Full Episode - Bari Weiss Burns The Credibility Of CBS News + The Media Meltdown: AI, Billionaires, and the Collapse of Trust - The Chuck ToddCast

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
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that code. Well, hello there, and Happy Christmas Eve. That's

(01:54):
when this episode is dropping. I am recording on Tuesday,
est of us, right, so it's Grievance Day actually when
I'm actually recording this, but you'll be hearing it for
the informal start of the Christmas holiday season with Christmas Eve.
So I appreciate it. I'm Chuck Todd another episode of

(02:15):
the Chuck Podcast. If I hadn't said that, get that away,
I appreciate it. It's been I have had a blast
these last eight months. We got started, I believe on
April second was our first episode, and this has been
just such a joy. So I appreciate it. And you know,
I've scratched itches that I've always wanted to scratch in

(02:37):
a semi public form, including all of the various sports
updates that I enjoyed doing. So let me give you
a rundown of this episode, a little bit of reaction
of some headlines over the last forty eight hours. I
want to get to a little bit on Epstein, a
little bit on the CBS Mets with sixty Minutes, but
a sort of larger view of sort of taking a
step back and what has changed in our politics and

(02:59):
what actually hasn't changed in the last year, and I
want to go through that a little bit. My interview
is with somebody who I just really enjoy talking with,
Mike Pesca. He is the just List former Slate. Many
of you are probably listeners. He is somebody that has
I really have appreciated how he's tried to attack news
of the day, current events. He has really tried to

(03:23):
attack these stories from the outside looking in, from a
more detached way, and we dig into the future of journalism,
we dig into what's going on at CBS, though we
our conversation happened before this specific incident was sixty minutes,
just to let you know, and then we spend a
lot of time on the on what is this sort

(03:43):
of uncomfortable moment we're in in the gamification of everything, right,
particularly sports and the prediction markets, and where this is headed.
So in general, I think it's a great conversation. By
the way, if you don't subscribe to the Just List,
you should. It's a lot of fun. Even the free
version is a lot of fun. He's really good at
sort of finding those stories that you're not going to

(04:08):
get in the headline newsletters that you subscribe to from
a news site. Right, it's that next story that you're
like back in the old days for us old guys here,
it was when you actually read a full newspaper and
you let it. Oh, I never would have sought that
headline out, but I'm glad I read the story. That
is what I think Mike's true gift is when it

(04:30):
comes to informing informing folks on that. I will do
some questions, we will have more mail bag that you
guys have just a lot of fun and smart questions.
And then I'm going to do a little twist on
my little sports page here a little bit which is
frankly trying to help you have the conversation during the
holidays with the person that you don't want to talk

(04:52):
about current events with. But you figure, I got to
be a little smarter about sports, so you can have
fun little storylines where you can just ask a question,
let other people talk. But if it's a way to
sort of you know, how to change a conversation, how
to look more fluent in a sports conversation that maybe
you don't want to remember, we're going to be We're
gonna have some tremendous I mean, there's nothing I love

(05:13):
more than these next two weeks because on a random
Tuesday afternoon, you flip on ESPN and there's a bowl game.
So this is the part. As much as these meaningless
bowl games are becoming more meaningless, all the time when
you're at home with relatives and you need that distraction
of noise in your gatherings. There's nothing like throwing a

(05:35):
football game on. So even these bad Netflix games that
the NFL for Netflix, right, they'd like to swap those
out or get a refund for these, right since they
barely had any playoff teams eventually in their matchups. But
so that's how I will orchestrate that sports update. But
let me just kick off a little bit with this

(05:56):
mess that is sixty Minutesry Weiss and the controversy around it.
For me, this is a welcome to welcome to the
NFL moment for Barry Weiss. Look, she is not the
first news executive brought in to run a television network
who has no clue how television works. And I say

(06:19):
this not trying to take a shot at her being snarky,
but this is her inexperience as a newsleader sort of
to me shown through here from what we know, first
of all, not understanding sort of the intricacies of what
it takes to put together a television piece. I thought
it was fascinating. There was a little bit of new snobbery,
which is something that I used to have until I

(06:41):
got into the TV business. But one of her critiques
of the piece was that all of this was reported
in the New York Times, as if if the New
York Times reported it, you shouldn't bother sharing it with
the rest of the world. Maybe the whole point of
why she started the free press, right, the whole point
of you know, it's sort of we're trying to broaden

(07:02):
the aperture of news consumption in a news consumption in America, right,
not narrow it down. So, yes, New York Times readers
might have known this story, what about everybody else? No
offense to New York Times readers. I'm one of them.
I'm a subscriber. But it's a very narrow set of Americans.
It's a it's an influential set of Americans. The New

(07:23):
York Times has influence, and there is a reminder that
when The New York Times reports something, eventually other news
organizations are going to do with their own version of
the story and making a putting a vision. Putting a
story that appeared in the New York Times, but putting
giving visual elements to it can be sometimes more powerful

(07:44):
than the original story itself, so that critique really struck
me as her not understanding what her mission actually is
at a news division. Right, is you there to broadly
inform everybody that is there, or are you there to
make an assumption that people already know certain things? And
that to me is a bit of a yellow flag

(08:06):
on her news instincts. Now, she may have just said
that as part of an email that she knew to
go public. Obviously, what doesn't look good for her on
this is the fact that she missed four screenings of
this piece and then weighed in very late, basically less
than forty eight hours than when the piece was going

(08:27):
to air. So it rings of Oh, she got a
whole bunch of complaints from people inside the administration, and
there were a few complaints that she thought ran pretty true,
like hey, they didn't have a voice in the piece,
or they didn't have this. And I think she's right
that it could use a voice. It certainly would improve

(08:49):
the piece. But when you come in that late in
the process, it certainly looks like you've let outsiders manipulate
the process, whether or not that's true, and it's her
timing now, So I think a few things here. Let's
take her at face value. I don't think she wants
to be seen as a political pawn. Okay, so I

(09:09):
have some of you may have a very snarky view
of her that she just wants to be an apparatic.
I don't believe that. I believe she thinks she can
do this better. What I do believe is she does
not understand how the television network works. She may very
well want to change how network television works and how
news gathering works. I think God bless her. Okay, I've

(09:32):
certainly had my share of inexperience. I dealt with my
share of inexperienced news executives. The ones that came in
and experienced, who wanted to who were good, actually spent
time trying to get to know parts of the news
division that they knew themselves they wanted to get rid of.
But you actually have to try to work and figure
out how they were. The bad news executives that I

(09:53):
dealt with, and I had quite a few of them,
I would say about half figured it out the right
way and half figured it out the wrong. About half
of them came in thinking they already knew how to
do this, and they were going to come and they
were there to break eggs, and they weren't going to
bother worrying about institutional norms, etc. But you're going to

(10:15):
get pushback, right, You're going to get resistance when you
have a lot of particularly at a broadcast news network
where there's a lot of really smart, talented people who
frankly probably would be more qualified to run the news division,
but they're on air personalities, and you know, they're not
just to be treated like actors in a sitcom. And

(10:37):
there's sort of two types of news executives I came across.
There was the news executive that assumed people that were
on air just read the reporting of other people's work,
and then there were those that actually respected the fact
that the people that could narrate a story could also
work a story behind the scenes as well. And so

(11:00):
this rings of somebody who just didn't fully understand how
the system worked. Now, this is where you can't you
have to you cannot discount the outside atmosphere that was
developing over the last month. You had President Trump twice
complain about sixty minutes pieces that he didn't like, and

(11:23):
he said the new owners haven't made a difference. It
was in some ways when he said nice things about
the Netflix bid to acquire Warner Brothers. It was almost
implied he didn't. He's mad at the Ellisons anyway, type
of mindset. So you have the fact that he's already
complained about two specific pieces, the Marjorie Taylor Green one
from a couple weeks ago being the most prominent. Then

(11:45):
you have the situation where the Ellisons are desperate to
see if they can get their hands on all of
Warner Brothers. They're trying to up their bid. They're trying
to make their access to government approval for their bid
as a sweetener to the Warner Brothers shareholders in order
to say, hey, look, Netflix is going to have a

(12:05):
harder time with this. Well, in order for that to happen,
they've got to appease this administration. So, whether this stuff
is having an impact or not, there is a perception
that it is going to and there's certainly that perception
could turn into questions that come from Democrats in Congress.
The point is, a smart leader tries to get ahead

(12:28):
of this somebody who and I have no doubt that
Barry Wis is a smart person here, but she just
how do you not you know, there's really only one
program that CBS News is going to be judged on
as far as anybody is concerned, right, critics of CBS News,
supporters of CBS News, critics of the President, supporters of

(12:50):
the President. It's sixty minutes, So how are you not
more involved in understanding every piece that they're working on.
So to weigh in as late as she did to
kill the peace just screams of outside interference and the
fact that she didn't see that coming. Either maybe she
did see that coming and she had no choice in

(13:10):
the matter, or she didn't see that coming and she
was a bit unprepared for the situation, which would tell
me that's a bit naive. Look, there's a few things
that you that I think are going to be fair
questions to raise. Can she run CBS News and the
free press at the same time? Is is she over?
I mean, CBS News is not a large operation compared

(13:31):
to NBC News, CBS News and a lot a large
operation compared to ABC News. It's it's a much smaller operation, So,
you know, so to me, not being able to be
on top of what they're producing. They don't have a
twenty four hour news channel. Yes, they have a CBS
Digital But her not being on top of this, you
have to ask, is she distracted by other stuff? Why

(13:54):
hasn't she figuring this out? Why hasn't Why didn't she
know what was happening inside these stories quickly and know
the rhythm of it. So I think it exposes Look,
I think there's a there's plenty that we don't know,
but she is. You know, she's now in a really

(14:16):
rough position. She's lost the trust of the journalists at
the single most important institution inside of CBS News in
that's sixty minutes. Anything they do now is going to
be seen through a political lens, no matter what that
they're appeasing one sided. They're in the worst of all
worlds now, And you know, I go back to to

(14:40):
this simple inexperience, and that's what this screams up. Look,
I could there's a there's another part of me that's
could easily be celebrating this moment. Once again, corporate owned,
corporate owned media is going to let you down. I

(15:00):
did not think this was the case, but this is
now the case in the Trump era, where these parent
companies do not care whether their journalistic institutions have credibility
with the whitest swath of Americans or not, that they
only want to cater to one side politically, and they
want to be a part of essentially influencing the country

(15:23):
rather than reflecting and reporting on the country. So yeah,
there's a part of me that would love to sit
here and gloat and just say, look, this is yet
another reason you're going to have some skepticism of this
corporate media structure that we've seen. I will be honest
with you, I'm skeptical. I'm mostly impressed with Washington Post reporting.

(15:49):
I'm very skeptical of its editorial page. It feels like
it's been it is not an honest editorial page, that
it is essentially manipulated with a point of view that
the owner that somebody wants to appease in owner or
a piece somebody. You now are going to have skepticism
about what CBS News does. I already know that there.
We've already seen Disney do what it did with the

(16:11):
George Stephanopolis situation, calling into question their support of ABC News.
We've seen what Comcast did with MSNBC, trying to spin
it out and get rid of it and separating it
out from NBC. You can look at that through the
prism of their just looking to appease and playcate the
current administration. So we are in a situation where all

(16:37):
of these stories have added to the public's distrust. And
it's frustrating to me because I many people look at
me and still see me as a quote member of
so called mainstream media. I promise you I I tried
really hard. I spoke out when I thought it was necessary.

(16:58):
So I know that moment that Sharon I'll Foncie. You know,
you make that decision. It's not an easy decision because
you're never you know, her career is never going to
be the same at CBS. You know, we'll see does
she out last Barry Weiss or does Berry Weis's outlast
her on that front. I have no idea what her
contract situation is or anything like that, But ultimately, executives

(17:22):
don't like to be shown up by their employees, and
so eventually that's you know, but at the end of
the day, you feel the need to stick up for
the journalists and the organization. And this is what makes
when you're a publicly traded company owning a journalist, journalistic institution.
You have a choice to make, right are you going
to stand by? Journalism is not meant to be popular.

(17:45):
I always say this, journalists are not meant to be
if you are doing this to be popular. And this
is why this whole, in this whole algorithmic driven nature
of our news consumption really bothers me because it it
it it's fuses popularity with news consumption, which is a
huge mistake for journalism. If you're doing your journalism based

(18:06):
on what you think is going to be popular, you're
not going to do good journalism because you're going to
be constantly worried about what an audience thinks, either an
audience of one, whether in the case of the White House,
or a larger audience in the case if you're a
partisan news channel MS NOW or Fox News, where you
don't want to quote alienate your viewers and alienate that
the audience that you have. I think this is a

(18:27):
huge concern with YouTube influences. I think it's a huge
concern with some substackers where you have essentially audience capture
on this front. So, if you're going to be in
the journalistic space and you want to be a journalist,

(18:47):
grow a thick skin and don't worry about being popular
or not. Over time and honest, straightforward, no bullshit talking
journalists is going is going to accumulate trust. Trust is
more important than popularity. That I promise you trust is
more important popular. So at the end of the day,

(19:08):
that's what I think about. I'd rather I'd rather tell
you honest information that make you feel good when I
don't think what you want to hear to feel good
is actually accurate, you know, do I want to present
it in such a way where it's easy to consume,
where it isn't doesn't feel like your own personal points

(19:30):
of view are being attacked when you're hearing information that
runs counter to your beliefs. Yes, I think there are
better ways to present information. I think there are more
detached ways to present information. I think one of the
things that we collectively didn't do well and we let hey, look,

(19:51):
Donald Trump can make anybody emotionally. You know, go Jesus,
you know that. But you got to do your best
sometimes to check yourself and try to detach yourself from
certain things. Right, if you really want to be a
referee like journalists, where you're just calling it like you

(20:12):
see it, pure in something and at the end of
the day, that's what I'm doing here. So that's why
I'm saying it. In some ways, if you're in the
independent space, you know nothing like the self destruction of
more corporate owned media like CBS News as being helpful
to the cause. But I will tell you this, there's
a reason why independent media is growing the way it

(20:33):
is growing because I think you have corporations that don't
care about their news divisions anymore, and at the end
of the day, they will use them if it helps
them for their business, and they will discard them the
second they become they interfere with their business. And look,
I get it. They have a fetishare responsibility their shareholders,
not to you. The American public ultimately independent own journalistic operations.

(20:57):
I do think have more more concern about the public
as a whole than any donor any subscriber, any shareholder.
And so in that sense, yesterday was just another bad
day for legacy media and another good day for the

(21:19):
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(23:10):
of the obsession of independent media, I would say the
Epstein files are certainly falling into that category. And look,
we're seeing, as I outlined to you a couple of
days ago, you know, none of us should be shocked
that the Justice Department front loaded all things Bill Clinton
on day one and are going to release whatever it

(23:33):
is that might be damning to Donald Trump much closer
to Christmas. Okay, but look, everybody's still pouring through it.
This is you know, I have my you know, I
don't think. I don't think this is going to somehow
change minds and what people believe regarding Epstein. But I

(23:56):
do think it What it has done to create division
inside the Trump coalition certainly makes it extraordinarily politically relevant.
But the fact that on Tuesday, on Festivus Day, the
airing of the Grievance Day. The Justice Department put out
the following statement after they released Another Earth, and I'm

(24:18):
just going to read it to you as a whole,
because the fact that the Department of Justice put out
this statement is both laughable and notable. Here it is
the Department of Justice is officially released nearly thirty thousand
more pages of documents related to Jeffrey Epstein. Some of
these documents contain untrue and cessationalist claims made against President

(24:39):
Trump that were submitted to the FBI right before the
twenty twenty election. To be clear that the claims are
unfounded and false, and if they had a shred of credibility,
they certainly would have been weaponized against President Trump already. Nevertheless,
out of our commitment to the law and transparency, the
DOJ is releasing these documents with the legally required protections
for Epstein's victims. The year began with a huge opportunity

(25:01):
for Trump on this front. Excuse me, no, that was
one other line that I had written for myself. So
there you have it. The Department of Justice put out
a statement that sounded like it came from Trump's defense attorney.
Oh wait, Trump's former defense attorney, is it the Department
of Justice as a deputy attorney general. The point is

(25:24):
there's a lot of today. The release on Tuesday is
a reminder that there's a lot more damaging allegations and
inn window and so we say unresolved what would you
call them? Sort of unclear rationales for why Donald Trump

(25:46):
spent so much time with Jeffrey Epstein on his plane
and things like this, and the various accusations that came
with him. But it's interesting because think about this. In theory,
everything in that's been released should fall under Hey, some
of these documents contain untrue, in cessationalist claims. It made

(26:08):
against President Clinton, some of them made against Alan Dershowitz,
against Prince Right. Not every allegation made against any of
these folks, not all of them have been proven. But
it's notable that they only single out Donald Trump, which
tells you it was a statement for an audience of one.
But in some ways the note itself actually perhaps and

(26:32):
maybe this was by design, and maybe I'm naive on
this one, but actually the statement oddly says, Okay, today's
the day you're going to see a lot more Trump stuff,
and it's not going to be a great day for
Donald Trump. But I do think this is one of
those stories that is more of an obsession with people

(26:54):
that are obsessed with this story, and it's hard to
imagine it's going to change the larger narrative, but clearly
it rattles Donald Trump. And that brings me to before
I get to the conversation with Mike Pesco, where we
sort of talk about a lot of things that I've
already mentioned now, future of journalism, independent media versus corporate

(27:14):
owned media, things like that, it sort of step back
a little bit and think about how the year began
and think about the opportunity, and it goes back to,
you know, and why I think this has been such
a disastrous year politically for Donald Trump and the Republicans
because it began with such an opportunity. He came into

(27:39):
office within some ways, more of a mandate than he
had gotten in his first election in twenty sixteen. He
had extraordin there was an extraordinarily unpopular president he was following.
That's a big difference in twenty sixteen, right, Barack Obama
was a popular president personally in some way, probably you know,

(28:00):
he left with a pretty high job rating and a
pretty high personal rating. This case, right, he's following a
president with a pretty low job rating in a pretty
low personal rating, you know, the way Biden laughed really ugly.
Just a terrible last six months being pushed out of
his of office, just looking weak. And then of course

(28:23):
the return of Donald Trump. In some ways he his
fingerprints are as much on Trump's ability to get back
here than any other. So the point was Trump came
in with a huge opportunity, sort of like Ronald Reagan
in nineteen eighty. You know, people just found the Jimmy
Carter presidency unpopular. They were ready to turn the page.
So the opportunity for a honeymoon was big. And if

(28:46):
you look at sort of frankly, I think Joe Biden
had the same opportunity. And it is interesting to me
that Donald Trump's second term and Joe Biden's one term
in the first year of their presidency pretty much much
are mirror images of each other. They both had sort
of one issue that sort of quickly severed whatever mild

(29:12):
hope voters, at least swing voters had that the presidency
could be somewhat successful right with Joe Biden, it was
the Afghanistan withdrawal, and for Donald Trump, it was Liberation Day.
And there's no doubt Liberation Day was sort of the
first hit and he never recovered from Liberation Day because
the economy didn't really the economy just kept getting sort

(29:37):
of uneven and those that were not doing well continued
to not doing well. Those that were doing well could
continue to do well thanks to the superinvestments of AI.
So the opportunity Trump had at the start of his
term versus he where he is now, I think you
should and at this point it becomes it becomes hard

(30:00):
to recover without sort of an outsized event to sort
of change the narrative. Right. And when I say outside event,
you know, to me, it's it's outside even the broad
brushes of what you might be predicting, right, it's just
something you know, out of the ordinary. The way the
pandemic hit that it was not on anybody's BINGO card,

(30:21):
and it ended up exposing Trump's inability to be a
leader in a moment of crisis, and that, you know,
it's it is why I think he lost that first reelection.
So I think when you look at sort of the
big picture here, he really he had an opportunity. He
had an opportunity to solidify his imprint on the conservative movement.

(30:47):
He had a chance to sort of keep Democrats sort
of fraying. He could have done some things that could
have potentially splintered the Democratic coalition. A good leader would
have actually looked for Democrats, you know, he had very
small majorities, and he'd have tried to find some Democratic
allies more as an attempt to try to splinter the party,

(31:10):
you sort of break people off to try to work
with him, And he chose not to do any of
that right. Instead, he came in a lot of retribution.
It's clear that that was much more front and center
for him. The pardons, the naming everything after himself, the bulldozing.

(31:30):
I mean, in that sense, he's he's made it really hard.
He's made it really hard to look at this as
anything other than through the prism of his own narcissism.
And the irony is that had he been sort of
a leader with a vision, had he cared about sort

(31:52):
of building a Republican party that could last beyond his years,
he would have i think, governed a lot differently. In
the first six months. How they you know, he was
so anxious. And maybe this has to do with him
feeling that he waited too long to do things in
the first term, and maybe it's mortality getting to him

(32:15):
and he's afraid that, you know, he doesn't have a
full four years. I don't know what it is, but
how he's gone about this where he's obsessed with quickly
putting his name on things, quickly being able to get notoriety,
desperate for a Nobel Peace Prize, desperate to see his
name associated with some sort of legacy thing like putting.

(32:36):
You know, right now people are up in arms about
the renaming of the Kennedy Center after him. Remember he
did this with the US Institute of Peace, a institute
that he defunded and tried to get rid of, but
instead slapped his name on it so that he could
have the words peace and Donald Trump in the same sentence.
So when you look at this year in total, when

(33:00):
you look at him with a job rating in the
very low forties, rating on the economy in the load
to mid thirties, it is a reminder that Donald Trump
did not win the twenty twenty four election. Kamala Harris
and Joe Biden lost the twenty twenty four election, just
like Joe Biden made the mistake of believing he won
in twenty twenty when that was not the case. Donald

(33:22):
Trump lost in twenty twenty, just like Hillary Clinton lost
in twenty sixteen. All Right, obviously, what do I mean
by that? Well, the voters knew who they didn't want
as president, and the voters were willing to roll the
dice with an unknown or roll the dice with what
they thought was a known quantity the second time. Right
the first time, Hey, let's disrupt things. We kind of

(33:43):
know what a Hillary Clinton presidency is going to look like.
We have no idea what a Trump president's going to
look like. And we're kind of in a cranky, grumpy mood.
This economy kind of sucks. I wish it were better.
I don't like this. I don't like that. I certainly
don't want to return to some sort of Clinton status quo. Okay,
so you understood that. Then incomes, you know, the pandemic happens.
You're like, oh my god, we're in a moment of crisis.

(34:05):
This guy can't make the trains run on time. And
it was just like, can you just give me a
functional bureaucrat. Joe Biden thirty plus years experience, seemed like
that functional Democrat to just make sure we can get
some COVID shots, make sure we can, you know, keep
our allies our allies, and go from there. And now

(34:27):
we see that that was the case. So I do
think when you see the political standing of the president,
you see where Democrats look like a resurgent party, because remember,
this is a party that's still very unpopular. This is
a party where swing voters don't really trust Democratic leaders,
don't really trust even some democratic stances, particularly on some

(34:50):
social issues, but they don't like the party in power, right,
they don't like what they have, And so we have
been voting, I would argue since to nine. Right, the
last time we voted for a president was Barack Obama
in twenty oh eight. Everything else has been more of

(35:10):
a vote against type of election. Twenty ten a vote
against sort of Democrats expanding the size of governments. Right,
the Tea Party surge got fired up that wing of
the party, Republicans win the House, but it was a
vote against, right, it was a vote against the Democrats.
Twenty twelve many ways was not an easy re election

(35:31):
for Barack Obama when you looked at the state of
the economy, well, they did a successful job saying, oh, yeah,
you're not gonna want met Romney's economy. You're not gonna
want met Romney deciding these policies. You're going to be
better off with Barack Obama policies than you will Bet
Romney policies. And they painted him as an outsourcer, as
a guy in the pocket of China, and that played
well in the Midwest. It's also the last time Democrats

(35:53):
were able to carry Iowa, Ohio, in addition to Michigan, Pennsylvania,
and Wisconsin. Not a small deal. But again, I look
at twenty twelve, not necessarily as a vote for but
really when you look at how he carried those Midwestern states,
he was not promoting himself. They were attack ads against

(36:14):
Mettroney twenty fourteen, Another vote against election twenty sixteen, Another
vote against election twenty eighteen, another vote against election right
twenty twenty another vote against election twenty twenty two is
the weird one where it was mostly an electorate that
wanted to put a check on Biden, but you had
an awful sort of slate of Republican candidates that minimize

(36:40):
the gains that they should have made. And now it
gave some false hope to Joe Biden. You had a
Biden white House that totally misinterpreted what happened in twenty
twenty two and fully not appreciating that that was just
a case of really bad, really bad Republican primary outcomes.
It wasn't as if the country was saying no, no, no, no,

(37:03):
we want more Biden cow Bell. That was not what
twenty twenty two was about. And of course now we
know twenty twenty four was a vote against elections. So
here we are again after one year of Trump, where
he had an opportunity and I would argue he had
a you know, he you know, no honeymoon periods very
long anymore in American politics. The war information ecosystem works.

(37:24):
But he had a good three months and Liberation Day
in April just destroyed any hope he had. And he's
been he's not really recovered from that moment. You know,
even the good economic news that he gets, like the
recent news about the GDP over the summer, when you
look at the details, you realize, oh, most Americans aren't

(37:47):
benefiting from that expanded GDP. It is really about the
investments in AI. So look, it certainly sets up what
appears to be another vote again election, which we could,
you know, argue, now this will be we're going to
hit what is nearly twenty years of this, right, our
eighteenth year sort of our let's see here ten twelve, fourteen, sixteen, eighteen, twenty,

(38:14):
twenty two, twenty four be our ninth straight national election
where basically the voters that decide who wins or loses
not about the two bases, but those of us that
live in the messy middle. You're going essentially to the
polls with a vote against rather than something to vote for,

(38:39):
and that our collective I understand some of you saying no, no, no, no,
I always vote for an individual candidate. Yeah, but it's
binary choice. Right, Ultimately we have a binary choice, and
that we're having our ninth straight election where we're we've
been living in this a generation of a political recession.
And you know, I would argue this, You know I
can make the case this goes back at least through

(39:04):
even in two thousand, right, we were starting to see
the first pieces of this. So look, I want to
spend a little bit of Next week, I'll have a
I'm gonna have a podcast. We're gonna do another We're
going to two this week with also a special edition.
I'm gonna you know, if it's if you haven't heard it,
it's new to you, as I used to say an NBC.

(39:25):
But I'm gonna re up the Jasmine Crockett interview I
did a few months ago, with a little bit of
a little bit of a Texas introduction to it later
this week. But next week I'll have another new episode
and we'll do a little bit of sort of where
the two parties are going. But I think, just briefly,
what we're watching I touched on it before. I do

(39:46):
think we're seeing Trump's coalition. As I've said for the
last three or four months, it is the coalition is cracking.
The cracks are showing. Now they're not just cracks anymore, right,
They're chasms in some cases. I think you're going to
see more of this. I think what we saw in Heritage,
this is sort of this is going to show itself

(40:07):
up more in twenty eight than it is in twenty six.
I mean sure, I think you'll see some hints of
this divide inside the right in the Texas Senate primary.
You'll see some of this perhaps in the Georgia Senate primary,
but for the most part, Republicans have avoided They're going

(40:27):
to avoid some messy primaries. So most of this infighting
is going to continue to take place online, continue to
take place in podcasts, and really start to ramp up
as the presidential candidates of twenty eight start to start
to rise, whether it's Cruise Pants Paul, all three of
them very much sort of coming at the mega coalition

(40:52):
in different ways, each wanting a piece of it, but
very critical to some parts of it. Right, and how
that can continues to splinter, I think is going to
be an animating force inside the Republican Party for the
next easily for the next two years. And I do
think you see that the online MAGA world, right, this

(41:14):
world of Eric Kirk, Meghan Kelly, Ben Shapiro. You know
some of you that listen to this podcast, maybe you
know these names are familiar. You may see him online.
It strikes me as this is, as I said in
an earlier podcast, that this is the rights version of
the groups. Right. You have democratic politicians who were afraid

(41:34):
to sort of connect with voters in the middle because
they didn't want to alienate certain groups. I think it's
pretty clear the Biden White House in the first two
years totally mismanaged the border, put restraints on Ali Mayorcis
and dhs from being able to do their job the
way they did it. May Orcus did with Jay Johnson
during the second Trump second Obama term because they didn't

(41:55):
want to offend the groups when the voters, you know,
were the ones that were making this this quote unquote,
not the groups, right. Well, I think now you're seeing
something similar happen in magaworld where they're where you have
Republicans seem to be more concerned about what's being said online,
who's saying it online, appeasing some online activists, rather than

(42:17):
actually talking to the voters. And I think that they
are detaching themselves from the mainstream of political debate by
being so consumed about what's being said at a turning
Point convention or what's being said on a Megan Kelly
podcast or any of this stuff. And like how the
I think the Democrats got consumed with appeasing progressive groups

(42:40):
and social justice groups at the expense of alienating swing
voters in the suburbs and the excerps. I think you're
seeing the same thing start to take place on the right.
But make no mistake, the Democrats also, there's a chance
they're having their own tea party moment. And you know,
the twenty ten midterms for Republicans were a huge success

(43:04):
on the House side of things, but they came up
shortened Senate races because of their own infighting. They had
primary challenges. They had sort of this tea party surge
which sort of was sort of Maga before we were
calling it. Maga was challenging the establishment wing of the
Republican Party, and it upset you know, you had the
which nominee. You know, at one point, you had the

(43:25):
bad nominee in Indiana. You had the bad nominee in
Nevada against Harry Reid. Right, you had all those things
both in the ten cycle and the twelve cycle, which
held them back. You can't help but wonder if the
Democrats are going through the same thing that they have.
You know, the quote, is there a liberal tea party
moment happening? Right? It's a little cliche to say it
that way, but there's definitely something. There's something happening here,

(43:46):
right the establishment of the Democratic Party doesn't have a
lot of credit, credibility with Democratic voters right now, doesn't
have a lot of credibility with Democratic donors right now,
and that's leading to what appears to be some terrible
primaries that are probably going to nominate less electable nominees,
whether it's Texas Senate, Michigan Senate, Main Senate. Those would

(44:08):
be catastrophic, right and you could see Democrats end up
in a similar scenario situation that Republicans were in twenty ten.
They went a ton of seats in the House and
actually come up short in the Senate. You know, they
only win, you know, only they come up one or
two seats short from winning the majority, just like Senate

(44:31):
Republicans did in twenty ten. So, you know, it's interesting.
Twenty twenty four, you know, sort of ended with a
divided Democratic Party and a more united Republican Party than
we'd seen since the beginning of the Trump era. Twenty

(44:52):
twenty five ends still with a divided Democratic Party, though
with a unifying force that is Trump for the midterms,
but the divisions are still pretty pretty out. But you
now have a pretty divided Republican Party and that is
what we're dealing with as we kick off for twenty
twenty six. There's actually a bunch of the other small

(45:15):
things I wanted to get to here, but you know what,
I've gone forty minutes here. It's Christmas Eve, and as
I'm sure some of you want to get back to
your family, others of you are out for that walk,
taking a few minutes with yourself, going when is Chuck
going to get to his college football up date? Well,
let's get to the Mike Pesca interview and then we'll
talk some sports on letters. There's a reason results matter

(45:41):
more than promises, just like there's a reason Morgan and
Morgan is America's largest injury law firm. For the last
thirty five years, they've recovered twenty five billion dollars for
more than half a million clients. It includes cases where
insurance companies offered next to nothing, just hoping to get
away with paying as little as possible, and Morgan fought
back ended up winning millions. In fact, in Pennsylvania, one

(46:03):
client was awarded twenty six million dollars, which was a
staggering forty times the amount that the insurance company originally offered.
That original offer six hundred and fifty thousand dollars twenty
six million, six hundred and fifty thousand dollars. So with
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need a lawyer, you need somebody to get your back.

(46:24):
Check out for the People dot com, Slash podcast or
Dow Pound Law Pound five to two nine law on
your cell phone. And remember all law firms are not
the same, So check out Morgan and Morgan. Their fee
is free unless they win. So joining me now with
frankly without a I'm not going to sit here and

(46:46):
say we have a specific reason we're talking other than
I like to talk to smart, interesting people, and Mike
Pescott is smart. You'll just decide how interesting he is.
But he seems to be interesting enough. I kid in
that many of you may be listeners to his podcast,
maybe subscribers to his newsletter to things that I am

(47:07):
so with that, mister Pesca, who I blew it? I
thought I was thinking fish is your last name, and
you're like, no, it's Italian for peaches, right.

Speaker 2 (47:18):
That's why the GISTs Production Company is peachfish productions because
the peach is literally Italian. Yeah. Many Spanish verb forms
of two.

Speaker 1 (47:27):
Fish are the fish. So yeah, you know what, you know,
two things I wouldn't want to eat together.

Speaker 2 (47:32):
I think that probably a good chefish marmally glad.

Speaker 1 (47:37):
But you would have to make the peach. You'd have
to make it more like mango and like create a salsa.
I guess you could say you could probably create a
peach salsa that's on your fish taco.

Speaker 2 (47:48):
It's a challenge, right, It would definitely be something that
would break most contestants on cooking shows.

Speaker 1 (47:54):
Yeah, so first of all, I appreciate you. You seem
to be always make content, so I appreciate that you're
helping me make content. How how many how many side
hustles do you have? And what do you what do
you say you do these days for a little bit.

Speaker 2 (48:11):
Sometimes you have so many side hustles that you say
is they're a real hustle. I've been doing the Gist
for twelve years, almost twelve years. The longest running news
and analysis podcast, and that is daily. It's actually six
days a week.

Speaker 1 (48:24):
That's what I used to say about Meet the Press,
the longest running television show You're Longest that's documentable.

Speaker 2 (48:30):
With podcasts, there is a little bit of wiggle room
because no one's taking account in the beginning.

Speaker 1 (48:36):
And the fastest growing podcast in the in the two
two two zero seven zip code. I don't know about you,
but anyway.

Speaker 2 (48:41):
Wow, you know, the bragging chock is a little it's
a little bit unbecoming, is what I'm saying here. Yes,
so I do that, and then I have the sub stack,
which is every day we have THEI just list, which
are a bunch of stories I maybe can't get to
on the gist. And then I do a written piece
on When's day and I'm taking over. I can't announce it,

(49:03):
but I'm taking over a new podcast where maybe maybe
you'll be on asking people how to refurbish your second floor.

Speaker 1 (49:12):
Let's just say that, Well, all right, well I have
refurbished the second floor. I need to clean up my
second floor. How do I accomplish my exercise refurbishing sweep
of all of that? What if I thought of one
theme I wanted to speak with you about. It is
the fact that you know, it's interesting I sort of
began my calendar year getting started in this world of

(49:32):
independent media. Going on your podcast early you were sort
of very, very gracious with that. But it's been quite
a year in media in general, especially legacy media, and
sort of like, if you think about where we began
and where we ended, is the information ecosystem at the

(49:55):
end of twenty twenty five worse or better than at
the start of twenty twenty five?

Speaker 2 (50:00):
Okay, just twenty twenty five. I say it's potentially better,
maybe because so much of the degradation is baked in
and priced in, and it's not getting worse and we've
been habituated to it. But a couple of the big trends,
one that is often decried by my left leaning friends

(50:21):
is what's happening with CBS and Barry Weiss and full disclosure,
I've written a couple pieces for the Free Press. The
way I look at that is two things. I know
that people will slam Barry Weiss for that. They say
bringing more of a right leaning sensibility to CBS, to
which I say, there are three broadcast networks and five

(50:45):
all news networks or quasi news networks with significant budgets.
I'm not counting OAAN and the like, although News Nation
does some nice things, and four of them. If we're
being fair, before Barry took control, we're somewhere in the
center to left leaning. So I know, as you know NBC,

(51:06):
the NBC, NBC very much tried not to be but
of course MSNBC was left leaning to be honest, and
CNN will I think they tacked more to the center,
Fox being right leaning. But what I'm saying is just
in terms of if you take away everyone's strong feelings
about politics, if you're just looking at them as businesses,

(51:28):
and four businesses on the block were selling ice cream
and kind of not doing that great, and one business
on the block was selling cotton candy and doing quite well.
Wouldn't some combo cotton candy ice cream business maybe be
the smart play. So this is all I'm saying. If
you want to call Barry right wood or center right,

(51:49):
she would call it. She really tries to say she's
trying to keep it between the forty yard lines. It
seems like a smart enough repositioning. And to that, I'd add,
if you were to hire a person and to do this,
why not hire the only person who's built the truly
successful media business from scratch in the last five years?
There's a case that Ben Smith of Semaphore is doing

(52:10):
something similar. I think on smaller scales, even big Barry
White's critics like Oliver Darcy, I think, is making a
million dollars with his substack, And there are some substacked successes,
but Barry's the biggest success. So add that up a
little bit differentiation in the news business and a track
record of success. I'm more interested than concerned. Let's say

(52:33):
I think she could do good things. I don't know,
what do you think?

Speaker 1 (52:36):
Yeah, I've not I am all four. I am sort
of rooting for the disruption, right, you know, I've seen
and I benefited from a disruptor coming into NBC, a
woman by the name of Debora Turnas, who I still
find to be one of the best network executives I
ever worked with, because she wasn't afraid, she wasn't afraid

(52:59):
to break things, and look, it got her the BBC job.
And then of course she had a fall on her
sword for something that happened below her. But that's also
says something about her, meaning like she sort of she
gets it. Okay, that's on me. You know, I'm the
buck stops with me, So I'm all for seeing disruption,
because I've seen network executives that just try to placate

(53:23):
the bosses right don't succeed. And so my only question
of her decision was you left the Times because you
didn't like working for the Salzburgers. Are you sure you
wanted to give up your independence to work for the Elesons? Right?
Like that that would be and that's like, to me,

(53:44):
the biggest It's funny. I also think this has been
a turning point for the collective media, meaning that you're
starting to see the audience feel more comfortable in the
independent spaces. You're seeing more people feel more comfortable trying
to launch in the independent space. And you know, I'm

(54:07):
pessimistic that any of the legacy media companies can be
They have good brands, and they can certainly tweak shows
and use their resources, you know. Specific I just don't
know if any of the legacy news divisions are ever
going to be what they were right, because there's no
money in it, right, there's no financial incentive. It is
really it's just about whether you know, in the case

(54:29):
of the Ellison's, like, here'd be my fear if I
were Berry, if Wes Moore is the next president of
the United States, do the Ellison's care about the news
division anymore, right, you know, because Wes Moore isn't like
on top of them, you know, helping them with other
business deals. And in order to get those business deals,
they've got to placate the president with certain things with

(54:52):
the media business, with the new side of things, right,
and that would be something which is does all of
the you know, right now I'm getting what if I'm Barry,
I'm getting some running room, I get to do a
special on Saturday nights, and which is the lowest, you know,
the lowest rated portion of network television, which is why
a lot of times you will see town halls and
special news presentations either on Friday evenings or Saturday evenings. Yes,

(55:14):
because literally those are the two nights that they can't
sell ads.

Speaker 2 (55:18):
For or counter program with a Charlie Brown special from
twenty years.

Speaker 1 (55:21):
Ago, exactly exactly. So that would be my concern whether
there is really an interest in allowing CBS to stay
disruptive CBS News beyond sort of what feels like performance
art for the man in the Oval office.

Speaker 2 (55:40):
So yeah, a couple points, did Barry and I've never
talked to her about the Sulzburgers per se or ae.
Did she defect? She defected from The New York Times.
Was it a Salzburger thing? The way I analyze what happened.

Speaker 1 (55:53):
I don't know. I mean, that's my point, but you
are the Salzburgers. Do care about that opinion page.

Speaker 2 (55:59):
I think at a time which was the height of
the New York Times being sort of redefined away from
the idea of objectivity, it had gotten out of control
and out of the hands of a Salzburger. And you
probably read I don't know how many out.

Speaker 1 (56:16):
Of the hands of Dean Bckay. I mean, who was trying.
He couldn't manage his own You know, you had basically
a revolt. I believe you let the And this to
me has been something I've been obsessed with, which is
be careful of the audience you build, because you may
become captive of your audience subscribers.

Speaker 2 (56:35):
I think at a certain point Nicole Hannah Jones was
more important in the New York Times than Dean Buckay.
And she's done great work. But this is a bad situation.
You know, these are we know from sports, when the
star becomes more important than the coach who you defer to.
My point with the Salzburgers is I see a lot
of evidence that he specifically was uncomfortable with where his

(56:59):
newspaper had gone, and he wrote a large piece in
the Columbia Journalism Review, which is only going to be
read by journalists, but it was a signal we are
getting back to the idea of objectivity. He knew he
couldn't use the word objectivity. It's a really interesting essay.
He even said that word is so toxic among so

(57:19):
many people in news, which I think is really interesting
and alarming that I'm not even going to try to
defend the word objectivity. We just believe in independence journalism.
And then he goes on to define independent journalism as
objectivity or something like objectivity. So that's point one. I
think that where The New York Times is now is

(57:40):
a place that is a bit more aligned with maybe
Barrywise's worldview. The other thing I'd say about the Ellisons is,
you're right if Wes Moore, if someone calm and soothing
or at least just not don.

Speaker 1 (57:53):
Just sort of like less a little boring, Let's be honest, right,
Andy Bisheer and I say this though, you know that
sounds like a big criticizing. It may be that America
wants boring come twenty twenty nine.

Speaker 2 (58:04):
So you're saying not Gavin Newsome, Like Gavin might be
a lightning rod.

Speaker 1 (58:09):
I would, I would be surprised if we go from
big personality the big personality. Yeah, I actually think you know,
usually what we do as a country, if you think
about it, when we elect a new president and we
will be electing a new one in twenty eight, we
usually elect somebody who has more of a character trait
that the previous one is missing.

Speaker 2 (58:30):
Right after that week got Pope, a skinny pope. All
that's sort of mindset, Like I go through it right. H. W.

Speaker 1 (58:36):
Bush was kind of detached. Bill Clinton was fiel your pain, right.
Bill Clinton was a bit of a party animal. George W.
Bush was the reformed alcoholic that wasn't going to you know, stray.
George Bush saw everything in black and white. Barack Obama
was nothing but gray area nuanced, right, you know. So
we do have this tendency, and so that's why I

(58:58):
am I would. You know, this is not personal to
Gavin Newsom. I'm bearish on his chances to be the
next president more out of character and temperament, sort of
comparisons to Trump. Well, do we want another big personality
that's constantly a where the world revolves around the personality
rather than the country as a whole.

Speaker 2 (59:20):
Good analysis, as always, this is what we expect from you.
But my point was was this, if people I know
you don't think this, I assume you don't. If people
took your analysis about if it's Wes Moore, do they
become unengaged? It is not the case that, especially David Allison,
who has more hands on control of the newsroom, is MAGA.

Speaker 1 (59:44):
Is even against MAGA.

Speaker 2 (59:46):
I'm not a Republican conservative. He gave one hundred million
dollars to the Joe Biden Fund. So it is not
if people hear that and say, oh, unless the unless
CBS is allowed to run an ideological newsroom, he's going
to become uninvolved. That's not the case, and that's not
what you're saying. It's just if things calm down and

(01:00:07):
politics aren't the way to get people's attention or for
him to make money. Because a politician donald Trump will
be so involved in our regulatory schemes, he might get
less involved but it's not because that he's ideologically committed.

Speaker 1 (01:00:23):
No, I think it's more of that, And I've never
thought I think, you know, I don't think Silicon Valley
is ideologically aligned with Trump. I think they are just
seeing it as the fastest way to get from A
to B.

Speaker 2 (01:00:35):
Yeah. I think many in Silicon Valley are, if not
ideologically aligned with things like tariffs, were extremely upset with
DEI and wokeism, and also thought that there were elements
of the Biden regulatory scheme that were challenging what they
were trying to do to improve society.

Speaker 1 (01:00:55):
And I'll give you a shorter version of that. Biden
did allow the bureaucrats to play a role. Trump will
allow you to shortcut in getting around regulatory issues.

Speaker 2 (01:01:09):
Yes, but of course it's just had not because of
some well thought.

Speaker 1 (01:01:12):
Out planned No, it's transactions. And that's my point, right,
is to go back to the original point. Will Barry
have a budget in twenty nine? If the Ellisons decide, hey,
they don't need to placate a president with the news
division anymore, we'll spend our lobbying dollars another way, Essentially,

(01:01:34):
it's sort of like it's almost as if the news
division is part of your lobbying budget, right, And if
you're Frankly, if you're Disney, if you're Comcast and your
paramount skuidant, you kind of are operating that way.

Speaker 2 (01:01:50):
And the other thing to say is that this is
all fascinating to us in some portion of your audience.
But with the CBS news viewers, we're talking about five
percent of them America.

Speaker 1 (01:02:00):
Well, and we're also talking about generationally only one demographic group.
I mean, have you seen the average age of the
cable newsviewer.

Speaker 2 (01:02:08):
It's not seventy They died three years ago. And the
other thing with CBS, well, they have these amazing properties,
these legacy properties. Sixty minutes. I love sixty minutes, but
I'm not convinced that sixty minutes. The reason that they're
so popular is because of who they are and their

(01:02:29):
attention to detail and their story selection. But I think
it all comes down to there after football of it
comes down, By the way, do you know what they
never do? They never They never saved their best stuff
for the spring.

Speaker 1 (01:02:42):
No, okay, which, by the way, you know, it's like,
why do you what do they ask? Is it? Is
it the Bonnie and Clyde. Why do you rob banks?
That's where the money is. It's like, you know, why
do you why do you save your stories for the
faults where the audience is right. It's where it's right
after ball, So of course you do. Yeah, but i'd

(01:03:04):
look at do I think. I will say this about
CBS if you think about it, they have between Sunday
Morning and sixty minutes, they have two of the more
interesting brands that have a chance to survive even if
the network doesn't.

Speaker 2 (01:03:20):
Yeah, distinct brands, brands that mean something. And not only
will people be sad that they go, but if you
took them and put them somewhere else, it's very clear.
Their DNA is so unique that you could have a
turnkey operation.

Speaker 1 (01:03:36):
We know, I think sixty minutes, I think, and so
I have this, We're about to see. The next big
shake up in the way people consume information is going
to come at the local TV affiliate level, right where
you have the So we have this mega merger coming
up between Tegna and Next Star, and what that is
going to create is a lot of overlap in a
lot of their markets, and you're going to have these

(01:03:58):
duopolies that are going to start popping up, and you
already see him. My hometown of Miami is now the
largest market in the country with the duopoly. The person
that owns the you Know channel, the Fox affiliate, also
owns now the ABC affiliate. But he's only gonna have
one news division, right, and there isn't going to be
local news for the ABC affiliate. It really is just
sort of a digital channel that will just you know,

(01:04:21):
provide the ABC programming, which for most people in South
Florida is football. But what you're going to have is
I actually think we're about three or four years away
from what I call ala carte, where everything becomes a
la carte, where you might have a local affiliate say
you know what we want. We want Savannah Guthrie in
the morning. We want I want the Tony diacoppole in

(01:04:47):
the evening. I want Meet the Press on Sunday, but
I want CBS Sunday Morning. Right, It's good. I have
a feeling we're going in the same way we're watching
this with with people in our space here in the
end dependance space starting to license their content on a
Pluto or on a Netflix or on Amazon. I think
we're about to see the same thing explode in the

(01:05:08):
local TV Atfilly Market, which means we're going to find out,
you know, how big of a brand is Good Morning
of America, Good Morning America? How big a brand? I
think Today's show's pretty big. You know what about the
Sunday morning programming right where the brands will matter more
than the network itself that they appear.

Speaker 2 (01:05:24):
Yeah, and the reason is this is how the consumer,
the under seventy three average age consumer, programs their own
news already. They you know, my kids don't know what
a network is or what a channel is.

Speaker 1 (01:05:38):
The channel numbers meaningless to my kids. I have an
eighteen year old and a twenty one year old. They
don't know the numbers any They know.

Speaker 2 (01:05:44):
News for that's it. Yeah, I just I get PV
and there aren't numbers assigned, So news for is just
I mean, they could have called themselves news Purple. It doesn't. Yeah.
So yeah, it is all changing. And we haven't even
talked out print. We haven't even talked about what we
really need, which is investigative journalism and journalism with a

(01:06:09):
lot of teeth, and journalism that can stand up to pressure.
And I think that their pro publica does a great job.
Some of the nonprofits want to do a good job,
but I think and I think there is a certain
amount of appetite for it. But what the great newspapers,
especially newspapers, used to be able to do was fund
these efforts from their advertising, from their car advertising, from

(01:06:31):
especially their want ads and their classifieds. And that's all done.
So not only do you have these, you know, all
these city councils not being covered. You just don't have
the great investigation that the Indianapolis Star or the Kansas
City Star or the Sacramento Bee was going to do
as a matter of course, because that's what you did.
And we don't even know what the price of having

(01:06:52):
all that lost is. And maybe it's just local and
maybe it doesn't get above the you know, land commissioner
for Albuquerque, but it's a big loss.

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I guess I'm like, A, I'm optimistic because B I

(01:08:27):
want to try to build something that scales that because
I think that's a gap in the market. I completely agree.
And you know, what I worry about is that some
journalism can be done independently in solo. You and I
are proven this, But there are some things I could
I would love to do, but I need more resources.
I need literally more physical human beings. I don't care

(01:08:47):
how many Geminis or chat Gypts you're going to give me.
They all can't walk the street, right, They can't do
the door knocking that you sometimes need in an investigative journalism.
And I think that this this is what you know,
My hope is that we'll start to see new consortiums,
you know, after the sort of you know, if you

(01:09:08):
look at the history of UPI, which was a wire
service before the AP existed, and AP was a different
type of wire service they really were. They started off
as attempts to try to allow local news organizations to
share resources and share material. It was in some ways, hey,
oh that might be of use to our readers too.
You know, we can trade off and if you figure

(01:09:30):
out how to ban these folks together that maybe they
can start working together on collaborative investigative pieces. Right. Pro
Publica does this a little bit, Well, they'll team up
with a with a news organization. Notice is doing this
with some small independent locals. They're being the Washington Bureau.

Speaker 2 (01:09:46):
I do you like what that?

Speaker 1 (01:09:47):
I do too? Oh my gosh, I just had two
of their founders on, two of their young folks on,
because for me, Mike Notice is suddenly the only news
organization based in Washington, d C. That covers Washington, d C.
The Washington Post might as well be called the Post.
They have decided to no longer as in former former

(01:10:09):
right they knew longer need to be. They have gotten
rid of everything that made them Washington right, even the
food critic there, you know, their their sports page has
never been smaller and less impactful, and that was so vital.

Speaker 2 (01:10:24):
The Post and the Boston Globe, just the two great
regional sports pages, launched so many stars. And now they
just and even before that the style section, which was
such a great section and oh no it wasn't about styles. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:10:39):
It really frustrates me because it feels as if Bezos said,
I want to be the Wall Street Journal And you're like, well,
we already have one, and they're better at it than you.

Speaker 2 (01:10:47):
Guys, I think you said I want to be Reason magazine.
I mean, he's stole their.

Speaker 1 (01:10:51):
Entire Can I can I get I have one? You know,
we were talking about different editorial pages. Here's something I
wish Jeff Bezos had thought of, and I wish mister
Salzburger would think of. Why does an editor? Why do
you have to have one? Who set the rule to
say you only are allowed to have one? Why not?
You know, Look, we live in a world where partisanship

(01:11:13):
is in stereo. Do I wish we didn't? Maybe I'd
wish we didn't, But you know what, two hundred of
our two hundred and fifty years we have lived this way.
Our media has been partisan much longer than it has
been nonpartisan. Okay, we had a brief window between World
War two and nine to eleven where we had basically
a media that attempted to not affiliate with a party.

(01:11:36):
But before that and frankly after, it's actually been par
for the course that media sort of identified with a movement.

Speaker 2 (01:11:45):
This is why the papers are called the Rochester Democrat,
This free right.

Speaker 1 (01:11:48):
I try. It's sort of one of these things that
I tell journalism schools all the time. Hey, guys, this
is not new right. The Waterbury Republican, the Arkansas Democrat
is at the Tayle Assi Democrat. You brought up Rochester
is another one. What's wrong with having two editorial pages?
Wouldn't it been great? Wouldn't it be great if the
New York Times had, you know, basically had a conservative

(01:12:10):
editorial essentially section and a liberal editorial section and frankly
allowed them to be side by side.

Speaker 2 (01:12:21):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:12:23):
Back in the nineties, the Atlanta Journal Constitution when they
had to do their joint operating agreement on Sundays, printed
one news newspaper and their editorial page on the left
was the Atlanta Constitution and on the right was the
Atlanta Journal.

Speaker 2 (01:12:38):
Yeah. And I lived in Atlanta then and it the greatest.
Tell you it covered Dixie like to do. But how
great is that? Like?

Speaker 1 (01:12:46):
Why is that? Why is that not?

Speaker 2 (01:12:48):
Like?

Speaker 1 (01:12:49):
That's the world I lived in. My father was a
conservative who always wanted to know what the liberals were saying,
so he subscribed to National Review and New Republic all right.
He thought the nation was too far of the left,
but he was in the New Republic. It was like,
that's aw Gores. It was like I remember him saying, yeah,
the guy is a big algore guy. And you know,
you know back in the day Marty parts and you had.

(01:13:09):
But the point was he wanted both sides of an argument.
He wanted to hear both sides of the argument. I
don't know why newspapers decided they only should have one voice.

Speaker 2 (01:13:19):
That's how I was raised. My dad was a social
studies teacher, the consummate social studies teacher. When I got
into news, he said, let me subscribe you to I
swear the two magazines that I got from the age
of twelve to eighteen, where the National Review in the
New Republic. I mean, those were trailblazing magazines then, and
I learned the latter from them. I think one of
the reasons it doesn't work is that what you just said,

(01:13:42):
audience capture, and that the audience you and I want that.
And if you poll people, they would say they want that, but.

Speaker 1 (01:13:48):
I say they want it, yeah, but they don't.

Speaker 2 (01:13:50):
I think I feel dedicated news consumers are they Some
are news consumers, many are ideology consumers. Many are tell
me the world, give me reflection of the world as
I see it, consumers, And I don't know this is
overly harsh a criticism, But what if The New York
Times did a liberal or conservative editorial page. I'm sure

(01:14:11):
someone listening to this would say they tried it. And
then James Bennett got fired based on publishing the Tom
Cotton op ed. I think that, yeah, that's an ideal.
I don't know that we'll ever regain that time.

Speaker 1 (01:14:25):
No or not. But the reason I'm disappointed in Bezos
in this is that if he had actually applied the
lessons he learned from building Amazon the Everything Store, imagine
imagine if he behaved as if I want to build
the Everything information store.

Speaker 2 (01:14:41):
Yes, but he wants to maximize profit with Amazon, and
the post is a different consideration.

Speaker 1 (01:14:47):
Well, he bought a trophy. I thought he wanted to
help the business, and it turns out he just wanted
a trophy. And then suddenly it wasn't cool to own
the trophy, and he was like, oh shit, I either
think he's here to the trophy or do I now
just use it for my own benefit.

Speaker 2 (01:15:02):
And that's why he's using it as he uses his
contract to do a biopic of Milania Trump. He uses
it for lobbying. Although when he bought the trophy, I remember,
I think it was a two hundred and fifty million
dollar purchase. Was that the price? I remember the Jacksonville
Jaguars went for I think three seventy five, and I
remember thinking, what are we doing with society that the

(01:15:24):
Jaguars are worth only one hundred and twenty five million more? Now,
the Jaguars, like every NFL franchise, is probably worth a
billion in the post, could be sold for parts. I
keep Meghan.

Speaker 1 (01:15:37):
I remember there's only thirty two trophies available in the NFL, right,
even the least valuable trophies, probably a five billion dollar
trophy now.

Speaker 2 (01:15:47):
Yeah, yeah, five billion. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:15:49):
So let's talk about AI, because you know, I bet
I can vacillate. I am. I am a long term
AI optimist, meaning I'm betting on human beings that we're
not We're a species that has survived quite a bit
over a million years and we're not going to let
robots replace us. So I am, but I am mindful

(01:16:11):
that the transition is going to be quite painful, and
I do think that increasingly. The next three years are
going to be about fear of AI displacement, even though
again I think, you know, we'll, we'll probably. My guess
is the fear is a little too soon. Like anything,
it's probably coming sooner than we should actually be fearing it.

(01:16:33):
But that's how I try to comfort myself and how
I remain optimistic in the long run about AI, even
though this is going to be extraordinarily disruptive in the moment.
Where's your head on this?

Speaker 2 (01:16:44):
There was just a pull out that showed a huge
decline in optimism or even excitement about AI. They expect,
I mean, the vast majority of people expect AI to
harm human abilities by twenty thirty five.

Speaker 1 (01:16:59):
Do you blame them thinking that? By the way, no,
given what social media, given what the tech companies did
to us with social media.

Speaker 2 (01:17:06):
Right people. And also science fiction and our storytelling plays
a role, and so there's I'd say the ratio of
dystopian to utopian science fiction is something like one hundred
to one. It's more easy to tell stories about destruction,
although Star Trek is utopian science fiction. So you know,
our mind goes to threats. The reason that we are

(01:17:28):
here as the people who've evolved over a million years
is because we understand threats, right. We evolve from the
people who were best position to understand the threats and
flee the sabertooth tiger, whereas our would be ancestors who
were like, no big deal, they got eaten. They didn't
get to reproduce that. All that said, there are three
camps with AI. The accelerationists who say, bring it on,

(01:17:51):
it's going to change humanity. A lot of them have
money involved, right. The doomers, who some prominent people who
could have made a lot of money with AI, give
it a twenty percent chance of killing us all one day.
There are a couple prominent people give it a ninety
eight percent chance. Then in between, and this is a
phrase invented by my friend Andy Mills, who just made

(01:18:12):
a good podcast, great podcast about this called the Last
Invention the Scouts. And this is where I am, which
is pay attention, don't be afraid, be very afraid, but
understand the transformative power of this. When Sam Aaltman testified,
maybe you remember in twenty twenty three, he was greeted,
he shocked the Senate Commerce Committee because he said, yes,

(01:18:36):
please regulate me and this was a message that they
wanted to hear. That was a message I wanted to hear.
It was refreshing and unusual for a captain of industry
to ask for regulation. Cut to two years later, the
big concern is China, and he said, well, I don't
know about all this regulation. We've got to beat China.
So what changed? Was it just China? Was it Samman?

(01:19:00):
In both cases trying to play cat or meet Congress
where it was. I'm definitely not a doomer. I think
it can be totally transformative, especially when it reaches what's
called artificial general intelligence. This is the computers teaching themselves
and accelerating and accelerating. But man, do we need more

(01:19:22):
visibility into how it works? And I'll add this, they
don't even know how it works. The people who program AI,
who invented AI will tell you, Ye, it's kind of
a black box and we can't exactly pick it apart
and tell you why it did that, not just beforehand,
but even afterwards. And that is legitimately.

Speaker 1 (01:19:42):
Scary, No, it is, especially when we realize that also
we're I mean, we've not had the correct generation matched
with the technological regulatory demands that we've had. Right when
the Internet first came along, we had a whole bunch
of people that were very analogue right by the time

(01:20:02):
social media.

Speaker 2 (01:20:03):
Came at, saying the Internet was a system of tubes.

Speaker 1 (01:20:05):
Right, and then you go to you know, as we
go to social media, you have people that are still
trying to figure out how to use email with their
Aol dot com. You know, they're still figuring out text.
By the time we've got an AI, you have people
that are still just now getting comfortable with the iPhone premise. Right.
So that's that's what's scary, is that the people we

(01:20:29):
elect to be the watchers may not are probably not
qualified to know what to watch for. Yeah, even if
adds to the concern.

Speaker 2 (01:20:37):
Right, and even if they were, I mean, some of
these people have backgrounds in the extractive industries. They don't
seem too keen on regulating them. There is a Congress
doesn't seem keen on being Congress. You know, even Nancy
Mace is writing op ads what is Congress for? They've
willingly abdicated their regulative responsibilities. One of the things though,

(01:20:57):
that gives me pause. I have great hope for it,
and I always think even with the Internet, I'm more
in favor of it than opposed. I owe my life
to the idea of podcasting. Otherwise, you know, I wouldn't
be able to get my voice outside wherever a radio
tower would take me. Maybe satellites would exist. But I
look at the history of big innovations, and there's always

(01:21:19):
the doomer. There's always the person who's an expert, who
gets a lot of attention, because, like I said, our
minds go towards, well, what's the worst thing that can happen.
And at one point it was this guy named King
Hubbert who predicted peak oil. And he was an expert.
He worked for Shell. He had many people with their
colorful charts written in you know, nineteen nineties fonts, We're

(01:21:43):
gonna run out of oil. That was a big concern.
I think cuts it Today. A lot of environmentalists would say,
thank god, we're going to run out of oil. But
we're not going to run out of oil. Shell gets invented,
fracking gets invented. Paul Erlik, who is the most frequent
guest on Johnny Carson, wrote the population bomb. It seems lausible,
we're going to outstrip our means of production. So throughout history,

(01:22:04):
Greta Tuneberg, throughout history, there have always been these doomers.
It's a long tradition of dumers. I'm not even talking about,
you know, the people who said that the hell Bop
commet was going to So.

Speaker 1 (01:22:15):
I guess Jeffrey Hinton would be the AI doomer in
this case, right, isn't he the inventor who says, be weary?

Speaker 2 (01:22:20):
Right if there s a twenty percent chance? But there
are for every hint in there is one hundred people.
Many of them have their fortunes tied to AI. But
I'll tell you something else I learned from Andy series,
The Last Invention. Many of the people working in the
companies are not doomers, but they're really worried, and they
say to themselves. Maybe they don't say I'm a genius,

(01:22:41):
they're geniuses. They're good at this, and they're involved in
the work with the knowledge that if it goes wrong,
it could go very very wrong in a way that
goes way beyond, you know, replacing menial labor and not
having some substitute for that, it could I'm not saying
death of yourn, but maybe they are. So there are

(01:23:01):
a lot of people within the industry who don't want
the industry just to go off the rails. I don't know,
Maybe you can make an analogy. I don't know the
people who work in bioweapons research. I would assume a
lot of them think the same thing, and every once
in a while bad stuff happens there too.

Speaker 1 (01:23:20):
There's one phenomenon that I'm fascinated by that is taking
place sort of simultaneously as we're having this sort of
race towards AI, and that is it is the one
issue that unites left and right, which is should we
get this technology out of the schools?

Speaker 2 (01:23:36):
Yeah?

Speaker 1 (01:23:37):
I had a woman on from an organization that she
founded called Mama Mothers Against Media Addiction, And it's not
just about, you know, getting rid of phones and classrooms.
It's also about should we stop hanging out iPads and
laptops in schools? Right?

Speaker 2 (01:23:54):
Like?

Speaker 1 (01:23:54):
Do we?

Speaker 2 (01:23:55):
You know?

Speaker 1 (01:23:56):
And boy, I'm pretty torn on this, yes, because on
the one hand, I think we should evolve with technology.
On the other hand, I understand the concerns and fears,
and there's no doubt there's plenty of study on screen
time and what that's done. But does fear of screen
time in the social media aspect, mean you should toss

(01:24:19):
away all technology you know in the classroom, and that's
where that's where I get concerned. But what I find
fascinating is that we have a collective fear of what
our kids, of how our kids learn, and we're actually
it seems like it's the one place where we think
we can try and do something about it where there's
almost like the least amount of political combat over too.

Speaker 2 (01:24:45):
Yeah, And I would remember, I remember the big issue
was the digital divide, the fear that not enough people
would have technology.

Speaker 1 (01:24:53):
And now we're going the other way. We're like, no, no, no,
we don't want it in the classroom. It's terrible.

Speaker 2 (01:24:57):
So where I come down is just because there is
junk food doesn't mean there shouldn't be culinary schools. Just
because there are bad Just because there is pornography doesn't
mean we shouldn't teach art or figure drawing in school
or even knew drawing on the college level. So I
definitely think that this is where the world is today.

(01:25:19):
You have to there's always been panics about technology. I
don't know if this is a panic. There are legitimate concerns,
right the corruption of the Innocent was congressional hearings about
comic books.

Speaker 1 (01:25:31):
I do think that video games or Tipper Gore in
the music industry, I'm an have to remember when Twisted
Sister with something that our parents thought was warping the
minds of people like myself.

Speaker 2 (01:25:45):
Sure Dee Snyder testifying on Capitol Hill in his Twisted
Sister Regelia did not wear a suit.

Speaker 1 (01:25:52):
Yeah we did.

Speaker 2 (01:25:53):
I also remember Blackie Lawless from a group called WASP,
and I can't even quote on a podcast what his
big songs were. But yes, so this is a perennial.
These are the tools that we use. I think a
flat out ban would not serve our children well, especially
as we compete against China in Singapore. But you know,
we saw another version of this where the answer is

(01:26:17):
never just take off the guard rails and trust in technology.
With the legalization of sports gambling, it has been a disaster.

Speaker 1 (01:26:35):
You went to the place I wanted to go because
I want to go to prediction markets here And what
CNN and call She are doing, which I think is
I say this. I love gambling, Mike, I love football gambling.
I have also my own biases about what you should
be allowed to gamble on and what you're not allowed
to gamble on. For instance, I don't gamble on player props.

(01:26:58):
You know why because I don't feel like it's an
honest market because at the end of the day, you're
relying on one person versus a team sport. Like I
don't like to bet on individual sports. I don't bet
on tennis. I don't bet on golf because again, one person.
You know, it's it is known that tennis players just

(01:27:21):
take an acceptance, you know, take an appearance fee and bail. Right,
That is just sort of how it works. And it's
like it's like betting on the NBA what players are
sitting out. You know, that's no You know, I enjoy
betting on a team sport when I know there's maximum
effort and I know that it's really going to be
about somewhat of a game of chance but also a
game of strategy. But you're right, keep going, it's interesting,

(01:27:46):
Bourn you out.

Speaker 2 (01:27:47):
I mean, look at the NBA gambling scandal, Look at
the baseball gambling scandal.

Speaker 1 (01:27:53):
Where why is this offered? Why are you allowed to
bet on the first pitch?

Speaker 2 (01:27:58):
Yeah, an e manual class, say can throw the ball
directly into the dirt and think he's going to get
away from with something.

Speaker 1 (01:28:04):
And think about this, right, these guys, some of them,
Let's say you come from a community that didn't have
a lot of money. You don't have enough to throw
money around to them, but you want to throw them
a bone, all right. You know, I see how these
individual players rationalize it. I'm just trying to help on
my pials. I want to help them make a couple
of bucks. This is something I can do for them,

(01:28:25):
No harm, no foul, Right, that's I really think that's
the rationalization.

Speaker 2 (01:28:29):
And yeah, the idea was that the gigantic salaries played
to paid to these players would protect or indemnify them
from ever being tempted. However, at the same time people
were making these arguments and believing it, they weren't just
self motivating. Yeah, we also know about the gigantic rates
of bankruptcy among professional athletes. They don't always take care

(01:28:51):
of their money so well, so you have guys like
Johntay Porter in the NBA who apparently owed a lot
of money to a lot of people, and so all
he has to do is claim an injury, take himself
out of a game, and then everyone who bet the unders,
which for the audience, I'm sure you know, it's if
you think he's going to get less than four rebounds
or less than three assists or whatever the statistic is.

(01:29:12):
If you fake an injury, you're definitely going to get
less than that. He has been thrown out of basketball.
Terry Rogier is another one who's on the hook. There's
the separate gambling scandal with this is so fascinating. The
mafia and and some coaches and poka gigs that can
be read with essentially X ray vision. But yeah, the

(01:29:33):
prop bets, now, I think that the form of let's
just get rid of these silly little prop bets that
we're not making that much money on that is that's
the deminimus that they have to do. The real problem
with sports gambling or gambling on the phones isn't even
sports gambling or gambling on games where a lot of

(01:29:55):
millionaires have a stake. There are you can still gamble
college games where even though kids are paid the nil money,
it's not that much. And there are a lot of
very very low level Division one games that were clearly
thrown a couple of years ago, and some enforcement though
not criminals been brought against players on I think Mississippi

(01:30:17):
Valley State and some other schools. The huge problem there's
been a lot of good reporting on this is the
online casinos on phones and this is we maybe you
and I focus on sports gambling. This is just sad
and should never been allowed. And you have home Healthcare
AIDS losing fifteen thousand dollars because they're constantly betting slot machines.

(01:30:39):
And if you look at the amount of revenue that
the states have taken in sports, some of them didn't
make good deals with the sports companies. And by the way,
a lot of these sites maybe not Fan Duel and DraftKings,
but a lot of these other sites are not making
anywhere near the money. And they thought they would on
sports gambling. But if you look at the casino gambling,

(01:31:00):
it's just a roundabout means of addiction. Now on Calshi,
we thought we were talking about the prop bets. What
about this prop bet? I have my calshilp app open.
I don't know if you can see it. Who will
be the first member of Trump's cabinet to leave? Now?
My update is since that Vanity Fair piece came out,

(01:31:22):
rocket Yeah, but.

Speaker 1 (01:31:23):
Then you know, well, it's what's funny about the prediction markets.
It's like, look, I am, I'm trying to keep an
open mind about the prediction markets. We used to call
the prediction markets the stock market, but I'll set that
aside here a minute. Like I would argue that that
kind of served as the prediction markets at least when
it came to nonsports events, right, certain stocks went up

(01:31:45):
or down based on oh, the economy. Economic numbers are
based on oh, like remember when when ozepic first took off.
Suddenly what didn't freedom lays stock collapse or something like,
you know, oh, no, nobody's gonna nobody's gonna eat snacks anymore.
Snacking is dead, you know, or good luck with Edmans,
like that's a brand that might disappear with everybody taking zempic.

(01:32:10):
But it's the it's it's the fact that CNN signed
to deal with cal Shei like incorporating Like is it
what does this fact tell you about Susie wilds Now
being at the top of this prediction market. Is it
just a whole bunch of people wanting to react to

(01:32:30):
something that happened in the news, or is there somebody
with insider information right now during I will, I will confess.
So I made my first Calshy trade the morning of
the college football playoff show. I'm a University of Miami guy,
and I was curious to see if things were going

(01:32:54):
to leak the way the Pope, not the Pope, the
Nobel Peace Prize leaked, and all of a sudden, the
prediction market spiked for Machado, and you're like, oh, what's
that about. Somebody must know something right here was somebody
that didn't have any other reason to spike it. So
I was curious to see, and I was watching, and
I literally did it to see if it would leak.

(01:33:15):
Now it turned out it didn't leak. Miami's number was
fluctuating up and down somewhere between. It got as low
as six, got as high as thirty eight, But it
was in the range of what was what would you
would expect if people didn't know the outcome, okay where
they were trying to project, rather than there wasn't anything.

(01:33:36):
But that's why I did it. I didn't do it
because I thought I did it because I thought somebody
might know the answer. I didn't do it because I
thought crowdsourcing was going to tell me what the answer.

Speaker 2 (01:33:48):
Was, right, I do it because I like to bet
eleven dollars on the Jets while they're losing, to give
myself somebody enjoyment of the game. My average bed is
like six dollars, so you don't have to worry about me.
But the same thing happened with the Time Person of
the Year whenever it's a non random outcome, and who

(01:34:13):
will make the college football playoffs. But that's a well
guarded outcome, the sort of outcome that someone would get
fired if at Leaf they leaked in I don't know
if Vanity Fair or Time magazine, but if you were
a copy editor at Vanity Fair and you knew about
this market, you knew this Susie Wild piece, don't you.

Speaker 1 (01:34:30):
Buy Susie wildstock yesterday?

Speaker 2 (01:34:32):
Right? Yeah?

Speaker 1 (01:34:33):
And then you sell it now?

Speaker 2 (01:34:35):
Yeah?

Speaker 1 (01:34:35):
Right right, That's what you're doing is that's insider trading.
And that's where, ultimately, I don't know how you can guarantee,
you know, other than are we going to have apply
insider trading rules to copy editors now in the same
way we apply insider trading rules to people that work it,
say it JB.

Speaker 2 (01:34:55):
Moore thing, can you articulate a difference?

Speaker 1 (01:34:58):
I can't. That's my point.

Speaker 2 (01:35:00):
Market with material information that the PO.

Speaker 1 (01:35:02):
Do we have enough to do. We have enough regulators
to keep track of all this.

Speaker 2 (01:35:06):
Yeah. To me, the big concern this is a concern.
You articulated a concern. The other big concern is when
you look at sports coverage and now that all the
sport although ESPN has gotten out of it, most of
the networks are in bed with this or.

Speaker 1 (01:35:22):
That they didn't get out of it. They just read
they just did their deal with DraftKings.

Speaker 2 (01:35:26):
Right, it's shake got out of it in terms of
it's not ESPN bets.

Speaker 1 (01:35:30):
Sure, but they're doing it's no, I mean, you know,
they're just they just took a bigger check from DraftKings.

Speaker 2 (01:35:36):
Right. So now it really affects the coverage. And maybe
you can make the case that CNN could just take
some hail Mary's to borrow football term and it's not
like their coverage will affect ratings on the downside that much.
But it does affect the coverage, and it gears the
coverage towards the relatively few people who really care about

(01:35:56):
this stuff. And even if you do care about sports
gambling in general? Do you really care in the start
of the fourth quarter when they flash what fan Duel says,
the Knicks all.

Speaker 1 (01:36:07):
My gods winning It Just really I find that's so annoying.
Do you know why I watched? In fact, this gets
it to my frustration with the college football playoff, with
the idea of the subjective committee, where you're like, hey,
give me what the statistically best teams are. When I'm like,
I've said this to various people who are sports fans,

(01:36:27):
and I'll ask you the question, min do you watch
sports to see the most probable outcomes happen? Or do
you watch it enjoy sports because every once in a
while there's an improbable result and you're like, wow. My
son will tell you why is he a college football fan?
Because the first college football memory he has was from

(01:36:48):
watching my wife and I go crazy over the kick
six the Auburn Alabama game where he kicks a few
where it attempts the field goal and the guy runs
it back to when the You're like, oh my god,
I've never seen a game end like that. Unbelievable. Alabama
was the better football team. Alabama always is the better
football team. Nine times out of ten, Alabama wins that game.

(01:37:08):
So why do we bother playing the games? Because we're
kind of we're kind of curious to see if the
improbable happens, which is why when they do stupid things
like lee Florida State out a couple of years ago,
you're like, you're actually taking away the opportunity for a
sports movie. Which, Oh, by the way, what do we love.
We love a good sports movie. We love a grandpa
that takes a snap in an NFL game. That's pretty interesting.

(01:37:30):
I kind of want to see that.

Speaker 2 (01:37:31):
Right, like Mule the kicks a field goal?

Speaker 1 (01:37:35):
Hey, I know that movie. I know exactly the one
you're talking about. The god I forget was what the
name of it was? The Donkey.

Speaker 2 (01:37:43):
It was not Gladys the kicking Mule. It was yeah,
it'll hit me someone.

Speaker 1 (01:37:48):
That's a don Knots, Right, wasn't like coach don Knots.

Speaker 2 (01:37:50):
Yeah, and he made a sound like whoosh every time
he kicked. Oh what do you think of James Madison
and Tulane both in the college football playoff but not
Notre Dame.

Speaker 1 (01:38:04):
So I'm of two minds, right, I want the center
and I know this is what and I this is
where I wish college football had a commissioner, because I
think the conferences, nobody that leads a conference or an
athletic director has the best interests of the entire game
in mind. Right, there is no what's best for college football.
It is great for college football. If there's an opportunity

(01:38:26):
for a Cinderella, we want to. You know, it was
great to see George Mason make that run to the
final four, right, that was really cool. It was awesome
when Butler got to the end the final of the
NCAA tournament, Right, that was something we were curious about.
That was great. And yet we also want to see
Kentucky in North Carolina or Kentucky and Duke because that's
awesome too. So I get the need for that. I

(01:38:49):
do think people don't realize and the coverage of college
football is terrible. The reason they had to do that
is they were preventing a lawsuit from the other conferences
from basically, you know, they can't legally keep these other
They had to give a pathway to prevent a lawsuit
from all these group of five conferences. Who would have
said that the big four schools in ESPN were essentially

(01:39:14):
violating you know, violate. We're a monopoly, right, violating antitrust.
So that's why it exists. And they had to put
the rules in wrote the rules the way they did it,
that was a lawyer telling them, well, you need to
at least give the group of five conferences a chance
that hey, if your champion is in the top five
of all champions, right then then you can say no, no, no,

(01:39:37):
we're not blocking them out of it. I'd personally like
to see a group of five playoff, like you take
the four top group of five conferences and they play,
you know, they play a little mini tournament and the
winner gets to come in. It's actually how the NIT
and the NCAA used to work way back in the fifties.

(01:40:00):
There's one school that has that has won both the
n T and the NCAA in the same year. Do
you know the name?

Speaker 2 (01:40:06):
City College of New York.

Speaker 1 (01:40:08):
I knew you would know.

Speaker 2 (01:40:09):
It's so very interesting.

Speaker 1 (01:40:10):
You're one of the few guests I could have that
would be like, he knows more minutia than I do,
and it's you do you know their nickname? The Cooney nickname?

Speaker 2 (01:40:19):
I do not think. I think they were the Beavers.
But I'm going to check that. So here's where I disagree.
Your analysis was right. You set the stage, you laid
the predictor correctly. I don't think you want both James
Madison and tu Lane in.

Speaker 1 (01:40:33):
By the way, you don't want one.

Speaker 2 (01:40:35):
Yeah, my son's a freshman at Tulane. I was never
a college football fan. I got so into them this year.
He stormed the field.

Speaker 1 (01:40:41):
It's fun. Oh, my son's a freshman at SMU. I
was at the goddamn Miami SMU game where he did
what storm the field? So yes, my son stormed the
field on a Miami game.

Speaker 2 (01:40:51):
I do I do think the analogy between you want
George Mason or Butler to make it. Those schools were
legitimately better, and not only does the record show they
could hold their own against the power schools. You know
in the final where I was there was covering a
f endpr the best player in that Duke Butler game
was Gordon Hayward of Butler. So that is not the

(01:41:14):
case with Tulane and James Madison. Those schools, I don't know.
Maybe tou Lane is a chance.

Speaker 1 (01:41:19):
Tulane is I would look at least Tulane played a
couple of power for schools, right, They played Duke and
they played Old Miss right, Like you know, they're put
it this way, when the ACC breaks up, they're going
to become a member of whatever's left of the ACC. Yeah,
they're the next, They're the next. They're sort of next
in line, right, Tulane and Memphis are probably in ut

(01:41:42):
San Antonio or probably the next three schools to get
the call up into the Power for if there's room.

Speaker 2 (01:41:48):
For more road runners. So yes, well I can.

Speaker 1 (01:41:51):
Oh, oh absolutely. I don't think people between UTSA and
USF by South Florida being the other one. These are
schools that basically have been created by the population booms
of those two states over the last thirty years. Where
these are commuter schools and now they're just substantials in
state universities.

Speaker 2 (01:42:12):
TSA B Tulane quite handily this year. So I can't confirm.
The City College of New York's are the Beavers. Their
mascot is Benny the Beaver. And I will also give
you this, do you know what other prominent though Division
three school is nicknamed the Beavers? Division one would be
Oregon State State, right which Division three And I'll give

(01:42:34):
you a hint. The reason they're the beavers is that
the beaver is nature's engineer.

Speaker 1 (01:42:42):
The beaver is nature's engineer. Interesting is it? Mit, that's
excellent work?

Speaker 2 (01:42:50):
Correct?

Speaker 1 (01:42:51):
Okay?

Speaker 2 (01:42:51):
Mit? Beavers?

Speaker 1 (01:42:53):
That is that feels like that feels like an idea
they came up with, Hey, what's a good reason for
us to have beavers? That isn't what we what everybody's
going to assume? What could we what could we actually?
What can we say that would be plausibly an explanation?
You know?

Speaker 2 (01:43:11):
I mean and when they when they face the Presbyterian
blue hose.

Speaker 1 (01:43:16):
H all right, let me so prediction markets are you?
Do you think they will be legal? Or do you
think we will when we have a sober up moment
on sports gambling that the prediction markets are in trouble too.

Speaker 2 (01:43:34):
They shouldn't be legal. I don't mean normatively, I mean
according to the law there. Their reason for not being
the reason for being legal is something other than entertainment.
Is that they try to make the case that they're
like more like a commodities market. Uh, there is no
viig so that's something in their favor. But I don't

(01:43:56):
know who's playing what commodity, or what business is benefiting
from the existence of a prediction market. Maybe you could say,
if you're the if you're the sports bar in Kansas
City and you bet against the Chiefs to make the
playoffs because you know it's going to impact business in January,
and that's a hedge. But that is so far fetched.

(01:44:17):
So as I look at the law, it doesn't seem
that they have a better case to not be regulated
than any traditional sports books. And it's not the big
isn't the big or the you know, cut and percent
isn't the big reason there?

Speaker 1 (01:44:33):
You know, let me get you out of here on
the following. It's sort of a historical fact that I'm
curious if you'll turn into a prediction. Ever since the
end of the pandemic, I've had a different view of
prohibition because you now realize how did prohibitions start. You know,
it always had a small group of people arguing to

(01:44:55):
ban alcohol. Right that you watch the TV show guilded Ay, Right,
Cynthia Nixon's character is actually holding meetings, right, the Temperance
movement and all that stuff, But we don't actually do
it until just after the nineteen seventeen and eighteen pandemic,
which tells me that like pandemics sort of make us
do crazy things, right, we sort of we go to

(01:45:19):
our extremes, we do certain things, and within a decade
we decide, WHOA, this was a bad idea. Whether it's gambling,
whether it's the legalization of marijuana. What's something that we've
been letting happen right that we'll look back on and
say in twenty five years and say, yeah, we ended that.

(01:45:42):
After a decade experiment, we realized that's not good for society.
We sobered up. Is it sports gambling, is it marijuana?
Is it something else?

Speaker 2 (01:45:52):
Yeah? I think the casino gambling there's just so little
justification for it, and it's creating more victims that states
have to take care of. So sports gambling, I don't know.
I'm not willing to make that prediction, but I think
being able to since only a few states allow it,
you know, bang slot machines on your phones, I do
think that will end. I think another one is I

(01:46:16):
think there's going to be massive regulation of the nil
business because it's not a business and it doesn't help
anyone everyone. You know, there are obviously a few people
taking advantage of it, but they do. Why do big
time college sports exist. It's it's the fan experience, right,
It's not the student athletes. It's so schools can make

(01:46:37):
money because the fans enjoy watching them. And I think
it is getting in the way of the fan experience
to some extent, so there's going to be major reformation there.
I would also say that there's no reason just to
pay kids for nil with their ability to go on Instagram,
get hundreds of thousands of followers and just sell their advertising. Maybe.

(01:47:03):
I've also always thought that puppy mills should be illegal,
but that's not in the that that didn't happen recently.
I see that trend maybe coming. But you know, prohibition
was a big progressive movement, wasn't it. It was said
to be a leap forward, and all the suffragists and
all the people who were associated with the progressive causes

(01:47:27):
were most in favor of it, and it turned out
to be a mistake. So in that way, you know,
marijuana legalization or whatever the extremely flawed rollout was, it
reminds me of it. Though I don't see us going back.
I mean, I see I don't think it's.

Speaker 1 (01:47:43):
So on marijuana because we're not having there isn't you
know it is It turns out that you know, it
isn't any more or less addictive than alcohol. And it
might be arguments that's slightly less addictive in alcohol. What's
not been true and you've die. You know, we don't
know yet that it really has. What benefits there are

(01:48:04):
there may be seems like almost none. It seems like
there may be of killing benefits. I could see that,
you know.

Speaker 2 (01:48:12):
Payment half people like maybe your rope is higher.

Speaker 1 (01:48:15):
Well, I will say this, I've had two people in
my life with MS and they swear by it. They
swear by.

Speaker 2 (01:48:22):
It, but is there nothing else that they would There's
nothing else that that allows them to Everything else makes
them too loopy or makes them too sick.

Speaker 1 (01:48:32):
Right Like, for whatever reason, weed is the right amount
of it actually helps them with an appetite right when
they need, and at the same time still doesn't totally
fog up their brain. It's this fine line, right. I know,
if you take too much weed, it can fog up
your brain. But some of the the you know, the
painkillers you're getting from the from the pharmaceutical cover.

Speaker 2 (01:48:52):
But I think the argument to the medical marijuana argument
wasn't that the people with glaucoma or ms were lying.
It was that every and claim to have back pain
in order to qualify for medical arijuana. And so eventually
the states just said let's just legalize marijuana. But they
didn't do it in the right way, and the rollout
was done so inexactly. And this is where execution comes

(01:49:13):
into effect, and this is where our state capacity. You know,
what the abundance agenda and what Dunkleman wrote about about
why nothing works, like for all our arguments about this
should or shouldn't be done, and what are the normative changes,
whatever you decide, doing it well is as important as
just doing it. So there's a way to legalize marijuana

(01:49:36):
where it works well. And I think there's probably a
way to get some version of the prediction markets work
that help more people than they hurt. I just I'm
skeptical that our government is capable of that way in
twenty twenty five.

Speaker 1 (01:49:52):
Well, here's the problem, right we I've always said, you know,
I think being libertarian is in the DNA of Americans. Right,
It's sort of like no, no, no, no. The whole point
of this country was no, no, no, We want to we
want to decide for ourselves what religion we do, and
we want to decide for ourselves and all this stuff.
But unfortunately when we make it, we're making a libertarian

(01:50:14):
We're sort of following through a libertarian idea about, Hey,
you smoke what you want to smoke, or you take
what you want to take. But you do need a
highly regulated delivery system, right in order to fulfill this
libertarian demand, right, And that's I think the problem is
that that's probably they just run into each other. Right. Our

(01:50:38):
DNA is like a live and let live to a point,
but you kind of need a highly structured system in
order to deliver this problem, or at least somewhat structured.

Speaker 2 (01:50:48):
And the libertarians I know would not say they're against
liquor licenses. They're just against liquor licenses that are given
via corruption, are suppressed, or are given maybe even to anyone.
You know. Libertarians are always will also admit that their
arguments well I don't know they'll always admit it, but

(01:51:09):
the honest ones will say, our arguments do tend to
fall apart when it comes to kids.

Speaker 1 (01:51:16):
Mike, I always enjoyed my conversations with you. Are you
still you still read hard copies of things or are
you all digital?

Speaker 2 (01:51:24):
I mean I could reach for like my it's all
it's all New Yorker in print and New York Times
in print, and yes.

Speaker 1 (01:51:32):
Yes, because I miss remembering where I read something, and
when I read everything on digital, when I read everything
on the same machinery, it doesn't matter whether I'm reading
The Atlantic, the Times, the Post, the gristlit it doesn't matter, right,
it all looks the same. And I miss the being

(01:51:53):
able to differentiate visually where I read stuff.

Speaker 2 (01:51:55):
So yeah, I was curious if I remember where on
the page I read things, And that's like really important.
And I keep some of these books behind me because
I have to get to them and I will be
doing the interviews. But a lot of them are I
don't know if they're cherished. They just gave me a
lot of information. And even though I say abstractly, I
suppose I could try to find it on the kindle version,

(01:52:15):
I can't. I definitely could find it in the physical version.

Speaker 1 (01:52:19):
Yeah. No, I wonder if prints has been more resilient
than I think many book publishers thought. And I'm wondering
if there's something there on local news that maybe that
maybe there's a way to bring print back selectively, even
in the local level.

Speaker 2 (01:52:39):
Yeah, well, I know Tablet has a print play that's
going pretty well for them. It's it's maybe like vinyl
with among the music offficionados.

Speaker 1 (01:52:50):
Well, we're starting to see.

Speaker 2 (01:52:51):
But I read something where said it's pretty it does
pretty well for the record companies they're vinyl divisions.

Speaker 1 (01:52:56):
Well, especially when you're charging forty dollars an album. I
don't know if you Bespoke, Yeah, bought one of these
newly new this new way that hey, get a Taylor
Swift album for your daughter on vinyl, you know, and
it's like fifty bucks even at Target. Anyway, Mike, enjoy
the holidays you too. Do you travel or do you host?

Speaker 2 (01:53:19):
I do a little of each. I think I usually
take my vacation two weeks later to beat all the crowds.
But as always, as always, Chuck, thank you for having
me and go Beavers.

Speaker 1 (01:53:32):
Go be If you learned anything, it's the fact that
the only person that knows more minutia, particularly sports mandusia,
than myself, it's you, mister Pesca Cooney lifts. Go Beavers.
Thanks problem well, I always enjoy my conversations with Mike.

(01:53:52):
I hope you do too. And again check out the gist.
It's say it is one of those it does not
it's a great news that it does not waste your time.
It is just a it is a great it's sort
of you know, it is that the second set I
had lines that you that sort of make you a
little bit smarter at that holiday party, a little bit

(01:54:12):
smarter at that cocktail party, et cetera. That little extra
nugget that not every news junkie seems to know. Mister
fishy peachy guy uh does a good job with that.
I always loved my conversations with Mike. It is notable,
by the way, before I get to Q and A

(01:54:33):
and I know, I spent the first part of this
monologue telling you about Trump's future and all this stuff.
There was some breaking news while I was taping my
monologue that I missed, and he put out the following tweet,
and he was very excited. I was. I was taping
before the CBS airs the Kennedy Center, excuse me, the

(01:54:54):
Trump Kennedy Center honors. Right, I'm sure we'll hear plenty
of jokes and in fact, Trump tweeted the following on Tuesday,
on Festivus Day before Christmas Eve. The Trump Kennedy Center
Honors is what he called it. The Trump Kennedy Center
Honors will be broadcast tonight on CBS in stream on
Paramount Plus ten at at apm Eastern. At the request

(01:55:15):
of the board and just about everybody else in America,
I am hosting the event. Tell me what you think
of my master of ceremony that's in quotes abilities if
really good, would you like me to leave the presidency
in order to make hosting a full time job. We
will be honoring true greats in the history of entertainments
of Wester Sloan, Michael Crawford, Kiss, George Strait, and Gloria Gainer.

(01:55:35):
So is this the soft launch for Trump's resignation strategy
from the president? You didn't get to kick me out.
I left on my own terms. You know, here's the irony.
Donald Trump as dinner party host, Donald Trump as sort
of the roast master, if you will, to take the
place during those old Comedy Central rows, that's kind of

(01:55:58):
what America wanted out of Donald. I don't think. I
think now it's fair to say most of a recond
did we really want this guy as president or did
we just want this guy to be sort of not
even necessarily the MC of the Center Ring, of the
three Ring circus. We just kind of wanted to tune
into him every once in a while because he was
kind of amusing, and he was kind of strange, and

(01:56:20):
he was kind of outlandish and sort of all of
those things. And a little bit of Donald Trump was amusing,
and a lot of Donald Trump is exhausting. Right, So
we know he's not totally serious about this, but you know,
in his own weird way, he probably realizes even his
haters are going to say, yes, please go be a host,

(01:56:41):
go leave the presidency of be a host, and then
he will take that and say, people loved all of
my hosting. Anyway, all right, let's get to some questions,
ask Chuck, And by the way, next week I'm going
to do I'm gonna do as forty minutes of questions.

(01:57:01):
I'm going to tackle that much of my mail bag
to try to clear it out from the year. But
in the meantime, let's slip in a few. All right,
first question, it comes from Michael Dallas, Texas. Help you
found some good barbecue in College Station. When you're in
Dallas for the Cotton bowlt checkup barbecue spotch Hutchins and

(01:57:21):
PKM Lodge.

Speaker 2 (01:57:22):
I did do.

Speaker 1 (01:57:23):
PKM Lodge and it is great. That is great. It
is hard to find bad barbecue in Dallas. I'm sure
it exists, but even the bad barbecue places are good
compared to almost any other city outside of Texas. So
but PKM Lodge, I had forgotten the name of it.
Thank you for reminument. Then he asks this. This twenty twenty
eight gets closer by the day. As of late December

(01:57:44):
twenty twenty five, what wing of the party do you
do you believe the Republican Party will lean towards? Will
it embrace someone from the Romney Bush era I e. Rubio,
or will it be a Trump air apparent I advance
have a hold over the voter. Keep up the good content.
Thanks Michael, Dallas, Texas. I think if you look look
take the law, I just look at. Let's just look

(01:58:04):
at sort of post World War two history of two
term presidents. Right, Eisenhower's vice president was the Republican nominee
in sixty you have lbj's vice president, Hubert Humphrey was
the Democratic nominee in sixty eight. Ronald Reagan's vice president

(01:58:28):
was the nominee in nineteen eighty eight. Now, the one
time where the party literally went further away from the
outgoing sitting president is arguably John McCain inaight from George W. Bush. Right,
there was nobody really running as the Bush air parent. Now,

(01:58:52):
McCain was the guy that finished second to Bush in
two thousand, so in some ways was following the traditional
Republican pattern of who finished second get this nomination the
next time. We saw it with Bob Dole after Bush,
we saw it with Bush after Reagan, We saw it
with Reagan after Ford. You get my drift. But you
could argue that the nomination of McCain was a way

(01:59:15):
of Republican primary voters going no, no, no, we're looking for
something different too. We want to we want to turn
the page on on Bush. I don't think with the
with as much as I think that there is a
an appetite for it within a good chunk of the
Republican Party. Right, We've seen, you know, the move Mike Pence,

(01:59:38):
pretty bold move Mike Pence made to to sort of
stake his claim and I think what I still think
those I still think Mike pen sees himself as a
person who can bridge the old Romney Bush wing of
the party with the new Trump Maga wing of the party.
I still think Penn sees himself is a better bridge

(01:59:59):
to that then say a Marco Rubio. But the most
likely result is Trump's air. Trump's VP is the nominee,
right it is. It is very hard to deny a
sitting vice president nomination. Hubert Humphrey wasn't denied at al
Gore wasn't denied at Kamala Harrison her own odd way,

(02:00:20):
wasn't denied at George H. W. Bush wasn't tonight. It
doesn't mean they don't have to work for it. They
got a Walter Mondale even as an ex VP, right,
it gets it. It is just very difficult. They When
you think about how state parties are sort of filled
with loyalists, you know you're going to have, you know,

(02:00:43):
it's not like you know, look who runs the state
Republican parties right now. There's not many people from the
Romney Bush wing of the party sort of in charge
anymore anywhere. So I don't know where you would get
a base of support to actually win a majority of
Republican primary voters to pull this off, you'd need it,
you know, McCain pulled it off because there really wasn't

(02:01:06):
a consolidated conservative to stop him. I mean, had Romney,
had Romney been a more trusted conservative in OA, right,
and he just wasn't yet he was the guy still
four years frankly, only two years removed from from romney Care,
only two years removed from flipping on the abortion issue

(02:01:26):
as he left the Massachusetts governorship, So he wasn't. He
couldn't consolidate conservatives completely. So there the sort of the
social conservatives were splintered, the sort of more Bush Ryan
wing of the party was kind of splintered, and it
gave a room for McCain. Look, it's possible, right, but

(02:01:48):
the more probable outcome is that you know, Vance gets it,
and you know, look, you I'd rather be the Democrats
than Vance, But every nomination's worth having because the Democrats
could end up nominating someone who's less selectable than Jade Vance's.

(02:02:09):
But I think Vance is it's interesting that what he
did over the weekend in his decision not to you know,
he he will not condemn hateful rhetoric on the right.
He goes out of his way to appease or apologize.
If somebody on the left says something hateful, they should

(02:02:29):
be ostracized from their job from society. When some of
the are right does it, Oh, they're just kids. Nobody
should be judged by one thing they do. He is
really and this is why I think he's going to
be somebody who appears to spend too much time online
and not enough time in the real world. This is
a guy that needs to touch Republican grass roots, not

(02:02:53):
just Republican internet grasstops. So I'm skeptical of him, but
he has to be considered the heavy favorite, and he
already has some institutional advantages that others are just not
going to have, and frankly having turning point as an
organization which right now will certainly be a financial juggernaut.

(02:03:14):
We'll see how influential it can remain if it is
as influential in two years as it feels like it
could be now. But he's already beginning there. It's hard
to see another wing of the party winning in twenty
eight now. If Vance does not win the presidency in
twenty eight. Then the twenty thirty midterms are going to

(02:03:36):
be something else. Then you're going to have they may
look what we're watching with the Democrats right now in
twenty six, which is we're getting a preview of the
fight in twenty eight between essentially fight or unite. You
know what kind of Democratic party should Democratic nominee? Should
they have a fighter or somebody that's going to try
to bring the country together or a united Right now,

(02:03:58):
the grassroots of the Democratic Party wants a fighter, right
and I think that you'll have some of those same Well,
you'll have some of this same sort of intra party
fighting and thirty, especially at fans loses all right. Next
question comes from Travis and see, hey Chuck, hope you're
enjoying the holiday season. I really say I had a
vivid dream where I dropped a college class only to

(02:04:19):
run into you as the professor. You gave me a
urt time and it stuck with me. Oh good, Look,
I will share the celibates. It's called how Washington Works,
so I'll give you an idea of what. So basically,
it's the class called how Washington Works. I have two assignments.
You know that everybody that it participates in this class
has a full time job, all right, so we meet

(02:04:42):
once a week. This is a special USC program. I
highly recommend it. Essentially, instead of spending a semester abroad
at USC, you spend a semester in DC. You get
a full time job, you work nine to five, and
then at six o'clock you have a class Monday through Thursday.
I am the Thursday class, right, I am the last
class before the start of their weekend. Though they do

(02:05:03):
have to work Friday, usually on Fridays. So I say that,
and I'm I am. I am mindful that this is
They're there too, They're there to learn. I am not
beating them up over assignments, though I do make them.
There are two assignments, a midterm and a final that
I do expect them to do. But essentially what I

(02:05:24):
do is I have a variety of speakers. You know,
I've I've had John Kasick, I've had Mark Short, I've
had Brendan Buck on the Republican side, Jake lett Turner,
I've had Jeff Science. I've had near a Tandent, I've
had Debbie Dingle. So I try to have a good
balance of I try to I want to have a

(02:05:45):
couple of lobbyists, including those that lobby from the right,
uh for the excuse me, from industry and those that
lobby from activist groups so people can get an understanding
how both types of lobbying work. Again, I view the classes.
Actually the intent is how Washington works. And my joke
is doesn't work for everybody. It's always working for somebody,

(02:06:08):
and yes, this year it's going to change and how
it works. And then I you know, the assignment I do.
I do this. Last time, I offered a choice of
books to read during the midterm that I think best,
and in fact I posted some of those books. But
I think that best sort of helped explain why we're

(02:06:29):
in the political moment we're in. So, you know, had
I've assigned the McKay Coppin's book on Romney and sort
of that campaign from twenty twelve and sort of Romney's
view of sort of how the party went from his
wing of the party to the Maga wing of the party.
I think it's an incredibly insightful book on that front.

(02:06:53):
The Wolves of k Street by Brodi and Luke Mullins,
their brothers, their investigative reporters I think it's the currently
the new best sort of guide to how lobbying in
Washington works these days? Where have all the Democrats gone?
Which is a roy to share a book about sort

(02:07:15):
of how the Democratic coalition shifted from the Obama era
to what it is today. All of it is designed
so that I think these are books that best explain
how we're in the situation that the current political electorate
is in. I am not I do actually stay away
from assigning books that how to quote make it better.

(02:07:36):
I want people to understand where we are and then
their final exam is their way of making one thing
work better. What's a way to if there's something in
Washington doesn't work right? How would you change it? Is
it through the power of Congress? Is it through the
power of the executive? Is it through outside influence? Is
it through small d democratic reforms? So it's a it's

(02:08:01):
a mix of guest speakers who have had real world experience,
because everybody that's in this class is somebody that is
animated about public service. That's a little bit different than
the average person. I would say, in my two years
of teaching this class, half of them want to run
for office. Someday, and so I want to give them

(02:08:22):
speakers that have done it themselves the ups. I mean,
John Kisa came in in here and said, don't run
for office in your twenties, which is exactly what John
Kaisack did. He basically admitted that for the first thirty
first ten years of his political career he did not
have enough life experience to be a good public servant.
And he said, I didn't know that then. You know,
thirty five forty years later, you know that now. It

(02:08:45):
just the tyranny of wisdom of the middle aged. We
all realized once we hit our fifties and sixties all
the mistakes we made in our twenties and thirties, and
we're desperate to convince others in their twenties and thirties
not to make these mistakes. And most of you never listen.
We are at peak wisdom in our fifties and sixties,
which is why probably all of our presidents should be
in their fifties and sixties, and we shouldn't let anybody

(02:09:06):
seventy plus be president. Is that that's my age cutoff
on there, because I do think peak wisdom is somewhere
in your fifties and sixties, and perhaps I say that
out of necessity since I'm in my mid fifties.

Speaker 2 (02:09:20):
But that is and.

Speaker 1 (02:09:23):
Discussing the current events. I always spend about It's a
three hour class, so iways spend about the first twenty
or thirty minutes just discussing what happened that week and
sort of. I also explained the new cycle a little bit.
But they take a separate media class. Mine is very
much more of how the institutions within Washington worse with
a little bit of the influence of the press. But

(02:09:45):
they have a separate class on that that is fully devoted,
fully devoted to that. So I hope that gave you
an idea of what class with me. So come on
over to USC Dornsife. It's anybody is eligible for this
class if you take, if you get involved in this
DC program. So there you go. All right, next question,

(02:10:11):
I think I'm going to make this the last question
because I went long on that other one. I'm going
to do three more. These are all good because I
can be quick.

Speaker 2 (02:10:16):
All right.

Speaker 1 (02:10:17):
First one comes from Dan Pinehurst, North Carolina. Ah, I
did a Pinehurst Boys trip once. I loved it. I
loved it we did three courses. It was amazing. I
don't think i've golf since then, but it was awesome. Pinehurst,
what a great place, Lieutenant Colonel retired Lieutenant Colonel Dan
lucky you that Pinehurst golf courses are your backyard, and

(02:10:41):
he goes, hey, I really enjoyed your take on how
we mismanaged the end of history after the fall of
the Soviet Union. Made me wonder how my things have
played out differently At Bush forty wanted one a second
term with the administration's strong national security team and less
political pressure to catch in the peace dividend. Could a
Marshall Plan style approach for Russia and Eastern Europe have
worked better than the short term thinking we saw the nighties.
Thanks for all the great programming, and go Clemson this weekend. Yeah,

(02:11:03):
it's a it's a good matchup on paper. You're like, boy,
that would would be a better game, right, I think
it's Clemson Penn State'd be better if it were game
one of the year and my recalibrated schedule of making
all the bowl games happen actually as as preseason game
one of the following season. You know, that's an interesting one.

(02:11:24):
If on George H. W. Bush. I think you're right.
I think it would have been a very foreign policy
heavy second term where Bill Clinton won on domestic issues,
so he'd make it all that so it you know,
in some ways though I don't think you know, remember
Clinton kept a lot he kept calling Pal's national security

(02:11:45):
advisor no excuse me as chairman of the Joint Chiefs
my mistake there, and and in some ways, even though
he had democratic you know, players from the foreign policy community,
they were really of the Cold War uniparty, if you will,

(02:12:06):
right Warren Christopher, I would argue, was that Tony Lake
and then later Sandy Berger On the national security side,
I would argue, was that Al Gore as a vice president?
Remember he was basically the Washington hand for for the
inexperienced Arkansas in Bill Clinton. So, I you know, I

(02:12:29):
don't want to I don't know if our foreign policy
would have changed all that much, but I do agree
with you the emphasis might have been different. There may
have been a more methodical approach that Bush and Baker
would have had. I mean, essentially, what you're saying is,
what if Jim Baker had been running things here right
in helping democracy in the Eastern Europe. Maybe it's not

(02:12:52):
a it's it's an interesting what if that I'd like
to put a little more of my own efforts into.
I need to familiar I need to go back. And
there's a great Jim Baker memoir not a memoir, excuse me,
a biography that was written by my friends Peter Baker
and Susan Glasser. It had some cooperation from Baker. It

(02:13:15):
is a really look I think Jim Baker's Jim Baker
and Leon Panetta are probably the two great equally the
greatest Republican and greatest Democratic public servants that weren't the
best politicians, right. I think Baker ran and lost a
state ag race in Texas. Leon Panetta obviously was a

(02:13:37):
member of Congress, wanted to run for governor, never could
find a way to do it. But boy, they.

Speaker 3 (02:13:42):
Were really good at they they they were They had
a politician's I with a with sort of CEO capabilities,
kind of like Cheney, you know, I meaning they knew
how not all all politicians want to run an institution,
know how to actually have employees.

Speaker 1 (02:13:58):
You get the sense of Panetta and or did, and
this is why they were sort of the super staffers
of their era, one one on the D side, one
on the R side. But I I almost needed would
want to go back and reread the Baker books, both
his and then the one he cooperated with with Glassner
uh And and Peter Baker. No relation by the way

(02:14:19):
to sort of answer that question fully, But but there's
no doubt they're needed. We we we. It is clear
we rushed through the democratization of the former Soviet republics
and and really screwed and it was really divving up industry,
is ended up creating the oligarchs. And in that sense,

(02:14:41):
I think you could say we had a hand in
creating the oligarchy that now essentially runs too much of
the of of Russia and much of and many of
the former Soviet republics on that front. So great question.
Next one today comes from Gavin Brady. Loved your deep
dive and how post World War One decision still shape
global politics today. Such an overlook part of history, the

(02:15:03):
way Western powers redrew borders in the Middle East continues
to have serious repercussions, yet it's barely discussed. You've talked
a lot about media decline, but how do we address
the erosion of historical education and understanding it feels essential
for making sense of modern challenges. Gavin Brady, Brisbane, Australia.
This is my frustration, right we look, I imagine you know Australia,

(02:15:25):
world history is certainly taught through the prism of Australia,
just like world history is taught through the prism of
America in American schools, etc. But I think we do
there's no doubt we have done a poor We don't teach,
We don't think about creating historical curriculums through the prism

(02:15:49):
of today's issues. Right. So if you were to create
a curriculum on history, and I almost wonder if there's
a class to be made which is current of the
history of current events. Okay, I need to come up
with a better class of that. But so that Okay,
the Middle East is in the news, let's teach history

(02:16:09):
of the Middle East to understand that, right, And it
seems like a simple thing to do. Here's the context
and we go. But that's really what's missing in our curriculum.
We probably would be in this and I think this
is what's look the politicizing of of of education curriculums,

(02:16:34):
particularly in Middle schools and high schools is a real
problem when everybody wants their point of view reinforced in
how history is taught rather than just getting getting people
more knowledgeable. I mean, when you look at how many
times we've been drawn into a hot conflict in the
Middle East, and how little in high school we spend
in history classes teaching how World War One created this

(02:16:58):
mess and the fall of the Ottoman it seems to
be kind of messed up when we you know, today
sixteen and seventeen year olds may end up fighting a
war in the Middle East, may end up fighting a
war in China. What do we teach about Taiwan? What
do we teach about the rise of communist China? You know,

(02:17:18):
we're tero you want to talk about you know, I
complain about our lack of of how we just gloss
over World War One and just teach it through the
prison of World War two? What kind of thing about
your own For those of you ask yourself how well
you feel like you were educated about China? Say pre mao, okay,

(02:17:38):
and even then, you know, we we do a little
bit of mao, right, But it's really quickly there's a
Nixon goes to China, YadA, YadA, YadA. We kind of
kind of fight China a little bit during the Korean War,
there's some normalization with then Chao Ping, YadA, YadA, YadA.
Then there's the Olympics, and you know, we don't really

(02:17:59):
teach the history of China and Asia in general. And
yet I could argue the twenty first you know, if
the twentieth century was all about sort of the re
it was all about sort of the I guess you

(02:18:19):
could call it the the de empiring of Europe. Right,
Europe was sort of nothing but a series of sort
of of empires trying to control it in some form
or another, and the twentieth century was sort of an
attempt to put an end to that, right, And it's
sort of and it did. I think the twenty first
century is going to be all about sort of reshaping

(02:18:44):
the power structures in Asia. And yet our education system
does very little in making sure we're fairly informed about
the history of Asian civilizations, of Asian governments of China
in particular. So yeah, we need to we need to
think about our history. Curriculums should be tied to active

(02:19:08):
current events, you know, sort of within a ten year
period in order, because frankly, if students, I know, I
got more animated about something, if I learned something and
then I saw something related to it in the paper
or you related to it in the current events, it
actually sunk in more. So it would just be better teaching. Look,

(02:19:29):
the best teachers figure this out, you know. I remember
having a great government teacher who was who did this
really well? But the best teachers figure figure that out.
All right, last question, uh for for today before I
get to my uh my sports viewing guide slash conversation
starters for you, per your suggestion, I watched Death by Lightning.
I enjoyed it, but found it too short, so I

(02:19:50):
read the book. I kept rolling my eyes at how
often it mentioned national unity around Garfield. Made me sad
to realize I can't imagine that kind of unity today.
Was the country really that united in grief and anger
over its assas nation? Or did the author take some
license loving the podcast? So just a reminder there are
other sports besides college football and baseball, Melanie, I hear you,
and I've got plenty of baseball takes. They're coming. This
is just the heart of college football season, trust me.

(02:20:12):
Pictures and catchers report, what do we add like less
than ten weeks? So I'm there, right, pictures and catchers
are I think we're like eight weeks away. I got you, Melanie,
don't worry, So can I can I recommend another book
that I think would because I you know, do I

(02:20:33):
think there was definitely real unity around Garfield because think
about this? Okay, what I think? What? What the what?
The movie did a terrible with the mini series terrible.
I'm too strong. I just I was glad it was done,
and it's so disappointed in the execution, okay, because I
thought it was short. It gave short shrift to too

(02:20:54):
many things. But there were two aspects to the story
that the death by lightning, as the mini series just
never really did a good job of showcasing. One was
the fact that he gets shot, he lives for months.
So that's why there was this sort of national think
about it. Okay, there was this was what's the latest

(02:21:16):
on the president? You know, is he running the country
or not? Like, how does it? So there was it
did become a national obsession. And while he's still alive,
we have the trial of Gauteau, and the trial was
the first trial of the century that everybody paid attention
to and in d C. Just to get a ticket

(02:21:37):
to attend the trial was like a was a big
deal in society. People wanted to be able to say, oh,
I was at the Guitou trial today, I saw him go.

Speaker 2 (02:21:46):
Crazy again today.

Speaker 1 (02:21:48):
I don't think it captured sort of that aspect of it.
So it I think in the book and sort of
destiny of the Republic, which is what Death by Lightning's
based on. Technically, this other Garfield book is called Dark Horse,
written by a Senate staffer some twenty five years ago,
but very you know, I like the more detail it

(02:22:10):
goes into the Republican convention, gives you a lot more
on that, which is a political junkie. I just love
and I do always want to remind people, you know,
the mythology that just anybody could become the nominee at
a convention is the Garfield story. And it was sort
of because it happened once it became the myth that

(02:22:30):
sort of made political conventions. We've all dreamed of a
convention taking over the process, when only time that happened
was in the eighteen eighty Chicago Republican Convention. So I
think the book does a good job of that, but
I do think the series gave short shrift to the

(02:22:51):
fact that this was a that he was alive for
months and it was due to poor medical treatment that
he died. Right. The bullet didn't kill him, poor medical
treatment killed them. Uh. And then the second thing was
the the the circus, that was the Goodeau trial itself,
and I think it didn't necessarily capture that what what

(02:23:14):
the public was feeling. But there's a reason Chester Arthur flips.
There's a reason Chester Arthur right. And oh, by the way,
the public blamed Arthur at first as part of you know,
sort of this this that that this was all due
to Roscoe Conkling and all of that. So yeah, let's

(02:23:37):
just say that I am That's why I was disappointed
it because I think two of the more fascinating parts
of it. Look at they did an okay job at
the convention, and they allowed that process to play out.
I want to I got I'm obsessed with I'm going
to end with this here. I'm obsessed with Purvis. And
so during my during this long car trip I just

(02:23:57):
took last week, I listen to a whole bunch of
sort of companion. Pluribis podcasts, not some with the official podcast,
but but some on our friends. The Ringer love those guys.
The watch their enthusiasm is a lot of fun. And

(02:24:17):
what Vince Gilligan is known for is showing you methodical process.
Right Like if you watch Pluribus, every time she calls
the phone spoiler lo Art and she's calling, you know,
the hive mind for stuff in the show, you have

(02:24:38):
to hear the entire message tape, recorded message play over
and over. Right. He wants to show that process. He
doesn't give you short shrift, he doesn't speed through it.
He wants you to absorb the process of living. Having
every time they have a conversation, she has to listen
to that recording over and over again. And you have

(02:25:00):
to do it too. I think what Death by Lightning
didn't do is it was so rushed in trying to
put everything that should have been an eight to ten
episode mini series into four episodes. Because the folks that
I don't know this, but I'm going to have an
educated guest, folks at Netflix didn't think Garfield was going
to be that interesting to people, that he was not

(02:25:21):
a known character. Guiteau was not a known assassin all
of those things. So they said, let's do this it
as an experiment. It did well, and it shows it
could have done eight, not four. But they took eight
to ten episodes of content and shoved it into four,
and they rushed things. They didn't show the process, show
me the trial, show more of the medical care, show

(02:25:44):
more of the convention. That's what Vince Gilligan would have
done with the content, and that's not what was done here.
All right, let me get to a little bit of

(02:26:06):
my weekend, of my week ahead. In college football, we
have no college football playf I will be I will
be uploading two more at least three more drops before
we get to the MIAMU Ohouse Gate game on December
thirty first, so I will have a lot more to
say about that game, I am. What's funny is that,

(02:26:29):
you know, we fans, we never forget the slights against teams.
We play like you know, Catholics versus Convicts. When it
comes to Notre Dame, we'll shoot that happened in nineteen
eighty eight. That's over thirty years ago, right, almost forty
years ago. Now on that front, I brought up the
Penn State game. I think that you know, my frustration

(02:26:50):
back during that national title game, Well, that happened in
nineteen eighty six, okay, and now we have Miami winning
eleven games this year. It's the first time that's happened
since before my daughter was born. And she's one years old,
so you know this, you know, so my bitterness about
Ohio State feels very recent. My bitterness about the Big
twelve official who threw the unnecessary flag that handed Jim

(02:27:12):
Tressel the controversial national title that year. Terry Porter is
a name I'll never forget. I'm sorry, mister Porter. If
you're a listener, you're you're you're probably tired of us
Miami fans harassing you by name. Let's just say be
glad that that that the the bad flag didn't happen

(02:27:35):
in the social media era, and that that had happened
back in January of two thousand and three. So, you know,
Miami Ohio State is a quote unquote rivalry just lives
in the minds of Miami fans twenty five years ago
who were alive back then. It is not with today's
Miami fans even you know, I have to explain it

(02:27:56):
to my daughter, you show it. Okay, that's why it's
not you know, it's not inherent on that front. So
but needless to say, I'll have some interesting I'll have
more to say about that game. But look, we're there
are a few things that I actually wanted to bring

(02:28:16):
up in the sports world that are off the field
that I think are worth having a conversation about. First
of all, are we suddenly moving? You know? One of
the things in sports stadium developments was we've always go
back and forth we go, and you can sort of

(02:28:36):
see it in the landscape if you go to older
major metropolitan areas. Right. So, when I first moved to Washington,
all of the basketball games and hockey games were played
in the suburbs. It was called the Capital Center. It
was in Landover, Maryland. And back then you had arenas

(02:28:56):
in suburban locations because there was this movement out of
the cities and the rise of the suburbs. So sports
owners thought they wanted to be where the people lived
at night, not necessarily where the people worked in the day. Well, then,
of course, another generation happens, and then there's a movement
to bring all of the arenas and football stadiums back

(02:29:17):
into cities, right, And we had this movement in the
nineties and in the aughts where everything was being brought
back into the cities. Well, in Washington, we're still trying
to bring a stadium back into the cities. But if
you've noticed, we are kind of in a period now

(02:29:38):
where there is as much movement out of cities again
as there is in sports stadiums coming into the cities.
The first of this was Atlanta, where they decided they
don't play in Atlanta anymore. They play in Cobb County, right,
They left the city of Atlanta, and it's weird. It
bums me that baseball is there, But it turns out
it was the right business decision. They did this based

(02:29:59):
on where are the majority of their fan base, and
they decided it was Cobb County and it worked. You've
got certainly Dallas, all right, You've got the hockey and
basketball are in downtown Dallas, but the baseball and football
are in the suburbs. And they continue to be in
the suburbs. But then again, the sort of the Dallas metroplex.
Is there a suburb anymore or is it just a

(02:30:21):
series of cities. Arlington is growing like crazy, Frisco and
Denton is growing like crazy. So it may be that
those are forward looking things, but it is notable to
me if the Chiefs made the decision to leave Kansas City, Missouri,
and they're going to go to Kansas City, Kansas, which

(02:30:41):
means I don't know how many of their fans are
going to do that, but I'm guessing they got a
better deal from Kansas to develop in Kansas than in
Kansas City, Missouri. You've got the Chicago Bears threatening to
move to another state and to pull what the Washington
then Redskins now commanders did by moving from the district

(02:31:01):
to the suburbs. Now they want to go back to
the district because that's where their fans wanted them to be. Meanwhile,
the Bears, who have this incredible set up Soldier Field,
in some ways is in the perfect location in a
city on the lake. I think it should be a
tremendous home field advantage. Obviously, they want more luxury boxes,
they want to make more money out of these things.

(02:31:24):
But now they're talking about moving into Indiana to northwest Indiana.
Is this really a good idea? Do you really want all.

Speaker 2 (02:31:32):
Of this there?

Speaker 1 (02:31:35):
This is a case where I bring this up because
I think the NFL as a league does not get
involved enough in these stadium decisions.

Speaker 2 (02:31:44):
Right.

Speaker 1 (02:31:44):
The most egregious thing that they let happen that I
still think is a stain on the NFL is letting
the Chargers leave San Diego. I mean, we now have
a zombie franchise in LA. There is nobody that cares
about the Chargers in LA. Unfortunately, I wish there were more.
Know there's a handful of fans. Don't get me wrong,
you all five LA Chargers fans. My apologies, but the

(02:32:06):
San Diego fan base was tremendous. All right. You had
an owner that had no trust with the community, and
you have a community that didn't believe in taxpayer funding
the stadiums. Okay, well, then the NFL should have stepped in.
What's in the best interest of the NFL keeping their
fan base in San Diego, not diluting this mess in LA.
But instead, what did they really want? Well, they wanted

(02:32:26):
to help an owner who couldn't afford a stadium he
was building in so far and he wanted a second
tenant in order to be able to have this magnificent stadium.
So the NFL prioritized having this incredible stadium. God love
it so fi. It's a beautiful stadium. It's a great,
you know, host stadium for Super Bowls, for National title games,

(02:32:49):
for Taylor Swift concerts, you name it. But without the
guarantee of a second tenant, it was going to make
it really hard for the owner to make that work.
And so and so the NFL prioritized sort of an
owner's needs over what was in the best interests of
the fans. And I be really careful here, NFL letting

(02:33:13):
the If the Bears end up moving to Indiana, I
would argue the move out of the Washington to Maryland
was a mistake and that was a Jack Cank Cook.
Can't blame that one on Dan Schneider, all right, that
was a Jack can Cook situation that turned out to
be a bad business decision. Not just a bad fan decision,

(02:33:35):
but bad fan decisions are bad business decisions. And in
this case, I think the NFL needs to be smarter. Look,
I know the only way owners can make money outside
of the socialistic enterprise that is the National Football League,
where you sort of have a salary cap and use
all the shared revenue et cetera. Right that the only

(02:33:57):
the differentiator for individual owners are the luxury boxes, are
the season tickets, is the stadium experience, is parking, is concessions,
et cetera. And I get that, but at the end
of the day, the owners to me are not you know,
these are not small businessmen. These are not the many
of them are not the best in price when it

(02:34:18):
comes to business decisions, and they're not always looking out
for the interest of the NFL or the interests of
the NFL fan base, and the league I think needs
to get more involved in these stadium decisions because these
are NFL facilities as well as team facilities. And considering
you are a socialistic enterprise, this is not a free
market system. It just isn't. Don't pretend it is every

(02:34:42):
once in a while when it comes to stadium development.
And I do think the NFL, you know, needs to
preserve you know, it's it's kind of embarrassing that the
New York teams don't play in New York. I think
it would be embarrassing that the Chicago team didn't play
in Chicago. And is it going to matter? Maybe in
the grand scheme of things, maybe it doesn't matter in
the grand scheme of things, but you sort of tear

(02:35:04):
away at the fabric and at the culture of a town,
and so you know, whether it's you know, making sure
that Kansas City move isn't going to alienate a big
chunk of the fan base, making sure the Bears going
to Gary, Indiana isn't going to alienate the fan base,
making sure that you don't abandon and basically lose out

(02:35:28):
on a bunch of fans in San Diego that should
still be its own fan. I mean, you have the
Chargers are having a tremendous season and no one cares
right and you know, look, you barely can get Angelino's
to care that much about the Rams. But at least
the Rams have some sort of identity and history in LA.

(02:35:49):
And I do think I've got friends in LA whose
kids have adopted the Rams. You have not seen the
same adoption of the Chargers. Look, the Clippers shouldn't be
in LA sharing a market with the Lakers. They should
also probably be in San Diego, and the Chargers shouldn't
be in that market because you realize the Chargers are
the third team in that market. The Rams are one

(02:36:13):
the raiders in Las Vegas are two because of their
old ties to Los Angeles when they're good. USC is three,
and then you finally get to the LA Chargers. But
that is something that needs to go in there very quickly.
Your weekend guide to viewing and conversations you want to

(02:36:35):
have to change to look like you're on top of
things in the sports world. One thing you can mock
and make fun of is how Netflix did a terrible
job of guessing which games would be relevant and which
ones which ones weren't. So other than gamblers, there really

(02:36:55):
is no reason to watch The Christmas games are Chris
get Cowboys Commanders totally meaningless Commanders. Maybe with a third
string quarterback, we won't even have Tyler Hennike Heinike to
root for or enjoy. Lions Vikings. Lions need a lot
of help. They got to win two games and hope

(02:37:16):
the Packers lose two games on that front. In Broncos Chiefs,
Broncos are playing for a piece of the one seed
and they should annihilate the Chiefs given the Chiefs are
now going to be on a third string quarterback on
this front, So you know what that means. It means
and I can't believe I'm saying this, but the Christmas

(02:37:38):
Day NBA games are more watchable than the Christmas Day
NFL games. Look, the NFL tried to basically bully the NBA,
and it really did ruin NBA last year the NBA
Christmas Day games last year. But guess what karma is
a you know what, and the NFL thought, we're putting.

Speaker 2 (02:37:56):
On the Cowboys and Patrick.

Speaker 1 (02:37:58):
Mahomes, We're going to be great. Whoops, not so much, right,
not so fast. So instead you get what I think
is that I'll give you three games all. Look, the
five games are good, but I would argue three stand apart,
and you could say four of the five are worth watching,

(02:38:18):
but they're even an opening game Cavs Nicks. I love
watching Jalen Brunson play basketball, and if you haven't seen
him play this year, this isn't a waste your time.
But the best game is the one, hopefully that starts
before you eat your Christmas dinner, and that is Spurs
Thunder Wemby Baby, the best team in the league against
the best player in the league or the most unstoppable

(02:38:41):
player in the league. I don't know if he's the
best yet, but my God when it is just he
does things you don't see other ordinary human beings do.
He's the alien, right, He's the one of one, whatever
you want to call it, it is amazing. Go watch
some Wemby if you haven't been a fan of the NBA.
Watch this is the future Oklahoma City as a team

(02:39:04):
and Wemby as an individual. This is the future of
basketball being played on heights. We've never seen the game played.

Speaker 2 (02:39:12):
Go watch it.

Speaker 1 (02:39:13):
The next game Mavericks Warriors. You get to see a
little bit of Cooper Flag. This dude is for real,
a lot of fun to watch. Plus you get Steph Curry,
so you get old and new, young and old Steph Curry,
I think technically old enough to beat Cooper Flag's father,
that's the age difference between the two. But it was like,
you know, getting to watch the brief period. We got

(02:39:33):
to watch the overlap between Kobe and Lebron. You get
to see this overlap between Cooper Flag and Steph Curry.
Rockets Lakers. Hey, it's Luca versus the All Star team
that is the Rockets with Kevin Durant and all these
new young players that are absolutely worth watching on that front,
and then the nightcap is Nuggets Timberwolves, and there's nobody

(02:39:56):
that there are two people I really enjoy watching play
basketball these days. One is Victor one Banyama and the
other is NICOLEA. Jokic and Nuggets timber Buls And and
I'm a I'm a I've got a soft spot for
Anthony Edwards. So I think this is a day and
I'm normally you don't hear me as a big proponent
of regular season NBA, but good for the NBA, this

(02:40:17):
is a great showcase. The NFL blew it thought they
were showcasing some of their some of their best teams
and some of their most marketable teams, and it imploded
in their face. They get that. As far as bowls
over the next few days that are worth you disrupting things,

(02:40:37):
take a look at the Cal Hawaii game. Hawaii's been
sneaky good this year. It's not gonna look good for
the ACC, but this will be a semi home game
for Hawaii. That'll be a fascinating fun day after Christmas.
I'm gonna be honest, none of the games are worth watching.
There's no if you're saying I've got to watch college

(02:40:57):
football the day after Christmas on the twin six. You're
either an alum of Central Michigan in Northwestern that's the
noon game. You're an alum of Minnesota New Mexico, although
watching New Mexico beat Minnesota would be a lot of
fun seeing the Big Ten lose to a team like
New Mexico. And then there's you know, the Fighting pit
Bulls aka FIU in its first Bowl game in a while,

(02:41:19):
playing the football program that was created by a former
University MIMI head coach, Larry Coker ut San Antonio. But
let's be honest, none of those are worth it. I
will say this. The Saturday games are a lot of fun.
You've got Penn State Clemson would be a lot more
fun as a meaningful game, but still not a bad

(02:41:40):
game that's going to be played in Yankee Stadium. You've
got Georgia Tech BYU. This should be Notre Dame BYU,
but we're going to get Notre Dame BYU is a
series which, by the way, what a great series. The
Mormons versus the Catholics, Right, that'll be a lot of fun. Sorry,
USC that you guys are afraid of your playing nine
Big Ten games and you don't want to play note
name every year. God bless you. But you know what,

(02:42:02):
BYU Notited Dame feels like a pretty good series. But
b WHYU Georgia Tech isn't a bad second place? And
I think both teams will care never bet on the
grown ass men of BYU. Remember they're all in their
early twenties because they've all done their missions, so you
don't have the misspent youth if you will. And then
the other game that I mildly interested in is whoever's

(02:42:24):
suiting up for LSU playing the Houston Cougars. Houston's a
school that I have a feeling is only going to
become more of a player in college athletics. They already
are in college basketball. There's real money down there at
that campus. There's real enthusiasm, it's a growing alumni base.

(02:42:44):
I just have a feeling Houston has a chance to
be to be interesting there. So there's your weekend guide,
a little bit of a few little nuggets to have
fun conversations with about sports, to make it look like
you have an athletic subscription. But be careful trying to
use some of these games as an excuse to to

(02:43:06):
avoid relatives, because honestly, there's the NBA is really the
only thing that's worth worth saying. Hey, let's set let's
let's set the snacks down a minute, let's check this out.
So enjoy, enjoy your holiday. Like I said, I will
have one more feed drop this week. It's sort of

(02:43:26):
a repackage of an interview I do with Jasmine Crockett.
But I do have some new information at the top
of that, so it is worth your time there. And
with that I will I'll see you next week after
the Christmas holidays. I hope you have a safe, happy
and healthy long Legion

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Full Episode - Bari Weiss Burns The Credibility Of CBS News + The Media Meltdown: AI, Billionaires, and the Collapse of Trust

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.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}Full Episode - Bari Weiss Burns The Credibility Of CBS News + The Media Meltdown: AI, Billionaires, and the Collapse of Trust