March 6, 2024 • 43 mins
Host Chris Moody speaks to Joseph Curl, who edited the Drudge Report from 2010 to 2014 and was Drudge's first full time employee. In an extensive interview, Curl reveals never before told details about The Drudge Report and his interactions with Matt Drudge. If you have a great Matt Drudge story, remember to call the hotline at 301-200-2414 and tell Chris about it!
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Today on finding Matt Drudge, and he said.
Speaker 2 (00:04):
I'm thinking about just dropping out. I'm thinking about not
being the face of the Drudge Report anymore. I'm thinking
I just make the Drudge Report about the page itself,
and I don't do anything.
Speaker 1 (00:18):
Those were the words of Joseph Curl, who from twenty
ten to twenty fourteen was an editor indeed the first
full time employee of The Drudge Report, where he worked
directly behind the scenes of the site with Matt Drudge.
Before joining the Drudge Report, Curl was the White House
correspondent for the Washington Times and now works as editor
(00:38):
in chief of Offthepress dot com. Curl first got to
know Matt Drudge when Drudge attended the White House Correspondence
dinner as a guest of the Washington Times, and the
pair hit it off. As a White House reporter, Curl
often found himself sending Drudge links to his own stories
and other pieces he thought would be a good fit
for the site, and then one day Drudge act actually
(01:00):
responded and asked if Curl would ever want to leave
his posts at the White House Briefing Room and come
work for him exclusively on the Drudge Report, and That's
how Joseph Curl found himself waking up early every day,
logging on to the back end of the Drudge Report
at seven am, and getting to work for Matt Drudge.
Curl has talked about Drudge the press before, but to
(01:22):
our knowledge, never on audio, and certainly never at this
length and in this detail. In our extended interview, Curl
takes us behind the scenes of the Drudge Report and
will share never before hear details about Matt Drudge and
how the Drudge Report operates, and how those who want
to get on the Drudge Report interact with him. He
(01:43):
also provides some new insights into the questions we started
this show to answer, like why Drudge may have turned
against Trump and whether it's possible Matt Drudge doesn't even
run the site anymore. Never before have we had on
the record such a detailed expose on how the Drudge
Report operates. Trust me, you won't want to miss this,
(02:04):
I promise. I'm Chris Moody and this is Finding Matt Drudge.
Stay tuned. How could the most powerful man in media
basically just vanish from public life from JMW Productions and iHeartMedia.
This is Finding Matt Drudge. Joseph Kurle, it's great to
(02:33):
have you on finding Matt Drudge. You'd met Drudge before
in Washington, but you first got to know him on
a trip to Miami. What can you tell us about
the first time visiting Matt Drudge in Miami in two
thousand and seven, Well.
Speaker 2 (02:45):
First time I met him, I actually reached out to him.
I knew that he was in Miami and we were
heading down there with our family, so I just dropped
him Ali and he said, swin on Vibe. He picked
me up and took me back to his He had
a suite I think was on the fortieth floor of
the Four Seasons. He took me back there and he
had a couch and just laptops. He was big on laptops.
(03:08):
I think he had he had two or three laptops,
and he just kind of showed me, you know, how
he did things and what he was doing. He said
something really interesting that I found odd. At that time,
he was doing his radio show, his weekly radio show.
He was doing an annual appearance on c Span whenever
he would come to Washington for the White House Correspondence Dinner.
(03:29):
And he said, I'm thinking about just dropping out. I'm
thinking about not being the face of the Drudge Report anymore.
I'm thinking, I just make the Drudge Report about the
page itself, and I don't do anything. I thought it
was an intriguing idea. I thought, you know, it can
always be kind of messy when when there's a person
behind something. But what if the page is just the page.
(03:52):
What if there is no celebrity journalist connected to it.
It's just this page that lives there when you go
on it and you see all the latest news, and
there's no personality connected to it. So I told him
I thought it was a good idea. And it was
shortly after that that he did kind of disappear and
become the mysterious man we don't know very much about nowadays.
Speaker 1 (04:14):
Did he give any more reasons why it might be
a good move for him, or what was drawing him
away from the public light.
Speaker 2 (04:22):
It was just the idea of the messy personal side
of things. He kind of wanted to drop out of everything.
We were walking through the parking garage and he said
that he always leaves the country during election day because
he or the election season, you know, the weeks before
(04:43):
the election, because he was afraid of what you know,
he had done so much on the Clintons, and of
course two thousand and eight was when Hillary was running,
so he said he was worried about the Clintons planting
you know, a bag of cocaine in his car, which
he had parts of the parking lot there. So he
would always take off and get out of the country
for around the election.
Speaker 1 (05:05):
When he told you this, was it joking or do
you think he was serious about this?
Speaker 2 (05:09):
Well, that's a good question. I think he was. I
really think he was mostly serious. He was the one
that exploded Bill Clinton, and he had just spent you
know a few years exploding and targeting Hillary Clinton as though,
you know, in the run up to the two thousand
and eight elections. So he was certainly persona non grada
among the Clintonistas. Maybe there was something to actually fear,
(05:32):
and Matt knew better than I did that maybe these
people were really dangerous. When he drove me back to
my car, he had the top down of his I
think it was a thunderbird, and we shook hands, and
as I was still standing there shaying our goodbyes, he
took some purell and wiped him off on his hands,
and I just remember thinking, you know, like, well, I'm
not that dirty. This was before the COVID time and
(05:54):
now it's pretty commonplace. And he told me later that
he had kind of a germ thing, an OCD kind
of phobia. So that's what I remember from that meeting.
Speaker 1 (06:04):
How do you come to work for Matt Drudge?
Speaker 2 (06:07):
Well, that all happened very quickly. One one day, in
the span of a couple of hours, he had posted
a story about Nancy Pelosi and she was on the
cover of some magazine here in Washington, and it was
a very photoshop photo. I mean at that time. I mean,
you know, Nancy Pelosi is one hundred years old now,
so at that point two thousand and nine, she was
(06:29):
what seventy something, and it was a super photoshops picture.
So I sent a message saying, you know, and the
headline of his story was, you know, white Pelosi's office
says photo not cover, photo not photoshopped. And so I
sent him a message just saying, you know, what you
should do is just find the latest AP photo of
(06:49):
Nancy Pelosi and post it right next to it, because
you know, it's super photoshopped to the point where she
looks forty, and he laughed at that and then did that.
And then he sent me a message on email about
an hour later saying, Hey, you should come down to
Miami and we should talk about your future and mine.
That's why I was intriguing, That's all he said. And
then we just worked out a date and for me
to head down in Florida. He says, book a ticket.
(07:13):
I'll book you a room and just book a ticket
for five first class and come down. And of course
he booked me a room, a suite in the Riz
Carlton in Miami, Miami Beach. The next day, about noon
or so, he comes by and I didn't really recognize
him because I didn't know he was bald, because I've
never seen him without his fedora, and he was wearing
(07:35):
flip flops and a pair of white shorts and a
baseball cap that he took off, and I was like, ooh,
I didn't I wouldn't even recognized him without his regular
fedora hat. He literally at that point just offered me
a gig with him and wanted me to come on
full time. Andrew Breitbart, who went on to found Breitbard News,
had worked with Matt occasionally before that, but Matt told
(07:58):
me that I would be his first full time employee.
Andrew basically just sort of sat in for him from
time to time. So he was hiring me and putting
me on a shift that he would then be off
of the page at that time and I would be on.
I'm very much similar to Drudge. We actually grew up
not very far apart, about six or seven years apart,
but close to each other. I grew up in Chevy Chase.
(08:19):
You grew up in Tacoma Park, Maryland, So we went
to a lot of the same places and things, so
we just had all kinds of things to talk about.
One of the things that he said when I first
got on there, he was like, you know, don't be
doing a lot of Facebook and Twitter because now you know.
And eventually, when it became known that I was one
of the editors there, you know, if I suddenly write
a tweet about something, then somebody can write, you know,
(08:41):
Drudge Report editor says this, and eventually people did write
a couple of headlines like that. I didn't realize that that,
you know, I would write a tweet. I remember there
was some big story that was happening and I said,
you know, I was still writing columns for the Washington Times,
and I said, I'm hearing from some sources that another
shoe's going to drop. And you know, somebody wrote, you know,
(09:02):
Drudge editor says it's not over on this scandal, and
I was like, oh crap. And Matt was not happy
about that because you know, now I'm Drudge editor and
he had gone to such great lengths to drop out
of everything and not be connected with it. There's nothing
on his Twitter page. He'll post something that he finds
interesting a couple of times a month, but then he
kills him off of there, so the page is always empty.
(09:23):
He doesn't have a history of what he's tweeted. He
just really wanted to make the Drudge Report be about
the page and not a person. And Matt's also been,
you know, very coy about his politics. I mean a
lot of people think he's conservative. He'll tell you to
your face that he's libertarian or you know, in some
(09:44):
ways open to everything. Every every political presidential cycle, somebody
will write a story saying, you know, is Matt Drudge
secretly for and then fill in the Democratic candidate Hillary
Clinton or Barack Obama there were always stories like that,
and you know, then he turned and on Donald Trump,
and then you know he supported Joe Biden. So his
(10:04):
politics are are not easily discerned.
Speaker 1 (10:08):
What did you learn about Matt Drudge from that time
that you didn't know before?
Speaker 2 (10:13):
Well, sitting down with Matt, you you really get a
sense of how bright he is. I mean, he didn't
he didn't go to college, and not that you need
to go to college to make you smart, but but
he's just he's very sharp and very quick and and uh,
and I didn't know he had a great sense of humor.
I didn't know he had a big kind of gregarious
laugh That surprised me the first time he really burst
(10:35):
out laughing because he's a he's a big laugher, but
just uh, the breath of his knowledge. I mean, you know,
I've I've joked about the Drudge Report being like plugging
into the matrix, where you're you're literally trying to cover
everything that's on the Internet, which is an incredibly difficult job.
(10:55):
I mean I used to joke about covering the White House,
as I literally had to know what was going on
politically in the entire world. So when I moved to
the Drudge Report, I suddenly had to be aware of
and in a lot of cases post quickly anything that
was happening in the world, and that includes culture, Hollywood,
(11:16):
justin Bieber, anything that might come up. So but Matt
really had this incredible knowledge of all those things. And
what again, what fascinated me was was his curiosity. I mean,
he wanted to know all these things, so he just
really just he just found out about everything. Like I
(11:36):
remember working with him so many times saying, hey, I
saw this, Hey I saw that, and he would always say,
I already know that. So you know that was surprising
because almost everything I would tell him, it would be
like I saw that already. He told me a couple
of other things, like about how to do the job,
(11:57):
which he called a suicide mission. He said, And I
should ask myself every day, if I'm the hottest editor
on the internet right now, am I posting just the
very best stoffers my page just a can't miss page?
And you know, that stuck in my head all the time,
because that's what his page always was for so long.
(12:18):
He told me that before he starts. I don't know
if he still does it. But back in that day,
or maybe he was just telling you this, but he said,
right before he plugs it, he would say game time
and then he would start, so he would get his
game face on and his game mentality, and then he
would start and then I think the other thing that's
incredible about Matt is his memory. His his institutional memory.
(12:41):
I mean he can because he's literally covered the world
and all of the biggest news stories for twenty some years.
He just has this huge base to pull from of.
Like you know, he remembers everything that happened because he
covered it, wrote headlines on it, posted it on his page,
and then proceeded to cover every of that story for
(13:01):
the next months that it ran out. So he just
remembered everything.
Speaker 1 (13:11):
Do you know where Matt Drudge is? If you have
a great Matt Drudge story, they can shed insight into
the mysterious mogul and help us on our search. Call
us at three zero one two zero zero two four
one four and tell us about it. We may even
air your message in the final episodes of the show.
If you want us to credit you, please say so
and leave your name. What was the appeal to leave
(13:38):
traditional news at the Washington Times and go work for
the Drudge Report.
Speaker 2 (13:43):
Well, I won't lie. It was the money. The money
was was basically three times when I was getting paid
at the Washington Times. I had pretty much risen to
the highest position you could be at the Washington Times.
As the White House corresponded, the senior White House corresponded,
and it just seemed like a really unchallenged It was
just a whole new challenge and it and it literally
(14:04):
one of the most unusual things about the job is
when you're on, you're plugged into the matrix, and when
you're off, you're literally off. There's nothing that you can
even do. There's nothing that you can work on for
the future because you're there to cover the news and
what's happening. So when my shift would end, I would
close my computer and I was literally done. I didn't
(14:25):
have to work on anything. There was nothing that was
coming up in the future that I that I needed
to get a grip on it. It was when I
when I would sit back down and open my computer,
that's when my day would begin. But it would end
just as abruptly by by closing my computer, and I
literally did not have to think about it until the
next day. The next time I open my computer.
Speaker 1 (14:47):
What do colleagues say when then you tell them you're
going to join the Druge Report.
Speaker 2 (14:52):
Well that's the interesting part too about Drudge is he's
a bit like fight Club is you know, the first
rule of working with Matt Drudge is you don't talk
about working with Matt Drudge. I didn't tell a lot
of people. Eventually, a friend of mine that I had
known through you know, work friend, he ran a website
about media in Washington, d C. Eventually he heard about it
(15:13):
and he said, you know, can I post something about it?
But at first I said no, and he's like, well,
it's going to get out, you know. So he's like,
just let me go ahead and post it. And I
was like, I We'll just you know, keep it, keep
it brief. And I also thought at the time that
maybe it would not be a bad idea because you know,
I know hundreds of journalists in Washington, so if they
know I worked there, then they can send me their
(15:35):
stuff right away. I'd get dozens and maybe one hundred
emails a day from people just sending me their links.
I mean, I got people from Reuter's in the Washington
Post and the New York Times and all kinds of
places just sending me their links in an effort to
get in and post it on Drudge. I wouldn't post
anything that wasn't drudge worthy. But there were a few
handful reporters, including Daniel Helper, who was then at The
(15:57):
Weekly Standard, and it got to the point where he
was sending me ten twelve things a day, and if
I saw something happen on MSNBC or CNN or Fox
News or someplace, I could shoot him an email and say, hey,
this just happened. Can you whip up a story? And
he'd have a story to me in ten minutes. So
you know, there were times too, and I did that
(16:18):
with other reporters where I really sort of played editor
in chief of a place or managing it or really
by saying, you know, hey, I need this story. I
just saw this. It just happened. There's no story out
there yet. I could wait an hour until somebody posts it,
or somebody puts it way down in a story where
I wanted to be the lead, or I can just
shoot an email to somebody and say, hey, can you
(16:39):
zip out a story for me that I would get
them the link on the page, and you know, it
would get me immediate news coverage. So it was a
value for both sides. It was also a not a
very well kept secret that if you wanted to get
a story on Drudges, you could write a story about
how influential Matt Drudge is and that would get posted.
And some of my colleagues have done that, and I
(17:01):
would always shoot them a joking message saying, you know,
kiss ass, you're just trying to get yourself on the
Drudge Report.
Speaker 1 (17:09):
As the editor of the Drudge Report, people want to
find out how they can get in with Drudge or
get their content onto Drudge. Tucker Carlson told me this
story of him, you know, when he launched The Daily Caller.
I was a reporter there in those early days. We
couldn't get on the Drudge Report. It just wasn't happening
for us. And I know that it bothered Tucker because
(17:31):
he had you know, we were getting scoops. We were
writing stories that were we thought were Drudge worthy. Can
you tell me the story of your side of the
story when when Tucker reached out to you to have
a chat.
Speaker 2 (17:43):
Yeah, one time I got an email from Tucker saying, hey, let's,
you know, let's meet up someplace. And he ended up
coming out near my house and we met at a
Starbucks and he he said, hey, man, I cannot get
on the drug Report. I don't know what to do,
and you know, we're trying to start this big opera.
And obviously, again back in those days, Matt was really
(18:03):
a kingmaker. I mean, if you got links on the page,
you know, you might triple your page views for the
day just by a single link. You know, if they
were getting three hundred thousand, they might get a million
page views by getting the top story on the Drugs Report.
So it would be huge not only to the success
of the of the web page, but also you know
for money for advertising rates, what you can charge and things.
(18:25):
I'm looking at an old notebook that I have kept
ever since my Day's there that from when he told
me things not to run, and this is interesting. He
said no Newsmacks, no NewsBusters, no Daily Caller, no Talking
Points memo, no business Insider, and no media hete He
laughed at that last one because he was like, what
a terrible name. You can't even say it media height.
(18:47):
But if you'll look now, I mean, he runs several
media stories every day, so obviously things keep changing. But
that was back in the day when when The Daily
Caller was was a banned site. So we met at
at Starbucks and Tucker said, you know, what, what do
I need to do here? What? Why why can't I
get on there? So one time when I was talking
(19:09):
to Matt, I said, you know, he's Tucker Carlson is
distraught about not being able to go on the page,
and and Mat goes, well, he knows what he did.
And I said, well, what does that mean. He's like,
he did something and he knows what it is, and
I'm not running his stuff. And so I went back
to Tucker and I said, hey, Tucker, it sounded like
(19:30):
you had done something, and he was unhappy and he goes.
Tucker goes, oh, man, that really still, he goes. We
were both in the green room at Fox News one
time and I said to Matt, what are you up to?
He was getting ready to go on a foreign trip,
and you know, then they parted ways, and Matt had
been on the air and then left, and then Tucker
(19:51):
goes on the air and I guess they said to Tucker,
you know, hey, you were just you know, just chatting
with Matt Drudge and he goes, yeah, here he's off
to or Sweden or wherever he was going. And that
made Matt so mad that he literally just was like,
don't run anything from the Daily Caller. So after he
Tucker told me that story, I said, look, just just
(20:13):
give it a try, just you know, do a graveling
apology to Matt and say you're really sorry, you didn't
mean to do anything, and you'll never do it again,
and can you please run me? And I got a
message back from Tucker a few weeks later saying, boom,
it happened. He's accepted it and he's posted our stuff.
So I guess back out over it. And after a
(20:34):
big formul apology, Hendr Breitbart told me a sort of
a depressing story one time is he called me and said,
this is after he had started Breitbart News and he said,
you know, I can't get stuff up on Drudge. Matt
had told me when before Breitbart left, he was concerned
that Breitbart was trying to cash in on the cachet
(20:57):
of the Drudge report. Breitbart was starting to get pretty famou.
He was an outspoken conservative, really enjoyed mixing it up
with people. And so Breitbart had started a new website
and he was like, I can't get anything on the page.
Matt said, you know, well, go ahead and get the
wires and I'll try to link to you and through
you to the wires, the associated press writers, those types
(21:19):
of places. Breitbart called me and said, you know, I
don't know why I can't get anything on the page.
And a short time after that, I asked Matt about
that and he said, don't run any Breitbart stuff. And
I didn't say why. I just said okay, and he said,
you know, just just don't run anything from Breitbart. Breitbart
I think spent something like one hundred thousand dollars to
get the wires, which are very expensive, and it was
(21:42):
more than a year before Matt came back and said, okay,
you can post Briitbart things. Now. I don't know what
that was about, but Matt is kind of thin skin
and somewhat vindictive, and so you know, it might have
just been punishment. It's it's the way Matt deals with
other people that you know, is unusual. Anyone who's been
(22:04):
his friend and then found that they are a former
friend that never speaks with him again knows what I'm
talking about. Like the story with Tucker Carlson, I never
would have guessed it was that until Tucker told me
that story. But that can hold some grudges.
Speaker 1 (22:17):
Take me through your average morning and when you were working,
and just kind of how it operated. How does the
Drudge Report operate behind the scenes.
Speaker 2 (22:26):
I'd get up at six o'clock here's I always did
when I was covering the White House, and just start
looking at things. In seven o'clock I would start posting it.
I would post out straight until eleven o'clock. A lot
of times after I got the hang of it, and
Matt would stay off and not come on until eleven o'clock.
And what other times he would send me a story
here or there and say, you know here post this
(22:46):
or post that, or but yeah I would. I would
then just spend my five hours, you know, coming the
Internet and my emails and the tip box, through the
Drudge Report emails and just you know, finding the stories
that I wanted. The drudg Report is the simplest code
you can imagine. It's actually just nineteen ninety eight code.
(23:08):
Anybody who's seen it then knows that it's exactly the
same way today, which is twenty five years later. So
it was a very simple process to put something on.
You grabbed a oky, you copy in the earl, and
you went into something that's called an FTP, which is
where the code goes, and you would just drop it
in there and then you'd either put a picture on
it or not. It's a bizarre job because I remember
(23:30):
talking about this one time with Andrew Breitbart, who had
worked with Matt before that. We met at a sea
Pack conference here in DC and I said, you know, hey,
I'm going to be going to run the DRUDG Report
and he was like, oh boy, that's going to be
uninteresting job. And I said, well, how do I do it?
Is it hard to do? And he said, this is
the only job where you don't really know what your
(23:50):
job is and your boss will never really tell you.
So that's really how it turned out to be, is
that Matt brought me on board because of the long
history of sending him stories that he'd like, and he
eventually just said to me the same thing that Andrews
said is just keep doing what you're doing, because you know,
the reason you're here is that I like what you've
been sending and so just keep it up.
Speaker 1 (24:12):
So you were not getting a lot of feedback as
an employee.
Speaker 2 (24:15):
Oh, almost no feedback. I mean it was an unusual job.
I mean the only time I would get feedback is
if I ran something that was a day or two old.
That would drive mad nuts, because you know, the whole
idea behind the site is fresh and new. And he's
told me one time that you know, if people see
old stuff here, they'll stop coming back because they'll go
(24:37):
I already know that they want to see stuff they
didn't know.
Speaker 1 (24:41):
Would you talk to Matt just about like as a
just your employees, you're working at the same company. Would
you guys hang out, talk on the phone, anything like that.
Speaker 2 (24:49):
Now, I think in the four years that I work
with Matt, I think we spoke less than ten times.
We would probably speak about twice a year maybe, And
it was funny because whenever we would speak, it was
always during my shift on and we would talk for
three or four hours because we just had so much
stuff to talk about. It we just hadn't caught up.
(25:10):
And you know, I'm plugged into the political world, He's
plugged into every world there is, and we would just
have really interesting, wide ranging talks. We never really talked
about doing the job, or you know, hey, let's keep
an eye on this story or that story. You know,
those are interesting and let's stay away from this. We
literally didn't talk shop hardly. Ever. I don't think he
(25:32):
ever really gave me any specific direction on you know,
let's not do this or let's do more of that.
Speaker 1 (25:38):
Would he just call you out of the blue, or
I mean, where was he at this time?
Speaker 2 (25:43):
Did you know it's hugually in Miami. I mean we
we and so, yeah, he would just call me and
we would chat. We only met one time in a
hotel in Virginia, just outside of DC. We were sitting
in a booth and he said, kind of cryptically, He's like,
this is where it all started. And I said, one
all started, and he said, this is where Linda Tripp
(26:06):
first gave me the tapes and the transcripts of Monica Lewinsky.
He was like, I used to meet Linda right here
at this table. That was the only time we ever
met in person.
Speaker 1 (26:16):
What was he doing in DC?
Speaker 2 (26:18):
I don't know. He was very mysterious. Hey, he would
send emails saying, you know, I'll be traveling from this
time to that time. So can you, you know, just
sit in on the page during my shift or and
you know, I would, like anyone else, say oh good
and cool, where are you going? And he would never respond.
I never knew where he was going or where he was.
You know, there were different times that I would suddenly
(26:38):
start to see more stories about Israel, more stories about Australia,
more stories about Mexico, and I would wonder, here's Matt there,
because he's interested in this place all of a sudden.
So but no, he was. He was very mysterious about that.
He never talked about where he was. Again, maybe owing
back to that story about Hillary Clinton, maybe it's you know,
(26:59):
maybe he had a real fear about the Clintons and
somebody doing something to him.
Speaker 1 (27:04):
When you were working there, did you learn anything about
the financial operation, like how much money the Drudge report makes.
Speaker 2 (27:11):
I know he paid me a lot, and so I
was assuming he was making a lot more than that.
It was an incredible operation. I mean it was literally
just him and some servers and some company that did
ads for him. And you know, not a lot of
overad not a lot of staff, not a lot of anything.
So by the time he started doing thirty million page
views a day. I mean, I'm assuming he was making
(27:35):
millions and millions, But I have no idea.
Speaker 1 (27:46):
When and how did your tenure at the Drudge Report
come to an end.
Speaker 2 (27:50):
Well, I guess it was the end of twenty thirteen
or early twenty fourteen that we met again here just
outside of DC in Virginia, and he talked about wanting
to come back on to the page and run the
page in the morning. I had been running the page
in the morning for probably three three and a half
years at that point, and what I started it was
(28:11):
also interesting because Matt said, you know, I don't know
how much longer I can do this. Maybe a couple
of years, you know, maybe longer. My opinion was just
that he was kind of burned out, and anyone would be.
I mean, he works every day, three hundred and sixty
five days a year, and he's been doing that for,
you know, twenty five years, and so at that point,
I think he was just kind of getting to the
(28:33):
point of being burned out. He's you know, how long
can you do that? So I think by me spelling
him for all that time in the mornings and kind
of giving him some of his life back. He got
out of his burnout and wanted to come back, and
he wanted to know if I wanted to, you know,
work the afternoon shift and kind of just post down page,
so I wouldn't really be running the page. I would
just sort of be putting some links on it. And
(28:55):
I had been posting the main stories and really just
completely running the entire page for a long time, and
I just didn't want to do that. And and again
it was a pay cup, but it was also shorter hours.
But I just figured, you know, well it's another experience
I've done, and I'll just go and do something else.
Speaker 1 (29:11):
And so it was just kind of an amicable fading away.
Speaker 2 (29:14):
Yeah, yeah, it really was. I mean it was funny
because I was, you know, in some ways being fired,
and you know, I didn't really you know, say I
want to stay and do things. But again, we ended
up speaking for five hours. We were at this restaurant,
and I remember we were there, you know, for like
a late breakfast and they were still there in mid afternoon,
late afternoon, and I remember the waiters and waitresses were
(29:37):
not that happy with us just sitting there and talking.
But yeah, we spoke for like four hours, which was unusual.
I said, hey, I don't even have a picture of
the two us of us, and he said, you know, no,
no pictures. I don't do pictures anymore, so we couldn't
take a selfie.
Speaker 1 (29:50):
Was that the last time you spoke to him?
Speaker 2 (29:53):
Yeah, it was definitely the last time I spoke with him.
I don't know if we had any emails or text
back and forth after that, but if we did, it
was it was for a very short period. And that
I've never spoken with him or emailed or communicated with
him in any way since then.
Speaker 1 (30:10):
That's remarkable. Just just like that, it's just gone.
Speaker 2 (30:13):
Yeah, it was. It was a shame for me, because
you know, I liked talking with him and he was
a he was a good friend. He did say something
unusual one time too, when I what I I guess
it was when we were first talking before he hired
me on. I said, well, I'm surprised that you're making
this move and that you would pick me for and
he said, well, you're one of my oldest friends. And
(30:35):
it was unusual because we hardly knew each other. I
mean I would see him maybe once a year at
the White Hoss correspondence dinner. I would send him emails,
but he would very rarely, if ever, send anything back,
because again he's so busy and he's reading one hundred
emails an hour, so he's not going to send you
back a message and says, hey, I've posted the thing
you have sent me the thanks very much. He didn't
(30:56):
do that. His thank you was he posted it. That
was was enough. So it was just unusual that he
was calling you one of his oldest friends when you know,
I kind of thought we barely knew each other.
Speaker 1 (31:10):
Who were Matt Drudge's friends. Obviously he considered you a friend.
Speaker 2 (31:14):
I don't know who any of his friends are. I
know that, and Culture was a friend of his. But again,
he kind of goes through his friends and then if
they have a falling out, it's just over. I don't
think very many former friends of Matt Drudge ever came back,
like Tucker Carlson did. I think once he had a
falling out, you were just done. That's the thing about
(31:35):
Matt Drudge is nobody really knows anything about him. I
don't know any of his friends. We never met with anybody,
hung out with anyone. I never met him someplace where
there are a bunch of people. I just he's very isolated,
and he's and again he's down close to the to
the Everglades, so he's, you know, really away from everything.
Speaker 1 (31:54):
The reporter tried to write a story about him and
go to he actually went to that compound and went
to the house and spoke to Drudge only on the telephone.
But Drudge was not happy that this reporter went to
his house.
Speaker 2 (32:08):
Well, that's really the only way that you would ever
see him. I think if he's exercising, he's not going
to a gym. I think if he's shopping, he's going
to the local grocery store or maybe even just having
that stuff brought to him. And I guess that's maybe
a lifestyle that you might need to live here in America.
But I think that's also why he likes foreign travel.
He can kind of go anywhere he wants and no
(32:30):
one's going to recognize him. I think most people around Washington,
d C. Would know who Mad Drudge is. But I
don't think, you know, if he popped up in Tapeka, Kansas,
that anyone would have any idea that he's a major
player in the political world.
Speaker 1 (32:43):
What do you think about the reporting or I guess
we should say the rumors that he sold the Dredge
Report and is no longer a part of it, Well.
Speaker 2 (32:51):
I think that's totally wrong, and I'll tell you why,
because number one, having run it and watched it for
not only the years that I ran the actual site,
but for pretty much his entire from the day he
started breaking these stories in nineteen ninety eight, everybody read Drudge,
and I got to know, you know, a Drudge headline.
He's a master of headline writing, and he's written tens
(33:13):
of thousands of headlines. And you know, people think the
guys that the New York Daily News and the New
York Post are clever. Matt's even more than that. And
I have seen plenty of headlines since all of those
rumors that I think right away, that's a headline that
only Matt Drudge could have written. But here's another thing
(33:34):
that is definitive proof. I had really kind of decided
that the page needed to have, you know, three, four
pictures per column, and so what I would be doing
my page. I tried not to go more than five
links or so before I had another picture, because it
would just turn into a big black and white mess.
So when I told him that one time, he was like, oh, man,
(33:55):
I wish I could just go back to the bi
old days where I had no pictures. I don't even
want pictures. And I said, well, you know, I mean,
it's twenty ten and everything's changing and people like pictures
and a picture can sometimes draw you into the story.
And he said, well, if I had by way, I
would do it like a newspaper. I would just do
only black and white pictures. And if you've been reading
(34:16):
his page for the last few months, that's what it
is now. It's just black and white pictures, which means
he's got to either have some sort of filter to
take a picture from color and turn it into black
and white, or he's spending an awful lot of time
finding black and white pictures. But it's only black and
white pictures on the page now, And to me, that
(34:36):
just means Matt Drudge is still running the page.
Speaker 1 (34:39):
Do you think he would have directed the current editor
to just do that.
Speaker 2 (34:42):
That's possible, in which case he'd still be involved in it.
If that were the case, he had told me at
one point that he had been offered either he had
been offered or he thought he could sell the page
for one hundred million dollars, and I think he told
me he'd been offered that for the page. Because it's
just so massive that you could really change the politics
(35:03):
of the page if you wanted to. Matt would sign
something that said, you know, he wouldn't disclose that he's
no longer even involved in the page. And you know
that would be huge because then you would just be
coming out of the page thinking you're reading that Drudge.
But again, with the stories that I see on the
page and the black and white and the occasional headline
(35:25):
that I just think is absolutely brilliant, That's why I
think Matt Drudge is still running it. But when I
was running it, I ran it from six or seven
am to eleven eleven am. Charlie Hurt, who was also
an editor at the Washington Times, he was eventually hired on.
He did it from eleven to four. Then Matt would
come on four or five o'clock run until ten o'clock.
(35:46):
In those days, the British papers were putting out their
good stuff in the evening, so he would come on
and run the page, and so he could have somebody
There are some rumors of different people that I've heard
of that are running the page now, but I still
think Matt's definitely involved in the page. And whether he's
coming on once a day and putting on some things
(36:06):
he likes and taking off some other things and setting
it up. Whether he runs an actual shift, whether he
does the mornings and somebody does the evenings, I don't
know about that, but it's just from my experience, I
think he's still on there in some capacity.
Speaker 1 (36:20):
Why do you think Matt Drudge turned against Donald Trump?
In twenty twenty?
Speaker 2 (36:25):
There were rumors and stories that came out from the
Trump camp that Drudge had gotten very angry at either
Donald Trump himself or Jared Kushno or somebody else in there.
Matt used to go to the White House every once
in a while when Trump was in and Matt was again.
He's so astute on things that he saw the viability
(36:48):
of Donald Trump. Drudge actually did have, I think, a
role in the election of Donald Trump. So what I've
heard from various sources is that the we had a
falling out with Donald Trump and Jared Kushta. In one
version that I've heard, apparently coming out of the Trump
White House was the fact that Drudge said, you know,
(37:11):
before the twenty twenty election, you need me, and the
Trumper said, we don't need you. We don't need we
don't need anybody. We sure don't need some blogger.
Speaker 1 (37:20):
So what does Joseph Kerl think about Matt Drudge in
the current era?
Speaker 2 (37:25):
Well, I think the page has definitely changed. When me
and Matt and Charlie were running the page, it was
super dynamic. I mean I was posting upwards of twenty
five thirty stories during my shift. I was taking off
a lot of things that were on the page from
the I was taking everything off that I had posted
the morning before, and I was taking some things that
had been on for a bunch of hours. And then
(37:46):
Charlie would come on and do the same thing, and
then Matt would do it. So we were cycling in
and out, you know, upwards of one hundred stories per day.
And now when you look at the page, Matt might
have the main story up there all day and never changes,
and there's far fewer links. I think that's another conscious
decision he's made. You know, sometimes there used to be
(38:08):
twenty five thirty links per column. You now have ten
or twelve links per colum unless something really big is
going on, so there's not a lot of content on
the page. It doesn't change very often, and his politics
are really different.
Speaker 1 (38:21):
You've done a few interviews appeared in books about Matt Drudge.
Have you heard anything about what Matt thinks of you
talking about working on the site when it was so
secretive when you were working there.
Speaker 2 (38:33):
The weird conundrum for me is that you know, Matt's
so secretive, you don't talk about Matt Drudge. And but
I'm really proud of the work that I did at
the Drudge Report. I had a blast doing it, and
I think it's cool to tell some stories about such
an influential place that I actually got to be a
part of at one point. But I worry sometimes if
(38:53):
the story is going to be lost, and I always
have the tiniest part of a story to tell. But
you know, I just think it's so weird to to
not be able to talk about something. I'm proud of
the work I did at the Drudge Report, and I'm
proud of the page and just being associated with it.
It has been a very cool thing. I was a
very tiny part of a big history of you know,
(39:14):
Drudge broke one of the biggest stories ever, certainly in
modern journalism, and I had some eventual role in that site,
is all I claim to fame too. But the other
reason is that, you know, I worry Matt had said
at one point that he was going to write a book,
and you know, maybe he was going to help participate
and aid somebody else who writes a book. And I
(39:36):
just worry that some of this will get lost.
Speaker 1 (39:40):
What do you think Matt Drudge would think of this podcast.
Speaker 2 (39:43):
I think he's secretly flattered by coverage. I mean, again,
like I was saying, the easiest way to get on
the Drudge Report is to write a story that Matt
Drudge still wields a lot of influence in the political world.
He posts those, so you know, I think he would
probably be flattered by it. Well, I mean, Matt's got
an ego, so Matt, you know, certainly would appreciate that
(40:04):
kind of coverage. And in just the last year or two,
I've seen several stories that are posted on the Drudge
Report saying that Matt Drudge still wields a lot of power.
So I would think I think he's going to be
flatter at it. I think he knows you're working on it.
Speaker 1 (40:20):
Do you have any advice for how I could get
him to come on the show.
Speaker 2 (40:23):
He's already done the shadow thing, so you could maybe
get one of those machines that alters his voice and
you could put him in a black box and he
could speak like he's in witness protection program or something
with his never complain, never explain mentality. I don't know
that there is a lot of reason for him to
go do something like that, because he clearly doesn't want
(40:46):
to be part of that, and his decision to drop
out of things and not be the face of the
Drudge Report means that maybe he's not interested at all
in just participating in stories about him. But I think
he goes back to the time he was talking about
it in two thousand and seven of just sort of
dropping out and no longer being the person connected to
(41:08):
the web page. It would just now be the web page.
And if you wanted to know what Matt Drudge thought,
you went to the web page. He wasn't going to
tell you himself. He wasn't going to be on c
SPAN or you know, have a Sunday night radio Shaw
where he pontificated for three hours it was just going
to be the website and the website alone. So that
(41:28):
was just his way of separating the two. And I
don't know either whether he enjoyed fame or you know,
enjoyed doing the things that he had been doing. I
you know, are a lot of people who don't you know,
a lot of people who don't like to do TV,
A lot of people who don't like to really do
public speaking. So I don't think that was Matt, but
(41:48):
I think he did it more for the reason of
I'll let the page speak for itself, and I will
just disappear in the background.
Speaker 1 (41:58):
Joseph Curl may not think Matt Drudge will sit down
with us, but we aren't so sure. While reporting this podcast,
we have regularly tried to reach Matt Drudge by emailing
him and trying to contact him through friends. Through a
couple tips, we now believe we might have Drudge's personal
cell phone number, So on the next episode, we're going
to give him a call and see if he will
(42:20):
chat with us and maybe meet us for dinner in town.
We know from our reporting that he loves to spend
a lot of time in and very well, maybe right now.
That's Las Vegas, Nevada. Join us next week to see
how the phone call goes and to see if Drudge
joins me for dinner in Sin City. We'll have a
seat waiting just for him. I'm Chris Moody and this
(42:43):
is Finding Matt Drudge. Remember to call us at three
(43:07):
zero one two zero zero two four one four if
you have a great tip or a great Matt Drudge story.
We'll track down the tips for the final episodes of
the show.
Today on finding Matt Drudge, and he said.
Speaker 2 (00:04):
I'm thinking about just dropping out. I'm thinking about not
being the face of the Drudge Report anymore. I'm thinking
I just make the Drudge Report about the page itself,
and I don't do anything.
Speaker 1 (00:18):
Those were the words of Joseph Curl, who from twenty
ten to twenty fourteen was an editor indeed the first
full time employee of The Drudge Report, where he worked
directly behind the scenes of the site with Matt Drudge.
Before joining the Drudge Report, Curl was the White House
correspondent for the Washington Times and now works as editor
(00:38):
in chief of Offthepress dot com. Curl first got to
know Matt Drudge when Drudge attended the White House Correspondence
dinner as a guest of the Washington Times, and the
pair hit it off. As a White House reporter, Curl
often found himself sending Drudge links to his own stories
and other pieces he thought would be a good fit
for the site, and then one day Drudge act actually
(01:00):
responded and asked if Curl would ever want to leave
his posts at the White House Briefing Room and come
work for him exclusively on the Drudge Report, and That's
how Joseph Curl found himself waking up early every day,
logging on to the back end of the Drudge Report
at seven am, and getting to work for Matt Drudge.
Curl has talked about Drudge the press before, but to
(01:22):
our knowledge, never on audio, and certainly never at this
length and in this detail. In our extended interview, Curl
takes us behind the scenes of the Drudge Report and
will share never before hear details about Matt Drudge and
how the Drudge Report operates, and how those who want
to get on the Drudge Report interact with him. He
(01:43):
also provides some new insights into the questions we started
this show to answer, like why Drudge may have turned
against Trump and whether it's possible Matt Drudge doesn't even
run the site anymore. Never before have we had on
the record such a detailed expose on how the Drudge
Report operates. Trust me, you won't want to miss this,
(02:04):
I promise. I'm Chris Moody and this is Finding Matt Drudge.
Stay tuned. How could the most powerful man in media
basically just vanish from public life from JMW Productions and iHeartMedia.
This is Finding Matt Drudge. Joseph Kurle, it's great to
(02:33):
have you on finding Matt Drudge. You'd met Drudge before
in Washington, but you first got to know him on
a trip to Miami. What can you tell us about
the first time visiting Matt Drudge in Miami in two
thousand and seven, Well.
Speaker 2 (02:45):
First time I met him, I actually reached out to him.
I knew that he was in Miami and we were
heading down there with our family, so I just dropped
him Ali and he said, swin on Vibe. He picked
me up and took me back to his He had
a suite I think was on the fortieth floor of
the Four Seasons. He took me back there and he
had a couch and just laptops. He was big on laptops.
(03:08):
I think he had he had two or three laptops,
and he just kind of showed me, you know, how
he did things and what he was doing. He said
something really interesting that I found odd. At that time,
he was doing his radio show, his weekly radio show.
He was doing an annual appearance on c Span whenever
he would come to Washington for the White House Correspondence Dinner.
(03:29):
And he said, I'm thinking about just dropping out. I'm
thinking about not being the face of the Drudge Report anymore.
I'm thinking, I just make the Drudge Report about the
page itself, and I don't do anything. I thought it
was an intriguing idea. I thought, you know, it can
always be kind of messy when when there's a person
behind something. But what if the page is just the page.
(03:52):
What if there is no celebrity journalist connected to it.
It's just this page that lives there when you go
on it and you see all the latest news, and
there's no personality connected to it. So I told him
I thought it was a good idea. And it was
shortly after that that he did kind of disappear and
become the mysterious man we don't know very much about nowadays.
Speaker 1 (04:14):
Did he give any more reasons why it might be
a good move for him, or what was drawing him
away from the public light.
Speaker 2 (04:22):
It was just the idea of the messy personal side
of things. He kind of wanted to drop out of everything.
We were walking through the parking garage and he said
that he always leaves the country during election day because
he or the election season, you know, the weeks before
(04:43):
the election, because he was afraid of what you know,
he had done so much on the Clintons, and of
course two thousand and eight was when Hillary was running,
so he said he was worried about the Clintons planting
you know, a bag of cocaine in his car, which
he had parts of the parking lot there. So he
would always take off and get out of the country
for around the election.
Speaker 1 (05:05):
When he told you this, was it joking or do
you think he was serious about this?
Speaker 2 (05:09):
Well, that's a good question. I think he was. I
really think he was mostly serious. He was the one
that exploded Bill Clinton, and he had just spent you
know a few years exploding and targeting Hillary Clinton as though,
you know, in the run up to the two thousand
and eight elections. So he was certainly persona non grada
among the Clintonistas. Maybe there was something to actually fear,
(05:32):
and Matt knew better than I did that maybe these
people were really dangerous. When he drove me back to
my car, he had the top down of his I
think it was a thunderbird, and we shook hands, and
as I was still standing there shaying our goodbyes, he
took some purell and wiped him off on his hands,
and I just remember thinking, you know, like, well, I'm
not that dirty. This was before the COVID time and
(05:54):
now it's pretty commonplace. And he told me later that
he had kind of a germ thing, an OCD kind
of phobia. So that's what I remember from that meeting.
Speaker 1 (06:04):
How do you come to work for Matt Drudge?
Speaker 2 (06:07):
Well, that all happened very quickly. One one day, in
the span of a couple of hours, he had posted
a story about Nancy Pelosi and she was on the
cover of some magazine here in Washington, and it was
a very photoshop photo. I mean at that time. I mean,
you know, Nancy Pelosi is one hundred years old now,
so at that point two thousand and nine, she was
(06:29):
what seventy something, and it was a super photoshops picture.
So I sent a message saying, you know, and the
headline of his story was, you know, white Pelosi's office
says photo not cover, photo not photoshopped. And so I
sent him a message just saying, you know, what you
should do is just find the latest AP photo of
(06:49):
Nancy Pelosi and post it right next to it, because
you know, it's super photoshopped to the point where she
looks forty, and he laughed at that and then did that.
And then he sent me a message on email about
an hour later saying, Hey, you should come down to
Miami and we should talk about your future and mine.
That's why I was intriguing, That's all he said. And
then we just worked out a date and for me
to head down in Florida. He says, book a ticket.
(07:13):
I'll book you a room and just book a ticket
for five first class and come down. And of course
he booked me a room, a suite in the Riz
Carlton in Miami, Miami Beach. The next day, about noon
or so, he comes by and I didn't really recognize
him because I didn't know he was bald, because I've
never seen him without his fedora, and he was wearing
(07:35):
flip flops and a pair of white shorts and a
baseball cap that he took off, and I was like, ooh,
I didn't I wouldn't even recognized him without his regular
fedora hat. He literally at that point just offered me
a gig with him and wanted me to come on
full time. Andrew Breitbart, who went on to found Breitbard News,
had worked with Matt occasionally before that, but Matt told
(07:58):
me that I would be his first full time employee.
Andrew basically just sort of sat in for him from
time to time. So he was hiring me and putting
me on a shift that he would then be off
of the page at that time and I would be on.
I'm very much similar to Drudge. We actually grew up
not very far apart, about six or seven years apart,
but close to each other. I grew up in Chevy Chase.
(08:19):
You grew up in Tacoma Park, Maryland, So we went
to a lot of the same places and things, so
we just had all kinds of things to talk about.
One of the things that he said when I first
got on there, he was like, you know, don't be
doing a lot of Facebook and Twitter because now you know.
And eventually, when it became known that I was one
of the editors there, you know, if I suddenly write
a tweet about something, then somebody can write, you know,
(08:41):
Drudge Report editor says this, and eventually people did write
a couple of headlines like that. I didn't realize that that,
you know, I would write a tweet. I remember there
was some big story that was happening and I said,
you know, I was still writing columns for the Washington Times,
and I said, I'm hearing from some sources that another
shoe's going to drop. And you know, somebody wrote, you know,
(09:02):
Drudge editor says it's not over on this scandal, and
I was like, oh crap. And Matt was not happy
about that because you know, now I'm Drudge editor and
he had gone to such great lengths to drop out
of everything and not be connected with it. There's nothing
on his Twitter page. He'll post something that he finds
interesting a couple of times a month, but then he
kills him off of there, so the page is always empty.
(09:23):
He doesn't have a history of what he's tweeted. He
just really wanted to make the Drudge Report be about
the page and not a person. And Matt's also been,
you know, very coy about his politics. I mean a
lot of people think he's conservative. He'll tell you to
your face that he's libertarian or you know, in some
(09:44):
ways open to everything. Every every political presidential cycle, somebody
will write a story saying, you know, is Matt Drudge
secretly for and then fill in the Democratic candidate Hillary
Clinton or Barack Obama there were always stories like that,
and you know, then he turned and on Donald Trump,
and then you know he supported Joe Biden. So his
(10:04):
politics are are not easily discerned.
Speaker 1 (10:08):
What did you learn about Matt Drudge from that time
that you didn't know before?
Speaker 2 (10:13):
Well, sitting down with Matt, you you really get a
sense of how bright he is. I mean, he didn't
he didn't go to college, and not that you need
to go to college to make you smart, but but
he's just he's very sharp and very quick and and uh,
and I didn't know he had a great sense of humor.
I didn't know he had a big kind of gregarious
laugh That surprised me the first time he really burst
(10:35):
out laughing because he's a he's a big laugher, but
just uh, the breath of his knowledge. I mean, you know,
I've I've joked about the Drudge Report being like plugging
into the matrix, where you're you're literally trying to cover
everything that's on the Internet, which is an incredibly difficult job.
(10:55):
I mean I used to joke about covering the White House,
as I literally had to know what was going on
politically in the entire world. So when I moved to
the Drudge Report, I suddenly had to be aware of
and in a lot of cases post quickly anything that
was happening in the world, and that includes culture, Hollywood,
(11:16):
justin Bieber, anything that might come up. So but Matt
really had this incredible knowledge of all those things. And
what again, what fascinated me was was his curiosity. I mean,
he wanted to know all these things, so he just
really just he just found out about everything. Like I
(11:36):
remember working with him so many times saying, hey, I
saw this, Hey I saw that, and he would always say,
I already know that. So you know that was surprising
because almost everything I would tell him, it would be
like I saw that already. He told me a couple
of other things, like about how to do the job,
(11:57):
which he called a suicide mission. He said, And I
should ask myself every day, if I'm the hottest editor
on the internet right now, am I posting just the
very best stoffers my page just a can't miss page?
And you know, that stuck in my head all the time,
because that's what his page always was for so long.
(12:18):
He told me that before he starts. I don't know
if he still does it. But back in that day,
or maybe he was just telling you this, but he said,
right before he plugs it, he would say game time
and then he would start, so he would get his
game face on and his game mentality, and then he
would start and then I think the other thing that's
incredible about Matt is his memory. His his institutional memory.
(12:41):
I mean he can because he's literally covered the world
and all of the biggest news stories for twenty some years.
He just has this huge base to pull from of.
Like you know, he remembers everything that happened because he
covered it, wrote headlines on it, posted it on his page,
and then proceeded to cover every of that story for
(13:01):
the next months that it ran out. So he just
remembered everything.
Speaker 1 (13:11):
Do you know where Matt Drudge is? If you have
a great Matt Drudge story, they can shed insight into
the mysterious mogul and help us on our search. Call
us at three zero one two zero zero two four
one four and tell us about it. We may even
air your message in the final episodes of the show.
If you want us to credit you, please say so
and leave your name. What was the appeal to leave
(13:38):
traditional news at the Washington Times and go work for
the Drudge Report.
Speaker 2 (13:43):
Well, I won't lie. It was the money. The money
was was basically three times when I was getting paid
at the Washington Times. I had pretty much risen to
the highest position you could be at the Washington Times.
As the White House corresponded, the senior White House corresponded,
and it just seemed like a really unchallenged It was
just a whole new challenge and it and it literally
(14:04):
one of the most unusual things about the job is
when you're on, you're plugged into the matrix, and when
you're off, you're literally off. There's nothing that you can
even do. There's nothing that you can work on for
the future because you're there to cover the news and
what's happening. So when my shift would end, I would
close my computer and I was literally done. I didn't
(14:25):
have to work on anything. There was nothing that was
coming up in the future that I that I needed
to get a grip on it. It was when I
when I would sit back down and open my computer,
that's when my day would begin. But it would end
just as abruptly by by closing my computer, and I
literally did not have to think about it until the
next day. The next time I open my computer.
Speaker 1 (14:47):
What do colleagues say when then you tell them you're
going to join the Druge Report.
Speaker 2 (14:52):
Well that's the interesting part too about Drudge is he's
a bit like fight Club is you know, the first
rule of working with Matt Drudge is you don't talk
about working with Matt Drudge. I didn't tell a lot
of people. Eventually, a friend of mine that I had
known through you know, work friend, he ran a website
about media in Washington, d C. Eventually he heard about it
(15:13):
and he said, you know, can I post something about it?
But at first I said no, and he's like, well,
it's going to get out, you know. So he's like,
just let me go ahead and post it. And I
was like, I We'll just you know, keep it, keep
it brief. And I also thought at the time that
maybe it would not be a bad idea because you know,
I know hundreds of journalists in Washington, so if they
know I worked there, then they can send me their
(15:35):
stuff right away. I'd get dozens and maybe one hundred
emails a day from people just sending me their links.
I mean, I got people from Reuter's in the Washington
Post and the New York Times and all kinds of
places just sending me their links in an effort to
get in and post it on Drudge. I wouldn't post
anything that wasn't drudge worthy. But there were a few
handful reporters, including Daniel Helper, who was then at The
(15:57):
Weekly Standard, and it got to the point where he
was sending me ten twelve things a day, and if
I saw something happen on MSNBC or CNN or Fox
News or someplace, I could shoot him an email and say, hey,
this just happened. Can you whip up a story? And
he'd have a story to me in ten minutes. So
you know, there were times too, and I did that
(16:18):
with other reporters where I really sort of played editor
in chief of a place or managing it or really
by saying, you know, hey, I need this story. I
just saw this. It just happened. There's no story out
there yet. I could wait an hour until somebody posts it,
or somebody puts it way down in a story where
I wanted to be the lead, or I can just
shoot an email to somebody and say, hey, can you
(16:39):
zip out a story for me that I would get
them the link on the page, and you know, it
would get me immediate news coverage. So it was a
value for both sides. It was also a not a
very well kept secret that if you wanted to get
a story on Drudges, you could write a story about
how influential Matt Drudge is and that would get posted.
And some of my colleagues have done that, and I
(17:01):
would always shoot them a joking message saying, you know,
kiss ass, you're just trying to get yourself on the
Drudge Report.
Speaker 1 (17:09):
As the editor of the Drudge Report, people want to
find out how they can get in with Drudge or
get their content onto Drudge. Tucker Carlson told me this
story of him, you know, when he launched The Daily Caller.
I was a reporter there in those early days. We
couldn't get on the Drudge Report. It just wasn't happening
for us. And I know that it bothered Tucker because
(17:31):
he had you know, we were getting scoops. We were
writing stories that were we thought were Drudge worthy. Can
you tell me the story of your side of the
story when when Tucker reached out to you to have
a chat.
Speaker 2 (17:43):
Yeah, one time I got an email from Tucker saying, hey, let's,
you know, let's meet up someplace. And he ended up
coming out near my house and we met at a
Starbucks and he he said, hey, man, I cannot get
on the drug Report. I don't know what to do,
and you know, we're trying to start this big opera.
And obviously, again back in those days, Matt was really
(18:03):
a kingmaker. I mean, if you got links on the page,
you know, you might triple your page views for the
day just by a single link. You know, if they
were getting three hundred thousand, they might get a million
page views by getting the top story on the Drugs Report.
So it would be huge not only to the success
of the of the web page, but also you know
for money for advertising rates, what you can charge and things.
(18:25):
I'm looking at an old notebook that I have kept
ever since my Day's there that from when he told
me things not to run, and this is interesting. He
said no Newsmacks, no NewsBusters, no Daily Caller, no Talking
Points memo, no business Insider, and no media hete He
laughed at that last one because he was like, what
a terrible name. You can't even say it media height.
(18:47):
But if you'll look now, I mean, he runs several
media stories every day, so obviously things keep changing. But
that was back in the day when when The Daily
Caller was was a banned site. So we met at
at Starbucks and Tucker said, you know, what, what do
I need to do here? What? Why why can't I
get on there? So one time when I was talking
(19:09):
to Matt, I said, you know, he's Tucker Carlson is
distraught about not being able to go on the page,
and and Mat goes, well, he knows what he did.
And I said, well, what does that mean. He's like,
he did something and he knows what it is, and
I'm not running his stuff. And so I went back
to Tucker and I said, hey, Tucker, it sounded like
(19:30):
you had done something, and he was unhappy and he goes.
Tucker goes, oh, man, that really still, he goes. We
were both in the green room at Fox News one
time and I said to Matt, what are you up to?
He was getting ready to go on a foreign trip,
and you know, then they parted ways, and Matt had
been on the air and then left, and then Tucker
(19:51):
goes on the air and I guess they said to Tucker,
you know, hey, you were just you know, just chatting
with Matt Drudge and he goes, yeah, here he's off
to or Sweden or wherever he was going. And that
made Matt so mad that he literally just was like,
don't run anything from the Daily Caller. So after he
Tucker told me that story, I said, look, just just
(20:13):
give it a try, just you know, do a graveling
apology to Matt and say you're really sorry, you didn't
mean to do anything, and you'll never do it again,
and can you please run me? And I got a
message back from Tucker a few weeks later saying, boom,
it happened. He's accepted it and he's posted our stuff.
So I guess back out over it. And after a
(20:34):
big formul apology, Hendr Breitbart told me a sort of
a depressing story one time is he called me and said,
this is after he had started Breitbart News and he said,
you know, I can't get stuff up on Drudge. Matt
had told me when before Breitbart left, he was concerned
that Breitbart was trying to cash in on the cachet
(20:57):
of the Drudge report. Breitbart was starting to get pretty famou.
He was an outspoken conservative, really enjoyed mixing it up
with people. And so Breitbart had started a new website
and he was like, I can't get anything on the page.
Matt said, you know, well, go ahead and get the
wires and I'll try to link to you and through
you to the wires, the associated press writers, those types
(21:19):
of places. Breitbart called me and said, you know, I
don't know why I can't get anything on the page.
And a short time after that, I asked Matt about
that and he said, don't run any Breitbart stuff. And
I didn't say why. I just said okay, and he said,
you know, just just don't run anything from Breitbart. Breitbart
I think spent something like one hundred thousand dollars to
get the wires, which are very expensive, and it was
(21:42):
more than a year before Matt came back and said, okay,
you can post Briitbart things. Now. I don't know what
that was about, but Matt is kind of thin skin
and somewhat vindictive, and so you know, it might have
just been punishment. It's it's the way Matt deals with
other people that you know, is unusual. Anyone who's been
(22:04):
his friend and then found that they are a former
friend that never speaks with him again knows what I'm
talking about. Like the story with Tucker Carlson, I never
would have guessed it was that until Tucker told me
that story. But that can hold some grudges.
Speaker 1 (22:17):
Take me through your average morning and when you were working,
and just kind of how it operated. How does the
Drudge Report operate behind the scenes.
Speaker 2 (22:26):
I'd get up at six o'clock here's I always did
when I was covering the White House, and just start
looking at things. In seven o'clock I would start posting it.
I would post out straight until eleven o'clock. A lot
of times after I got the hang of it, and
Matt would stay off and not come on until eleven o'clock.
And what other times he would send me a story
here or there and say, you know here post this
(22:46):
or post that, or but yeah I would. I would
then just spend my five hours, you know, coming the
Internet and my emails and the tip box, through the
Drudge Report emails and just you know, finding the stories
that I wanted. The drudg Report is the simplest code
you can imagine. It's actually just nineteen ninety eight code.
(23:08):
Anybody who's seen it then knows that it's exactly the
same way today, which is twenty five years later. So
it was a very simple process to put something on.
You grabbed a oky, you copy in the earl, and
you went into something that's called an FTP, which is
where the code goes, and you would just drop it
in there and then you'd either put a picture on
it or not. It's a bizarre job because I remember
(23:30):
talking about this one time with Andrew Breitbart, who had
worked with Matt before that. We met at a sea
Pack conference here in DC and I said, you know, hey,
I'm going to be going to run the DRUDG Report
and he was like, oh boy, that's going to be
uninteresting job. And I said, well, how do I do it?
Is it hard to do? And he said, this is
the only job where you don't really know what your
(23:50):
job is and your boss will never really tell you.
So that's really how it turned out to be, is
that Matt brought me on board because of the long
history of sending him stories that he'd like, and he
eventually just said to me the same thing that Andrews
said is just keep doing what you're doing, because you know,
the reason you're here is that I like what you've
been sending and so just keep it up.
Speaker 1 (24:12):
So you were not getting a lot of feedback as
an employee.
Speaker 2 (24:15):
Oh, almost no feedback. I mean it was an unusual job.
I mean the only time I would get feedback is
if I ran something that was a day or two old.
That would drive mad nuts, because you know, the whole
idea behind the site is fresh and new. And he's
told me one time that you know, if people see
old stuff here, they'll stop coming back because they'll go
(24:37):
I already know that they want to see stuff they
didn't know.
Speaker 1 (24:41):
Would you talk to Matt just about like as a
just your employees, you're working at the same company. Would
you guys hang out, talk on the phone, anything like that.
Speaker 2 (24:49):
Now, I think in the four years that I work
with Matt, I think we spoke less than ten times.
We would probably speak about twice a year maybe, And
it was funny because whenever we would speak, it was
always during my shift on and we would talk for
three or four hours because we just had so much
stuff to talk about. It we just hadn't caught up.
(25:10):
And you know, I'm plugged into the political world, He's
plugged into every world there is, and we would just
have really interesting, wide ranging talks. We never really talked
about doing the job, or you know, hey, let's keep
an eye on this story or that story. You know,
those are interesting and let's stay away from this. We
literally didn't talk shop hardly. Ever. I don't think he
(25:32):
ever really gave me any specific direction on you know,
let's not do this or let's do more of that.
Speaker 1 (25:38):
Would he just call you out of the blue, or
I mean, where was he at this time?
Speaker 2 (25:43):
Did you know it's hugually in Miami. I mean we
we and so, yeah, he would just call me and
we would chat. We only met one time in a
hotel in Virginia, just outside of DC. We were sitting
in a booth and he said, kind of cryptically, He's like,
this is where it all started. And I said, one
all started, and he said, this is where Linda Tripp
(26:06):
first gave me the tapes and the transcripts of Monica Lewinsky.
He was like, I used to meet Linda right here
at this table. That was the only time we ever
met in person.
Speaker 1 (26:16):
What was he doing in DC?
Speaker 2 (26:18):
I don't know. He was very mysterious. Hey, he would
send emails saying, you know, I'll be traveling from this
time to that time. So can you, you know, just
sit in on the page during my shift or and
you know, I would, like anyone else, say oh good
and cool, where are you going? And he would never respond.
I never knew where he was going or where he was.
You know, there were different times that I would suddenly
(26:38):
start to see more stories about Israel, more stories about Australia,
more stories about Mexico, and I would wonder, here's Matt there,
because he's interested in this place all of a sudden.
So but no, he was. He was very mysterious about that.
He never talked about where he was. Again, maybe owing
back to that story about Hillary Clinton, maybe it's you know,
(26:59):
maybe he had a real fear about the Clintons and
somebody doing something to him.
Speaker 1 (27:04):
When you were working there, did you learn anything about
the financial operation, like how much money the Drudge report makes.
Speaker 2 (27:11):
I know he paid me a lot, and so I
was assuming he was making a lot more than that.
It was an incredible operation. I mean it was literally
just him and some servers and some company that did
ads for him. And you know, not a lot of
overad not a lot of staff, not a lot of anything.
So by the time he started doing thirty million page
views a day. I mean, I'm assuming he was making
(27:35):
millions and millions, But I have no idea.
Speaker 1 (27:46):
When and how did your tenure at the Drudge Report
come to an end.
Speaker 2 (27:50):
Well, I guess it was the end of twenty thirteen
or early twenty fourteen that we met again here just
outside of DC in Virginia, and he talked about wanting
to come back on to the page and run the
page in the morning. I had been running the page
in the morning for probably three three and a half
years at that point, and what I started it was
(28:11):
also interesting because Matt said, you know, I don't know
how much longer I can do this. Maybe a couple
of years, you know, maybe longer. My opinion was just
that he was kind of burned out, and anyone would be.
I mean, he works every day, three hundred and sixty
five days a year, and he's been doing that for,
you know, twenty five years, and so at that point,
I think he was just kind of getting to the
(28:33):
point of being burned out. He's you know, how long
can you do that? So I think by me spelling
him for all that time in the mornings and kind
of giving him some of his life back. He got
out of his burnout and wanted to come back, and
he wanted to know if I wanted to, you know,
work the afternoon shift and kind of just post down page,
so I wouldn't really be running the page. I would
just sort of be putting some links on it. And
(28:55):
I had been posting the main stories and really just
completely running the entire page for a long time, and
I just didn't want to do that. And and again
it was a pay cup, but it was also shorter hours.
But I just figured, you know, well it's another experience
I've done, and I'll just go and do something else.
Speaker 1 (29:11):
And so it was just kind of an amicable fading away.
Speaker 2 (29:14):
Yeah, yeah, it really was. I mean it was funny
because I was, you know, in some ways being fired,
and you know, I didn't really you know, say I
want to stay and do things. But again, we ended
up speaking for five hours. We were at this restaurant,
and I remember we were there, you know, for like
a late breakfast and they were still there in mid afternoon,
late afternoon, and I remember the waiters and waitresses were
(29:37):
not that happy with us just sitting there and talking.
But yeah, we spoke for like four hours, which was unusual.
I said, hey, I don't even have a picture of
the two us of us, and he said, you know, no,
no pictures. I don't do pictures anymore, so we couldn't
take a selfie.
Speaker 1 (29:50):
Was that the last time you spoke to him?
Speaker 2 (29:53):
Yeah, it was definitely the last time I spoke with him.
I don't know if we had any emails or text
back and forth after that, but if we did, it
was it was for a very short period. And that
I've never spoken with him or emailed or communicated with
him in any way since then.
Speaker 1 (30:10):
That's remarkable. Just just like that, it's just gone.
Speaker 2 (30:13):
Yeah, it was. It was a shame for me, because
you know, I liked talking with him and he was
a he was a good friend. He did say something
unusual one time too, when I what I I guess
it was when we were first talking before he hired
me on. I said, well, I'm surprised that you're making
this move and that you would pick me for and
he said, well, you're one of my oldest friends. And
(30:35):
it was unusual because we hardly knew each other. I
mean I would see him maybe once a year at
the White Hoss correspondence dinner. I would send him emails,
but he would very rarely, if ever, send anything back,
because again he's so busy and he's reading one hundred
emails an hour, so he's not going to send you
back a message and says, hey, I've posted the thing
you have sent me the thanks very much. He didn't
(30:56):
do that. His thank you was he posted it. That
was was enough. So it was just unusual that he
was calling you one of his oldest friends when you know,
I kind of thought we barely knew each other.
Speaker 1 (31:10):
Who were Matt Drudge's friends. Obviously he considered you a friend.
Speaker 2 (31:14):
I don't know who any of his friends are. I
know that, and Culture was a friend of his. But again,
he kind of goes through his friends and then if
they have a falling out, it's just over. I don't
think very many former friends of Matt Drudge ever came back,
like Tucker Carlson did. I think once he had a
falling out, you were just done. That's the thing about
(31:35):
Matt Drudge is nobody really knows anything about him. I
don't know any of his friends. We never met with anybody,
hung out with anyone. I never met him someplace where
there are a bunch of people. I just he's very isolated,
and he's and again he's down close to the to
the Everglades, so he's, you know, really away from everything.
Speaker 1 (31:54):
The reporter tried to write a story about him and
go to he actually went to that compound and went
to the house and spoke to Drudge only on the telephone.
But Drudge was not happy that this reporter went to
his house.
Speaker 2 (32:08):
Well, that's really the only way that you would ever
see him. I think if he's exercising, he's not going
to a gym. I think if he's shopping, he's going
to the local grocery store or maybe even just having
that stuff brought to him. And I guess that's maybe
a lifestyle that you might need to live here in America.
But I think that's also why he likes foreign travel.
He can kind of go anywhere he wants and no
(32:30):
one's going to recognize him. I think most people around Washington,
d C. Would know who Mad Drudge is. But I
don't think, you know, if he popped up in Tapeka, Kansas,
that anyone would have any idea that he's a major
player in the political world.
Speaker 1 (32:43):
What do you think about the reporting or I guess
we should say the rumors that he sold the Dredge
Report and is no longer a part of it, Well.
Speaker 2 (32:51):
I think that's totally wrong, and I'll tell you why,
because number one, having run it and watched it for
not only the years that I ran the actual site,
but for pretty much his entire from the day he
started breaking these stories in nineteen ninety eight, everybody read Drudge,
and I got to know, you know, a Drudge headline.
He's a master of headline writing, and he's written tens
(33:13):
of thousands of headlines. And you know, people think the
guys that the New York Daily News and the New
York Post are clever. Matt's even more than that. And
I have seen plenty of headlines since all of those
rumors that I think right away, that's a headline that
only Matt Drudge could have written. But here's another thing
(33:34):
that is definitive proof. I had really kind of decided
that the page needed to have, you know, three, four
pictures per column, and so what I would be doing
my page. I tried not to go more than five
links or so before I had another picture, because it
would just turn into a big black and white mess.
So when I told him that one time, he was like, oh, man,
(33:55):
I wish I could just go back to the bi
old days where I had no pictures. I don't even
want pictures. And I said, well, you know, I mean,
it's twenty ten and everything's changing and people like pictures
and a picture can sometimes draw you into the story.
And he said, well, if I had by way, I
would do it like a newspaper. I would just do
only black and white pictures. And if you've been reading
(34:16):
his page for the last few months, that's what it
is now. It's just black and white pictures, which means
he's got to either have some sort of filter to
take a picture from color and turn it into black
and white, or he's spending an awful lot of time
finding black and white pictures. But it's only black and
white pictures on the page now, And to me, that
(34:36):
just means Matt Drudge is still running the page.
Speaker 1 (34:39):
Do you think he would have directed the current editor
to just do that.
Speaker 2 (34:42):
That's possible, in which case he'd still be involved in it.
If that were the case, he had told me at
one point that he had been offered either he had
been offered or he thought he could sell the page
for one hundred million dollars, and I think he told
me he'd been offered that for the page. Because it's
just so massive that you could really change the politics
(35:03):
of the page if you wanted to. Matt would sign
something that said, you know, he wouldn't disclose that he's
no longer even involved in the page. And you know
that would be huge because then you would just be
coming out of the page thinking you're reading that Drudge.
But again, with the stories that I see on the
page and the black and white and the occasional headline
(35:25):
that I just think is absolutely brilliant, That's why I
think Matt Drudge is still running it. But when I
was running it, I ran it from six or seven
am to eleven eleven am. Charlie Hurt, who was also
an editor at the Washington Times, he was eventually hired on.
He did it from eleven to four. Then Matt would
come on four or five o'clock run until ten o'clock.
(35:46):
In those days, the British papers were putting out their
good stuff in the evening, so he would come on
and run the page, and so he could have somebody
There are some rumors of different people that I've heard
of that are running the page now, but I still
think Matt's definitely involved in the page. And whether he's
coming on once a day and putting on some things
(36:06):
he likes and taking off some other things and setting
it up. Whether he runs an actual shift, whether he
does the mornings and somebody does the evenings, I don't
know about that, but it's just from my experience, I
think he's still on there in some capacity.
Speaker 1 (36:20):
Why do you think Matt Drudge turned against Donald Trump?
In twenty twenty?
Speaker 2 (36:25):
There were rumors and stories that came out from the
Trump camp that Drudge had gotten very angry at either
Donald Trump himself or Jared Kushno or somebody else in there.
Matt used to go to the White House every once
in a while when Trump was in and Matt was again.
He's so astute on things that he saw the viability
(36:48):
of Donald Trump. Drudge actually did have, I think, a
role in the election of Donald Trump. So what I've
heard from various sources is that the we had a
falling out with Donald Trump and Jared Kushta. In one
version that I've heard, apparently coming out of the Trump
White House was the fact that Drudge said, you know,
(37:11):
before the twenty twenty election, you need me, and the
Trumper said, we don't need you. We don't need we
don't need anybody. We sure don't need some blogger.
Speaker 1 (37:20):
So what does Joseph Kerl think about Matt Drudge in
the current era?
Speaker 2 (37:25):
Well, I think the page has definitely changed. When me
and Matt and Charlie were running the page, it was
super dynamic. I mean I was posting upwards of twenty
five thirty stories during my shift. I was taking off
a lot of things that were on the page from
the I was taking everything off that I had posted
the morning before, and I was taking some things that
had been on for a bunch of hours. And then
(37:46):
Charlie would come on and do the same thing, and
then Matt would do it. So we were cycling in
and out, you know, upwards of one hundred stories per day.
And now when you look at the page, Matt might
have the main story up there all day and never changes,
and there's far fewer links. I think that's another conscious
decision he's made. You know, sometimes there used to be
(38:08):
twenty five thirty links per column. You now have ten
or twelve links per colum unless something really big is
going on, so there's not a lot of content on
the page. It doesn't change very often, and his politics
are really different.
Speaker 1 (38:21):
You've done a few interviews appeared in books about Matt Drudge.
Have you heard anything about what Matt thinks of you
talking about working on the site when it was so
secretive when you were working there.
Speaker 2 (38:33):
The weird conundrum for me is that you know, Matt's
so secretive, you don't talk about Matt Drudge. And but
I'm really proud of the work that I did at
the Drudge Report. I had a blast doing it, and
I think it's cool to tell some stories about such
an influential place that I actually got to be a
part of at one point. But I worry sometimes if
(38:53):
the story is going to be lost, and I always
have the tiniest part of a story to tell. But
you know, I just think it's so weird to to
not be able to talk about something. I'm proud of
the work I did at the Drudge Report, and I'm
proud of the page and just being associated with it.
It has been a very cool thing. I was a
very tiny part of a big history of you know,
(39:14):
Drudge broke one of the biggest stories ever, certainly in
modern journalism, and I had some eventual role in that site,
is all I claim to fame too. But the other
reason is that, you know, I worry Matt had said
at one point that he was going to write a book,
and you know, maybe he was going to help participate
and aid somebody else who writes a book. And I
(39:36):
just worry that some of this will get lost.
Speaker 1 (39:40):
What do you think Matt Drudge would think of this podcast.
Speaker 2 (39:43):
I think he's secretly flattered by coverage. I mean, again,
like I was saying, the easiest way to get on
the Drudge Report is to write a story that Matt
Drudge still wields a lot of influence in the political world.
He posts those, so you know, I think he would
probably be flattered by it. Well, I mean, Matt's got
an ego, so Matt, you know, certainly would appreciate that
(40:04):
kind of coverage. And in just the last year or two,
I've seen several stories that are posted on the Drudge
Report saying that Matt Drudge still wields a lot of power.
So I would think I think he's going to be
flatter at it. I think he knows you're working on it.
Speaker 1 (40:20):
Do you have any advice for how I could get
him to come on the show.
Speaker 2 (40:23):
He's already done the shadow thing, so you could maybe
get one of those machines that alters his voice and
you could put him in a black box and he
could speak like he's in witness protection program or something
with his never complain, never explain mentality. I don't know
that there is a lot of reason for him to
go do something like that, because he clearly doesn't want
(40:46):
to be part of that, and his decision to drop
out of things and not be the face of the
Drudge Report means that maybe he's not interested at all
in just participating in stories about him. But I think
he goes back to the time he was talking about
it in two thousand and seven of just sort of
dropping out and no longer being the person connected to
(41:08):
the web page. It would just now be the web page.
And if you wanted to know what Matt Drudge thought,
you went to the web page. He wasn't going to
tell you himself. He wasn't going to be on c
SPAN or you know, have a Sunday night radio Shaw
where he pontificated for three hours it was just going
to be the website and the website alone. So that
(41:28):
was just his way of separating the two. And I
don't know either whether he enjoyed fame or you know,
enjoyed doing the things that he had been doing. I
you know, are a lot of people who don't you know,
a lot of people who don't like to do TV,
A lot of people who don't like to really do
public speaking. So I don't think that was Matt, but
(41:48):
I think he did it more for the reason of
I'll let the page speak for itself, and I will
just disappear in the background.
Speaker 1 (41:58):
Joseph Curl may not think Matt Drudge will sit down
with us, but we aren't so sure. While reporting this podcast,
we have regularly tried to reach Matt Drudge by emailing
him and trying to contact him through friends. Through a
couple tips, we now believe we might have Drudge's personal
cell phone number, So on the next episode, we're going
to give him a call and see if he will
(42:20):
chat with us and maybe meet us for dinner in town.
We know from our reporting that he loves to spend
a lot of time in and very well, maybe right now.
That's Las Vegas, Nevada. Join us next week to see
how the phone call goes and to see if Drudge
joins me for dinner in Sin City. We'll have a
seat waiting just for him. I'm Chris Moody and this
(42:43):
is Finding Matt Drudge. Remember to call us at three
(43:07):
zero one two zero zero two four one four if
you have a great tip or a great Matt Drudge story.
We'll track down the tips for the final episodes of
the show.
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