Full Episode - A Growing Number Of Republicans Are Breaking From Trump + The Chicago Cubs Owner Trying To Fix How America Gets Its News - The Chuck ToddCast

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
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podcast at checkout. This is a sponsor I absolutely embrace,
so use that code. Hello there, Happy Thursday, and welcome
to another episode of the check podcast. It has been

(01:46):
quite a week. There's been a lot of political news,
a lot of campaign news. We're in the middle of
the never ending vote count in California, which, yes, this
is a problem the state needs to deal with. I'm
tired of people trying to defend the system and so
just be patient. No, this is creating problems. But I'm

(02:07):
going to get to that in a minute. Don't want
to start my start some of these election counting rants
too soon here. But I've just had a week because
I also have some sad news. But in some ways
that that is that has hit my family. We lost
my grandmother this week. She lived an incredible life ninety

(02:32):
nine years on this on this earth, and I am
going to use the privilege of this podcast at the
end of it to share a few a few thoughts
on her and just share a few nuggets about her
that I want anybody that wants to know me needs

(02:54):
to know about her. So it's just all happening. I've
been traveling a lot anyway. My point is is, it's
it's been a week. It's been a week both it
was a busy week in and of itself in my
professional world, in our professional world of campaign politics, a
busy week, and what's happening in the real world of
Warren peace and and and things like that, with Ukraine,

(03:17):
with Iran, et cetera. We just kind of we just
got a lot going on so and got my own
situation there. So, but I think we had to begin.
Let me be a rundown of today's episode. My guest
is a gentleman by the name of Todd Ricketts. And
if you say Ricketts, isn't he a US Senator? I
would say no, But there is a Rickets name in

(03:38):
the US Senate. It is happens to be Todd Ricketts's brother,
but this is not a political interview. Todd Ricketts, who
is one of the own is an owner of the
Chicago Cups. He and his family I is launched an
app called free Spoke, and I've been using it for
the last couple of weeks and it's this is primarily

(04:00):
why he's on the podcast. This is it's an app
that's attempting to do a few things, trying to I
think the best way to it's essentially trying to curate
the internet and front loads, so you know, you know, hey,

(04:20):
this has got a left bias, this has got a
right bias. This is this is sort of somewhere in
between left and right. Whether you want to call it middle,
that's up to you. But trying to do what a
lot of people have wanted to do over the years.
It's very similar to all sides if you're familiar with
that in media. But there's an added aspect to it
is that they are trying to essentially create a search

(04:43):
engine that no longer uses you as the product. Basically,
it's a private search engine which no cookies, no sort
of trailing, you know, trying to use what you search
to then turn into advertising. It's very similar to something
that Frank McCourt's been trying to work on with Project Liberty,

(05:07):
if any of you are familiar with that. So anyway,
he's my guest, but given that he's also an owner
of the Chicago Cubs, we actually do talk a little
baseball and labor and it's obviously been a huge start
to the negotiations between the players and the owners that
will begin pretty intensely after the season ends, when the

(05:30):
owners are likely to lock out the players when the
current collective bargaining agreement expires at the end of November,
and so we'll likely see that and you get a
little preview of where the owners stand. And so, like
I said, come for the interesting pitch about a private

(05:50):
search engine that also tries to essentially cut through some
of the noise of the information ecosystem, and then stay
for the little bit of owner insider handicapping of their
perspective when it comes to the future of baseball's economics.
But on the political front, I want to tackle a

(06:12):
few things. We've got some new news out of the
White House regarding potential permanent pick for the post of
Attorney General. I've got some updates on Maine Senate and
a focus on how what I would say is how
we should assess how Janet Mills does against Graham Platner.
And the Democratic primary planner is going to be the

(06:33):
Democratic nominee that we know, but Janet Mills's name is
on the ballot, and it is going to be a
barometer to see, how, you know, how much of a
problem has all of this, all of these disclosures about
his personal life and personal habits, How much of a
toll has this taken with rank and file Democratic voters.

(06:57):
Let's just say I did did a little bit of
research and have ad a driven metric for you to
watch that main center race. And I want to go
through a poll memo that he put out to try
to reassure donors and supporters that things aren't as bleak
as the media coverage has said. But I want to
begin and then we'll a little update about California, because

(07:18):
I think the best you can hope for is maybe
maybe my friends over at Decision to SAQ will have
enough information to at least call the second slots of
the runoff in La Mayor and in California Gov. Maybe,
And we're hopeful by Friday or Saturday. But if it

(07:42):
obviously if some of these drops make things even closer
between second and third and could go another few days.
But not only will I sort of help you in
how to watch this a little bit, but I do
think we've got a this really needs to I think
the way a California is conducting itself here is introducing

(08:06):
more just allows for conspiracy theories to fill the vacuum.
And it's just unnecessary to feel to allow a vacuum
like this to exist. But we're going to get to
that as well. But I want to begin what I
think has been the most significant development of the week,
and that is Congressional Republicans and starting the increasing number

(08:31):
of Congressional Republicans that are pretty much done capitulating to
Donald Trump. Now, maybe for some of you it may
not be enough, and for some of you you may
think that they're only doing the minimum and there are
more ways that they should push back on Donald Trump.
But the reality is this has been a pretty significant development.

(08:54):
When the Senate Republican leaders I was telling you in
the last episode immediately reacts to the Bill Poultine nomination,
as we don't for the Director of National Intelligence. We
don't need weaponization and a weapon using the word weaponization, right.
It was not a democratic talking point. First, it came

(09:15):
from the leading Republican in the Senate. It's you know,
and Thune wouldn't have done this if he wasn't speaking
for a majority of his own conference. The Senate Republicans
have had enough, and now you've even got any you know,
some of this is due to absentees, but you continue
to see a trickle of House Republicans, at least on

(09:36):
the War Powers Act when it comes to Iran, and
we'll see if more happens over the next day or
two when it comes to aid Ukraine, but an increasing
number of Republicans slower in the House. I mean, remember,
House Republicans are more closely aligned with Donald Trump's wing
of the party than Senate Republicans. It's just been the
case pretty much his entire presidency. But the fact that

(10:00):
you know, it's a symbolic vote in the House, but
Republicans lost it, or more importantly, the Trump administration lost it.
So even though that Donald Trump has had mostly success
in punishing Republicans that have crossed him, it appears there
are fewer that fear him, and there certainly is this

(10:22):
growing Yolo caucus of course that we've been talking about
in the Senate. But even on Tuesday night, his ability
to tell primary voters what to do was has been
called into a little bit of question, at least in
the state of Iowa, given that his endorsement, which was
seen as necessary essentially to rescue the Republican ticket for

(10:45):
fear that Zach Lane, who did win the Republican nomination,
is just not going to is going to be a
bit of a drag on Ashley Hintson, the Republican Senate
candidate nominee, rather than an asset. And so there's no
doubt how the President was talked into that. But the
point is is that tons of data points this week

(11:06):
that the Republican Party that is not Trump centric is
ready to move on and they are comfortable now treating
this president as a lame president. And then of course
there's his behavior himself, and when things are going badly
for him, he gets cranky, he lashes out, he's doing

(11:27):
his misogynistic attacks on journalists. I mean, what he does
to Caitlin Collins is just outrageous, and it's so you know,
I don't react every time he unfairly maligns reporters unfairly

(11:50):
maligns news organizations, because it would be all I would
do if that's what I do. And I do think
that the compact I've made with you at this podcast
is to basically try to do two things, politics as
it is, but also present politics perhaps as it could
be or should be. That's essentially my north star here.

(12:11):
And I don't want to be labor. I mean, I
could sit here and wine and wine and wine about
just how ridiculous, how un American that the Pentagon behaves
when it comes to the First Amendment in journalists, how
the White House behaves when it comes to the First
Amendment in journalists, and then just the absolute nasty way
that he speaks about women journalists in particular. It's and

(12:34):
this is sadly not anything new. What's disappointing is not
that plenty of us fellow journalists will speak up from
time to time, because you just get to a point where,
like Jesus, you know, does anybody you know have you
no decency? Sir? I mean, this is the moment, but
I really would like to hear it from somebody inside

(12:57):
you know the Republican Party that you know this is,
this is becoming embarrassing and it's damaging and it's fairly
destructive to the political discourse in the country. But he's not.

(13:18):
You know, he's clearly when when, like I said, when
things don't go well, you can you know, he wears
he wears it all. You know, he is terrible. You know,
We've said this, He's a terrible poker player. He wears
all of his and he wears it all out there
in a sleeve. Both how he's feeling his strengths, his weaknesses,

(13:39):
his vulnerabilities, his projections. Right, he does not hide any
of them, right, he is He is oddly incredibly easy
to read. Which is why he can't get a deal
with the Iranians, right, which is why he's been such
a terrible negotiator and trying to supposedly put together a
ceasefire between Russia and Ukraine. Right, because he's just and

(14:00):
why she is eating his lunch in every single negotiation
the United States has had under Donald Trump with China.
He's a terrible negotiator, you know, That's why he loves
to say he's a great negotiator. This is a classic
attempt at gaslighting, right, But he is just awful, right,
one of the worst that we've had in this in

(14:21):
this position. So he's in as he wears it all
on his sleep, he's not in a good place. And
this is all happening right when he's about to have
this inward celebration of himself while trying to wrap himself
in America to fifty. And I will tell you, I
think there's a lot of political riskiness here, you know,

(14:42):
creating this UFC event on the South Lawn. You know,
I know how Republicans would have reacted if Barack Obama
had decided to host the All Star Game on the
South Lawn and manufactured a basketball court. Might be a
lot of fun, might be a great idea, but nah,
I think a lot of people would at the time
would have seen that, Huh, that's you know, is that
the way we should use the White House? And oh,

(15:02):
you're just doing it because you love basketball, right and
all these things, but that's not the way Barack Obama
was going to conduct his presidency or use the White
House this way. And you do this and there's a
part of this, it's like, you know, put it on
the National mall, and you know, in some way, it's like,

(15:24):
you know, there's it's always with Trump, like, especially with
this beautification aspect of DC. There are things that I'm
glad he's doing. Cleaning up some of these monuments. Absolutely please.
The federal government should spend money to present a capital
that people can be proud to visit and see. But
it is your federal government, mister President, that consistently underfunds

(15:46):
things like this and makes it very difficult for the
Park Service and the Smithsonian to keep everything in tip
top shape. Good to see that there's some part of
this is but with like with everything Trump, by ten
percent of what he says is legitimate, but he goes
ninety percent too far, almost all of it. Right. How

(16:08):
he's behaving with this reflecting pool, I mean, he almost
is convincing himself that he built the reflecting pool now
that he's comparing it to skyscrapers. And as someone said
in social media, hey man, if he can build a
vertical reflecting pool that would be taller than you know,
I'm here for it, love to see it. That'd be

(16:28):
an engineering marvel. We'd love to see this. But I
think this sort of exhaustion this sort of inward celebration
at a time when the economy is not popular, when
people feel as if this White House is focused on
anything but people's day to day lives, spending two months

(16:52):
celebrating himself in June, sort of hijacking the two hundred
and fiftieth birthday to make it all about himself, the
Indy car race, which we'll try to make all about himself.
I don't know if it's gonna wear well. And this
is a campaign year, and this is a time when
the Republican Party's brand is not in it in some

(17:14):
ways has been in slightly better shape than the Democratic brand.
I don't think it's going to be after Donald Trump's
finished for the next sixty days, especially as his actual
political grip on governing the country and controlling the Republican
Party is slipping away. And so he's gonna, you know,
almost be more desperate for these events to be about himself,

(17:36):
more desperate to you know, and he's going to you know,
continue to get angry when you know, major celebrities feel
uncomfortable with how much he's politicizing America's birthday. As I
said before, you know, Donald Trump could have gotten all
of the ego bump. He wanted out of this if
he knew how a tiny bit of humility and he
knew how to actually engage the former presidents into co

(18:00):
a great celebration of America two fifty. But that's not
who Donald Trump is, right. He burns bridges with everybody,
burn bridges with the former presidents, Republican and Democratic alike.
He burns bridges with our allies in Europe right when
we have no help. We're having to go it alone
with the straight ofform muvesm with what's happening there right.
All he does is burn bridges on this front. But

(18:23):
I you know, I don't know if this is going
to go so well and it's going to be this
is you know, the Marie Antoinette comparisons to let them
eat cake. Optics on this I think are a lot
more dangerous for Republicans that are on the ballot. Wouldn't
be surprised if you start to see some Republicans find

(18:46):
more ways to distance himself even from these celebrations. I think,
and maybe Donald Trump doesn't want some of these people around,
but they're not going to be with them. And one
other thing to watch supposedly they're going to do this
midterm convention and quite announced to yet. I think it
could be Dallas is one idea that they had it.

(19:07):
I'm not sure Republicans running in some of these Senate
races want to have a nationalized political rally with the president, right.
I mean, you know, the Republican coalition is a tricky
thing in a midterm year because there there is some
data that says, well, actually getting the president's base fired

(19:28):
up about the midterms could help, right with turnout. But
the very voters they need as sort of the ones
that are not big Trump fans, but maybe you are,
are kind of turned off by the leftward turn of
the Democratic Party. Do they become less gettable if he
magnifies things too much? Of that midterm convention, for instance,
you think Dan Sullivan's going to show up to that.

(19:51):
I know if I were one of his advisers and
you're like, yeah, you might want to go to that, right.
Do you think Ashley Hinson goes? Maybe she goes because
maybe she needs she needs a Trump voter turnout in Iowa,
you know, so it you know, I'm not sure John
Houston goes, right, I'm not sure John Sonunhu goes. I'm

(20:14):
not sure Mike Rogers goes. We'll see. It'll be an
interesting test over there, and you'll know by those that
go to that convention who needs Trump based voters more
and who needs swing voters more. So it may depend
a little bit on the nature of your electorate. This

(20:37):
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(23:11):
the news of the of the morning, because by the
time I'm recording this, there's one report that indicates the
President is likely to announce that Todd Blanche is longtime
his personal attorney who has been the acting Attorney General,
that he's going to nominate him to uh formally nominate

(23:32):
him for the post of Attorney General and have him
put up for confirmation. This is this could be the
jump the shark moment for Donald Trump. And I'm sorry
for using that old cliche and metaphor, but this is this.
There is zero chance Todd Blanche can get confirmed. And

(23:54):
I think Trump in his own head thinks, well, you
know what if I flood the zone with crazy at
the Senate not going to reject all of that. Right,
That's how it worked in the beginning of this second term,
right when he fled the zone with crazy Matt Gates, RFK,
hag Seth, Tulci, Gabbert, he got three of the four through, right,

(24:15):
So maybe he thinks Bill Poulti and Todd Blanche that
you know, it's like Darren to reject both. And my
answer to the President and to folks in the West wing,
I don't know if you're paying attention here, Todd Blanche
has not made any friends. This weaponization fund was the
clearly Todd Blanche creation. And if he didn't create it,

(24:36):
he blessed it. It doesn't matter. It's his. He owns it.
And by the way, they haven't scrapped they just scrapped
the financial reward. Part of this settlement in place is
still this ridiculous idea that the president's personal former personal attorney,
but I don't know if it's former, if he's acting
in his personal capacity or for the government, has somehow

(24:56):
agreed to give h I guess amnesty to Donald Trump
on every tax form and anything any of the Trump's
have filed with the IRS through calendar year twenty twenty five.
I don't know about you, guys. You love to have
permanent amnesty from any sort of IRS scrutiny of your

(25:20):
taxes in you know, for every single tax form you've
ever filed, especially if you run in some weird, sketchy
development deals all over the country. I mean, it is,
you know, the idea that Blanche has a snowballs chance
in hell, There's no way Susan Collins votes to confirm him.

(25:43):
She's got a very winnable race for reelection Uphill, and
she can't. The further away she is from Trump, the
better chances she's going to have. There's no way Dan
Sullivan is going to vote for this. We kind of
know where the Yolo caucus is. We really think Tom
Tillis will vote for Tom Blanche. You think John Cornyn

(26:04):
or Bill Cassidy, So there's three. How about Mitch McConnell.
How comfortable do you think he is? Then you have
to start looking at at cann John Houston afford this vote.
I don't think they fully appreciate how tough these votes
are going to be. And maybe this could be an
indication that Trump's done listening to any sort of advice

(26:28):
like this. Maybe he's done with Senate Republicans. He's so
angry that they took the fund away from him. He's
so angry that that they can't pass that they won't
pass this funding for his East Wing project, and he's
just you know, this is he's just gonna go Tony

(26:49):
Montana on the Republican Party and just you know, push
the envelope, wait for the courts to say no, wait
for the Congress to say no. Still try to get
away with that as much as he can until he's
sort of forced not to. And maybe that's what the
next two years are like. But my word, it's one
of those I'm like I said, there's one report indicating

(27:15):
that this may happen, and by the time you hear this,
it may have already happened. But as I indicated before
and Bill Poulti yesterday, there's no way where this Republican
Senate is currently. There is no way Bill Poulty has
a snowballs chance in hell of getting confirmed, and neither
does Todd Blanche And it's almost as if Donald Trump

(27:36):
wants to put a neon sign on the White House
that says I no longer am I am a lame
duck that and just put it in flashing lights when
you offer up people that's your party is just going
to summarily reject. That is I think the very definition

(28:03):
of what a lane duck president starts to look like.
And we haven't even gotten to the midterms yet. Usually
this formally doesn't begin until after you get the sill
acking in your second midterm, at least the way it's
happened in the last couple of decades. Speaking of the midterms,
of two things. One quick California update. So we've gotten

(28:27):
you as I as we left off with each other, uh,
after the results. Going into Wednesday's podcast, I indicated that
there's a that there's an open question can Spenser Pratt's
hold on to that second runoff spot or is the
Momdaniac like remain going to catch him? And in the

(28:49):
governor's race, does sti er have a chance of catching well,
right now, it's uh, as I'm taping this, Uh, it
is still Hilton that's ahead in the governor's race. But
all indications and all sort of our understanding of when
these vote drops are coming, and you can see it

(29:09):
by the by Friday or Saturday, Besarah is going to
be the first place candidate. Kilton's likely to hang on
to the second slot. The question is how much will
the stire vote grow now we've seen we saw a
lot more drops on Wednesday in La County then we
really did statewide. Not every county updated their vote counting,

(29:30):
which is just absurd. But we'll get to that in
a second. But it was some interesting trends in La
which means these are ballots that came in closer to
election day and we're getting closer election day vote and
in those votes and the governor's race, at least in
La County it was Besarah, Stier, Hilton, and Hilton being
in third. So Styre certainly did pick up some you know,

(29:52):
made up a little bit of ground on the top two.
As he is he tries to see if he can
pick up six percentage points men of them to try
to sneak into this runoff. I think it's unlikely, but
again I think that you're going to see some unusual
late like we saw even in La Mayor with the

(30:12):
last drop, Well, you know, Pratt seems a bit stronger
I think in holding onto the second slot. Than what
we might see in the governor's race. And but you know,
I'm always hesitant here because of how we still don't
know how many ballots are our total ballots we're dealing with.
We may not actually feel comfortable saying what that number

(30:35):
likely estimate is going to be until Friday or Saturday,
because at that point they'll know as they deal with
the trickle of member. Ballots can keep being processed up
to one week after Tuesday, so up to June ninth,
as long as the ballot was postmarked on June second,
and it's quite common. There's one of the California race

(30:58):
I want to point out, and it's one and I
was talking about a lot in the live stream, and
it's one that at the time we didn't make that
our friends and Decision a SQ weren't making it one
of our key races to watch. And that's California six.
And this is the race that features Kevin Kylie apublic

(31:19):
who was first elected to Congress as a Republican, who
decided to drop his Republican party affiliation and run for
reelection in the sixth congressional district after the remap in
California as an independent. And as and look it is
only half the vote is in and as of this taping,
a Republican is in second place, and the Democrat. Even

(31:41):
though this district was drawn to elect a Democrat, it's
about a fifty six fifty seven percent performing Democratic district.
The Democratic candidate is currently in third place, not that
far behind, about a thousand votes behind second place the
Republican candidate. But there's every chance they're you know, on
paper right now. If these somehow this these percentages hold,

(32:02):
Democrats will get locked out of a congressional district that
they designed to win. But it would be kind of
and and and the Republican. And I think the question
is is if you're Kylie, you're going to You're going
to be in the top two. You're going to be
an I do you you know? Is it is probably

(32:27):
an easier path to re election for him if the
Republicans and second, and he's got a better shot at
winning over some skeptical Democrats if he says, no, I'm
going in there to be an independent, and I'll make
my decision who who if either party I caucus with
depending on on what happens, or he may say, you know,
which is what I might do if I were an independent. Look,

(32:47):
if elected, I'm going to caucus with the majority. I'm
not going to be the the candidate that gives any
party the majority, but I'm I'm going to caucus with
them because that'll be in the best interest of my
constituents in my district. It'll give me the loudest voice
that I can have. But if the other party went,
I'm going to switch and organize with them. That's how

(33:08):
I would handle trying to be an independent and just
the way our system is set up in the House
of Representatives. But it's it's to me, it's one of
my it's one of my under the radar favorite races
because an independent has as I think, a real shot

(33:30):
winning here and it you know, we've had a growing
no party affiliation set of registrants. You know, can Kighie
actually appeal to that growing set of the electorate. So
I just think it's an interesting political science experiment at
a minimum on that. But before I moved to this
deep dive that I did on Maine and how to

(33:51):
watch the primary on June ninth and how you should
interpret that pole memo that has been circulating on social media.
From the Platner campaign. I just want to put a
plea out there to the California Legislature, California governor. You know,
it's my understanding. Governor Knews called up these counting clerks
and said, you gotta you really got to, you know,

(34:12):
work faster. And essentially the response to the governor was
give us more money. You know, if you want the
count faster, we you know, we need to hire more people.
We need to be able to pay more overtime, put
the resources in place to count these ballots faster, to

(34:33):
process these ballots faster. The integrity of the democracy is
on the line, guys. You know, I you know, do
I trust this process? I do, all right, I've toured
to vote Voting Center. I understand your signature match, but
a lot of Americans don't. And the ability to fill

(34:54):
a vacuum here with conspiracy theories, nobody has enough credibility
to convince people that they don't to see it with
their own eyes. Okay, So, and when forty nine other
states seem to be able to get somewhere to ninety
five two one hundred percent, I guess forty eight because
Washington State can take a little bit of time too,
but at forty eight or forty nine, other states can

(35:16):
pull this off. Come on, California, you spend a lot
of money on governance, put some here. If you care
about the democracy, if you care about the perception of
the democracy, if you care about trust in the democracy,
then the California Legislature and the California governor should be

(35:37):
focused like a laser beam and making sure the vote
count happens accurately and quickly so that you are protecting
the integrity of the democracy. So you're minimizing the ability
of people who want to fill that vacuum with misinformation
and who want to play games like Donald Trump does

(35:59):
because he's he's impatient, or he's ignorant, or he just
wants to be exploitive on it, right, you pick, pick
your pick your answer on that one. The guys, this
is I think this is this is not a nice
to have. This is something that is uh that Again,

(36:19):
if you if the rhetoric that many of you California
leaders use about the democracy, if you mean it, start
by making this a pristine process. State of Florida does
a lot of early vote, a lot of mail in vote,
and they seem to be able to pull this off.
But look, we our friends in Maricopa County need, uh

(36:41):
need need a lot more resources to I am all
for giving people as many options as possible to vote.
I think there's nothing wrong with mail in voting, and
you have signature verification and it's the California system is
very impressive when it comes to security and verification. The

(37:02):
one thing it lacks is speed, and that can be
fixed with resources. So come on, guys, get your act together.
Don't make it easy for trolls on the internet to
create conspiracy theories about these vocals. This episode of the

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code podcast for thirty percent off. And yes, I too,
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we get to the interview. With Todd Records with an
update on the Platner campaign. The most fascinating thing about
what's coming next with Platner. It's clear that his visit

(39:17):
to d C was okay when it came to his
meetings with Democratic senators. Those that wanted it, that were
desperate to look for reassurance, believe they somehow found it.
But you can kind of tell if you read that
Wall Street Journal story about what he said, where he

(39:38):
he didn't seem to say no more was going to
come out. He just seemed to say that the worst
stuff you've the worst stuff you've heard is not true.
That was to me far did not quite get to
the point of there's nothing more there and there's no
there there. So you get that report and then you

(39:59):
get this memo that the Platner campaign put out as
an attempt to and they shared it all over social media,
and it's clearly an attempt to try to calm calm
down the nervous the folks that are nervous about Platter
and they they go, hey, we just we just came
out of the field and they did a quickie pole,

(40:21):
but they didn't use you know, one of their uh,
they didn't use put it this way. Anytime I've ever
seen a poll where Democrats wanted to make it look
like they had a better chance somewhere than they probably have.
It's amazing how often the poll comes from PPP. PPP
is definitely a Democratic leaning firm. Uh, it is a

(40:43):
robo pole it is, you know, but there's a lot
of VR, you know, where you press a button or
now it's talked to text and all that stuff. But
if you track PPP surveys, you know, it has definitely
a den bias to it. There's always a two to
four point you know. It's it's always sort of the
perfect electorate that Democrats would need. I'm not saying they

(41:06):
manipulate the numbers that I'm not saying. It's just you know,
they they they they will, they will do a sample,
they will do the they will find the rosiest sample
that is defensible in order to put it, get get
a result, get a poll result that reinforces a narrative

(41:28):
that they're trying to get out there. And so what's
the narrative the platner wants to get out there. Hey,
we've had a terrible week, We've gotten all this incoming
and you know what, guess what, We're still ahead of Colins.
So that's what this poll says. Except if you're going
to throw out a pepe people, and you know, this
is one of those for the political community, if you know,

(41:48):
you know anybody that does this for a living. And again,
I'm not here to tell to to to wish cast here,
I'm just telling you the reality. Anybody that's serious about
political announcers handicapping discounts PPP polls by a couple of
points for Team Blue, and the best they could, the

(42:08):
best results that the PPP folks could produce for the
Platiner campaign was a forty nine to forty five lead
over Collins. Now you say, hey, he leads an incumbent,
this is an incumbent senator under fifty the challenger is ahead.
That's a big deal. Except all the public polling for
weeks has shown Platiner with the massive lead over Collins,

(42:31):
you know, anywhere from high single digits to even some
low double digits, and he would So this is definitely
left a mark. And then they did a when you
hear the worst about Platiner, and you hear the worst
thing that they believe they can stick on Collins that

(42:53):
it doesn't it that the damage is minimal to his standing,
and essentially it produces the same result. Well, you've got
to be careful when you do these. You know, you're
trying to do these hypothetical questions. So you know, if
you learn that, you know, and they read the text
messages or they read about sexting with Platner, and if
you knew that, you know, Susan Collins's husband benefited from

(43:15):
insider government contracts to a massive amount of money, you know,
it wouldn't you know? You know, So they introduced both
pieces of information to their voting sample and it didn't
change their head to head. The point is is that

(43:35):
while the memo on its face was an attempt to
reassure supporters everything's going well, we still we've got some
good fundraising metrics to share and we're still leading in
the poll because we did this quickie poll, but we
didn't use the polster we normally use. We used PPP
to do this. So again, it feels like a trying

(44:00):
to just plug a hole here, right. So the bottom
line is I think Platiner is in much more trouble
than anybody's letting on and I don't know if there's
you know, if there is any more shoes that drop,
if there's any more drip drip here. I'm not sure
how many more drip drips that he can handle. So

(44:21):
the question is how much of this matters to main Democrats. Well,
we're gonna have an interesting experiment on June ninth looking
at this Pole memo and realizing, oh wow, this must
be a lot worse. You know, Look, I am not
convinced this is going to end Platiner's campaign. He could

(44:44):
recover from this and win. I think there is definitely
Collins fatigue in the state, right he could still win
with all of this out there, So I don't rule
that out. But I thought, wow, that that pole tells
me this is the you know, basically the memo saying, hey, yeah,
we took a hit, but this is recoverable. Don't panic yet.

(45:08):
That was essentially the tone of the memo, even though
you know it didn't. They weren't acknowledging any of the
negatives in it. But if you sort of read between
the lines, they're telling you, yeah, Platner took a pretty
big hit. So if there is any buyer's remorse on Platner.
This is one of these occasions where voters actually can

(45:32):
get a do over if they really want it. Right,
Janet Mills, while she's not actively campaigning, did not take
her name off the ballot, in a fact that Janet
Mills herself chose to remind a reporter about during an
interview earlier this week. So I thought, Okay, Mills is

(45:55):
going to get some votes obviously in the Democratic primary
next Tuesday. Maine is one of a couple of states
next year. We're going to Nevada, South Carolina, Maine. Maine's
got a tremendous governor's race. It's crazy on both sides
of the aisle. That'll be a lot of fun to watch.
We're going to do our live stream. But what I
wanted to do is try to try to come up
with a metric to decide what is the Mill's number

(46:18):
that she gets in a primary that should set off
alarm bells at the d SEC or set off alarm
nails among Democrats to say, hey, maybe out a swap
Platiner out and Main, for what it's worth, is actually
one of the easier states to replace a candidate on
the ballot if the candidate willingly wants to get off
of the ballot by the deadline in July. Literally, there's

(46:39):
no other rigormarole. You have to go to the party
can decide who they want to put on there. It's
a New Jersey and Maine, two of the easier states
to pull this off. So she's going to get some number.
Is it ten percent, is it eighteen, is it twenty five?
And there's no doubt whatever her number is, there's going
to be a temptation for myself and everybody in the

(47:00):
chattering class to try to react to that number, what
does it mean and decide on the fly whether it's
a disaster for Platiner or whether hey, you know, because
I think there's some amount of Mills support that was
always going to be there because their name's on the ballot.
So I don't I don't want to be knee jerk
about it, and I want to, frankly, give you some

(47:20):
tools to decide for yourself what the metrics should be.
So I did a little I did a little research,
So this is what I want to do. So tonight
I'm sort of channeling a little This is something you
normally would see in the Nate Silver substack. So stay
with me here a minute. I want to set the
bar of of what the Mills primary number. You know

(47:43):
what Mill's primary number is sort of a nothing to
worry about at all, that's kind of an issue or
oh my god, five alarm fire. So we're going to
start with this. So chunk of whatever Mills gets has good.
It's nothing to do with how Democrats feel about Graham Platner.
Two things guarantee that. One, there are already going to

(48:06):
be some banked votes. Maine's been voting early for weeks.
A lot of those ballots were even filled out, probably
before folks fully understood that Mills was getting out, was
right around it, so she was still to a lot
of voters in Maine, probably seen as a real candidate.
So she probably banked, you know, in the first or
you know, part of early voting, banked a bit more

(48:26):
vote than usual. And they're already locked in, right, they're
in a box. They count for Mills no matter what
anybody thinks today. And then of course there's the name
id factor. She's true term sitting governor. So some people
are going to walk in see two names they sort
of recognize and one they really recognize and they'll pick
the governor. It's not a protest, that's just fame, right.
So I know there's going to be a certain amount

(48:47):
of votes she gets that you kind of you shouldn't
make a big deal of. So part of her number
is going to be mechanical inertia, if you will. So
the real question, and the only interesting question, is how
much sits on top of that sort of mechanical floor
that we're creating here, because that part the excess, that's
the part that's actually a message to platter and to

(49:07):
figure out where the floor is and where the danger starts.
I used two recent elections to basically do all the
work for us on this. So the first yardstick I
used was a campaign in Iowa in twenty eighteen. This
was a governor's race in Iowa Democratic primary in twenty eighteen.
A state senator named Nate Bolton was running second, pulling

(49:28):
around twenty percent semi serious candidate. Then, about twelve days
for the primary, multiple women came forward with allegations of
sexual misconduct. After those allegations of misconduct from the multiple women,
Bolton suspended his campaign. But, and this will sound familiar,
early voting had already started in Iowa, his name stayed
on the ballot and the votes for him got counted.
He ended up finishing with five percent, pulling at twenty

(49:52):
at the time of the allegations, ending at five. So
there's that lesson, and this is the limit of the lesson.
The five percent is the floor. That's the name id
plus banked early votes, and not much else. Because when
you leave a race and disgrace your supporter scatter, they
run away from you. So Bolton tells us that that
mechanical floor is real and it's low. But Mills did

(50:14):
not leave in disgrace. There's no scandal attached to her.
She left over money and frankly over math. She was
losing her voters don't have a reason to be ashamed
of her. So Mills starts, probably above Bolton's five percent.
So Iowa gives us the floor, It does not give
us the ceiling on this sort of inertia business. Right

(50:37):
for the ceiling, I'm using Nicki Haley. So in twenty
twenty four, remember Nicki Haley drops out of the Republican
presidential race in early March of twenty twenty four, but
her name stayed on ballot after ballot, and the guide
she'd been running against Donald Trump was somebody a real
slice of the party just would not get behind. So

(50:58):
Haley became a protest forevehicle, a way to vote not
him without having to vote for a Democrat if you
were a Republican. And the numbers were quite striking. Right
two months after she quit, she pulled seventeen percent in Pennsylvania,
almost twenty two percent in Indiana, twenty in Maryland, eighteen
in Nebraska. And nobody thought Nika Haley was going to

(51:19):
be the nominee. This was all protest vote. Everyone understood
those numbers for what they were, a measurement of how
many Republicans were not sold on there on Donald Trump.
Both campaigns read it that way. The phrase that got
used over and over was red flag. Now here's the
part that matters the most for Tuesday. It wasn't just
how big the Haley vote was. It was where the

(51:40):
Hailey vote was. It piled up in the affluent, college
educated suburbs in all of these places, the Philadelphia Coller Counties,
places like that, which happened to be the exact areas
where Trump was weakest. Later in November, the size of
the number told you the size of the problem. The
map told you whether the problem actually mattered. And that's

(52:03):
the platiner parallel here. Yes, no he's not Donald Trump,
but I'll let some of you sort of think about
that metaphor here a minute. But let's be clear, but
he is a wounded front runner. Those old Reddit posts,
the tattoo that resembled a Nazi sign, and now reporting
about explicit, you know, some sexting with women. If Maine

(52:24):
Democrats are nervous about handing this guy the nomination against
Susan Collins, Janet Mills is the obvious easy place to
register that discontent, a respected governor right there on the
ballot who pointedly has not told them to stand out.
So let's start to build the bar. Well, we're gonna
start with that floor pull out of late May, a
month after she quit the race and before the latest

(52:46):
story broke, had Mills sitting around ten percent. So we're
going to call that a pure sort of stagnant mechanical
number and inertia number. Right name, I D in early votes,
basically nothing else. So here's how I'm in a great
Tuesday Night low teen say, twelve thirteen, fourteen percent for Mills,

(53:07):
I'm going to chalk that up to just aertship, to
just this mechanical floor that we're discussing here. That's the
famous governor's name doing famous governor things, right, green light,
don't need to overreact, don't let anybody tell you it's
a story. You know. Fifteen percent, that's where you start
to see the green turned to yellow as far as

(53:27):
my flag is concerned. So why am I saying fifteen
Because that clears the famous person who quit zone, if
you will, and it beats this this sort of stagnant
you know name, you know number by enough of a
margin that you can credibly say the scandals moved real votes,
that people went out of their way to send a

(53:48):
message about platter. So if you look at it, fifteen
to twenty five percent, that's kind of the Hailey band, right.
She would be somewhere between fifteen and twenty one. That's
where she lived in stayed after state, and in her
case that range was treated correctly as a genuine warning
to Donald Trump. So if Mills lands in there, I'm

(54:09):
not going to call it on the top line alone.
I'm going to I want to see the map of
where this vote came from. And we're going to go
more on that in a minute. Obviously, anything over twenty
five percent, and this is, you know, where you have
one in four Democratic primary voters or more than one
in four actively choosing the woman who quit the race
over the man who is going to be their nominee.

(54:29):
That's a red flag, no asterisk, no explanation. Twenty five
or more, and then you're going to start hearing about
should he be replaced, because that's even greater than where
Haley landed in most states in twenty four That's a
party standing up and telling you it is not sold
on its own presumptive front runner, and you're going to

(54:55):
put him up against one of the most durable Republicans
in the country in Susan Collins there in November with
Senate Control writing on it. Now, let's talk about the
gray zone of that fifteen to twenty five percent bar,
which is actually where I expect the number to be.
I don't think unless somebody decides to insert some super
pac money over the weekend to say, you know, you

(55:17):
have literally proactively trying to get Mills more votes or
trying to damage Platner. I think we're looking at somewhere
between fifteen and twenty five percent, you know, And this
is where how to interpret the Hailey Lesson I think
helps us here. If the Mills protest vote is concentrated

(55:40):
in the first district, basically Portland and the southern suburbs,
the wealthy areas, Democrats should be less worried about it, right,
Those are blue voters. These are people that don't want
to vote for Susan Collins. However grumpy they may be
about Platner's character in June, They're probably simply going to

(56:00):
go in there and vote Jersey color in November. You
could consider a lion's share of the votes coming from
the first district for Mills as basically a bit of
a wine of a tantrum, but not a full defection.
But if Mills overperforms in the second district, the rural,

(56:21):
working class, more conservative northern half of the state, the
district that Donald Trump has carried three times now in
presidential elections, that's that makes that yellow flag look a
little more red because the second district is where all
the swing voters are. That is where a statewide main
race is one or lost. And if Plattner is bleeding

(56:42):
Democratic votes in the second on Tuesday means he is
weakest in the precise place he cannot afford to be
weak in the fall. So it's the same state wide
number twenty percent, let's say, but it means two to
completely different things depending on where the twenty percent is
coming from. Twenty percent out of Portland, yeah, but no

(57:06):
twenty percent out of the second district. That's a warning
Democrats to take quite seriously. And you might actually hear chatter,
a little bit of chatter about replacement. So that's the bar.
So when you're watching us in our live election stream
and you see us pull up, we're going to constantly
check that main Senate vote. You know, We're going to

(57:27):
do our best to let you know where the votes
where her support appears to be coming from. And if
you want to do it on your own, keep track
of where. If you start to see Mills in the twenties,
where's it coming from? Is it coming from the first
or is it coming from the second. And this is
if this is making you nervous about democratics chances to
win the Senate, or making you nervous about Republican chances

(57:50):
to hold the Senate, or Collins's chances to win. I
think that's the best way to look at this unique
situation where we have a candidate appears to be a
bit in battle, and voters have an opportunity to essentially
escape this if they choose to just a little extra

(58:13):
something to watch for on Tuesday night. All right, with that,
sneaking a break when we come back, my fascinating conversation
with Todd Ricketts about his intriguing app, which I do
think all of you should check out Free Spoke, and
of course we do a little bit of baseball economics.

(58:33):
Let's sneak in the break and I'll see on the
other side. So joining me now is the owner of
the Chicago Cubs, and we're not going to be talking baseball,
although I might sneak in a question or two about

(58:56):
what's coming in the next two years. Those of us
who love baseball are word we're going to lose lose
half a season. So I'm warning him now. I'm warning
you down, mister Ricketts. I will have a labor question
towards the end. But you're on here because you've got
a new app, and it's more than an app, and
it's sort of an interesting and I think it's bigger
than that, and I think the consumer facing app it's

(59:16):
called free Spoke. I encourage people to take a look
at it right now, get your free trial right now,
and what it attempts to do. And I'm going to
let mister Ricketts describe it in more detail, but I'll
just give you my first impressions. You know, it wants
to give you an array of perspectives. Label the perspective,
so you'll see left, right, and middle based on publisher

(59:39):
leanings rather than individual reporter leanings. And we'll get into
that a little bit. But the idea is to quote
paint the full picture. This also particularly on political topics
or on issues that are more subjective than objective. Right
we have in this, of course, is this war. We
can all be claim that it is being fought sometimes

(01:00:01):
between left and right over what is truth, what is
what is real, et cetera. And this is one of
the more interesting answers I've seen out there. You know,
All sides media is something that I've been very curious
about for a long time, and this is a new
entry into this. And mister Todd Ricketts joins me. Now,
so Todd, how did I do describing it and fill

(01:00:22):
in the blanks here because I didn't do justice to
your AI search engine, which I find also quite interesting.

Speaker 2 (01:00:29):
Yeah, you know, I think you did a bring good job,
and really what we set out to do was, you know,
I'll step back to where I came at it from.
It's like, as you look at social media and big technology,
I felt like, oftentimes you're being led down a narrative.
Oftentimes you're being let down a narrative that just reinforces
what they already know about you to a little.

Speaker 1 (01:00:48):
Information bias, right, and something that the Internet is really
made that phrase, which was sort of a phrase that
was rarely used pre Internet days to now something we
think about a lot, you know.

Speaker 2 (01:00:59):
Yeah, and a lot of it is like, you know,
these the platforms are trying to get you to spend
more time there, but they're also just reinforcing what you
see to give you things you'd like. And what that
has done, in my opinion, is like it's kind of
driven that divide in Americans where you know, I think,
you know, in previous generations, people were Republicans or people
were Democrats, and maybe they talked about politics, but nobody

(01:01:22):
took it to heart in the same sort of way.
And I think we just got to a point where
we couldn't even agree on the facts because where like
people are getting driven down to their own side. And
so what I wanted to do is like create a
search engine and you know, and like a little bit
of a a search engine layered on with AI that
kind of takes in everything that's being published and finds

(01:01:45):
that overlap and then also kind of defines or kind
of tries to like describe each side in like normal terms,
not no name calling, just saying this is how the
where these people are coming from. This is where these
people are coming from, and so you can kind of
inform yourself because I had a lot of faith in
the American people that given good information, they'll come up
with good answers. And so that was kind of like

(01:02:06):
where we started. And what we did was we built
our own index of the Internet, so we're not relying
on Being or Google, and then layered our own algorithm
of AI on top of that and really trained our
AI to be just the facts. Man, is it current,
is it relevant? And is it leading? Like when? So
what we say is we're not trying to lead anybody

(01:02:27):
in a particular narrative. We're trying to present all sides,
present everything that we can find, and then let people
make up to their own mind.

Speaker 1 (01:02:36):
So let's talk about the search engine aspect to this,
because you know, I mean that's the part that in
some ways I'm excited to see if this will be
more functional than search in general at the moment, right,
I mean, with the big tech companies so focused on
their AI offerings, search, you know, is search is difficult,

(01:02:57):
and frankly everybody's search has become monito tied, right, that's
not consumer friendly, it is you know, we're the mark
as I always say, right, like you know, when you
do a search on an old school Google search, it
takes a while before you get out of sponsored content
and yeah, that's right. Yeah, And so I would, you know,

(01:03:19):
and I think I'm a little nervous about just turning
search over to AI. It seems like you're trying to
bridge this.

Speaker 2 (01:03:25):
No, definitely, definitely, And so we do protect your privacy,
so we're not tracking you like the other companies. And
you kind of said it without saying it is that
if you're on the Internet and you're getting something for free,
you are the product like, you are being sold. Your
information is being sold. They're trying to find advertisers to
match up with like what kind of tennis shoes you like,

(01:03:46):
or what kind of car you might buy and so on,
and so you're being sold out there, and there's a real,
like I think, long term privacy concern about that because
maybe people are like, well, I like seeing the ad
from my favorite shoe company and knowing what they're putting
out there. But then you're like, where does it stop?
And how do you how do you maintain control of that?
And also, you know, we want to make sure that

(01:04:07):
the people that are buying the ads aren't driving the
content you're seeing, like you're saying, like you get a
bunch of advertising your sponsored content to the beginning. So
we're trying to avoid all that and really just bring
the best information we can in front of people. And
when you think about all the AI platforms, whether it
be Chat, gybt or Gemini or what have you, that

(01:04:28):
still is search. It's not it's not that different than what.

Speaker 1 (01:04:32):
No, it's just it's curated search essentially.

Speaker 2 (01:04:34):
Yeah, and it's a thousand times faster. Right if if Google,
the regular Google search could come up with something a
thousand times faster. It can just come up with something
that's a little more elaborate and a little more catered
and curated to you. And so it's all about like, Okay, well,
where are those people getting their content? And how are
they where are the platforms getting their content? And how
much of it is Reddit and how much of it

(01:04:55):
is coming from being and how much physic is coming
from Google and other sources.

Speaker 1 (01:05:00):
You know, it's interesting, You're not the first baseball owner
I've had this conversation with really Frank McCourt project Liberty.
Are you familiar with what he has been trying to do,
because you guys are on the same page, and you know, yeah,
and I understood sort of where he came at this,

(01:05:22):
and I always sort of really much empathized. He said,
you know, fifteen years later, the first five things when
you google Frank mccurt is something that happened in his
life fifteen years ago, right, And it was this idea
that you had no control over your own identity and
his whole philosophy. And I think it's it's admirable. But
I don't know how we put this toothpaste back in.

(01:05:43):
But I feel like you're going down this road too,
which is instead of that US seeking permission of the
tech companies to use their product. That essentially, apps or
tech companies ask our permission to monetize us. And while
they are technically asking our permission, and we're being coerced
because if you don't accept the terms and conditions, you

(01:06:04):
don't get the updated bells and whistles. Is this something
the market can fix or is government going to have
to intervene?

Speaker 2 (01:06:12):
Well, just to go back to Frank, I think I
think Frank has another layer to what he's trying to
do too, is that, like, and if you're going to
take the information you know about me and take you
to the market and sell it, I deserve to cut
of that. I deserve to get I deserve to get
paid on that somehow. So I'm using your product. It's free,
for sure, But if you're going to go sell information

(01:06:33):
about me like that that money, I have a right
to some of that as well, if I've opted into that.
And so I don't know how that lands, but I
think it's a great from the philosophical point of view,
I think it's a great idea. I should be able
to go like, well, if I'm going to be on
the Internet and they're going to sell information about me
based on my patterns, my habits, yeah I should. I
should participate in that as well.

Speaker 1 (01:06:55):
Well, you know it's funny. I remember having this large
debate with him, like, you know, it's the and I've
had this discussion with high people up at META where
we've had this conversation, which is, my data individually is
not valuable, but my data coupled with a million people
in Arlington, Virginia is extraordinarily valuable. How do you compensate it?

Speaker 2 (01:07:18):
Yeah? No, I don't know. I don't know what the
right answer is, but I love, like I say, philosophically,
I think it's it's the right direction, and that should
be a META. I don't know how they wrap to
get their head rep around all the data they do have, right,
It's like they have so much they're swimming in it,
and I'm sure that they have trouble trying to keep
it organized themselves.

Speaker 1 (01:07:37):
Well, And I guess that's the question is should data
be regulated like a public utility? Is data electricity?

Speaker 2 (01:07:44):
Yeah, that's a great question.

Speaker 1 (01:07:45):
I don't you know. I think this is a I mean,
it sounds like you believe this is an issue that
our politicians out of debate rather do you have an
opinion on this?

Speaker 2 (01:07:54):
Well, what I what I think is it has to happen,
is it has to come from society, like people have
to And I think at some point there's going to
be some sort of event that will make it clear
to people that they should be more concerned about their
Internet identity and how their information is being shared and
who has it and so on. And I think it
has to be people saying, like, I'm concerned about who

(01:08:16):
has my information, and it has to be that sort
of ground swell up before we're going to get a
top down sort of answer. And I feel like you,
if it comes from that direction, then we're going to
get a better answer anyway, because it'll be come from
people expressing their concerns and wanting to control their own information.

Speaker 1 (01:08:33):
One of the hallmarks of your app is that it
is that it you know, protecting my privacy right, the
ideas you're protecting user privacy. So this next question I'm asking,
I wonder if this if if your protection of privacy
gets in the way from you be able to search
the following. But you know, one of the things with
labeling news does it come from the left, right, or center,

(01:08:56):
is that it becomes almost like a neon sign for
those that want their news that way. And what you
find out and what I think I have frustratingly found
out myself and maybe, and I'm curious if you guys
have been able to do some research, is that while
people say they want all perspectives, they usually only look

(01:09:19):
at one one. Have you been able to denote, you know,
without violating people's privacy, do the labels? Because this is
where I'm torn on the labels in this respect, I
think the label should be there. I would just argue
put them at the end of the article and humor
me a minute, which is, if you add the label,
then automatically I'm going to our brains right, You're just

(01:09:43):
going to read it. I almost like read it as
if somebody from stage left is saying it or somebody
from stage right, versus consuming it, forming my own opinion
and then seeing, oh, this came from stage left or
this came from stage right. And look, it's a small thing.
But I'm curious if you guys had a debate where
do you put the label? You put it high and

(01:10:05):
very prominent. And on one hand, that's the premise of
free spoke, right, So I get it. But if you
had all done any consumer research of how people are
using the labels.

Speaker 2 (01:10:17):
You know, I don't know if we've had like as
sort of like sort of survey of where to label
it or how people feel about it. My hope is
that when people see those labels, that they'll see something
that's left and see something that's right and read both articles,
or they can kind of come down to our perspectives
where it kind of shows that consensus and that overlap.
But we haven't done anything specific about trying to track people.

(01:10:41):
And if people have patterns of like this individual goes
to it clicks on everything that says left, or that
individual's clicks on everything that says right, Yeah, and we
would have trouble finding that because we do protect people's
privacy and we don't track people in that manner.

Speaker 1 (01:10:56):
No, it's something because look I say this as somebody
building my own you know, it is if you if
you don't tack you know, essentially prominent left or prominent right,
it is a slower build than if you signpost right.
And and the irony is that that's been the conundrum
of American politics. We all kind of revert to the

(01:11:20):
mean of somewhere between the thirty five yard lines right
when push comes to shove, and yet the dialogue is
inside is on the other side of those thirty five
yard lines in both perspectives, right and so and and
the middle is hard to find, especially we're in the
middle of a pre a realignment todd you know, meaning
that you know what was left is right on some things,

(01:11:44):
like take the issue of trade free traders are left
owners and protectionist or right? That's what I grew up, right.

Speaker 2 (01:11:51):
It's it's I would say that in this moment and
this strategy that the President is using to try to
get to and I think what he wants to do well,
he definitely wants to or some of the manufacturers, but
I think in the end what he wants is just
better trade deals than we've had historically. And so I
don't know if like the president necessarily wants teris forever
he talks in those terms, because he's always he's selling

(01:12:12):
ideas and he's pushing the developer way.

Speaker 1 (01:12:15):
He speaks like every developer the inabsolute you know, it's
kind of the greatest ever, the biggest ever, the most ever.
I mean, you know, yes, you know, he is sort
of a developer first.

Speaker 2 (01:12:25):
But I think I think, like you know, Scott Pascenta
said it a bunch of times that you know, if
other countries got rid of their tariffs, we'd get rid
of all of ours as well. And so it's kind
of trying to like land in this place where there's
just a little less protectionism going on around the world.
And I come at him from this view of like
in nineteen forty five, we signed trade deals with everybody
saying like, we'll buy all the products you can make,

(01:12:47):
and we're going to secure the sea lane so your
products can make it to the United States, and we
weren't so concerned about what they were going to buy
back from US, and so we had these like one
sided trade deals, and over time that has worked against us.
In the nineties and two thousands, we were like everybody
was like this, free trade, free trade, free trade, Republicans
and Democrats alike. And I think the idea that was
sold on everybody at that time was we're going to

(01:13:10):
take manufacturing from towns like Youngstown, Ohio, and that may
go to Mexico. But then that's going to get backfilled
with you know, high tech, you know, high tech service jobs.
And what happened is we saw a lot of that
manufacturing leave and not get that backfilled. So a lot
of these small cities were left with unemployment and Methamida
mean right, And I think that's what the president sees.

(01:13:30):
It sees that like this, these these trade deals that
have taken manufacturing away from the US and not brought
back the promise of the high tech service jobs that
was supposed to come in their place. And he's like, well,
you know, maybe we just need to bring some of
that back on shore until we figure this out.

Speaker 1 (01:13:57):
We have cross pressure, right, we have sort of like
you know eighties you know they you know, I I
you know, I remember during the Republican convention when I
heard the Teamsters president speak. It would have been fit
right in the eighty four convention for Walter Mondale, you know,
and I don't. And it's and the point being is,

(01:14:17):
so this is where I I appreciate the labels, but
and I and I think you you hint at this,
it's like you want to keep them simple, but take
take George, well, right, where do you label him, right,
and and I say this with you know, he is
to me a classical conservative small seat. That's right. But

(01:14:42):
my guess is it doesn't fit your these labels's I.

Speaker 2 (01:14:46):
Think I think he's still he's still would be conservative.
He's just you know, maybe he's not in step with
the Republican Party at the moment. Like we just labeled
him Cubs fan and we just hold on to him.

Speaker 1 (01:14:56):
Hey, we Nats fans claim, you know, he goes to
more Nats games than Cubs games.

Speaker 2 (01:15:00):
You know, I'm sure that's true, But but he sits
next to me when he comes to Cubs games.

Speaker 1 (01:15:05):
Yeah okay, but he has his own set in that scapes.
Yeah okay.

Speaker 2 (01:15:08):
So I can I get off topic for a second
and tell a cute story. I was sitting next to
him at a at a game against the Mets years ago,
and Bartolo Cologne was pitching, and he was like, he
was like, I don't know if he was forty four
or something, and I was like.

Speaker 1 (01:15:24):
I he told me he was really sixty, like though
he never had his birth rate ticket, right, I wouldn't
be shocked.

Speaker 2 (01:15:29):
Yeah, exactly. And I'm like, hey, like I don't all
I know is that you don't get better after forty
I'm like, he must be taking something. I don't know
what it is. And he came out of the bullpen
and you know, he got that time. He probably weighed
two hundred and fifty pounds. He was big. He was
and he's not like super tall either, he was big.
And George was sitting next to me, He's like, you

(01:15:51):
think that guy is on steroids. And I'm like, well,
steroids and burritos, baby, But I've had some good times
in Georgia. It's not to get too off topic. I
know we're talking about la no no, yeah, and.

Speaker 1 (01:16:06):
I guess that that's my you know, you know what's
funny about political labels is it's everybody wants them for
everybody else, but not themselves.

Speaker 2 (01:16:14):
Yeah. Well, everybody thinks they're in the middle, right, everybody
thinks they're that they're they're like the middle of everything,
and uh so it's tough and and again, yeah, it's
not a perfect system that we have. We we kind
of use outside outside groups that that label content. We have.
We have the ability to label it in house, but
we haven't started doing that ourselves yet. So we look

(01:16:35):
kind of the outside. So it's really just more of
a guy. It's not meant to be this this overarching
black and white of because even even within left and right,
there's like a good range of you know, of uh
spectrum there.

Speaker 1 (01:16:48):
Well, let me ask this, is this a for profit
or nonprofit?

Speaker 2 (01:16:51):
It's for profit. Yeah, and so we we do we
do sell ads like and and we do have a
premium service where you can pay five dollars a month
to custom as your experience and put in some of
your preferences. And we're sort of elaborating on that and
trying to expand that out a little bit. So it
is for profit and like you say, like we do
generate revenues that way, we just don't do in the

(01:17:13):
same way that that other search engines or other platforms
have historically.

Speaker 1 (01:17:18):
And so what is your how many human beings are curating?
And how much of this is is AI is sort
of some you know, sort of audio some sort of automation,
Like how much of the human curation is in is
in the editorial process?

Speaker 2 (01:17:36):
So when you uh, when you come to the side
everything that you do as far as when you search,
when you type anything into the bar that is going
to be one automatic from our AI layered onto our
our index. But when it comes to like the current
event we have, we do have people to kind of
put up like the current event news that are that's

(01:17:56):
on the homepage, and that's curated by humans, and that's
really just trying to identify the top stories of the
day and a kind of like give like what's breaking
and keeps things current and relevant on that homepage. So
that's the only part that's really human curated.

Speaker 1 (01:18:13):
Do you you met? I look, I'm a I'm believing
competition whatever it is, and that if your organism, you
should always want to have your organization measuring itself against
someone or some entity or what it is? Who is
free spoke? Who are you measuring yourself against? It happen?
Use is it being? What are you measuring yourself against? You?

Speaker 2 (01:18:34):
No? I would say it's more being in Google still,
you know, those would be that those are the people
we're looking at. And then because we do have that
kind of AI larrying, if you're spending your time on Chat,
GBT and Gemini, I always tell people like go ahead,
like compare, compare to like the results you get from
the AI platforms. Two to what you're getting at at
free spoke, explain.

Speaker 1 (01:18:55):
How your large language model works. So if I if
you're using claw chet youpt for research, Yeah, what what
is the you know, give me, give me the give me,
give me your pitch and why it's better to use
your large your.

Speaker 2 (01:19:12):
Because we really, we really try to strip out all
the bias. You know, a lot of those the clouds
are looking. If you're looking for current information, they're looking
at places like Reddit where it's there. There's a lot
of bias and Reddit, and so if it's taking Reddit
at space value, it's going to express itself as do.

Speaker 1 (01:19:31):
You keep Reddit completely out of your system? Or how
do you deal with Reddit?

Speaker 2 (01:19:35):
You know, what we try to do is it's not
about trying to keep people out of the system. It's
about always trying to find balance in everything we do.
So if there's if you type on a search on
some sort of topic and there's a thousand stories from
the from the right and only four stories from the left,
we're going to pick kind of pick four stories from
the right and four stories from the left and kind
of blend those in. So you're not just saying like

(01:19:57):
saying like oh, there's only stuff on the right. Here,
we're trying to bring in both sides, regardless of how
much content there is all that topic topic from whichever side.

Speaker 1 (01:20:07):
That's interesting because sometimes there are just some issues that
are just you know, I really don't care what the
left has to say about you know, Trump Paxton versus Cornyn,
and I don't care what the right has to say
about AOC versus Josh Shapiro, right Like, So there are
some issues that you know, it makes more sense to
me that only the rights animated or only the lefts animated.

Speaker 2 (01:20:28):
Yeah, and what you find on some of these topics,
it's you know, some some topics don't get covered by
the left or covered by the right, and so when
if you search on that, you're going to find a
ton of content from one side and none on the other.
And so we were just trying to kind kind of
come back to that just the facts, ma'am sort of answer.
And so we're trying to pull from both sides, and
so it's not and give a balanced point of view

(01:20:49):
that doesn't say like, oh, well, everything on this is
from the right.

Speaker 1 (01:20:52):
If you had your druthers, how would you tell news
organizations in the so called legacy media, you know, and
I don't know what that I know, I know what
I think, I know what people mean when they say it.
I know I'm referring to sort of the quote traditional networks,
the longstanding newspapers, right, those things, you know, maybe the
wire services. What would you like to see as a consumer?

(01:21:18):
Do you want to know about the author, the editor,
the publication, you know, what would give you? And I
just say this because I think ultimately you know that
that I'm sure has informed how you went about this.
So I'm just so like, what would you if you
were in their focus group saying, hey, help us widen
our aperture so that we have people left, right and

(01:21:41):
centered consuming our content.

Speaker 2 (01:21:43):
Yeah, you know, I don't I don't know what I
would say specifically to just let's just pick it network news, right.
But what we have seen, and we've kind of shaped
our product around that, is that fewer people are turning
to network news or even cable news for their information
and more more and more people are turning into podcasts
like your podcast. Uh, and you know, people like the

(01:22:05):
Joe Rogan's of the world, and you find all these
the Theo Vaughn's, and they're informing themselves through these these
podcasts that have huge followings. And if I was somebody
at a network right now, I I'd see that as
a red flag. It's like, okay, what are we doing
that people trust Joe Rogan more than they trust us.
And I mean, I can start off, I say, Joe

(01:22:26):
Rogan is a great interviewer first of all, but it's
not it's less about like his views because he lets people,
he lets people talk, but he's not necessarily news.

Speaker 1 (01:22:34):
I mean, right, whatever you think of Joe Rogan, he
makes it. You know, the first rule of of of
any sort of content is make it interesting.

Speaker 2 (01:22:41):
Yeah, And he like, I mean, Joe Rogan is wherever
he's at, he's like, I think he's a good interviewer
because he just asked the question and then he stops talking, right,
and he lets people just go on and on and on,
and then he'll he'll go down a rabbit hole. But
if I was like at CBS or some place someplace
like that today and say like, hey, you know what,
why why are we losing people to these other these

(01:23:02):
other platforms and these other forms of media, and like
really questioning, It's like, okay, so we were holding on
to people that are you know, in one profile on
the spectrum of politics where we have them, and do
we want to expand and make it more consumable or
if we just want to focus on the people that
we have and and kind of stay in their lane. No.

Speaker 1 (01:23:23):
I mean, you know, I could tell you where where
I was running into problems was just on length of interviews,
and you know, and that's that was the that was
always the fight. And I used to say, look, you know,
I refer to the Sunday shows as baseball analytics. Now,
there was this point in baseball where everybody had the
same data. Right at first, it was an advantage for

(01:23:45):
teams that we're using data, and eventually everybody's going to
use the same data. And then all of a sudden,
everybody understood how to you know, do the do the
uh you know, you know, do the do the the
switch whatever when they when they would move all the
infielders to one side or the other, and you know,
bring in the lefty, the lefty, righty, righty and all
this stuff, and it was becoming almost predictable and you

(01:24:08):
knew and was same with Sunday interviews, meaning everybody's knew, oh,
it's seven to eight minutes. You know, I can filibuster
question one and this and this is the pattern, and
you know, it's this tyranny of if it just it
was no different than anything else you could see during
the week. And I used to argue, no, no, no, you
got to be you know, this has got to be

(01:24:28):
the long interview. Don't be afraid of it. And what
are what's podcast treating teaching us? People want thirty to
forty five?

Speaker 2 (01:24:34):
Yeah? Well, I mean that's because there's so many of
these issues today that where you know, you and I
could be asked on a question and you're like, well,
what do you think of this? It's like, well, my
ten second answer is like I agree with that, but
we don't agree with that.

Speaker 1 (01:24:46):
I'm going to interact. You've already proven it once. Look
at the trade No, look at the trade conversation we had.
It was not a simple answer, and it isn't right.
It is a complicated answer, and you were giving a
very complicated, nuanced response, which if you were doing a
five minute segment on one of the cable channels, which
you've done a few times. You know, boy, if I
gave that long answer, then I'm you know, I'm not

(01:25:07):
going to be able to talk about this, this and this.

Speaker 2 (01:25:10):
Yeah, no, one hundred percent, it's one hundred percent. You
get into that. I think you hit right on at
these sound bites don't allow any of the commentators or
any of the journalists are part of it, to like
really dig deep, to like that second level of information.
It really it is a problem on television and cable
with these short little it's like just ten seconds, like

(01:25:31):
what's your one little sound bite? And even politics gets
into that too, where it's hard to have a long,
a long, comprehensive answer answer to anything if you have
to put it into ten seconds.

Speaker 1 (01:25:42):
Well, and then politicians then you get the extra issue,
which is they're they're now afraid to do numances because
they're afraid something's going to get clipped. Yeah, right, exactly,
get clipped right, And then that becomes I mean, trust me,
I've been clipped for years now. Like you said this,
I'm like, yeah, but do you hear what I said
this and this, which totally changes the context of that.

Speaker 2 (01:26:03):
You know, right, everything's taken out of context all the time.

Speaker 1 (01:26:07):
Right, And it's one thing I've I'm guessing I don't
want to guess, are you making individual deal with the
news organizations, because I don't see any Wall Street Journal,
and I'm wondering are the paywalls a challenge for this?

Speaker 2 (01:26:23):
The walls are a huge challenge. So Luckily a lot
of our users on the places that they like, they
have a subscription already to places like Wall Street Journal,
but we don't. We don't highlight or downgrade anybody's results
based on whether there's a paywall or not. We try
to bring the headlines and the little snippets that we
can grab and give it the best we can.

Speaker 1 (01:26:43):
So it is included in your search. So be there
the Atlantic, anybody with a paywall.

Speaker 2 (01:26:49):
Yeah, all that the paywalls do get included in there.
They just might get and may not get as highlighted
as as well, because we don't have enough information on
those particular articles to give a full.

Speaker 1 (01:27:04):
I will say the labels on the sports coverage, did
you guys debate whether you needed it or not?

Speaker 2 (01:27:12):
You know, I can't remember, it's been a little while
since we did that.

Speaker 1 (01:27:15):
I mean, take the athletic and you note in the
about page because the Athletic is labeled left and in
the about page you say, look, it's the publisher, and
in this case, the New York Times is the publisher.
I totally understand where you're put in the New York Times,
but you're like the athletic I don't know, like I
just don't think of them as you know, yeah maybe
culturally if you.

Speaker 2 (01:27:36):
None of them are nice to me, so we should
just put them as wrong at least maybe not nice
to our team.

Speaker 1 (01:27:44):
But that was the one where you're like, huh, okay,
I don't know. If I you know sports, you know,
there's a handful of places that are trying to put
a political lens in their sports coverage. I hope that
doesn't become a fat.

Speaker 2 (01:27:59):
That's going to be more like driven by like the
advent of the world, like because we draw from those
guys than god selves directly. So they're they're putting that
label on there, and it's uh, and we're trying to
we're accepting those as you know, as a base just
to have something.

Speaker 1 (01:28:14):
So let me give you the one Devil's Advocate question
that something like this, because you know, crowdsourcing subjective material
I think is a is a winner. I'm a big
fan of it. I want to know right at the
same time, fact, just because something's crowdsource doesn't mean it's true.
So the separation of truth and look, you made your

(01:28:36):
you made your mark in the financial world, and you're
making your mark on on actual data and truth. Right,
So what's the what's what's what do you feel as
if free spokes responsibility is on the miss and disinformation
side of things?

Speaker 2 (01:28:53):
Well, you know, if you go and you and you
click on perspectives and any of these topics, right, what
it does is it's fine finding that that gray area
that or that overlap between and so often what you
find is that if it's misinformation, it's coming from one
side and it won't show up on the other side
at all. And so in the perspectives it kind of
you kind of get the overlap of like what both
sides acknowledge as true and a lot of that, a

(01:29:16):
lot of the other stuff gets kind of it's taken
over to you know, the left and the right itself.
If as you as you kind of page down on
this on these searches.

Speaker 1 (01:29:24):
What's two point Oh, I mean, I have an idea
of what free Spoke two point zero would be, but
I'm curious what you have planned in your head.

Speaker 2 (01:29:32):
I'd love to you know, I'd love to hear your
two point. Oh, but I think as we go forward,
what we want to do is we want to add
more customization to our premium product and let people really
kind of tell us what they want and shape that
that experience for themselves. So I think that's what we're
going to be working on for the rest of the
year and try to get more and more people into
that that product.

Speaker 1 (01:29:51):
I mean, look, I know I know what I'd be
doing if I were the hotline using this as a
tool right now, because it would perhaps give me the opportunity.
I want to know what are the what are the
where's their agreement? Show me the agreement between between left
and right and I, and then highlight the disagreement. Yeah,
tell me where you know, like, because that is a

(01:30:12):
consumer right of news and an analyst, it allows me. Okay,
they believe it's this is the reason, and they believe
it's this is I got it, Okay, And I think
you know, my guess is that's where you're headed. Right.
Round one is putting all this together. You know. Round
two is getting to all that and the only fear

(01:30:34):
I have and what I'm envisioning in my head is
do I want a human being doing this or do
I want AI doing this? And I and I know
that it's easier probably to have AI do it. It
might be ninety five percent good, but then you worry
about the five percent that it that AI doesn't understand,
you know, because it's just a probability thing, and then
it can screw up the perception the whole thing.

Speaker 2 (01:30:56):
Well, yeah, yeah, the AI is only as good as
the person who trained it or the people that and
so we can garbage out right exactly. And so I
think I feel pretty good about our technicians who kind
of live this every day, who are trying to really
forget that AI to able to identify bad information on
its own right and then again kind of bring that again.

(01:31:17):
I keep saying like that just the facts, just the facts.
We're trying to, like, just put the facts in front
of you and let you read them and make up
your own mind as to what makes sense to you.
And I think we'll get better and better in that
as time goes on, and as we have more searches
and more more.

Speaker 1 (01:31:32):
Do you see a newsletter business for you?

Speaker 2 (01:31:35):
Maybe maybe there could be.

Speaker 1 (01:31:38):
What do you think is the next business here in your.

Speaker 2 (01:31:41):
I was actually going to start my own podcast and
call it the Podcast. So I think you're going to
be hearing from my attorneys pretty soon.

Speaker 1 (01:31:58):
And you got better at You probably have better pay
attorneys than I do. You know, here's what I learned
by calling it the Toddcast. Uh Todd. First of all,
as somebody, you know, when your last name is Todd,
everybody assumes your first name is Todd. I've been third
generation of this. All all the male Todds in my
family ended up just succumbing to their last name being
their first name. But I had I got to take

(01:32:20):
this with me from NBC because they couldn't. You know,
NBC never lets intellectual property leave, but they couldn't claim
that they could use the Chuck todcast for somebody else.

Speaker 2 (01:32:32):
Yeah, sound somebody else named Chuck Todd. That'd be right.

Speaker 1 (01:32:36):
So this is the this is the hack. If you
work for somebody else, name a product after yourself, and
at least you have a boxer's chance of keeping your
right you.

Speaker 2 (01:32:49):
Yeah, so, but I don't. I don't really know if
we're going to get into the newsletter business, but we might.
The world is changing and just.

Speaker 1 (01:32:58):
The basic business adds and subscriptions, the two models.

Speaker 2 (01:33:03):
Yeah, so we just need to find more people, more people,
more people.

Speaker 1 (01:33:06):
So of course, all right, before I let you go,
I don't you know, don't get an owner of a
of a sports team, and you probably somebody probably prepped
you in the fact that I was a one of
the founders of Sports Business Journal, so cut my teeth
and cover, you know, create essentially creating the daily sports
business beat, which the industry didn't think it needed until

(01:33:30):
we created the product and then it then you know,
Sports Business Journal is what it is today. So baseball
in twenty twenty seven. This is one of those difficult
things because from sixty thousand feet the answer seem obvious,
the details are very difficult. If there's a sal can

(01:33:52):
you sell a salary cap without complete equal revenue sharing
among the owners?

Speaker 2 (01:33:58):
Yeah. I think the answer is the short answers yes,
the network news answer is yes, and a little bit
more detailed answer is. All the other leagues have kind
of gone through this, right, They've all had that growing
pain of getting into having a hard cap and having
a hard floor to make sure that the league stays competitive.

(01:34:19):
I think what you'll see in baseball is will have
sort of a revenue sharing model that might have to
do with TV rights, like taking more TV up to
the league and splitting that and making sure that every
team has enough to breach the floor. And if you
think of that, it's just like taking you know, one
hundred million dollars a pay roll away from the Dodgers
and taking it to the Pirates and making sure the
Pirates have enough money to cover it.

Speaker 1 (01:34:41):
And you, as the owner of the Chicago Cubs, who
frankly have more opportunity for revenue than the Minnesota Twins
or the Pittsburgh Pirates, you're going to be okay with sharing.
You know that you're basically contributing more to the pot
than the Pittsburgh Pirates and the Minnesota Twins.

Speaker 2 (01:34:58):
I no, I'm comfortable with that. Like, if the league
doesn't have competitiveness, we're going to start losing, and so
we need to have a competitiveness across the board. Although
I will say in baseball doesn't spending money doesn't always
turn into results. The dodge the beauty of the best
three or five.

Speaker 1 (01:35:16):
Please don't ever get rid of it, because it's the
great equalizer, right the Dodgers. You know, trust me as
a Nats fan, and you know, if you get the
Dodgers in a five game series, you got a chance.
You can't beat on a seven.

Speaker 2 (01:35:30):
Well, you know, and if you just look what's happened
in the Cubs this last week. I look at some
of the teams we played, I'm like, there's not one
guy in that other dugout that's good enough to be
on this team and they just beat us. So it's
like the kind of you have to roll with it,
but we do need to find like that that balance
and get into this thing, this this era where you know,
it's good. It's good for the league. If all the

(01:35:51):
teams are profitable at some level and not losing money
and we have a little bit of competitiveness on the field.
I think that's good and be good for baseball. And
you know, some of the modeling that we've worked out
internally is that you know, right now, players get about
forty eight percent of revenues in Major League Baseball. And
then and then the model we're going to present that
you know, I'm not part of the Major.

Speaker 1 (01:36:13):
League Baseball, but you're going to be. Are you on
any of these committees where you'll be sitting down now.

Speaker 2 (01:36:17):
In fact, my brother is our owner representative, so he's
he's much closer to the league and talks to the
connatural a lot. But but my instinct says that, like
we're going to go from someplace where it's forty eight
percent of the revenues today to like fifty two percent
of the revenues in the future. Right, Yeah, that's right.

Speaker 1 (01:36:33):
I like that.

Speaker 2 (01:36:34):
I think you and I think the NFL is about there.
On the NHL, I think they are all just above
fifty percent. So what what you'll see is like it's
actually more money to players, just in a different form
than the giant free agent contracts with you know, hundreds
of millions.

Speaker 1 (01:36:48):
No, I mean this is look, I mean, I know
what we're going to hear. It's, you know, the Scott
Boris view of the world, right, you know, basically unlimited
free market. Great if that's the way it works. But
you know, let me ask you this as a as
an owner, and for me, I'm going to call you
relatively new. I say relatively new, right if you have
if you've only been an owner for about ten or

(01:37:09):
fifteen years compared.

Speaker 2 (01:37:10):
To seventeen yeah, right.

Speaker 1 (01:37:12):
Compared we have some people that have been owners for
you know, generations right as longer for sure, and you
were in the particularly in the finance world. What's the
what's the same about operating a sports franchise and what
is different? As a you know, everybody says, well, you
got to operate it like a business, but as sports franchise, boy,

(01:37:36):
it's complicated because you know, we were discussing this before
we started. Your fan base thinks they own the team,
and unlike and only the Green Bay Packers have a
fan base that actually can say they own a piece
of the team. Although I'm sure if you guys started
selling shares you do pretty well. So what's the same
and what's the big difference?

Speaker 2 (01:37:57):
I think a lot of the same is just trying
to run like you say, run it like a business.
It's like, how what are we doing on ticket sales?
Are we selling every ticket that we can? Are the
tickets price right?

Speaker 1 (01:38:09):
You know?

Speaker 2 (01:38:09):
Where are we with our corporate sponsors, and and how
how they can contribute to the team in ways that
we can't go with other places. For so, it is
very much a business. And on the other side, you
have these opportunities to be completely irresponsible sometimes where you're like, Okay.

Speaker 3 (01:38:27):
We're just one game out and if we win our division,
it's going to mean this, and so do we go
out and and and get that extra free agent or
or or kind of get outside our own discipline.

Speaker 2 (01:38:39):
So you always have those opportunities, and I got to say, like,
I don't think it's the craziest idea. Sometimes it's just
it doesn't always work out and then you generally regret it.
But we keep it pretty tight ship we have. We
really have a great team of people. There were a
lot of great people that were at the Cubs when
we bought the team, and we've supplemented that with a

(01:39:00):
much more. And it's a very disciplined business. And when
we look at those opportunities to step outside our disciplines
and the discipline, especially when it comes to the baseball
team itself, we think long and hard about it.

Speaker 1 (01:39:15):
What didn't you know that you were like, oh my god,
I wish i'd known this going.

Speaker 2 (01:39:21):
It's been a little while since since we bought the team,
and it kind of went through it. It's what you
don't see is the backside business side of all the teams,
and you look at other teams and you see how
they're run and you're like, gosh, I really I wish
I could give them some advice. I wish not every
team and every league is run with the same sort

(01:39:43):
of professionalism that we have, and that's why you kind
of see some of the variations of teams that can
make money or lose money and so on and so forth.

Speaker 1 (01:39:52):
So I'm doing this sports history podcast with Jayadande and
we've done three deep dives so far, the Dodgers, the
the Steelers, and the Warriors. And you know what all
three have in common is that their original owner was
essentially the local sports promoter. So like Art Rooney for
the Steelers, he was the guy that the NFL went to,

(01:40:14):
hey do you want this franchise, because he was the
guy you went to if you were bringing a boxing
match to Pittsburgh and you wanted to promote it, and
he was that guy. And the Warriors owner, the first
one in San Francisco, was sort of it was like
a nightclub owner. You know when I say that, he
didn't own a nightclub, but it was the equivalent of
where you would just do it. Can I bring in
a marquee name to bring in fannies in the seat

(01:40:35):
so I can sell a few extra concessions. Like how
much you know we've seen this transition from sort of
the family business model, right the small business owner model,
to the twenty first century business you know, acumen, Harvard
Business School type of mindsets and take baseball. Would you

(01:40:56):
say eighty percent of the teams are in this bucket now?
Or you know, how many of the teams are still
in the mom and pops phase of operations?

Speaker 2 (01:41:05):
Maybe you know, maybe half and half. I'd have to
like go through team by team and see where they're appens.
It's definitely has a few things have changed in the
last twenty five years that have changed the way the
businesses are run. First of all, you've seen institutional money
kind of coming into some of these teams, you know,
these big of these big.

Speaker 1 (01:41:21):
Do you have any private equity? Do you guys have
brought in? Have you guys brought private equity in or not?

Speaker 2 (01:41:26):
We have like a wide range of limited partners that
we brought out at different times, Like we sold off
some of the team to renovate Wrigley Field, and so
that a lot of that that was all privately funded,
and we did that through selling a little bit of equity.
But what's happened is like these as you bring in
that institutional money, they want to bring in that professional management.

(01:41:46):
And the second thing that you're saying is that as
teams need new stadiums, the city, county, state governments are
less and less inclined to finance those. And so I
don't think that's a problem. But what it does it
change the mindsets of the team. Whether they start saying like, Okay, well,
if we're going to fund our own stadium, we're going
to want to own some real estate around our stadium.

(01:42:07):
We're going to want to own all of our parking lots.
We're going to want to control that fan experience from
a perimeter that's not just the venue itself. And so
that's why you're seeing these kind of entertainment districts and
we you know, we kind of we built one around
Wrigley that's been really successful and other stuff are doing that.

Speaker 1 (01:42:24):
You tell me, I don't feel like Wrigleyville was a
thing until you guys kind of made it a thing.

Speaker 2 (01:42:29):
You know, we we really had that mindset of wanting
to control the neighborhood and control that fan experience for
the better. Really, you know, we're just we want to
make sure our fans are having a great experience when
they come to the ballpark. And I don't and I
don't know what's changed about sports specifically to make it
like this, but it's no longer just about the two
and a half hour game or that. You know, even

(01:42:50):
for football, you know, the football you have tail getting
before the game, and and for baseball you were starting
to see it's like people come down early to get
something to eat, and then they go to the game,
and then they're going to go out, maybe to a show.
We're just going to borrow to have a few beers.
Like it's an all day experience regardless of how long
the game itself is. And so people are trying to
like make sure that that experience is positive for everybody.

Speaker 1 (01:43:14):
Should baseball games be available for free? In Chicago? The
Chicago Cubs always be available on supposed free TV, And
should that be a philosophy of Major League Baseball?

Speaker 2 (01:43:24):
I'm going to I'm going to shift a little bit
and say all team owners want their fans to be
able to see their games on TV. But the world
is in such upheaval today whether it's you know, the
cutting of the court on cable has happened so quickly
and so much shifted to these streaming services that I

(01:43:46):
think it's not just baseball, it's football. Is everybody's kind
of in the space of like, Okay, we were trying
to get our games out to be seen, but we're
also still trying to get paid for the games in
the old way that we were when we just went
to Comcast and they just gave it you.

Speaker 1 (01:44:01):
They gave you at hey, we'll sell the ads. Well,
we'll make it on the back end. And I'm guessing
media networks like now, maybe you guys can sell the
ads well.

Speaker 2 (01:44:11):
And the funny part is is that everybody was paying.
Everybody thought they were getting Cubs games for free when
they had their cable, but they weren't. They were paying
for it in their cable bill and always just included.

Speaker 1 (01:44:22):
Yeah no, and Apple companies for years just passed along
and you didn't realize. And then when you disaggregate that bundle,
you're like, well, somebody's got to pay for this. You know,
it was always I joke. You know, I made a
lot of money over the years on o PM. Other
people's money, right, whether it's newsletters that were so expensive
that it became a business expense, so there was no

(01:44:42):
individual that you went to for a subscription. And you
you know this, a B to B business is sometimes
more stable than a consumer facing business.

Speaker 2 (01:44:52):
Yeah, that's right. And I think what people are finding
out is they were paying more for their sports than
they thought. You know, if you have if you're if
you your cable bill was one hundred and fifty dollars,
I'm just making it number and you're like, well, I
bet I've been in paying like two or three of
that goes to sports, and you're finding out actually it
was like twenty five and now if you want to
get those same games, you're gonna have to pay twenty
five dollars a month to have that. And so it's

(01:45:14):
all it's all just in flux, and I know that
there's the bigger brains in mind are thinking about it,
and all sorts of people outside in sports are concerned
about it. But at the end of the day, I think,
you know, we're just we're just trying to find out
where people want to get.

Speaker 1 (01:45:27):
To have one dumb request, I'm a season ticket holder,
why do I also have to spend extra money to
watch the games at home.

Speaker 2 (01:45:35):
Yeah, yeah, that's a good point to get here.

Speaker 1 (01:45:38):
That because I always you know, it's interesting what season
ticket holders have always gotten m THEMLB Extra Innings package. Yeah,
like that's always come with the deal. But look, some
of this was new, right. The nets were part of
the of the group of teams that all had to
scramble to put together a deal before the season started.
So it's possible they'll think these things through. Well, let

(01:46:04):
me let me close with this. What's this If you
don't win a division, If you don't win the division
this year is the season of failure? If you don't
get in the playoffs, is it a failure? What's your
what's your the goals always win the World Series. I'm
it's a bit, But what's what's your realistic? What's a
disappointment to you this year? Because baseball is.

Speaker 2 (01:46:21):
Hard, you know, we kind of you're going back to
that baseball discipline and business discipline. We shoot to be
in the playoffs every single year. So if we're not
in the playoffs, that's some one pointing season to us.

Speaker 1 (01:46:33):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:46:33):
And when I look at our roster and I look
down the talent that we have. I feel like we
have an incredibly competitive team. Now we don't have a
Dodgers as far as like the payroll numbers, but when
I look at like the talent we have top to bottom,
if we can, if we can get some of these
injured guys back on and get everybody playing, get you
every ready to aggress back to their norm? Right? Uh,

(01:46:53):
they're they're have an average season. I think we have
an incredibly competitive team, which is kind of your sky's limit.

Speaker 1 (01:47:00):
Have you like bugged your guys going why didn't we
sign Murakami? But never mind?

Speaker 2 (01:47:04):
You know, no, No, I feel like as as an owner,
you have to like turn that over to the baseball guys.
And because if you get too involved, you can't hold
them accountable, right like if you if you tell them
who to get who.

Speaker 1 (01:47:18):
We've seen other we've seen other owners and they get
really involved. And then if it doesn't go well, especially
at the say started the first third of the season,
you only have one person to blame.

Speaker 2 (01:47:30):
Right, That's exactly it. So I never want to be
the person that gets blamed. So I throw out ideas,
but I don't I don't like live and die by them.

Speaker 1 (01:47:39):
Well pre spoke. This is how much of your bandwidth
is on this?

Speaker 2 (01:47:45):
Yeah, well a lot, I'd say a lot of it
at the moment. I'm sure that until Yeah, like i'd say,
like half of my time's spent on free spoke for
at the moment, we're trying to get our product in
a way and place that we like and find new users.

Speaker 1 (01:48:00):
Well, I hope you know, just keep reaching down to
a There's a lot of great, sort of what I
call entrepreneurial local news sites that are really trying to
fill the gap. And that to me is you know,
the information ecosystem. What you're trying to do is something
I think we need. And there's a lot of decent
bottom up journalism. They just need a little awareness because

(01:48:21):
Google makes it hard. Google and Facebook made it at
first made it easy to be a local publisher. That
made it quite difficult. And if you could be a
place to help local because that's been the biggest thing
that is killed local publishers is how Google is messed
with search and awareness. And this feels like an opportunity
for local news to get to get some you know,

(01:48:42):
to have a site that won't hide there or only
boost you. I mean it feels like you have to
pay Google to get boosted. I'm not saying that is
how the business works, and I know they would claim
it isn't, but that's the way many of these local
news entrepreneurs. Yeah, that's the way they feel like it works.

Speaker 2 (01:48:59):
Yeah, totally, it totally is how it works. And so
we were trying to combat that and uh and really
just informed people. So if you have if you have
sources that and uh that we're not crawling, you're not
seeing the show up and free spokes, let us know
and make sure we get it added to our index.

Speaker 1 (01:49:15):
Well, like I said, I love what the all sides
guys do and uh, and I know him pretty well
and he worked really hard on that on that bias
rating system. And I know the ad font stuff too.
I mean it's it's it's good metrics to you. So,
Todd Ricketts, this was a pleasure to get to know you.
And uh, like I said, I love what you're trying
to do when I encourage people to check it out.

Speaker 2 (01:49:37):
Great, Yeah, thanks for having me.

Speaker 1 (01:49:42):
H well, I hope you enjoyed that conversation with Todd Ricketts.
I for like I said, first time I had met him,
I had certainly had covered and his brother in his
political days, but Todd Ricketts uh, and I find what

(01:50:03):
he's doing fascinating. I think you really should check it out.
It is this attempt to try to essentially create an
opportunity to use the Internet without constantly feeling product right,
that your data is being essentially vacuumed out from under

(01:50:23):
you and used and monetized in all sorts of ways.
And so I know, I'm certainly hopeful that this would
this uh, some this technology can work, that this will
catch on. So do take a look at it. I
think it's it's worth your time. And on the baseball front,
I thought it. I thought, you know, in full disclosure,

(01:50:46):
it's about a week old. So this was I asked
him the baseball sort of workstoppage questions before we got
the official salary cap proposal. We kind of knew what
was coming in the first round of traded proposals right there.
Both were going to do their maximum their maximum issues there.

(01:51:07):
But the reason I focused on local media and this
idea because the Cubs are one of those teams you
have your haves and you have your have nots, and
the Cubs and the Dodgers and the Yankees. They're not
the only three teams that have great, incredible local revenue
that they basically get to hoard to themselves. They don't
have to share it the way the Chicago Bears share
their revenue or the La Rams or the New York Giants.

(01:51:27):
So and I've always thought they're real impediment. Part of
the issue. It's, you know, players are united, but owners aren't.
You know, the owners that feel like they have a
greater ability to make money with local revenue don't love
the idea in their own heads of quote unquote subsidizing
those in smaller markets who in their heads haven't figured

(01:51:50):
it out. Although the smaller markets might say, hey, we've
maximized everything we can. The point is if the owners truly,
if if, if if Rob Manford in Major League Baseball
has actually gotten the owners to all agree to pull
their local revenue, that's the that then this idea of

(01:52:11):
some hard ish you know, I don't think we're going
to have a hard salary cap, but I think it's
going to feel like do you remember as a kid
when they had the chocolate sauce that would harden you know,
it was liquid and would harden, but then it would
crack easily. I envisioned something like that, Right, it's sort
of like the NBA style of salary cap meets something

(01:52:32):
a little looser, but the idea that you're going to
see a and the cap could be a lot higher
than you might expect. Right, it could be essentially what
the Dodger payroll is right now, or even one hundred
million over what the Dodger payroll is right now, as
a way to buy time, right, it's it's I think

(01:52:54):
the owner, the owners and MLB, they've got to come
up with a plan where no players playing today will
feel like that they're losing money, and in fact, they
want to think that they're going to be, in fact
making more money in the short term, while those guys
can feel like they're bending the cost curve if you
remember that and the healthcare debacles in the long term. Right,

(01:53:16):
by creating the sort of future trying to future proof themselves,
that would be the rational sort of compromise that could happen.
But we'll see, you know, the players of Union has
always been one of the most sophisticated and one of
the most They also think about twenty years down the road.

(01:53:36):
As much as they think about twenty days down the road.
I would argue the owners have always only thought twenty
days down the road. They actually don't always think twenty
years down the road. But I thought the fact that
Ricketts was so comfortable saying, oh, yeah, we're willing to
pool local revenue, it's a much bigger deal than I

(01:53:56):
think some of the coverages has made of it. All right,
let's get some questions here, ask Chuck. It's a Thursday episode,
so we'll go a little a little long on questions here.
So the first one comes from Bill s Newberg, Oregon,
and he writes, Hey, thanks for the focus on character

(01:54:18):
and politics. I agree that it matters. I'm curious though,
if a candidate's poor character is clear, how do you
think about voter responsibility in choosing to support them? Is
voting for that candidate in some way a reflection on
the voter as well? Also, if you tried to book
Graham Platner on your show, Thanks Bill S in Newberg, Oregon. PS,
My mariners are finally firing on all cylinders. Listen to
Ian Bremmer on as a client show. Would love to

(01:54:39):
see you too, do a home and Away on that well.
Ian Bremer's coming up pretty soon actually. And as for
Graham Platner, we we the invitation is out, it has
been out for a while. We would love to have him.
I'd love to talk with him. I've certainly he strikes

(01:55:00):
me as somebody that would want to have the conversation
I want to have. At least that's what a lot
of people tell me. So I am not going to
pre judge. I think he's I think that I think
the campaign is a may put him out, So we'll see.
But I look forward to it, and I think we

(01:55:20):
can have a you know, I've had I'll do LSI
ed on this podcast. I've you know, I want all
flavors of the political spectrum to make their way onto
this podcast because I think the the the audience that
I'm hoping to appeal to is is quite broad and
one that understands that that you can be one hundred

(01:55:42):
percent assured of your point of view, but you know
that ultimately you're going to have to compromise somewhere, and
that's that's sort of the big picture thing. So yes
on that. So as for character, look and and in
some ways I'm glad this question is come here because
I also want to. In fact, I got a few
on sub stack from folks that I'm going to include

(01:56:06):
because they're very similar in questions that you asked me
here because it's it's it's this question of degrees. Right.
Let me let me read you one here. Here's one
that I think gets it sort of similar. Here's a
one from Amy Smith. She writes, I get where you're
coming from, but I don't agree with you one hundred percent.

(01:56:28):
I've been a lifelong Democrat from a lifelong Democratic family.
As such. Truthfully, there has been a lot of judging
over the years, a lot of we are a party
that is better than that. While I agree that there
should be norms and standards, I'm not sure that space
really exists anymore because that leaves no room for people
who are different than I am, who think differently or
speak differently. It also doesn't allow for rehabilitation if someone

(01:56:48):
accepts responsibility, realizes the air of their ways, and no
longer behaves in that manner. Should personal stuff really matter
that much?

Speaker 2 (01:56:54):
Now?

Speaker 1 (01:56:54):
I'm not saying that covers terrible people like Donald Trump,
who have abandoned morality altogether. But I know in my
own life. I have made terrible decisions, have hurt family, friends, etc.
When I was younger, I had terrible ideas and behaviors,
but I eventually quote got it, did what I had
to do, make it right, and don't make those same
mistakes anymore. Does that mean I should never run for
office because at some point in my life I was
on the wrong side of something. Truthfully, I don't want

(01:57:17):
to be a part of a party that believes that
flawed character is a non starter. I don't know if
that makes any sense. Honestly, it makes a ton of sense,
and I think this is the look. I don't think
there's any one way to look at this. I think
we all process this slightly differently. I do process it

(01:57:39):
differently than most of you because I've probably not probably
I know I do this, which is I've had a
lot of experience covering candidates, covering flawed candidates, being surprised
at the flaws, right, you know, stuff that gets unearthed, affairs,
money issues, all sorts of things like that. It's how

(01:58:00):
somebody deals with it. And ultimately, I guess I would
put it this way in because I got as I
it's sort of hinted at you Bill. I got a
lot of versions of this same of some form of
this question, and I guess I think the voter responsibility

(01:58:23):
is this, you've got all these data points, think about
your own life. We all know people that have that
have you know, had a rough time in their twenties,
maybe had a rough time in their forties, but you know,
pulled things together, became the most important or started a

(01:58:46):
great business, or did all these things, you know, after
sort of getting getting back on track right on their life,
whatever back on track is for them. And yes, I
think a rehabilitated person in public office in some ways
is somebody who who's probably going to bring a bit

(01:59:08):
of empathy to some decisions. And that's something that does
matter to me. So, for instance, I think there were
some people with George W. Bush who saw his ability
to quit drinking as an asset, and there were others
that saw the fact that he became an alcoholic for
a period of time as a flaw. And in some ways,

(01:59:31):
it's probably more reflective on who you are as a
person to decide which should matter more to you. And
that's ultimately it, right, I can't sit here and say
what matters to me should matter to you when it
comes to character. But you take all this and it's predictive,
and ultimately it does become predictive. I will just tell

(01:59:52):
you this in my experience, it's how the candidates that handles.
It's how you find out about their mistakes. It's how
how they decide to handle it when those mistakes become
public information that ultimately tells me who somebody is and

(02:00:15):
perhaps tells me how they'll handle pressure or crisis or
an unknown situation. I mean, you know, that's that's what
these campaigns ultimately are about. It's pressure testing these folks
to see, you know, who are they and how and
are they going to be able to in some ways
do to do the job. And just because one person

(02:00:37):
believes somebody's personal life should be fair game and another
says somebody's personal life should have nothing to do with X,
Y or Z, well look we all we all have
different reasons for voting the way we vote. So I
don't think it's that. But I worry about the slippery slope.

(02:00:57):
I worry about looking the other way. And when you
you know the ability to step back and say if
if this if instead of Graham Platner, this were Ashley Hinson, Right,
what would you say or instead of Graham Platner and
this were Byron Donald's And if you're defending Graham Platner,

(02:01:23):
how would you you know? And the thing is, actually,
I don't even have to pretend about Byronos. It's Ken Paxton.
It's it's Graham Platner. And I've seen folks say, yeah,
but this is worse than this, And it's like, you know, now,
if you wanted to make the case to me that
Paxton has already proven that in public office, he brings
his bad morality and bad ethics into office, so that

(02:01:45):
obviously makes him even more unqualified than Platiner. That's a
fair argument. My Platner hasn't been in public office. There
is there is concern that if he's you know, had
uh had a at a very you know, a bit
of a tumultuous feels like not the right word here,

(02:02:07):
but a challenging first twenty years of adulthood is you
don't know for sure that he's going to somehow bring
some of the irresponsibility. And I think in the case
of Platiner, it may not be irresponsibility. It may be
struggles coming back from war which I think you know.

(02:02:31):
But the question is when, if you've got your personal struggles,
if you haven't dealt with them, should you be bringing
this into the public square, because there are many people
that are counting on you to look out for them,
not yourself. And the decision to go into public service
to me is you've made the decision that you're going

(02:02:53):
to put others ahead of yourself. And if you are
not prepared to do that because of what's happened in
your life, then please go fix what's going on in
your life first. Don't bring your personal life and and
and have it get in the way of public service.
Now that's where I come down on this. I I

(02:03:14):
will you know. I've been making the case that I
think that unfortunately this is this is predictive, and we've
seen this, and you know that that doesn't mean there
isn't a redemptive quality to plenty of people. I think.
Take the Speaker of the Virginia Assembly. Here's somebody that
in his early life got into a lot of trouble.

(02:03:38):
I had to serve some time, fully rehabilitated, paid his
debt to society, came back, and over time worked his
way into politics. It's right there front and center he
you know, announces for office. Here's here's essentially here's my
APO file. These are the mistakes I've made. Here's how

(02:03:58):
I've learned from these mistakes. And let me so let
me and I know I'm aitt rambling here, and I'll
explain why I'm rambling. Some of it is lack of
sleep from our near all night or with the California
primaries on Wednesday night Tuesday night. But there's a few
other things I don't want to get to at the
end of the podcast, so stay tuned, as they say,

(02:04:22):
But let me let me put out another scenario for
for everybody that has written me about the about my
character critiques here and the yes, I both sided it,
and some people hate both sideries, right, But this is
one that I'm very concerned about because I do think
this is a spiral that that we're going to regret
that we're going down. If Graham Plattner said, look, I'm

(02:04:48):
sorry that this came out the way it came out.
I'm sorry that somebody decided they didn't want to respect
the privacy of my marriage and decided to leak this.
But I'm not going to hide from this. Yes, I
did these things, and you know, if you and if
it bothers you, I understand, and you're going to give

(02:05:10):
me time to work back up. It's, you know, the
more defensive someone gets in these situations without sort of
acknowledging the wrongdoing or accepting responsibility or trying to sort
of say, yeah, but you know, one of my this
is a piece of advice I gave in a commencement
speed yeah, butt right, don't give me the butt you know, yes,

(02:05:34):
take responsibility. Don't say but if it wasn't for this,
this or this, I might not have made this mistake,
or I might not or you might not have known,
and we wouldn't have had to have this conversation. I
think perhaps this might have landed differently. So this is

(02:05:55):
a very long winded way for me to say. Ultimately,
on these issu shoes, in my opinion, it's as much
of how they acknowledge the character fall, how they lean
frankly lean into it, accept responsibility and say well this
is look I'm you know, this is not who I am,

(02:06:15):
and let me explain why I'm not this anymore. And
then you know, look, we can you ask a great
question about when does forgiven And this was the question
I think from substact sort of when when does somebody
get when have you paid your debt? We went through

(02:06:35):
this with the me too movement, which is, if you
own up to your bad behavior, if you sort of
you know, take take responsibility and all of this, are
you canceled or are you suspended? You get my drift
there right? And are you welcome backed or is there
always an asterisk and you're not necessarily welcome back into

(02:06:58):
your profession whatever that's per fashion is. And I think
we you know, we've we've collectively struggled with this, and
I think we individually are always all more empathetic, and
collectively collectively we're usually a bit more skeptical of people,
of people's redemptive qualities. And so you know, it's and

(02:07:22):
and again, the other point of the column is my
criticism was less about Platner himself and more of the
blind defenses that partisans are making to sort of look
the other way. Some of these same people that are
defending everything defending Platner like this mocked those on the
right who were using the same language, the same rationalizations

(02:07:46):
to come to the conclusion that they were going to
support Donald Trump or that they were going to support
Ken Paxton. And I think that that's the that's where
the brand damage to the Democrats comes in. It's not
it doesn't become about Graham, plattn or anymore. It becomes like, oh,
you only believe character counts for the other side that

(02:08:10):
when questions are raised here, if the person's winning, you
know you're not going to risk a senence. It over
back just the other way. Right, it wasn't that long
ago that essentially Democrats forced Al Franken to resign. Also
that they could have Democrats could keep the high ground
in the Doug Jones Roy Moore Senate race, which they

(02:08:30):
did win. Next question, Christen Roscoe, Illinois. Right, second time
are here. I don't miss an episode even on trail runs. Well,
I appreciate that. As someone who worked in the in
facilities management, I'm all for expanding the house, but I
wonder about the logistics. How would the Capitol accommodate hundreds
of additional members and staff. Would it require major construction

(02:08:52):
or is there space to support that kind of expansion? Well, actually,
I hope you caught and I'll be curious. I hope
you caught the Q and A portion they asked Chuck
from Wednesday's episode, because someone asked a similar thing and
we talked about One of the questions was about It
wasn't necessarily about the logistics, but I sort of turned

(02:09:13):
it into the logistics because I told I was telling
folks that I had a student and I'm going to
share more of these next week, their ideas that they
had of fixing Washington, because I know you guys will
love to hear some of the but one of the
more unique one was to take Congress out of Washington.
That basically Congress should should meet every year in a

(02:09:34):
different location around the country, and that you know, logistically,
this is much more viable to do today than it
would have been thirty years ago, let alone two and
fifty years ago. So to get at your physical so
to get at the facilities issue. So here's how I
would do it. My recommendation, we're at my eight hundred

(02:09:57):
and ninety members, if from my House of Representatives at
eight ninety members, which would be one per four hundred thousand,
I would make the district offices the main offices for
members of Congress. That's where all the staff is there.
I would make Washington so we already have all this

(02:10:17):
House office space that there's suites, Senate offices or you know,
multi floors. You know, there's there's one hundred person staffs
and Senate offices. So if you essentially, at least on
the House side, everybody just you know, every member of
Congress got a office and like you know, one other

(02:10:37):
room with two you know, with with with with the
two staff are shared, that would be enough. And that
the essentially the main office and the main staff and
the main people that interacted with constituents were all in
the state offices, all in the district offices. I would
allow for remote voting, but only from the district office

(02:11:00):
main office of the of the House representatives. And then
you'd have these so I you know, I think that's
how you would deal with this logistics challenge. Right, this
is not about adding you know, if there's say three
thousand House staff, right more than that. But I'm gonna
let's put it five thousand staff for the four hundred
and thirty five members. Suddenly, where the hell are we

(02:11:22):
going to put another five thousand staffers? See, I wouldn't
do that. I'd almost figure out a way to take
your eight ninety and cap it at about twenty five
hundred staffers total for the for the for the eight
hundred and ninety, right, So what does that put you
at about two and a half two point five staffers, right,
you know, per per office in the capital, and then

(02:11:45):
you have a more expansive office in the district itself.
So I think remote governance plays a role here in
order to make this a bit more feasible. Rather than
just building three more house office buildings that you know,
maybe you build one more house office building because they

(02:12:06):
got to put Pelosi's name in a house office building,
first woman Speaker of the House. You know, her name
needs to be on a building. I think, you know,
whatever you whether you're left or right, I think she's
earned that. Moniker. Uh, you know, so maybe you add
the Pelosi house office building you when when you expand
the house. But I think that there is I think

(02:12:26):
there is a way to do this without allowing logistics
to crush the idea. Next question comes from Jake and Denver, Colorado.
He says, Hey, your recent deep dive on character raised
a question for me. How much should it Canada's private

(02:12:47):
sexual behavior factor into public judgments of character, and where
should journalist draw on the line and reporting on those
details where you're at risk of setting a standard that
discourages otherwise qualified people from running for office. A loyal
to timer, I mean, ask questions, not vulneral. That's very funny,
Jake in Denver. Well, look, here's the thing. We over

(02:13:07):
corrected after Gary Hart, right, We excuse me, we over corrected.
We were we were on the wrong. We were sort
of overly moralistic with Gary Hart. And we've clearly over
corrected with Donald Trump, right, like you know, we we've
you know, and and so we've we vacillate here. It
is ultimately, if you're going to do risky behavior and

(02:13:32):
you're going to have a security clearance, that's a national
security vulnerability. So if you're asking me about that, I
think that it is the line you got to draw,
is you know, our you know is you know, it's
just why there is a deeper dive of background checks

(02:13:53):
and extra vetting for people that get various levels of
security clearances when it comes to the American government. So
I think that there's there's some fair lines to draw here.
I think I I you know what happens in the
bedroom should stay in the bedroom. How people treat people

(02:14:17):
and deceive people is a different story. And if you're
a serial decepter in your personal life, I think that's
a relevant piece of information for the voting public. There
are plenty of people that are going to say that's
a character trait, that's you know, if you're comfortable doing this,
then you might do this. And I don't know if

(02:14:38):
I want that. I don't, you know, you know, so right,
there's you're you're getting at to all of the debates
that we've had in I've had in newsrooms for thirty years.
What's fair game? What isn't? Now I can tell you
what political consultants believe is fair game. All of it.
Everything is fair game. They'll say, oh, some things are

(02:15:02):
off limits, will say kids are off limits. But at
what point are kids off limits? Right? Kids below twelve
are off limits? Kids below sixteen? You know, at eighteen
and nineteen. We've certainly seen plenty of political campaigns try
to make behaviors of adult children part of the issue.

(02:15:22):
I'll just be frank, I've always thought it was weird
that Hunter Biden is about the same age as I am.
We treated this idea that Joe Biden should know everything
about Hunter Biden's finances of a forty nine at the time,
a forty nine year old man, and I was like,
my mother knows nothing about my finances. And I think

(02:15:43):
at the time I was a forty nine year old man,
and I, you know, just not. I don't think it's
you know, I'm sure there are some adult children that
are very financially intertwined with their parents and they and
they share, and there's plenty of adult children who you know,
don't necessarily share their financial details with their parents, and

(02:16:07):
vice versa that their parents. And so I've always been
I've always thought, I don't see how that's fair game.
Now if you're trading off your family name, like you know,
Hunter's business dealings, that was another story, as he was
certainly basically pitching himself as the son of a vice
sitting vice president to get business, not necessarily something else.
But to me that there was some life, you know,

(02:16:29):
that was the debate we would have in our newsrooms there.
And so I think on the private life, it's well,
I'll give you I'll give you an example where I thought,
I think that there's a fair critique of whether this

(02:16:50):
was this should be a news story. The original potential
Republican challenger to Barack Obama in two thousand and four
in the Illinois Center Race gentleman by the name of
Jack Bryant. The scandal that basically took him down was
a detail in his divorce records. He was married to
at the time. I think she's still an actress, still

(02:17:11):
a working actor, but it was of some prominence at
the time Deep Space Notch. She was a character on
that show. For any of you Star Trek fans, and
you know, in the divorce records, I think it came
out that she, you know, was you know that one
of the one of the things that you know, she
basically said was he was trying to pressure her to

(02:17:33):
have essentially to have sex in a in a public
club of some sort or some sort of swingers club
or something like that. And you know, one of one
of my sort of punchlines back then, and I'll admit
younger version of me being a little snarky, was man.
It's not often that a politician finds themselves in a

(02:17:56):
scandal because they want to have sex with their own wife.
But obviously you needed to know the details, understand it,
but was that relevant to voters? You know, sex lives
or sex lives. People have kinks, fetishes, and you know
there are some laws on the books that some fetishes
are illegal, but you know kinks, there's plenty of people

(02:18:18):
have their thing. And if we start going down that road,
we start losing you know, the feeling of personal freedoms. Right,
this is you know, we're not we don't want to
get a welly in here, but you're you're The question
you're asking is also exposing that there is no right answer.

(02:18:43):
I think what you're what you're what you're helping to though, explain?
Is this is why? This is why a lot of
people don't want to run for office who might make
terrific public servants. It's not that they haven't things in
their life that they think are disqualifying. It's maybe there

(02:19:03):
are things in their life they just don't want to
see public. And whether we like it or not, this
stuffs always going to get public because we live in
a zero sum game when it comes to political campaigns,
and each side simply once they know there might be
at least one voter that that bothers and hey, every
vote counts, right, So you know there's no one rule

(02:19:25):
book for how reporters report things. The standards that I
have are different, frankly than the standards that that somebody
else has. They what what I would do versus what
someone you know? I? You know, do I think I've do?
I think I could set some standards that that should

(02:19:50):
be broadly agreeable to seventy percent of people in my business.
I do. I think I think I could come with that.
I think most of us in this business could. But
I don't think you're ever going to get that. So
it comes down This is why it ultimately comes down to.
You know, you're when you when you run for public office,

(02:20:12):
You're going to have to be comfortable in your own
skin because nothing's ever going to stay a secret. All right.
Next question comes from Andrea and Los Angeles. Sening writes,
can you help me understand something? It states like Florida
have no income tax and are exploring eliminating property taxes.
Where does the revenue come from to fund government and services?
With population growth already straining resources, How does that model

(02:20:32):
hold up long term? Appreciate your insight regards Andre in
La PS. If you're reading this on the pod. I'm
now a member of the full time four x timers club. PSS,
you nailed something many missed about the Spencer Pratt Merrill run.
His reach doesn't seem to extend beyond certain areas or
into working class communities. Uh yeah, I if it's if

(02:20:54):
you haven't figured it out now, h it is. It's
it's pretty clear who Karen Bass would prefer to run against,
and it is not the mom Dannie Acolyte. Karen Bass's
political base and Spencer's Pratt's political base do not overlap

(02:21:16):
at all. Karen Bass's political base is about three x
higher on a bad day than Spencer Pratt's political base
in La So I think I think, you know, do
I think he'll do. You know, he'll may get You
know that you're looking at a fifty four forty six,
fifty five forty five final between the two of them,

(02:21:37):
if it does, for sure come down to them. And
then we had a lot of ballots account literally as
the time of this question being asked, half the ballance there. Look,
you just asked your question about Florida. I can tell
you how they fund service is now right? When you
there are certain things like registering a car in Florida
is astronomically expensive, right, so you get feed to death.

(02:21:59):
You get fee over here, feed feed feed feed fees.
You know, we don't in Florida. They don't raise taxes,
they raise fees. And they say, hey, we don't raise taxes,
but they raise fees. There's quite a few Republican governors
over the years who have claimed they have not raised taxes,
but have raised fees through the roof registration fees. And

(02:22:19):
because it doesn't apply to everybody, isn't it isn't sort
of forced apply to everybody, but it's sort of only
if you choose to do certain things do you pay
this fee? Is it not considered an overall tax? But
to me, if you're paying money to the government, it's
a tax. You can call it a fee, you can
call it a tariff, you can call it a tax.

(02:22:41):
It's it's money out of your pocket that goes into
the coffers of the government.

Speaker 2 (02:22:47):
Uh.

Speaker 1 (02:22:47):
This you're getting at the fundamental problem. And this is
why this is. This is it's not feasible like at all.
This is simply a pr stunt to desperately try to
motivate some voters in Florida to show up to the
polls in twenty six with this sort of you know
there is in it. This is where I think people

(02:23:11):
misunderstand the Santis. DeSantis comes from a certain strain of
the conservative movement there really wants small government and doesn't
believe that government should be involved in the services that
it's involved in, and would like to starve the beast,
as the right used to call it. And so if
you get rid of property taxes, well then that is

(02:23:31):
going to put strain on local governments and you and
I I think look at it as bugs. And I
think DeSantis would argue this is a feature of this idea,
and those that are the most fired up about that
or that, now, the campaign against this is really easy.
Do you like trash pickup? Okay, then don't vote for this.
Do you like this, well, then don't vote for this,

(02:23:51):
right And I think that that's why I think this
is going nowhere. All right, last, let me do one
more or question here and ask check. And then I
got a little something I'd like to share with you guys,
longtime listener, first time writer. This comes from adib Audi writes.
With recent large settlements by the government, what's to stop
future administrations from using similar tactics for their own policy goals.

(02:24:14):
Does this risk creating a race to the bottom and
how policy gets implemented? I know you often advocate for
taking the high ground. How does that apply in moments
like this? Thank you well. I think good news here
is that we finally found the line right. And this
was sort of the point that I was making in
Wednesday's episode, and perhaps you wrote in this question before
you heard that we found the line on the weaponization

(02:24:39):
fund right, and it did in it. To me, it's
proof if Republicans that are uncomfortable with Trump's behavior want
to push back, they can. They can do it. We
just saw it. They made them shut down this fund.
Now they're still trying to keep the settlement, with this
ridiculous settlement that somehow the IRS never gets to look
into his taxes going backward ever again, and he somehow

(02:25:03):
settles some years long audit dispute, the audit and dispute
over his tax filings that he's been having with the
government for decades somehow just goes away. I think we
still have to deal with that situation. And if you
are following John Cornyan's Twitter feed. John Cornyan is ready
to stick a knife into this idea, and meaning Congress

(02:25:25):
can essentially proactively kill this deal completely rather than let
the they're trying to say, oh no, we're getting ready
of the fund, but they're trying to keep the one
small part of the deal on somehow giving him permanent
immunity on every tax on everything he's ever filed for
his taxes. Not immunity going forward for what it's worth,

(02:25:47):
but immunity. But I don't know how. I just don't
know how that's feasible there. So I guess what I'm
saying is is that I don't know if I have
to accept the premise of your question. And isn't that
good news that that in this case? I mean I
think that that was the point. Like if somehow that
became legal and I don't know where the hell we're going, right, Uh,

(02:26:10):
if that became legal and we had more and more
presidents manipulate you know, executive power this way, Uh, and
essentially you know, find this loophole to essentially steal money
from the tax payers. Yeah, this would be you know

(02:26:31):
what I really hope we all do collectively. And I
know what I'm hope. What I'm trying to do here
is Donald Trump has provided an incredible public service and
we ought to we ought to thank him for. And
what do I mean by that? He has been an
mri for loopholes in the government, in our system, in

(02:26:54):
the executive versus the legislative. And you know, whether it's
violation of quote unquote norms which turned out to be
just accepted practices that had no controlling legal authority to
borrow a phrase, and so we're he is, to me

(02:27:20):
made it. He's helped us find the things that we
need to codify to essentially prevent future presidents from abusing
the system the way he abused the system, whether it's pardons,
whether it's how the Department of Justice works. You know,
one of the reforms no one talks about that I
think is one hundred percent necessary. Is I am Now?

(02:27:43):
You know, I am never trusting another president to appoint
attorney general. And I know I say that, you know
it's you know, Donald, you know, Donald Trump, But I mean,
think about it. You know, we sort of look back
fondly at the idea that a president appointed his brother

(02:28:03):
attorney general. Boy, in hindsight, is one of the most
ridiculous things that we could have ever thought of, Like
imagine if Donald Trump tried to appoint his sister at
the time, who was alive was a federal a federal
judge to the Attorney general. Now I know that after

(02:28:27):
that was done, I think we passed a law to
try to prevent something like that from happening again. But
it's pretty clear to me that the risk of putting
the rule of law in the hands of a president
is a mistake. And because if they're going to if

(02:28:51):
they can essentially put their personal attorney there. I don't
know who Todd Blanche. I know Todd Blanche just draws
a paycheck from the United States tax He does not
work for the United States. He works for Donald Trump.
And he's made it almost crystal clear that he works
for Donald Trump. He should he is somehow he should

(02:29:12):
never have gotten to that position. Now, we counted on
norms to do that. We counted on checks and balances
in the legislative branch to prevent something like this. He's
the acting attorney General. I do not think he could
get confirmed to the permanent job for what it's worth
at this point in time, given the relationship you know,
Trump has fully burned his relationship with the Senate Republicans,

(02:29:34):
so you know he's going to get ideological things that
he wants to get done, but some of the ego
stuff he's going to have a much harder time getting
out of the Senate at this point for the rest
of his term, because it's not like the Senate numbers
are going to get better for Trump after twenty twenty six,
whether Republicans have control or not, it's going to be
a smaller majority. And so the point is that's just

(02:30:01):
another example. Trump is exposed a laundry list of reforms
we got to do to Essentially, it's like it's like
your house went through a storm and you found out, oh,
we have leaky windows here, we've got a roof that
we need new roof tiles over here, and we weren't
We didn't realize the house couldn't handle a heavy storm, right,

(02:30:25):
And you now got to you got to put in
stronger reinforcements. And Donald Trump has provided a roadmap for
reform in all of the ways that he has legally
abused the system to his own personal benefit. And we've
got a lot of work to do. And it begins
with dealing with you know, with preventing things like these

(02:30:46):
personal lawsuits that get settled with the government, that whole business.
But there's a lot of things, and like I said,
this is I am. I am bullish that we are
that over the next fifteen years we are going to
do a lot of reform. I'm not saying it's going
to happen this year, for in the next two years,
but I think we are. We are we are nearing

(02:31:08):
this breaking point where we're going to have the Samuel L.
Jackson reaction. Enough is enough. I'm sick and tired of
these gosh darn MF snakes on this MF plane. Right,
We're going to We're we're going to hit that moment
as voters. I've personally hit that moment. I'm just enough

(02:31:29):
is enough? Can we just you know, stop this race
to the bottom crap? And I think the voters are
going to get there. You know, it may not be
this cycle, maybe one more cycle, maybe it's a cycle
and a half, but you know, in the decade of
the thirties, we're going to start to really have a
major reform movement. Certainly, if you if we continue to

(02:31:49):
track the way we're tracking with sort of history rhyming
of the early twentieth century in the in the mid
to late nineteenth century. So someday we may thank Donald
Trump for showing us all the ways that we needed
to repair this democracy. Before I go, I want to

(02:32:17):
tell you the story of a remarkable woman, Dorothy Burns.
She happens to be my grandmother, and she passed away
this week at the age of ninety nine. She turned
ninety nine this February, and she never She had her

(02:32:39):
faculties to the very end. Her memory was terrific. She
never missed a birthday, whether it was her great grandkids,
her grandkids, her kids, friends, family. Her physical infrastructure started
was breaking down on much faster than her brain ever did.

(02:33:02):
And I always felt, you know it was she, you know,
to to know she couldn't She couldn't really move anymore.
Her osteoporosi has made that very difficult. She couldn't see
sud maclear degeneration, and she'd become fully blind over the
last five years. She was starting the loser hearing. But
she was a red Book on tape listener. My friend

(02:33:26):
Daniel Silva, the author, used to be so he she
loved Daniel Silva books, and she used to first read
the large print editions as her vision was going. And
then and God blessed Jamie, my friend Jamie Gingell and
Daniel Silva. They would always always make sure that they
had the right type of addition that my grandmother could read.

(02:33:48):
I just that always tickled me, and it always tickled
her as well. She lived in a and I just
think about the life she lived, born in nineteen twenty
seven and all the things she saw. She she went

(02:34:10):
to one year of college in what is now Illinois State,
but back then it was a teap the Illinois Teachers College,
as she used to say, my parents let me go there,
but I was to get my Mrs Degree as many
people back then used to call it. She met my grandmother, grandmother,
my grandfather. He came home from the war, went to

(02:34:33):
essentially a Jewish singles night at the temple, and met
my grandmother and the rest is history. I look, when
you're a fifty four year old man with a ninety
nine year old grandmother. I've known her a long time,
and I would say, you know, we're selling celebrating America

(02:34:57):
to fifty And it's made me think about the first
time I got to participate in a big national celebration
of a commemoration. And it was the one hundredth anniversary
of the Statue of Liberty. And this is the summer
of nineteen eighty six, and this is probably when my
grandmother and I bonded the most. My grandmother, like I said,
she so, you know, nineteen eighty six, I'm fourteen. Do

(02:35:21):
the math. She's fifty seven to fifty basically about my
age right now. And she was she was wanting to
take some dishes and some things to one of her children.
Her my aunt lives in New York City, and she
wanted to drive from Delray Beach, Florida, to New York
City during the summer. And she didn't want to and

(02:35:45):
nobody wanted her to drive alone. So I'm fourteen and
I we do this road trip, and we decide and she,
you know, we take our time. She is to do
the driving the whole time. Right, I'm fourteen, So she
wasn't going to do me. I'm doing I'd have done
it in one night, but you know, she we stopped.
We stopped in Savannah, and we spent a little extra

(02:36:06):
time and we did Williamsburg and we did We did
essentially what I would call the American Revolution Tour, all
up and down the East Coast and uh, any major
historical site that was within within driving range of I
ninety five we hit making our way, spent a lot

(02:36:31):
of time in Washington, d C. And uh. Back then,
I had a cousin here who and that's for what
it's worth, it's when I really got the bug about politics.
We were visiting my cousin at the time, he was
like twenty five, and we stayed with him. He had
this big old apartment in Adams Morgan, and he gave

(02:36:55):
me the sort of the tour of d C that
a twenty five year old would give. And man, I
just thought DC was amazing. And from then on I
was coming to school in Washington. I didn't know how
I was doing it, where I was going, but I
was coming there, and we did everything to get We
did this entire tour, all the Smithsonian stuff, and then

(02:37:17):
then we went to New York and we did the
U N and we did, you know, all of the
more historical stuff. I'm not a bit you know, fourteen
year old fourteen year old boys who loved baseball and
football at the time. Every time we stopped somewhere, I
was buying a pack of baseball carts. You know, this
is eighty three, eighty four, So I was obsessed, still
obsessed with collecting me Oh, I kidding, I'm obsessed with

(02:37:39):
baseball cards today, right. So we didn't she didn't. We
didn't do a lot of the art museums, although my
aunt did make me go to the go to the
go to the mat and then we enjoyed the amazing
it's the frankly, the greatest fire display outside of Washington,

(02:38:02):
DC that I've ever seen to this day was the
Statue of Liberty celebration in nineteen eighty six. And now
we drove, drove back, but it was this was it
was interesting. You know, my memories of my grandmother as
a little kid, she was she was not the person
to get on the floor and do that type of stuff.

(02:38:25):
But the second I was reading books, she was. She
read all the time. She was somebody that knew a
little bit about a lot of things because she was
constantly reading. And after my grandfather died, she was constantly traveling.
She loved cruises and she did all sorts of cruises,

(02:38:46):
and she was always trying to not She didn't go
on a cruise to relax. She wanted a cruise to
get to somewhere she wanted to see whether it was.
She did a freighter cruise. She didn't want to spend
twenty hours on an airplane, so she wanted to go
see Australia. So she spent thirty days on a freighter
cruise with nine other senior citizens and a crew and

(02:39:06):
played bridge for thirty days and read a bunch of
books and literally sailed the seas thirty days to Australia.
Three weeks in the country thirty days back when I
think she left and came and went out of Jacksonville,
if if I remember, and she was just what I

(02:39:30):
think what my grandmother passed on to me was this
sort of curiosity. She always wanted to know more. She
wanted to see the taj Mahall, so she figured out
a way to get to India to see the taj Mahll.
She wanted to see the Pyramadge. She is somebody she
got to check off. She did. You know, this is
what's remarkable. At ninety nine, you know she was she said,

(02:39:51):
she goes I'm not saving any money. I'm not here
to pass on money. You know. She wanted to live
these experiences, uh and see the world, and she did.
And I used to always get a T shirt from
wherever she wherever she came from. That and that's that

(02:40:13):
was my grandmother through my teenage years. So fast forward
a little bit, and you know, I'm starting to have
a little bit of success in the late nineties, and
I want to I want to get my grandmother a
fun gift for her. I think at the time it
probably was her seventieth birthday. This is twenty seven, Yeah,

(02:40:34):
right around her seventieth birthday. It's actually probably it was
probably it was probably for her seventy fifth birthday. I
got her computer and one program, a genealogy program. Well,
I'm not sure if the rest of my family loves
that I did this or hates that I did this,
but my grandmother for the next ten years became essentially

(02:40:58):
an expert at genieology, and she threw herself into it,
and she made family trees for all every every aspect
of my family, of my family lines on my father's side,
on my mother's side. She did it for my wife
on her father's side and on her mother's side, and
she did it for her in laws and and anybody
that asked. Frankly, and she she got so into it.

(02:41:24):
She would show up and do research at the Mormon
temples because the Mormons, as you know, have some of
the best uh uh research centers when it comes to
genealogy records that you can find. And you know, she
just she learned the you know, I knew that I
had a grandmother that would figure it, would would sort

(02:41:44):
of take to the Internet, and she really she was
a great Web one point zero user. Unfortunately, as her
vision went, you know, she she the technology that allow
for a lot more verbal to be able to do
a lot more of this communication just straight verbally and

(02:42:05):
even like text to type and all this stuff really
didn't quite come into time for her to take the
best advantage of it. But even in these last few
years where she couldn't see it all, we had set
up her iPhone so that it would be essentially automatically
answer always on speak her phone and put it this
way to allowed her and she would just say, call Chuck,

(02:42:26):
or call Sherry, or call Janet, and she was able
to she would communicate like I'll get out. And the
other thing that she was incredibly good at is just
she was always finding family with this genealogy. Sometimes you
were like, you know, hey, I'm going to Charleston, South

(02:42:47):
Carolina for some work, Grandma, and she goes, well, you know,
we have a cousin that lives so and so I
found this cousin. I didn't know them, but I've since
called them. They helped me fill out this part of
the family tree of an in law that was like
to and You're just like, Okay, I'm not going to
go look up that relative, Grandma. Sorry. What she she
always did. She was incredibly good at making friends with

(02:43:10):
people she didn't know. She just had a couple and
so look, this all just happened recently, meaning in the
last few hours, so I'm not on a lot of sleep,
but I wanted to be able to share something about her.
I think her great gifts was her curiosity. Was her
was her openness to how quickly she would make somebody

(02:43:35):
a close friend. She loved getting to know new people,
and it was part of that curiosity in her. There's
a part of me that's always lamented. Was she born
thirty years too soon? You know she she was stroves,
you know, and she she loved the fact that she

(02:43:58):
was able to do jobs work when she was younger,
but not everybody, and at that time that was not
seen as acceptable that she would work outside the home.
And and there was I've always gotten the sense there
was some tension there, and it was always a part
of me. I was lucky. I've had two grandmothers who
had in my heart of hearts, you think, you know,

(02:44:20):
they didn't get to live the life they deserve to
have simply because of the way society treated women as
second class citizens in their jair in most of their lifespan.
But I just wanted to share that with you guys's
she was a force of nature. And you know, when

(02:44:43):
you make it to ninety nine, you never think you're
going to lose them. And yet at the same time,
you know, her body was breaking down. Her brain was
all there, but her body was breaking down. And so
I think she's at peace. I think she it's no
more pain. And I just thank her for giving me

(02:45:05):
that curiosity, giving me that setting an example that hey,
you can always make new friends, and she did it
almost all the way to the end of her life.
One of the great gifts. So thanks for humoring me
here and listening to me sharing my memories of my grandmother,

(02:45:25):
Dorothy Bernstein ninety nine years old. And with that, don't
forget to call your grandmother if your grandmother's stile around,
and your grandfather and your mom and your dad, all right,
and I'll see in about seventy two hours

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