to bring
2:11:44
Speaker 1: people together.
2:11:45
Speaker 2: Right.
2:11:46
Speaker 1: You know, I was thinking about this when I was
2:11:48
Speaker 1: putting together that opening monologue about sort of how Donald
2:11:52
Speaker 1: Trump has handled divisive times versus say, how George W.
2:11:55
Speaker 1: Bush did. George W. Bush made sure right after nine
2:11:58
Speaker 1: to eleven to make it clear to the Muslim world
2:12:02
Speaker 1: we were not at war with them and that people
2:12:06
Speaker 1: shouldn't be taking out their anger on members of that faith.
2:12:10
Speaker 1: Went out of his way to do that after nine
2:12:12
Speaker 1: to eleven. Do you think this president would have done that?
2:12:18
Speaker 1: So my point is is that I think that what
2:12:20
Speaker 1: you're experiencing is you know, and I think you could
2:12:24
Speaker 1: feel it in the genuine affection that many Americans have
2:12:27
Speaker 1: for George W. Bush, who probably didn't vote for him
2:12:31
Speaker 1: the second time perhaps or don't want to, or didn't
2:12:34
Speaker 1: vote for him the first time, or maybe didn't vote
2:12:36
Speaker 1: for him at all, because he cared. You know, you know,
2:12:41
Speaker 1: you cannot say he didn't care about the country and
2:12:43
Speaker 1: he didn't care about people. You may have disagreed with
2:12:47
Speaker 1: his tactics, you may have disagreed with his policies, but
2:12:51
Speaker 1: you got a sense that he genuinely cared about the
2:12:53
Speaker 1: country and he genuinely cared about everybody, even people that
2:12:57
Speaker 1: he disagreed with. You know, Donald Trump wants to deport
2:13:00
Speaker 1: people that disagree with him. He's openly talked about it.
2:13:07
Speaker 1: So you know, if you you get back what you
2:13:14
Speaker 1: put into it. And to answer your question, will Donald
2:13:19
Speaker 1: Trump continue to provoke strong, polarized reactions long after his
2:13:23
Speaker 1: presidency or will time soften those divisions. It's up to
2:13:26
Speaker 1: him to soften the divisions. It's not up to the
2:13:29
Speaker 1: rest of us.
2:13:30
Speaker 2: It's up to him.
2:13:34
Speaker 1: Steven Orange County, long time, first time as a recovering
2:13:38
Speaker 1: Polly seinerd. Your commentaries bring back fond memories of lectures
2:13:41
Speaker 1: from my favorite political science professors in college decades ago.
2:13:45
Speaker 1: That can I just stop right there, Steve, that is
2:13:48
Speaker 1: the single best compliment you can That's that's that's I
2:13:51
Speaker 1: am tinily hoping. I just want to be I want
2:13:55
Speaker 1: to make it fun and interesting. So thank you. During
2:13:59
Speaker 1: one of your recent podcat as you said, the writing
2:14:00
Speaker 1: is on the wall that Trump is in Lame Duk territory.
2:14:03
Speaker 1: Since Trump almost certainly will not go quietly into the
2:14:05
Speaker 1: night like most of his predecessors, how likely is it
2:14:07
Speaker 1: that there will be a bigger faction of Republicans willing
2:14:09
Speaker 1: to push back against him without going the way of
2:14:12
Speaker 1: Jeff Flake, Bensas or Tom Tillis, someone's besides from Paul
2:14:15
Speaker 1: at Lease. Thanks well, I think you know, as you see,
2:14:20
Speaker 1: it's sort of it starts incrementally. If Thomas Massey survives
2:14:27
Speaker 1: as primary. I think that's another step and you'll see more.
2:14:31
Speaker 1: One of these things is nobody wants to be first.
2:14:33
Speaker 1: But as more Republicans survive the wrath of Trump, then
2:14:40
Speaker 1: you know, so Tom Tillis's protests worked. It got Trump
2:14:44
Speaker 1: and that Justice Department to back down on their trump
2:14:47
Speaker 1: up charges against Powell. Right as more Republicans see certain
2:14:51
Speaker 1: things work, and the pushback works, then more will get
2:14:55
Speaker 1: comfortable doing it. So I think it's one of those things.
2:14:58
Speaker 1: This is why, just politically, if you're Donald Trump, you
2:15:03
Speaker 1: care so much about this Thomas Massey primary more really,
2:15:06
Speaker 1: more than anything else, because he has put this guy
2:15:10
Speaker 1: on blast for almost a year now, and if he
2:15:13
Speaker 1: can't take him out in as Republican of an area
2:15:17
Speaker 1: as you can find in Kentucky, in theory a mega area,
2:15:23
Speaker 1: that will stiffen the spine of a lot of Republicans
2:15:27
Speaker 1: who maybe are quiet right now but would like to
2:15:29
Speaker 1: push back. So it's one of those things that every
2:15:36
Speaker 1: every little incremental pushback of the president, every stumble, every
2:15:42
Speaker 1: special election loss, only increases the courage of those who
2:15:49
Speaker 1: realize they're the ones left holding the bag and the bill,
2:15:53
Speaker 1: and they'll can they'll start to get a little and little,
2:15:56
Speaker 1: a little more each time. I don't don't ever expect
2:16:01
Speaker 1: this to look like a rush and a flip and
2:16:03
Speaker 1: a sea change. It will be one of those things,
2:16:06
Speaker 1: more like the hockey stick where all of a sudden,
2:16:08
Speaker 1: you're like, holy cow, third of the party is now
2:16:11
Speaker 1: voting against him really regularly. Now, that might not happen
2:16:14
Speaker 1: until the summer of twenty eight. But you're starting. I
2:16:18
Speaker 1: do believe that it's sort of we're in the stages,
2:16:20
Speaker 1: and it's one of those things that it's like, you know,
2:16:23
Speaker 1: we never we always know when when recessions begin, but
2:16:27
Speaker 1: not until after the fact. It's kind of with lame
2:16:29
Speaker 1: duck status, you know, is it right now? Has it
2:16:32
Speaker 1: already begun? Did it? You know, did it begin with
2:16:36
Speaker 1: the you know, you know, with the twenty five elections.
2:16:38
Speaker 1: You know, well, well, we'll post date this at some point,
2:16:42
Speaker 1: but we're in the uh, we're definitely in the in
2:16:45
Speaker 1: the landing zone of lame duck, of lame duckness. Take
2:16:53
Speaker 1: one more question, so number seven here, Nesa. Then we
2:16:57
Speaker 1: will save eight and nine for the next episode. Andy,
2:17:05
Speaker 1: why from a Milliewauk rights You mentioned recently that Trump
2:17:09
Speaker 1: maybe setting vance up to fail, and it made me
2:17:11
Speaker 1: wonder if vancies that too. Could he be positioning himself
2:17:14
Speaker 1: to benefit it from it long term? Is there a
2:17:17
Speaker 1: scenario where he distanced himself at the right moment to
2:17:19
Speaker 1: capture voters who were aligned with Trump's agenda but fatigued
2:17:21
Speaker 1: by him personally, or are the risks of staying tied
2:17:24
Speaker 1: to Trump too high for that to be a viable strategy.
2:17:27
Speaker 1: Best Andy, Why Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Well, we actually the question
2:17:35
Speaker 1: would be have has Trump had a vice president who
2:17:38
Speaker 1: tried to do this? The answer is yes, right, I
2:17:41
Speaker 1: was thinking about Pence the whole time that you were
2:17:44
Speaker 1: asking this question. And I know what Pence thought to
2:17:48
Speaker 1: himself starting in January of twenty twenty one, and frankly
2:17:52
Speaker 1: thought all the way through when he started running for
2:17:54
Speaker 1: president in January of twenty twenty three, that there was
2:17:58
Speaker 1: a scenario where he would distance himself at the right
2:18:01
Speaker 1: moment January six, that he could capture voters who were
2:18:04
Speaker 1: aligned with Trump's agenda. That he was you know that
2:18:06
Speaker 1: he agreed with what Trump was trying to do. He
2:18:08
Speaker 1: just didn't like what he was doing and they were
2:18:10
Speaker 1: tired of him personally. That was Pence's theory of the case.
2:18:13
Speaker 1: It is still Pence's theory of the case. I think
2:18:17
Speaker 1: long term, like I think, he really is playing a
2:18:20
Speaker 1: long game. He's trying to start an alternative heritage that
2:18:22
Speaker 1: he wants to be the guy if there if this
2:18:26
Speaker 1: version of the conservative movement collapses, and there's a lot
2:18:30
Speaker 1: of evidence that Trump's movement will collapse at some point,
2:18:33
Speaker 1: Pence wants to be the guy organizing the next conservative movement,
2:18:37
Speaker 1: or the sort of a revitalized version of it. So,
2:18:42
Speaker 1: but I ask you, I'll flip it to you, is that,
2:18:46
Speaker 1: you know, if that's a long game? You know, is
2:18:49
Speaker 1: can both these guys be playing the long game like
2:18:52
Speaker 1: this right? Or I am more inclined to believe that
2:18:55
Speaker 1: the stain of Trump is too hard to get rid
2:18:57
Speaker 1: of and that it is too difficult to try to
2:19:01
Speaker 1: be to try to be a half measure version of it.
2:19:05
Speaker 1: We're going to find out, right, I think you're going
2:19:06
Speaker 1: to have a variety of candidates who say that they're
2:19:11
Speaker 1: you know, they're they're the real Maga movement. And you know,
2:19:15
Speaker 1: I think I think that's how Ran Paul might position himself.
2:19:18
Speaker 1: And I think Pennce is going to position himself as
2:19:20
Speaker 1: more of a traditional conservative who's who's also morally upstanding.
2:19:31
Speaker 1: You know. I think it's Vance that is, you know,
2:19:36
Speaker 1: Vance has never really been a part of any of
2:19:38
Speaker 1: any any politic. You know, he's never really had success
2:19:41
Speaker 1: being his own, having his own political identity, right, his
2:19:45
Speaker 1: entire political identity was rescued by Donald Trump with that
2:19:49
Speaker 1: endorsement in the Senate primary in twenty twenty two. So
2:19:54
Speaker 1: Pence had a political identity before Donald Trump, right. In fact,
2:19:57
Speaker 1: Donald Trump needed a Mike Pence, I don't from didn't
2:20:00
Speaker 1: need a JD. Vance just the opposite, right, Vance needed Trump.
2:20:05
Speaker 1: So that's why I'm skeptical that there's any any sort
2:20:10
Speaker 1: of you know, Rubio was more likely to have the ability,
2:20:12
Speaker 1: because again he had a political identity pre Trump Vance
2:20:16
Speaker 1: and didn't really have a sustainable put right now. You know,
2:20:19
Speaker 1: once he started running for office, he tried, he tried
2:20:21
Speaker 1: to do it with his own political identity and cluldn't
2:20:25
Speaker 1: and instead just sort of my most cynical version of it,
2:20:30
Speaker 1: Peter Thiel bought the Trump endorsement for Vance hard stop
2:20:34
Speaker 1: right in some form or another, And here we are.
2:20:40
Speaker 1: And that's why I'm I'm I'm pretty skeptical on that front.
2:20:44
Speaker 1: All right. A few draft reactions. Number one, I'm really
2:20:49
Speaker 1: happy for Carson Beck. Pretty cool that he's QB. Three. Look,
2:20:55
Speaker 1: he understood he has been in two different offenses, and
2:20:59
Speaker 1: I think that that just helps you transition better. So
2:21:01
Speaker 1: I do think he'll transition well. He does well in
2:21:05
Speaker 1: the scripted portion, you know, he struggles a little bit
2:21:08
Speaker 1: when when offensive line protection falls behind, and we'll see
2:21:12
Speaker 1: I mean, he was behind arguably one of the best
2:21:14
Speaker 1: offensive lines in the history of the University of Miami.
2:21:18
Speaker 1: He's not going to have that right away at Arizona.
2:21:21
Speaker 1: But he's going to get a chance. I mean, I'm
2:21:23
Speaker 1: guessing he'll be the starter by somewhere in the you know,
2:21:26
Speaker 1: barring injury or something like that, or just a total
2:21:28
Speaker 1: inability to get the playbook, which I just find unlikely.
2:21:35
Speaker 1: You know, he's going to get a real chance, and
2:21:37
Speaker 1: you don't know if you're going to get a situation
2:21:39
Speaker 1: where you get it. So I'm just happy he's going
2:21:40
Speaker 1: to get a chance. It's Arizona. We know it's uphill.
2:21:43
Speaker 1: You know, that's a franchise that just never seems to
2:21:46
Speaker 1: get out of its own way, right, But now get
2:21:49
Speaker 1: to have Trey McBride to throw four that three, that's
2:21:51
Speaker 1: pretty good. He's got Marvin Harrison there, He's got Jeremiah Love.
2:21:54
Speaker 1: I mean, there's some interesting tools there. I mean, he's
2:21:57
Speaker 1: so I'm happy for him. That's exciting. I'm trying to
2:22:02
Speaker 1: remember the last time in the Niversery Mimmy had two
2:22:04
Speaker 1: starting quarterbacks simultaneously in the NFL that I think we
2:22:06
Speaker 1: have to go back to the Vidie Bernie era for that.
2:22:10
Speaker 1: So that's that would be That would be fun. Look,
2:22:16
Speaker 1: you got to say, got to give the Packers credit.
2:22:19
Speaker 1: What they told the press before the draft is what
2:22:21
Speaker 1: they did. They said they need to work on cornerback.
2:22:24
Speaker 1: First pick was a quarterback with a C by the
2:22:27
Speaker 1: way corner and that quarter a little bit of a
2:22:30
Speaker 1: project out of South Carolina, but huge athletic upside. But frankly,
2:22:34
Speaker 1: this is what the Packers do, right. They loved the draft.
2:22:37
Speaker 1: Guys like that are just you know, I have all
2:22:40
Speaker 1: this athletic ability, but you know, need a refinement here,
2:22:43
Speaker 1: a refinement there. Their believers in their system, and frankly
2:22:48
Speaker 1: it usually works out pretty well. I mean, you know,
2:22:50
Speaker 1: I would put the Packers up against anybody in their
2:22:53
Speaker 1: record of particularly I just feel like they kill it frequently,
2:22:57
Speaker 1: kill it in the second round, first round. They can
2:23:00
Speaker 1: be all over the map. So needless to say, I
2:23:03
Speaker 1: liked our first round pick this year because it was
2:23:05
Speaker 1: Michael Parsons. We traded it away as part of that trade,
2:23:08
Speaker 1: So I like that. One other note that I think
2:23:10
Speaker 1: is interesting about the draft that tell you know, so
2:23:14
Speaker 1: there's been all this stuff about nil and how the
2:23:18
Speaker 1: last three rounds of the draft there was just you know,
2:23:21
Speaker 1: the talent fell off a cliff because those tweener players,
2:23:25
Speaker 1: those players that had some upside, they now stay in
2:23:28
Speaker 1: college an extra year, they get refined, and then they
2:23:30
Speaker 1: end up being drafted in one of the first three rounds. Right,
2:23:32
Speaker 1: So you have this what you have right now, is
2:23:37
Speaker 1: you have is you have the first you know, I
2:23:46
Speaker 1: think the first seventy players off the board all now,
2:23:52
Speaker 1: if you know, they've all played quite a few snaps.
2:23:54
Speaker 1: There's a few exceptions. Ty Simpson's an exception, but they've
2:23:59
Speaker 1: all all played a lot of college ball, right where
2:24:06
Speaker 1: there's fewer that are coming out early for the money
2:24:08
Speaker 1: because you're actually better off staying getting the money, right.
2:24:11
Speaker 1: I mean, David Bailey is as good of an example
2:24:13
Speaker 1: as anybody. Right, He's a guy that contemplated going to Harvard,
2:24:17
Speaker 1: decides to go to Stanford, gets his degree early, then
2:24:19
Speaker 1: ends up playing one year in Texas Tech and nine
2:24:21
Speaker 1: became number two overall. Pick Right, cam Ward is another
2:24:24
Speaker 1: one right from last year for Nanna Mendoz is another
2:24:27
Speaker 1: one right. He could have after graduating Cal left early
2:24:30
Speaker 1: and then would have been a third or fourth round pick.
2:24:33
Speaker 1: So you've done all this. Here's something else that I noticed,
2:24:36
Speaker 1: right the top ten picks. First pick was in the playoff,
2:24:42
Speaker 1: Second pick was in the playoff. Third pick was Notre
2:24:45
Speaker 1: Dame should have been in the playoff. Fourth pick was
2:24:47
Speaker 1: in the playoff. Fifth pick was in the playoff. Sixth
2:24:49
Speaker 1: pifth with LSU not in the playoff. Seventh pick was
2:24:52
Speaker 1: in the playoff. Eighth pick was not in the playoff.
2:24:55
Speaker 1: Neither was the ninth pick, but the tenth pick was. Right,
2:24:58
Speaker 1: you start to go through here, and the first round
2:25:01
Speaker 1: is just essentially the entire top ten Indiana, Texas Tech,
2:25:06
Speaker 1: Notre Dame, Ohio State, Miami, Alabama, Oregon, Georgia, Texas, A
2:25:16
Speaker 1: and M. And then you look at the schools that
2:25:21
Speaker 1: weren't in the top ten that had players LSU projected
2:25:25
Speaker 1: to be there. Arizona State a playoff team the year before,
2:25:27
Speaker 1: Utah projected to be a contender for there. Penn State
2:25:31
Speaker 1: was supposed to be there, Clemson was supposed to be there,
2:25:35
Speaker 1: Florida was supposed to be better than they were, usc
2:25:39
Speaker 1: was supposed to be there. So it is I think
2:25:43
Speaker 1: what you're seeing is just what NIL is doing, which
2:25:46
Speaker 1: is it You're going to have more prepared for more
2:25:49
Speaker 1: first rounders are going to be starters in the NFL
2:25:51
Speaker 1: than ever before, more second rounders and more third rounders.
2:25:55
Speaker 1: Then you're going to have this just sort of a
2:25:57
Speaker 1: lot more experimental picks. So this is where I think
2:26:00
Speaker 1: over the next couple of years, you'll start to see
2:26:04
Speaker 1: more of the foreign academies get into the fourth, fifth,
2:26:08
Speaker 1: and sixth round where instead of drafting somebody who didn't
2:26:12
Speaker 1: get noticed by the Power four conferences and paid nil
2:26:15
Speaker 1: money to come join them, you know, taking a flyer
2:26:18
Speaker 1: and somebody at North Dakota State, they did rather take
2:26:21
Speaker 1: a flyer and somebody that went through the Australia Academy
2:26:23
Speaker 1: or went through the Canada Academy, went through Canadian high school.
2:26:26
Speaker 1: I just think you're going to see more of more
2:26:30
Speaker 1: that more diverse, because ultimately, you know, they want they
2:26:35
Speaker 1: want these picks to matter. And you may see also
2:26:37
Speaker 1: more teams trade away these fifth, sixth, and seventh round
2:26:40
Speaker 1: picks and they start to seem less valuable, more experimental.
2:26:44
Speaker 1: But look, everything is we're still only two or three
2:26:46
Speaker 1: years into like This feels like the first draft of
2:26:49
Speaker 1: the more mature INIL era, And it's why I think
2:26:53
Speaker 1: the last part of the draft really is filled with
2:26:57
Speaker 1: guys that are probably not going to make the team.
2:26:59
Speaker 1: Where before you still thought you were drafting special teams
2:27:03
Speaker 1: guys in the sixth and seventh round, and I think
2:27:05
Speaker 1: it's just less likely, less likely you're gonna have that.
2:27:11
Speaker 1: All Right, the next time I see you, how many
2:27:17
Speaker 1: NBA First round matchups will be over? Will it be done?
2:27:23
Speaker 1: Will it be done in Houston? That's the big question
2:27:25
Speaker 1: I have. Right you will next hear from me, We
2:27:28
Speaker 1: will tape, I will tape on Tuesday. You will next
2:27:31
Speaker 1: hear from the air. How many series will be officially
2:27:34
Speaker 1: over by the time I drop on Wednesday morning? One,
2:27:39
Speaker 1: two or three. I'm gonna guess just I'm gonna guess two.
2:27:45
Speaker 1: I'm gonna go with two, but we shall see. All
2:27:48
Speaker 1: right with that, I've gone quite a bit, obviously. I
2:27:50
Speaker 1: had a lot to say about the weekends incidents. I
2:27:54
Speaker 1: heard from a lot of you appreciate it. Don't worry
2:27:56
Speaker 1: about me. We know I do know h I'd like
2:28:01
Speaker 1: to think I know how to keep my head on
2:28:02
Speaker 1: a swivel. And I sort of look at all of
2:28:07
Speaker 1: these events with eyes wide open. But we all need
2:28:11
Speaker 1: to be vigilant out there a little bit. Number one
2:28:13
Speaker 1: and number two, we all need to do our part
2:28:19
Speaker 1: to de escalate depolarize. Our institutions are geared towards polarizations,
2:28:24
Speaker 1: the algorithms are geared towards polarizations. We as voters have
2:28:29
Speaker 1: to find less polarizing people and be putting them in
2:28:32
Speaker 1: leadership positions. You know, we need to fix some of
2:28:36
Speaker 1: the systems, right. We got to get rid of parson primaries,
2:28:39
Speaker 1: no doubt about it. That's a massive contributor to this.
2:28:44
Speaker 1: But the partisan leadership right, partisan primaries give us more
2:28:50
Speaker 1: partisan leadership. And of course we have a president who
2:28:54
Speaker 1: is intentionally divisive and all of that trickles down. So
2:29:01
Speaker 1: we all have some work to do, but it starts
2:29:04
Speaker 1: with demanding better, more moderate temperament. Moderate does not mean
2:29:11
Speaker 1: some sort of uncomfortable compromise between the left and right.
2:29:14
Speaker 1: Moderate means, for me, temperament matters more. Temperament and character
2:29:21
Speaker 1: matter more in making a president than ideology or policy position.
2:29:27
Speaker 1: And with that, I'll see in forty eight hours