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

Transcript

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Speaker 18 Welcome Welcome to the Megan Kelly Show, live on Sirius XM channel 111 every weekday at Noon East.

Speaker 18 Hey, everyone, I'm Megan Kelly. Welcome to the Megan Kelly Show.
I'm like a little jarred right now, given the story that we're opening with.

Speaker 18 We have a huge show for you. We've got the fifth column.
Love these guys, but we're going to start with a shocking report that just hit on what we know about Air India Flight 171,

Speaker 18 which horrifically crashed soon after takeoff, just a couple of weeks ago, about a month ago, June 12th, killing all but one of its 242 passengers and a reported 29 more on the ground. Think of that.

Speaker 18 So 241 passengers killed and a reported 29 more on the ground.

Speaker 18 That Boeing 787 Dreamliner, which took off from India and was headed to London's Gatwick airport, seemed to run into problems almost immediately after takeoff.

Speaker 18 Stunning footage of the crash emerged online. Watch.

Speaker 18 Horrific. For the listening audience, you just see a plane, the huge white plane that looks like it might kind of be trying to land, but this happened on takeoff.
And then you just see the fireball.

Speaker 18 Incredibly, somehow one person survived. A 40-year-old British man, Vishwash Kumar Ramesh.
He just walked away. It was an incredible tape.
You've probably seen it in the past five weeks.

Speaker 18 Just walked out of the fireball with only minor injuries.

Speaker 18 It's not clear in the moment the guy knew what had happened to him. He later told local media I was going to die.
But when I opened my eyes, I realized I was alive.

Speaker 18 I pulled out the belt from under my seat and tried to escape. And then I managed to do it.
I saw others and the air hostess in front of me who could not escape.

Speaker 18 Air India said those on board included 169 Indian nationals, 53 British nationals, seven Portuguese, one Canadian. The youngest victim believed to be just four years old.

Speaker 18 And according to a new report in the Wall Street Journal, a black box recording indicates it was the captain who turned off switches that allow fuel to flow into the plane's engines right after the plane took flight.

Speaker 18 The journal's reporting cites people familiar with the U.S. officials' early assessment of the evidence in the crash.

Speaker 18 According to the journal, the first officer asked the captain why he turned off the switches, allowing the fuel to flow, and then you can hear the first officer panic.

Speaker 18 The captain apparently remains calm the entire time.

Speaker 18 India's Aircraft Accident Investigation Bureau, or AAIB, first revealed the exchange last week without specifying which pilot made each comment.

Speaker 18 That report says one pilot asked why the other turned off the switches and the other denied doing so.

Speaker 18 But clearly we now know that it was the second in command, but the one who was actually flying the plane, who said, why did you just turn off the fuel switches?

Speaker 18 And then the captain calmly, this is obviously in a moment of dire situation for the plane. says he didn't do it.

Speaker 18 The report says the switches were moved one second apart and turned back on after they had turned off the fuel about 10 seconds later, but it was too late.

Speaker 18 The report also made no conclusions on whether the actions were deliberate, but it's easy to see why there are now reports hitting online from several aviation experts that there is no way this plane went down other than intentionally.

Speaker 18 that the captain of this plane deliberately brought down this flight. According to the journal, these preliminary findings have led some U.S.

Speaker 18 officials to believe that a criminal investigation must be opened.

Speaker 18 The AAIB issued a statement to the journal Thursday evening stating, we urge both the public and the media to refrain from spreading premature narratives that risk undermining the integrity of the investigative process.

Speaker 18 Well, too bad, because these folks have been notoriously secretive. in other investigations and in this one, and U.S.
officials think a criminal investigation should be opened up.

Speaker 18 So, we're not going to honor your request.

Speaker 18 They added that at this stage, it's too early to reach any definite conclusions.

Speaker 18 Okay, that's fine, but you don't stop speculation from a country that is not exactly known for its transparency on this kind of thing.

Speaker 18 And when you're talking about hundreds of people who may have just been mass murdered, joining me now to react to all of this are Captain Steve Scheibener, Captain Steve on YouTube, Matthew Wiz Buckley, decorated U.S.

Speaker 18 Naval Aviator and Top Gun graduate, and Patrick Smith, who's an airline pilot and air travel blogger at Ask the Pilot.

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Speaker 18 Guys, thank you so much for being here. Wow, this is really stunning.

Speaker 18 This was a Wall Street Journal exclusive posting these new details. that it was the first officer questioning the captain's apparent actions.
He expressed surprise and then panic.

Speaker 18 The captain remained calm And the names of those who were flying, it was First Officer Clive Kunder. He was the pilot flying the plane, age 32.

Speaker 18 The captain, who remains calm and is under suspicion, was Sumit Sabarwal, a decades-long veteran. He is the one who flipped the switches, age 56.

Speaker 18 Wiz, let me start with you as our top gun grad and pilot.

Speaker 18 What do you make of this information?

Speaker 4 Initially, Megan, it's an absolute horror.

Speaker 22 It looks like a murder-suicide. As you alluded to, 787s just don't simply rotate, get airborne, and then settle back down.

Speaker 22 It looks like the captain, for whatever reason, wanted to check out that day. And sadly, Megan, this isn't the first example of a pilot just wanting to take an aircraft down or take people with them.

Speaker 22 Egypt Air 990 or the German wings mishap, I believe, in 2015.

Speaker 22 Before I started flying for FedEx, there was a famous incident with a former Flying Tigers pilot who was going to jump in the jump seat and crash a plane into FedEx headquarters so he could get the insurance.

Speaker 22 And, you know, he didn't want to look like a murder, so he wanted to crash the airplane. So Megan,

Speaker 22 all indications are that the captain selected the cutoff position on the fuel switches.

Speaker 22 about 10 seconds for that first officer who was flying the airplane to be a little confused and look around going, hey, what are we doing here? And then to put them back on.

Speaker 22 And sadly, one of the motors spooled up a little bit above idle and the other one was just trying to come online, but it was too late.

Speaker 22 Real quick, Megan, I know pilots unions hate this, but we have like HD cameras on the other side of the moon.

Speaker 22 If we had some HD cameras in the cockpit instead of just a voice recorder, we'd know for absolute 100% certainty what happened.

Speaker 22 But for whatever reason, pilots unions don't like a camera looking over their shoulder. Maybe this will change that.

Speaker 18 I mean, it's like being a cop. You're in, you've got other people's lives potentially in your hands.

Speaker 18 And unfortunately, you may have to sacrifice a bit of privacy because this is not the first time this has happened.

Speaker 18 I mean, just researching for the show, we have seen pilot, you know, death by suicide, but while committing mass murder before.

Speaker 18 I mean, that crash, that German air, that German pilot in 2015 was the most recent, but there were many prior to that.

Speaker 18 Captain Steve, as you hear, as you look at the video of that plane, it was taking off and then, of course, comes back down.

Speaker 18 It almost looks like a gentle come down, but obviously it wasn't and it wasn't supposed to be coming down um and you hear these facts as reported by the journal what conclusions do you reach

Speaker 23 well at first when you see that video it doesn't make any sense i've never seen anything like that an airplane that takes off it looks like it achieves flight fine and then seconds later maybe four or five seconds later you can see the nose kind of come over clearly the wings are losing lift and the airplane then begins to settle into the the buildings off the end of the runway and it does look like it's landing but it's not.

Speaker 23 We clearly know that at this point. The only answer to that is it's a dual engine failure and what caused the dual engine failure.

Speaker 23 And I think now with this Wall Street Journal confirmation, plus a preliminary report, which, you know, they parsed their words a little bit.

Speaker 23 They said the fuel control switches transitioned from run to cutoff. They don't transition.
Somebody has to place them there. It's a three-step process.

Speaker 23 You have to grasp the switch, pull it up because it's spring-loaded, pull it down and let it go. So that's only a human has to do that.

Speaker 23 And there's no known procedure that I know of at 200 feet off the ground on rotate where you would grab those switches and put them to cutoff.

Speaker 23 So either way, it was pilot error, whether it was intentional or unintentional. I think now the Wall Street Journal has kind of concluded that it's intentional and that's no surprise.

Speaker 18 And my understanding is, and maybe you can speak to this, Patrick, but my understanding is they put a little guard on the

Speaker 18 control panel dashboard.

Speaker 18 I'm not exactly sure what the right term is, but where they keep those fuel switches, there's like a little guard so that a pilot can't inadvertently like knock it with his hip or his hand while he's reaching for something.

Speaker 18 So it really does look like, by all accounts, here's a picture we got from the Daily Mail.

Speaker 18 For the listening audience, it shows a little control panel and you can see the tiny little fuel lovers, but to the right and to the left of them is like a little metal guard that stands up.

Speaker 18 And my understanding is, Patrick, that's to prevent anything inadvertent from happening.

Speaker 24 That's correct. And

Speaker 24 I think we need to start out by saying that there's a lot here that we just don't know. The report that came out the other day was very preliminary.
We don't even have a CDR transcript yet.

Speaker 24 You've mentioned a few times what we know, what we know. Well, what about all the things we don't know?

Speaker 24 And

Speaker 24 as a result, I tend to be a little more reserved and conservative in my assessment of what happened.

Speaker 18 What do you think happened?

Speaker 24 I don't know. We don't know.

Speaker 18 Well, you say you're more reserved. How are you more reserved? What conclusion are you reaching?

Speaker 24 I don't necessarily buy the murder-suicide scenario.

Speaker 24 I'm not saying it didn't happen. There's evidence leaning in that direction strongly.

Speaker 24 But the dynamics of the crash don't quite make sense that way. So let me get this straight.
You're going to shut the engines off at the moment of rotation and glide to a crash.

Speaker 24 There are so many unknowns in a scenario like that. There's no guarantee that the crash would be catastrophic, that everybody would be killed, that

Speaker 24 the person who did it would be killed.

Speaker 24 Just to the left of the impact area where the plane hit is a mostly open stretch without buildings or larger obstructions. If the plane had just been a little more to that side,

Speaker 24 the the crash could have been at least partly survivable. It just doesn't seem like the way somebody would go about doing something like that.

Speaker 24 And you go back to Egypt there and German wings and MH370, which almost certainly was a murder-suicide.

Speaker 24 It just, it feels different.

Speaker 24 And there remains the distinct possibility, this is going to sound preposterous, that the fuel control switches were shut off accidentally, inadvertently, in a moment of absurd absent-mindedness.

Speaker 24 And while it sounds preposterous, that sort of thing has happened before.

Speaker 18 For the listening audience, Patrick's speaking, and both of our other pilots are shaking their heads, no.

Speaker 18 But I like the disagreement. I appreciate the different opinions because we don't know what happened.
Go ahead, Wiz.

Speaker 22 I just couldn't disagree more, Megan.

Speaker 22 If there was anything but what we've been talking about, they would go out of their way in this report to say it if there was a hiccup in the electrical systems megan these jets you wouldn't know that yet

Speaker 22 you would not know any of that yet this is you absolutely would know that you absolutely know that because these jets are tattletales okay let was data link stuff no those engines they data link stuff directly to ge the the flight control computers they know just about everything at this point if there was any other straws they could be grasping at they would throw that in the report right now they did not there was no electrical hiccups there was no contaminated fuel.

Speaker 22 They put in this preliminary report, very preliminary stuff, obviously,

Speaker 22 what they believe. If there was any other thing on God's green earth, they probably

Speaker 22 would have written that down.

Speaker 18 Go ahead, Captain Steve. You made your thoughts.
I'll come back to you in a second, Patrick. I'll come right back to you.
Let me get Captain Steven.

Speaker 23 Yeah, I agree that there's no way that those switches move from run to cutoff. And that's what they said in the preliminary report that

Speaker 23 they didn't say place. They said transition to cutoff.

Speaker 23 let's assume for a minute that there there's some reason that there was uh an electronic glitch uh you would have to believe that it happened on both switches one second apart uh and if that were the case they would be grounding every single Boeing airplane on the planet.

Speaker 23 They all have those same switches. There would be an investigation into what was wrong with those switches.
None of that has come out of this.

Speaker 23 And so what's not being reported in the report is, or what's not taking place is just as important as what you do do read in the report.

Speaker 23 I don't think Boeing or anybody else suspects that there's anything wrong with the 787 because there's not.

Speaker 18 Correct.

Speaker 18 I'll give you the floor in one second.

Speaker 18 One second, but I just want to say this. We also have the other piece of evidence, which is the co-pilot, the one who was actually flying the plane, believed the captain did it.

Speaker 18 100% believed he did it. And then the captain denied it in some sort of calm manner, which was said to be his manner.

Speaker 18 And then we'll get to the reports about his mental state, which vary.

Speaker 18 Okay, go ahead, Patrick. You wanted to defend your position.

Speaker 24 Again,

Speaker 24 I'm not concluding anything. I'm leaving open the possibility that this indeed was a murder-suicide.
And as I said, it is certainly trending that way, but it's not, we don't know for sure.

Speaker 24 There's a lot we don't know. And what of the possibility that he

Speaker 24 simply shut them off by mistake. It has happened before, and I'm sure my guests know that.
It sounds ridiculous, but it has happened.

Speaker 24 And there also was mentioned in the report of a boeing a service bulletin that was put out um a few years back regarding fuel control switches that would not lock into position and could potentially slide back to the cutoff position on their own um what of that um to me that kind of jumped out uh it's not it's not likely but it's also not likely that the captain shut the engines off and and and crashed i don't find that unlikely at all i i actually don't find that unlikely it's happened it's i mean we're just pulling up these.

Speaker 18 Well, as the other scenario, but nobody wants to talk about that because it's not

Speaker 18 talking about it. You're having your say, Patrick.
What are you complaining about? Here's some examples. You've got

Speaker 18 this is from the FAA. They call them aircraft-assisted pilot suicides, saying they're rare.

Speaker 18 They include the November 2013 crash of Mozambique Airlines, a plane bound for Angola, which was eerily similar to the German Wings plane one. That was German Wings Flight 9525.

Speaker 18 That one was so eerie where that pilot died taking 149 other people with him. He was depressed and flew the plane right into the side of a mountain.
That was absolutely awful. He was 27 years old.

Speaker 18 We know he was determined to kill himself.

Speaker 18 Okay, and then there's,

Speaker 18 let's see, there's a bunch. Egypt Airlines, you guys mentioned Flight 990 off Nantucket in 1999, killing all 217 people on board, caused by deliberate action, according to the NTSB.

Speaker 18 In that case, a relief pilot, Gamil al-Battudi, waited for for the captain to leave the cockpit, then disengage the autopilot.

Speaker 18 As the plane descended, he could be heard saying in Arabic, I rely on God over and over. And there are more.
I mean, you could keep going.

Speaker 18 Hey, Megan, real quick, with the Egypt air.

Speaker 22 Yeah, with the Egypt air mishap. So the captain actually came back from the head or whatever he was doing and saw this going on.
He jumped in.

Speaker 22 pulled back on the control yoke and he's fighting with the FO, the first officer at the time. And the Boeing at the time, the captain would override the first officer's control inputs.

Speaker 22 Guess what he did to take the airplane down after that? He reached over and shut the fuel to the engines off. So

Speaker 22 another instance of that. But let's be clear, Megan.

Speaker 22 Whether it's the India board, the NTSB,

Speaker 22 history has shown us that we want to have preliminary reports. Why? Does the flying public want to wait 12 to 18 months to find out why an airliner crashed? No.

Speaker 22 So they want to compile as much facts as they can, as quickly as they can.

Speaker 22 As Captain Steve alluded to, if there was something going on in these brand new 787 airliners where just magically the fuel switches go to cutoff, they would be freaking the hell out right now.

Speaker 22 They're not.

Speaker 22 I'll support Patrick a little bit and say, of course, there's all sorts of slim to none possibilities going on here, but all the evidence is pointing in this direction.

Speaker 22 And, you know, Megan, it sounds like we're going to talk about mental health stuff here in a little bit, but yeah, let me tell you what the reporting is on that.

Speaker 18 Okay, the Daily Telegraph is reporting the following that captain mohan rangang nathan um a leading aviation safety expert in india has revealed that quote several air india pilots had allegedly confirmed that this experienced pilot had suffered from poor mental health the captain we're talking about here sumit subarwal the one he's now dead uh age 56 who we are speculating may have brought down this plane um so this other captain is saying that he's spoken with several air india pilots who allegedly confirmed to him that this pilot had suffered from poor mental health.

Speaker 18 Speaking to the Daily Telegraph, he claimed, quote, he had taken time off from flying in the last three to four years. He had taken medical leave for that.

Speaker 18 This captain is understood to have taken bereavement leave after the death of his mother.

Speaker 18 Again, this is from the Daily Telegraph, though it's believed by this man doing the reporting, a different captain, Rung Ganathan, that he'd been medically cleared by Air India prior to the fatal crash.

Speaker 18 The Telegraph said that while Air India declined to comment, an official working with their parent company, Tata Group, told the publication that Captain Sabarwal, the guy at issue, had not taken any medical leave, with the preliminary report failing to obtain any significant findings.

Speaker 18 They added that within the last two years, both pilots on board the flight had passed the Class 1 medical exam, which makes an evaluation of their psychophysical capabilities.

Speaker 18 Unfortunately, some of those other pilots in the cases that we just went over also passed their exams and were not identified as having mental problems, but they clearly did.

Speaker 18 Your thoughts on that, guys?

Speaker 23 Well, Megan, we just went out with a video about mental and emotional health, and I interviewed Dr. Charlie Carreri, who's really the pioneer in this field.

Speaker 23 He's the guy responsible for, at least at American Delta United and Southwest, their programs that are in place where pilots can go self-report without any fear of incrimination or losing their jobs, which is hugely important because there's a big stigma with mental health.

Speaker 23 And I think that's the direction that all this is going is to sit and talk about what's the mental health issues with pilots.

Speaker 23 And it's a very stressful job and you have to balance on the road with at home. And those two things don't always go together very well for people that travel all the time.

Speaker 23 And then there's a stress and the responsibility that goes with the job. So I think there's never a bad time to have that conversation about mental health.

Speaker 23 Certainly now, this is kind of a springboard into having that conversation, and it's certainly one that I think is important to have.

Speaker 22 Hey, Megan, a quick, uh, quick update with the German wings. Uh, they actually knew a lot of his doctors knew, but apparently, the German medical system, it's to steal a phrase, it's verboten.

Speaker 22 Those two systems weren't allowed to talk in Germany. Apparently, you could say, I'm absolutely nuts and suicidal.
I'm going to crash an airliner.

Speaker 22 The doctors were forbidden from telling whatever the German FAA is about any of this. Oh yeah, trust me.
After that, I think they've hopefully made some changes in the German system.

Speaker 22 But at the time, all the doctors after it came out, they had to shrug their shoulders and say,

Speaker 22 bound by law not to do that.

Speaker 18 Yep. That thing was so disturbing.
And it was very clear in that case that it was a murder-suicide.

Speaker 18 Like my husband and I have, you know, as one does in gallows humor, made jokes about it.

Speaker 18 There's, I'm down here at the Jersey Shore for the summer, and we always take our kids to this amusement park at least once a summer.

Speaker 18 And there's one of those rides, the Scrambler, at this amusement park. And there's something crazy about this particular Scrambler.

Speaker 18 It goes to like a gear that you've never seen before, where you really feel like you're going to be flung right off the coast of New Jersey into the ocean.

Speaker 18 And one time, like one of the first times I ever rode it, I looked at my husband and our kids, and I tried to get a look at the guy operating it.

Speaker 18 And I said to my husband, Doug, I'm like, he's like the German pilot. This is it.
You're like, he's, it's fun. It's gallows humor.
But like, there are, there are people who are extremely sick.

Speaker 18 And that's what's so disturbing about this is it's one thing if you're sick and you commit suicide. But if that's what happened here, we're talking about a mass serial killer.
Same thing with MH370.

Speaker 18 Like

Speaker 18 you're beyond suicidal. You're one of the worst homicidal maniacs in world history.

Speaker 18 We're talking about hundreds, hundreds of murders in an instant, which to your point, Patrick, is why we should be cautious before completely throwing this captain under the bus.

Speaker 24 And by the way, as Steve alluded to, airlines regulators,

Speaker 24 the pilots' unions, at least in the U.S.,

Speaker 24 we've come a long way.

Speaker 24 There's a lot of, I guess you could call it proactivity now towards self-reporting and

Speaker 24 being open and upfront about mental health issues to keep

Speaker 24 trouble from being driven underground where it could cause some sort of accident or

Speaker 24 something awful.

Speaker 24 That being said, I mean, there are people with mental health issues in every line of work from surgeons, police officers, airline pilots, whomever.

Speaker 24 It's very important to emphasize here, very important that having a mental health issue, having even depression,

Speaker 24 does not turn you into a psychopathic mass murderer.

Speaker 24 For that to happen, there has to be something else going on.

Speaker 24 What it is, I don't know how is that diagnosed? How is that discovered? How do we know who those outliers are?

Speaker 18 What do you do? Like when you get on board the plane, when you guys fly commercially, you know, my friend, I've mentioned this before, my friend, she's always giving the pilots boxes of chocolates.

Speaker 18 I'm like, yeah, L, that's not going to save you. Okay, but she does.
What do you guys do when you get on board the plane? Do you look at the pilot?

Speaker 18 Like, this is something that's going to be running through the minds of people. I realize it's like the chance of getting hit by lightning.

Speaker 18 It's extremely remote, but like it's going to be through us nervous flyers, through our heads the next time we get on board a plane. Captain Steve, what do you think?

Speaker 23 Well, Megan, we've talked a lot about this on my channel. I'm coming up to my retirement date in three months.
And I'm, you know, just because I turned 65, it's, I'm done.

Speaker 23 And it's kind of a one size fits all position. But 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.

Speaker 23 You don't care what color their skin is. What you're looking for is a little bit of gray hair.

Speaker 20 And if you see gray hair, that reassures you.

Speaker 23 If you see somebody up there that looks like it's one of your teenage daughter's dates,

Speaker 20 it's not causing

Speaker 18 you.

Speaker 23 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.

Speaker 23 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.

Speaker 18 Yeah.

Speaker 18 The older one here is the one who is allegedly culpable. And the younger one, who's 32, the co-pilot was 32, who was flying a plane, first officer, and the guy, you know, being possibly accused is 56.

Speaker 18 Go ahead, Patrick. You're going to say something.

Speaker 24 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,

Speaker 24 fully qualified, excellent airline pilots out there. So

Speaker 24 the extrapolation you made, maybe without meaning to, is that younger pilots aren't as safe as older pilots. And I just, I just can't, I can't accept that.

Speaker 20 Well, it didn't.

Speaker 20 I'm not saying that. They're equally qualified.

Speaker 23 What they lack is the experience and the judgment. And that's what you pay for with a captain on an airliner is.

Speaker 23 somebody that's been around the block a couple of times that can say at certain times slow down that's that's the experience.

Speaker 18 You tell our audience a little bit about you, Captain Steve, because I neglected to do that. But you joined the Navy after college graduation.

Speaker 18 You were commissioned and trained as a pilot back in 83, 84, commercial pilot for 40 years.

Speaker 18 And you were initially scheduled to fly American Airline Flight 11 on September 11th, 2001, the first plane that hit the World Trade Center. My God, I didn't know that.

Speaker 20 That is really chilling.

Speaker 23 I was actually scheduled to be the first officer on that flight.

Speaker 23 And due to kind of an extraordinary circumstance, I was bumped from the flight the night before uh and there's a documentary called in my seat that's available on youtube that tells my story but i uh travel now all around the world uh talking about living on borrowed time so that that was my near-death experience uh but yeah it kind of gives you chills on the back of your neck thinking about uh how close it was to being uh the the basically the pilot on the first airplane that flew into the first world trade center yeah speaking megan uh

Speaker 20 i want to matt drop anchor a little bit

Speaker 22 on the mental health stuff, not to freak the flying public out even more.

Speaker 22 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.

Speaker 22 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?

Speaker 22 Because then then we're grounded and we're not flying and we're not doing the one thing that's probably making us happy.

Speaker 22 So 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?

Speaker 22 You're going to get immediately grounded, most likely, and you're put over in this filing cabinet. And it's an absolute nightmare.

Speaker 22 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.

Speaker 22 You're going to lose your job or potentially your license.

Speaker 22 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.

Speaker 22 Pilots and mental health

Speaker 22 is the elephant in the room that nobody's really talking about.

Speaker 18 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.

Speaker 22 Well, you know, Megan, real quick, you know, Sully and Miracle and the Hudson, everything like that, obviously a great aviator and did some good stuff.

Speaker 22 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.

Speaker 22 If both engines flamed out and I'm Sully, guess who I care about in that moment?

Speaker 20 Me.

Speaker 22 All interest is self-interest. The fact that I saved 150 people sitting behind me is gravy.

Speaker 22 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.

Speaker 22 Oh, and everybody else too, if they do a documentary about it.

Speaker 18 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

Speaker 18 from a long time ago. This is in the Wall Street Journal.
They said that he started his flying career in the early 1990s. He attended the Indira Gandhi Academy.

Speaker 18 It's a prestigious flight school run in India. That a friend of his, who overlapped with him for one year in

Speaker 18 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.

Speaker 18 Unlike other students, messy quarters, Sabrawal kept a Spartan room filled with the bare minimum.

Speaker 18 If you opened his cupboard, said the friend, there were two formal shirts, two t-shirts, two pairs of shoes, one slippers, and one bag.

Speaker 18 So it wouldn't be unusual, I think, to find a pilot who's meticulous.

Speaker 18 Then figuring out where, if at all, he turned homicidal is a different question altogether. Can I ask you something, Wiz?

Speaker 18 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 the,

Speaker 18 you know, it is strange to like, it's all on cam, you know, as opposed to the MH370 guy who it's never been confirmed.

Speaker 18 We can't because the plane disappeared that that was a murder-suicide, but I agree that that's overwhelmingly likely what happened.

Speaker 18 He got the plane out over the Indian Ocean, which is huge and vast. And you, you know, you're guaranteed to kill everybody to have almost no evidence of it.

Speaker 18 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 by the co-pilot or something could happen?

Speaker 22 Megan, that airliner was gliding like a set of car keys at that point. That's exactly when you'd want to do it.

Speaker 22 It was enough time where they, like Captain Steve said, just got airborne and immediately the engine shut off and it's going to settle right back down.

Speaker 22 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.

Speaker 22 God bless the first officer for, whoa, what are you doing? Remember, Megan, in the West, we got rid of the Imperial Imperial captain years ago.

Speaker 22 Like, you can't question the captain and they're a god on the flight deck. We don't do that in the West.

Speaker 22 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 is like, what are you doing?

Speaker 22 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.

Speaker 22 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.

Speaker 18 It's just, you know, I don't think he's going to be in the same place you and I are.

Speaker 20 And it's interesting because some people online are like, well, he

Speaker 22 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.

Speaker 20 So clearly.

Speaker 18 And he knew there'd be a black box recorder.

Speaker 22 He knew it was being recorded, correct?

Speaker 18 Go ahead, Steve.

Speaker 23 And Megan, you're asking why, with a rational rational mind 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 but i agree that if that that's the 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.

Speaker 23 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.

Speaker 18 It doesn't. I'll give you a last word, Patrick.
Go ahead.

Speaker 24 So why glide onto the roof of the building? Why not simply push the nose down and crash into the ground at that point?

Speaker 24 Why the glide?

Speaker 24 I'm not saying it didn't happen that way, but it doesn't make a whole lot of sense. And meanwhile, here,

Speaker 24 I want to point out, I think where the whole conversation is veering in a little bit of a sensationalist direction.

Speaker 24 And I don't want people to have this idea that when you get onto a commercial flight, you should start psychoanalyzing your pilots

Speaker 18 in the hierarchy.

Speaker 18 You should.

Speaker 24 The idea that your pilot is going to crash the plane is like so out there among the possibilities and things you should be

Speaker 24 thinking about.

Speaker 20 Hey, Megan,

Speaker 22 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.

Speaker 22 But this guy was in Philly, and he went through TSA. Do you remember when they were stealing tweezers and fingernail clippers?

Speaker 22 Well, they took his fingernail clippers and he looked at the TSA agent or whatever and said, go ahead and take that. I have these.
And he held his hands up.

Speaker 22 He's like, I don't need my nail clippers to take the plane down. I have these.
Guess what happened?

Speaker 18 They threw that guy in jail and it took the union like a couple days to get him out and fight like two or three years to get uh his job back so he said i have these i don't need a fingernail clipper so i know i said that patrick was gonna have the last word but i i it no because he raised some interesting points there no no no because he raised some interesting points like i i'd love to hear you respond captain steve on why wouldn't he just put it in a nosedive and take it down that that's actually a good question Well, again, we're trying to make rational sense out of something that's completely irrational.

Speaker 23 Maybe he's fantasized about turning the fuel control switches to cutoff. They were placed one second apart from each other, which is consistent with the way we turn them on and turn them off.

Speaker 23 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.

Speaker 23 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.

Speaker 23 If I was the first officer, I would absolutely be in a panic. about it.

Speaker 23 You're transitioning from flying out normally to what just happened.

Speaker 23 the the the fact that the first officer had the presence of mind to reach down and put them back to the running position is semi-incredible in my mind uh good on him for doing that he almost almost saved the day but not quite 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 the cockpit, captain's beat, and trying to break down the door.

Speaker 22 He put the autopilot in a gentle descent and flew into the Alps.

Speaker 22 So why didn't i'll answer a question patrick's question with a question why didn't the that guy just roll the plane inverted and fly it 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 a mountain so again you can't question crazy can i can ask this one other question what about the survivor

Speaker 18 do you think he could be important you know like there's a survivor

Speaker 18 right

Speaker 20 unless

Speaker 23 He was seated right in front of the wing spar, which is the heaviest, strongest part of the airplane. It's a steel girder, basically right behind where he was.

Speaker 23 And that probably took most of the impact.

Speaker 23 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 deployment.

Speaker 23 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.

Speaker 23 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 you

Speaker 18 having observed a pilot in in his sort of mental state are very slim i think go ahead whiz

Speaker 22 well if if he was in our fighter squadron his call sign would be highlander you have gallos humor so do we so you got to cut that guy's head off to kill him clearly so his new call sign's highlander it's true when you're in a dangerous business you're actually in one i just report on many.

Speaker 18 And so you have to go to that. Otherwise, you're just, you're crying every day.
Guys, thank you.

Speaker 18 Patrick, we gave you a hard time, but you kept the discussion interesting with your different friends. That's my job.
Okay.

Speaker 18 Thanks to all of you. Good job, Patrick.
Thank you, Megan.

Speaker 18 All the best. Wow.
What a story. My God.
It's 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.

Speaker 18 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.

Speaker 18 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.

Speaker 18 So maybe this is something that we can actually, you know, 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,

Speaker 18 God rest those souls. All right, we'll be right back with our friends from the fifth column.

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Speaker 18 Joining 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.

Speaker 18 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.

Speaker 18 Okay, and you can subscribe there too. Guys, great to see you.
It's a pleasure.

Speaker 18 I want to start with,

Speaker 18 do we have the Mark Halperin site, you guys, my team? Okay. Oh, all right.
See, I'm in front of me. So I went on with my pal, Mark Halperin, on his Next Up show this morning.

Speaker 18 We taped it before I taped my show. We're doing this live.
And

Speaker 18 Halperin is everywhere. He does that show and he does Two-Way and he's like, you know, whatever.

Speaker 18 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 I want to tell you what happened.

Speaker 18 On Tuway, he said the following.

Speaker 18 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.

Speaker 18 Everyone 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.

Speaker 18 Then he asks the following questions to Dan Turantine 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.

Speaker 18 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.

Speaker 18 He's just asking these questions. It's fine.
These guys don't know. I think I know the answers to a lot of these, and I answered them on Halperin's show.

Speaker 18 So if you want to hear my answers, you can tune in to Next Up.

Speaker 18 Not that I'm some expert on Epstein. I've just been neck deep.
in all these reports over the past couple of weeks for obvious reasons.

Speaker 18 But I can tell, I don't know why we're afraid to say it's the Wall Street Journal.

Speaker 18 Maybe that will turn out to be untrue, but I've been told by multiple sources that the journal is working on a piece on Trump and Epstein. And, guys, there's no question in my mind that

Speaker 18 there's going to be a lot there because they knew each other for 15 years. They were actually close friends for 15 years prior to Epstein's troubles.

Speaker 18 And I'm sure they did spend a lot of time together. But what does that tell us? He spent a lot of time with a lot of luminaries, and they weren't all pedophiles, right?

Speaker 18 It's like a lot of them, some of them were women. It was the Dalai Lama was over at Epstein's house.

Speaker 18 Michael Wolfe just told Vicki Ward that a couple of days ago, and we could go on. So, what it's not,

Speaker 18 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.

Speaker 18 The question is: Are you going to produce evidence that Trump took advantage of an underaged girl? Now, if they're there, then we're talking a scandal.

Speaker 18 But honestly, if somebody's got that proof, we would have seen it by now, would we not?

Speaker 20 Yeah.

Speaker 20 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.

Speaker 20 The possibility that this information, this damning, incriminating information that would have devastated Donald Trump's future prospects as a politician, or perhaps even brought him under criminal suspicion, the likelihood that that would not have already come out years ago is unbelievably low.

Speaker 20 I 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.

Speaker 20 We would accused of rape. So that doesn't seem to be what's hidden here or obscured anyways.

Speaker 18 Eugene Carroll accused him of rape, which was a completely bullshit allegation.

Speaker 18 I don't believe one word that Eugene 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.

Speaker 18 So it's like the fact that Trump might have had a handsy

Speaker 18 40s and 50s or even earlier than that, I don't know, is 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?

Speaker 20 I think we would know that.

Speaker 20 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.

Speaker 18 Wait, is that a real term or are you just saying that? Because I love that.

Speaker 20 No, no, that was the term. That was the term among both the journal and the New York Times reporting about the

Speaker 18 Joe Biden.

Speaker 18 That's awesome.

Speaker 20 Talked about on this show.

Speaker 20 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?

Speaker 20 But so anyways, it's wall street journal does good reporting uh period but right now it the i think the fact of the matter uh 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 you're handling this or i don't like how your administration is handling this and 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 like been to Epstein's island and/

Speaker 20 had interactions with him, scientists and people like that.

Speaker 20 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, okay, I'll stop talking about it.

Speaker 20 People are still talking about it on the right.

Speaker 18 Well, Charlie is too.

Speaker 18 He had that one day of like, I'm not doing it.

Speaker 20 And then the next two days, his shows have been heavily on Charlie, which is not something that I say every single day.

Speaker 20 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.

Speaker 18 He said he's lost bad people who are weaklings.

Speaker 20 Weaklings and that they're working for the fake news and that this is all like a fake news plot or a liberal democratic plot that you fell for. It's a hoax and et cetera.

Speaker 20 It's going to be really interesting against that backdrop to see what. those people do.
You have just been insulted by the president.

Speaker 20 I don't know, Megan, if you know this, but sometimes Donald Trump insults people in the media.

Speaker 18 It's a day ending in why.

Speaker 20 So

Speaker 18 I will say for the record, my advice to all those people who are on the right is

Speaker 18 just keep doing your thing. Like

Speaker 18 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 don't forget the fake news.

Speaker 18 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. You are disliked more than you're liked.

Speaker 18 And that's just the way it goes if you're doing your job right.

Speaker 20 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.

Speaker 20 Like everything

Speaker 20 about this has gone badly for the administration. The messaging around it has been absolutely terrible.

Speaker 20 Someone should absolutely lose their job about over it.

Speaker 20 Whether 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.

Speaker 20 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?

Speaker 20 Who is responsible for actually talking to the public?

Speaker 18 When I think about like, oh, I don't know what they have. Is it a picture of Trump with like a young girl?

Speaker 18 Like it's not going to be with some, you know, really young girl, but let's say like a 17-year-old girl. Um,

Speaker 18 if that had come out, if they have that and that comes out

Speaker 18 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.

Speaker 18 He was a man about town when he was younger. And

Speaker 18 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.

Speaker 18 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?

Speaker 18 And then if they drop this story with that kind of thing now,

Speaker 18 it could potentially hurt him because now even his own supporters have been insulted for actually caring about child issues, including potentially sexual abuse.

Speaker 18 And then you see that and you think, oh, how much is there in this lane? And why does that explain? I'll give you the last thought on that.

Speaker 18 Whoever wants to take it in the 30 seconds we have before a break.

Speaker 20 Just to say 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.

Speaker 20 Can he do that with his base

Speaker 20 of people who are independent in media? We are going to find out.

Speaker 18 Yeah, we're in the process of finding out. Okay, be right back with the fifth column.
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Speaker 18 Back with me now, two of the three, Camille Foster and Matt Welsh of the fifth column. I mean, Moynahan's not here, so I think we can we can just say that the two best, the best two I've made.

Speaker 20 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 he'll be finishing it.

Speaker 18 You never know. He's a bomb, Vivant.
I mean, who knows where he's been? Yes. My team did send me this just for what it's worth.
Okay. Michael Wolf, like,

Speaker 18 he, he's like, to me, he's like a Gabe Sherman type, where like 50% of what he writes is explosive and spot on and jaw-dropping, and the other fifth is totally made up. That's my own impression.

Speaker 18 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.

Speaker 18 Trump, anyway, he dropped a book not long ago called Too Famous, like T-O-O, and he wrote this in the book.

Speaker 18 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.

Speaker 18 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.

Speaker 18 Now,

Speaker 18 that's Michael Wolf. Yeah.
So I have no idea whether any of that is true, but again,

Speaker 18 you know, this has been out there. And if this is now somebody's going to produce this photo, my first question will be, where'd you get it? What other photos of Jeffrey Epstein's do you have?

Speaker 18 And why haven't they been made public before now?

Speaker 18 That would be the kind of thing Trump wouldn't want hitting, but that doesn't prove he molested anybody.

Speaker 18 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

Speaker 18 there's nothing. Jeffrey Epstein had nothing on Donald Trump.
I asked him.

Speaker 18 I specifically asked Epstein whether he had anything on Trump. And the answer was no.
So that lawyer also

Speaker 20 doesn't know Donald Trump, correct?

Speaker 18 yes.

Speaker 18 But it's one thing to show like the president that, you know, the current president, but then, you know, he owned a beauty pageant and he was just like a rich guy sort of frolicking about with young girls.

Speaker 18 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.

Speaker 18 And just like, you know, these are people letting off some steam, having fun, not thinking he's going to be the future president. I can see why Trump would be like, yeah, that's not ideal.

Speaker 18 I'm not going to be putting that out, or I don't want to invite somebody to put that out.

Speaker 18 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 Wolfe's point, not seized.

Speaker 18 So this is some private individual. Could it be Michael Wolfe? I have no idea.
Who's been holding on to it for however long?

Speaker 18 Michael Wolfe dropped tapes of Epstein right before the presidential election.

Speaker 18 They just didn't get any attention because we were focused on saving the world and he couldn't stop Trump's Trump's reelection with his last 11th hour hit piece on Trump and it had to do with Epstein.

Speaker 18 In any event, that's where things stand. Any thoughts on that, on the picture, on the details?

Speaker 20 Wolf, it's a 50-50. It's a 75-25.
I'm not sure in what direction I would go. Probably 25-75

Speaker 20 with his veracity. He's just...

Speaker 20 been historically kind of loose and slompy, but he also does have access. So it's always buyer beware.

Speaker 20 I would caution that if there is a photo, anything like what you describe, that's trouble for Trump. There's such a difference between visuals and non-visuals.

Speaker 20 And this is going to sound like a strange comparison, but I'm going to make it anyways with the Abu Ghraib photos, right? The prison that the U.S.

Speaker 20 military ran in Iraq and abused prisoners, and it was bad. When those first photos came out, It was awful.
America had a reckoning, a long conversation.

Speaker 20 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.

Speaker 20 Partly because, and their stated 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.

Speaker 20 And it absolutely cut into trust for the government and the military and a bunch of other things besides. It makes things uncomfortable.
So it's just the visuals of seeing this.

Speaker 20 There can be totally documented center.

Speaker 18 How would you recommend he handle it, Matt? Like at this point, if

Speaker 18 he were taking your advice on what to do right now, what would it be?

Speaker 20 Look, my advice is not for the health of the political prospects of any civic politician. My advice is I want to see everything

Speaker 20 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.

Speaker 20 I want to see all those photos. I want to see the rest of the Albuquerque photos too, not that I relish looking at them.
I want the maximum transparency.

Speaker 20 And let's just remember that, again, regardless of what one thinks about,

Speaker 20 you know, the Epstein files being a skeleton key towards everything. And I don't at all think that.

Speaker 20 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.

Speaker 20 We should be in favor of transparency.

Speaker 20 And 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.

Speaker 20 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.

Speaker 20 And we're going to do this also in light of Jelene Maxwell has an open appeals process going and we don't want to jeopardize that. That's not what she did.

Speaker 20 She invited influencers to the White House and gave them Trapper Keeper photo.

Speaker 18 Yep. The The

Speaker 20 fan service, not transparency. And then when those fans and they read phase one, they were phase one.

Speaker 18 Like there were more phases. They did.

Speaker 20 They did.

Speaker 20 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 anyway.

Speaker 20 But the first thing is do it. The first thing is perhaps a disagreement with you, Matt.

Speaker 20 I love transparency. Secrecy is for losers.

Speaker 18 This is what makes you guys the top two. Just FYI.
This is what makes you the top two. Keep going.
Thank you.

Speaker 20 Thank you. The secrecy is for losers, et cetera, et cetera.
That said,

Speaker 20 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.

Speaker 20 And 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.

Speaker 20 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.

Speaker 20 Now, that's a bit of a nuanced point. It just kind of brings two things into tension.

Speaker 20 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?

Speaker 20 It would be so easy to do, especially when you have things like this out. You would expect it to spread like wildfire.

Speaker 20 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.

Speaker 18 So Adam Schiff is in his basement right now creating it. He's personally stitching it together.

Speaker 18 I'm sure it's going to hit soon.

Speaker 20 I don't know if he has the technical prowess, but I believe he has the motive for sure.

Speaker 18 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, he represented Trump, I think, and maybe was it the first impeachment trial?

Speaker 18 Earlier, I guess I should say. He said,

Speaker 18 second impeachment trial. 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.

Speaker 18 I can say authoritatively, unequivocally, and definitively that he had no information to hurt President Trump. I specifically asked him,

Speaker 18 exclamation point.

Speaker 18 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 compromat on Trump. And if there's a picture, okay, fine.
It'll keep tongues wagging.

Speaker 18 But look, the reason why I really think,

Speaker 18 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.

Speaker 18 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.

Speaker 18 Now, suddenly, they're 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.

Speaker 18 To his credit, Scarborough asked him something along these lines. Look what happened.

Speaker 21 You could have gotten that from 21 to 25 when Democrats controlled the DOJ.

Speaker 21 It was a crisis then. It's a crisis now.

Speaker 21 Why didn't Democrats call for it from 21 to 25?

Speaker 19 So, I mean, you'd have to go back and look specifically at particular prosecutorial decisions

Speaker 19 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

Speaker 19 Epstein, who was his very close friend, and there's all kinds of pictures of them.

Speaker 18 So he has no answer. Donald Trump did not lead the crusade.
Trump, sir, gets definitely, we're into the Epstein thing. Trump himself has always been very measured.
Yeah, family. I'm Don Jr.

Speaker 18 Yes, I mean, that's true. But how about Jamie Raskin? I don't know.
There may have been issues going on, but Trump. But Trump, Trump, Trump, Trump, Trump, Trump.

Speaker 20 Here's why Trump screwed up.

Speaker 18 But that's Trump's problem now is because forget Jamie Raskin. No one gives a shit what he's thinking or doing.

Speaker 18 But, you know, now suddenly you're going to have the New York Times like, oh, well, it's a chance to hurt him. Great.

Speaker 18 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.

Speaker 18 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.

Speaker 20 And I mean, without go ahead, Matt. Just that, you know, in general, always, those legacy media institutions have so much less oomph and power and influence than they used to.

Speaker 20 So that's always worth keeping in mind.

Speaker 20 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.

Speaker 20 And 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.

Speaker 20 Like, why did these decisions get made and what were the contours of it or whatever? That there might need to be those.

Speaker 18 Why did Alex Acosta cut such a sweetheart deal?

Speaker 18 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.

Speaker 18 That 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.

Speaker 18 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.

Speaker 18 She was like, I have absolutely no doubt about my reporting. I stand by it 100%.
The person was in the room with Acosta and heard him say it.

Speaker 18 And I have never gone back even once Antilla on my reporting. So she's, you know, she stands by her reasons on why Acosta did what he did.
And you're right.

Speaker 18 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.

Speaker 18 Now, they might in 2026, but right now they don't. So they can't have hearings.

Speaker 18 I don't think we will have hearings, but if we were going to, we definitely have to keep 2007, 2008 in the mix.

Speaker 18 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?

Speaker 18 Because Alex Acosta said Maine Justice vetted everything and approved everything I did. And we know what that means.

Speaker 18 Now later, he told the Office of Professional Responsibility, reportedly, we've never seen the actual Q ⁇ A, that

Speaker 18 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.

Speaker 18 This is not an important thing. Actually, before I get to this, but this is my second, this is my, after the plane crash, this is my second favorite story.

Speaker 18 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.
I don't think there's any question.

Speaker 18 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, right?

Speaker 18 Sunday sunday night what 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

Speaker 18 somebody when elon and trump were fighting on twitter and we were all ref refreshing our ex

Speaker 18 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

Speaker 18 no one cares she did the opposite um but i want to say this, as we're talking about all this, today National Review had the headline that I'll read it to you.

Speaker 18 Exclusive, Trump administration to cut off federal funding to hospitals that provide gender transition services to minors. Yes, right on.

Speaker 18 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.

Speaker 18 That's $9 billion we're going to to have in the pocket that we didn't.

Speaker 18 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.

Speaker 18 In June, thanks 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.

Speaker 18 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.

Speaker 18 It doesn't sound like the United States.

Speaker 18 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, really devastating to working-class communities and middle-class communities too across the country.

Speaker 18 So he's just racked up a ton of wins, a ton of wins, and things for which he should be celebrated.

Speaker 18 So I understand Trump's frustration at having to talk about this creton 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 on the corner uh 90

Speaker 20 is a you might be slipping out of the number number one position yeah whatever this is i've been on the show before i know where i belong um and it ain't number one but uh nine billion dollars operates operates the federal government for one half of a day um it is uh much less than the 500 billion dollar rescissions package that ran paul was looking for obviously much less than the initial claims of doge um i like nine billion it's better than zero um but it's only nine billion better than zero and uh and i'm glad for the pbs npr thing which you alluded to and uh and some other things besides but uh i want more government cutting period and i i would cosign and just say

Speaker 20 trimming politically politically divisive things that the federal government is funding. I mean, probably appropriate.

Speaker 20 The federal government shouldn't be throwing tons and tons of money at things that most Americans aren't particularly interested in. That doesn't make a lot of sense.

Speaker 20 But we can talk about it.

Speaker 18 Okay.

Speaker 18 No, I want to talk about what happened at the Cold Play concert. I'm sorry, but it's everywhere.
It's all anybody's talking about. And we just got some news on it.

Speaker 18 So in an extraordinary chain of events, there was a Cold Play concert. And where was the Cold Play concert?

Speaker 18 I was at Gillette Stadium, home to the NFL's New England Patriots in Foxborough, Massachusetts. And here is what happened.

Speaker 18 They had like the kiss cam kind of thing that goes around, and I guess we should play it. Do we have the video?

Speaker 18 That zeroed in on this one couple. And 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.

Speaker 20 Oh, look at these two.

Speaker 20 All right, come on. You're okay.
Oh, what?

Speaker 20 Either they're having an affair or they're just very shy.

Speaker 18 At 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.

Speaker 18 These are two obvious lovers or in some sort of romantic relationship.

Speaker 18 It's not how I hold the head of our HR.

Speaker 18 Non-existent. We don't have that person.
But anyway, it turns out the man is

Speaker 18 hold on his name is he's an astronomer he's a ceo of a company called astronomer

Speaker 18 yeah andy byron i think is his name thank you thank you andy byron and

Speaker 18 his hr director who it 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 i just it's spread out across my packet stamp 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

Speaker 18 so much paper and so little time okay his name yeah is uh andy byron by 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.

Speaker 18 The problem here is that Andy Byron is married to someone other than Kristen Cabot,

Speaker 18 who again, the irony of her being head of HR.

Speaker 18 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.

Speaker 18 Okay.

Speaker 18 That

Speaker 18 Byron and his wife, both 50, live in Northborough, which I think is by Foxborough, Massachusetts. And per Mrs.

Speaker 18 SpaceX 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.

Speaker 18 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.

Speaker 18 But 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.

Speaker 18 And as soon as that cam went on them and they saw their image up on the thing, it was the worst cover-up ever.

Speaker 18 She turned her back to the camera and he just like squat, he looked totally humiliated and embarrassed. It's like, hello, everybody knows to just act like you didn't do anything wrong.

Speaker 18 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.

Speaker 20 He did so many things wrong. I 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.

Speaker 18 I'm Oh, happy birthday.

Speaker 20 Great. But if I did it, to borrow the phrase from O.J.

Speaker 20 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 Cold Play concert.

Speaker 20 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.

Speaker 20 I mean, seriously, you just throw the fans under the bus who paid their hard-earned money for these tickets. Maybe probably for a very expensive box.
Just being an accelerationist, Camille.

Speaker 20 Just trying to get them faster to where they were. Maybe going all along.

Speaker 18 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.

Speaker 18 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.
As much as we all trust Mrs.

Speaker 18 SpaceX and her reporting, we really don't have this confirmed, but it's everywhere. It's everywhere.

Speaker 18 And honestly, it's, it's just, it's alarming because every woman sees that and has like a shudder go down her spine that like Your marriage could go up in an instant based on really bad judgment.

Speaker 18 People do this, they have affairs, you know, marriages fall apart. Normally, not in such a public way

Speaker 18 where you've got Chris Martin involved. Here, we've got the race clip now.
Let's watch it.

Speaker 20 Yeah, oh, look at this.

Speaker 20 All right, come on, you're okay.

Speaker 20 Either they're having an affair or they're just very shy.

Speaker 20 Oh, she's talking to her friend. That's her friend.

Speaker 18 She whips her back to the camera. Yeah.
And he actually, he actually

Speaker 18 bends down to get out of it, like squatting to get out of

Speaker 18 the sight.

Speaker 18 Honestly, they should have listened to me. Look, he's really hugging her.
It's tight. Yeah, you just lean in.

Speaker 20 You have to lean in at that point. Right?

Speaker 18 Like, you really do. You got to 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 that.

Speaker 18 I don't know. I'm not sure what you do, but I don't think this is it.

Speaker 20 It is a pity Moynihan isn't here because he would have great advice. He just wouldn't.

Speaker 20 He wouldn't be turning and shying away. I think

Speaker 20 he has a certain transparency in the way he lives his life. Megan, I'm just alarmed a little bit by the level of specificity in your suggestions for how to avoid

Speaker 20 with your side piece.

Speaker 18 You know what? It's because I'm an actress now. I don't know if you caught my premiere in With Love, Megan,

Speaker 18 my Megan Markle parody, but I'm an actress.

Speaker 20 I did see.

Speaker 18 Yeah. And let me explain to you how it works in the improv world since you clearly don't know.

Speaker 18 It's just all 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.

Speaker 18 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. Try to blow it up, Welsh.
Okay.

Speaker 20 Yeah. It's great advice.

Speaker 18 Yeah. Yeah.
This is, this is the problem. When 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.

Speaker 18 I'm an astronaut. We should probably connect.
He should give me the exclusive.

Speaker 20 Are you auditioning for something here?

Speaker 18 Team's very loving. Definitely not.
I feel about my spouse the way Camille feels about his.

Speaker 18 Okay.

Speaker 18 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 taking a Dane.
I'm taking a different route.

Speaker 18 Scotty

Speaker 18 Scheffler.

Speaker 18 You know me in the sports. Do I have it wrong? The golf? Scheffler, the golf champion.

Speaker 20 I'm not a golf guy. I don't know.

Speaker 18 Look at this. I got nothing here.

Speaker 18 I'm talking to like intellectuals.

Speaker 18 And Moynihan would not help here either.

Speaker 20 No, he doesn't know golf either. But basketball, football, I'm your guy.
Yeah.

Speaker 18 Okay. All right.
Well, golf is a sport too. And it is.
This guy, Scotty Scheffler, is very popular and very successful in his accomplishments.

Speaker 18 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.

Speaker 18 He's 29, three-time major champion, has won the Masters twice and the PGA championship this year.

Speaker 18 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.

Speaker 18 Like, I don't think you can get any more accomplished in the world of golf. And he just gave a press conference.

Speaker 18 I saw this on X, and I, it's rare that I sit and I watch like the whole four-minute four-minute clip of somebody I don't know at all. I

Speaker 18 was fascinated by what he said. I'm going to play you part of it and you'll see why I was.

Speaker 26 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,

Speaker 26 okay, now what are we going to eat for dinner? You know, life goes on. I love the challenge.
I love being able to play this game for a living.

Speaker 26 It's one of the greatest joys of my life, but does it fill the deepest wants and desires of my heart? Absolutely not. That's why I talk about families being my priority because it really is.

Speaker 26 I'm blessed to be able to come out here and play golf.

Speaker 26 But if my golf ever started affecting my home life or it ever affected the relationship I have with my wife or with my son, that's going to be the last day that I play out here for a living.

Speaker 26 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?

Speaker 26 Because, you know, I would much rather be a great father than I would be a great golfer.

Speaker 18 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.

Speaker 18 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.

Speaker 18 He really talked about how

Speaker 18 winning's great, but it's really not that great. Like

Speaker 18 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, so I won.

Speaker 18 I can't remember which tournament, but, you know, one of them. And he's like, and everybody's like, yeah.
And you're hugging. And then that night, you know, we went out and like watched a movie.

Speaker 18 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 going to do for the next one?

Speaker 18 Like, what, what could, can you do the next one? Like, what's going to happen the next one? I could totally understand what he's saying.

Speaker 18 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 Super Bowl of law.

Speaker 18 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.

Speaker 18 It was all wins.

Speaker 18 And you'd you'd be so thrilled at having the W and you would go out and celebrate that night. And then the next day, it's just done.
It's done.

Speaker 18 But the pain of losing was so acute and would weigh on you for weeks, you know, like, oh, it so far outweighed the joy of winning.

Speaker 18 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.

Speaker 20 Yeah. I mean, and you mentioned his age.
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.

Speaker 20 I mean, I think we are

Speaker 20 people of privilege. We live, you know, pretty, pretty, pretty extraordinary lives in many respects.

Speaker 20 We get to talk to really prominent people in all kinds of public contexts, occasionally come in for controversy, but we've been able to do a lot of stuff.

Speaker 20 Before I had kids, my wife and I visited every continent, including Antarctica and then all kinds of cool crap.

Speaker 20 But 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 like wake up and try to be a great husband and try to be a great father.

Speaker 20 And that doesn't mean I don't care about other things, but I've put those things into the right context.

Speaker 20 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.

Speaker 20 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. And I hated it for years.
I was like, I want to win.

Speaker 20 But I have come around to completely understanding it. Like it is, it is those quiet moments.

Speaker 20 The best moments of my life are those quiet moments where, or not so quiet moments, where everyone is in the bed together for 15 or 20 minutes.

Speaker 20 And to be able to recognize it in that moment is an extraordinary privilege. And we don't, we don't do it enough.
We're consumed with politics.

Speaker 20 We're consumed with career advancement or the next thing that we want to do.

Speaker 20 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?

Speaker 20 What 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.

Speaker 20 Eventually the void, the void is screaming out for all of us.

Speaker 20 But we have this moment to be present, to be grateful.

Speaker 18 And I love that i mean it's such a great sentiment i i don't really watch golf but i'm an instant fan of his yeah same because 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 going to get them you've already won this is this is daily winning the the 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.

Speaker 18 Now, in my case, in the ratings or whatever God you're chasing, once you know what really matters, right? It's like that fulfillment is up here.

Speaker 18 Maybe you can bump up a degree or two, but I don't know.

Speaker 18 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.

Speaker 20 First of all, I need to take credit. I was badgering Camille Foster to have kids for a very long time.
It's actually

Speaker 20 broadened a list of the film podcasts. It's true.
I love how kids don't have any idea what you do for a living. Not what you do, Megan.

Speaker 20 In particular, my 17-year-old knows exactly what you do for a living. I love her.
Dad, you aren't Megan Kelly. I've seen it on TikTok.

Speaker 18 Like, that's why I put up up with this abuse.

Speaker 20 Basically, but there was an interesting interview.

Speaker 20 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.

Speaker 20 But there was an interview with Francisco Lindor, the great Mets shortstop, that was kind of similar.

Speaker 20 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.

Speaker 20 And he's like, you kind of gave an Alan Iverson almost, you know, like motivation?

Speaker 20 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.

Speaker 20 But to do the grind every single day to pursue a consistent level of excellence to be the best at what you do,

Speaker 20 that takes a lot of discipline

Speaker 20 and it takes work ethic and kind of long-term thinking.

Speaker 20 And that way you're much more at peace, actually, about whether you win and where you lose. Did you put in your best effort? Great.

Speaker 20 And then hopefully if you have some kid lits around who don't even know that you play baseball or host a podcast or do whatever, it's incredibly rewarding. You feel like you've done your best.

Speaker 20 And if you're fortunate enough, like all of us are in this conversation, to know that that work, that attempt to strive for a consistent excellence and the work ethic that goes into it.

Speaker 20 can contribute to you be able to provide some stability and

Speaker 20 comfort for your kids to pursue the things that they want to do. It It is so satisfying.
It's as satisfying as like growing a garden and eating your food.

Speaker 20 Like, oh man, there's just something elemental about that. And it's not necessarily chasing immediate spike of highs.

Speaker 20 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.

Speaker 18 Yeah.

Speaker 18 It's a good reminder, you know, not to get too drawn into, it could be anything in your life, even for like my work, my, my stay-at-home moms who watch or listen to the show.

Speaker 18 You're on social media, you make a post, you check it over and over to see how many likes you've gotten. The same false God, you know, as like

Speaker 18 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 the thing. It's exactly the same thing.

Speaker 18 You know, we all get sucked into it. And it's a, what a great gift he gave us.

Speaker 18 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, they're all false.

Speaker 18 They're not going to do the thing for you that you're looking for. Really, book inside your living room.
That's where the answer is. Guys, stand by.
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Speaker 18 We just had the one-year anniversary, one-year mark since Butler, Pennsylvania, which was, you know, just a sea change moment in American politics in a way.

Speaker 18 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 eh about him after that moment, didn't feel that way.

Speaker 18 Now, if you were a member of the press and a normal person, you could at least begrudgingly say, wow, he really handled that like a champ, you know, gosh.

Speaker 18 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 Comperator and his widow.

Speaker 18 They've never explained that piece of their bizarre theory nor apologized to her for saying such a thing.

Speaker 18 And if you were a member of the press, you might, who is a lunatic, have made it all about you,

Speaker 18 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.

Speaker 18 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.

Speaker 18 She was there with the president on that day. So if you're a real loon, here's where you go with it.
This is CBS's Seth McFarlane, who appeared on Chuck Todd's cast.

Speaker 18 Sorry, sorry, Scott, Scott McFarlane. Seth is a different guy.
Scott McFarlane, who appeared on the Chuck Todd cast,

Speaker 18 which has the same number of viewers as people who are in this screen right here. And

Speaker 18 here's what he said about Butler.

Speaker 27 For those of us who were there, it wasn't an immediate or even a long-term reflection reflection on Secret Service. For those of us there, it was such a horror because you saw

Speaker 13 an emerging America.

Speaker 27 And it wasn't the shooting, Chuck. This was, I got diagnosed with PTSD within 48 hours.

Speaker 18 I got put on trauma leave, not because, I think, of the shooting, but because you could, you saw it in the eyes, the reaction of the people.

Speaker 27 They were coming for us.

Speaker 1 If he didn't jump up with his fist, they were going to come kill him.

Speaker 13 I know.

Speaker 27 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.

Speaker 27 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.

Speaker 20 And they're going to beat us with their hands.

Speaker 27 I mean, they were going to kill us. And respectfully, the Secret Service had bigger issues in protecting us.

Speaker 27 When he jumped up triumphantly, it saved us.

Speaker 27 But that's the thing. I can't eliminate from my mind's eye the look in their faces.

Speaker 27 That's what America is right now. It's not rational.
It's an irrational thought to think the media shot somebody from atop a building. But the lack of rationality is what connects January 6th to this.

Speaker 18 Oh, gosh.

Speaker 20 What?

Speaker 15 Wow.

Speaker 18 He's the CBS's J6 reporter, by the way. Do you believe that lunacy?

Speaker 20 I can't. I'm just trying to, I'm out here with like, with diagrams against bulletin board, just trying to,

Speaker 18 well, what the

Speaker 20 theory exactly

Speaker 18 here. Yeah, that the mob was going to kill them, that was going to kill the media, the totally peaceful mob that didn't even stampede out of the joint before Trump jumped up that was there.

Speaker 18 You read Selena's book, lovingly, happily celebrating him, and then to their enormous credit, stayed calm calm even after the bullets were flying.

Speaker 18 And then, yes, when Trump stood up and heroically did that, felt inspired. But who is ever talking about the mob turning on the media? This is the first I've heard anything like that.

Speaker 18 And it's totally inconsistent with the actual tone and tenor of MAGA rallies.

Speaker 18 That guy, I'm just going to say it, is fucking making that up the same way AOC wants us to believe she was almost raped on J6 when she wasn't even there.

Speaker 20 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

Speaker 20 the reality in front of him. I mean, he's mad that people responded.
I mean, Trump stood up there. I didn't vote for Trump, as we know.

Speaker 20 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,

Speaker 20 that's scary, the way he acted there or that response there. No, it was awesome.
He got up. The shooting was horrifying.

Speaker 20 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 into the Column podcast.

Speaker 20 America has a problem with political violence. That assassination attempt was very much part of it.
Killed a man.

Speaker 20 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.

Speaker 20 If Trump would have died that day, I shudder to think what would have happened in america

Speaker 20 we really we all dodged a bullet corey compator sadly did not um but the country dodged a bullet and 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

Speaker 20 but it's not what the what are you doing that's not the story from that day yeah

Speaker 20 and he didn't he didn't even seem to get there yeah he didn't

Speaker 20 to that conclusion like the the react grappling with the reality and honestly on the fifth column there are many things that we talk talked about regularly.

Speaker 20 The surging, not the surging, but the persistent growing problem of political violence that we've had in this country,

Speaker 20 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.

Speaker 20 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.

Speaker 20 We 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.

Speaker 20 And doing something about it means sober, honest,

Speaker 20 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.

Speaker 20 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 like 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 i'd love to see us have a serious bipartisan investigation and inquiry into what happened during the summer of 2020 into what happened with covet 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.

Speaker 20 And quite frankly, you just saw an example of a journalist who is similarly informed

Speaker 20 about the nature of things. And I think actually

Speaker 18 lifting up the veil. This is what I think of Trump supporters.

Speaker 18 They're deranged, googly-eyed, madmen who want to kill members 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.

Speaker 18 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, ongoing, on Trump.
on anything involving Trump supporters.

Speaker 18 And 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.

Speaker 18 That guy should actually be fired. He should be fired.
Obviously, he's not well.

Speaker 20 Yeah.

Speaker 20 That is not the way. There's a new book out

Speaker 20 about

Speaker 20 the COVID disastrous response. And one of the, and the others are not in front of you, is two Princeton sociologists, actually, who describe themselves as leftist center.

Speaker 20 And it's an absolutely harsh indictment on what we're supposed to be the truth-seeking institutions in this country, in science,

Speaker 20 in government, and in the media, in academia.

Speaker 20 And everyone really, really failed during COVID. And as a result,

Speaker 20 really like helped erode and shred trust and

Speaker 20 impinge on civil liberties and such like. We see this kind of example here.

Speaker 20 The journalism industry, as it has been collapsing through things that may or may not be related to this um has been covering itself in this type of kind of openly partisan what's the worst thing he said there besides all the words um it's that me and all the other reporters were text messaging each other with the same kind of sentiment then you're all crazy i hope that's not true honestly um because that and show tag they're like yes yes This is like the main face of NBC's political coverage for many years.

Speaker 18 Like, yes, right on. Yes.
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?

Speaker 18 No, not a thought because he was like right on. By the way, we don't have time for it, but Francis Collins, he was on late night on Colbert just last night.
Maybe we do have time.

Speaker 18 Let's play it really quickly. We're going to play it.
Stop 35.

Speaker 29 Stephen, we have other deficits that politics aren't going to solve. Maybe they're making it worse.

Speaker 20 There's a truth deficit.

Speaker 29 We're in a place now. Yeah, where

Speaker 29 seems to be no real penalty for saying something that's demonstrably false. It just seems

Speaker 20 irony. Oh, yeah,

Speaker 29 we have a trust step, is it?

Speaker 29 Where because people don't know if they can be sure somebody's telling the truth, why should I trust that person?

Speaker 29 So we stop trusting each other most of the time, and that's dangerous also for our future.

Speaker 18 Oh, geez. Wow.

Speaker 18 No introspection.

Speaker 18 Francis Collins, you guys, you have to stay for two more minutes, and we just have to talk about that, but don't go away. I'm Megan Kelly, host of the Megan Kelly Show on Sirius XM.

Speaker 18 It's your home for open, honest, and provocative conversations with the most interesting and important political, legal, and cultural figures today.

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Subscribe now, get your first three months for free.

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Offer details apply.

Speaker 18 Okay, guys, so Francis Collins, who ran the NIH and the COVID response above Fauci, says we're at a truth deficit, and this is really unfortunate and lamentable.

Speaker 18 This is the man who decided to try to ruin people like Dr.

Speaker 18 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.

Speaker 18 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.

Speaker 18 And so he decided he had to be labeled fringe and ruined. This is one of our best scientists in America at Stanford.

Speaker 18 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.

Speaker 18 Thoughts on that?

Speaker 20 Let's evaluate the truth-seekingness of the following quote, the science-ness of the following quote.

Speaker 20 When the Great Barrington Declaration came out in the summer or late or early fall of 2020, that Jay Bhattachari and others signed,

Speaker 20 basically saying we won't focus protection.

Speaker 20 His words, Francis Collins' words, we need a quick and devastating takedown

Speaker 20 of these fringe epidemiologists.

Speaker 20 Okay? Quick and devastating takedown. That is

Speaker 20 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?

Speaker 20 Jay Bhattachari was censured by 100 faculty members at Stanford, censured. The amount of chilling effect.

Speaker 20 There was a great piece by John Tierney in the City Journal a couple of years ago, talking about all these different places where peer review was happening in epidemiology science that was related to COVID after this intervention by Francis Cole.

Speaker 20 It had a huge chilling effect on scientific discourse. And meanwhile, then the Biden administration did all kinds of jaw boning against social media companies to have them suppress people.

Speaker 20 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.

Speaker 20 Successful. They kicked him off for a while.

Speaker 20 Amazing mass kind of censorship jaw jawboning event. He was in the middle of this.

Speaker 20 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.

Speaker 20 He's not sorry. He's 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.

Speaker 18 No, and lets him totally get away with it, Camille. Yeah.

Speaker 20 I mean, well, he's not a journalist, so I don't, I don't expect him to do much better.

Speaker 20 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.

Speaker 20 Our public health infrastructure completely failed us.

Speaker 20 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.

Speaker 20 Like that's what they should have been doing. They failed profoundly.
We We don't even have to get into debates about vaccine efficacy or anything else.

Speaker 20 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.

Speaker 20 All of that has not only had consequences. 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.

Speaker 20 They only trust people who kind of openly agree with them.

Speaker 20 They'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.

Speaker 20 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.

Speaker 18 By the way, he didn't get a pardon. He's got to be cleared out.
He didn't get a pardon.

Speaker 18 Fauci got a pardon, but he was on all those emails too, when those two decided to stifle any discussion about whether this thing originated in a lab.

Speaker 18 Remember that explosive story where it was like, I mean, now we all know.

Speaker 18 It definitely started in a lab, but you couldn't talk about it.

Speaker 18 And 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.

Speaker 18 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 two went in there and browbeat them.

Speaker 18 And then within literally like hours, they all did a 180 saying, it's natural, it's natural, came from a pengolin or something like that.

Speaker 18 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.
That's okay. That's your decision.

Speaker 18 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.

Speaker 18 Let's now having had that discussion, let's play SOT 35 one more time.

Speaker 29 Stephen, we have other deficits that politics aren't going to solve. Maybe they're making it worse.

Speaker 20 There's a truth deficit.

Speaker 29 We're in a place now. Yeah, where

Speaker 29 seems to be no real penalty for saying something that's demonstrably false. It just seems to be.

Speaker 18 Oh my God.

Speaker 20 No, it's not.

Speaker 29 Oh, yeah.

Speaker 29 We have a trust deficit

Speaker 29 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.

Speaker 29 time and that's dangerous also for our future

Speaker 18 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.

Speaker 18 What?

Speaker 20 A counter conspiracy. He's never been held accountable.

Speaker 20 A counter conspiracy. I do

Speaker 20 using the word settle. Yeah.
I'm going to pre-settle the science in the name of science.

Speaker 18 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, could it be natural?

Speaker 18 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.

Speaker 18 He knew that we were funding gain of function research in that COVID lab. He knew that we were paying EcoHealth Alliance to partner with the bat lady to do it.

Speaker 18 And 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.

Speaker 18 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.

Speaker 18 Do you have another few minutes? Because there is one other thing I wanted to get to.

Speaker 20 Yeah, we got time for you, Megan. Okay.

Speaker 18 Okay. God bless you.
Because there's nobody else I'd rather do this with. I've been waiting all week to do this with you guys.

Speaker 18 Did you catch the piece in the New York Times entitled, Is it Time to Stop Snubbing Your Right Wing Family?

Speaker 20 Fantastic.

Speaker 18 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.

Speaker 18 Now, the man's name is David Litt, L-I-T-T.

Speaker 18 However, the term does not apply with respect to his piece, as the kids would say. That's slang, but cool.

Speaker 18 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.

Speaker 18 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.

Speaker 18 I 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.

Speaker 18 He was a huge Joe Rogan fan and went on to get his electrician's license.

Speaker 18 Can you imagine? It's basically like, what a rube, unlike me. My early memories of Matt are hazy.
I was mostly trying to impress his parents.

Speaker 18 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.

Speaker 18 We were on opposite sides of a cultural civil war. The deepest divide was vaccination.
I wasn't shocked when Matt didn't get the COVID shot, but I was baffled.

Speaker 18 Turning down a vaccine during a pandemic seemed like a rejection of science and self-preservation.

Speaker 18 It felt like he was tearing up, he was tearing up the social contract that until that point I'd imagined we shared.

Speaker 18 Had Matt been a friend rather than a family member, I probably would have cut off contact completely.

Speaker 18 As it was, on the rare and always outdoor occasions when we saw each other, I spoke in disapproving snippets.

Speaker 18 Then he quotes,

Speaker 18 Work's been good.

Speaker 18 I guess that's Matt saying, work's been good, and David with the, hmm, my disapproving snippet of you, Matt.

Speaker 18 My 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?

Speaker 18 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.

Speaker 18 A 2021 essay for USA Today declared it's time to start shunning the vaccine hesitant.

Speaker 18 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 as like, these were my teachers.

Speaker 18 Shunning as a form of accountability goes back millenniums. And then he goes back on

Speaker 18 Hester Prynn and the Scarlet Letter and what that was meant to do. That was before social media, blah, blah, blah, blah.

Speaker 18 What people used to do, he says, few people who lost friends over the vaccine changed their minds. They just got new friends.

Speaker 18 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.

Speaker 18 So he goes on about how he really wrestled with this. And he really kind of tried to shun poor Matt.
But then

Speaker 18 they decided to start surfing together.

Speaker 18 Matt, 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.

Speaker 18 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.

Speaker 18 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.

Speaker 18 Matt was the only other surfer I knew. I put my principled unfriendliness aside.

Speaker 18 Listen to the guy cloaking himself in glory for being a dick all the way through Matt, not abandoning him and continuing to help him.

Speaker 18 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.

Speaker 18 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.

Speaker 18 Where is this coming from? I wondered. The answer was nearly always Joe Rogan.

Speaker 18 I assumed our surf buddy experiment would either fall, fail spectatorly, or would bring Matt over to my side. Neither of those things occurred, however.

Speaker 18 Instead, the the connections we found were tiny and unrelated to politics. And then he goes on to talk about common ground they found on non-political matters.

Speaker 18 And

Speaker 18 he forgave Matt for being a crazy Joe Rogan fan and started to rethink his decision to completely ostracize Matt from his life.

Speaker 18 And

Speaker 18 he decided that this was a better path. That shunning, he writes, plays into the hands of demagogues, making it easier for for them to divide us and even in some cases, to incite violence.

Speaker 18 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.

Speaker 18 That'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,

Speaker 18 your thoughts on it.

Speaker 20 There are so many aspects of that that make me want to

Speaker 20 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.

Speaker 20 But there are public policy aspects of this that are worth thinking about. End of 2021, we were just talking about when Francis Collins was in office.

Speaker 20 The president of the United States was calling this the pandemic of the unvaccinated. That sense of absolutely divisive and accusatory, you don't like, you're not doing what we want you to do.

Speaker 20 And so therefore your death is your fault. That was widespread in mainstream media and mainstream democratic discourse and in democratic governance during the Biden administration.

Speaker 20 And it is and it was sick.

Speaker 20 Joe Biden accused Ron DeSantis and all these governors who were not doing exactly what he wanted to do in terms terms of like schools and other aspects, he was accusing them of playing with kids' lives.

Speaker 20 Remember, I wrote about all this stuff in real time.

Speaker 20 Like, you're accusing a governor of a state during a pandemic of being more interested in politics than his own children in his family, because DeSantis has a bunch of kids, and the children in the state living or dying.

Speaker 20 That is so warped.

Speaker 20 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 principled unfriendliness.

Speaker 20 Like, dude, you've got you, you need to touch a lot of grass.

Speaker 18 Yes. Yes.

Speaker 20 And maybe even some weed while you're touching grass. It's like go somewhere, smoke out a lot.

Speaker 18 Touch it and smoke it.

Speaker 20 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.

Speaker 20 Matt isn't out there writing in the New York Times op-ed page to think about reconsidering.

Speaker 20 And 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.

Speaker 20 Same reason Gavin Newsom wouldn't be going on bro podcasts now if Kamala Harris would have won.

Speaker 20 Now, suddenly, the New York Times is like, oh, maybe we should, I don't know, profile Andrew Schultz or something. Like

Speaker 20 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.

Speaker 18 It's a whole I I guess CBS's McFarlane didn't get the memo.

Speaker 20 No, it didn't.

Speaker 20 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.

Speaker 20 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.

Speaker 20 We've watched this happen. We know people who have done this themselves.
And I will say, you know, for my part, I've weird politics.

Speaker 20 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.

Speaker 20 I 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.

Speaker 20 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.

Speaker 20 and attributing the worst possible motives to them. Like that is just a monstrous way to live.

Speaker 20 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

Speaker 20 kind of

Speaker 20 prone to condemnations. But some people on the right have adopted some of these same approaches to politics and to kind of social interactions in victory.

Speaker 20 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 hate storm.

Speaker 20 Like, the first was in June, where I was skeptical of the critical race theory bans, not critical race theory itself.

Speaker 20 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.

Speaker 20 And a couple of weeks later, I remember that debate.

Speaker 18 I was down here at the shore when we had it. Yeah.

Speaker 20 And a couple of weeks later, I published this story about Amy Cooper, the Central Park Karen, quote unquote.

Speaker 20 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.

Speaker 20 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.

Speaker 20 We don't seem to have an appetite for that.

Speaker 20 And 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.

Speaker 20 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.

Speaker 20 Just be better, motherfucker.

Speaker 18 Come on. Because you know, yeah, be better, motherfucker.

Speaker 18 You know, like he's putting all those things, those, those things in there to win him plaudits from the left-wingers, he assumes correctly, are reading the times, right?

Speaker 18 Like, 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 is work going okay? Hmm.

Speaker 18 Like, oh my, I mean, I think we've also determined that David is a gay man.

Speaker 18 No, he's not, because he's, I think it's a sister-in-law, but he's certainly acting a little on the edge.

Speaker 18 Anyway, he's doing it because he wants

Speaker 18 snaps, right? He wants snaps from the Times readers. That's why he's,

Speaker 18 and what does he think is going to get him snaps?

Speaker 18 Being a complete asshole to someone he loves someone who's in his family someone who's been nothing but nice to him and and none of that matters all that matters is he didn't get the covet 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 what where is where is matt's terrible sin you didn't even say that like he listens to tucker carlson like i joe rogan

Speaker 18 he's kind of middle of the road like what do you mean anyway i just think it's such an amazing amazing window, right, into how the left is.

Speaker 18 And is anybody surprised that this was a speechwriter for Obama?

Speaker 20 God, just zero. I would just add there's a cautionary tale for everybody.

Speaker 20 You 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.

Speaker 20 You don't have to bring your politics into everything. You don't have to bring it into your baseball or your golf.

Speaker 20 You certainly don't have to bring it to your family, especially in ways where you're naming them out loud.

Speaker 20 If it's the New York Times,

Speaker 20 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,

Speaker 20 you know, the first conversations that you have with people aren't about politics.

Speaker 20 You know, I spent the 4th 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.

Speaker 20 What'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?

Speaker 22 That's right.

Speaker 18 You look like a Trumper.

Speaker 20 That's actually not how normal humans live. You can't go in any direction in America and no one really is having those conversations except when you've over-politicized everything.

Speaker 20 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.

Speaker 20 They just need to maybe have a little bit less power.

Speaker 18 I have like dear friends, like truly very, very close friends who are die-hard liberals and also woke. Not just liberals.

Speaker 18 I mean, I don't have a lot of friends who are woke, but I have a couple of girlfriends who are woke.

Speaker 18 And people ask me, like, how have you maintained those friendships through like the last five years in particular?

Speaker 18 And we, not all of them have survived i 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 i 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 like 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 what 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

Speaker 18 are the ones who ruin it for everyone for families and and friend groups he's the one who should be kicked out he's the hester of the group hester prin right was that her last name yeah Prynn from the Scarlet Letter.

Speaker 18 You're Hester. You get the Scarlet Letter, not sweet Matt.
Matt, I hope I see you here on the Jersey Shore.

Speaker 18 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.

Speaker 18 Guys, thanks for doing overtime. It's always a pleasure.
And all the best to Moynihan. Hope whatever he's going through resolves quickly.

Speaker 20 Yeah, amen.

Speaker 20 We'll work on him. Anti-packaging.
I go back.

Speaker 18 Here we go. Oh, boy.
Thanks, Megan.

Speaker 18 See you soon. All righty.

Speaker 18 Awesome. What another great show.
I love those guys. What a day.

Speaker 18 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.

Speaker 18 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.

Speaker 18 Thanks for listening to the Megan Kelly Show: No BS, no agenda, and no fear.

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