October 3, 2025 • 35 mins
The John Kobylt Show Hour 2 (10/03) - Ted and Courtney Balaker come on the show to talk about their documentary "The Coddling of the American Mind". Some people that were part of the sexual abuse lawsuit against LA County say they were paid to file a claim. Supposedly flying taxis are coming soon!
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Can't. I am six forty.
Speaker 2 (00:02):
You're listening to the John Cobelt Podcast on the iHeartRadio
app ron every day from one to till four o'clock,
and if you miss anything after four o'clock, we post
the podcast John Cobelt Show on demand, same as the
radio show, and you could listen to it later today
or all weekend long. All right, Really excited to have
on our next guests. It is Ted Ballaker and Courtney Ballaker.
(00:25):
His wife. Ted is the director, Courtney is the producer.
And as I've been saying since the started show, their
new documentary, a movie called The Coddling of the American Mind,
is something I know if you listen to our show regularly,
you were going to want to watch because it explains
what's gone on at the universities over the last fifteen
(00:50):
years or so. I think it started to get noticeable
that something bizarre was happening. And it's as if students
got to these universities and they were recruited or groomed
into a cult that really distorted their mind and made
some of them go insane. And you've seen all the behavior,
(01:11):
You've seen all the wild, woke, progressive ideas and concepts
that's come out of the university, the whole university realm
over the last fifteen years. The first time I noticed
this was I remember probably twenty thirteen, twenty fourteen, is
when the Yale students, mostly women, had this massive public
(01:34):
meltdown where everybody was crying and screaming because there was
a university official, a dean or an assistant dean, who
put out a memo saying, hey, enjoy Halloween, enjoy the parties.
Dress up however you want. Don't worry about your costume.
I think the dean and his wife and they were
(01:56):
surrounded on campus with all these young women at them
that you're supposed to protect us, You're supposed to keep
us from being, you know, hurt, And I thought, what's
going on here?
Speaker 3 (02:10):
Wow?
Speaker 2 (02:10):
Little did I know? Did little did anybody know? That
the next ten years were going to be a really
wild ride. And it's not over yet. Let's get let's
get ted. Ballaker, Courtney Ballacker, welcome, Thank you so much
for I'm telling you. Your documentary really shook me up.
And I knew what was coming. I was familiar with
(02:31):
the book, and I thought, so I started watching it
at home and I actually couldn't sit still on the sofa,
and I decided to listen and watch it while I
was driving, and I was able to well, I got
to keep my eyes on the road, so I'll be
able to withstand this.
Speaker 1 (02:44):
But wow, and it's all true, it's all real.
Speaker 3 (02:47):
Wow.
Speaker 2 (02:48):
You describe what this documentary is about. What did you discover?
Speaker 3 (02:55):
Yeah, well, it's about the gen Z mental health crisis
and a roundabout twenty twelve, everything kind of went sideways.
Rates of an anxiety and depression among gen Z just skyrocked
it out of nowhere. Even suicide skyrocket it out of nowhere,
and people were looking around like, what's going on here?
And so the book and now the movie is our
(03:17):
attempt to explain what's going on, and it's you put
your finger right on it. The first major episode was
that eruption at Yale, and it hasn't gotten any better
since then. People think all the badness has passed us,
but I think, especially with what's going on after the
Charlie Kirk aftermath, they are very myopic and very naive
(03:40):
if they really.
Speaker 2 (03:41):
Think that, Courtney, what did you discover about the world
after helping to produce this movie?
Speaker 4 (03:52):
Well, we We're very good friends with the co author
of the book, Greg Lukianov. We've known him for years
and we didn't know that he was going through his
own mental health crisis that almost led him to suicide,
and thank goodness, he did not succeed in that. He
does a lot. He's the president of the Foundation for
Individual Rights and Expression FIRE. They do a lot of
(04:14):
work on college campuses, which is in most of his career,
and what he noticed after he came out of being
institutionalized that saved him from committing suicide. He saw things
happening to college students that were leading him to his
own depression that almost led him to suicide. Safety ism
students being taught that they are fragile, students being literally told, well,
(04:39):
if you have an emotional reaction to something, then that
means it's really bad and you need to escape it.
And for me, watching what was happening the Yale example
of a fantastic one, it was almost like witnessing Munchausen
by proxy against college students, committed by college professors and administrators.
Students who come into an environment where they're supposed to
(05:01):
be exposed to new ideas. That's why they're there. They're
there to learn, they're there to discover skill sets, are
there to understand their own worldview and be challenged by it. Instead,
they were being taught literally to protect themselves from things
that made them sad, uncomfortable and hurt and lo and behold.
When you do that to young people, they go into
(05:23):
the real world, well, where you are surrounded by uncomfortable ideas,
people you disagree with, and they couldn't really tolerate it.
They didn't really know how to survive up against it.
And that's really frightening. And it's also not surprising that
that leads to a lot of mental health problems, not
just with gen zers, which is what the film and
(05:45):
the book is focused on, but in society in general.
Speaker 2 (05:50):
In the movie, it seems like it was an unhealthy
confluence of three things. Is this woke progressive politics, the smartphone,
and social media and the three combined into this toxic
stew that overwhelmed the emotional health of just millions of students.
Speaker 4 (06:15):
Absolutely, and that's a great term. I think about it
exactly as a toxic stew. You have social media where
these young people they were kind of born into it,
you know, ted and iyer of a generation where we
were fully formed adults, or as close as possible as
you can be, before social media was put into our life.
But these young people grew up with it, and that
in and of itself is its own piece. But creating
(06:39):
a culture in which college students young people are not
only being told, but almost being taught, how to be fragile.
One of the interview subjects in our piece, for instance, Arion.
He's a young man from India. He came to the
United States literally to go to an American college, and
he tells this amazing story of a freshman orientation where
(06:59):
he's sitting around with a bunch of other freshmens and
the administrator of this orientation went around the room and said,
what is your trigger? And so everybody in that classroom
had to identify their trigger, and it got to one
young woman who said, I don't have one, and the administrator,
who is a college educator, said well, let's find it.
(07:19):
And he was really blown away by this. Coming from India,
he thought, that's beautiful that she doesn't have a trigger. Wow,
what a great way to live through life. You're doing okay,
Maybe you had trauma, maybe you have something that you
are dealing with, but you're moving through it. And to
have somebody say, well, we're going to find it. It's
like somebody literally saying, well, if you're not sick, let's
(07:40):
make you sick. Let's find out how you're sick. How
is that healthy? How is that preparing young minds for
the real world that we all deal with once we
get into the marketplace of ideas, professions, all of the
things that we're supposed to know how to do. It
seems like they were unlearning how to do.
Speaker 2 (08:03):
In the movie, there's a lot of talk about how
the universities, the professors, just the whole infrastructure was teaching
students that they are fragile, that they are vulnerable, that
they're really emotionally frail, and they're not ready to handle
the world.
Speaker 3 (08:22):
That's right. They implement speech codes that One of the
points we make in the film is this great untruth
that students are taught you are fragile. But that's a
terrible thing to teach people. That's a way to make
them afraid of the world and to help them actually
develop depression and anxiety. And a lot of times the
(08:44):
administrators don't come out and just say that They do
it indirectly by, for instance, shielding students from speakers who
might make them uncomfortable. So they've canceled hundreds upon hundreds
of speakers, I mean, everyone from Ben Shapiro to Hill
Clinton for all kinds of reasons. There are even websites
where they can report quote unquote offensive students or professors.
(09:08):
There are biased response teams at the University of Michigan.
They said the best evidence of bias is your own feelings.
So it's a very feelings focused worldview that they're creating.
Speaker 4 (09:21):
Too.
Speaker 3 (09:22):
They don't tell them that your feelings often lead you astray.
Just imagine how mad we'd all be if we just
like followed our feelings all the time. I mean, sometimes
our feelings point in the right direction, but oftentimes they don't.
In the movie, Greg explains that he felt like he
should kill himself, and thank goodness, he didn't follow his feelings. There.
Speaker 1 (09:43):
Can you stand for another segment?
Speaker 3 (09:46):
Yeah, of course?
Speaker 2 (09:46):
Okay quickly though, in case people can't hang around. What
streaming networks are running The Godling of the American Mind.
Speaker 4 (09:56):
The Coddling of the American Mind is on Time Video,
Apple TV, google Play. You can go to the website,
The Coddlingmovie dot Com and find out all of the
streaming services. And we are also on substack.
Speaker 1 (10:07):
Yeah, I was watching it on Prime.
Speaker 2 (10:09):
All right, We're going to talk more with Ted Ballaker
Courtney Ballacker, director and producer of The Coddling of the
American Mind. It's really an investigation into why it seems
so many students coming out of the university's last fifteen
years had had these mental breakdowns, What was going on,
what is still going on.
Speaker 1 (10:28):
We'll talk more coming up.
Speaker 5 (10:30):
You're listening to John Cobelt on demand from KFI AM
six forty.
Speaker 2 (10:37):
And we continue with Ted Ballaker, the director, Courtney Balaker,
his wife, the producer of a new movie called The
Coddling of the American Mind, based on a book and
by Greg looking Off in Jonathan Hate, and it just
chronicles like the descent into madness at the American university
(10:57):
system and what it did to the students and how
everybody became so crazy. And it was a mixture of
woke progressive politics and social media and smartphones because a
lot of them, a lot of mental health in this
country for young people went downhill off the cliff. In
(11:17):
twenty thirteen, when smartphones became widespread and okay, let's get
let's get Ted Ballaker and Courtney Ballaker on. I mean,
I mean that is the moment when everything changed, because
in looking back, I realized everything seemed to happen suddenly.
I mean, I know, all these ideas in the university
(11:38):
must have been around, you know, for decades, but somehow
it became front and center in everybody's mind. And I
remember watching your movie where one student talked about arriving
and he immediately was instructed by his peers. You know
that he's got to find some type of marginalized group
to belong to so he would get the proper social status.
(12:00):
And I guess the smartphone and the social media is
what metastasized this whole thing.
Speaker 3 (12:06):
Yeah, exactly right. You're talking about Sayid, who was an
immigrant from Nigeria and he came to campus, the American
campus when Trump was elected the first time. He had
no idea who Trump was, He had no idea what
it meant to be left or right, and yet, as
you point out, his classmates demanded that he choose a side.
(12:28):
You have to have strong feelings about all the right
progressive beliefs or else you will be shunned or worse.
And with the smartphone and social media, you can't escape
even when you're away from them, because it's always haunting you.
It's always there. You can't escape from social media. It's
like having the worst parts of junior high in your
(12:50):
pocket twenty four hours a day or seven days a week.
And so he went into a very deep, deep depression.
He almost considered suicide himself. He's a sweet kid who
had never been to this country before, and he thought
he was coming for a very kind of free speech,
open experience, and what he found was exactly the opposite.
Speaker 2 (13:12):
You had four students I remember, tell their stories. It
seemed like they climbed out of it. How were they able.
Speaker 1 (13:20):
To do that?
Speaker 3 (13:24):
Yes, each one of them dealt with social justice extremism
in one way or another. One each was able to
climb out of it. In Sayid's case, it was the
Cobbling of the American Mind and other books by Jonathan Hight.
In another case, a young lady. Two young ladies were
kind of able to draw on the reservoir of good
(13:45):
stuff that their parents had helped provide for them in
their younger years. In one case, a young woman leaned
on her Christian faith. In another case, a young woman
remembered that her family really actually promoted debate, and it
was it was a place where you stood around the
table and if you have a good idea, you express it.
(14:05):
But you can't just expect to have your idea affirmed
just because you believe deeply in it, without any foundation.
And so there are various ways that these young people
were able to climb their way out of it. So
we certainly hope that young people watch this, and they
have been watching it. We're happy to say and learn
from from our young interview subjects. You went into the darkness,
(14:28):
but pulled themselves back into the light.
Speaker 4 (14:32):
Go ahead, Sorry, you go ahead. I was just going
to say, I mean these ideas the testis laid out.
I mean this should start really early on. This should
start at kindergarten. This should start when pete, when before
we get to college, critical thinking, understanding, how to have
a conversation or debate and civilized way. The younger we
(14:53):
can expose children to these ideas and practices, the better
chance we have of not having this newer generation. I
guess they're called jen Alpha. Now go down the same
path that some of these gen Zers have gone down
that led them to depression and unfortunately suicide and horrible cases.
Speaker 2 (15:13):
I think I remember one of the girls said that
they were taught that what they say could be trouble,
what they don't say could be trouble. Like they were
expected to comment, but they had to have the correct comment,
and if they didn't comment at all, that in itself
was a.
Speaker 4 (15:28):
Problem, said the interview subject. That yeah, yeah, I was
just talking about, said the young man from Nigeria. There's
literally a part in the documentary John where he says,
I remember saying one thing out loud to my friends
and thinking something completely different. I mean, that is a
recipe for a mental health problem, when you're saying one
(15:51):
thing but thinking something else. And this just becomes a
part of the territory, apparently because they're afraid they will
get ostracized, they will not have friends. It's us versus
them culture now.
Speaker 2 (16:06):
And you have to like they felt like they had
to play the game, that they had to join one
of the teachers, and then they had to follow whatever
the team leaders were instructing, no matter how nuts it was.
Speaker 4 (16:15):
Even if they didn't agree with it. I mean Can
you imagine walking around the world saying one thing that
you completely disagree with just because you don't want to
lose friends? It to the commissary.
Speaker 1 (16:27):
Honestly, God, I was watching that.
Speaker 3 (16:29):
No.
Speaker 2 (16:30):
If I was in college during this period, I would
have left. I was about three days. It's just like,
I am not playing this game. You know, I'm going
to go and sell vegetables somewhere. I'm not doing this.
I mean, it's crazy. All right, listen. I can't tell
you how much I enjoyed the movie. I can't tell
you how much I recommend that everybody listening watched this.
It's called The Coddling of the American Mind. It's it's
(16:50):
on all the streaming channels like Prime, like Apple and
others Google. Ted Ballaker's director, Courtney Ballaker, is the producer,
and it's based on the book by bred Greg lukan
Off and Jonathan Hay. Thank you so much for doing this.
Speaker 4 (17:09):
Thank you so.
Speaker 3 (17:09):
Much for some work you do.
Speaker 4 (17:11):
John. We really appreciate it.
Speaker 1 (17:12):
Oh, you're welcome. It was good talking with you.
Speaker 2 (17:15):
Thanks for coming on, Like, okay, take care, there you go,
And that's Ted and Courtney Ballaker.
Speaker 1 (17:20):
More coming up.
Speaker 5 (17:21):
You're listening to John Cobels on demand from KFI AM
six forty.
Speaker 2 (17:27):
We're on every day from one until four o'clock, and
then after four o'clock the podcast John Cobelt Show on
demand two rounds of the voistline next hour three twenty
and three point fifty. I really debri you Ott to
watch the cobbling of the American mind. I mean, your
kids went through college I think during this era. Oh yeah,
as did a couple of mine, and oh man, they
(17:50):
it's so infuriating. And I I just knew instinctively when
the smartphone came out and I got I always got mocked.
I said, this thing is going to ruin life. I
just knew it because as wonderful as it is, as
long as we want to use it for good things,
(18:11):
I knew much of the world isn't good. A lot
of people aren't good, and people are going to give
in to all their worst impulses and worst desires, and
oh my god, what what that? That Social media is
the same thing, and it's really ruined a lot of kids' lives.
Their brains are permanently destroyed. They've they've been programmed into
(18:33):
a cult.
Speaker 1 (18:34):
I tell you what.
Speaker 2 (18:35):
They there's so many administrators and professors who ought to
be uh fired at these universities. There's some people who
can't believe what Trump is doing, threatening federal funding unless
all woke progressive politics is ended at the universities. He's
absolutely right. Watch this movie. If you think Trump should
(18:57):
not be doing this, watch this movie and then come
back to me. Somebody's got to do it, because it's
really wrecked the generation. And I actually feel sorry for
that whole gen Z generation who because some of the
kids just powered their way through it and realized that
this was nuts and did the best they could, just
appeasing whoever they had to appease. But the ones who
fell for it all the way. And you'll see these
(19:18):
kids in the movie who sunk to the depths and
are climbing their way out.
Speaker 1 (19:25):
It is cult.
Speaker 2 (19:27):
I've been calling it a cult. This progressive politics, this
woke nonsense, it's all a cult. And they used cult
methods to indoctrinate and rope in these kids. I mean,
you recognize if you've read any books, if you watch
ever watched a documentary, or heard interviews with people who
got sucked into cults, you will recognize within thirty seconds.
(19:47):
The methods used at the university by the administrators who
run the university and by the professors. They all know
what they're doing and they just needed the right tool,
and that was social media and smartphones to amplify the message.
It's just terrible. So it's the coddling of the American mind.
You can see it on Prime, Apple Plus and other
(20:10):
and other streaming channels.
Speaker 1 (20:12):
I got to tell you about this scam though.
Speaker 2 (20:16):
This is one of those hard to believe but absolutely
easy to believe. You know, recently there was a settlement
by Los Angeles County Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors,
and those people are really a bunch of numb nuts.
And I'm talking about the supervisors, you know, the ones
(20:37):
who spent no money on the Office of Emergency Management
and that's why nineteen people died in the Altadena fire.
You know, they spent no money to warn people to
get out of the neighborhood during a fire. Well, they
spent four billion dollars on a settlement for sex abuse
victims who these people claimed that when they were in
the juvenile detention system, for example, juvenile halls, foster homes,
(21:01):
they got sexually abused. Well, some of them did not
get sexually abused, but they were paid to be part
of the lawsuit. And so I hope the staff UH
and and the UH supervisors and Lindsey Horvath pay attention
Hill to Slise and Holly Mitchell, UH and Jennie Hahn,
(21:21):
those four knuckleheads. Well, maybe you read this story in
the Times. There's a a law firm called Downtown LA
Law Group. They represented some of the plaintiffs. Some of
the plaintiffs said they were paid to sue. Apparently, if
(21:42):
you go down to south central Los Angeles to the
County Benefits office and that's where you get your welfare
and food stamps, there are salesmen on the sidewalk. They're
trying to they're they're they're they're hawking. They're selling you.
They're selling you something. They these incredible deals. For example,
they'll pay you fifteen dollars for a blood pressure exam.
(22:06):
Now I don't really get that one. You get fifteen
dollars by holding your arm out for a blood pressure exam.
They're handing out free phones. You get two dollars for
a COVID swab. That doesn't make any sense, but that's
not the point of this. There are people working, so
is claimed in this story, for the LA LAG Group,
(22:28):
who was getting plaintiffs to be part of the class
action sex abuse settlement against LA County. What they do
is they take people desperate for cash and these salesmen
point them toward the law firm LA Law Group, and
(22:51):
LA LAG Group will put their names on the list
and that'll add to the money that they're going to
get in the settlement and then LA LAG Group keep
about half the money. All you have to do again,
you're wandering on the sidewalk, maybe just looking for food
stamp to get the food stamp line, and they're saying, hey,
we'll make you some money. Make up a sex abuse,
(23:14):
make up a sex abuse claim against the county, and
you could be part of this settlement.
Speaker 1 (23:19):
So people do. LA Time spent two.
Speaker 2 (23:22):
Weeks outside the Social Services office in South LA there
was a constant flow of people that applied for food
stamps and cash aid and spoke with seven people who
said they were paid within the last year to sue
the county for sex abuse. They had not Some of
them had not been abused, some of them had not
planned to sue even if they were, and of course
(23:44):
they were, they were already in the juvenile halls. So
these are criminals who were lined up on the sidewalk
to access our tax money through food stamps and welfare.
Two people said they were told to fabricate stories of abuse.
Here's an example. Marlon Bland is thirty one years old.
(24:05):
He got two hundred dollars. They paid him one hundred
dollars in cash outside the office and gave him the
other one hundred dollars. When he met to meet with
lawyers from Downtown La Law Group, the receptionist there gave
him one hundred dollars check and then he joined the lawsuit.
Downtown La Law Group sued the county on his behalf.
(24:30):
Kevin Richardson. Another one fifty nine years old, said he
got fifty dollars outside the office.
Speaker 1 (24:36):
Another woman, I think, is it a moment. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (24:39):
Quontavia Smith, thirty eight, said the vendor drove her to
the office of the law firm and gave her two
hundred dollars. Of the law firm denies all this. Of course,
Downtown La Law Group a mask more than twenty seven
hundred people to sue La County. Here's what one of
(25:04):
the defendants, here's the story he made up. His name
is Juan Fajardo. He was part of the lawsuit against
La County LA Supervisors.
Speaker 1 (25:16):
Are you Missay, are you listening to this?
Speaker 2 (25:18):
You guys got conned by this character now, Juan Fajardo
said he used to sell phones next to the lawsuit vendors.
He would watch a man pull up outside the social
services office in a tesla and hand the recruiters cash,
and then they would give them to potential plaintiffs. Fajardo
(25:40):
said the recruiters would say, just make up a story,
say you got touched, here's fifty dollars.
Speaker 1 (25:48):
Then they'll give you.
Speaker 2 (25:49):
The fifty dollars and say, hey, you never know, you
might even get a lawsuit. One recruiter sold phones. When
somebody wanted a phone, he would watch the recruiter take
a call on the new phone and make up a
story of abuse under the customer's name. Then this recruiter
would hand the customer the phone and pocket the fifty
(26:09):
for himself. So Fa Heart had been watching this thought, well,
this looks like a good scam. I'll make up a
story too, So he made up a fake name and
a fake birthday. He took fifty dollars and the law
contacted the law firm and he got a call back.
Ten minutes after the call, they said his case had
been accepted.
Speaker 1 (26:30):
Well, what was this story?
Speaker 2 (26:31):
He said, Well, they videotaped ups while we're in the showers,
touching us while they pat us down.
Speaker 1 (26:36):
Be Fahard.
Speaker 2 (26:37):
I heard everybody else say this online, right. That was
he was in juvenile hall. They would would be in
the shower and you know, the guards, the attendants would
would would touch them their private parts while patting us down.
So I was like, I'll use that instead of trying
to make up a whole different lie.
Speaker 1 (26:55):
And it worked.
Speaker 2 (26:57):
They got paid and then they share fifty percent, they
claim with the Downtown La Law Group, which again is
denying all this.
Speaker 1 (27:08):
And then eleven.
Speaker 2 (27:09):
Thousand names were brought to the county, although I think
this law firm represented twenty seven hundred, and there was
a settlement made. Jennis Han, Hildesalise, these geniuses, Holly Mitchell,
(27:32):
the Lindsay Harvath.
Speaker 1 (27:37):
Oh yeah, sure, we'll pay four billion dollars.
Speaker 2 (27:40):
In fact, I think this is the deal where La
County is going to be paying off this till the
year twenty fifty, twenty fifty one, something like that.
Speaker 1 (27:48):
And some of these defendants were hired off the street.
Speaker 2 (27:50):
They were bribed, according to this LA Time story, for
two hundred dollars.
Speaker 1 (27:57):
And I don't know what the.
Speaker 2 (27:58):
Of the settlement is, but the law firms share is
fifty percent. Good lord, what a racket. And you know
who started this was Newsom and the Democratic legislature because
what they did is they extended the statute of limitations
(28:18):
on sex abuse claims, and suddenly thousands of sex abuse
claims poured in thousands. And now Santa Monica's getting bankrupted.
LA County's getting bankrupted, and some of these claims are
totally crazy. Now, the private law firms like John Manley's
(28:44):
law firm, Manly Sturt and Finalde they do they do
strict betting, but apparently some of the other law firms don't.
Speaker 1 (28:54):
So there you go.
Speaker 2 (28:54):
More another good use of your tax money. All right,
More coming up three locker to have Laura Angele on
about the ditty sentencing. It finally happened.
Speaker 5 (29:05):
You're listening to John Cobels on demand from KFI A
six forty.
Speaker 2 (29:11):
Coming up after three o'clock did he's been sentenced. It
happened on our show at about quarter to two, and
we were getting but the house shut up, shut him up.
Quarter to two. We were getting the whole back and
forth of the defense argument, the prosecutor's argument. What the
(29:33):
judge was saying. Lor Angle from NewsNation Cable TV news outlet,
is gonna give us the whole story because did he's
going to jail? He got a sentence of four years
and two months, which sounds like it's only going to
be three years because he's already spent fourteen months in
prison just awaiting the trial. These are federal charges and
you don't get much discount on a federal sentence.
Speaker 6 (29:57):
Well, didn't he already made plans for next week thinking
that he was that he was getting out.
Speaker 2 (30:02):
Yeah, he did, He actually did. He booked two speaking
engagements in Miami.
Speaker 1 (30:06):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (30:08):
Well, I don't know if they take zoom out of
a prison, what's going to happen. He was trying to
make money. I guess he was going to talk about
the unfairness of the federal justice system.
Speaker 1 (30:18):
Anyway, Laurel will be on with this coming up. If
for Cardli, Laura wouldn't do zoom. I don't think did
he will? All right? Flying taxis? Did you see this
this morning? I heard about the La Times un a story.
Speaker 2 (30:34):
Electric air taxis are going to be flying in the
sky soon and it's it needs approval from the FAA, which,
by the way, all those people are not getting paid.
If you're if you're if you're flying anywhere in the
coming days and weeks. Everybody's unpaid, the TSA agents and
(30:57):
and the air traffic controllers, especially the air traffic controllers.
In fact, did you see and I think this is
why they were still getting money the two Delta planes
at the Guardia Airport.
Speaker 3 (31:09):
In New York.
Speaker 1 (31:10):
Yeah, I did that story yesterday. Yeah, collided on the runway.
Can you imagine?
Speaker 6 (31:17):
Well, no, let's not you know what, John, Let's think positive.
Let's not put seriously, let's not put that out there.
That's really scary.
Speaker 2 (31:25):
These guys. First of all, you're going to get hungry
and thirsty. They've got no money, they can't even go
to the vending stowll.
Speaker 6 (31:31):
Maybe they have a good work ethic and hoping that
this will resolve itself quickly, and they don't want anybody
to be hurt.
Speaker 1 (31:39):
That's what I'm hoping.
Speaker 2 (31:40):
So this company is called Vertiports, and a vertiport is
going to be a place where you can land these
air taxi helicopters so that we can all jump around
and avoid traffic, right if you want to go from
downtown to the airport real fast, or the valley to
the west side, any number of routes because they want to.
(32:05):
They want two or three dozen of them scattered around
the whole La Orange County market, kind.
Speaker 6 (32:09):
Of like those scooters that you can jump up right
those what are they birds or whatever they're called.
Speaker 2 (32:14):
Yeah, except it's it's an air tax right, So you're
up in the sky, so you're going to see more
things flying in the sky.
Speaker 1 (32:21):
I don't know who's keeping track of those.
Speaker 2 (32:23):
They're looking for open land near an airport or a university,
or on top of a parking garage or on top
of an office building rooftop in the downtown area. And
they want to have air travel in congested urban centers
so you don't have to sit in your car. I
don't know what the price of this is going to be.
(32:46):
They have it's a it's called Electric Vertical Takeoff and
Landing e VTOL. So these aren't going to be gas powered.
This is uh, this is gonna be I guess battery operation.
Speaker 6 (33:00):
What happens when the battery dies midair?
Speaker 1 (33:04):
I don't know.
Speaker 2 (33:06):
And this is supposed to bring helicopter travel to the
masses and they make less noise, so maybe the TV
stations can get this.
Speaker 1 (33:16):
Wait to wait a second, we're already having trouble.
Speaker 6 (33:19):
Look at as you mentioned those two planes that glided
at La Bardia, So how are we going to how
are we going at We're putting more flying.
Speaker 1 (33:27):
Objects, Yeah, dozens of the right.
Speaker 6 (33:30):
Who's who's going to be monitoring those things?
Speaker 2 (33:32):
I don't know, nobody. It seems nobody's monitoring anything now.
SOFI Stadium is going to be one of the sites
lax and uh every everywhere from Santa Monica to Orange
County and uh they're looking at clusters of offices and stores,
dense residential neighborhoods where there's a lot of heavy traffic
(33:54):
on the freeways and the main boulevards, and you'll have
a little vertiport nearby to jump by the taxi. It
doesn't say how it's going to cost, but it's more
things to fall out of the sky.
Speaker 1 (34:05):
Is the way I looked at it, or crash.
Speaker 2 (34:08):
Right right to go along with these wacky waymos that
are all over the place. They you know the story
about the one that made a you turn suddenly in traffic. Yeah, yeah,
I was reading one of the papers had a story
about it and says, this raises questions about the safety
(34:29):
of these Yeah, it raises questions. I love that phrase.
It raises questions. Yes, the thing took off on its
own and did an illegal U turn. All right, we
come back. Lore Engele News Nation. It's a good cable
TV news operation. And she's been covering the Sean Ditty
Combs trial for quite a while and today was sentencing
(34:52):
day and she'll have the whole story from beginning to
end coming up in minutes. Debor Mark Live MCAFI twenty
four hour Newsroom. Hey, you've been listening to The John
Cobalt Show podcast. You can always hear the show live
on KFI AM six forty from one to four pm
every Monday through Friday, and of course anytime on demand
on the iHeartRadio app.
Can't. I am six forty.
Speaker 2 (00:02):
You're listening to the John Cobelt Podcast on the iHeartRadio
app ron every day from one to till four o'clock,
and if you miss anything after four o'clock, we post
the podcast John Cobelt Show on demand, same as the
radio show, and you could listen to it later today
or all weekend long. All right, Really excited to have
on our next guests. It is Ted Ballaker and Courtney Ballaker.
(00:25):
His wife. Ted is the director, Courtney is the producer.
And as I've been saying since the started show, their
new documentary, a movie called The Coddling of the American Mind,
is something I know if you listen to our show regularly,
you were going to want to watch because it explains
what's gone on at the universities over the last fifteen
(00:50):
years or so. I think it started to get noticeable
that something bizarre was happening. And it's as if students
got to these universities and they were recruited or groomed
into a cult that really distorted their mind and made
some of them go insane. And you've seen all the behavior,
(01:11):
You've seen all the wild, woke, progressive ideas and concepts
that's come out of the university, the whole university realm
over the last fifteen years. The first time I noticed
this was I remember probably twenty thirteen, twenty fourteen, is
when the Yale students, mostly women, had this massive public
(01:34):
meltdown where everybody was crying and screaming because there was
a university official, a dean or an assistant dean, who
put out a memo saying, hey, enjoy Halloween, enjoy the parties.
Dress up however you want. Don't worry about your costume.
I think the dean and his wife and they were
(01:56):
surrounded on campus with all these young women at them
that you're supposed to protect us, You're supposed to keep
us from being, you know, hurt, And I thought, what's
going on here?
Speaker 3 (02:10):
Wow?
Speaker 2 (02:10):
Little did I know? Did little did anybody know? That
the next ten years were going to be a really
wild ride. And it's not over yet. Let's get let's
get ted. Ballaker, Courtney Ballacker, welcome, Thank you so much
for I'm telling you. Your documentary really shook me up.
And I knew what was coming. I was familiar with
(02:31):
the book, and I thought, so I started watching it
at home and I actually couldn't sit still on the sofa,
and I decided to listen and watch it while I
was driving, and I was able to well, I got
to keep my eyes on the road, so I'll be
able to withstand this.
Speaker 1 (02:44):
But wow, and it's all true, it's all real.
Speaker 3 (02:47):
Wow.
Speaker 2 (02:48):
You describe what this documentary is about. What did you discover?
Speaker 3 (02:55):
Yeah, well, it's about the gen Z mental health crisis
and a roundabout twenty twelve, everything kind of went sideways.
Rates of an anxiety and depression among gen Z just skyrocked
it out of nowhere. Even suicide skyrocket it out of nowhere,
and people were looking around like, what's going on here?
And so the book and now the movie is our
(03:17):
attempt to explain what's going on, and it's you put
your finger right on it. The first major episode was
that eruption at Yale, and it hasn't gotten any better
since then. People think all the badness has passed us,
but I think, especially with what's going on after the
Charlie Kirk aftermath, they are very myopic and very naive
(03:40):
if they really.
Speaker 2 (03:41):
Think that, Courtney, what did you discover about the world
after helping to produce this movie?
Speaker 4 (03:52):
Well, we We're very good friends with the co author
of the book, Greg Lukianov. We've known him for years
and we didn't know that he was going through his
own mental health crisis that almost led him to suicide,
and thank goodness, he did not succeed in that. He
does a lot. He's the president of the Foundation for
Individual Rights and Expression FIRE. They do a lot of
(04:14):
work on college campuses, which is in most of his career,
and what he noticed after he came out of being
institutionalized that saved him from committing suicide. He saw things
happening to college students that were leading him to his
own depression that almost led him to suicide. Safety ism
students being taught that they are fragile, students being literally told, well,
(04:39):
if you have an emotional reaction to something, then that
means it's really bad and you need to escape it.
And for me, watching what was happening the Yale example
of a fantastic one, it was almost like witnessing Munchausen
by proxy against college students, committed by college professors and administrators.
Students who come into an environment where they're supposed to
(05:01):
be exposed to new ideas. That's why they're there. They're
there to learn, they're there to discover skill sets, are
there to understand their own worldview and be challenged by it. Instead,
they were being taught literally to protect themselves from things
that made them sad, uncomfortable and hurt and lo and behold.
When you do that to young people, they go into
(05:23):
the real world, well, where you are surrounded by uncomfortable ideas,
people you disagree with, and they couldn't really tolerate it.
They didn't really know how to survive up against it.
And that's really frightening. And it's also not surprising that
that leads to a lot of mental health problems, not
just with gen zers, which is what the film and
(05:45):
the book is focused on, but in society in general.
Speaker 2 (05:50):
In the movie, it seems like it was an unhealthy
confluence of three things. Is this woke progressive politics, the smartphone,
and social media and the three combined into this toxic
stew that overwhelmed the emotional health of just millions of students.
Speaker 4 (06:15):
Absolutely, and that's a great term. I think about it
exactly as a toxic stew. You have social media where
these young people they were kind of born into it,
you know, ted and iyer of a generation where we
were fully formed adults, or as close as possible as
you can be, before social media was put into our life.
But these young people grew up with it, and that
in and of itself is its own piece. But creating
(06:39):
a culture in which college students young people are not
only being told, but almost being taught, how to be fragile.
One of the interview subjects in our piece, for instance, Arion.
He's a young man from India. He came to the
United States literally to go to an American college, and
he tells this amazing story of a freshman orientation where
(06:59):
he's sitting around with a bunch of other freshmens and
the administrator of this orientation went around the room and said,
what is your trigger? And so everybody in that classroom
had to identify their trigger, and it got to one
young woman who said, I don't have one, and the administrator,
who is a college educator, said well, let's find it.
(07:19):
And he was really blown away by this. Coming from India,
he thought, that's beautiful that she doesn't have a trigger. Wow,
what a great way to live through life. You're doing okay,
Maybe you had trauma, maybe you have something that you
are dealing with, but you're moving through it. And to
have somebody say, well, we're going to find it. It's
like somebody literally saying, well, if you're not sick, let's
(07:40):
make you sick. Let's find out how you're sick. How
is that healthy? How is that preparing young minds for
the real world that we all deal with once we
get into the marketplace of ideas, professions, all of the
things that we're supposed to know how to do. It
seems like they were unlearning how to do.
Speaker 2 (08:03):
In the movie, there's a lot of talk about how
the universities, the professors, just the whole infrastructure was teaching
students that they are fragile, that they are vulnerable, that
they're really emotionally frail, and they're not ready to handle
the world.
Speaker 3 (08:22):
That's right. They implement speech codes that One of the
points we make in the film is this great untruth
that students are taught you are fragile. But that's a
terrible thing to teach people. That's a way to make
them afraid of the world and to help them actually
develop depression and anxiety. And a lot of times the
(08:44):
administrators don't come out and just say that They do
it indirectly by, for instance, shielding students from speakers who
might make them uncomfortable. So they've canceled hundreds upon hundreds
of speakers, I mean, everyone from Ben Shapiro to Hill
Clinton for all kinds of reasons. There are even websites
where they can report quote unquote offensive students or professors.
(09:08):
There are biased response teams at the University of Michigan.
They said the best evidence of bias is your own feelings.
So it's a very feelings focused worldview that they're creating.
Speaker 4 (09:21):
Too.
Speaker 3 (09:22):
They don't tell them that your feelings often lead you astray.
Just imagine how mad we'd all be if we just
like followed our feelings all the time. I mean, sometimes
our feelings point in the right direction, but oftentimes they don't.
In the movie, Greg explains that he felt like he
should kill himself, and thank goodness, he didn't follow his feelings. There.
Speaker 1 (09:43):
Can you stand for another segment?
Speaker 3 (09:46):
Yeah, of course?
Speaker 2 (09:46):
Okay quickly though, in case people can't hang around. What
streaming networks are running The Godling of the American Mind.
Speaker 4 (09:56):
The Coddling of the American Mind is on Time Video,
Apple TV, google Play. You can go to the website,
The Coddlingmovie dot Com and find out all of the
streaming services. And we are also on substack.
Speaker 1 (10:07):
Yeah, I was watching it on Prime.
Speaker 2 (10:09):
All right, We're going to talk more with Ted Ballaker
Courtney Ballacker, director and producer of The Coddling of the
American Mind. It's really an investigation into why it seems
so many students coming out of the university's last fifteen
years had had these mental breakdowns, What was going on,
what is still going on.
Speaker 1 (10:28):
We'll talk more coming up.
Speaker 5 (10:30):
You're listening to John Cobelt on demand from KFI AM
six forty.
Speaker 2 (10:37):
And we continue with Ted Ballaker, the director, Courtney Balaker,
his wife, the producer of a new movie called The
Coddling of the American Mind, based on a book and
by Greg looking Off in Jonathan Hate, and it just
chronicles like the descent into madness at the American university
(10:57):
system and what it did to the students and how
everybody became so crazy. And it was a mixture of
woke progressive politics and social media and smartphones because a
lot of them, a lot of mental health in this
country for young people went downhill off the cliff. In
(11:17):
twenty thirteen, when smartphones became widespread and okay, let's get
let's get Ted Ballaker and Courtney Ballaker on. I mean,
I mean that is the moment when everything changed, because
in looking back, I realized everything seemed to happen suddenly.
I mean, I know, all these ideas in the university
(11:38):
must have been around, you know, for decades, but somehow
it became front and center in everybody's mind. And I
remember watching your movie where one student talked about arriving
and he immediately was instructed by his peers. You know
that he's got to find some type of marginalized group
to belong to so he would get the proper social status.
(12:00):
And I guess the smartphone and the social media is
what metastasized this whole thing.
Speaker 3 (12:06):
Yeah, exactly right. You're talking about Sayid, who was an
immigrant from Nigeria and he came to campus, the American
campus when Trump was elected the first time. He had
no idea who Trump was, He had no idea what
it meant to be left or right, and yet, as
you point out, his classmates demanded that he choose a side.
(12:28):
You have to have strong feelings about all the right
progressive beliefs or else you will be shunned or worse.
And with the smartphone and social media, you can't escape
even when you're away from them, because it's always haunting you.
It's always there. You can't escape from social media. It's
like having the worst parts of junior high in your
(12:50):
pocket twenty four hours a day or seven days a week.
And so he went into a very deep, deep depression.
He almost considered suicide himself. He's a sweet kid who
had never been to this country before, and he thought
he was coming for a very kind of free speech,
open experience, and what he found was exactly the opposite.
Speaker 2 (13:12):
You had four students I remember, tell their stories. It
seemed like they climbed out of it. How were they able.
Speaker 1 (13:20):
To do that?
Speaker 3 (13:24):
Yes, each one of them dealt with social justice extremism
in one way or another. One each was able to
climb out of it. In Sayid's case, it was the
Cobbling of the American Mind and other books by Jonathan Hight.
In another case, a young lady. Two young ladies were
kind of able to draw on the reservoir of good
(13:45):
stuff that their parents had helped provide for them in
their younger years. In one case, a young woman leaned
on her Christian faith. In another case, a young woman
remembered that her family really actually promoted debate, and it
was it was a place where you stood around the
table and if you have a good idea, you express it.
(14:05):
But you can't just expect to have your idea affirmed
just because you believe deeply in it, without any foundation.
And so there are various ways that these young people
were able to climb their way out of it. So
we certainly hope that young people watch this, and they
have been watching it. We're happy to say and learn
from from our young interview subjects. You went into the darkness,
(14:28):
but pulled themselves back into the light.
Speaker 4 (14:32):
Go ahead, Sorry, you go ahead. I was just going
to say, I mean these ideas the testis laid out.
I mean this should start really early on. This should
start at kindergarten. This should start when pete, when before
we get to college, critical thinking, understanding, how to have
a conversation or debate and civilized way. The younger we
(14:53):
can expose children to these ideas and practices, the better
chance we have of not having this newer generation. I
guess they're called jen Alpha. Now go down the same
path that some of these gen Zers have gone down
that led them to depression and unfortunately suicide and horrible cases.
Speaker 2 (15:13):
I think I remember one of the girls said that
they were taught that what they say could be trouble,
what they don't say could be trouble. Like they were
expected to comment, but they had to have the correct comment,
and if they didn't comment at all, that in itself
was a.
Speaker 4 (15:28):
Problem, said the interview subject. That yeah, yeah, I was
just talking about, said the young man from Nigeria. There's
literally a part in the documentary John where he says,
I remember saying one thing out loud to my friends
and thinking something completely different. I mean, that is a
recipe for a mental health problem, when you're saying one
(15:51):
thing but thinking something else. And this just becomes a
part of the territory, apparently because they're afraid they will
get ostracized, they will not have friends. It's us versus
them culture now.
Speaker 2 (16:06):
And you have to like they felt like they had
to play the game, that they had to join one
of the teachers, and then they had to follow whatever
the team leaders were instructing, no matter how nuts it was.
Speaker 4 (16:15):
Even if they didn't agree with it. I mean Can
you imagine walking around the world saying one thing that
you completely disagree with just because you don't want to
lose friends? It to the commissary.
Speaker 1 (16:27):
Honestly, God, I was watching that.
Speaker 3 (16:29):
No.
Speaker 2 (16:30):
If I was in college during this period, I would
have left. I was about three days. It's just like,
I am not playing this game. You know, I'm going
to go and sell vegetables somewhere. I'm not doing this.
I mean, it's crazy. All right, listen. I can't tell
you how much I enjoyed the movie. I can't tell
you how much I recommend that everybody listening watched this.
It's called The Coddling of the American Mind. It's it's
(16:50):
on all the streaming channels like Prime, like Apple and
others Google. Ted Ballaker's director, Courtney Ballaker, is the producer,
and it's based on the book by bred Greg lukan
Off and Jonathan Hay. Thank you so much for doing this.
Speaker 4 (17:09):
Thank you so.
Speaker 3 (17:09):
Much for some work you do.
Speaker 4 (17:11):
John. We really appreciate it.
Speaker 1 (17:12):
Oh, you're welcome. It was good talking with you.
Speaker 2 (17:15):
Thanks for coming on, Like, okay, take care, there you go,
And that's Ted and Courtney Ballaker.
Speaker 1 (17:20):
More coming up.
Speaker 5 (17:21):
You're listening to John Cobels on demand from KFI AM
six forty.
Speaker 2 (17:27):
We're on every day from one until four o'clock, and
then after four o'clock the podcast John Cobelt Show on
demand two rounds of the voistline next hour three twenty
and three point fifty. I really debri you Ott to
watch the cobbling of the American mind. I mean, your
kids went through college I think during this era. Oh yeah,
as did a couple of mine, and oh man, they
(17:50):
it's so infuriating. And I I just knew instinctively when
the smartphone came out and I got I always got mocked.
I said, this thing is going to ruin life. I
just knew it because as wonderful as it is, as
long as we want to use it for good things,
(18:11):
I knew much of the world isn't good. A lot
of people aren't good, and people are going to give
in to all their worst impulses and worst desires, and
oh my god, what what that? That Social media is
the same thing, and it's really ruined a lot of kids' lives.
Their brains are permanently destroyed. They've they've been programmed into
(18:33):
a cult.
Speaker 1 (18:34):
I tell you what.
Speaker 2 (18:35):
They there's so many administrators and professors who ought to
be uh fired at these universities. There's some people who
can't believe what Trump is doing, threatening federal funding unless
all woke progressive politics is ended at the universities. He's
absolutely right. Watch this movie. If you think Trump should
(18:57):
not be doing this, watch this movie and then come
back to me. Somebody's got to do it, because it's
really wrecked the generation. And I actually feel sorry for
that whole gen Z generation who because some of the
kids just powered their way through it and realized that
this was nuts and did the best they could, just
appeasing whoever they had to appease. But the ones who
fell for it all the way. And you'll see these
(19:18):
kids in the movie who sunk to the depths and
are climbing their way out.
Speaker 1 (19:25):
It is cult.
Speaker 2 (19:27):
I've been calling it a cult. This progressive politics, this
woke nonsense, it's all a cult. And they used cult
methods to indoctrinate and rope in these kids. I mean,
you recognize if you've read any books, if you watch
ever watched a documentary, or heard interviews with people who
got sucked into cults, you will recognize within thirty seconds.
(19:47):
The methods used at the university by the administrators who
run the university and by the professors. They all know
what they're doing and they just needed the right tool,
and that was social media and smartphones to amplify the message.
It's just terrible. So it's the coddling of the American mind.
You can see it on Prime, Apple Plus and other
(20:10):
and other streaming channels.
Speaker 1 (20:12):
I got to tell you about this scam though.
Speaker 2 (20:16):
This is one of those hard to believe but absolutely
easy to believe. You know, recently there was a settlement
by Los Angeles County Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors,
and those people are really a bunch of numb nuts.
And I'm talking about the supervisors, you know, the ones
(20:37):
who spent no money on the Office of Emergency Management
and that's why nineteen people died in the Altadena fire.
You know, they spent no money to warn people to
get out of the neighborhood during a fire. Well, they
spent four billion dollars on a settlement for sex abuse
victims who these people claimed that when they were in
the juvenile detention system, for example, juvenile halls, foster homes,
(21:01):
they got sexually abused. Well, some of them did not
get sexually abused, but they were paid to be part
of the lawsuit. And so I hope the staff UH
and and the UH supervisors and Lindsey Horvath pay attention
Hill to Slise and Holly Mitchell, UH and Jennie Hahn,
(21:21):
those four knuckleheads. Well, maybe you read this story in
the Times. There's a a law firm called Downtown LA
Law Group. They represented some of the plaintiffs. Some of
the plaintiffs said they were paid to sue. Apparently, if
(21:42):
you go down to south central Los Angeles to the
County Benefits office and that's where you get your welfare
and food stamps, there are salesmen on the sidewalk. They're
trying to they're they're they're they're hawking. They're selling you.
They're selling you something. They these incredible deals. For example,
they'll pay you fifteen dollars for a blood pressure exam.
(22:06):
Now I don't really get that one. You get fifteen
dollars by holding your arm out for a blood pressure exam.
They're handing out free phones. You get two dollars for
a COVID swab. That doesn't make any sense, but that's
not the point of this. There are people working, so
is claimed in this story, for the LA LAG Group,
(22:28):
who was getting plaintiffs to be part of the class
action sex abuse settlement against LA County. What they do
is they take people desperate for cash and these salesmen
point them toward the law firm LA Law Group, and
(22:51):
LA LAG Group will put their names on the list
and that'll add to the money that they're going to
get in the settlement and then LA LAG Group keep
about half the money. All you have to do again,
you're wandering on the sidewalk, maybe just looking for food
stamp to get the food stamp line, and they're saying, hey,
we'll make you some money. Make up a sex abuse,
(23:14):
make up a sex abuse claim against the county, and
you could be part of this settlement.
Speaker 1 (23:19):
So people do. LA Time spent two.
Speaker 2 (23:22):
Weeks outside the Social Services office in South LA there
was a constant flow of people that applied for food
stamps and cash aid and spoke with seven people who
said they were paid within the last year to sue
the county for sex abuse. They had not Some of
them had not been abused, some of them had not
planned to sue even if they were, and of course
(23:44):
they were, they were already in the juvenile halls. So
these are criminals who were lined up on the sidewalk
to access our tax money through food stamps and welfare.
Two people said they were told to fabricate stories of abuse.
Here's an example. Marlon Bland is thirty one years old.
(24:05):
He got two hundred dollars. They paid him one hundred
dollars in cash outside the office and gave him the
other one hundred dollars. When he met to meet with
lawyers from Downtown La Law Group, the receptionist there gave
him one hundred dollars check and then he joined the lawsuit.
Downtown La Law Group sued the county on his behalf.
(24:30):
Kevin Richardson. Another one fifty nine years old, said he
got fifty dollars outside the office.
Speaker 1 (24:36):
Another woman, I think, is it a moment. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (24:39):
Quontavia Smith, thirty eight, said the vendor drove her to
the office of the law firm and gave her two
hundred dollars. Of the law firm denies all this. Of course,
Downtown La Law Group a mask more than twenty seven
hundred people to sue La County. Here's what one of
(25:04):
the defendants, here's the story he made up. His name
is Juan Fajardo. He was part of the lawsuit against
La County LA Supervisors.
Speaker 1 (25:16):
Are you Missay, are you listening to this?
Speaker 2 (25:18):
You guys got conned by this character now, Juan Fajardo
said he used to sell phones next to the lawsuit vendors.
He would watch a man pull up outside the social
services office in a tesla and hand the recruiters cash,
and then they would give them to potential plaintiffs. Fajardo
(25:40):
said the recruiters would say, just make up a story,
say you got touched, here's fifty dollars.
Speaker 1 (25:48):
Then they'll give you.
Speaker 2 (25:49):
The fifty dollars and say, hey, you never know, you
might even get a lawsuit. One recruiter sold phones. When
somebody wanted a phone, he would watch the recruiter take
a call on the new phone and make up a
story of abuse under the customer's name. Then this recruiter
would hand the customer the phone and pocket the fifty
(26:09):
for himself. So Fa Heart had been watching this thought, well,
this looks like a good scam. I'll make up a
story too, So he made up a fake name and
a fake birthday. He took fifty dollars and the law
contacted the law firm and he got a call back.
Ten minutes after the call, they said his case had
been accepted.
Speaker 1 (26:30):
Well, what was this story?
Speaker 2 (26:31):
He said, Well, they videotaped ups while we're in the showers,
touching us while they pat us down.
Speaker 1 (26:36):
Be Fahard.
Speaker 2 (26:37):
I heard everybody else say this online, right. That was
he was in juvenile hall. They would would be in
the shower and you know, the guards, the attendants would
would would touch them their private parts while patting us down.
So I was like, I'll use that instead of trying
to make up a whole different lie.
Speaker 1 (26:55):
And it worked.
Speaker 2 (26:57):
They got paid and then they share fifty percent, they
claim with the Downtown La Law Group, which again is
denying all this.
Speaker 1 (27:08):
And then eleven.
Speaker 2 (27:09):
Thousand names were brought to the county, although I think
this law firm represented twenty seven hundred, and there was
a settlement made. Jennis Han, Hildesalise, these geniuses, Holly Mitchell,
(27:32):
the Lindsay Harvath.
Speaker 1 (27:37):
Oh yeah, sure, we'll pay four billion dollars.
Speaker 2 (27:40):
In fact, I think this is the deal where La
County is going to be paying off this till the
year twenty fifty, twenty fifty one, something like that.
Speaker 1 (27:48):
And some of these defendants were hired off the street.
Speaker 2 (27:50):
They were bribed, according to this LA Time story, for
two hundred dollars.
Speaker 1 (27:57):
And I don't know what the.
Speaker 2 (27:58):
Of the settlement is, but the law firms share is
fifty percent. Good lord, what a racket. And you know
who started this was Newsom and the Democratic legislature because
what they did is they extended the statute of limitations
(28:18):
on sex abuse claims, and suddenly thousands of sex abuse
claims poured in thousands. And now Santa Monica's getting bankrupted.
LA County's getting bankrupted, and some of these claims are
totally crazy. Now, the private law firms like John Manley's
(28:44):
law firm, Manly Sturt and Finalde they do they do
strict betting, but apparently some of the other law firms don't.
Speaker 1 (28:54):
So there you go.
Speaker 2 (28:54):
More another good use of your tax money. All right,
More coming up three locker to have Laura Angele on
about the ditty sentencing. It finally happened.
Speaker 5 (29:05):
You're listening to John Cobels on demand from KFI A
six forty.
Speaker 2 (29:11):
Coming up after three o'clock did he's been sentenced. It
happened on our show at about quarter to two, and
we were getting but the house shut up, shut him up.
Quarter to two. We were getting the whole back and
forth of the defense argument, the prosecutor's argument. What the
(29:33):
judge was saying. Lor Angle from NewsNation Cable TV news outlet,
is gonna give us the whole story because did he's
going to jail? He got a sentence of four years
and two months, which sounds like it's only going to
be three years because he's already spent fourteen months in
prison just awaiting the trial. These are federal charges and
you don't get much discount on a federal sentence.
Speaker 6 (29:57):
Well, didn't he already made plans for next week thinking
that he was that he was getting out.
Speaker 2 (30:02):
Yeah, he did, He actually did. He booked two speaking
engagements in Miami.
Speaker 1 (30:06):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (30:08):
Well, I don't know if they take zoom out of
a prison, what's going to happen. He was trying to
make money. I guess he was going to talk about
the unfairness of the federal justice system.
Speaker 1 (30:18):
Anyway, Laurel will be on with this coming up. If
for Cardli, Laura wouldn't do zoom. I don't think did
he will? All right? Flying taxis? Did you see this
this morning? I heard about the La Times un a story.
Speaker 2 (30:34):
Electric air taxis are going to be flying in the
sky soon and it's it needs approval from the FAA, which,
by the way, all those people are not getting paid.
If you're if you're if you're flying anywhere in the
coming days and weeks. Everybody's unpaid, the TSA agents and
(30:57):
and the air traffic controllers, especially the air traffic controllers.
In fact, did you see and I think this is
why they were still getting money the two Delta planes
at the Guardia Airport.
Speaker 3 (31:09):
In New York.
Speaker 1 (31:10):
Yeah, I did that story yesterday. Yeah, collided on the runway.
Can you imagine?
Speaker 6 (31:17):
Well, no, let's not you know what, John, Let's think positive.
Let's not put seriously, let's not put that out there.
That's really scary.
Speaker 2 (31:25):
These guys. First of all, you're going to get hungry
and thirsty. They've got no money, they can't even go
to the vending stowll.
Speaker 6 (31:31):
Maybe they have a good work ethic and hoping that
this will resolve itself quickly, and they don't want anybody
to be hurt.
Speaker 1 (31:39):
That's what I'm hoping.
Speaker 2 (31:40):
So this company is called Vertiports, and a vertiport is
going to be a place where you can land these
air taxi helicopters so that we can all jump around
and avoid traffic, right if you want to go from
downtown to the airport real fast, or the valley to
the west side, any number of routes because they want to.
(32:05):
They want two or three dozen of them scattered around
the whole La Orange County market, kind.
Speaker 6 (32:09):
Of like those scooters that you can jump up right
those what are they birds or whatever they're called.
Speaker 2 (32:14):
Yeah, except it's it's an air tax right, So you're
up in the sky, so you're going to see more
things flying in the sky.
Speaker 1 (32:21):
I don't know who's keeping track of those.
Speaker 2 (32:23):
They're looking for open land near an airport or a university,
or on top of a parking garage or on top
of an office building rooftop in the downtown area. And
they want to have air travel in congested urban centers
so you don't have to sit in your car. I
don't know what the price of this is going to be.
(32:46):
They have it's a it's called Electric Vertical Takeoff and
Landing e VTOL. So these aren't going to be gas powered.
This is uh, this is gonna be I guess battery operation.
Speaker 6 (33:00):
What happens when the battery dies midair?
Speaker 1 (33:04):
I don't know.
Speaker 2 (33:06):
And this is supposed to bring helicopter travel to the
masses and they make less noise, so maybe the TV
stations can get this.
Speaker 1 (33:16):
Wait to wait a second, we're already having trouble.
Speaker 6 (33:19):
Look at as you mentioned those two planes that glided
at La Bardia, So how are we going to how
are we going at We're putting more flying.
Speaker 1 (33:27):
Objects, Yeah, dozens of the right.
Speaker 6 (33:30):
Who's who's going to be monitoring those things?
Speaker 2 (33:32):
I don't know, nobody. It seems nobody's monitoring anything now.
SOFI Stadium is going to be one of the sites
lax and uh every everywhere from Santa Monica to Orange
County and uh they're looking at clusters of offices and stores,
dense residential neighborhoods where there's a lot of heavy traffic
(33:54):
on the freeways and the main boulevards, and you'll have
a little vertiport nearby to jump by the taxi. It
doesn't say how it's going to cost, but it's more
things to fall out of the sky.
Speaker 1 (34:05):
Is the way I looked at it, or crash.
Speaker 2 (34:08):
Right right to go along with these wacky waymos that
are all over the place. They you know the story
about the one that made a you turn suddenly in traffic. Yeah, yeah,
I was reading one of the papers had a story
about it and says, this raises questions about the safety
(34:29):
of these Yeah, it raises questions. I love that phrase.
It raises questions. Yes, the thing took off on its
own and did an illegal U turn. All right, we
come back. Lore Engele News Nation. It's a good cable
TV news operation. And she's been covering the Sean Ditty
Combs trial for quite a while and today was sentencing
(34:52):
day and she'll have the whole story from beginning to
end coming up in minutes. Debor Mark Live MCAFI twenty
four hour Newsroom. Hey, you've been listening to The John
Cobalt Show podcast. You can always hear the show live
on KFI AM six forty from one to four pm
every Monday through Friday, and of course anytime on demand
on the iHeartRadio app.
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John Kobylt
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