February 15, 2024 • 40 mins
SEASON 2 EPISODE 123: COUNTDOWN WITH KEITH OLBERMANN
A-Block (1:44) SPECIAL COMMENT: The Kansas City Super Bowl Parade shooting took place on the sixth anniversary of the Parkland shooting. And it took place on the sixteenth anniversary of the Northern Illinois University shooting. And two days ago was the anniversary of the Michigan State shooting. And next Monday will be twelve years since Alabama-Huntsville and two years since Portland and seventeen since Bethel Alaska and and and...
We are here because mass shootings - and the bullshit about "Good Guys With Guns" and "equip the police better" - are the backbone of the gun industry and the politicians and judges and states it owns. And so we will have to financially break the backs of that industry and those politicians and judges and states. Because now it's them or us.
B-Block (23:05) THE WORST PERSONS IN THE WORLD: A match made in TV Old Age Heaven: NewsNation hires Geraldo. Rep. Greg Murphy implies Vice President Harris is stupid - and mispronounces her name. And if the latest January 6 arrested suspect is named Method, the joke is inevitable.
C-Block (29:15) THINGS I PROMISED NOT TO TELL: I offered Netflix ownership of the news industry. Its leaders worried only about the subtitles, and what would happen if one day the shows didn't upload. Seriously.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:04):
Countdown with Keith Olderman is a production of iHeartRadio. The
shooting at the Super Bowl Parade in Kansas City yesterday
(00:25):
was on the sixth anniversary of the shooting at Parkland
High School in Florida, And that seems at first like
an astonishing and horrifying coincidence of timing, until you do
a little work, very little work, and you find out
that yesterday was also the sixteenth anniversary of the shooting
at Northern Illinois University, and tomorrow will be the twenty
(00:50):
sixth anniversary of the stalker walking into his office in
California with a thousand rounds and shooting people there. Oh,
this past Monday was twelve years since the University of
Alabama at Huntsville shootings. Next will be the second anniversary
of the shooting in Portland during the protest for Racial justice,
and the seventeenth anniversary of the shooting at Bethel High
(01:12):
School in Alaska. And two days ago was the first
anniversary of the shooting at Michigan State three students dead
plus the gunmen. A week from today will be the
first anniversary of Pine Hills, Florida, three dead there. The
week from Sunday will be eight years since Heston, Kansas,
The week from Monday will be four years since the
Milwaukee Brewery, and eight years since Tyrone, Missouri, when the
(01:35):
shooter went door to door, and a week from Tuesday
is Shardon High in Ohio. So that covers what sixteen
days worth of anniversaries. They happen because if they did
not happen, more Americans would not buy more guns. Every shooting.
(01:58):
Every year, more Americans buy more guns to feed their
fantasies that they will be the guys who stopped the
next one. About a million good guys who could have
legally owned and carried guns at the Super Bowl parade
in Kansas City yesterday did not stop it. Not because
they weren't brave, not because they weren't alert, not because
(02:21):
they were all unarmed, but because it's a fantasy. The
good guys who apparently did tackle a shooter yesterday. No guns.
Every shooting every year, more Americans then support more guns
for more police, to feed the other fantasy that more
(02:42):
cops with more guns will stop the next one. The
shooter captured in Kansas City yesterday not stopped by the police,
stopped by those unarmed civilians who tackled him, and the
police chief of Kansas City, Stacy Graves, then solemnly and
evidently completely convinced that the farcical statement she was making
(03:04):
was true. The police chief then said that citizens had
assisted the police in apprehending the suspect. A complete lie,
A complete lie. We have the laws that permit this
(03:25):
to happen literally every day of the calendar. And we
have the mindset that the solution to more guns is
more and more guns. And we have the other mindset
that even after Uvalde, the cops will take care of this.
So let's have more cops with more guns. We have
this because without it, the gun industry would collapse. Because
(03:47):
men and women, oddly enough, nearly every last one of
them a Republican lawmaker, they understand that profit is more
important than human life. As the lieutenant governor of Texas
said during the pandemic, we should be willing to die
to protect the economy for our grant kids. As this
(04:08):
gun fetishing idiot Trump said after the last shooting, not
the last shooting in Missouri today is the first day
anniversary of that one, but the last shooting in Iowa
a month ago. Trump said it was horrible, so surprising
to see it here. But we have to get over it.
We have to move forward. And of course he felt
(04:29):
that way didn't happen to him. And if you could
get all the politicians who have sold their souls to
force us to live like this and die like this
to protect the gun industry, if you could force them
to tell the truth, you would probably get answers very
much like Trump's real answer combined with my hypothetical answer.
(04:53):
So surprising to see it here, he said, which is
just a rationalized version of this doesn't happen to us,
happens to other people. So that's fine. And then that
other part we have to we get over it. We
have to move forward because we can't do anything that
would meddle with profits. We'd had the tobacco industry virtually
(05:15):
run this country and kill millions. We had the slavery
and plantation industry really run this country until the eighteen sixties,
and god knows how many human beings they killed, And
now we have the gun industry killing us off half
a dozen or so at a time.
Speaker 2 (05:33):
During my four years, nothing happened, and there was great
pressure on me having to do with guns. We did nothing.
We didn't yield, and once you yield a little bit,
that's just the beginning. That's the avalanche begins.
Speaker 1 (05:47):
We are owned by guns, and so we go on
calculating the averages and deciding if by age five it
is already too late to teach kids how to play
dead in their classrooms, And we go on listening to
fascist asshole madmen like Ron Desantists talk about fortifying schools
(06:10):
and fortifying movie theaters and fortifying churches, and we go
on listening to messianic buttonheads like Eric Adams talk about
giving more guns to more police, when police often turn
out either to be the murderers or the cowards who
idle in the hallways as the children of Uvalde are
executed one by one, And we go on listening to
(06:32):
the fatuous idiots like the Missouri House where the police
said we need laws to stop fourteen year olds from
walking down the streets of Saint Louis carrying ar fifteen's
and the House voted one hundred and four to thirty
nine to keep open carry legal in Missouri for kids,
And we go on listening to amorl monsters like Donald
(06:53):
Trump talk about arming teachers and bringing back firing squads,
and we listen to these paid scum Republicans bribed by
the gun manufacturers and the gun organizations, recite what they
have been paid to say about responsible gun owners, when
after half a million gun deaths in this country in
the last ten or twelve years, it is no longer
(07:14):
in doubt there are no longer any responsible gun owners.
On this nightmare so familiar, so routine, and so constant
that we no longer remember the details or the location,
or the motive or the sequence of them. And now
(07:35):
we are no longer even remembering that there was a
nightmare last night or the night before, and we're now
marbling them into other things in American life, as if
they were snowstorms or flight delays. And a hockey podcaster
begins by saying, well, it's tough to do this after
the Michigan State news, but let's talk about the Carolina
(07:56):
hurricanes needs at the deadline, and the New York Times
can run a sidebar that the shooting, well, it upended
the lives of thousand, but it also put the school
back in an uncomfortable spotlight, what with the sexual assault scandal.
There we go on in an unacceptable world in which
we are owned by guns. We go on to borrow
(08:22):
from Churchill in strange paradox, decided only to be undecided,
resolved to be irresolute, adamant for drift, solid for fluidity,
all powerful to be impotent. The dead of Michigan State,
(08:45):
the dead of Las Vegas, the dead at the Pulse,
the dead at Well, why do we bother with individual
place names anymore? The dead of the killing field, the
dead of the transcendent national shooting Range that is the
United States of America. They are dead because somebody is
(09:10):
making money off them, and because Ted Cruz is making
money off them, and Marjorie Taylor Green is making money
off them, and every horror politician is making money off them,
and rarely even bothering any more to wash the money
through sea, pack or save America this, or shoot America,
(09:33):
that the donations come straight and unhidden, and whether it's
Trump or DeSantis or Poor soon to be very very surprised,
Nicki Haley, or just some other idiot free from morality
or conscience, whom the moneyed interests select. It is fair
to say that the Republican nominee for president in twenty
(09:53):
twenty four whoever that is will be underwritten by the
gun manufacturers and the gun lobby and their masters, the
death lobby, who pay good money to bad peace to
maintain not just our culture of guns and shooting and
dead children and thoughts and prayers, but also maintain the
(10:14):
world's culture of continuing to poison the atmosphere and kill
off the species one by one, because the one billion,
nine hundred and sixty three million dollars in profit made
last year by big Oil just isn't enough. Because they
stay up at night anguished by the thought that there
remains somewhere one dollar not yet stolen from a child
(10:39):
dying next to the earthquake rubble in Syria or Turkey,
one dollar yet to be pocketed by Darren Woods, the
CEO of Exxon Mobile. Away God intended it. It is economics,
and thus the only solution can also be economics, because
(11:04):
we will not defeat them in the states that are
already lost to the control of the death lobby. And
even if President Biden said tomorrow we are not owned
by guns, and I don't give a damn if I'm
re elected or even renominated, I'm going to issue four
hundred and fifty executive orders and take every damn gun
I can get off the streets. And if the House
(11:26):
and Senate won't reinstate the assault weapons man, I will
do so unilaterally and come and get me in the courts.
Even if Biden did that, we the anti death people,
we would lose in the Supreme Court, because Clarence Thomas
the whore is on the Supreme Court because of and
(11:49):
bought and paid for by the death lobby, and Samuel
Alito the whore is, and John Roberts the whore is,
and Neil Gorsich and drunken Brett Kavanaugh and Bible paralegal
Amy Coney Barrett. So we must ask ourselves, what economically
can we do to the gun lobby, to the oil lobby,
(12:13):
to the death lobby, and to their minions in the Senate,
in the House, and all the Senates and all the
houses in all the states in America and in this country.
There are only a couple of measures that might possibly work,
and might possibly work fast enough so that enough of
us won't be killed in next year's three hundred gun
(12:37):
massacres or the next decades three hundred climate crises. And
that one thing is to spare you the kind words,
the soft words, that one thing is economic civil war.
It can start simply, buy nothing from Texas, do not
go to Florida, do not patronize Missouri. We can start there,
(13:05):
and then we can get serious. It is a simple
mathematical fact that, with some exceptions, and a little more
nuanced than time permits me here, it is a simple
mathematical fact that the Blue states of this country keep
the Red states of this country from going bankrupt. It
is a simple mathematical fact that the Blue states pay
(13:27):
in more to the federal government than they ever get
back in services or infrastructure, or certainly in per capita representation.
New York pays a net twenty four billion a year,
California pays in a net fourteen billion, and most of
that goes to keeping Florida and Texas from starving. Florida
(13:49):
gets thirty six billion a year, more than it pays
in Texas, nearly that much. It is state to state socialism,
and we all know that we can't have socialism. And
it is a simple fact that the Blue states restrict
(14:09):
and regulate guns, and the Red states sell guns and
sell guns and sell guns and profit off dead children.
And when the political wars like Ted Cruz and Tucker
Carlson and Rupert Murdoch point to the gun carnage of Chicago,
(14:32):
they are actually pointing to the gun carnage of weapons
smuggled in from Indiana to Chicago. And it is also
a simple fact that we can dance around for decades
yet to come about how to stop the gun massacres
of February twenty forty seven and the chemical disasters of
June twenty sixty one so bad they reminded old timers
(14:55):
of where was that East Palestine, Ohio? Or we can
cut to the chase and put it this way, if
the Red States do not agree to strict and enforced
gun regulation and the removal and the outlawing of gun manufacture,
and a revision of the Second Amendment so that the
vagueness that isn't actually there but the death lobby has
(15:18):
spedisentury convincing millions. Is there that all doubt about the
Second Amendment be erased and replaced by the simple statement
that private gun ownership is illegal without a series of
licenses and mental health tests, and that the owner is
liable for whatever is done with his gun. And if
that includes murder, then the owner is liable for life imprisonment,
whether he fired the gun or not. If the Red
(15:39):
States do not agree to that, and by the way,
to reapportioned representation in the House and the Senate so
that Idaho does not have as many senators as a
real state and not a welfare state like Idaho, And
if they do not agree to the resignations of Chief
Justice Roberts and Justices Alito, Barrett, Gorsch, Kavanaugh, and Thomas.
(16:00):
If the Red States do not agree to that, then
the Blue States will simply stop paying money into the
federal government, and the Blue states will simply spend that
money directly on their own citizens. And if the leaders
of our Blue states who will not comply with this,
then the only solution we have since the murders at
(16:23):
your town name here next week are profit streams for
many people, the only solution we have is to then
stop paying our federal taxes until our state leaders recognize
that the only way out of this nightmare is to
threaten the Red States and thus threaten the gun lobby,
(16:44):
and thus threaten the oil lobby and thus threaten the
death lobby with economic strangulation, economic civil war, to save
the country, to save the next six hundred thousand Americans
who will die by gun violence. So certainly by the
(17:06):
year twenty thirty five, if it does not get worse before,
then six hundred thousand, the same number who were killed
in the actual civil war. And if you ask yourself,
or you are asked, by what right we could threaten
economic civil war, just say this is constitutional under the
(17:29):
Second Amendment. Quote, a well regulated militia being necessary to
the security of a free state, the right of the
people to keep and bare arms shall not be infringed.
Our rights to the security of a free state have
been infringed upon by the gun lobby and the death lobby,
(17:51):
which has convinced generations of gun fetishists that an amendment
that does not contain the word own nor any synonym
for own, does contain it. The Constitution is a property document.
It mentions rights only fi fifteen times. It mentions voting
only thirty seven times. This is out of nearly eight
thousand words. But it mentions money and ownership one hundred
(18:12):
and three times. The Second Amendment is about making sure
nothing interferes with the well regulated militia. A well regulated
militia that is there protecting our rights as citizens to have,
as it says in the Second Amendment, the security of
a free state. Our Second Amendment rights have been trampled
(18:35):
on by Donald Trump and the Republicans, the anti Second
Amendment Republicans. We need to start enforcing the Second Amendment.
We need an economic civil war against the gun lobby
and the death lobby and those corrupted and financially insolvent
red states that stand in the way of peace and
(18:55):
security in this country because we are owned by guns.
But God damn it, we are not going to be
owned by guns any longer. This is countdown, with Keith
(19:17):
Olberman still ahead of us on countdown. There's a bunch
(19:41):
of news about Netflix, and I am in no mood
to tell you any of the news about Netflix, but
because we need something to help us through things like this,
I'm going to tell you only about the day I
met with Netflix about starting news on Netflix, and their
only concerns were what about the Italian subtitles and what
(20:01):
would happen if one day my show didn't upload things
I promised not to tell. Coming up first, Yes, it's
the daily roundup of the other miscreants. Morons and Dunning
Kruger effects specimens who constitute today's worst persons in the world.
The bronze worse Heraldo Rivera and News Nation. I have
(20:21):
noted before. News Nation is the Nick at Night of
cable television, the retirement home for all those faces you
vaguely remember from when cable was a big deal and
they were too sort of Dan Abrams at his MSNBC
hair weave, Chris Cuomo and his CNN belligerent refusal to
(20:42):
understand journalistic standards, conservative con man Steve krackour hell, they
even put George will and Mick mulvaney and Sean Spicer
on the air. And Heraldo Well, of course, Heraldo Rivera
is the Heraldo Rivera of Heraldo Rivera's still complaining that
(21:02):
NBC spent money to promote my new show on MSNBC
instead of more money to promote his extant show on CNBC.
He first issued this complaint in the summer of nineteen
ninety seven. While the inevitable has finally happened, News Nation
Quote announced Heraldo Rivera will join the channel as correspondent
(21:23):
at large, effective immediately. Oh knows. Does this mean we'll
see less of some of their hardworking female correspondents Kaylee
and Kelsey and Kelly and Marky and Marne. By the way,
I'm not making that up. Their website lists twenty three
female anchors and correspondents on News Nation, including Kaylee and
(21:44):
Kelsey and Kelly and Marky and Marnie and now Heraldo.
They're honors up the Daily Wire and doctor Greg Murphy.
The Ben Shapiro bullshit Service quotes somebody named Jeremy Boring
revealing the secret Democratic plot to replace the vice president
to pay Harris a five year, one hundred million dollar
(22:07):
deal to run a foundation for the next five years
so she could make twenty million dollars a year. And honestly,
I'm impressed that somebody from the Daily Wire got the
math right. As to Murphy, the congressman from North Carolina
and urologist, also misogynist and racist, apart from his bizarre
claim that Trump is less likely to have dementia than
(22:27):
Biden because Trump is smarter, which I guess he determined
during a sistoscopy of Trump's brain. By the way, that's
a great joke, but you're gonna have to google sistoscopy anyway.
Congressman Murphy has also told Fox that Vice President Kamala
Harris is stupid. Quote Kamala, good lord. We talked about
(22:49):
intelligence being a risk factor for dementia. Let's not even
go there. Unquote. Four years ago, Murphy called the vice
president quote a walking disaster. She was only picked for
her color and her race. Punchline, while insulting the intelligence
of the Vice president, Congressman Murphy mis pronounced her first name.
(23:11):
Well done, Greg MURPHFI but our winner the worst. Thomas J.
Method the latest to be arrested for the January sixth insurrection.
He's from Framingham, Massachusetts, and the FBI asked him to
produce two photos he had taken of himself inside the
Capitol rotunda on January sixth. He was quoted as saying
(23:33):
at the Capitol, we can overthrow this. I don't care
what happens as long as Trump maintains his presidency. I
have a feeling it's going to be Mayhem, chaos and pandemonium.
Or he probably said it this way, we can overthrow this.
I don't care what happens as long as Trump maintains
as presidency. I have a feeling, no, that's enough. It's
(23:55):
going towards carry grant. Anyway, the arrestee, mister Method, told
the FBI he had gone through the trash in his
phone and Google Photos in his phone, and unfortunately those
two images they wanted, they could not be recovered because
the trash automatically deleted them after two months. As sorry,
I can't give you the incriminating evidence you know I have.
(24:15):
So the FBI got a warrant and Google said, yeah,
they're over here and produce the images. And now he's
under arrest on felony and misdemeanor charges. Thomas J. Method, Yes,
I know you have seen this joke coming. I still
could not resist it. There was a madness to his method.
(24:36):
Two days worst person in the world. Finally to the
number one story on the Countdown and my favorite topic,
(24:58):
me and things I promised not to tell. And I
don't usually venture into financial commentary or advice. You will
remember the story of my great grandfather who gave away
the name General Motors for free. But I just read
of Netflix finally staunching the subscriber flow. It had lost
around a million, two hundred thousand households in the first
(25:19):
half of this year, but added about twice that many
in the third quarter thanks to such uplifting programming as
the Jeffrey Dahmer story. So yay corporate cannibalism profits. Anyway,
I had an experience with Netflix which so shook my
confidence in them that it made me fearful of even
(25:39):
playing their stuff on my big TV, because I was
wondering if their stuff would damage my big TV. This
is my favorite story of what happens when media management
misunderstands its own business and wrongly thinks superstitions and coincidences
are inviolable rules for success. This happened on June seventeenth,
(26:01):
twenty sixteen, the day I found out about the vitality,
the importance, the absolute necessity of Netflix's Italian subtitles. I
don't want to exaggerate the importance of the two video
series I did for the GQ magazine site in twenty sixteen.
In twenty seventeen, The Closer and The Resistance. I mean,
(26:23):
for one thing, The Closer was so named because each
of the handful of us involved in its production could
not really conceive that there were enough morons and closeted
racists in this country to actually elect crazy Trump. We
grandly called the videos the closer because we expected our
expositions of Trump's essential fraudulents and dangerousness would close the
(26:44):
deal for Hillary Clinton. Uh huh, but people watch those videos.
I forget the final count, one hundred and eighty or
so episodes, four hundred million or so views, not plays,
but people actually viewing, essentially the whole piece. And CBS
News did a story once with the web analyzing platform
(27:06):
social Flow that showed that the first episode of The
Resistance from November sixteenth, twenty sixteen, was the top story
or video on Facebook through the first six months of
the Trump administration. The calculation, and lord knows what this
formula actually looks like, but the calculation was probably pretty
close that it reached fifty four million people, the equivalent
(27:29):
of one out of six of everybody in the country.
That's CBS News reporting this. Not my ego, and ego
is not the reason I mentioned this, well, it's not
the only reason I mentioned this. MSNBC had offered me
a new show in January of twenty sixteen, but I
would have hated it and you would not have watched it.
So it was not supposed to have any commentaries in it,
(27:53):
and a conservative co host was supposed to be there,
and the goal was she and I would be the
wacky couple who would find middle ground. Plus I would
have had to move to Laws even though I could
see the headquarters of NBC News out my bedroom window
in New York. And then when it was successful, the
producers wanted me to simply get on a plane from
(28:15):
Los Angeles and show up one morning in the New
York office of the president of NBC News, Andy Lack,
and tell him either we were scrapping the format and
relaunching Countdown that night, or I was quitting. In short,
they wanted me to do this lousy show and then
run a palace coup against the president of NBC News.
I passed. I put my energy and said into finding
(28:38):
a new platform for Countdown or a Countdown like show.
I had a deal in place to become the video
anchor of The Huffington Post, a daily exclusive commentary interviews,
features breaking news, funny stuff, whatever. Two days later. Two
days later, Arianna Huffington sold the Huffington Post no more deal.
(28:59):
Before and after this, some friends from Lionsgate Productions and
I were trying to sell to two Idea is pitching
to a series of forward looking media companies. One was
that they should be producing and running or posting or
streaming or whatever the series of my commentaries that became
The Closer and then The Resistance. I don't know what
that would have been worth, but I do know that
(29:20):
the tiny slice of the advertising GQ got just from
the commercials that would roll if you watched one of
the episodes on YouTube was well over a million dollars.
The overall profit might have been ten times that. Production
costs were like fifty thousand dollars. But I had a second,
bigger idea to pitch to these other companies. Who wants
(29:41):
to own the future of cable news when there isn't
any cable news anymore? I correctly predicted twenty twenty two
back in twenty sixteen. Who wants to own the future
of cable news when there isn't any cable anymore? Start
with just my commentaries, and as they make money for you,
(30:02):
build out if they work, you add my interviews and
my debates, and then somebody else's commentaries, and then some
conservatives commentaries, and then add all of what is now
cable news and put it on one streaming platform. We
rented a studio, We made a demo commentary, We made
(30:25):
what TV pitchmen call a deck. That's how I knew
the producers were serious. We met with HBO about this,
We met with something called Pop TV, The Daily Beast, Yahoo,
tune In, Sony, Epics, BBC, Hulu, Conde Nast. Ultimately that
led to the GQ series. But the one I had
the most hoped for was Netflix. The way I saw it,
(30:47):
they could start this tiny little thing in the corner
of their homepage called news Flicks, and you could click
on it, and someday there would be a menu with
Keith Olderman commentaries and I don't know, Glenn Beck commentaries
and Bill Maher commentary and Jesus H. Christ commentaries and
(31:07):
Keith Olderman newscast and lou Dobbs newscast and and all
of them partisan but collectively one giant, all encompassing by
partisan because of volume news and commentary site, the proverbial
marketplace of ideas, Duncan Donuts and Baskin Robbins and Pizza
(31:28):
Hut living together only as newscasters, you know, for kids.
I thought Netflix would see it immediately. They would own
news all of it.
Speaker 2 (31:42):
I mean.
Speaker 1 (31:42):
These were the people who realized America was too lazy
to go down to the video store anymore, so they
began to send America rented DVDs by mail, and people
actually returned the DVDs, And then they realized that America
was too lazy to return them anymore, and that the
optimum date to switch from DVDs to the then laugh
(32:04):
out loud bad concept of online video was precisely January sixteenth,
two thousand and seven. These guys had the gonads to
take a brilliantly successful, profitable new idea and gradually strangle
it and replace it with a different, brilliantly successful new idea.
I could not wait to meet them. My agent at
(32:28):
the time, I would be producer the head of television
of Lionsgate, like the chief of chief at Lionsgate. And
I went to the Netflix building in Beverly Hills at
ten thirty am Pacific daylight time on Friday, June seventeenth,
twenty sixteen. It felt perfect. Netflix was still just down
from the corner of Alden and Maple. Twenty five years later,
(32:50):
I had lived two blocks away from Alden and Maple.
It was a four minute walktops. Yeah, The two people
there from Netflix were vice presidents. Wish I remembered their names.
I don't know. Maybe they're still there. I deliberately locked
the names from my memory after this. One was in
charge of documentaries, one was in charge of non fiction series.
(33:11):
One was a man, one was a woman. I did
most of the talking, and I said, start with these
daily commentaries. You'll never have a better launch window than
the four months before the election. We could have one
ready for you to upload by Monday. This is lowest risk,
highest reward. How would you like to own the news
(33:32):
or if it doesn't work for some reason, you spend
I don't know, one hundred thousand dollars. The man spoke first.
But if you're going to do these daily, how are
people going to binge watch them? I mean, the first
time somebody comes to Netflix to see your commentaries, there's
only going to be one to watch. I took a
(33:54):
quick breath and explained that could be a drawback. On
the other hand, within four weeks there would be twenty
of them to binge. We could even start with five
or ten evergreen commentaries, so that when they come to
see the official premiere they watch that, then ten more
first day, and and you guys keep telling the press
that your problem is people binge, and then they don't
(34:15):
come back for another five days or a week. This way,
at least some of them would come back every day
to your website. You'd begin to solve your frequency of
visitation problem, wouldn't you. I mean, you're the executives. I'm
just the talent, the meat puppet. But isn't that then
the woman interrupted me, okay, yeah, that would help, and
I like starting with ten, But what about the subtitles?
(34:40):
There was a long pause. Then the head of Lionsgates
said what subtitles? The man said, well, everything we run
is subtitled in the language of each country we run
it in. So your commentary would have to have subtitles
added in like sixteen different languages. That usually takes three months.
Could you do commentaries today that would still work in September?
(35:05):
I said, well no, But why do you need subtitles?
Why do you need, say, Italian subtitles, or any subtitles.
I mean, it's very unlikely. I said that people worldwide
who are interested enough in American politics to watch commentaries
about American politics don't already speak English. The woman looked
(35:26):
aghast I mean the coloring of her face changed, but
the subtitles. She said, we always have subtitles, We always
do it that way here, And I said, well, yeah,
I understand, but see this would be for news flicks,
not Netflix per se. See you could adapt your rules
(35:48):
to fit the urgency of timeliness. I mean, MSNBC has
a profit of like five hundred million a year because
of timeliness and their last in profit in cable news.
Couldn't you adjust slightly for five hundred million a year?
The man now looked a gas couldn't this is the
Netflix rule. We can't change a rule. I began to
(36:10):
feel not happy. The man spoke again. Plus, what about
the twelve oh one rule? We all looked at each other.
You said, the commentaries would probably work best at eight
or nine pm, But in all of our countries, anything
new gets posted at exactly twelve oh one am local time,
only at twelve oh one am, so anything you did
(36:32):
today could not possibly run until twelve oh one am tomorrow.
I was still reeling from the Italian subtitles. Now there
was also an unbreakable twelve oh one tomorrow rule. I
was thinking of getting up and leaving, but the woman
apparently had one more gut punch to throw at me.
I also wanted to know if we somehow were able
(36:53):
to turn the subtitles around with lightning speed, or skip them,
or do them and say only two or three hours.
The man interrupted, plus the hours until it's twelve oh one,
don't forget them. She nodded, yes, plus the hours until
it's twelve o one. If we could somehow do that.
What would happen if one day something went wrong technically
and we couldn't upload that day and people came to
(37:13):
the site and there wasn't a new one. What if
it doesn't upload? Well? I had an answer to that,
but I did not say it out loud. I said
it a few minutes later to the head of lions Gate,
after we had said goodbye to mister and missus vice
president in the lobby of the Netflix building, I said,
good God. These people are in the uploading business. They
(37:34):
have been uploading for nine years. They aren't sure they
can upload. What equipment have they been uploading with? Are
they uploading from Kevin Spacey's nineteen ninety six Dell laptop?
As I left to get in the car to go
to Lax to fly home to New York, totally disappointed.
(37:55):
The Lionsgate guy was just shaking his head. I'm sorry,
I had no idea. I call you later at exactly
twelve oh one am with Italian subtitles. What if it
doesn't upload, he said as he walked away from me.
Christ I got to get my broker on the phone.
(38:16):
I got to sell all my Netflix stock. I've done
all the damage I can do here. Thank you for listening. Countdown.
Musical directors Brian Ray and John Phillip Chanelle have arranged, produced,
(38:38):
and performed most of our music. As always. Mister Ray
was on guitars, bass and drums. Mister Shanelle handled orchestration
and keyboards, and was produced by Tko Brothers. Other music,
including some of the Beethoven compositions, arranged and performed by
No Horns Allowed. The sports music is the Olderman theme
from ESPN two, written by Mitch Warren Davis Court to
see of ESPN inc Now. Our satirical and pithy musical
(39:01):
comments are by Nancy Faust, the best baseball stadium organist ever.
My announcer today is my friend John Dean. Everything else
was pretty much my fault. So that's countdown for this
the two hundred and sixty fifth day until the twenty
twenty four US presidential election, and the thirty fourth day
since dementia. Jay Trump's first attempted coup against the democratically
(39:22):
elected government of the United States. Use the fourteenth Amendment,
the Insurrection Act, the justice system, and the mental health
system to stop him from doing it again while we
still can. The next scheduled countdown is tomorrow. The official
position on that is it's iffy. My voice has pleasantly
surprised me by carrying me all the way through to
(39:42):
the end of this show, which will occur when I
say bulletins as the news warrants. Till then, I'm Keith Olderman.
Good morning, good afternoon, good night, and good luck. Countdown
(40:12):
with Keith Olderman is a production of iHeartRadio. For more
podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or
wherever you get your podcasts.
Countdown with Keith Olderman is a production of iHeartRadio. The
shooting at the Super Bowl Parade in Kansas City yesterday
(00:25):
was on the sixth anniversary of the shooting at Parkland
High School in Florida, And that seems at first like
an astonishing and horrifying coincidence of timing, until you do
a little work, very little work, and you find out
that yesterday was also the sixteenth anniversary of the shooting
at Northern Illinois University, and tomorrow will be the twenty
(00:50):
sixth anniversary of the stalker walking into his office in
California with a thousand rounds and shooting people there. Oh,
this past Monday was twelve years since the University of
Alabama at Huntsville shootings. Next will be the second anniversary
of the shooting in Portland during the protest for Racial justice,
and the seventeenth anniversary of the shooting at Bethel High
(01:12):
School in Alaska. And two days ago was the first
anniversary of the shooting at Michigan State three students dead
plus the gunmen. A week from today will be the
first anniversary of Pine Hills, Florida, three dead there. The
week from Sunday will be eight years since Heston, Kansas,
The week from Monday will be four years since the
Milwaukee Brewery, and eight years since Tyrone, Missouri, when the
(01:35):
shooter went door to door, and a week from Tuesday
is Shardon High in Ohio. So that covers what sixteen
days worth of anniversaries. They happen because if they did
not happen, more Americans would not buy more guns. Every shooting.
(01:58):
Every year, more Americans buy more guns to feed their
fantasies that they will be the guys who stopped the
next one. About a million good guys who could have
legally owned and carried guns at the Super Bowl parade
in Kansas City yesterday did not stop it. Not because
they weren't brave, not because they weren't alert, not because
(02:21):
they were all unarmed, but because it's a fantasy. The
good guys who apparently did tackle a shooter yesterday. No guns.
Every shooting every year, more Americans then support more guns
for more police, to feed the other fantasy that more
(02:42):
cops with more guns will stop the next one. The
shooter captured in Kansas City yesterday not stopped by the police,
stopped by those unarmed civilians who tackled him, and the
police chief of Kansas City, Stacy Graves, then solemnly and
evidently completely convinced that the farcical statement she was making
(03:04):
was true. The police chief then said that citizens had
assisted the police in apprehending the suspect. A complete lie,
A complete lie. We have the laws that permit this
(03:25):
to happen literally every day of the calendar. And we
have the mindset that the solution to more guns is
more and more guns. And we have the other mindset
that even after Uvalde, the cops will take care of this.
So let's have more cops with more guns. We have
this because without it, the gun industry would collapse. Because
(03:47):
men and women, oddly enough, nearly every last one of
them a Republican lawmaker, they understand that profit is more
important than human life. As the lieutenant governor of Texas
said during the pandemic, we should be willing to die
to protect the economy for our grant kids. As this
(04:08):
gun fetishing idiot Trump said after the last shooting, not
the last shooting in Missouri today is the first day
anniversary of that one, but the last shooting in Iowa
a month ago. Trump said it was horrible, so surprising
to see it here. But we have to get over it.
We have to move forward. And of course he felt
(04:29):
that way didn't happen to him. And if you could
get all the politicians who have sold their souls to
force us to live like this and die like this
to protect the gun industry, if you could force them
to tell the truth, you would probably get answers very
much like Trump's real answer combined with my hypothetical answer.
(04:53):
So surprising to see it here, he said, which is
just a rationalized version of this doesn't happen to us,
happens to other people. So that's fine. And then that
other part we have to we get over it. We
have to move forward because we can't do anything that
would meddle with profits. We'd had the tobacco industry virtually
(05:15):
run this country and kill millions. We had the slavery
and plantation industry really run this country until the eighteen sixties,
and god knows how many human beings they killed, And
now we have the gun industry killing us off half
a dozen or so at a time.
Speaker 2 (05:33):
During my four years, nothing happened, and there was great
pressure on me having to do with guns. We did nothing.
We didn't yield, and once you yield a little bit,
that's just the beginning. That's the avalanche begins.
Speaker 1 (05:47):
We are owned by guns, and so we go on
calculating the averages and deciding if by age five it
is already too late to teach kids how to play
dead in their classrooms, And we go on listening to
fascist asshole madmen like Ron Desantists talk about fortifying schools
(06:10):
and fortifying movie theaters and fortifying churches, and we go
on listening to messianic buttonheads like Eric Adams talk about
giving more guns to more police, when police often turn
out either to be the murderers or the cowards who
idle in the hallways as the children of Uvalde are
executed one by one, And we go on listening to
(06:32):
the fatuous idiots like the Missouri House where the police
said we need laws to stop fourteen year olds from
walking down the streets of Saint Louis carrying ar fifteen's
and the House voted one hundred and four to thirty
nine to keep open carry legal in Missouri for kids,
And we go on listening to amorl monsters like Donald
(06:53):
Trump talk about arming teachers and bringing back firing squads,
and we listen to these paid scum Republicans bribed by
the gun manufacturers and the gun organizations, recite what they
have been paid to say about responsible gun owners, when
after half a million gun deaths in this country in
the last ten or twelve years, it is no longer
(07:14):
in doubt there are no longer any responsible gun owners.
On this nightmare so familiar, so routine, and so constant
that we no longer remember the details or the location,
or the motive or the sequence of them. And now
(07:35):
we are no longer even remembering that there was a
nightmare last night or the night before, and we're now
marbling them into other things in American life, as if
they were snowstorms or flight delays. And a hockey podcaster
begins by saying, well, it's tough to do this after
the Michigan State news, but let's talk about the Carolina
(07:56):
hurricanes needs at the deadline, and the New York Times
can run a sidebar that the shooting, well, it upended
the lives of thousand, but it also put the school
back in an uncomfortable spotlight, what with the sexual assault scandal.
There we go on in an unacceptable world in which
we are owned by guns. We go on to borrow
(08:22):
from Churchill in strange paradox, decided only to be undecided,
resolved to be irresolute, adamant for drift, solid for fluidity,
all powerful to be impotent. The dead of Michigan State,
(08:45):
the dead of Las Vegas, the dead at the Pulse,
the dead at Well, why do we bother with individual
place names anymore? The dead of the killing field, the
dead of the transcendent national shooting Range that is the
United States of America. They are dead because somebody is
(09:10):
making money off them, and because Ted Cruz is making
money off them, and Marjorie Taylor Green is making money
off them, and every horror politician is making money off them,
and rarely even bothering any more to wash the money
through sea, pack or save America this, or shoot America,
(09:33):
that the donations come straight and unhidden, and whether it's
Trump or DeSantis or Poor soon to be very very surprised,
Nicki Haley, or just some other idiot free from morality
or conscience, whom the moneyed interests select. It is fair
to say that the Republican nominee for president in twenty
(09:53):
twenty four whoever that is will be underwritten by the
gun manufacturers and the gun lobby and their masters, the
death lobby, who pay good money to bad peace to
maintain not just our culture of guns and shooting and
dead children and thoughts and prayers, but also maintain the
(10:14):
world's culture of continuing to poison the atmosphere and kill
off the species one by one, because the one billion,
nine hundred and sixty three million dollars in profit made
last year by big Oil just isn't enough. Because they
stay up at night anguished by the thought that there
remains somewhere one dollar not yet stolen from a child
(10:39):
dying next to the earthquake rubble in Syria or Turkey,
one dollar yet to be pocketed by Darren Woods, the
CEO of Exxon Mobile. Away God intended it. It is economics,
and thus the only solution can also be economics, because
(11:04):
we will not defeat them in the states that are
already lost to the control of the death lobby. And
even if President Biden said tomorrow we are not owned
by guns, and I don't give a damn if I'm
re elected or even renominated, I'm going to issue four
hundred and fifty executive orders and take every damn gun
I can get off the streets. And if the House
(11:26):
and Senate won't reinstate the assault weapons man, I will
do so unilaterally and come and get me in the courts.
Even if Biden did that, we the anti death people,
we would lose in the Supreme Court, because Clarence Thomas
the whore is on the Supreme Court because of and
(11:49):
bought and paid for by the death lobby, and Samuel
Alito the whore is, and John Roberts the whore is,
and Neil Gorsich and drunken Brett Kavanaugh and Bible paralegal
Amy Coney Barrett. So we must ask ourselves, what economically
can we do to the gun lobby, to the oil lobby,
(12:13):
to the death lobby, and to their minions in the Senate,
in the House, and all the Senates and all the
houses in all the states in America and in this country.
There are only a couple of measures that might possibly work,
and might possibly work fast enough so that enough of
us won't be killed in next year's three hundred gun
(12:37):
massacres or the next decades three hundred climate crises. And
that one thing is to spare you the kind words,
the soft words, that one thing is economic civil war.
It can start simply, buy nothing from Texas, do not
go to Florida, do not patronize Missouri. We can start there,
(13:05):
and then we can get serious. It is a simple
mathematical fact that, with some exceptions, and a little more
nuanced than time permits me here, it is a simple
mathematical fact that the Blue states of this country keep
the Red states of this country from going bankrupt. It
is a simple mathematical fact that the Blue states pay
(13:27):
in more to the federal government than they ever get
back in services or infrastructure, or certainly in per capita representation.
New York pays a net twenty four billion a year,
California pays in a net fourteen billion, and most of
that goes to keeping Florida and Texas from starving. Florida
(13:49):
gets thirty six billion a year, more than it pays
in Texas, nearly that much. It is state to state socialism,
and we all know that we can't have socialism. And
it is a simple fact that the Blue states restrict
(14:09):
and regulate guns, and the Red states sell guns and
sell guns and sell guns and profit off dead children.
And when the political wars like Ted Cruz and Tucker
Carlson and Rupert Murdoch point to the gun carnage of Chicago,
(14:32):
they are actually pointing to the gun carnage of weapons
smuggled in from Indiana to Chicago. And it is also
a simple fact that we can dance around for decades
yet to come about how to stop the gun massacres
of February twenty forty seven and the chemical disasters of
June twenty sixty one so bad they reminded old timers
(14:55):
of where was that East Palestine, Ohio? Or we can
cut to the chase and put it this way, if
the Red States do not agree to strict and enforced
gun regulation and the removal and the outlawing of gun manufacture,
and a revision of the Second Amendment so that the
vagueness that isn't actually there but the death lobby has
(15:18):
spedisentury convincing millions. Is there that all doubt about the
Second Amendment be erased and replaced by the simple statement
that private gun ownership is illegal without a series of
licenses and mental health tests, and that the owner is
liable for whatever is done with his gun. And if
that includes murder, then the owner is liable for life imprisonment,
whether he fired the gun or not. If the Red
(15:39):
States do not agree to that, and by the way,
to reapportioned representation in the House and the Senate so
that Idaho does not have as many senators as a
real state and not a welfare state like Idaho, And
if they do not agree to the resignations of Chief
Justice Roberts and Justices Alito, Barrett, Gorsch, Kavanaugh, and Thomas.
(16:00):
If the Red States do not agree to that, then
the Blue States will simply stop paying money into the
federal government, and the Blue states will simply spend that
money directly on their own citizens. And if the leaders
of our Blue states who will not comply with this,
then the only solution we have since the murders at
(16:23):
your town name here next week are profit streams for
many people, the only solution we have is to then
stop paying our federal taxes until our state leaders recognize
that the only way out of this nightmare is to
threaten the Red States and thus threaten the gun lobby,
(16:44):
and thus threaten the oil lobby and thus threaten the
death lobby with economic strangulation, economic civil war, to save
the country, to save the next six hundred thousand Americans
who will die by gun violence. So certainly by the
(17:06):
year twenty thirty five, if it does not get worse before,
then six hundred thousand, the same number who were killed
in the actual civil war. And if you ask yourself,
or you are asked, by what right we could threaten
economic civil war, just say this is constitutional under the
(17:29):
Second Amendment. Quote, a well regulated militia being necessary to
the security of a free state, the right of the
people to keep and bare arms shall not be infringed.
Our rights to the security of a free state have
been infringed upon by the gun lobby and the death lobby,
(17:51):
which has convinced generations of gun fetishists that an amendment
that does not contain the word own nor any synonym
for own, does contain it. The Constitution is a property document.
It mentions rights only fi fifteen times. It mentions voting
only thirty seven times. This is out of nearly eight
thousand words. But it mentions money and ownership one hundred
(18:12):
and three times. The Second Amendment is about making sure
nothing interferes with the well regulated militia. A well regulated
militia that is there protecting our rights as citizens to have,
as it says in the Second Amendment, the security of
a free state. Our Second Amendment rights have been trampled
(18:35):
on by Donald Trump and the Republicans, the anti Second
Amendment Republicans. We need to start enforcing the Second Amendment.
We need an economic civil war against the gun lobby
and the death lobby and those corrupted and financially insolvent
red states that stand in the way of peace and
(18:55):
security in this country because we are owned by guns.
But God damn it, we are not going to be
owned by guns any longer. This is countdown, with Keith
(19:17):
Olberman still ahead of us on countdown. There's a bunch
(19:41):
of news about Netflix, and I am in no mood
to tell you any of the news about Netflix, but
because we need something to help us through things like this,
I'm going to tell you only about the day I
met with Netflix about starting news on Netflix, and their
only concerns were what about the Italian subtitles and what
(20:01):
would happen if one day my show didn't upload things
I promised not to tell. Coming up first, Yes, it's
the daily roundup of the other miscreants. Morons and Dunning
Kruger effects specimens who constitute today's worst persons in the world.
The bronze worse Heraldo Rivera and News Nation. I have
(20:21):
noted before. News Nation is the Nick at Night of
cable television, the retirement home for all those faces you
vaguely remember from when cable was a big deal and
they were too sort of Dan Abrams at his MSNBC
hair weave, Chris Cuomo and his CNN belligerent refusal to
(20:42):
understand journalistic standards, conservative con man Steve krackour hell, they
even put George will and Mick mulvaney and Sean Spicer
on the air. And Heraldo Well, of course, Heraldo Rivera
is the Heraldo Rivera of Heraldo Rivera's still complaining that
(21:02):
NBC spent money to promote my new show on MSNBC
instead of more money to promote his extant show on CNBC.
He first issued this complaint in the summer of nineteen
ninety seven. While the inevitable has finally happened, News Nation
Quote announced Heraldo Rivera will join the channel as correspondent
(21:23):
at large, effective immediately. Oh knows. Does this mean we'll
see less of some of their hardworking female correspondents Kaylee
and Kelsey and Kelly and Marky and Marne. By the way,
I'm not making that up. Their website lists twenty three
female anchors and correspondents on News Nation, including Kaylee and
(21:44):
Kelsey and Kelly and Marky and Marnie and now Heraldo.
They're honors up the Daily Wire and doctor Greg Murphy.
The Ben Shapiro bullshit Service quotes somebody named Jeremy Boring
revealing the secret Democratic plot to replace the vice president
to pay Harris a five year, one hundred million dollar
(22:07):
deal to run a foundation for the next five years
so she could make twenty million dollars a year. And honestly,
I'm impressed that somebody from the Daily Wire got the
math right. As to Murphy, the congressman from North Carolina
and urologist, also misogynist and racist, apart from his bizarre
claim that Trump is less likely to have dementia than
(22:27):
Biden because Trump is smarter, which I guess he determined
during a sistoscopy of Trump's brain. By the way, that's
a great joke, but you're gonna have to google sistoscopy anyway.
Congressman Murphy has also told Fox that Vice President Kamala
Harris is stupid. Quote Kamala, good lord. We talked about
(22:49):
intelligence being a risk factor for dementia. Let's not even
go there. Unquote. Four years ago, Murphy called the vice
president quote a walking disaster. She was only picked for
her color and her race. Punchline, while insulting the intelligence
of the Vice president, Congressman Murphy mis pronounced her first name.
(23:11):
Well done, Greg MURPHFI but our winner the worst. Thomas J.
Method the latest to be arrested for the January sixth insurrection.
He's from Framingham, Massachusetts, and the FBI asked him to
produce two photos he had taken of himself inside the
Capitol rotunda on January sixth. He was quoted as saying
(23:33):
at the Capitol, we can overthrow this. I don't care
what happens as long as Trump maintains his presidency. I
have a feeling it's going to be Mayhem, chaos and pandemonium.
Or he probably said it this way, we can overthrow this.
I don't care what happens as long as Trump maintains
as presidency. I have a feeling, no, that's enough. It's
(23:55):
going towards carry grant. Anyway, the arrestee, mister Method, told
the FBI he had gone through the trash in his
phone and Google Photos in his phone, and unfortunately those
two images they wanted, they could not be recovered because
the trash automatically deleted them after two months. As sorry,
I can't give you the incriminating evidence you know I have.
(24:15):
So the FBI got a warrant and Google said, yeah,
they're over here and produce the images. And now he's
under arrest on felony and misdemeanor charges. Thomas J. Method, Yes,
I know you have seen this joke coming. I still
could not resist it. There was a madness to his method.
(24:36):
Two days worst person in the world. Finally to the
number one story on the Countdown and my favorite topic,
(24:58):
me and things I promised not to tell. And I
don't usually venture into financial commentary or advice. You will
remember the story of my great grandfather who gave away
the name General Motors for free. But I just read
of Netflix finally staunching the subscriber flow. It had lost
around a million, two hundred thousand households in the first
(25:19):
half of this year, but added about twice that many
in the third quarter thanks to such uplifting programming as
the Jeffrey Dahmer story. So yay corporate cannibalism profits. Anyway,
I had an experience with Netflix which so shook my
confidence in them that it made me fearful of even
(25:39):
playing their stuff on my big TV, because I was
wondering if their stuff would damage my big TV. This
is my favorite story of what happens when media management
misunderstands its own business and wrongly thinks superstitions and coincidences
are inviolable rules for success. This happened on June seventeenth,
(26:01):
twenty sixteen, the day I found out about the vitality,
the importance, the absolute necessity of Netflix's Italian subtitles. I
don't want to exaggerate the importance of the two video
series I did for the GQ magazine site in twenty sixteen.
In twenty seventeen, The Closer and The Resistance. I mean,
(26:23):
for one thing, The Closer was so named because each
of the handful of us involved in its production could
not really conceive that there were enough morons and closeted
racists in this country to actually elect crazy Trump. We
grandly called the videos the closer because we expected our
expositions of Trump's essential fraudulents and dangerousness would close the
(26:44):
deal for Hillary Clinton. Uh huh, but people watch those videos.
I forget the final count, one hundred and eighty or
so episodes, four hundred million or so views, not plays,
but people actually viewing, essentially the whole piece. And CBS
News did a story once with the web analyzing platform
(27:06):
social Flow that showed that the first episode of The
Resistance from November sixteenth, twenty sixteen, was the top story
or video on Facebook through the first six months of
the Trump administration. The calculation, and lord knows what this
formula actually looks like, but the calculation was probably pretty
close that it reached fifty four million people, the equivalent
(27:29):
of one out of six of everybody in the country.
That's CBS News reporting this. Not my ego, and ego
is not the reason I mentioned this, well, it's not
the only reason I mentioned this. MSNBC had offered me
a new show in January of twenty sixteen, but I
would have hated it and you would not have watched it.
So it was not supposed to have any commentaries in it,
(27:53):
and a conservative co host was supposed to be there,
and the goal was she and I would be the
wacky couple who would find middle ground. Plus I would
have had to move to Laws even though I could
see the headquarters of NBC News out my bedroom window
in New York. And then when it was successful, the
producers wanted me to simply get on a plane from
(28:15):
Los Angeles and show up one morning in the New
York office of the president of NBC News, Andy Lack,
and tell him either we were scrapping the format and
relaunching Countdown that night, or I was quitting. In short,
they wanted me to do this lousy show and then
run a palace coup against the president of NBC News.
I passed. I put my energy and said into finding
(28:38):
a new platform for Countdown or a Countdown like show.
I had a deal in place to become the video
anchor of The Huffington Post, a daily exclusive commentary interviews,
features breaking news, funny stuff, whatever. Two days later. Two
days later, Arianna Huffington sold the Huffington Post no more deal.
(28:59):
Before and after this, some friends from Lionsgate Productions and
I were trying to sell to two Idea is pitching
to a series of forward looking media companies. One was
that they should be producing and running or posting or
streaming or whatever the series of my commentaries that became
The Closer and then The Resistance. I don't know what
that would have been worth, but I do know that
(29:20):
the tiny slice of the advertising GQ got just from
the commercials that would roll if you watched one of
the episodes on YouTube was well over a million dollars.
The overall profit might have been ten times that. Production
costs were like fifty thousand dollars. But I had a second,
bigger idea to pitch to these other companies. Who wants
(29:41):
to own the future of cable news when there isn't
any cable news anymore? I correctly predicted twenty twenty two
back in twenty sixteen. Who wants to own the future
of cable news when there isn't any cable anymore? Start
with just my commentaries, and as they make money for you,
(30:02):
build out if they work, you add my interviews and
my debates, and then somebody else's commentaries, and then some
conservatives commentaries, and then add all of what is now
cable news and put it on one streaming platform. We
rented a studio, We made a demo commentary, We made
(30:25):
what TV pitchmen call a deck. That's how I knew
the producers were serious. We met with HBO about this,
We met with something called Pop TV, The Daily Beast, Yahoo,
tune In, Sony, Epics, BBC, Hulu, Conde Nast. Ultimately that
led to the GQ series. But the one I had
the most hoped for was Netflix. The way I saw it,
(30:47):
they could start this tiny little thing in the corner
of their homepage called news Flicks, and you could click
on it, and someday there would be a menu with
Keith Olderman commentaries and I don't know, Glenn Beck commentaries
and Bill Maher commentary and Jesus H. Christ commentaries and
(31:07):
Keith Olderman newscast and lou Dobbs newscast and and all
of them partisan but collectively one giant, all encompassing by
partisan because of volume news and commentary site, the proverbial
marketplace of ideas, Duncan Donuts and Baskin Robbins and Pizza
(31:28):
Hut living together only as newscasters, you know, for kids.
I thought Netflix would see it immediately. They would own
news all of it.
Speaker 2 (31:42):
I mean.
Speaker 1 (31:42):
These were the people who realized America was too lazy
to go down to the video store anymore, so they
began to send America rented DVDs by mail, and people
actually returned the DVDs, And then they realized that America
was too lazy to return them anymore, and that the
optimum date to switch from DVDs to the then laugh
(32:04):
out loud bad concept of online video was precisely January sixteenth,
two thousand and seven. These guys had the gonads to
take a brilliantly successful, profitable new idea and gradually strangle
it and replace it with a different, brilliantly successful new idea.
I could not wait to meet them. My agent at
(32:28):
the time, I would be producer the head of television
of Lionsgate, like the chief of chief at Lionsgate. And
I went to the Netflix building in Beverly Hills at
ten thirty am Pacific daylight time on Friday, June seventeenth,
twenty sixteen. It felt perfect. Netflix was still just down
from the corner of Alden and Maple. Twenty five years later,
(32:50):
I had lived two blocks away from Alden and Maple.
It was a four minute walktops. Yeah, The two people
there from Netflix were vice presidents. Wish I remembered their names.
I don't know. Maybe they're still there. I deliberately locked
the names from my memory after this. One was in
charge of documentaries, one was in charge of non fiction series.
(33:11):
One was a man, one was a woman. I did
most of the talking, and I said, start with these
daily commentaries. You'll never have a better launch window than
the four months before the election. We could have one
ready for you to upload by Monday. This is lowest risk,
highest reward. How would you like to own the news
(33:32):
or if it doesn't work for some reason, you spend
I don't know, one hundred thousand dollars. The man spoke first.
But if you're going to do these daily, how are
people going to binge watch them? I mean, the first
time somebody comes to Netflix to see your commentaries, there's
only going to be one to watch. I took a
(33:54):
quick breath and explained that could be a drawback. On
the other hand, within four weeks there would be twenty
of them to binge. We could even start with five
or ten evergreen commentaries, so that when they come to
see the official premiere they watch that, then ten more
first day, and and you guys keep telling the press
that your problem is people binge, and then they don't
(34:15):
come back for another five days or a week. This way,
at least some of them would come back every day
to your website. You'd begin to solve your frequency of
visitation problem, wouldn't you. I mean, you're the executives. I'm
just the talent, the meat puppet. But isn't that then
the woman interrupted me, okay, yeah, that would help, and
I like starting with ten, But what about the subtitles?
(34:40):
There was a long pause. Then the head of Lionsgates
said what subtitles? The man said, well, everything we run
is subtitled in the language of each country we run
it in. So your commentary would have to have subtitles
added in like sixteen different languages. That usually takes three months.
Could you do commentaries today that would still work in September?
(35:05):
I said, well no, But why do you need subtitles?
Why do you need, say, Italian subtitles, or any subtitles.
I mean, it's very unlikely. I said that people worldwide
who are interested enough in American politics to watch commentaries
about American politics don't already speak English. The woman looked
(35:26):
aghast I mean the coloring of her face changed, but
the subtitles. She said, we always have subtitles, We always
do it that way here, And I said, well, yeah,
I understand, but see this would be for news flicks,
not Netflix per se. See you could adapt your rules
(35:48):
to fit the urgency of timeliness. I mean, MSNBC has
a profit of like five hundred million a year because
of timeliness and their last in profit in cable news.
Couldn't you adjust slightly for five hundred million a year?
The man now looked a gas couldn't this is the
Netflix rule. We can't change a rule. I began to
(36:10):
feel not happy. The man spoke again. Plus, what about
the twelve oh one rule? We all looked at each other.
You said, the commentaries would probably work best at eight
or nine pm, But in all of our countries, anything
new gets posted at exactly twelve oh one am local time,
only at twelve oh one am, so anything you did
(36:32):
today could not possibly run until twelve oh one am tomorrow.
I was still reeling from the Italian subtitles. Now there
was also an unbreakable twelve oh one tomorrow rule. I
was thinking of getting up and leaving, but the woman
apparently had one more gut punch to throw at me.
I also wanted to know if we somehow were able
(36:53):
to turn the subtitles around with lightning speed, or skip them,
or do them and say only two or three hours.
The man interrupted, plus the hours until it's twelve oh one,
don't forget them. She nodded, yes, plus the hours until
it's twelve o one. If we could somehow do that.
What would happen if one day something went wrong technically
and we couldn't upload that day and people came to
(37:13):
the site and there wasn't a new one. What if
it doesn't upload? Well? I had an answer to that,
but I did not say it out loud. I said
it a few minutes later to the head of lions Gate,
after we had said goodbye to mister and missus vice
president in the lobby of the Netflix building, I said,
good God. These people are in the uploading business. They
(37:34):
have been uploading for nine years. They aren't sure they
can upload. What equipment have they been uploading with? Are
they uploading from Kevin Spacey's nineteen ninety six Dell laptop?
As I left to get in the car to go
to Lax to fly home to New York, totally disappointed.
(37:55):
The Lionsgate guy was just shaking his head. I'm sorry,
I had no idea. I call you later at exactly
twelve oh one am with Italian subtitles. What if it
doesn't upload, he said as he walked away from me.
Christ I got to get my broker on the phone.
(38:16):
I got to sell all my Netflix stock. I've done
all the damage I can do here. Thank you for listening. Countdown.
Musical directors Brian Ray and John Phillip Chanelle have arranged, produced,
(38:38):
and performed most of our music. As always. Mister Ray
was on guitars, bass and drums. Mister Shanelle handled orchestration
and keyboards, and was produced by Tko Brothers. Other music,
including some of the Beethoven compositions, arranged and performed by
No Horns Allowed. The sports music is the Olderman theme
from ESPN two, written by Mitch Warren Davis Court to
see of ESPN inc Now. Our satirical and pithy musical
(39:01):
comments are by Nancy Faust, the best baseball stadium organist ever.
My announcer today is my friend John Dean. Everything else
was pretty much my fault. So that's countdown for this
the two hundred and sixty fifth day until the twenty
twenty four US presidential election, and the thirty fourth day
since dementia. Jay Trump's first attempted coup against the democratically
(39:22):
elected government of the United States. Use the fourteenth Amendment,
the Insurrection Act, the justice system, and the mental health
system to stop him from doing it again while we
still can. The next scheduled countdown is tomorrow. The official
position on that is it's iffy. My voice has pleasantly
surprised me by carrying me all the way through to
(39:42):
the end of this show, which will occur when I
say bulletins as the news warrants. Till then, I'm Keith Olderman.
Good morning, good afternoon, good night, and good luck. Countdown
(40:12):
with Keith Olderman is a production of iHeartRadio. For more
podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or
wherever you get your podcasts.
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