Was Air India Crash Deliberate, and Previewing Next Epstein Shoe to Drop, with Fifth Column and Aviation Experts | Ep. 1110

26:56But I tell people, look, when you get on an airplane and you can look up into the cockpit, you don't care what gender the person is. You don't care what color their skin is. What you're looking for is a little bit of gray hair. And if you see gray hair, that reassures you. If you see somebody up there that looks like it's one of your teenage daughter's dates, it's not cause for concern. Or your teenage daughter. You know, again, you know, and I was young at one point, I get it, but I also wasn't the captain at that point over the years I've aged. And I think it's a little bit of gray hair is reassuring, especially in a position where you're sitting in the back and you're trusting somebody basically with your life.

27:35Yeah. The older one here is the one who is allegedly culpable and the younger one who was 32, the co-pilot was 32, who was flying a plane, first officer, and the guy being possibly accused is 56. Go ahead, Patrick, you're going to say something. I would somewhat disagree with that. I understand that it's reassuring to people, but it's also not necessarily meaningful. You know, there are a lot of younger, fully qualified, excellent airline pilots out there. So the extrapolation you made maybe without meaning to is that, you know, younger pilots aren't as safe as older pilots. And I just, I just can't, I can't accept that.

28:14Well, it didn't work in this point. I'm not saying that. They're equally qualified. What they lack is the experience and the judgment, And that's what you pay for with with the captain on an airliner is somebody that's been around the block a couple of times that can say a certain times slow down. That's that's the experience. I should tell our audience a little bit about you, Captain Steve, because I neglected to do that. But you joined the Navy after college graduation. You were commissioned and trained as a pilot back in 83, 84, commercial pilot for 40 years. and you were initially scheduled to fly American Airline Flight 11 on September 11, 2001, the first plane that hit the World Trade Center.

28:52My God, I didn't know that. That is really chilling. I was originally scheduled to be the first officer on that flight and due to kind of an extraordinary circumstance, I was bumped from the flight the night before. And there's a documentary called In My Seat that's available on YouTube that tells my story, but I travel now all around the world talking about living on borrowed time. So that, that was my near death experience. But yeah, it kind of gives you chills on the back of your neck thinking about how close it was to being the, the, basically the pilot on the first airplane that flew into the first world trade center.

29:28Yeah. Speaking of planes to commit. I want to drop anchor a little bit on the, on the, on the mental health stuff, not to freak the flying public out even more. pilots are either gods and we're flawless or we're not, which clearly we're not. Megan, if you go to your FAA doc or as Steve will know, you know, in the Navy flying fighters, we had a flight surgeon. Of course, the flight surgeon would say, hey, if anything's wrong with you, you make sure you come and tell me. That was the last person on this planet we would tell anything was wrong to. Why? Because then we're grounded and we're not flying and we're not doing the one thing that's probably making us happy.

30:06So if you tell your FAA doctor and your annual physical or every six months or whatever it is like, hey, I'm not feeling too good. I'm a little depressed. Guess what's going to happen? You're going to get immediately grounded, most likely, and you're put over in this filing cabinet. And it's an absolute nightmare. Megan, this is one of the reasons I started the No Fallen Heroes Foundation four years ago is because of aviation mental health. We have got to hide anything that's wrong with us. You're going to lose your job or potentially your license. It is a perverse system right now where pilots are forced to either self-medicate, drink, hide what's wrong with them, or lose their job until the FAA steps up and says, hey, we're going to have a no kidding serious conversation about this.

30:52Pilots in mental health is the elephant in the room that nobody's really talking about. That is really terrifying and makes perfect sense. What you're saying is that my friend needs to board the aircraft with like a pot of coffee and maybe a breathalyzer. I like this. Well, you know, Megan, real quick, you know, Sully and Miracle and the Hudson and everything like that, obviously a great aviator did some good stuff. It's funny in the movie because they're like, oh, hey, they kept doing the count like, hey, we saved this many. I got to be honest with you, Megan. Maybe I'm just speaking for me. If both engines flamed out and I'm Sully, guess who I care about in that moment?

31:28Me. All interest is self-interest. The fact that I saved 150 people sitting behind me is gravy. But remember, unless you're a suicidal captain, as potentially in this case, if something goes wrong with the airplane, I'm caring about me right now and my beautiful bride, my kids. Oh, and everybody else, too, if they do a documentary about it. Well, we have to find out. I don't know whether he had a family or what. Obviously, there's one report suggested he had a mother who died recently. There was an interesting report about this captain from a long time ago. This is in The Wall Street Journal. They said that he started his flying career in the early 1990s.

32:04he attended the Indira Gandhi Academy. It's a prestigious flight school run in India that a friend of his who overlapped with him for one year in flight school, flight school said he stood out among their classmates, very polite, never cursed, never drank alcohol, spoke softly, so softly that sometimes they had difficulty hearing him, had to ask him to speak louder. Unlike other students, messy quarters, Sabarwal kept a Spartan room filled with the bare minimum. If you open his cupboard, said the friend. There were two formal shirts, two t-shirts, two pairs of shoes, one slippers and one bag. So it wouldn't be unusual, I think, to find a pilot who's meticulous, then figuring out where, if at all, he turned homicidal is a different question altogether.

32:47Can I ask you something, Wiz, on Patrick's point of like, if you wanted to bring down the plane, this doesn't really seem like the way you would do it. Like, you know, it is strange to like, Like it's all on cam, you know, as opposed to the MH370 guy who it's never been confirmed. We can't because the plane disappeared that that was a murder suicide. But I agree that that's overwhelmingly likely what happened. He got the plane out over the Indian Ocean, which is huge and vast. And, you know, you're guaranteed to kill everybody to have almost no evidence of it. Like, why, if you were going to do this, would you do it so soon after takeoff and in an area where there's a field right there where maybe it could be recovered?

33:29by the co-pilot or something could happen. Megan, that airliner was gliding like a set of car keys at that point. That's exactly when you'd want to do it. It was enough time where, like Captain Steve said, just got airborne and immediately the engine shut off and it's going to settle right back down. Any higher altitude, unless he knocks out the first officer, the FO is going to have time to put those switches back. There's a horrific 10 second delay. God bless the first officer for, whoa, what are you doing? Remember, Megan, in the West, we got rid of the Imperial captain years ago. Like you can't question the captain and they're a god on the flight deck.

34:06We don't do that in the West. In some of these other countries, Asian and Indian, the captain is still kind of revered as a god. So you can tell in that 10 seconds, maybe, that the FO was like, what are you doing? Why did you do that? And then the guy just kind of sitting there as the plane's descending into the neighborhood, the FO puts the switches back on. Maybe if he had done it a little bit quicker, he could have gotten some thrust. So we're never going to be able to know until we all transition and meet this guy again why he did this. It's just, you know, I don't think he's going to be in the same place you and I are.

34:39And it's interesting because some people online are like, well, he he replied with, oh, I didn't. Hey, man, if you're about to commit murder, suicide, telling the truth probably isn't high on your list of things to do in that moment. And he knew there'd be a black box recorder. He knew it was being recorded, correct. Go ahead, Steve. And Megan, you're asking why with a rational mind. Correct. We're trying to make sense out of something that's completely irrational. Now, when he stepped over that line, none of us is really ever going to know. But what we do know is that what he did was completely psychotic, and it doesn't make any sense.

35:15But I agree that if you're going to do what he did, that's the perfect place to do it. 200 feet off the ground, there's no recovery from that. And that airplane is going to crash. And most likely, everybody's going to die. I think he was just thinking about himself in that moment, clearly. But the rational mind tries to make sense of the irrational, and it doesn't work. It doesn't. I'll give you the last word, Patrick. Go ahead. So why glide onto the roof of a building? Why not simply push the nose down and crash into the ground at that point why why the the glide it i'm not saying it didn't happen that way but it it doesn't make a whole lot of sense and and meanwhile here i i want to point out i think where the whole conversation is veering in a little bit of a sensationalist direction and i don't want people to have this idea that when you get onto a commercial flight you should start psychoanalyzing your pilots in the hierarchy.

36:14It's not that you should. My point was, I will. The idea that your pilot is going to crash the plane is like so out there among the possibilities and things you should be thinking about. Hey, Megan, real quick. After 9-11, there's a famous story of a U.S. air captain in Philadelphia. I love the Jersey Shore reference. I was born and raised in Margate, so nice job there. But this guy was in Philly and he went through TSA. Do you remember when they were stealing tweezers and fingernail clippers? Well, they took his fingernail clippers and he looked at the TSA agent or whatever and said, go ahead and take that.

36:49I have these. And he held his hands up. He's like, I don't need my nail clippers to take the plane down. I have these. Guess what happened? They threw that guy in jail and it took the union like a couple of days to get him out and fight like two or three years to get his job back. So he said, I have these. I don't need a fingernail clipper. So I know I said that Patrick was going to have the last word, but I know some interesting points. No, no, no. Because he raised some interesting points. Like, I'd love to hear you respond, Captain Stephen. Why wouldn't he just put it in a nosedive and take it down?

37:19That's actually a good question. Well, again, we're trying to make rational sense out of something that's completely irrational. Maybe he's fantasized about turning the fuel control switches to cut off. They were placed one second apart from each other, which is consistent with the way we turn them on and turn them off. It's a one handed operation. One, two. It goes like that. So he probably was fantasizing over that on some level, thinking about just watching the airplane descend. The reports are that I guess apparently he was very calm in this. He was the only one on that airplane, apparently, that knew what was coming next.

37:52If I was the first officer, I would absolutely be in a panic about it. You're transitioning from flying out normally to what just happened. the the fact that the first officer had the presence of mind to reach down and put them back to the run position is semi-incredible in my mind good on him for doing that he almost almost saved the day because of where it was done it was done so low that there was really no recovering from it megan with the german wings remember what the german wings guy did locked locked the cockpit captain's beat and trying to break down the door he put the autopilot in a gentle descent and flew into the Alps.

38:31So why didn't I'll answer a question, Patrick's question with a question. Why didn't that guy just roll the plane inverted and fly straight into the ground? He put it into a gentle descent, like Captain Steve just said, maybe had some sort of weird fetish about I'm just going to watch this thing slowly fly into the side of the mountain. So again, you can't question crazy. Can I can ask this one other question? What about the survivor? Do you think he could be important? You know, like there's a survivor. Right. Unlikely. He was seated right in front of the wing spar, which is the heaviest, strongest part of the airplane.

39:06It's a steel girder, basically right behind where he was. And that probably took most of the impact. The fact that he said one of the initial reports was that he heard a loud bang and the lights flickered. That would be consistent with the Ram air turbine deployed. Yeah. Eyewitnesses in that situation are not necessarily reliable, but with all the other information we have that his account fits with the deployment of the rats. So he's one part of this that that seems to be accurate with the whole transition of what took place in those basically 60 seconds. Megan, if having observed the pilot in its sort of mental state are very slim, I think.

39:45Go ahead, Wiz. Well, if he was in our fighter squadron, his call sign would be Highlander. You have gyalos humor, so do we. So you've got to cut that guy's head off to kill him, clearly. So his new call sign is Highlander. It's true. When you're in a dangerous business, you're actually in one. I just report on many, and so you have to go to that. Otherwise, you're crying every day. Guys, thank you. Patrick, we gave you a hard time, but you kept the discussion interesting with your different field. That's my job. Okay. Thanks to all of you. Good job, Patrick. Thank you. Thanks, man. All the best.

40:15Wow. What a story. My God. So disturbing. I totally accept that the odds of this happening to you are incredibly small and it is not something that you need to worry about at all. But then you think about what Wiz was saying about the mental health screening and how it's not set up to encourage honesty and transparency from our pilots. And you think, well, there is an action point here that we need to really think about. Thankfully, we've got Sean Duffy running transportation. So maybe this is something that we can actually message we can get to him. This did not happen in America. This happened in India, but you know, there, but for the grace of God, God rest those souls.

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43:06Joining me today for the rest of the show to react to all of today's headlines are our pals from the fifth column, Camille Foster, editor-at-large of Tangle News, and Matt Welsh of Reason Magazine. Moynihan is scrambling to make it. That'll be the drama that takes us through the next hour. Will he or won't he? But in the meantime, you can find all of their work at wethefifth.com. Okay. And you can subscribe there too. Guys, great to see you. It's a pleasure. Um, I want to start with, do we have the, do we have the, um, Mark Halpern site? You guys, my team. Okay. Oh, all right. Stand by. I have it in front of me.

43:41So I went on with my pal, Mark Halpern on his next up show this morning. We taped it before I taped my show. We're doing this live and, um, Halpern is everywhere. He does that show and he does two way and he's like, you know, whatever. And apparently on his two way show today. And even in our interview, he raised this with me and I knew what he was talking about, but I want to tell you what happened on two way. He said the following, everyone I know believes a major newspaper. One of the top three newspapers in the country is about to publish a piece about president Trump's relationship with Jeffrey Epstein.

44:12Everyone I know knows that. And people in the white house know that too. When that story drops, if it drops today, and some people think it might, it could drive the day. Then he asks the following questions to Dan Turrentine and Sean Spicer, either answer them or say, in fact, we don't know how did Trump and Jeffrey Epstein meet? I don't know. They say, did Trump ever go to Jeffrey Epstein's townhouse? Yes. It's not a townhouse. It's a mansion. How many times? I believe many. What occasions? One-on-one parties. What did he go for? I don't know. Okay. He's just asking these questions. It's fine.

44:40These guys don't know. I think I know the answers to a lot of these and I answered them on Halpern's show. So if you want to hear my answers, you can tune into next up. Um, not that I'm some expert on Epstein. I've just been neck deep in all of these reports over the past, you know, a couple of weeks for obvious reasons, but I can tell, I don't know why we're afraid to say it's the wall Street Journal. Maybe that will turn out to be untrue, but I've been told by multiple sources that the journal's working on a piece on Trump and Epstein. And guys, there's no question in my mind that there's going to be a lot there because they knew each other for 15 years.

45:13They were actually close friends for 15 years prior to Epstein's troubles. And I'm sure they did spend a lot of time together, but what does that tell us? And he spent a lot of time with a lot of luminaries and they weren't all pedophiles, right? It's like a lot of them, some of them were women. It was the Dalai Lama was over at Epstein's house. Um, Michael Wolff just told Vicki Ward that a couple of days ago and we could go on. So what it's not, it doesn't make Trump look bad or it doesn't incriminate him in any way that he was friends with the guy. He's already admitted that the question is, are you going to produce evidence that Trump took advantage of an underaged girl?

45:53Now, if they're there, then we're talking a scandal. But honestly, if somebody's got that proof, we would have seen it by now, would we not? Yeah. The Biden administration had access to all of these files, at least the Biden Justice Department did, whether or not the president or any of his people looked at it. The possibility that this information, this damning, incriminating information that would have devastated Donald Trump's future prospects for its politician or perhaps even brought him under criminal suspicion, the likelihood that that would not have already come out years ago is unbelievably low.

46:30I just can't imagine it. We've seen leaks of absolutely everything else. We've seen legal trials that have been completely prosecuted on much thinner, thinner, thinner, less sensational grounds. We would have seen this already. So that doesn't seem to be what's hidden here or obscured anyways. E. Jean Carroll accused him of rape, which was a completely bullshit allegation. I don't believe one word that E. Jean Carroll said, but Trump is on camera with the, you know, you can grab him by the P word and they let you get away with it when you're a celebrity. So it's like the fact that Trump might've had a handsy forties and fifties or even earlier than that, I don't know.

47:10It's not going to come as a huge shock, Matt, but it's, if there were proof that he had a thing for underaged girls, you don't think we'd know that by now? I think we would know that. I think the potential political damage of this story, and let's keep in mind, the Wall Street Journal was not alone, but they were ahead of the pack mostly in writing about the Biden White House Operation Bubble Wrap cover up for months and years. Wait, is that a real term or are you just saying that? Because I love that. No, no, that was the term. That was the term among both the Journal and the New York Times reporting about the handlers.

47:47I've forgotten that. Joe Biden. That's awesome. talked about on this show. They use Operation Bubble Wrap to describe the Dr. Jill Biden kind of initiative. And maybe we'll even talk about that later on in the episode. Who knows? But so anyways, Wall Street Journal does good reporting, period. But right now, I think the fact of the matter about the politics of this is that Trump is facing a political challenge, the likes of which he hasn't really seen in a good while, which is that some people in his base are like, I don't know, dude, I don't like how you're handling this, or I don't like how your administration is handling this.

48:21And at a time when there's a lot of people who are more of the independent bent among people in media, the conservative media, podcasts, and Substack, who are dissatisfied with the level of disclosure so far in Epstein-related information from the Justice Department, having the story drop to remind you of what we already know on the record, is that he does have a relationship, as does a lot of people, including several people that all three of us know have been to Epstein's Island and or have had interactions with him, scientists and people like that. But the timing of that information at a time when there's these struggles between Pam Bondi and Dan Bongino and when there are people who haven't gone full Charlie Kirk in that they haven't gotten a call from the president and said, OK, I'll stop talking about it.

49:12People are still talking about it on the right. Well, Charlie is, too. he did he had that one day of like i'm not doing it and then the next two days his shows have been heavily good on charlie which is not something that i say every single day uh but trump just went out and called those people on the right and within maga who are talking about it still he called them a bunch of losers he said he's lost bad people who are weaklings uh weaklings and that they're working for the fake news and that this is all like a fake news plot or a liberal the Democratic plot that you fell for. It's a hoax and et cetera.

49:45It's going to be really interesting against that backdrop to see what those people do. You have just been insulted by the president. I don't know, Megan, if you know this, but sometimes Donald Trump insults people in the media on the right. It's a day ending in Y. I will say for the record, my advice to all those people who are on the right is just keep doing your thing. Like you, you can't, you can't run a show that way, a journalistic outfit. You really can't run that way. President Trump will get mad at any journalist who is doing their job. And I, I don't forget the fake news. They got their own issues, but I mean, honest reporters who actually like Trump and are fair to Trump and you just, you know, it's part of being a journalist.

50:30You are disliked more than you're liked. And that's just the way it goes if you're doing your job right. Yeah. I mean, there's, it seems to me though, without having seen the Wall Street Journal reporting or the reporting from whomever is going to be publishing this story, there's no possibility that we would be talking about this or that this story would be coming out if there was not this profound mishandling of the disclosures related to the Epstein investigation. Everything about this has gone badly for the administration. The messaging around it has been absolutely terrible. Someone should absolutely lose their job about over it.

51:04Whether or not it happens this week or a couple of weeks from now is the only question, I suppose, that actually ought to be seriously entertained. But they mishandled this. Like one doesn't have to believe any sort of conspiracy theories to look at the situation, to raise an eyebrow and say, what on earth is going on over there? Who is responsible for actually talking to the public? like when I think about like, oh, I don't know what they have. Is it a picture of Trump with like a young girl? Like it's not going to be with some, you know, really young girl, but let's say like a 17 year old girl.

51:35Um, if that had come out, if they have that and that comes out on any other day, it'd be like, all right, whatever. You know, everybody knows that Trump was a bit of a playboy when he was younger. You know, he's had multiple wives. He was a man about town when he was younger. And it wouldn't have been a total yawn, but it would have been mostly a yawn. Certainly his supporters would not have given two figs about that. But now would be a terrible time for that to drop because of the way this is all snowballed into like, why is he so adamant about not releasing another document? And then if they drop this story with that kind Now it could potentially hurt him because now even his own supporters have been insulted for actually caring about child issues, including potentially sexual abuse.

52:26And then you see that and you think, oh, how much is there in this lane? And what does that explain? I'll give you the last thought on that. Whoever wants to take in the 30 seconds we have before a break. Just to say that that Trump has over the last 10 years successfully used insult comedy to kind of bring his base into line and into check, most famously, in my point of view, with the House Freedom Caucus, which started off as an antagonist and then he whipped them into line by the end of 2017. Can he do that with his base of people who are independent in media? We are going to find out. Yeah, we're in the process of finding out.

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55:07Back with me now, two of the three, Camille Foster and Matt Welsh of the fifth column. I mean, Moynihan's not here, so I think we can just say the two best. The best two have made it. We can say that anytime. He's very busy trying to get his name scrubbed off certain flight logs. I didn't really understand the exact thing, but hopefully it'll be finished. You never know. He's a bomb, Avant. I mean, who knows where he's been? My team did send me this just for what it's worth. OK, Michael Wolfe, like he's like to me, he's like a Gabe Sherman type. We're like 50 percent of what he writes is explosive and spot on and jaw dropping.

55:45And the other fifth is totally made up. That's my own impression. Um, and he, but he gets all these very, very famous billionaire type people to let him follow them around like a fly on the wall, you know, like the Murdochs and many others. And then they all regret doing it. Trump. Anyway, he dropped a book, um, not long ago called too famous like T O O. And he wrote this in the book. The FBI did not list in its findings of the Epstein residence search, a set of pictures that Epstein sometimes removed from the safe to show friends. A dozen or so snapshots from shortly before their quarrel in 2004 of Donald Trump at Epstein's Palm Beach home, posing with a variety of young women in various stages of undress, some topless sitting on his lap, touching his hair, laughing and pointing at a suggestive stain on the front of the future president's pants.

56:41Now that's, that's Michael Wolf. Yeah. So I have no idea whether any of that is true, but again, you know, this has been out there. And if this is now, somebody is going to produce this photo. I, my first question will be, where'd you get it? What other photos of Jeffrey Epstein's do you have? And why haven't they been made public before now? Um, that would be the kind of thing Trump wouldn't want hitting, but that doesn't prove he molested anybody. And let's not forget that one of Epstein's lawyers, not Dershowitz, the other guy whose name is escaping me right now, but he is on the record as saying there's nothing.

57:16Jeffrey Epstein had nothing on Donald Trump. I asked him, I specifically asked Epstein whether he had anything on Trump and the answer was no. So that lawyer also has worked for Donald Trump, correct? Correct. Like. Yes. But it's one thing to show like the president, you know, the current president. But then, you know, he owned a beauty pageant and he was just like a rich guy. It's sort of frolicking about with young girls. And I don't I mean, the stain is just that's so nasty. If they're all making fun of it and having fun with it on camera, the odds are it's an absolute nothing burger. And just like, you know, these are people letting off some steam, having fun, not thinking he's going to be the future president.

57:55I can see why Trump would be like, yeah, that's not ideal. I'm not going to be putting that out or I don't want to invite somebody to put that out. But again, it sounds like that's not in the government's possession, that that's in somebody who knew Epstein's possession because it was not seized. That's Michael Wolff's point, not seized. So this is some private individual. Could it be Michael Wolff? I have no idea. Who's been holding onto it for however long. Michael Wolff dropped tapes of Epstein right before the presidential election. They just didn't get any attention because we were focused on saving the world and he couldn't stop Trump's reelection with his last 11th hour hit piece on Trump.

58:33And it had to do with Epstein. In any event, that's where things stand. Any thoughts on that, on the picture, on the details? Wolf, it's a 50-50. It's a 75-25. I'm not sure in what direction I would go. Probably 25-75 with his veracity. He's just been historically kind of loose and sloppy, but he also does have access. So it's always buyer beware. I would caution that if there is a photo, anything like what you described, that's trouble for Trump. There's such a difference between visuals and non-visuals. And this is going to sound like a strange comparison, but I'm going to make it anyways. With the Abu Ghraib photos, the prison that the U.S.

59:13military ran in Iraq and abused prisoners and it was bad. Uh, when those first photos came out, it was awful. America had a reckoning along a conversation. Then candidate Barack Obama said, when I'm president, we're going to release the rest of them. And then when he became president, he changed his mind. Um, partly because, and their stated, uh, reason was not that Barack Obama was in the photos, but like, this is going to make life difficult. The Abu Ghraib photos changed or impacted American foreign policy. And it absolutely cut into trust for the government and the military and a bunch of other things.

59:50Besides, it makes things uncomfortable. So it's just the visuals of seeing this. There can be totally documented Senate reports. How would you recommend he handle it, Matt? Like at this point, if if, you know, he were taking your advice on what to do right now, what would it be? My advice is not for the health of the political prospects of any sitting politician. My advice is I want to see everything as long as it doesn't abuse the individual rights of some of the people in the images. And it certainly would not abuse Donald Trump's individual rights to have that released in any shape or form.

1:00:23I want to see all those photos. I want to see the rest of the Abu Ghraib photos, too. Not that I relish looking at them. I want the maximum transparency. And let's just remember that, again, regardless of what one thinks about the Epstein files being a skeleton key towards everything. And I don't at all think that one can look at the real reporting from people like Julie Brown, heroic reporting at the Miami Herald that basically reopened the case in 2019 because of them working hard to uncover previously covered up files, not even covered up, just unreleased files. We should be in favor of transparency.

1:00:57And one reason that Pam Bondi is rightly in the crosshairs, in my opinion, right now, is that she could have said in February, she could have said, I'm in favor of transparency. And we're going to see and do the serious work to try to release as many files as possible. And we'll go over which names need to be redacted and which don't. And that's difficult work. And we're going to do this also in light of Ghislaine Maxwell has an open appeals process going. who don't want to jeopardize that. That's not what she did. She invited influencers to the White House and gave them Trapper Keeper. Yep. The fan service, not transparency.

1:01:32And then when those fans - And they read phase one. Phase one. Like there were more phases coming. They did. So there's two things that I want to say. One of which I'm actually a little nervous to say, and I kind of don't want to say it, but I may say it anyways. Good tease. Do it. The first thing is perhaps a disagreement with you, Matt. I love transparency. Secrecy is for losers. This is what makes you guys the top two. Just FYI. This is what makes you the top two. Keep going, Camille. Thank you. Thank you. The secrecy is for losers, et cetera, et cetera. That said, there is a reality here. Like libertarians are both concerned about transparency and checking government power, but also checking government's ability to abuse that power.

1:02:12And in a high profile investigation like this, what we all know is that if your name is published, even in a totally innocent way because of your own personal affiliation with Epstein, which might not have been criminal in any sort of nature whatsoever, to have it publicized in a sloppy way or at all even in this particular climate is tantamount to accusing you of something really, really nefarious. So I appreciate the restraint on the part of judges who've been involved in this case. And now, even with respect to federal disclosures, that's at least a worthwhile consideration. Now, that's a bit of a nuanced point.

1:02:49It just kind of brings two things in tension. Now, the other thing that I want to say that I'm a little reluctant to say, but I can't be the first person to think this is, why the hell haven't we seen some AI generated video of Donald Trump with Epstein or even AI generated photo of it? It would be so easy to do, especially when you have things like this out. You would expect it to spread like wildfire. It is just odd to me that something like that hasn't happened yet. I don't necessarily want it to. In fact, I don't want it to, but it is Adam Schiff is in his basement right now, creating personally stitching it together.

1:03:23I'm sure it's going to hit soon. I don't know if he has the technical prowess, but I believe he has the motive for sure. Here's the tweet I was referring to the guy. It's the lawyer, David Schoen, S-C-H-O-E-N, who did later, uh, he represented Trump, I think, and maybe it was at the first impeachment trial earlier, I guess I should say, he said, second impeachment trial. Uh, he said, I, this is a tweet. I was hired to lead Jeffrey Epstein's defense as his criminal lawyer nine days before he died. He sought my advice for months before that. I can say authoritatively, unequivocally, and definitively that he had no information to hurt president Trump.

1:03:58I specifically asked him exclamation point. So that's, you know, as close as we're going to get to hearing from Epstein himself that he didn't have any real compromise on Trump. And if there's a picture, okay, fine. It'll keep tongues wagging. But look, the reason why I really think I don't know how long this goes on, you know, if there's a drip, drip, drip in the journal or whoever else. And like the problem for Trump is now the left wing is suddenly interested in Epstein. You know, like these absolute cretins who had absolutely nothing, not a care for who might have been hurt behind the scenes by, you know, some pedophile ring or just freaks who hung out with Epstein.

1:04:35Now, suddenly there are everyone's savior like, oh, I'm on it. I'm on it. In fact, there was an extraordinary exchange on Morning Joe where Jamie Raskin, a villain, went on. To his credit, Scarborough asked him something along these lines. Look what happened. The congressman could have gotten that from 21 to 25 when Democrats controlled the DOJ. Why? It was a crisis then. It's a crisis now. Why didn't Democrats call for it from 21 to 25? Uh-huh. so i mean you have to go back look specifically at particular prosecutorial decisions um and what was taking place in terms of the other cases so i don't know we could try to reconstruct that record but the point is is that donald trump is the one who has led the crusade to say that uh that epstein who was his very close friend and there's all kinds of pictures of them hmm so he has no answer donald trump did not lead the crusade trump surrogates definitely we're into the epstein thing trump himself has always been very measured yeah family i'm don jr yes that i mean that's true but how about jamie raskin uh i don't know there may have been issues going but but trump but trump i'm not here to relitigate the past that's why trump screwed up but that's that's trump's problem now is because forget jamie raskin no one gives a shit what he's thinking or doing but you know now suddenly you're gonna have the new york times like, oh, well, it's a chance to hurt him.

1:06:04Great. And I don't know whether that's going to help or hurt Trump because it's going to generate a lot of additional coverage of it. But as soon as the Times and The Guardian and The Washington Post are on the story and CNN's doing it wall to wall, that's when all of us on the right are going to start defending Trump because we can't stand those people. And it's just too cynical. I mean, without just that, you know, in general, always those legacy media institutions have so much less oomph and power and influence than they used to. So it's always worth keeping in mind. I think what will drive some of this, these headlines, what we're already seeing, which is that Democrats in Congress are going to say, oh, we're going to need to have some hearings on this in August.

1:06:44And the thing is, you know, maybe we should have hearings on this if it means that we need to figure out the behavior, particularly of the Department of Justice, way back in 2007, the first time around, like, why did these decisions get made and what were the contours of it or whatever, um, that there might need to be those things. Why did Alex Acosta cut such a sweetheart deal? And by the way, I had Vicki Ward on the show two days ago, the reporter who wrote for vanity fair for all those years, and then wrote that piece in the daily beast in 2019 saying, I spoke with a member of Trump transition team.

1:07:14That person said they weren't worried about Alex Acosta getting confirmed because he told them the reason I gave Epstein the sweetheart deal is because he belongs to intelligence. This is above my pay grade. And basically I needed to make it go away. So she stands by that 100%. She go back and look at the clip. It's on our YouTube feed right now. She was like, I have absolutely no doubt about my reporting. I stand by it a hundred percent. The person was in the room with Acosta and heard him say it. And I have never gone back even once on my reporting. So she's, you know, she stands by her reasons on why Acosta did what he did.

1:07:46And you're right. If we're actually going to have a special counsel, I don't think we're going to have congressional hearings because Dems would have to control the house. Now they might in 2026, but right now they don't. So they can't have hearings. Um, I don't think we will have hearings, but if we were going to, we definitely have to keep 2007, 2008 in the mix. What was, what was George W. Bush's, you know, in the last year, his attorney general doing, why did Alberto Gonzalez or his top team sign off on this? Cause Alex Acosta said, main justice vetted everything and approved everything I did.

1:08:19And we know what that means. Now, later he told the office of professional responsibility reportedly, we've never seen the actual Q and a that he was, that he was not told to drop it because of any intelligence link. So anyway, that's just yet another something that they'd have to look into. All right. I want to shift gears now. This is not an important thing actually before I get to this, but this is my, this is my, after the plane crash, this is my second favorite story. Um, but before I get to it, I just want to say this. It does occur to me. This is a self-inflicted wound because of Pam Bondi.

1:08:48I don't think there's any question. I don't know why she thought it would be a great idea to drop this two page memo in the dark of night in the middle of the summer during a slow news time when people have nothing to chew on, but that Sunday night for Monday for Monday. Yeah. Yeah. Like if you want to bury a story, you bury a story during a busy news time, not during a slow news time. Um, somebody when Elon and Trump were fighting on Twitter and we were all refreshing our ex, you know, like people addicted to crack, you know, like every two seconds, like refresh, refresh. Somebody tweeted out like, by the way, if you have any bad news, you want to drop you now would probably be the time to do it.

1:09:24No one cares. She did the opposite. Um, but I want to say this as we're talking about all this today, uh, national review had the headline that I'll read it to you. Exclusive Trump administration to cut off federal funding to hospitals that provide gender transition services to minors. Yes, right on. They're in the process right now in the Senate of approving$9 billion worth of doge cuts. It's not the full gamut, but it's a very nice start. That's$9 billion we're going to have in the pocket that we didn't. Today, one of the other great news stories we'll get to is we appear to be about to defund officially NPR and PBS to the tune of a billion dollars who should not be getting one more penny of taxpayer money in June.

1:10:14Thanks to Trump's tariffs. That's according to NBC, which hates Trump. We had a surplus for the first time in forever in the month of June. Again, thanks to the tariffs. We were not deficit spending in June. We were spending in the black, like people who have a budget and are going to live up to it and actually have savings to put away. It doesn't sound like the United States. He just this week signed the Halt Fentanyl Act, cracking down on fentanyl and the people who deal it, which is a scourge across America, are really devastating to working class communities and middle class communities too across the country.

1:10:47So he's just racked up a ton of wins, a ton of wins and things for which he should be celebrated. So I understand Trump's frustration at having to talk about this cretin Jeffrey Epstein. Again, for that, he needs to blame Pam Bondi. He doesn't seem like he wants to do that. Anybody want to comment on the Trump W's before we move on to my second favorite story of the day? Just as the libertarian jerk hole here in the corner, you might be slipping out of the number one position. I've been on the show before. I know where I belong. It ain't number one. But$9 billion operates the federal government for one half of a day.

1:11:31It is much less than the$500 billion rescissions package that Rand Paul was looking for, obviously much less than the initial claims of Doge. I like$9 billion. It's better than zero. But it's only$9 billion better than zero. And I'm glad for the PBS NPR thing, which you alluded to, and some other things besides. But I want more government cutting, period. And I would co-sign and just say trimming politically divisive things that the federal government is funding, I mean, probably appropriate. The federal government shouldn't be throwing tons and tons of money at things that most Americans aren't particularly interested in.

1:12:09That doesn't make a lot of sense, but we can talk about it. Okay. No, I want to talk about what happened at the Coldplay concert. I'm sorry, but it's everywhere. It's all anybody's talking about, and we just got some news on it. So in an extraordinary chain of events, there was a Coldplay concert and where was the Coldplay concert? I was at Gillette Stadium, home to the NFL's New England Patriots in Foxborough, Massachusetts. And here is what happened. They had like the kiss cam kind of thing that goes around. And I guess we should play it. Do we have the video that zeroed in on this one couple?

1:12:46And I'll describe it for the listening audience, though. I imagine 99 % of the audience has seen this clip already because it's gone totally viral. Let's watch it. Yeah. Oh, look at these two. All right. Come on. You're okay. Oh, what? Either they're having an affair or they're just very shocked.

1:13:05At the beginning of the clip, it's got the man behind the woman, like holding her with his arms around her and she's swaying in his arms. These are two obvious lovers or in some sort of romantic relationship. Um, it's, it's not how I hold the head of our HR, not existent. We don't have that person, but anyway, it turns out the man is, um, hold on. His name is, he's an astronomer. He's a CEO of a company called astronomer. Andy Byron, I think is his name. Thank you. Thank you. Andy Byron and his HR director who that's who he's holding in there. And I'll give you her name too in a second. I got it all in here.

1:13:48I just, it's spread out across my packet. Stand by. This is, if it's my favorite story, I should have been more prepared. Um, oh, it's in the update is in the update. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Sorry guys. Bear with me. So much paper and so little time. Okay. His name, yeah, is Andy Byron, B-Y-R-O-N. And he's the CEO of a company called Astronomer. And that is his chief people officer. Is that what we're calling HR now? That is so weird. Chief people officer, Kristen Cabot, C-A-B-O-T. The problem here is that Andy Byron is married to someone other than Kristen Cabot, who, again, the irony of her being head of HR.

1:14:28Um, and he has two children and it appears that they were caught in what appears to be an affair. And here's the latest reporting. Uh, okay. That Byron and his wife, both 50 live in Northboro, which I think is by Foxborough, Massachusetts. And per Mrs. Space X on X, who is heavily covering and tracking the story. His wife has now deactivated her account. The wife later dropped her married name on her Facebook account to the delight of Mrs. SpaceX, who wrote, what a class act. Go, Megan, get that divorce lawyer and get the money. Okay. So this is all speculation because none of this has been confirmed by the relevant players.

1:15:16But what we do know for sure is that this is the guy that is his head of HR. They were caught in an obvious embrace. And as soon as that cam went on them and they saw their image up in the thing, it was the worst coverup ever. She turned her back to the camera and he just like, he looked totally humiliated, embarrassed. It's like, hello, everybody knows to just act like you didn't do anything wrong. You got to keep the, keep holding and then make it into like a dance. That's all it was. It was a dance. It wasn't an embrace. Do something other than turn and cower in humiliation, Camille? He did so many things wrong.

1:15:53I mean, the very first thing is, and look, I've never cheated on my wife. I'm not cheating on my wife. I love you, baby. It's her birthday. Oh, happy birthday. Great. But if I did it, to borrow a phrase from O.J. Simpson, I sure as hell am not going to take my side chick to a stadium with 65 ,000 strangers and just kind of march through the crowd and go up to our box and then be helding her in a warm embrace at a Coldplay concert. I think that the actual star of this story, though, is Chris Martin, who decides, given an opportunity here to let these people off the hook and just let the camera move along, to suggest explicitly that these people are either having an affair.

1:16:33I mean, seriously? You just throw the fans under the bus who paid their hard-earned money for these tickets? Maybe he's just - Probably for a very expensive box. He's being an accelerationist, Camille. He's just trying to get them faster to where they were maybe going all along. Maybe he didn't believe it. It feels like the same. The only reason he would say that is if he didn't believe it. You know, if he just thought they were camera shy and he's giving them a hard time. But as it turns out, he may have been correct. We don't have confirmation of that. Take it with a grain of salt. There could be some other innocent explanation.

1:17:03As much as we all trust Mrs. SpaceX and her reporting, we really don't have this confirmed. But it's everywhere. It's everywhere. And honestly, it's it's just it's alarming because every woman sees that and has like a shutter. go down her spine that like your marriage could go up in an instant based on really bad judgment. People do this. They have affairs, you know, marriages fall apart. Normally not in such a public way where you've got Chris Martin involved here. We've got the right clip. Now let's watch it. Yeah. Oh, look at this. All right. Come on. You're okay.

1:17:46either they're having an affair or there's this very shot oh she's talking to her friend that's her friend she whips her back to the camera yeah and he actually he actually beds down to get out of like squatting to get out of the site honestly they should have listened to me look well he's really hugging her it's tight yeah you just lean in you have to lean in at that point right you really you gotta like kiss her on the top of her head and be like she's so cute my head of hr she's been through a lot somebody just died that's why i'm holding her like i don't know i'm not sure what you do but i don't think this is it it is a pity moynahan isn't here because he would have great advice he just wouldn't he wouldn't he wouldn't be turning and shying away he has a certain transparency in the way he lives life megan i'm just uh alarmed a little bit by the level of specificity in your suggestions for how to avoid PDAs with your side piece.

1:18:45You know what? It's because I'm an actress now. I don't know if you caught my premiere in With Love, Megan, my Megan Markle parody, but I'm an actress now. I did see. Yeah. And let me explain to you how it works in the improv world since you clearly don't know. It's just everything's a yes. You don't say no. It's like, yes, I'm on camera. Yes, I'm hugging. Yes, it's no problem. Yes. It's, it's never like, no, no, I wasn't doing it. It's you threw something at me and we're going to go with it. Okay. He's trying to keep up Welsh. Okay. Yeah. It's great advice. Yeah. Yeah. This is, this is the problem.

1:19:17When you haven't been the way I have to outer space, you don't know things. See, I probably, this guy and I will probably get along. He's an astronomer. I'm an astronaut. We should probably connect. He should give me the exclusive. Are you auditioning for something here?

1:19:32definitely not i feel about my spouse the way camille feels about his um okay it's not related but it kind of is forgive me because we're taking a usually we do harder news and then softer news but i'm i'm taking a dain i'm taking a different route scotty schaeffler you know me in the sports do i have it wrong the golf chef schaeffler the golf champion i'm not a golf guy i don't know Look at this. I got nothing here. I got, I'm talking to two like intellectuals. I, and Moynihan would not help here either. No, he doesn't, he doesn't know golf either, but basketball, football, I'm your guy. Yeah.

1:20:08Okay. All right. Well, golf is a sport too. And this guy, Scotty Schaeffler is very popular and very successful in his accomplishments. I'm going to tell you all the stuff that he's done in one second. He's number one in the world, just in case you didn't know that, which I didn't. He's 29, three-time major champion, has won the Masters twice and the PGA championship this year. He's looking to inch closer to the career grand slam at the open this week at Royal Portrush. 16-time PGA Tour winner, and he's been the number one ranked golfer for over 100 weeks. So it's crazy. I don't think you can get any more accomplished in the world of golf.

1:20:51And he just gave a press conference. I saw this on X and I swear that I sit and I watched like the whole four minute clip of somebody I don't know at all. I was fascinated by what he said. I'm going to play you part of it and you'll see why I was. It feels like you work your whole life to celebrate winning a tournament for like a few minutes. It only lasts a few minutes. That kind of euphoric feeling. It's like, okay now now what are we gonna eat for dinner you know life goes on i love the challenge i love being able to play this game for a living it's it's one of the greatest joys of my life but does it fill the deepest you know wants and desires of my heart absolutely not you know that's why i talk about families being my priority because it really is you know i'm blessed to be able to come out here and play golf but if my golf ever started affecting my home life or it ever affected the relationship i have with my wife with my son you know that's gonna be the last day that i play out here for a living.

1:21:44You know, this is not the be all end all. This is not the most important thing in my life. And that's why I wrestle with why is this so important to me? Because, you know, I would much rather be a great father than I would be a great golfer. He went on, right? And he was talking about how, you know, you, you work all day, you're out here on the course all day, the links, whatever, and you're practicing, practicing, practicing, you get up early in the morning. My wife always says, thank you to me when I go, because she knows I'm really putting it all out there for the family. And then you win and you're like, yay.

1:22:17He really talked about how winning's great, but it's really not that great. Like you make such sacrifice. You put so much effort into getting the win. When you get it, there is that moment of euphoria, but then it's quickly over. He's like, well, I won. I can't remember which tournament, but you know, one of them. And he's like, and everyone's like, yeah. And you're hugging. and then that night, you know, we went out, like watched a movie, like we went out to dinner, you know, it's like, and then you're right back that the questions that come your way immediately are, what are you gonna do for the next one?

1:22:50Like, well, what can you do the next one? Like, what's going to have the next one? I could totally understand what he's saying. I'm not an athlete, but it reminded me a little bit of back when I practiced law and you would kill yourself getting ready for this big trial. You know, it's like the Superbowl of law and I mean, night and day with no sleep and like years that way. And then you'd try the case and yes, you would win. I lost one, but we got it reversed on appeal. Any event. So it was all net net. It was all wins. And you'd, you'd be so thrilled at having the W and you would go out and celebrate that night.

1:23:26And then the next day it's just done. It's done. But the pain of losing was so acute and would weigh on you for weeks, you know, like, oh, it's so far outweighed the joy of winning. And I've never heard a professional athlete just be so honest about it and just get like really real about how that high is a bit of a false God. And what's real is sitting in your living room. yeah i mean and you mentioned his age and i don't remember how old you said he was it sounds so sub 30 he's fortunate to have figured it out so early i don't know that most people do i mean i think we are we are people of privilege we live you know pretty pretty pretty extraordinary lives in many respects we get to talk to really prominent people in all kinds of public context occasionally come in for controversy but we've been able to do a lot of stuff before i had kids My wife and I visited every continent, including Antarctica, and done all kinds of cool crap.

1:24:24But what I've come to realize, and I think the knowledge I have that other people don't, having already done a lot of the bucket list stuff that I could have imagined before we had kids, is the most important thing I do every day is wake up and try to be a great husband and try to be a great father. And that doesn't mean I don't care about other things, but I've put those things into the right context. I think my daughter and my son really helped crystallize what my priorities are, like my marriage and my own kind of personal happiness and my ability to be present in any given moment. And we used to have one of those posters in the office that said something like, you know, it's not the destination, it's the journey.

1:25:03And I hated it for years. I was like, I want to win. But I have come around to completely understanding it. Like it is it is those quiet moments. The best moments of my life are those quiet moments where, not so quiet moments, where everyone is in the bed together for 15 or 20 minutes. And to be able to recognize it in that moment is an extraordinary privilege. And we don't do it enough. We're consumed with politics. We're consumed with career advancement or the next thing that we want to do. And we forget that the moment you achieve the great thing you've been thinking about, you're immediately thinking about, okay, what's next?

1:25:40What other thing am I striving for? just things, however things are in your life right now, it could be so much worse. And it may be eventually the void, the void is screaming out for all of us. But we have this moment to be present, to be grateful. And I love that. I mean, it's such a great sentiment. I don't really watch golf, but I'm an instant fan of his. Yeah. Same. Cause you look at those kids, like I think about my kids when they were babes in their cribs and they smell so good and they're so happy to see you in the morning and going to get them. You've already won. This is daily winning.

1:26:15The W staring you in the face. It's not to say you shouldn't have any professional ambition. It's just when you have that satisfaction, that true, like true, real love and joy, it's like everything else is kind of gravy. I'm not even sure if you can get the high from winning on the golf course or whatever. Now, in my case, in the ratings or whatever God you're chasing, once you know what really matters, right? It's like you, that fulfillment is up here. Maybe you can bump up a degree or two, but I don't know. Even people who don't have kids, Matt, I think can recognize the disappointment of chasing something that's kind of false, whether it's an Oscar in Hollywood or a trophy in sports, you know, not to undermine the whole process and the discipline and, you know, being great at something, but like the win isn't necessarily all it's cracked up to be.

1:27:04the um first of all i need to take good credit i was badgering camille foster to have kids for a very long time that's true pro natalist on the podcast it's true i love how kids don't have any idea what you do for a living not what you do megan in particular my 17 year old knows exactly what you do i love her dad you weren't making kelly i seen her on tiktok uh so you're like that's why i put up with this abuse uh basically but um there was an interesting interview that We just had the baseball all-star game, which was really terrific this week in Atlanta, in Atlanta, where it had been banned by idiots a couple of years ago.

1:27:40But there was an interview with Francisco Lindor, the great Mets shortstop that was kind of similar. A reporter just like, you know, what is your motivation to go out there every day? Just a little 30 second clip. I recommend looking at it. And he's like, kind of gave an Allen Iverson almost, you know, like motivation. But like, no, it's not about motivation. It's about work ethic. Motivation is like, you know, is temporary. It lasts for a while. It's on your shoulder, makes you think to do a thing, but to do the grind every single day to pursue a consistent level of excellence to be the best at what you do.

1:28:13That takes a lot of discipline and it takes work ethic and kind of long-term thinking. And that way you're much more at peace actually about whether you win or you lose. Did you put in your best effort? Great. And then if hopefully if you have some kidlets around who don't even know that you play baseball or or a host of podcasts or do whatever, it's incredibly rewarding. you feel like you've done your best. And if you're fortunate enough, like all of us are in this conversation, um, to know that that work, that, that attempt to strive for a consistent excellence, um, and the work ethic that goes into it can contribute to you be able to provide some stability and, and, uh, comfort for your kids to pursue the things that they want to do.

1:28:58Um, it is so satisfying. It's as satisfying as like growing a garden and eating your food. Like, Like, oh, man, there's just something elemental about that. And it's not necessarily chasing an immediate spike of highs. It's about a long term. I'm grinding. I'm working. And I'm putting in long hours. But I'm doing it for this reason. And that reason is the true source of the happiness. Yeah. It's a good reminder, you know, not to get too drawn into. It could be anything in your life. Even for, like, my stay-at-home moms who watch or listen to the show. You're on social media. you make a post, you check it over and over to see how many likes you've gotten.

1:29:37The same false God, you know, as like thinking winning the PGA tour is going to be the thing that fulfills you or winning the Oscar, you know, for whatever movie is going to be that it's exactly the same thing. You know, we all get sucked into it and it's a, what a great gift he gave us a great reminder that whether it's this huge goal that everybody in the world, well, most of us have watched and know about, or it's something in your private life that you've prioritized, like getting a raise or getting a new job title or getting a social media like, or whatever, getting the right invitation to the right, you know, cocktail parties.

1:30:14They're all false. They're not going to do the thing for you that you're looking for. It really look inside your living room. That's where the answer is. Guys, stand by more coming up when we come back. Don't go away. Let's be honest. No one has time to simmer bones for 24 hours. But our bodies could use the benefits of real bone broth, especially as we get older. That is where Paleo Valley's 100 % grass-fed bone broth protein powder comes in. It's made from American cattle raised with regenerative farming practices sourced only from bones and water. No chemicals, no fillers, no mystery ingredients, just clean traceable nutrition that you can actually trust.

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1:32:35We just had the one year anniversary, one year mark since Butler, Pennsylvania, which was, you know, just a sea change moment in America politics in a way. I mean, Trump was on his way toward winning the election, but that moment and the way he handled it just galvanized support behind him, even amongst disaffected Republicans who were sort of about him after that moment didn't feel that way. Now, if you were a member of the press, um, and a normal person, you could at least begrudgingly say, wow, he really handled that like a, like a champ, you know, gosh, if you were a lunatic member of the press, you speculated on MSNBC about how he faked it, how it was all, the whole thing was fake, totally disrespectful to Corey Comparatori and his widow.

1:33:21Um, they've never explained that piece of their bizarre theory, nor apologized to her for saying such a thing. Um, and if you were a member of the press, you might, who is a lunatic have made it all about you, your trauma. And I don't mean that you were almost shot, which is something Selena Zito can say, by the way, thank you. Megan Kelly show viewers, her book debuted at number one on the New York times bestseller list, which I'm sure did not want to put her there. So God bless all of you for buying her book, Butler. She was there with the president on that day. So if you're a real loon, here's where you go with it.

1:33:58This is CBS's Seth McFarlane, who appeared on Chuck Todd's cast. Sorry, sorry, Scott, Scott McFarlane. That's a different guy. Scott McFarlane, who appeared on the Chuck Todd cast, which has the same number of viewers as people who are in this screen right here. And here's what he said about Butler. For those of us who were there, it wasn't an immediate or even a long-term reflection on Secret Service. For those of us there, it was such a horror because you saw an emerging American. And it wasn't the shooting, Chuck. I got diagnosed with PTSD within 48 hours. I got put on trauma leave, not because I think of the shooting, but because you saw it in the eyes, the reaction of the people.

1:34:49They were coming for us. If he didn't jump up with his fist, they were going to come kill us. Many of us on press row, as we talked about this on our text chains for weeks after, were quite confident we'd be dead if he didn't get back up. There was a subset, not everybody, there's dozens of people in the crowd who started comforting us, saying, you did this, this is your fault, you caused this, you killed him. And they're going to beat us with their hands. I mean, they were going to kill us. And respectfully, the Secret Service had bigger issues and protecting us. We jumped up triumphantly. It saved us.

1:35:25But that's the thing. I can't eliminate from my mind's eye the look in their faces. That's what America is right now. It's not rational. It's an irrational thought to think the media shot somebody from from a top building. But the lack of rationality is what connects January 6th to this. Oh, gosh. What? Wow. He's the CBS's J6 reporter, by the way. Do you believe that lunacy? I can't. I'm just trying to I'm out here with like with diagrams against bulletin board just what is the theory exactly here? Yeah, that the mob was going to kill them. It was going to kill the media, the totally peaceful mob that didn't even stampede out of the joint before Trump jumped up.

1:36:17That was there. You read Selena's book, lovingly, happily celebrating him. And then to their enormous credit, stayed calm even after the bullets were flying. And then yes, when Trump stood up and heroically did that felt inspired. But who was ever talking about the mob turning on the media? This is the first I've heard anything like that. And it's totally inconsistent with the actual tone and tenor of MAGA rallies. That guy, I'm just going to say it, is fucking making that up to the same way AOC wants us to believe she was almost raped on J6 when she wasn't even there. He's imagining he's imagining thing, making media the center of the story and also transposing his personal grief at an electoral outcome with with the reality in front of him.

1:37:06I mean, he's mad that people responded. I mean, Trump stood up there. I didn't vote for Trump, as we know. He got up, blood coming out of his ear and said, fight, fight, fight. You can't. I think it's really, really difficult to look at that and say, wow, that's scary, the way he acted there or that response there. No, it was awesome. He got up. The shooting was horrifying. And we could have had the only fair thing to say to Scott McFarland about his scenario planning here. And it's something that we talk about constantly in the Column podcast. America has a problem with political violence. That assassination attempt was very much part of it.

1:37:43Killed a man. And it's terrible. And it's an unresolved problem with political violence on the right and on the left in different ways. And we don't talk about it honestly. All that is true. If Trump would have died that day, I shudder to think what would have happened in America. We all dodged a bullet. Cory Campantore sadly did not. But the country dodged a bullet. But we still have that problem in front of us. So that part of it is true. That's the only part of it that's semi-true. But it's not, what are you doing? That's not the story from that day. Yeah. And he didn't even seem to get there.

1:38:19Yeah, he didn't even seem to get there to that conclusion. Like the grappling with the reality. And honestly, on the fifth column, there are many things that we talk about regularly. The surging, not the surging, but the persistent growing problem of political violence that we've had in this country, which became really prominent and undeniable in the summer of 2020, which certainly played a part on January 6th, which has risen up in so many other occasions. And honestly, when President Trump was elected, that assassination attempt at the baseball field during that congressional baseball game, we've seen so many instances of this.

1:38:53We should be trying to connect it, not in a way that directs blame at either of these political parties, but in a way that acknowledges this is a reality in our politics and we need to do something about it. And doing something about it means sober, honest, thoughtful engagement with one another, talking honestly about ways that we can kind of ratchet down the temperature of our political exchanges and debates. We don't do that, honestly. For the most part, we're looking for who to blame in various circumstances as opposed to, and this is interesting because it has a parallel to the very first segment on your show today, Megan, but the kind of NTSB style investigation of what happened with this particular plane crash, what went wrong, How can we avert it and make certain it doesn't happen again?

1:39:35I'd love to see us have a serious bipartisan investigation and inquiry into what happened during the summer of 2020, into what happened with COVID and why we didn't do a better job with messaging there, into what happened with January 6th. But we won't have a sober, honest, not at all politicized investigation into these things because our politics is utterly broken. And our politicians, generally speaking, are not really in the business of actually trying to get to the bottom of things nearly as much as they are assailing their political enemies. And quite frankly, you just saw an example of a journalist who is similarly.

1:40:09Well, that's where I see it about the nature of things. And I think actually journalism. That's where I come in on it. Yeah, I agree. That's a member of the media lifting up the veil. this is what I think of Trump supporters. They're deranged, googly eyed mad men who want to kill members of the media like me and would in a New York minute that I my life was the one you should have been worried about the day of Butler as a member of the media. I was almost killed. I could see it in their eyes. Trust me. Now CBS sends that guy out to go do reporting on January 6th on, you know, ongoing on Trump, on anything involving Trump supporters.

1:40:50And they're supposed to watch CBS and watch this guy come on camera and think I can trust him. He's fair. He gets me. He's made the effort to get my side of the country. Bullshit. That guy should actually be fired. He should be fired. Obviously he's not well. Yeah. Yes. That is not the way there's a new book out about the COVID disastrous response. And one of the others are not in front of you, it's two Princeton sociologists, actually, who describe themselves as left of center. And it's an absolutely harsh indictment on what were supposed to be the truth-seeking institutions in this country, in science, in government, and in the media, in academia.

1:41:37And everyone really, really failed during COVID and as a result really helped erode and shred trust and impinge on civil liberties and such like. We see this kind of example here. The journalism industry, as it has been collapsing through things that may or may not be related to this, has been covering itself in this type of kind of openly partisan. And what's the worst thing he said there besides all the words? it's that me and all the other reporters were text messaging each other with this kind of sentiment then you're all crazy i hope that's not true honestly um because that's not they're like yes yes this is like the main face of nbc's political coverage for many years like yes right on yes i'm no no pause at all like gee do you think you might want to pause before condemning the entire group that was there that themselves had been traumatized by this no not not a thought because he was like right on by the way we don't have time for it but Francis Collins.

1:42:35He was on late night on Colbert just last night. Maybe we do have time. Let's play it really quickly. We're going to play it. Stop 35. Steven, we have other deficits that politics aren't going to solve. Maybe they're making it worse. There's a truth deficit. We're in a place now. Yeah. Seems to be no real penalty for saying something that's demonstrably false. It just No, it's not. Irony. We have a trust deficit where because people don't know if they can be sure somebody's telling the truth, why should I trust that person? So we stop trusting each other most of the time. And that's dangerous also for our future.

1:43:15Wow. No introspection. How did that happen, Francis Collins? You guys, you have to stay for two more minutes and we just have to talk about that clip. Don't go away. I'm Megan Kelly, host of The Megan Kelly Show on Sirius XM. It's your home for open, honest, and provocative conversations with the most interesting and important political, legal, and cultural figures today. You can catch The Megyn Kelly Show on Triumph, a SiriusXM channel featuring lots of hosts you may know and probably love. Great people like Dr. Laura, Glenn Beck, Nancy Grace, Dave Ramsey, and yours truly, Megyn Kelly. You can stream The Megyn Kelly Show on SiriusXM at home or anywhere you are.

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1:44:26Okay, guys. So Francis Collins, who ran the NIH and the COVID response about Fauci, says we're at a truth deficit. And this is really unfortunate and lamentable. This is the man who decided to try to ruin people like Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, who's now running NIH and in the Francis Collins seat, because he said, maybe we should do focus protection and just focus on the people who are really vulnerable and ask them to, you know, lock down and not the entire society, that might make more sense than having totally fine, perfectly healthy children and young people run around masked or not run around at all or arrest them while surfing or out in a public park, not near anyone.

1:45:09And so he decided he had to be labeled fringe and ruined. This is one of our best scientists in America at Stanford that now that guy wants to turn around. That's the least of his sins, by the way, and lecture us on how it's really sad we have a truth deficit in this country and something ought to be done about it. Thoughts on that? Let's evaluate the truth seekingness of the following quote, the science-ness of the following quote. When the Great Barrington Declaration came out in the summer or late or early fall of 2020, Jay Bhattacharya and others signed, basically saying we won't focus protection.

1:45:46His words, Francis Collins's word, we need a quick and devastating takedown of these fringe epidemiologists. Okay. Quick and devastating takedown. That is some clown talk, bro. To paraphrase Bryce Harper, what are you doing? There's no truth. There's no science. That's a political hatchet job. And what effect did it have? Jay Bhattacharya was censured by a hundred faculty members at Stanford, censured. The amount of chilling effect, there was a great piece by John Tierney in the City Journal a couple years ago, talking about all these different places where peer review was happening in epidemiology sciences related to COVID after this intervention by Francis Cole.

1:46:30It had a huge chilling effect on scientific discourse. And meanwhile, then the Biden administration did all kinds of job boning against social media companies to have them suppress people. Just like go ahead and kick them off your platform of people, not just Joe Rogan from Spotify was their attempt that they talked about on a daily basis, but people like Rand Paul from YouTube successful. They kicked him off for a while. Um, amazing mass kind of censorship job boning events. Uh, he was in the middle of this. I don't want to hear a single damn word coming out of his mouth about truth and freedom and science and anything like that, unless the first one is, I'm sorry, I screwed up.

1:47:11Yes. I'm not sorry, he totally screwed up. And Stephen Colbert, who is doing dance routines with giant syringes about the vaccine, is also not the place to have that conversation. No, and lets him totally get away with it, Camille. Yeah, I mean, well, he's not a journalist, so I don't expect him to do much better. And he came there for a PR opportunity, but it would have been much better to have him do a little bit of introspection. During our moment of most profound need, our public health infrastructure completely failed us. Like just in terms of messaging and communicating with people in an honest and transparent way, communicating both our certainty and our uncertainty, really profound uncertainty at various moments.

1:47:52Like that's what they should have been doing. They failed profoundly. We don't even have to get into debates about vaccine efficacy or anything else. I think the quote that Matt just cited And the many, many, many instances of people getting way out over their skis, openly misleading the American public about the use of masks or necessity of masks in certain instances only to reverse themselves later. All of that has not only had consequence. It didn't only had consequences during the pandemic. It has contributed to this circumstance we find ourselves in where people don't know who to trust. They only trust people who kind of openly agree with them.

1:48:27They're upset with the bureaucracy. They're upset with the institutions broadly. like there is an absolute need for us to go back, think carefully about what happened there. And it isn't too late to do it. We can still do it at this point, but it is definitely the case that a lot of these people just need to, by the way, he didn't get it. Got to be cleared out. He didn't get a pardon. Fauci got a pardon, but he was on all those emails too. When those two decided to, to stifle any discussion about whether this thing originated in a lab. Remember that explosive story where it was like, I mean, now we all know it definitely started in a lab, but you couldn't talk about it.

1:49:02And those two got those ridiculous epidemiologists together who had all privately, we found out things to the house that the Republican led house that investigated it and got the emails privately. They were like, this doesn't look like anything in nature that we've ever seen before. Kind of looks like we grew it in a lab. And then those to went in there and browbeat them. And then within literally like hours, they all did a 180 saying it's natural. It's natural. Came from a pangolin or something like that. Definitely, definitely, definitely not in a lab. And the nerve, so okay, you're going to be a dishonest, disgusting broker on a pandemic that took a lot of lives.

1:49:40That's okay. That's your decision. You'll have to live with that and face up to it when you meet your maker. But then to have the nerve to go on a truth tour, trying to lecture the rest of us. I actually want to hear it one more time. Now having had that discussion, let's play SOT 35 one more time. Stephen, we have other deficits that politics aren't going to solve. Maybe they're making it worse. There's a truth deficit. We're in a place now. Yeah, it seems to be no real penalty for saying something that's demonstrably false. It just, oh my God. No, it's not. Oh yeah. We have a, we have a trust deficit where because people don't know if they can be sure somebody's telling the truth, why should I trust that person?

1:50:24So we stopped trusting each other most of the time. And that's dangerous also for our future. It's very meta, you know, like what he's saying applies 100 % to him and you're watching it thinking, I agree with every word. It's just, you're the one who created the trust deficit. You're the one who said the untruths that for which there was no accountability. Just as a reminder in those emails, he gave, he give, gives the order in the emails writing that it's important to settle the matter to quote, put down this very destructive conspiracy about COVID starting in a lab, lest the experts do quote, great potential harm to science and international harmony.

1:51:08What? He's never been held accountable. A counter conspiracy. I do. It's crazy. Using the word settle. Yeah. I'm going to pre-settle the science in the name of science. Yeah. Why? Why was it so important to have it settled when you could see the debate was raging within the top experts of the world saying, okay, it could it be natural? Might be, but geez, we don't think so. He wouldn't let it play out. He wanted a conclusion because he knew we funded it. That's the reason he knew that we were funding gain of function research in that COVID lab. He knew that we were paying eco health Alliance to partner with the bat lady to do it.

1:51:45And he didn't want it to come out that he and Anthony Fauci were likely behind the entire pandemic. That's what was going on there. And now he's given red carpet rollout on Stephen Colbert and not asked about any of that shit. It's infuriating. Now, wait, now I've taken, I've abused you. I've kept you seven minutes over. Do you have another few minutes? Cause there is one other thing I wanted to get to. Yeah, we got, we got time for you, Megan. Okay. Okay. God bless you. Cause there's nobody else I'd rather do this with. I've been waiting all week to do this with you guys. Did you catch the piece in the New York times entitled, is it time to stop snubbing your right wing family?

1:52:30fantastic it is it's so good i can't wait to talk about it and if you haven't read it camille fear not i have it here and i'm going to bring you the highlights thank you now the man's name is david litt l-i-t-t however the term does not apply with respect to his piece as the kids would say that's slang for cool um okay i'm just going to give you a little from the top published july 13th. Not too long ago, I felt a civic duty to be rude to my wife's younger brother. I met Matt Kapler, names him, in 2012, and it was immediately clear we had nothing in common. He lifted weights to death metal. I jogged to Sondheim.

1:53:11I was one of President Barack Obama's, who does that? I was one of President Barack Obama's speechwriters and had an Ivy League degree. He was a huge Joe Rogan fan and went on to get his electrician's license. Oh, can you imagine? Basically like what a rube unlike me, my early memories of Matt are hazy. I was mostly trying to impress his parents. Still, we got along chatting amiably on holidays and family events. Then the pandemic hit and our preferences began to feel more like more feel like more than differences in taste. We were on opposite sides of a cultural civil war. The deepest divide was vaccination.

1:53:51I wasn't shocked when Matt didn't get the COVID shot, but I was baffled. Turning down a vaccine during a pandemic seemed like a rejection of science and self-preservation. It felt like he was tearing up the social contract that until that point, I'd imagined we shared. Had Matt been a friend rather than a family member, I probably would have cut off contact completely. As it was on the rare and always outdoor occasions when we saw each other, I spoke in disapproving snippets. Then he quotes, work's been good. I guess that's Matt saying work's been good and David with the, it's my disapproving snippet of you, Matt.

1:54:37My frostiness wasn't personal. It was strategic. Being unfriendly to people who turned down the vaccine felt like the right thing to do. How else could we motivate them to mend their ways? This is not a parody. This is real. He's actually writing this in the first person. I wasn't the only one thinking this. A 2021 essay for USA Today declared, it's time to start shunning the vaccine hesitant. An LA Times piece went further, arguing that to create teachable moments, it may be necessary to mock some anti-vaxxers deaths, which he brings up again here. It's like, these were my teachers. Shunning as a form of accountability goes back millenniums.

1:55:17And then he goes back on Hester Prynne and the Scarlet Letter and what that was meant to do. That was before social media, blah, blah, blah, blah. What people used to do, he says, few people who lost friends over the vaccine changed their minds. They just got new friends. Those exiled from one version of society were quickly welcomed by another, an alternate universe full of grievance peddlers and conspiracy theorists who thrived on stories of victimized conservatives. So he goes on about how he really wrestled with this and he really kind of tried to shun poor Matt. But then they decided to start surfing together.

1:55:56Matt, like a typical right winger, didn't write him off, didn't take it too personally, continued talking to him, was nice to him and actually volunteered to help him learn how to surf. And he says, okay, I wish I could have learned the lesson that ostracism doesn't help, doesn't work. I wish I could have learned this through self-reflection and study. What actually happened is that I started surfing after moving to the Jersey shore. Oh, great. In 2022, I signed up for lessons. Despite my advanced age of 35 and lack of natural talent, I got hooked. Matt was the only other surfer I knew. I put my principled unfriendliness aside.

1:56:38Listen to the guy cloaking himself in glory for being a dick all the way through Matt, not abandoning him and continuing to help him. From the moment we began paddling out together, I could tell my cold shoulder strategy had backfired. I'd spent the peak of the pandemic in a cultural bubble and he had done the same. Driving to a break or changing into our wetsuits, he'd often express opinions about the merits of vigilantism or the health benefits of Mexican stem cell injections that I found slightly unhinged. Where is this coming from? I wondered. The answer was nearly always Joe Rogan. I assumed our surf buddy experiment would either fall, fail spectacularly, or would bring Matt over to my side.

1:57:24Neither of those things occurred, however. Instead, the connections we found were tiny and unrelated to politics. And then he goes on to talk about common ground they found on nonpolitical matters. And he forgave Matt for being a crazy Joe Rogan fan and started to rethink his decision to completely ostracize Matt from his life. And he decided that this was a better path that shunning, he writes, plays into the hands of demagogues, making it easier for them to divide us and even in some cases to incite violence. So he hasn't learned anything about his worldviews other than when you have the hateful, awful people on the other side, the shunning isn't the most effective way of getting them to change their worldview because you drive them into the arms of the true lunatics.

1:58:18That's what he learned on the surfboard with Matt. There's so much in here. I'll start with you, Matt Welsh. Since you're a Matt and you read the piece, your thoughts on it. There are so many aspects of that that make me want to both punch the window that I'm looking through right now and also just laugh myself to death because the lack of self-awareness is so fantastic. But there are public policy aspects of this that we're thinking about. End of 2021, we were just talking about when Francis Collins was in office, the president of the United States was calling this the pandemic of the unvaccinated.

1:58:57That sense of absolutely divisive and accusatory, you don't like, you're not doing what we want you to do, and so therefore your death is your fault. That was widespread in mainstream media, mainstream democratic discourse, and in democratic governance during the Biden administration. And it is and it was sick. Joe Biden accused Ron DeSantis and all these governors who were not doing exactly what he wanted to do in terms of like schools and other aspects. He was accusing them of playing with kids lives. Remember, I wrote about all this stuff in real time. Like you're accusing a governor of a state during a pandemic of being more interested in politics than his own children in his in his family.

1:59:44Because DeSantis has a bunch of kids and children in the state living or dying. that is so warped um i mean it's a terrible thing to a terrible place to be as a human being like maybe i shouldn't ostracize people like my principled unfriendliness like dude you've got you you need to touch a lot of grass yeah and maybe even some weed while you're touching it's like go somewhere smoke out a lot touch it and smoke it and figure out why you've become a monster because you kind of have just as an interpersonal way of going through things but also these theater kids held power. He still has the power to get Matt isn't out there writing in the New York Times op-ed page thinking about reconsidering.

2:00:22And let's be honest, this wouldn't have been published if Kamala Harris would have won because he wouldn't be going through the same levels of introspection. Same reason Gavin Newsom wouldn't be going on bro podcasts now if Kamala Harris would have won. Now suddenly the New York Times is like, oh, maybe we should, I don't know, profile Andrew Schultz or something. Like there's a palpable difference. Like maybe we can't just pretend like half of the country is irredeemable bigots that we should just sort of shun their way into modifying their behavior. It's a whole, I guess CBS is McFarlane didn't get the memo.

2:00:59No, I mean, the times was still going after Schultz in that piece as well, where they were profiling him. Look, I wholeheartedly agree with everything that you all have said about this situation. I mean, especially like the notion of casting you just deliberately being an asshole to everyone in this self-serving way is just so obnoxious. It's nearly beyond belief, except we've all lived this. We've watched this happen. We know people who have done this themselves. And I will say, you know, for my part, I've had weird politics. It is always the case long before COVID that we would be in circumstances where people would meet me, discover something that I think like, I don't know, the Department of Education should be completely shuttered and think, what a monster you are.

2:01:45I can't even talk to you. And I think for people like us, we've long had this, given that experience, you have to be pretty generous to people, even when you have a severe disagreement. And looking for those areas of common ground and trying to persuade people on the basis of the things that we have in common, as opposed to trying to castigate everyone who is imagined to be somewhat different from you or diverges from accepted opinion on something and attributing the worst possible motives to them. That is just a monstrous way to live. I do have real concerns, though, that this has been a hallmark of the left, that they've been uniquely censorious in many instances, that they've been, interestingly, because many of them aren't believers, they've been weirdly puritanical and kind of prone to condemnations.

2:02:34But some people on the right have adopted some of these same approaches to politics and to kind of social interactions in victory. and I'm someone who in that summer of 2021 I remember and we were talking around that time Megan and some periods after as well I got published two pieces within the space of a couple of months and found myself at the center of like a hate storm like the first was in June where I was skeptical of the critical race theory bans not critical race theory itself I have nothing but contempt for those ideas but I didn't think the bans were a good idea and I said so in a public place and a lot of conservatives got openly and secretly angry with me.

2:03:14And a couple of weeks later, I remember that debate. I was down here at the shore when we had it. Yeah. Yeah. And a couple of weeks later, I published this story about Amy Cooper, the Central Park Karen, quote unquote. That was amazing. And people on the left were not impressed with it. And it was the same exact thing in the other direction. And there was never really an interest in maybe we should have a conversation. Perhaps Camille is an honest broker. And the fact that he manages to piss off people on both sides has something to do with the fact that he's just trying to get at the truth. We don't seem to have an appetite for that.

2:03:45And my Joe Rogan bro who surfs, who's still cool enough with you to take to invite you out to surf, despite the fact that you've been strategically and deliberately an asshole to him systematically for years. He deserves a medal. And you desperately, desperately, desperately need to touch grass, as has already been said, and think carefully about the kind of person you want to be. Just be better, motherfucker. Come on. Because, you know, yeah, be better, motherfucker. You know, like he's putting all those things in there to win him plaudits from the left wingers, he assumes correctly, are reading the Times, right?

2:04:19Like, I was a complete douche to him. Let me reassure you. At every turn, I treated him like absolute shit. Let me reenact the dialogue. How's his work going? Okay. Hmm. Hmm. Oh, my. I mean, I think we've also determined that David is a gay man. No, he's not because he's I think it's his sister-in-law, but he's certainly a little on the edge. Anyway, he's doing it because he wants snaps, right? He wants snaps from the Times readers. That's why he's and what does he think is going to get him snaps? Being a complete asshole to someone he loves, someone who's in his family, someone who's been nothing but nice to him.

2:05:01And none of that matters. All that matters is he didn't get the covid jab, people. He watches Joe Rogan. So we have to hate him. I mean, truly, even his on paper indictment of the guy doesn't go beyond that. Like, where is where is Matt's terrible sin? You didn't even say that, like, he listens to Tucker Carlson. Like Joe Rogan, he's kind of middle of the road. Like, what do you mean? Anyway, I just think it's such an amazing window, right, into how the left is. And is anybody surprised that this was a speechwriter for Obama? Oh, God, just zero. I would just add this a cautionary tale for everybody.

2:05:38You know, we're talking on a podcast that talks about politics, the people who are going to be higher than normal sense of involvement or consumer interest in politics. You don't have to bring your politics into everything. You don't have to bring it into your baseball or your golf. You certainly don't have to bring it to your family, especially in ways where you're naming them out loud. you don't have to like the world is a big and beautiful place anytime i go anywhere in america which i do as often as possible because america is awesome um you know the first conversations that you have with people aren't about politics you know i spent fourth of july on the 13th deck of a cruise ship in boston moored with a bunch of senior retirees standing up and putting their hand over their heart as the military anthems of each branch of the military were played as we're watching it on a big screen.

2:06:30What's wrong with you? Am I going to turn to the lady next to me and say, I don't know, man, did you vote for someone I didn't like? That's right. You look like a Trumper. That's actually not how normal humans live. You go in any direction in America and no one really is having those conversations except when you're over politicized everything and too much of your brain space on a daily basis is taken up by politics. Don't do it. You don't have to. Don't judge people that way. We're all awesome in our way. Even our theater kids are awesome. They just need to maybe have a little bit less power.

2:07:06I have dear friends, truly very, very close friends who are diehard liberals and also woke, not just liberals. I mean, I don't have a lot of friends who are woke, but I have a couple of girlfriends who are woke. And people ask me, like, how have you maintained those friendships through the last five years in particular? And we not all of them has survived. I told the audience months ago that a friend did break up with me not too long ago over politics. But for the most part, my dearest friends are still intact. And the reason is with some we sometimes discuss politics, but we do it totally respectfully.

2:07:42I am completely open to their worldview. And there's so many things on the Republican side that you can criticize. I'm happy to give them all their main points, which are never unreasonable. You know, they're not like nutcases and they give me mine too about the Democrats. So if we go there, we go, go only 10 % into the politics. And usually there's plenty to criticize on both sides. And I'm delighted to give it up about the right. And they're usually fine giving it up about the left, but the vast majority of our time together, we talk about our lives, you know, like who's running around all day thinking about Trump or politics.

2:08:14Like we do it for our jobs. Sure. And that's fun. Like when I'm with my friends, we talk about our lives. We talk about our kids. We talk about something funny that happened with other friends or a dinner we went to or a party we went to, or what's going on with your mom? How's your mom doing? Where did you guys vacation? What was it like? There's so much you can discuss that doesn't come anywhere near the political sphere. And there's so much within politics that you can discuss that's like fair game and isn't going to upset anybody. It's just these people who are so hard partisan, like you, David Litt, are the ones who ruin it for everyone, for families and friend groups.

2:08:50He's the one who should be kicked out. He's the Hester of the group. Hester Prynne, right? Was that her last name? Yeah. Prynne from the Scarlet Letter. You're Hester. You get the Scarlet Letter, not sweet Matt. Matt, I hope I see you here on the Jersey Shore. And I hope you come up to me and you tell me, it's me, Matt. And I will give you a hug and we can talk about your jerk relative. Guys, thanks for doing overtime. It's always a pleasure. And all the best to Moynihan. Hope whatever he's going through resolves quickly. Yeah. Amen. We'll work on them. Antiviral bacteria. Thanks, Megan. See you soon.

2:09:26All right. Awesome. What another great show. I love those guys. What a day. Thank you all for tuning in. Please tune in tomorrow, too. We're going to have Maureen Callahan, the one and only. She and I have a lot to go through, including the sit down on Michelle Obama's. Remember Megan O? Michelle O has an update to her podcast that stars Barack O. And we both have a lot of thoughts. Tune in then.

2:09:53Thanks for listening to The Megan Kelly Show. No BS, no agenda, and no fear.

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