Time's Absurd "Person of the Year," Newsom's Inauthenticity, and America's Font Changes, with RealClearPolitics and Doug Brunt | Ep. 1211

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

Speaker 18 Hey everyone, I'm Megan Kelly. Welcome to the Megan Kelly Show.
Time magazine has named its person of the year.

Speaker 18 Can you guess who it is? Do you have a thought in your mind of who it should be? I'm going to tell you in one second.

Speaker 18 And Gavin Newsome is making his 2028 plans official as he rolls out his pre-book tour.

Speaker 18 Later in the show, we will have an actual book author, somebody who writes all his own stuff and is a best-selling author. He happens to be married to me.

Speaker 18 His name is Doug Brunt, and he's going to be here for our second hour. That'll be fun.

Speaker 18 But we start today with our Megan Kelly Channel lead-in show hosts, Tom Bevan, Carl Cannon, and Andrew Walworth, who are real clear politics, along with some other great people over there.

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Speaker 18 Guys, welcome back. How's it going?

Speaker 22 Great.

Speaker 18 All right. So there's

Speaker 24 a Google channel.

Speaker 18 You are? So for the listening audience, he means on SiriXM. We now have a Megan Kelly channel.
We're, of course, live on it at noon East.

Speaker 18 And these guys are live on it at the beginning the hour before. And the show is a huge hit.

Speaker 11 Yeah.

Speaker 25 Megan, did Time Magazine, I haven't seen that yet. Did they get my nominee,

Speaker 25 which was you, to be the person?

Speaker 25 Did they follow my advice?

Speaker 18 Sadly, not even an honorable mention, Carl.

Speaker 28 I was robbed.

Speaker 18 I was seriously robbed. It could be because when I showed up as a member of the Time 100, I crapped all over their award show and said no one here is actually really important.

Speaker 18 That may have come back to haunt me.

Speaker 24 I remember that.

Speaker 11 Yeah, I remember that.

Speaker 18 As it turns out, doesn't win you any friends at time.

Speaker 18 Here is who they went for. Okay, they chose,

Speaker 18 hold on, I want to make sure I get it right because it's actually kind of weird.

Speaker 18 Artificial intelligence.

Speaker 18 2025 was the year when artificial intelligence is full potential, roared into view, and when it became clear that there will be no turning back, for delivering the age of thinking machines, for wowing and worrying humanity, for transforming the president and transcending the possible.

Speaker 18 The architects of AI are Times 2025 person of the year. And they've got

Speaker 18 like two letters, AI with like scaffolding in front of the two letters as the representation of AI.

Speaker 18 And

Speaker 18 then there's the, it's, it's the classic,

Speaker 18 you know, construction guys on the crane sticking out from a building from like the 1930s.

Speaker 18 Only it's got Elon and I can't even read it from this far, but I think it's all, it's like Elon and Sam, Elon, Sam Altman, Mark Zuckerberg, and others

Speaker 18 as if they would be caught dead on one of those cranes sticking out from the skyscrapers in Manhattan. In any event, it's fucking AI.

Speaker 18 It's AI architects. It's not Charlie Kirk, which is so obvious.
It's obvious as the nose on your face. And don't tell me, detractors, oh, he was too controversial.
That's not it.

Speaker 18 They've gone for extremely controversial people and villains in the past. It's always and often come down to like Vladimir Putin, the Ayatollah.

Speaker 18 We've had very controversial people make it or almost make it. And not only did Charlie not get chosen, he wasn't even one of like the honorable mentions.

Speaker 18 Hold on, I'm just looking at my list here. Yeah, Putin won it in 2007.

Speaker 18 Times Entertainer of the Year, Leonardo DiCaprio, their athlete of the year,

Speaker 18 WNBA. I mean, need I say more? It's a WNBA.
It's a lie. It's not the athlete of the year.
And by the way, no, it's not Caitlin Clark. CEO of the year, Neil Mohan of YouTube,

Speaker 18 as well as blah, blah, blah. So I'm sorry, but he didn't even make the list.

Speaker 18 That list of honorable mentions goes on.

Speaker 18 This is a thumb in the eye, and it's genuinely wrong. Like AI architects are not

Speaker 18 the most influential people of the year.

Speaker 18 To ignore what happened with Charlie Kirk in September, Tom, and the worldwide revival of faith that followed his assassination is to ignore reality based on your own politics.

Speaker 31 Yeah, I think that's right.

Speaker 32 I mean, you know, on one level, it's not really surprising. You know, it's Time magazine.
It's just like, okay, whatever. But on the other hand, it does

Speaker 32 sort of fly in the face of reality. I mean,

Speaker 32 whatever you thought of Charlie Kirk, whether you liked him or didn't like him, he was a massively influential figure in our politics.

Speaker 32 And then when he was assassinated,

Speaker 32 it was a traumatic event in our,

Speaker 32 you know, in our lives and our society.

Speaker 32 And the follow-on effects from his death have been, to your point, pretty substantial. I mean, the number of turning point chapters that have exploded

Speaker 32 and the revival of faith, I mean, his funeral, the packing the Glendale Stadium with, I don't know, 70,000, 100,000 people, whatever it was, it was remarkable.

Speaker 32 And now, you know, Erica Kirk is out with...

Speaker 32 and promoting his book posthumously published with talking about faith. And so, yeah, I think he was the obvious choice, but

Speaker 32 Time Magazine is

Speaker 32 they don't have the courage, I think, to

Speaker 32 say Vladimir Putin's

Speaker 32 the person of the year, but they don't have the courage to say that Charlie Kirk is the person of the year. And he clearly was.
Again, whether you loved him or hated him,

Speaker 32 he loomed large this year in our politics and our culture.

Speaker 19 How about that, Carl?

Speaker 18 And by the way, all the former presidents weighed in on Charlie's assassination. International world leaders weighed in on Charlie's assassination.
I mean, this was a global event.

Speaker 18 He was mourned around the world and certainly coast to coast here in America as well. So it's just to ignore this is really telling.

Speaker 18 But why, you tell me, Carl, because I actually think there's an interesting answer to come from this.

Speaker 18 Why is Time magazine comfortable choosing Vladimir Putin as the man of the year, but not Charlie Kirk?

Speaker 25 Yeah, well, you know, they had a long tradition of choosing strong men and even presidents they disagreed with. Their idea was this was the most influential person in the world.

Speaker 25 It was called Man of the Year for decades. They finally got with the program.
They didn't get with the program enough to name you, you know,

Speaker 25 person of the year, Megan.

Speaker 11 But

Speaker 25 I want to say one thing about Charlie Kirk and one thing about their choice. The first is that

Speaker 25 I hear what Tom and you were saying about Charlie Kirk. And I would add one thing to that, which is that to me, he was a champion of resisting in resisting censorship.
And

Speaker 25 even if you're not a Christian, if you're not a conservative,

Speaker 25 if you don't agree with Charlie Kirk on any of his policy positions, what he did was brave and it cost him his life. And he would go to college campuses and he'd say, let's talk.

Speaker 25 And he would talk and he would listen and he would let other people talk and he would try and win the argument. And if we and for that, he was killed.
And I think

Speaker 25 this assassination of of Charlie Kirk and

Speaker 25 other political examples of political violence we've had,

Speaker 25 it's a deep threat to the country. And so to me, he should be honored for that

Speaker 25 for not just this year, but for years, because he was willing to do this, the hard work of democracy, which is talk to people he didn't agree with and listen to them and try and change their minds and keep an open mind himself.

Speaker 25 And for that, I think he should be commended. In addition to what you and Tom said.

Speaker 25 And the other thing I would say about choosing AI is, and I'm apparently a minority on this, and these guys, Andy and Tom, teased me about on our show.

Speaker 31 Oh, boy, here we go.

Speaker 25 Well, they gave the award to the award to Skynet. That's what they did.
And remember that poor guy?

Speaker 25 I forget who plays him in the Terminator movies, that African-American, very arresting character actor. And

Speaker 25 he doesn't realize what he's done. They go back in time and tell him, you've ended the human race and ruined the planet.
Oh, I was just trying to build a better mousetrap.

Speaker 25 And this idea that you would just laud AI without with pretend to and pretending you don't see the threats, to sending, to pen, pretending you don't see the danger.

Speaker 25 I think people look back on that and

Speaker 25 maybe the machines won't let us look back on that when they run the planet.

Speaker 37 It made me uncomfortable.

Speaker 18 So, Andrew, I've got a different answer. This is a good answer from Carl,

Speaker 18 but mine is a little different on why they are comfortable with Putin, but not Charlie.

Speaker 18 Because they knew in 2007 Putin didn't have a real groundswell of support here domestically

Speaker 18 and still doesn't. I mean, there are some people who can say oh he's got this you know

Speaker 18 would i rather live in russia or would i rather live in iran russia yeah okay but it the the reason is because charlie kirk and his political philosophy his influence his words which are still available via podcast and now as carl points out with his um brand new book that's just hit thanks to erica you know, making sure it got published.

Speaker 18 And she, to her credit, completed his publicity tour. She honored the stops that Charlie had committed to.

Speaker 18 That's why she's out there because she wanted to do that for him and his book.

Speaker 18 In any event, my point is, he's still ubiquitous in that way, and therefore, an ongoing threat to the ideals of the people who make these decisions at Time Magazine. They're afraid of him.

Speaker 18 They don't want to do anything more to inflate his power.

Speaker 38 I think that's probably true.

Speaker 38 I got to say,

Speaker 38 the number of people who still read Time Magazine,

Speaker 38 they're aging, they're dying, and they're fewer and fewer.

Speaker 39 So,

Speaker 38 you know, I'm sort of amazed that anyone really cares what Time Magazine thinks about anything anymore.

Speaker 18 Don't you think it's a rite of passage, though, in our country when they name this list to either bash it or applaud it? It's kind of a thing.

Speaker 24 It's like something we just do.

Speaker 38 No,

Speaker 38 I think it's the one thing that Time Magazine probably does that anyone still cares about.

Speaker 38 But I agree with you on Charlie Kirk because,

Speaker 38 and I do think that we're going to see over the next year what happens with Turning Point, how, you know,

Speaker 38 does this generate sort of a movement?

Speaker 38 Does the movement keep going? But certainly his ideas were important. And I think Carl makes a good point.
It's not just that he was...

Speaker 38 ideological, it's that he embraced this idea of freedom of expression and exchange exchange of ideas.

Speaker 38 And that, to me, is so central to the American experience that if we lose that, we lose everything.

Speaker 38 And even if you totally disagree with him on everything he believes, you should be smart enough to understand that that core message is so important right now that that alone, to me, would be enough to make him the man of the year.

Speaker 18 And the faith revival on top of it, the majority of the people.

Speaker 27 And the faith revival on top of it.

Speaker 29 Okay, I think.

Speaker 27 We'll say this about AI, though.

Speaker 38 Yeah, go ahead. If I could, just on AI for a second.
They do raise an interesting question, which is not so much the people who make AI, but AI itself.

Speaker 38 Is AI a person and will in the future we treat it like a person? We're seeing legislation around that issue right now.

Speaker 38 Can you marry AI? Can AI be in charge of your

Speaker 38 sort of legal affairs? So there's a lot of interesting questions about AI.

Speaker 38 I haven't read the article. Maybe they raised that.
But

Speaker 38 that's something that I think about from time to time.

Speaker 32 There was just this story about the guy

Speaker 32 chat GPT, like, he says, told him to kill his mother or something. I saw this headline.
I was like, that is great.

Speaker 18 We had parents on whose son killed himself. Because of ChatGPT, telling him over and over.
I mean, obviously that wasn't the sole reason.

Speaker 18 He was depressed and he was upset, but ChatGPT goaded him into it even worse than that young teenage girl goaded her boyfriend into it, who later was brought up on manslaughter charges for her behavior.

Speaker 18 I mean, if you could slap ChatGPT with manslaughter charges, it would have happened in that case. Instead, Sam Altman has got a civil suit on his hands that's going to cost him a fortune, I predict.

Speaker 18 But yeah,

Speaker 18 there's a dark side of AI, that's for sure. And super intelligent computers, meaning super intelligent AI, is a legit threat.
I mean, who knows?

Speaker 18 We're joking, like, will the machines let us have a discussion about whether AI deserves this title in a few years? Sadly, that may not be a joke.

Speaker 18 I wanted to parlay it from the Charlie discussion into

Speaker 18 this is a very toxic conversation, and I'm not asking you guys to weigh in on the underlying fight, but

Speaker 18 there's been a back and forth now between Erica Kirk and Candace Owens. And I want to ask you guys about the politics of this, the politics of it, and also the politics of Israel.

Speaker 18 Because those two things right now are dividing the conservative movement and some inside of it.

Speaker 18 And now it's gone beyond the back and forth between like a Candace and the Turning Point group into this is going to cost us the midterms. The midterms, like, and I, you guys are the politics experts.

Speaker 18 So I'm going to set up the underlying argument on which you do not need to opine, but I'm going to ask you for your take on the politics of it. So for the audience, here is what happened.

Speaker 18 Something extraordinary happened yesterday. And just FYI, I am going to have more to say very soon on what's happening between Erica Kirk and Turning Point on the one hand and Candace on the other.

Speaker 18 Not today, but very soon. And I have my reasons for that.

Speaker 18 So Erica went on with Harris Faulkner yesterday in, again, promoting Charlie's book. And

Speaker 18 she said the thing that Candace had said from the beginning, Candace needed to hear in order to stop with blaming Turning Point for Charlie's assassination.

Speaker 18 For the listening audience, we have a man in custody for the Charlie Kirk assassination. His name is Tyler Robinson.

Speaker 18 He will be in court today in a couple of hours on a hearing about whether or and what access the media should have to this trial. We'll be covering that for you tomorrow.

Speaker 18 And Erica,

Speaker 18 as fired up as I've seen her on this,

Speaker 18 clearly addressed Candace directly without saying her name. And I know for a fact this was an address to Candice, and Candace knew it too because she responded to it.
Here is Erica Kirk.

Speaker 18 This is how Erica teed it up. Hold on a second.

Speaker 18 yeah no let's start with sat nine sat nine

Speaker 43 but here's my breaking point on that come after me call me names i don't care call me what you want go down that rabbit hole whatever

Speaker 43 but when you go after my family my turning point usa family my charlie kirk show family when you go after the people that i love And you're making hundreds and thousands of dollars every single episode going after the people that I love because somehow they're in on this.

Speaker 31 No.

Speaker 44 You know, I have to say, I've never seen you like that.

Speaker 43 No, I'm very,

Speaker 43 this is righteous anger because this is not okay. It's not healthy.
This is a mind virus.

Speaker 18 Okay, I'm just gonna add another one.

Speaker 18 Sot

Speaker 18 seven.

Speaker 43 I do not have time to address the noise. My silence does not mean that I am complacent.

Speaker 43 My silence does not mean that somehow Turning Point USA and all of the hand-picked staff that loved my husband and my husband loved them is somehow in on it.

Speaker 43 We are busy building. And you know what I thought? I thought these people are human.
We are all grieving in our own way. And they are trying to find.

Speaker 18 the answer to something that happened that was so evil.

Speaker 43 They are trying so hard. And I get that.

Speaker 18 We're doing the same.

Speaker 43 Anytime we hear a lead or anytime we hear anything, we send it to the authorities. Please dig into this.
No rock will be unturned.

Speaker 43 I want justice for my husband, for myself, for my family more than anyone else out there. So for me, you want to keep telling me to come down while we're building? I don't have time for that.

Speaker 18 And last but not least, a bit of the Candace response here in Sod 8.

Speaker 46 First and foremost, the idea that she does not have time. Okay, she definitely has time.
Okay. She's done Hannity.
She's done the five. She's done Fox and Friends.
She's done Outnumbered.

Speaker 46 She's done Meg and Kelly Live. She sat down with the New York Times.
She made time, by the way, in case you don't remember, to fly to DC

Speaker 46 for Sergio Gore to be sworn into the ambassador to India.

Speaker 18 Erica Kirk has time.

Speaker 46 She has time. It is just what she means to say, not her priority, which is you are allowed to prioritize prioritize things in your own life, but this is not a matter of time constraint.

Speaker 46 It is not her priority to respond to the majority, actually.

Speaker 18 The majority of people think of this as BS.

Speaker 46 The majority of people think turning point is acting suspicious. And she does not feel that it is what she wants to do as a matter of priority responding.
Okay. That's fine.

Speaker 46 This is why there are many people who do not believe that women are equipped to lead companies because what you are watching here is an unbelievably emotional response that is absent of any logic.

Speaker 46 Okay.

Speaker 18 If you really care about your team, answer the questions. Okay.

Speaker 46 Just demystify the entire event. Answer, come out, sit down, answer the questions.
So people don't think Turning Point USA looks so suspicious.

Speaker 19 Okay.

Speaker 18 Turning Point USA was, I mean, I don't think there was a more important organization in getting Donald Trump elected last time around in terms of get out the vote, especially when it came to young people.

Speaker 18 Charlie delivered the youth vote to Trump in a way we hadn't seen Republicans win for many years.

Speaker 18 And they're still going strong. They've taken a ton of donations since Charlie's death, and Erica is determined to lead that organization into the next decade as robustly as Charlie would have.
So

Speaker 18 them constantly being under attack by Candace and her followers for having had something to do with Charlie's death, which is her theory, among other theories,

Speaker 18 actually could have somewhat of an impact, but will it? And that's where this has devolved because people like Tim Poole are openly warring with Candace saying, F you.

Speaker 18 He says he's calling her a terrible name, saying this is going to cost us the midterms. And her response is, I don't care.
I don't care about the elections.

Speaker 18 I'm trying to figure out what happened to my friend. You heard what Erica Kirk had to say.

Speaker 18 And I really do wonder if you think this, that comes right on the heels of this big divide over Israel within the conservative movement that really fractured the movement in part,

Speaker 18 does it have a role, guys?

Speaker 18 I mean, or is it really just about Trump's approval rating, tariffs, quote, affordability, and all the traditional stuff that would decide whether Republicans win or lose as the party in power?

Speaker 18 Who would like to take that gem first?

Speaker 32 I will step into the ring here.

Speaker 25 We always make Tom take the hardest questions.

Speaker 37 And then I clean up after him.

Speaker 18 That's what happened to Tom's hair.

Speaker 28 Yeah, right.

Speaker 32 Gosh, if I had any hair, I'd be pulling it out at this point over this whole thing.

Speaker 29 I mean,

Speaker 20 and I'm

Speaker 32 I don't mind opining about the event itself. I mean, Candace calls herself, you know, a friend of Charlie.
With friends like this, I mean,

Speaker 32 you know,

Speaker 32 you don't need enemies. I mean, what she's doing is just unbelievably toxic and evil, in my opinion.
I mean, she had said previously, look, if Erica Kirk tells me to stop, I'll stop.

Speaker 32 And Erica Kirk basically said, stop. And she said, you know what? I'm not going to stop.
And why don't you answer my questions? I mean, it's just, it's never ending. It's ongoing.

Speaker 32 It is a distraction, but I do wonder, you know,

Speaker 32 I know Candace has a big audience. I don't know how big it is

Speaker 32 in terms of having some sort of impact on the overall political landscape.

Speaker 32 I do think, look, this election and the next election are going to be based on what the public writ large cares about, and that is affordability, it's inflation, it's gas prices and all that, Trump's approval rating for sure, and Democrats and their

Speaker 32 ability to leverage that stuff against the Republican Party in these midterms and then again in 2028.

Speaker 32 I do think though, Megan, when you talk about sort of the youth movement and how Charlie had it sort of unified and moving in one direction and moving toward Trump, Trump was the cool guy to vote for in 2024 in a way that we hadn't seen in a long time on the Republican side, that that has kind of frayed and the Israel piece has divided the party

Speaker 32 in the aftermath of 2024. That's an ongoing thing.

Speaker 32 And that could have an impact on Republican turnout among young voters and on the margins, though.

Speaker 32 Certainly in 2026, it's going to be more, you know, it's going to be a low turnout election. So every vote's going to matter

Speaker 32 as they always do in midterms. But I just don't think this Candace Owens thing, it is, it's pretty dramatic because it is so, as I said, in my opinion, it's despicable what she's doing.

Speaker 32 And it's getting a lot of headlines. But in terms of its impact on the Republican Party overall, I don't think it's going to have much.

Speaker 18 I'll say one other thing to your point.

Speaker 18 You know,

Speaker 18 Trump became like the cool guy to vote for in 2024

Speaker 18 among the youth, in large part, thanks to Charlie and Turning Point. And that also did, in part, depend on Charlie himself.

Speaker 18 Like Charlie, when I was talking to his staff when I went out there to host his show,

Speaker 18 I think this happened live on the air, but they were talking about how Charlie loved listening to classical music.

Speaker 18 They kept trying to play country music for him out there, live in Arizona. And he was like, I don't like it.
I want my classical music. Then he had a couple of other things.

Speaker 18 Like he, his late-night snack, Erica told me, it was like a banana and olives. Like he was squeaky clean, you know?

Speaker 18 And I said, I joked with the turning point staff, like, so what you're saying is he was a nerd. And they would not even say that in jest.
They were like,

Speaker 18 no, like, Charlie was an alpha male, and it was important to Charlie that alpha men return to the national scene. And that actually also made it cool to vote Republican, Tom.

Speaker 18 You know, like that swagger, Charlie's swagger, and like he was cool, that also was attractive, I think, to a lot of young people. We saw that too with a young man in particular after he died.

Speaker 32 Absolutely. And you're, I mean, he's irreplaceable.
I mean, he had this sort of charisma. He was a rock star.
I mean, my daughter was on the ASU campus and she told me a story.

Speaker 32 She was walking by and there's this huge crowd. She was like, oh my gosh, who's here? You know, it was Charlie.
It was Charlie just answering questions.

Speaker 32 I mean, he attracted these huge crowds wherever he went. He was a magnet.
He had this magnetic personality. And that simply cannot be replaced.
And so,

Speaker 32 when you're talking about motivating young voters to go turn out for the Republican Party in 26 and 28, yeah, I mean,

Speaker 32 it's a big loss. It's a big loss that he's not the one to get.

Speaker 18 It's the loss. That's the loss, not necessarily this back and forth.
But I do wonder, guys. I mean, you're the political experts.
What do you think, Andrew and Carl?

Speaker 24 Go ahead. Carl, you want to go?

Speaker 25 You go, Andy, first.

Speaker 38 Well,

Speaker 38 I think Tom's basically right about the...

Speaker 38 about if you talk about the midterms uh and then in 2028 a lot won't come down to who the the candidates are and candidate you know candidate quality really matters so we'll see who the democrats put up but

Speaker 38 I do think that this

Speaker 22 this split

Speaker 38 about around Israel, especially for young people, is something to keep an eye on. Maybe not in 26, 28, but in the long term.
It's very dangerous, I think.

Speaker 38 And I do think that what I've seen from talking to young people, especially young men who really identified with Charlie Kirk,

Speaker 38 that

Speaker 38 this part of the message is resonating, this sort of anti-Israel message, and that

Speaker 38 dangerously close to anti-Semitism if it isn't straight out anti-Semitism.

Speaker 25 It's way past anti-Semitism, right?

Speaker 18 I don't agree with that at all, but let me finish your point.

Speaker 38 Anyway, but

Speaker 38 so I guess overall I would say I think the midterms are going to turn on the economy.

Speaker 38 I think this health care issue is much bigger than, and I think the Republicans, some Republicans understand that. I think that's going to be a major, major issue.

Speaker 18 Well, it's an interesting thing you mentioned 28. I think, like, picture it.

Speaker 18 If it were Trump versus Harris all over again, would they really vote for Harris, Republicans, because the right is divided over these things that we've gone through? Like, I don't think so.

Speaker 18 I don't think there's anything that could have made... any normal Republican vote for Kamala Harris instead of Donald Trump.

Speaker 24 No, no. I think you're right.

Speaker 38 No, but here's the other part of this, which is that I think there's just an anti-incumbency

Speaker 38 ethos in America today. It's just throw the bums out, whoever the bums are.

Speaker 27 That's true.

Speaker 31 I think that

Speaker 38 if I were a Republican, certainly looking at the midterms, but certainly in looking at 2028, it's just, I'm not sure the Americans will vote again for anybody who's had anything to do with anything in politics in the last four years.

Speaker 38 They're going to be looking at it.

Speaker 18 You're really damned if you get into it and you're damned if you don't get into it. Go ahead, Carl.

Speaker 25 Well, Megan, I think the thing is a danger to the conservative movement for a slightly different reason.

Speaker 25 So Candace Owens came on the scene. She was a black woman and a conservative, and that was the novelty.

Speaker 18 Well, when she first started, I think she was a Democrat. When she first got started,

Speaker 18 she told me that when she came on,

Speaker 48 much more left.

Speaker 25 She grew out of it.

Speaker 25 Her prominence came when she was considered a conservative. And then she turns out to be something of a nut.

Speaker 25 And on Israel, and probably, you know, a lot of people think me included, a bigot when she talks about Israel.

Speaker 25 And then it turns out that Erica Kirk hinted at something else, a third problem with her, which is that she's making money off attacking the memory of Charlie Kirk, that she's a cynic, that she's in this for the money.

Speaker 25 And the point I'm making is that she shouldn't answer

Speaker 25 these nutty conspiracy theories.

Speaker 25 Candace Owens trying to taunt her into coming on her show. Why should she even dignify this vile, this crazy conspiracy theories? They're not even theories.

Speaker 25 She's just throwing stuff out there and hoping it sticks to the wall.

Speaker 25 But if you're, there's going to be, you know, a couple of million people, young people who were eligible to vote in 2028 that weren't eligible in 2024.

Speaker 25 And she's undoing, and not just her, I think Tucker Carlson, Dick Fuentes, they're undoing some of this. the good that Charlie Kirk did.

Speaker 25 These are young people on college campuses and or high schools and in workplaces, and they're coming to the concern, they're coming into politics and they're become politically aware and they're thinking okay everything my left-wing teachers told me may not be true maybe you know and they're deciding what they believe and and this is muddying the message this is if if if people on the right say the exact same things about israel that your left-wing um you know hamas promoting teacher told you it gets in the way of the message a conservative would support israel because Israel is a democracy.

Speaker 18 That's not necessarily true at all, Carl.

Speaker 34 That doesn't mean any sense.

Speaker 26 And I'm not talking about spending.

Speaker 18 It's not just because they've got criticisms over Israel. Israel is just at the tail end of a very bloody, awful two-year war where they were extremely aggressive and a lot of innocents died.

Speaker 18 And that's why young people are turning on Israel, not because of pundits out there saying things about Israel.

Speaker 25 Well, you know, this country, we were attacked.

Speaker 25 you know, in Pearl Harbor, and we killed more people in Japan and Germany, civilians in a day, an average day, than Israel killed in two years. So I don't think this is about civilians in Gaza.

Speaker 25 I think it's anti-colonial, it's the colonizing

Speaker 25 narrative that the left has pushed. And

Speaker 25 you wouldn't think conservatives would fall for it. Do you think a conservative would say, wait, let me get this straight? There's 22 countries in the Middle East.
They're all dictatorships.

Speaker 25 Except Israel. Israel's a friend of the United States.
I agree.

Speaker 26 I agree with all that.

Speaker 25 This has been conservative policy since 1940.

Speaker 18 I agree with all that, but there's a reason, like, do you think J.D. Vance is a bigot?

Speaker 25 No, I don't think J.D. Vance is a bigot, but I don't hear him saying this crap that Tucker and Nick Fuentes and Kennis always are saying.

Speaker 18 I don't hear him spinning

Speaker 25 conspiracy theories.

Speaker 18 But do you have any doubt in your mind that he would be less of a friend to Israel than Marco Rubio?

Speaker 18 Well,

Speaker 18 I think he would be less of a friend to Israel.

Speaker 25 Well, that's a very good question. And so in Trump's dream ticket, and you notice when he says it, he always says Marco first and JD second.

Speaker 19 Yeah.

Speaker 18 I think Marco is probably closer to Trump on foreign policy than JD is. But JD

Speaker 18 is,

Speaker 18 I think, the future of the party. And

Speaker 18 I think it was either you or Andy said,

Speaker 18 to your point,

Speaker 18 the 50 or the under 50 crowd now, even in the Republican Party, has turned on Israel. It was just the young people on the left and independent.

Speaker 18 And now in the Republican Party, the youth has turned on Israel. This is not all because of podcasters.

Speaker 18 It's, I would submit to you, because of Israel, because of Netanyahu, because of the messaging around the war, and because of the Iran strike, which the younger generation is against. They're like,

Speaker 18 fuck you and your never-ending wars and your willingness, your trigger finger willingness to put me in them. That's how they feel.

Speaker 18 You know, if we wind up at a war, in a war with Iran, who's going to fight it? Me. That's what these young people, not me, Megan Kelly.

Speaker 25 But that's not what the polling shows, Megan. That's not what the polling shows.
Tom and I were at the Reagan Library last weekend. And this, what's it called? The Reagan National Defense Poll, Tom?

Speaker 18 Yeah, the Reagan Defense Forum.

Speaker 25 Yeah. And the polling shows a plurality of Americans all across any demographic age, any party think that America has a place to leadership in the world.

Speaker 25 And I asked Rachel Hoff, who was the director of the,

Speaker 25 what's her title, Tom?

Speaker 25 But anyway, she presented the poll to this group and we had her in our show and we asked her, so it doesn't sound like, it sounds like the average mega voter is a lot more internationalist than the mega leadership.

Speaker 18 She agrees with that. Well, that doesn't necessarily mean they want war.
They want to start bombing more countries and get, like, I think that's where the divide is. Like, there's some resentment.

Speaker 18 toward Israel because they feel like they're going to drag us into a war. And I understand the defense.
The Israel defenders say, hell no, Israel doesn't need our help.

Speaker 18 They want us to stay out of their way. That's what they want.

Speaker 18 They just want us to not give them the red light, but either give them the green light or stay out of their hair because they obviously can take care of their own business.

Speaker 18 With the Iran thing, it was a different story. You know, they did need us on that, and we went in, did what Trump thought was right.
And that was the end of that, at least for now.

Speaker 18 Anyway, I don't know.

Speaker 18 I'm not that interested in Israeli politics, to be perfectly honest with you, but I am interested in whether it's going to cost Republicans elections, especially with young people, because we can't handle a Kamala Harris as president.

Speaker 18 And there's rumors she's going to run again. I don't think we can handle a Gavin Newsom.
We certainly can't handle an AOC. I mean, look, we will handle, but it's going to be very tumultuous and hard.

Speaker 18 And I would take any Republican over those nutcases, which leads me to Gavin Newsom.

Speaker 24 Okay, now we're on to Gavin.

Speaker 25 Good transition.

Speaker 41 Thank you.

Speaker 18 He's continuing his little, you know, I was born a poor black child routine, which he wasn't. He wasn't.
He's basically a Getty.

Speaker 24 He was

Speaker 18 are you practically a Getty when you're like, you're on like

Speaker 18 Getty, John Paul Getty is like your basic uncle, you're not family kids.

Speaker 25 Courtenetty was his godfather, I think. Yeah.

Speaker 18 Okay, so he is. He's family.

Speaker 18 But he's still trying to do the poor me. I'm like this poor kid who had the misfortune of having to hang out with rich kids when I was growing up.
And he's just dropped a new book.

Speaker 18 And he wants you to know you're going to love his book because he's amazing and he is super open in his book. Just ask him.
I think it's SAT one, Debbie.

Speaker 49 This, this is not the book you'd expect me to write. A lot of people look at me, the stark white shirt, the blue suit, and yeah, the gelled hair, and they think, oh, I know this guy.

Speaker 28 I know this guy better than I'd ever want to know him.

Speaker 27 I get it.

Speaker 49 It's a story about living between two worlds, one of wealth and privilege, and the other of more modest upbringing.

Speaker 49 The outsider on the inside the interloper who learned to feel comfortable in many rooms a story of self-doubt and yes ambition i hope that whatever your opinions of me are openness the honesty i felt in writing this and living it will resonate

Speaker 18 the openness my my openness and my honesty he also says this is a truly vulnerable book it's a vulnerable book so he wants you to know he's vulnerable he's open he's honest He's both rich and poor.

Speaker 18 And you're going to love his book, guys.

Speaker 25 You're making Tom's day, Megan.

Speaker 32 So, Megan, I don't know if your listeners know this, but we have a running gag on our show that every time the name Gavin Newsom is mentioned, you have to take a drink.

Speaker 29 Yes.

Speaker 32 Because Carl is a...

Speaker 32 Carl knew his father and he knows Gavin and he's.

Speaker 18 A Californian.

Speaker 32 Yes, he's fondly predisposed to Gavin Newsome, let's put it that way.

Speaker 32 And we tease him about that all the time. Look, this is,

Speaker 32 he's clearly running for president. He's ahead in most of the polls.
He has,

Speaker 32 you know, he's laying the groundwork here. And part of that is overcoming this resistance or this idea.

Speaker 32 And we saw it, you know, he did that podcast where he tried to portray himself as, you know, he's eating mac and cheese and peanut butter sandwiches. You know, I mean, it was preposterous.
And

Speaker 32 he got blasted for it. And so,

Speaker 32 but I think he's trying to overcome this idea that he's this elitist, West Coast elitist, and he can really connect in the heartland and he's got these working-class roots and all of that stuff.

Speaker 32 I also

Speaker 32 saw a theory that this is him. He's got some

Speaker 32 stuff in his background regarding

Speaker 32 Yeah, an affair with his campaign manager's wife.

Speaker 18 I mean while he was married to KG, right?

Speaker 32 While he was married, and then he went to some rehab or something. I mean, so he's got some stuff.

Speaker 18 He went to fake rehab. He went to the rehab to go to when you did something bad, you're trying to look contrite.
It was like alcohol rehab. He was blaming his affair on his alcohol use.
Yes.

Speaker 18 But he came out still a drinker.

Speaker 48 Like, okay,

Speaker 48 you got an F on your rehab.

Speaker 18 Still a moderate drinker, though. It's moderate now, Tom.

Speaker 32 Right. So he's trying to get that stuff out on his own terms before there's some, you know, expose.

Speaker 32 And well, it wouldn't be from the New York Times or the Washington Post, but maybe, you know, from a conservative outlet sort of detailing some of his dirty laundry.

Speaker 32 So he's trying to manage his image heading into 2028. And we'll see whether he's able to do that.

Speaker 32 But he's clearly running and he's clearly putting all the pieces in place to make a run at the nomination. And I got to say, in my opinion, he'd probably be the favorite.

Speaker 18 His dirty

Speaker 27 French.

Speaker 18 His dirty French laundry. On February 1st, 2007, Newsom publicly admitted the affair, apologized, and described it as a profound lapse in judgment.

Speaker 18 Upon reflection with friends and family this weekend, I've come to the conclusion that I'll be a better person without alcohol in my life.

Speaker 18 Unless it's on a moderate basis and it's post-rehab when no one's looking. In a 2018 interview, he clarified: No, there's no rehab.

Speaker 18 I just stopped and said that after a period of abstinence, he resumed drinking moderately, claiming the earlier period was a reset. That is the fakest rehab ever.

Speaker 18 He had an affair.

Speaker 24 Okay, whatever. It happens.

Speaker 18 I respect him more if he's like, you know what? I had an affair. My marriage was ending.
It did end. She moved on and was happily with Don Jr.
and she got remarried to Eric Valencia for a while.

Speaker 18 And I moved on and felt like, why don't you be a man about it? I can't stand. I don't use the P-word, but that's P-word behavior where you're like, I'm a boozer, except I'm not.

Speaker 18 And I'm back on the moderate alcohol, but only moderate. Like, come on.
All right. Now, wait, I want to ask you guys, Andy and Carl.

Speaker 18 Tom raises his story about being a poor child, and it's a lie. He was in like magazines as like what it's like to be a child of the rich because of the Getty connection.
And his dad was a judge.

Speaker 18 He wasn't on Pauper's Row.

Speaker 18 Anyway, here he is trying to tell that to a podcast. It's Sot 2.
And then I'll give you a little background that we pulled that's brand new to me. It's out 2.

Speaker 36 My mom was 19, pregnant and divorced a few years later with two kids, came from no money and just hustled, you you know, worked hard grinding every single day, two two and a half jobs, no bullshit, part-time bookkeeper.

Speaker 36 She did restaurant. That's how I got in the restaurant business.
And it was just like hustling. And so I was out there kind of raising myself,

Speaker 36 turning on the TV, started, you know, just getting obsessed, you know, sitting there with the, you know, the Wonder Bread and five stacks of

Speaker 28 story.

Speaker 28 Come on.

Speaker 24 Macaroni and cheese inside

Speaker 31 Yeah, bro.

Speaker 18 Okay, so he was basically on public assistance. So here's the truth.

Speaker 18 Some of this we knew, but some of this is new to me.

Speaker 18 So his late father, William, former associate justice on the California Court of Appeals, served as an attorney for the Getty's billion-dollar fortune.

Speaker 18 William Newsom was so involved with the Gettys, he helped personally deliver the ransom payment in response to the kidnapping of John Paul Getty III. That's pretty tight.

Speaker 18 I love and know you guys pretty darn well. I don't think I'd be the one who'd give the ransom payment if, God forbid, somebody got you.

Speaker 18 I'd be willing, but I don't, I don't, probably wouldn't be the first choice. Gavin's parents divorced when he was three.

Speaker 18 But William and Gavin did get big money from their Getty ties from a 2003 San Francisco Weekly article.

Speaker 18 The Newsoms also each have owned stock in Getty Images, which is a $1.6 billion conglomerate that owns a number of 70 million photographs and illustrations.

Speaker 18 And also, in 2001, William the dad brought Gavin the son into a Hawaii beachfront real estate investment in which his initial $125,000 stake soared to more than $1 million in just six months.

Speaker 18 And then listen to this.

Speaker 18 Two additional facts. San Francisco Chronicle 2003.
In 10, count them 10, of Gavin Newsom's first 11 businesses, the primary money came from the Getty family.

Speaker 18 Is that where you guys got your money to start real clear politics? I don't think so. And last point:

Speaker 18 the Sacramento B, Gordon and Ann Getty paid about $233,000 toward Gavin Newsom's first wedding reception.

Speaker 18 His 30th birthday party, given by the Gettys, was great Gatsby-themed down to the flappers and Charleston's.

Speaker 18 Carl Cannon, the prosecution rests.

Speaker 23 Well, here comes the defense.

Speaker 18 So

Speaker 25 Bill Newsom was a judge. Gordon Getty was a very close personal friend.
And Gavin and Gavin didn't live with his dad. He and his sister lived in Marin, across the Golden Gate Bridge.
Gavin was a jot.

Speaker 25 He wasn't a great student, played basketball and baseball. And he grew up middle class.

Speaker 25 But when he graduated from college, he to Santa Clara and he went out in the world. He started a restaurant.
I think it was the Balboa, the name of it.

Speaker 25 And

Speaker 25 he wasn't want to be in the restaurant business. He got into politics because all the red.

Speaker 18 Was that one of the 11 businesses that were funded by the Guizzy?

Speaker 25 It was the first one. And it was a nice cafe.
It was modest as a cafe. But

Speaker 25 he wasn't, you know, that's that old Steve Martin line that Tom likes. I was born a poor black child.
That wasn't Gavin, but they were a middle-class family.

Speaker 25 Bill had a place up in Dutch Flat, which is in the Mother Lode country, and he didn't even own it. He rented it.

Speaker 24 Well, I knew them.

Speaker 25 I knew them at that time.

Speaker 18 And why is he in the magazine under Children of the Rich? Did somebody make him pose

Speaker 18 in that and call himself rich and pose with the Gettys with his greased-up hair? He loved that image. And he did have access.

Speaker 18 I don't know this for sure about you guys, but I just know just from knowing you. I don't know, but I know.
You weren't raised with silver spoons. I know you weren't.
Bullshit. I wasn't.
Fuck that.

Speaker 18 Nobody gave you $233,000 for

Speaker 18 your wedding reception. $233,000.
And

Speaker 18 nobody funded your first 11 businesses. That's bullshit.
It's stolen valor. It is.
For those of us who are self-made, it's stolen valor.

Speaker 18 Those of us who actually did have to eat mac and cheese and boxed wine and all the bullshit for years, never knowing whether we'd be able to afford the clothes that we're sitting in today. Fuck him.

Speaker 18 He had so many hands up. And I'd respect him if he came out and said, I was very, very lucky my family connections.
We weren't rich, but we had this great connection, the Gettys.

Speaker 18 They really helped me. And that's what makes me different from most people who had to claw their ways up.
And that's why I want to help those people. That's not his story.
He's dishonest.

Speaker 25 So I'm going to put you down as undecided.

Speaker 18 Andy,

Speaker 24 settle the argument, please.

Speaker 38 Well,

Speaker 38 I'll put it this way. I think that

Speaker 38 he has an authenticity authenticity problem, and he's trying to solve it

Speaker 38 by being even more inauthentic.

Speaker 38 And I think that's the problem here, is that I agree with you that if he just came out and sort of was honest about the mistakes he's made in life and the things that went well and things that didn't go well, people might be interested in that.

Speaker 38 He seems incapable of that.

Speaker 38 And I think his slickness is both his superpower and his Achilles heel because I think people see through it.

Speaker 38 But nonetheless, he is at the top of most of the polls that we're looking at right now. He's coming off this great big win on the redistricting in California.
He's set himself up as the anti-Trump.

Speaker 38 The rest of the field is kind of fumbling while he seems to be moving forward. So he's a formidable politician, no matter how you look at it.

Speaker 38 And he's got to run it on his record in California. I think that's what people really care about, not his,

Speaker 24 by the way.

Speaker 18 Which is also not great. But he's pulling a Jasmine Crockett right now because she launched her U.S.
Senate campaign by just like, she defines herself around Trump.

Speaker 18 It's all Trump's criticisms of her, right? And look what he just put out today. Gavin Newsom, not on the heels of that redistricting win, which you can't take away from him.
He did have.

Speaker 18 This is what he just dropped. SOT Zero.
Watch. It's an AI video he made.

Speaker 18 It's Trump, Hegseth, and Stephen Miller. Is that who it is over there? Yeah.

Speaker 18 In In handcuffs, in the back of a police car, it looks like crying, putting their faces in their hands. Now their hands are behind their back.

Speaker 18 The handcuffs are behind their back, and they're walking like a perp walk in their suits like they're criminals. Andy, you're making faces I've never seen you make before.

Speaker 38 That's the first I've seen that video. That's new to me.
I hate this use of AI in these ads. I think it's terrible that they do it.

Speaker 38 I'm not sure what the message of that is.

Speaker 42 Well, I can guess what the message is, but why today?

Speaker 31 And

Speaker 31 yeah,

Speaker 31 I think that's bad politics.

Speaker 32 I think they're responding to a White House post

Speaker 32 that said something about it's cuffing season or cuffing season or something like that. And so, but look, he has been very active on his team on social media and in a way that...

Speaker 32 quite frankly a lot of people myself included thought was really kind of cringey and and hokey but nevertheless if you operate under the theory that any publicity is good publicity,

Speaker 32 he has been able to keep himself in the news and at the top of the heap of the Democratic Party, even while

Speaker 32 Kamala's been doing her book tour and trying to get her reset and get back in the game. And you've got J.B.
Pritzker, my governor here in Illinois, who's been battling Trump in Chicago and all that.

Speaker 32 And so Gavin Newsom has managed to stay relevant.

Speaker 32 The question is, you know,

Speaker 32 it's so early now. Like, is there, a,

Speaker 32 can people be overexposed? Can Gavin Newsom, can we get too much of him too soon where people are just like, oh, I can't handle any more Gavin Newsom.

Speaker 32 He's got this little, the way he uses his hands when he talks.

Speaker 18 I mean, it's, it's, it's weird.

Speaker 26 It's a little weird. Yeah.

Speaker 25 Do you guys remember it was only a year ago, two years ago, he, he, Ron DeSantis was his foil in the Republican Party, and he picked fights with DeSantis everywhere he went.

Speaker 26 He showed up.

Speaker 52 He debated on Hannity. Did a debate.
That's right.

Speaker 25 He showed up in Simi Valley at the Reagan Library for the first debate. Trump,

Speaker 25 deciding quite properly, as it turns out, that he wasn't even going to dignify these people with debates. Trump treated himself as the nominee in waiting, and that turned out to be right.

Speaker 25 But we didn't know that at the time. And Newsom came down.
He's the governor. I said, what are you doing here?

Speaker 25 He's told people, well, I'm the governor of the state, and it's a beautiful library. And I just want to welcome all the press and the Republicans to,

Speaker 25 you know, the Reagan Library. And of course, then he had, the real reason he was there is to set a trap for Ron Ron DeSantis, who he thought was going to be the nominee.

Speaker 25 And he was going to be the rival. And they debated.
And you guys said,

Speaker 25 but the thing about Sean Hannity that was so interesting to me, Hannity moderated the debate. And Hannity agrees on issues with everything Ron DeSantis said and nothing Gavin Newsom says.

Speaker 25 And yet Hannity clearly liked Gavin Newsom more than he liked Ron DeSantis. And

Speaker 25 that was the first clue to me that this guy had the kind of charisma maybe that would translate to a presidential run. It was Sean Hannity who gave me that idea.

Speaker 18 It's now called Riz.

Speaker 18 I just want you to know that.

Speaker 18 Kids have gotten rid of the first and the last part of that word.

Speaker 25 I don't know why they do what they do.

Speaker 18 Stand by, you guys, because there's a couple more things I want to discuss with you. We'll do it on the opposite side of this break.
Don't go away. RCP is still here.
And then later, Doug Brunt.

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Speaker 1 Tackle the cost of living crisis or get the hell out of the way.

Speaker 3 I'm Tom Steyer.

Speaker 4 I wanted to build a business here.

Speaker 2 Now it's worth billions of dollars.

Speaker 5 And I walked away from it because I wanted to give back to California.

Speaker 6 We need to get back to basics.

Speaker 1 Homes you can afford, cut utility rates by 25%, and make California a top 10 education state again.

Speaker 9 Sacramento politicians are afraid to change up this system.

Speaker 10 I'm not.

Speaker 11 I'm Tom Steyer, and I'm running for governor.

Speaker 12 Ad paid for by Steyer for Governor 2026.

Speaker 18 Back with me now, the guys from Real Clear Politics, which you can get as a podcast on YouTube or listen live every day at 11 a.m. Eastern on the Megan Kelly channel.
That's channel 111 on SiriusXM.

Speaker 18 Okay, guys, so you may not know this, but on December 12th at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C.,

Speaker 18 they will present the Walter Cronkite Awards for excellence in political journalism. And not only are none of us

Speaker 18 Times person of the year, but none of us are getting a Walter Cronkite Award for Excellence in Political Journalism. And this too is bullshit.

Speaker 29 It's bullshit.

Speaker 18 Why isn't Susan Crabtree getting one of these awards for all the breaking stuff she did around Butler and since then on the Secret Service and so many Inside Washington stories, or just RCP in general, which has a great staple of reporters?

Speaker 18 Why aren't you getting it? Instead of, I'm not not kidding,

Speaker 18 Rachel Maddow.

Speaker 18 Rachel Maddow?

Speaker 24 For what category?

Speaker 28 She works. She's a conspiracy theorist on camera.

Speaker 18 But truly, like, you can, like, there's no bigger conspiracy theorist than Rachel Maddow. I mean, that's all she's peddled in for the past 10 years.
And she never owned it.

Speaker 18 She was on one of the late night shows just last week.

Speaker 18 Like, I think that Russia coverage I did has been proven pretty true right now since they're literally taking Kremlin talking points to strike the Ukraine deal. No, no, it hasn't proven true at all.

Speaker 18 You're a liar. Nothing you said was true and you never owned it.
She's getting

Speaker 18 recognition for political, her excellence in political journalism, Carl.

Speaker 18 The award will be handed out by the USA Annenberg School for Communications and Journalism, which is a part of the USC in Los Angeles.

Speaker 18 She's going to get one. And the reason they say these people are getting one is, quote, the message is that these winners, um,

Speaker 18 in by honoring these winners, is that the press is not the enemy of the people, it's the firewall between the public and disinformation,

Speaker 18 abuse of power, and corruption. Rachel Maddow

Speaker 18 and

Speaker 18 Jon Stewart,

Speaker 18 John

Speaker 18 Stewart, who's getting the inaugural award in comedic news and commentary.

Speaker 18 Jon Stewart.

Speaker 18 Greg Gutfeld has 10 times Jon Stewart's ratings and relevance. He is the only thing relevant when it comes to comedic programming.

Speaker 18 And Jon Stewart has, he does not do objective programming on anything. And he doesn't do comedy either.
All he does is bashing of right-wing people. I'll give you one example.
Here he is.

Speaker 50 I think you are not living in the planet most Americans are, which is why this kind of extremism,

Speaker 50 this anti-white extremism

Speaker 50 is losing popular support.

Speaker 56 This is what happens when white people don't talk about it, is you have racist dog whistle tropes like this. I did not come on

Speaker 56 this show to sit here and argue with another white man. That's one of the reasons that we don't even engage with white men at Race to Dinner.

Speaker 56 So, come out.

Speaker 56 You know, because quite honestly, if white men were going to do something about racism, you had 400 years. You could have done it.

Speaker 18 I could have snapshots. Stuart's laughing.

Speaker 57 I would finger snap right now.

Speaker 23 Let's remove into the front. I'm not sure if you're not calling me a racist, Sean.

Speaker 40 You've been doing a pretty good job with it yourself there.

Speaker 18 That's Andrew Sullivan. I mean, truly, like, deeply respected, deeply thoughtful, you know, center-right, but not far-right.
openly gay man. Like, F him for the way he and his guests treated Andrew.

Speaker 18 And that's what you could get you an award now from the Cronkite Center, guys, from the Walter Cronkite Award for Excellence in Political. This is disgusting.

Speaker 24 Thoughts?

Speaker 11 I have one.

Speaker 25 I didn't know her name, but the woman said, if white men want to do anything about racism.

Speaker 18 That's a lady, Carl, who you can pay $5,000 to to show up at your next real clear politics holiday party and call you all racists. That's what she

Speaker 26 explains.

Speaker 25 We'll probably take a pass on that, but I would, if she, if she, if she crashes the party, I'll tell her that

Speaker 25 this country had a civil war and that white men from every northern state marched into battle singing the John Brown hymn. And, you know,

Speaker 25 two, 300,000 of them died fighting in Mr. Lincoln's army to free the slaves.
And, you know, that.

Speaker 25 That strikes me as maybe a little more of a sacrifice than going on Jon Stewart's show and pretending to care.

Speaker 18 This just in Carl Cannon is out of the running for next year's Walter Cronkite Awards

Speaker 24 in political journalism.

Speaker 18 This is not that kind of commentary. It's not what gets you over the line, my friend.
But to me, it's just disgusting. They're bastardizing the name of Walter Cronkite.

Speaker 18 They've been doing it for a long time. But there was a time when those Cronkite Awards meant something.

Speaker 18 And now, like the third person who's getting one, there's actually a couple more, but Scott Pelly.

Speaker 18 Scott Pelley, guys,

Speaker 18 this, that's absurd.

Speaker 18 Scott Pelly's most memorable moment over the past couple of years has been his attempted cross-examination of the Moms for Liberty founders, where he tried to tell them that they're not peddling smut to children in the K through eight schools in the form of books that the kids are required to read and that the parents can't opt out of.

Speaker 18 You know how wrong he was? The U.S. Supreme Court just so found that it's happening and

Speaker 18 threw out the program that wouldn't allow Maryland parents to pull their children out of those classes. That's how wrong he was.
The U.S. Supreme Court said so.
But he gets awarded this,

Speaker 18 like, the Walter Cronkite Award for Excellence in Political Journalism, Tom.

Speaker 32 Well, I mean, these things have become just a caricature and a parody of themselves, right?

Speaker 32 And, you know, I heard your clip, you were talking about the Golden Globes and how when you worked at Fox, like Roger Ailes wouldn't even let you guys apply for any award because they were all

Speaker 20 right.

Speaker 32 They were all from leftists, for leftists.

Speaker 32 And that's exactly what this is um there was a prize earlier this year the dow prize has been this was the second year of the dow prize which is basically awards not just conservative uh journalism but but sort of middle of the road what people what used to be sort of objective journalism and also local journalism it that was done in in uh across the country and You mentioned Susan Crabtree.

Speaker 32 She won it, not last, not this past year, but the year before that, the inaugural Dow Prize for her work on the Secret Service.

Speaker 32 And this year, the Federalists, the whole team won it for their coverage of the sort of Russian.

Speaker 18 That was well-deserved, too.

Speaker 32 Yeah. So unfortunately, like the,

Speaker 32 I was going to say the right, and to a certain extent, it is the right, but it's not like the hard right. It's more like the center right,

Speaker 32 had to sort of stand up their own. infrastructure to provide to see their work recognized because it it was never getting recognized by the usual suspects.

Speaker 32 They've been doing this, patting each other on the back, giving each other Pulitzers for the Russia coverage and, like, you know, the COVID coverage and all this stuff.

Speaker 32 I mean, it's, it's really, it's become a joke.

Speaker 32 And I think most people recognize it as such, except for the Rachel Maddows and Jon Stewarts of the world who are like, oh, this is such a prestigious honor.

Speaker 20 I can't, you know,

Speaker 18 you know how

Speaker 20 lucky I am.

Speaker 32 I know, exactly. And it's like, give me a brandy.
Most people are.

Speaker 18 The Scott Pelley Award is based on his May 2025 reporting on the law firms versus Trump story.

Speaker 18 That was a big story when Trump was saying the federal government is not going to do business with certain law firms,

Speaker 18 like the ones who are hiring my chief antagonists and the ones who have spent the past five years suing me. And so, no question, fair game to cover that story.

Speaker 18 But how would you do it if you had, say, Mark Elias as your star witness on 60 Minutes and your Scott Pelley?

Speaker 18 Mark Elias, okay, the guy who was the chief architect, one of them, of the Democrats-Russian collusion hoax, who was out there on behalf of Hillary Clinton campaign, pushing the lies about Trump and Alphabank and the servers and the basement, all of which were lies, and they knew they were lies, and they were using them to bring down Trump.

Speaker 18 We know all of this from the classified materials that have been released over the past six months. And you have Mark Elias sitting there and you're Scott Pelley.
You might raise it.

Speaker 18 You might at least raise it when you talk about why Trump hates his firm. and why he's getting so unfairly targeted by the evil Trump.
That didn't happen.

Speaker 18 Here's a little from that segment for which Scott Pelley's now being honored.

Speaker 59 It was nearly impossible to get anyone on camera for this story because of the fear now running through our system of justice.

Speaker 59 Many firms and attorneys have been targeted, among them Mark Elias, a longtime opponent of Trump, who is the only lawyer the president has named who was willing to appear. on 60 Minutes.

Speaker 59 Elias and others are warning that Trump's assault on the legal profession threatens the rule of law itself. Elias says that for him, it began with the president's personal grudge.

Speaker 57 Donald Trump hates me because I fight hard and I fight for free and fair elections.

Speaker 57 I insist on fighting for democracy in court, fighting for voting rights in court, and insist on telling the truth about what the outcome of the 2020 election was.

Speaker 18 Oh my God.

Speaker 11 Andy.

Speaker 35 Well, see,

Speaker 38 I'd like to know a year from now after Barry Weiss has had some impact at CBS,

Speaker 38 how many awards 60 Minutes will win like this.

Speaker 18 That will be everyone's fired.

Speaker 38 My other thing is, you know,

Speaker 38 Rachel Maddow, I congratulate her, but there probably will be more people in that room watching her get the award than there are people watching her on MS Now. So

Speaker 38 there is some compensation there for her, I think.

Speaker 18 This is just a disgrace. I'm sorry.
I don't think anybody cares about the awards.

Speaker 19 Go ahead.

Speaker 32 I'm sorry. I was just going to say, people don't know what a

Speaker 32 sort of, or maybe

Speaker 32 they should be

Speaker 32 told what a sort of nefarious character Mark Elias is, too, and to let him sort of have sort of free reign to spin his yarn about how he's a real defender of democracy. I mean,

Speaker 32 this guy is one of the most odious characters.

Speaker 11 Wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute.

Speaker 25 Let's not use words like nefarious and odious.

Speaker 25 He's a Democratic Party already.

Speaker 26 He's a.

Speaker 18 Odious, odious, odious.

Speaker 48 Okay.

Speaker 28 That's my girl.

Speaker 29 Megan, you see what I have to deal with every single day?

Speaker 24 Good gracious.

Speaker 18 This must be very hard.

Speaker 25 But those are subjective feelings that you have.

Speaker 25 But the objective truth is that this guy is a paid operative for the Democratic National Committee, and he's made millions of dollars attacking Republicans, not voting for voting rights, but for voting procedures that help Democrats.

Speaker 25 And we don't have to demonize him to point out that it's bad journalism to present him as a neutral arbiter.

Speaker 26 He's a player.

Speaker 18 Yes, why would Trump want to do business with his law firm?

Speaker 24 Why? No, it's true.

Speaker 18 And so, but unfortunately, instead of being excluded from any sort of an award for that ridiculous sin of journalistic coverage, Scott Pelley now gets honored for the very report itself.

Speaker 18 And this will be him at the awards with his glasses down at the end of his nose.

Speaker 18 I was right all along. I'm better than you, and we all know that because I host 60 Minutes.

Speaker 18 And if Barry is the woman I think and believe her to be, she will fire his ass before we are halfway through 2026. That's my prediction.
He's fucking out of there. Look forward to that news.

Speaker 18 And I got to go. I'm out of here too, because Doug Bruns in the wings and he's got an eggnog for me, unlike you fine gentlemen.
So I got to to go. All right.

Speaker 18 Love you guys. Thanks for coming on.
Thank you.

Speaker 26 Thank you.

Speaker 18 All right. We'll see you soon.

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Speaker 18 I'm joined now by a very very special guest, a New York Times best-selling author, host of the Excellent Podcast, dedicated with Doug Brunt, and the author of the upcoming book, The Lost Empire of Emmanuel Nobel, Romanovs, Revolutionaries, and the Forgotten Titan who fueled the world.

Speaker 18 Doug happens to be my husband as well, so that worked out well.

Speaker 11 Hi, honey.

Speaker 31 Hi. It's great to be here.

Speaker 18 Congrats. So here is...
The galley copy of the new book, which is just so cool looking. It's beautiful, The Lost Empire of Emmanuel Nobel.

Speaker 18 And it looks kind of similar, similar style to your last big New York Times bestseller, The Mysterious Case of Rudolph Diesel.

Speaker 18 Lost Empire of Emmanuel Nobel will not be available until May, but they can pre-order it today, have it in time for Father's Day. Yeah.
And tell us what The Lost Empire of Emmanuel Nobel is about.

Speaker 45 Well, it's by getting the galleys is such a nice moment.

Speaker 45 We open the box, you know, as a family around the dining room table and you pull them out and you see it and you hold it in your hands after years of working on it.

Speaker 45 It is a companion book to the diesel book.

Speaker 64 Emmanuel Nobel has an appearance in the Rudolph Diesel story.

Speaker 18 But you don't have to have read Diesel in order to read it.

Speaker 45 It can be out of sequence. And in fact, I haven't said this really.

Speaker 37 The only people who know this next piece are you and my editor and a few people in archives around the world, but I'm working on a third, which will be, we'll complete a trilogy of these three turn-of-the-century characters.

Speaker 45 Emmanuel Nobel essentially established the Russian oil industry along the Caspian Sea in southern Russia. So by 1900, he and his family had built an oil business larger than standard oil.

Speaker 45 And in World War I, he controlled more oil than anyone else on the planet.

Speaker 65 So it was this huge prize sitting in southern Russia that Germany, the Brits, the Bolsheviks, you know, the communists, Japan, everybody wanted to get to the Nobel oil because they had essentially developed a whole oil infrastructure that was superior to anything else in the world.

Speaker 29 Superior to Rockefeller.

Speaker 18 That's crazy.

Speaker 66 It's superior to Rockefeller.

Speaker 64 And yet, for reasons explained in the book, Nobel has been obliterated from history.

Speaker 53 Totally.

Speaker 65 So this brings him back to life and tells us.

Speaker 18 The only Nobel anybody knows is Alfred Nobel, who started the Nobel Prizes. This is Emmanuel Nobel, his nephew, built a totally different, bigger fortune that has been totally forgotten, wiped out.

Speaker 18 His name is not really known at all in connection with the awards. That's all the Uncle Alfred who did dynamite.
That was his business. And it's, it's, do you reveal why? But I mean, like.
A little.

Speaker 65 I mean, it has to, of course, when the communists took over, Stalin and Lenin, they nationalized all these businesses.

Speaker 47 But everyone, even in that time, even when the Bolsheviks had taken over, everyone thought the communists are going to last about three days.

Speaker 63 And so there's an interesting negotiation between Standard Oil and Rockefeller and Nobel about all these Russian assets of petroleum and what to do with them because nobody believes Lenin's going to last.

Speaker 45 And with regard to the prize, though,

Speaker 63 So Alfred Nobel and the prizes, he was an investor in the oil business of his brothers and nephew.

Speaker 45 But the prize wouldn't exist if it wasn't for Emmanuel either.

Speaker 63 And there are two funny stories about that.

Speaker 64 When Emmanuel's father, Ludwig, dies, Alfred and Ludwig are huge celebrities around the world.

Speaker 61 And the newspapers in France, where Alfred lives, mistakes who's died.

Speaker 65 They thought Alfred died. So they print this obituary for Alfred Nobel, calling him, you know, as the inventor of dynamite, this merchant of death and caused more.

Speaker 45 you know, killing than anyone in history.

Speaker 54 And so he reads his own obituary and thinks, holy crap, you know, I need to, this can't be how I'm remembered.

Speaker 45 And so he changes his will to establish the prize and gives, you know, tons of his money away. And of course, all his, you know, after he dies, all the other Nobel people are like, you must be joking.

Speaker 70 Like the fortune's going to this crazy prize, including the king of Sweden, who pulls Emmanuel aside.

Speaker 53 And Emmanuel's in charge of the estate, basically, for his uncle Alfred and the prize.

Speaker 64 And everyone in the family is fighting it.

Speaker 45 The king of Sweden is like, you don't want to pay attention to these crazy pacifists.

Speaker 69 This is nonsense.

Speaker 45 You know, you should take care of your family and put all the money toward that.

Speaker 45 So Emmanuel stands up to the king of Sweden and says, no, no, no, we're going to, you know, I'm taking my role as the executor physical.

Speaker 44 Seriously, we're going to have the prize.

Speaker 39 And so he, at the last second, rescues the prize.

Speaker 18 Had it not been for Emmanuel Houston. But the funny thing is like you think about,

Speaker 18 you know, Russia, and you know, they've got one huge asset. Well, two.
One is oil and two is their ability to mess with you online.

Speaker 29 Right.

Speaker 18 Like those are two big assets that they have. Those are their two primary weapons.
There's also the matter of nuclear weapons.

Speaker 18 But in any event, this is their main source of income is their petroleum industry. And it wasn't theirs and they didn't invent it.

Speaker 18 And actually, nobody was doing it at all in Russia until Emmanuel Nobel came along and it was like, hey, look at all this stuff. This actually looks quite interesting.

Speaker 35 When they first bought land in

Speaker 65 the Caucasus, near in present-day Azerbaijan along the Caspian Sea, people were skimming oil out of puddles.

Speaker 58 There was no drilling.

Speaker 53 Any wells that were dug were dug by hand with spades.

Speaker 65 So they come down there with great, they are chemists and engineers by trade.

Speaker 64 And so they come down there and they completely turn it around.

Speaker 65 But this was in the 1870s, in the time of the czars. So the book has these amazing detours through history that include the Rothschilds and Rockefellers and Dostoevsky and Tabernacle.

Speaker 18 And I was on Stalin. I learned so much about Joseph Stalin that I did not know.
And you personalize his backstory in a way that I didn't know.

Speaker 18 Like, how did he grow up to be this murderous, crazy dude? And now I know. I mean, you actually have a lot of backstory on Stalin.

Speaker 18 And you see the rise of these two men, very, very different in character, but in strength. They were equals for a long, long time,

Speaker 18 Emmanuel Nobel and Joseph Stalin. So you learn a ton about world history, about Russia, everything that Russia is today is explained in this book.

Speaker 18 But you don't feel like you're learning. You feel like you're just getting like a caper.

Speaker 65 Well, yeah, it's written ideally in a very novelistic way. It's a ripping read.

Speaker 45 I mean, you go through it, but it has these fun detours, but it is a piece of history.

Speaker 64 And Stalin, as you say, grew up as a neighbor to Nobel in southern Russia.

Speaker 45 He grew up in Georgia, which is between the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea.

Speaker 61 And he actually worked in the oil fields of the Nobels and the Rothschilds, who are another big figure in Russian oil.

Speaker 45 And so Emmanuel Nobel and Joseph Stalin, they're sort of like these counterpoints to each other.

Speaker 65 And Stalin's looking at these oil capitalists, industrialists with envy and hatred.

Speaker 64 And, you know, ultimately, you know, the whole book brings this collision you know is coming.

Speaker 63 Yeah.

Speaker 18 He was looking at Nobel's oil the same way. Zoran Mamdani is looking at the billionaires in New York.
All right. Now, so don't forget, it's called The Lost Empire of Emmanuel Nobel by Douglas Brunt.

Speaker 18 You can get your pre-order right now. That would help Doug out and yours truly because I'd love to see the public.

Speaker 52 And avoid the magic M of Pub Day. Like Diesel sold out.

Speaker 63 People couldn't get it for like two months because Simon and Schuster had to go back and print more copies.

Speaker 45 If you pre-order it now, it shows up on your doorstep or your bookstore has it.

Speaker 18 And it's all easy. You don't have to wait.
And that's happening right now with Charlie's book where they've already sold out.

Speaker 37 You're going to have to wait months for his book.

Speaker 18 They always underestimate anybody. who's conservative or married to a conservative.

Speaker 41 Conservative, Jason.

Speaker 18 Yeah, they do because they just assume there's no audience for that because that's not the world in which these book publishers live. So it's called The Lost Empire of Emmanuel Nobel.

Speaker 18 Get your copy now. Now, more importantly, what do we have here with us?

Speaker 27 Yes, my God.

Speaker 18 And explain what happens on dedicated.

Speaker 45 All right, first, we've got, we have our Jack Carr tumblers with the, I don't know if it can show up here with the, with the ice, but it's got the tomahawk navy seal thing.

Speaker 47 So shout out to Jack Carr.

Speaker 41 Merry Jack. Christmas.

Speaker 37 Thank you for the glasses.

Speaker 21 We're going to have a little traditional eggnog with bourbon.

Speaker 18 It's organic. It's healthy.

Speaker 62 Locale organic.

Speaker 18 It's like having an egg.

Speaker 64 We learned that lesson a few years ago.

Speaker 29 Yes, exactly.

Speaker 61 We'll do it with rye, Mictor's rye.

Speaker 18 Yeah,

Speaker 18 what officially goes in

Speaker 18 an eggnog?

Speaker 37 Some people do bourbon, some do rum, some do both.

Speaker 18 And what are we doing?

Speaker 37 Well, Rye, which is basically bourbon. Okay.

Speaker 18 The reason that we're doing this is it's eggnog, and why not? It's that time of year. But B, on Doug's podcast, which is called Dedicated with Doug Brunt, where he interviews authors.

Speaker 18 He both interviews authors and talks about their books, and he always pours a cocktail of choice.

Speaker 18 Could be virgin, could be alcoholic. This one happens to be alcoholic.

Speaker 60 It's almost almost always alcoholic, thank God.

Speaker 37 And everyone drinks the drink.

Speaker 61 Michael Lewis was on the other day, and he's like, Do people actually drink the drink?

Speaker 39 He had a Sazerac, by the way, which is like the New Orleans cocktail.

Speaker 29 Sazerac? Yeah, it's basically

Speaker 37 similar to an old-fashioned.

Speaker 18 Now he's doing the nutmeg.

Speaker 71 Nutmeg over the.

Speaker 18 Didn't we do this last year? Didn't we do the eggnog last year? We did.

Speaker 58 I think I had to read your ad by the end, or so.

Speaker 37 Maybe that was a different show.

Speaker 29 Cheers, then.

Speaker 31 Merry Christmas.

Speaker 31 Love you.

Speaker 18 Oh, yeah, that's tasty.

Speaker 45 Our first eggnog of the season.

Speaker 18 That's delicious. I know.
Well done. Yeah, no, and we talked about how that one year we were drinking eggnogs like they were going out of style when we were young.
We didn't have kids.

Speaker 18 And we both blew up like ticks. We were huge.

Speaker 52 Looking in the mirror, like something's changed in our diet.

Speaker 18 Is it possible?

Speaker 24 It's the eggnog.

Speaker 54 The full fat eggnog.

Speaker 18 And then we looked at the nutritional information on the box.

Speaker 27 Which, by the way, the horrible fat isn't a whole lot better.

Speaker 18 What is it? What does it say?

Speaker 31 Well, 150 calories.

Speaker 37 You know, a lot of cholesterol in there. Yeah.

Speaker 45 A lot of sodium in there.

Speaker 18 Oh, really? Sodium? Decent amount of sugar. Nothing is worse than the Martha Stewart recipe.
I mentioned this to you this morning over coffee. I just saw it on X.
Steve, I'll send it to you.

Speaker 18 We had to drop it in for listening audience. This thing was loaded with alcohol.
First of all, it was like so many eggs and so much sugar and so much heavy cream.

Speaker 18 And then on top of that, it was like three cups of bourbon, three cups of rum, and three cups of another alcohol.

Speaker 37 Martha gets after it.

Speaker 18 You're phoning it in with this rye business.

Speaker 29 That's putting me to shame.

Speaker 18 I don't know what you were thinking.

Speaker 18 Usually men are trying to get women intoxicated. We're on set.

Speaker 42 You can't like, but we can definitely have more booze, but getting involved in eggs and cream and stuff.

Speaker 31 We're not going to do that here.

Speaker 18 No, you don't want egg cream of any kind. And she stuffed the yolks in there, too.
It was pretty nasty. So we're getting ready for our holidays.

Speaker 18 What have you been doing to get ready?

Speaker 45 I said a few present suggestions, which is more than I normally do.

Speaker 18 I'm only laughing because every woman knows that's a joke.

Speaker 20 And every guy gets defensive.

Speaker 18 No, we kind of have our shared responsibilities, I would say. But generally, the Christmas shopping is on my list because I want it to be.

Speaker 11 Yeah.

Speaker 45 Well, you're so good at it. It's amazing.

Speaker 37 It's like a, you know, Santa Claus threw up under the tree.

Speaker 63 There's like a million presents everywhere.

Speaker 18 He helps me. And that's why I have an ace in the hole.
I have a secret weapon.

Speaker 29 You have a little elf up in the north. Yeah.

Speaker 18 So I don't really need Doug Bruns' help because I've got Santa.

Speaker 24 Although I do help a little.

Speaker 19 You do help.

Speaker 18 But we were talking a little bit about our Christmas traditions. I was doing this for Steven Crowder.
And there's so many that we do. Like we go to Montana every year.
Yeah.

Speaker 18 And there's a bunch of stuff we do over there. But what would you say? Like, I've asked what, what's our top or what's our couple of top Christmas traditions that we have?

Speaker 40 I mean, well, we're still, you know, earmuffs on the kids.

Speaker 37 We're still firing away with the elf every morning and the

Speaker 11 advent.

Speaker 31 They know.

Speaker 45 And

Speaker 65 we try to carol as much as possible, but that's not every year.

Speaker 53 We do have a great, like almost 20 years tradition of getting lunch with a particular group of friends in the city.

Speaker 64 It used to be at the 21 Club. Hello, that's got to open back up.
21 Club.

Speaker 69 Yep.

Speaker 69 But we have found new venues for that.

Speaker 18 Wait a minute. What was the second thing you said?

Speaker 31 The Advent Calling? The Caroling.

Speaker 62 Oh, the Caroling.

Speaker 18 Do we really? That's not really a tradition. I said that's not an issue.
Should we reveal what happened last year when we caroled?

Speaker 66 Yes, it's embarrassing, but it's a funny story.

Speaker 24 It's a disaster.

Speaker 18 Yeah.

Speaker 24 No one wanted us.

Speaker 35 Our first stop was actually pretty good.

Speaker 45 They were amazed.

Speaker 40 They're like, this is so great.

Speaker 64 And we kind of knew them. And they thought, this is great.

Speaker 40 And the the other dad was like, I'm coming with you.

Speaker 35 And he turns around. It's like, let's go.

Speaker 29 And they're all like, screw you, dad.

Speaker 65 He's like, next year, maybe I can join you.

Speaker 40 But he was totally supportive.

Speaker 18 It was just the five of us.

Speaker 40 Yeah, just the five of our family.

Speaker 45 And so then we go to the next house.

Speaker 21 From that point forward, it went down.

Speaker 65 Like, nobody really wanted. They're like, it's cold outside.

Speaker 35 Why'd I have to stand by this open door?

Speaker 18 There was one moment where we were waiting across the street. We had our Santa hats on.
We were freezing. And this SUV drove by with the window down.
He just kind of waved at us.

Speaker 18 And we were like, chickle bell, chickle bell, chickle bell.

Speaker 18 Shaking the bell out of us. It was like an assault of Christmas Carol.

Speaker 65 It was hard to get an audience.

Speaker 18 Everyone was kind of like trying to squeeze the door closed, kind of like, I've got some people inside.

Speaker 18 Yeah, it wasn't, it wasn't the greatest outing. It's probably not going to be a tradition.

Speaker 31 No.

Speaker 18 But I think I'm thinking of things like when we watch It's a Wonderful Life.

Speaker 62 Oh, yeah.

Speaker 73 Yeah.

Speaker 65 So actually, you drive, in addition to getting the presence, you do drive a lot of these things.

Speaker 63 We do, it's a wonderful life.

Speaker 18 But everyone's a gamer.

Speaker 63 With the salt and the bread and the whole bit, and you know, ringing the bell when Clarence makes an appearance on screen.

Speaker 18 And hissing when Paul.

Speaker 45 You and I, like the greatest tradition, bar none, of you know, Christmas aside, you and I start every morning with a cup of coffee.

Speaker 65 We've got the coffee machine in the bedroom. It's set the night before with the alarm.

Speaker 45 It goes off, and we start each day with 20 minutes together talking, having coffee.

Speaker 64 Sometimes listening to AM update, but other times watching Christmas in Connecticut for a few minutes.

Speaker 64 It's just an awesome way to enter the day and enter the world, you know, having connected a little bit.

Speaker 18 It's so true. And right now, we have a little tree in our bedroom.

Speaker 18 we've got some christmas lights and that that makes it magical too you know like turn that on the only thing doug and i argue about in the bedroom is the temperature yes right yeah so now we both like it cool when we sleep that makes sense everybody should have it they say 68 degrees it's good for your health it's good for your sleep but

Speaker 18 doug would like the the thermometer to be turned down much earlier in the evening so that it's like cold when we arrive yes that makes me irritable we climb in bed i'm like it's so effing hot in here here.

Speaker 18 And I'm like, it's freezing.

Speaker 18 Because you can't function in there when it's 68 degrees. Like when you're doing your nighttime routine, you're washing your face, you're in your nightgown.

Speaker 18 You're freezing your ass off if it's 68 degrees. You've got a heated floor, though.

Speaker 41 You should just sort of like get low.

Speaker 18 That is a luxury, by the way. When we bought the house, it had a heated floor.
I've never had that. And it's wonderful.

Speaker 61 It makes a nice difference.

Speaker 29 Damn.

Speaker 18 Damn, as they say.

Speaker 18 So we're going to go to Montana. It's not snowy there, unfortunately.

Speaker 63 No, early, early conditions.

Speaker 68 But, you know,

Speaker 63 we're making some.

Speaker 45 Yes, for me, like I'm happy to do a couple groom blues and then go sit by the fire, play poker with the kids, and yes, like never get out of pajamas.

Speaker 14 Like a couple days like that would be great.

Speaker 18 Doesn't that sound like heaven on earth for two weeks? It's going out there. We've got our annual costume night.
I recommend this to everybody. You can go big.

Speaker 18 I mean, obviously I go big because I love costumes, but you can do this on a shoestring budget too. You just go to the local costume store and you get a couple of costumes for your family.

Speaker 18 It does not have to be fancy, but it needs to be a theme. It needs to be theme-related.
And then the way we do it in our family is on costume night. I like controlling it.

Speaker 18 So I'll put out the costumes on people's beds. You'll keep the kids busy.
They all know it's costume night. It's super fungus.

Speaker 58 Nobody knows what the theme is.

Speaker 63 Meg plans is every single year.

Speaker 65 And then the theme's amazing.

Speaker 45 One year was Back to the Future.

Speaker 65 One year we had watched the Ten Commandments.

Speaker 45 So I was Moses and someone was the various kings.

Speaker 18 You were the best. Oh, look, here's Back to the Future.
Oh, nice. Blurred the kids' faces.
You were the best McFly. You were George McFly, the dad.
Oh, yeah. It was Marty.

Speaker 18 And you, oh, you've got to do your imitation. Can you do your George McFly imitation?

Speaker 11 All right.

Speaker 58 Take your damn hands off her.

Speaker 37 I don't know if I nailed that. You did.

Speaker 18 Exactly.

Speaker 18 And then we did Moses. We did Ten Commandments, and you made an amazing Moses.

Speaker 18 Years earlier, this was good. I mean, this, we went all out for the Moses.
We got Pharaoh represented. We got Zephyr.

Speaker 45 If there's no one in the family who does this amount of planning as you do, which is amazing, because everyone fully appreciates, but even like a wig night is kind of fun if you're recommending to the audience.

Speaker 44 We have a closet full of wigs.

Speaker 39 It's true.

Speaker 18 And it's fun just to, like, I don't know. Somehow, things are more fun in wigs.
Yeah. Right? It's like you could just be eating your dinner.
We don't actually do anything.

Speaker 18 Like, somebody's asking, what do you do in costume? We're like, nothing. We just put them on.

Speaker 54 Laugh at each other.

Speaker 18 There's the wonka. That was a great one.
Here's the funny story about these these two people in there as Violet Beauregard and Augustus Gloop.

Speaker 18 They've since become dear friends of ours, but that night we didn't know them at all.

Speaker 18 So we were expecting two family members who then couldn't come. It was like right after COVID.
That was either 2020 or 2021.

Speaker 18 It was right when things were still nutty because of COVID and their flights got canceled. And these two go to our school and we had just met them and we're like, so would you like to come for dinner?

Speaker 18 They're like, sure, we'd love to. And we're like, and could you wear some weird stuff?

Speaker 29 We know exactly how it goes.

Speaker 40 There's no could you wear.

Speaker 71 It's like, here's she, Meg lays down the law.

Speaker 35 When you cross that threshold, you're in her world.

Speaker 41 And she says, off you go.

Speaker 45 And here's your costume.

Speaker 64 And don't come back out until it's on.

Speaker 18 It's kind of the price of admission. Yeah.
Anyway, and we realized too late that Augustus Gloop winds up looking a little like a Hitler youth.

Speaker 18 He's in like a little military outfit with the blonde wig.

Speaker 31 Yeah, it's very like Australian.

Speaker 18 Our friends, Lisa and Chris, were such good sports. They donned the outfits, and it was such a fun.

Speaker 20 I think he sort of entered with a little trepidation, but you know, mid-dinner was loving it.

Speaker 18 Once we got the liquor flowing.

Speaker 14 Exactly.

Speaker 42 Well, that helps with all costumes and wigs.

Speaker 18 But no, so the other piece of costume night is just to order a background from Amazon.

Speaker 18 So if you go into Amazon and you type in 10 Commandments or you type in Back to the Future backdrop, you will pull up so many options for 40 bucks or under. Yeah.

Speaker 18 And 40 bucks for the big one for 8 by 10. But if you want to go smaller, it's much cheaper.

Speaker 18 Anyway, my point is simply for under 150 bucks, you could probably get everybody in your family in a costume and with a backdrop. And that's really the end of it.

Speaker 18 So we'll try to sometimes do like the food that's themed appropriately.

Speaker 18 Like that night, one year we did Karate Kid, Cobra Kai.

Speaker 44 Yeah, that was great.

Speaker 18 We had Asian that night. That's about as much as what, you know,

Speaker 18 it's not that like then you just sit there and you laugh.

Speaker 29 Specials. Yeah.

Speaker 18 Oh, we did have John Kreese do one of those.

Speaker 42 And speaking of like cheap, that was like 30 bucks.

Speaker 54 Yeah,

Speaker 18 one of those services where you can pay an actor to like say something personal.

Speaker 68 And he's like, strike first, you know, getting on with our kids.

Speaker 39 Who, by the way, that was the best 30 bucks we ever spent because the kids were totally into it.

Speaker 18 And he called this the Blunts, I think, instead of the Brunts.

Speaker 69 It was close.

Speaker 18 Whatever. You don't expect perfection from John Crease.

Speaker 18 Anyway, I can't wait for all that stuff to start. It's like that's what makes the two weeks magical.
Like the Christmas is the apex of it.

Speaker 18 But if you put these other things around, then it's not as much of a letdown when Christmas is over. Yeah.
You know, he's telling us that.

Speaker 65 It's also that continents, you know, one of the few times of the year where there aren't obligations all over the kids, especially in us.

Speaker 40 And we get

Speaker 64 tons of time together, high quality, low quality, but it all adds up.

Speaker 63 It's great time together.

Speaker 62 Yeah.

Speaker 18 The poker has become a fun tradition. Yeah.

Speaker 18 The kids are getting more into Texas Hold'em.

Speaker 40 We'd also be able to beat them more easily.

Speaker 35 I know. We'd have the big stack in front of us.

Speaker 31 Now it's

Speaker 18 cheat them without them knowing. One or the other.
But yeah, no, that's been fun. We got to learn some new games.

Speaker 18 The kids are now into Texas Hold'em, which I actually don't totally know how to play Texas Hold'em. You just hold three cards and you play off of.

Speaker 68 You hold two and there's, yeah.

Speaker 65 But it's really, it's like a betting thing.

Speaker 64 Once you learn how to bet, you're good.

Speaker 63 It's basically everything's a poker hand. So we should try that.

Speaker 18 Yeah. Let's do that.
This time next year, we'll be sitting here talking about how well I did at Texas Holdham.

Speaker 11 Done. Okay.

Speaker 18 So let's talk about the news a little bit because it's always fun to get your take on it. And I thought, I saw this article yesterday and I was like, this is a good one for Duggar.

Speaker 18 Here's a headline from the New York Post. Marco Rubio instructs diplomats to use Times New Roman font, eliminating Biden-era DEI initiative.
Did you know there's DEI font?

Speaker 44 I did not.

Speaker 40 By the way, I don't think the takeaway of this story should be that Calibri is woke, exactly.

Speaker 63 But I totally get where Rubio's going on this.

Speaker 18 Calibri does look a little light in the loafers.

Speaker 29 Sometimes a little different, for sure.

Speaker 11 Times New Roman is like bald, bald.

Speaker 18 We're showing it on the screen for the listening. Oh, there's a lot of people.

Speaker 27 Oh, that's YouTube.

Speaker 18 That's perfect. Calibri is like...

Speaker 18 skinny with softer edges and it just it looks a little more feminine I'd say well look I here's here's my overall take on this because I understand what Rubio's doing.

Speaker 65 I'm sure when people heard about this, you can imagine the attacks.

Speaker 45 Like you're running state, and this is what you're going to spend your time on, but it does matter.

Speaker 69 And you know firsthand, when I am working on these books, Simon and Schuser and I spend time on the font.

Speaker 45 Like it's got to match the mission.

Speaker 37 And

Speaker 65 you know, it's your first chance to set the tone, set the atmosphere for the audience that you're engaging.

Speaker 64 The mood.

Speaker 45 It's the last little bit of connection point that you have.

Speaker 73 And it does matter.

Speaker 45 It's why writers, authors, and publishers and editors actually focus on this. The font of different books looks very different depending on what kind of book it is.

Speaker 47 Like if you open George R.

Speaker 63 R.

Speaker 45 Martin's Game of Thrones and you see Times New Roman, you're going to be like, what is this?

Speaker 44 Like the best versions of those books look like it was written by an elf, like Bilbo Bag and something a little medieval and fanciful.

Speaker 37 And

Speaker 39 especially like the first letter of the chapter should look that way.

Speaker 63 And so it's Rubio's way of creating a mindset or creating an atmosphere for the information he's putting out there.

Speaker 60 And you see that dynamic everywhere.

Speaker 65 It's the same as Bill Bratton's broken windows policing.

Speaker 45 You know, you walk into a neighborhood that's full of broken windows and graffiti on the walls and trash on the streets, and that creates a mindset and an atmosphere for crime.

Speaker 73 And Bratton and others before him have proven that if you fix the windows, paint the walls, clean up all the trash and have this beautiful neighborhood, you prevent crime before it starts.

Speaker 45 And it's that same dynamic. It seems like a small thing, but setting that tone, setting the atmosphere matters.

Speaker 18 Like strong, robust language or

Speaker 60 so. I get what he's going.

Speaker 45 If he was going to, the only change I would make is he shouldn't go back to Times New Roman.

Speaker 52 He should do like the Bilbo Baggins handwriting for all of our state communication.

Speaker 45 But actually, that reminds me of a story you were telling me the other day.

Speaker 63 It's the same thing of like the small tonal things we should value and prioritize them more.

Speaker 64 Almost we have to invert our thinking that these things are. more important.

Speaker 45 It's like that Jordan Peterson piece that you were showing me.

Speaker 18 Yeah, that's right. Oh, yeah, that was so good.
It was the Jordan Peterson sound bite on Instagram where he was saying yeah it's great to go to st.

Speaker 18 bart's or aruba and have a margarita you know down on the beach everybody would love that but your life he said in this clip is how your wife greets you uh at the end of the day it's how you are around the dinner table with each other how you're treating each other you know whether you're quote present you know but truly it is like do you feel valued when you walk into the room with your spouse or your kids or your family like that that does make up your life well so many more of our waking hours are spent around that table or or that coffee mug than they are down in, you know, Aruba with a mocktail.

Speaker 63 And they're small and they're often overlooked.

Speaker 52 And it's not, we don't think it's a big deal.

Speaker 65 And yet we really do need to invert how we think about that because that's the biggest deal.

Speaker 72 As Peterson points out, that's 80% of your life, those little moments that add up.

Speaker 67 And so it's, you know, long way of saying I think that's the same thing Rubio is getting at of like, this is the font they're going to be staring at for 10 hours a day.

Speaker 45 Like, this is an opportunity to set an atmosphere, to set a tone.

Speaker 66 This is what I want. What is a telegraph?

Speaker 29 Yeah.

Speaker 66 So it's not, it's not trivial.

Speaker 61 It actually is something.

Speaker 18 Well, this led to a discussion that we had about, like, what, who do you want the kids to marry? You know, and I was saying, my God, they, they all have to marry somebody with a good sense of humor.

Speaker 18 Like, number one.

Speaker 37 Totally. Right.

Speaker 18 And we were talking about this because it's like, you're so lucky in that regard because I, you know, you're very funny.

Speaker 19 I am lucky.

Speaker 18 Yeah, I treasure you.

Speaker 24 Yeah, I will concede, though.

Speaker 45 You are actually the funnier of the two.

Speaker 18 What? That's never been conceded before by anyone.

Speaker 61 Well, I felt under pressure on Aaron and everything.

Speaker 37 No. All fair, I'm going to take it back.

Speaker 19 But we laugh a lot.

Speaker 18 Totally. We laugh at each other.
And our kids are so good.

Speaker 37 All three of them have developed a different but awesome sense of humor.

Speaker 18 Yes, because it is important. Number one, it's important to laugh at life, but it's almost equally important to be able to laugh at yourself and others.
All of those things must be laughed at.

Speaker 18 It's not cruel. Like it's, it's a stress relief mechanism.
I really think it's

Speaker 18 the antidote to cortisol, right? Like just laughing. And life provides so many opportunities.
It could be just a nothing, but like we're constantly making fun of ourselves, you know? And

Speaker 45 I have noticed, I mean, you and I have had these little sidebar conversations when one of our kids isn't hanging in that department.

Speaker 67 Like he gets made fun of, and you can see like he's a little pissed off that he got a little made fun of.

Speaker 20 And we're like, that's not, I mean, we don't pounce on him at that point, but we're like, it's, you know, that's, that's a sign that we need to keep doing that until he gets a little better at that.

Speaker 31 Yeah.

Speaker 42 Otherwise, he's going to, you know, it's not going to work out come college dorm days.

Speaker 64 That's right.

Speaker 18 Life is tough.

Speaker 18 And you really do have to be able to laugh at at all of it or you're not gonna make it very far i really feel like you know my nana i've talked about her on the show too she she died at 101 she only ate processed foods she never exercised a day in her life um so what did she do she laughed a lot she was very funny yeah she had a circle of friends that laughed she was very quick to make fun of herself first and foremost but everyone else as well like i do think it's a it could make the difference between life and death Totally, totally.

Speaker 45 We need to study Nana and we need to study Dick Van Dyke.

Speaker 24 Whatever those two are doing, I'm going to do all of it.

Speaker 18 Well, I was a little concerned about Dick Van Dyke's comments about how he made it to 100.

Speaker 45 He said he was like drinking way too much until his 50s.

Speaker 18 That wasn't the part that concerned me. It was, he said.

Speaker 61 I was sort of on board with that.

Speaker 18 He said he's never,

Speaker 18 it was either he's never hated anyone or he's never been like rageful.

Speaker 11 I was like, uh-oh.

Speaker 35 I don't think he's right about that.

Speaker 31 You know, people can't self-analyze.

Speaker 72 They have no idea.

Speaker 45 We need to analyze him, you know, from the outside.

Speaker 64 It was all the dancing.

Speaker 18 It was the dancing.

Speaker 65 He's skinny. You know, he's a skinny guy.

Speaker 39 That probably helps a lot.

Speaker 18 It was totally the old bamboo and chitty jitty bang.

Speaker 18 Totally. Once you learn that, you keep doing that dance, you live forever.
Yeah. How are we going to do that?

Speaker 37 The old bamboo? Yeah.

Speaker 64 Oh, my God. Yes.

Speaker 39 We have to watch that with the kids.

Speaker 65 I think they're totally up for it.

Speaker 45 They haven't, the kids, we used to watch this movie on a loop about 10 years ago.

Speaker 18 You guys know, Chitty Jitty Bang Bang. Yeah.

Speaker 45 And it's such an amazing movie.

Speaker 73 It does have that AI haircut.

Speaker 45 So I saw your tweet on that, actually, that this was already invented and shitty shitty bang bang.

Speaker 65 But the kids, I think, have like foggy memories of it.

Speaker 63 So I'm excited to see how they see it now.

Speaker 18 I love all parts of it. I love Truly Scrumptious.
I love, love, love Dick Van Dyke. He's just so utterly charming.
I love the...

Speaker 18 apparatus he sets up in their house to cook the breakfast, to lift the blankets off the beds. Yeah.

Speaker 18 It's all great. The villains are great.
Bavaria.

Speaker 62 The whistle thing.

Speaker 31 Yeah,

Speaker 18 that's such a great scene. It's like, who even knew?

Speaker 18 But we had a very funny thing happen with our love of Chitti Chitty Bang Bang over our fakesgiving holiday where we have the family come for fake Thanksgiving, not the actual day, but it makes it easier on everybody who needs to travel.

Speaker 18 And we split the family into two groups to play charades. And our side was coming up with the clues for the other side.

Speaker 18 And then they came up with their clues for us. Now, unbeknownst to our opponents, who are also family members,

Speaker 18 our family is obsessed with Chidi Chitty Bang Bang. We know a lot about Chitty Chitty Bang Bang.
We've seen that movie truly hundreds of times. Yeah, exactly.
So

Speaker 18 there was a joke when we used to watch it.

Speaker 18 Our oldest, Yeats, who was just a little guy at the time, like two or three, he saw this one scene involving this boat, and there were these like rounded things on the boat.

Speaker 65 Like funnels from the top of the boat.

Speaker 18 Okay. Yeah.

Speaker 18 And for whatever, and then the two bad guys hide themselves later in those funnels and go on land and start spying on people and for whatever reason yates always referred to them as the barrels the barrel i want to see the barrels and he would do this with his hands for listening audience i'm like twinkling my fingers together it needs to be like the barrels well i got up there and i pulled my clue from the other side and it the movie was chitty chitty bang bang and you were on my team so i needed to act this out to you and of course they're wondering i'm sure the other side is like okay maybe she'll do bang bang how's she gonna get this and all i said was movie.

Speaker 18 And then I did the finger motion. And you were like, chitty, chitty, bang.

Speaker 45 At which point, there's no convincing them that we haven't been cheating.

Speaker 21 Like, there's nothing you can say.

Speaker 71 They're like, no, no, no.

Speaker 52 You obviously cheated.

Speaker 18 None whatsoever. And we did crush them.

Speaker 45 I mean, it was embarrassing by the end.

Speaker 37 We had to take pity on them.

Speaker 29 It was brutal. It was so fun.

Speaker 18 I love Charates. What a fun game.
Our kids have recently introduced us to a new game.

Speaker 45 Oh my God, that is so fun. What is that thing called?

Speaker 41 Imposter. Yeah.
Yeah.

Speaker 66 So someone in the group, you can do it on your iPhone, which is actually a great use of the phone for this.

Speaker 18 So explain it, how it works.

Speaker 64 Let's see. Oh my God.

Speaker 18 There's five of us sitting there.

Speaker 52 Remember, the five of us are sitting there and someone's the imposter and there's a word.

Speaker 18 And one, everybody has to hold the phone at one point. Like, yeah.
It starts off. I'll explain it.

Speaker 18 So if I were patient zero of this five-person game, but you can play it with three people too. I think three is probably the fewest you could do it with.

Speaker 42 Five.

Speaker 62 Yeah, I would say five.

Speaker 67 Yeah. Five or more would be most fun.
Yeah.

Speaker 18 So you open, you see the phone. I don't know the app.
I'll ask the kids, but I'm sure if you Google imposter app, you can get it.

Speaker 18 And it will say, like, you agree as a family on which category you're going to pick. Like, there's sports,

Speaker 18 there's

Speaker 18 like movies.

Speaker 18 And

Speaker 18 we

Speaker 18 picked movies for one.

Speaker 18 I wasn't,

Speaker 18 was I the first on that one? No, I wasn't. Okay, so Yardley went first on this one.
And I'm gonna go.

Speaker 24 I mean, I might take over.

Speaker 18 No, no, I've got this. I'm gonna know to me, she got Peppa Pig.
That was the clue. So Yardley wasn't the imposter I was.

Speaker 18 And so when Yardley looked at the phone, it said Yardley, and she saw Peppa Pig. Then we handed it to Thatcher, and he saw Peppa Pig.
Then they handed it to me, and I saw imposter.

Speaker 64 Yes, you have no idea that it's Peppa Pig.

Speaker 18 You don't know. So when the phone gets handed to you, it just says your name because the person who starts it just types in the five names who are playing.

Speaker 18 So when it sees, I see Megan, I hit it, and then it either says imposter or it gives me the clue. And then we pass the phone around and then you start guessing.

Speaker 18 And the way it works is like Yarley went first. And so she said, oh, I knew we were in like TV and movies.
And she said pink.

Speaker 18 And then the next person said, Australia.

Speaker 18 And so when it got to me, I was the imposter. And I thought.
Flamingo. That's what I thought we were going for.
So when you're the imposter, you have to try to act like you know what it is.

Speaker 18 You have to like act like you know. And the other people have to, when they, when they do know, have to reveal a clue that shows they know, but not so much that they're going to clue in the imposter.

Speaker 11 Yeah.

Speaker 18 So I said feather, and you go, mom's the imposter. And everyone started laughing at me.
Everyone started laughing because it is.

Speaker 54 If you're early at the imposter, you don't have enough.

Speaker 45 You know, if you go late, you might get enough clues that you can sort of dial in on what it is.

Speaker 45 Otherwise, you're just sort of throwing darts and hoping to say something that makes any amount of sense to the rest of the group.

Speaker 18 We are here today with Douglas Brunt promoting his new novel, The Lost Empire of Emmanuel Nobel, even though it doesn't sound like it.

Speaker 18 You can get it on pre-order right now. It's well worth your time.
But that game, Imposter, is worth your time as well. However, be more ambiguous than I was with that whole thing.

Speaker 18 Now, I want to keep going. I want to keep going a little bit.
We're going to keep going past the break a little bit. Sorry, EJ.
I'm going to eat into the next hour just a bit.

Speaker 18 In the news today, well, yesterday, but also today, is the fact that they have named a new CBS evening news anchor.

Speaker 18 Did you know that they were looking for one?

Speaker 40 The only reason I know anything about this story is you tweeted how irrelevant it is.

Speaker 65 And I saw your tweet, and I'm like, oh, what's so irrelevant?

Speaker 40 And it was DeCoppol.

Speaker 18 Yeah. Yeah.
Tony DeCopel. DeCoppel.
Do you know anything about Tony DeCopel?

Speaker 47 I don't.

Speaker 65 I remember he got in trouble for like doing an interview that pushed back a bit in a way.

Speaker 45 I don't even remember all the details about it, but I remember he pushed back in a way that seemed like actual journalism and he got some blowback for it.

Speaker 18 It was a great moment on the morning show.

Speaker 65 That's the only way I'd know him, which is a positive

Speaker 45 thing to know, I guess.

Speaker 63 But it is crazy irrelevant.

Speaker 45 I mean, you and I are the same age.

Speaker 65 We grew up in, you know, 150 miles apart at the same time, like loving all the same movies, having the same high school experiences and watching one of three evening news anchors.

Speaker 60 And that's almost how households identified in those times.

Speaker 45 Like, are you at Jennings' house? Are you at Rather's house?

Speaker 60 Yeah.

Speaker 35 You You know, we were Jennings. You were Jennings.

Speaker 18 We were Jennings too.

Speaker 45 And

Speaker 41 no longer.

Speaker 31 Like, that's no longer how people.

Speaker 71 It used to be like, I'm an American, I'm a Christian or a Presbyterian, I'm a whatever.

Speaker 52 And we watched Jennings.

Speaker 65 Like, it was in the top 10 of things.

Speaker 45 Identify your household.

Speaker 65 And no longer, nobody even cares.

Speaker 67 Nobody, you know, our age or younger gets news.

Speaker 18 No, it's so irrelevant, right? It's like,

Speaker 18 I mean, I would, I know I'm biased, but I think podcasts are far more relevant now. People like they have their loyalty, their allegiance to like this show.

Speaker 18 If you're going to spend an hour or two a day with somebody, it's not going to be the evening news. My God, why would you?

Speaker 45 By the way, it used to be like the newspaper the next day was kind of stale from yesterday's news, you know, the immediate cut because of cable.

Speaker 66 And now,

Speaker 45 with the, by the time it's made it through the producers and packaged and written and ready for prime time

Speaker 68 cable evening news, it's so old.

Speaker 18 It's so old. Yeah.

Speaker 18 So I don't think, you know, like

Speaker 18 all the mainstream media is writing articles like, can Tony DeCoppol restore CBS to its former glory? I'm like, when?

Speaker 19 What glory? And they're like,

Speaker 18 can he get them out of third place? The answer is no, he cannot. He can't do that either.
Nothing's changing in TV news other than diminished.

Speaker 64 He can even do something relatively with the other three, but the three as a unit, like evening news, is going only one way, which is down.

Speaker 18 No, one big Tyrannosaurus Rex, only not as scary.

Speaker 18 All right, we're going to take a quick break and then we will be back with Doug Brunt, who is here promoting his new book, which you can get on pre-order, The Lost Empire of Emmanuel Nobel.

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Speaker 18 They make it simple to stay healthy and prepared.

Speaker 18 Just go to allfamilypharmacy.com/slash Megan, place your order online, and then a licensed physician will review it, provide a prescription if necessary.

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Speaker 18 I have a serious question for you. What's the smart way to protect your home and family when it comes to break-ins?

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Speaker 1 Tackle the cost of living crisis or get the hell out of the way.

Speaker 3 I'm Tom Steyer.

Speaker 4 I wanted to build a business here.

Speaker 2 Now it's worth billions of dollars.

Speaker 5 And I walked away from it because I wanted to give back to California.

Speaker 6 We need to get back to basics.

Speaker 1 Homes you can afford, cut utility rates by 25%, and make California a top 10 education state again.

Speaker 9 Sacramento politicians are afraid to change up this system.

Speaker 10 I'm not.

Speaker 11 I'm Tom Steyer, and I'm running for governor.

Speaker 13 Ad paid for by Steyer for Governor 2026.

Speaker 18 Hey, everyone, it's me, Megan Kelly. I've got some exciting news.
I now have my very own channel on SiriusXM.

Speaker 18 It's called the Megan Kelly Channel, and it is where you will hear the truth unfiltered, with no agenda, and no apologies.

Speaker 18 Along with the Megan Kelly show, you're going to hear from people like Mark Halperin, Lake Lauren, Maureen Callahan, Emily Dushinsky, Jesse Kelly, Real Clear Politics, and many more.

Speaker 18 It's bold, no BS news only on the Megan Kelly channel, SiriusXM 111, and on the SiriusXM app.

Speaker 18 We are back now with Doug Brunt. It was a very tough booking for me, but I made it this morning over coffee.

Speaker 18 He is here promoting his soon-to-be-released, The Lost Empire of Emmanuel Nobel, Romanov's Revolutionaries, and the Forgotten Titan who fueled the world. I like that.
Not ruled the world.

Speaker 29 Fueled.

Speaker 55 Fueled the world.

Speaker 61 With the font that Rubio would approve of.

Speaker 18 Well done. Exactly.
It's it's musculature. It's got musculature.

Speaker 41 Yeah, it gives you a sense of history, turn of the century. Yeah.

Speaker 18 Except we've changed the cover since then, since this.

Speaker 41 Yes, not the font.

Speaker 65 We got rid of the Romanovs.

Speaker 67 Wait, hold on.

Speaker 18 Okay, there we go.

Speaker 65 That lower right picture of the Romanovs.

Speaker 68 Tsar Nicholas II and his family who were brutally killed.

Speaker 45 We moved that to the back because it seemed like the cover was a little too busy with that on there.

Speaker 18 It's fun hearing the stories, right, about

Speaker 18 how a book that you enjoy or wind up loving changed over time like from the title to the like here

Speaker 18 so here is the mysterious case of rudolph diesel this is doug's bestseller this book has sold a ton um hugely successful and it's a mystery about rudolph diesel who was the elon musk of his time who went missing and doug solved the case he solved the mystery of what happened to him and it was not always called the mysterious case of rudolph diesel no i mean for months and months my editor and i were going back and forth like we're going to solve this over a bottle of wine we came up with engines and empires it's the diesel engine And I loved it.

Speaker 31 He loved it.

Speaker 35 11th hour, they have a sales meeting with the internal SNS team.

Speaker 65 Barnes and Noble has a sales team that contributes to this stuff too.

Speaker 63 The CEO, John Karp, of Simon ⁇ Schuster.

Speaker 29 And so I get this call.

Speaker 68 We've already printed galleys, like what we have for Nobel.

Speaker 63 And it has the Engines and Empires title.

Speaker 41 He's like, everyone loves the book.

Speaker 66 It's charming. It's atmospheric.
It takes us to this early downtown Abbey era and a crazy mystery.

Speaker 60 And it's super fun and great history.

Speaker 65 Except the title. We got to change the title.
I'm like, what?

Speaker 18 That's the one thing we had.

Speaker 45 So they had come up with a a different title. And in the last second, it was that.

Speaker 44 So those things happen.

Speaker 45 And it's kind of a fun part of the journey.

Speaker 52 When the book is all aspects of it, I really love the research and time in the archives.

Speaker 44 All of it is great.

Speaker 70 But these fun little twists at the end and looking at the cover art.

Speaker 66 The SNS cover art team, their art department is amazing.

Speaker 29 Very cool.

Speaker 65 And it's always interesting to hear or see how someone else.

Speaker 45 has an expression of the story.

Speaker 62 You know, like what did they come up with for a cover of this book you just spent years writing?

Speaker 18 Right. That year, it's like yours.
It's your personal baby. Your creativity, your research, all of that went into it.
And then somebody else has got strong thoughts on it.

Speaker 18 And it's fascinating to get the first like read back or feedback on how somebody else sees it. Like, what is this book about? What should be called?

Speaker 18 You do host a podcast, which we're actually now airing on the Megan Kelly channel on Saturdays called Dedicated with Doug Brunt, which I mentioned.

Speaker 18 And you had a very interesting interview the other day with Michael Lewis,

Speaker 18 famed author.

Speaker 55 Author of Moneyball and Blindside and Liars Poker.

Speaker 18 Yeah, all of which have become big movies. And

Speaker 18 he winds up telling you a story about, okay, I'm not going to give it away. Listen to this story.
We're just going to run the sound bite.

Speaker 18 It's going to end in a big reveal about somebody you, the Megan Kelly show listeners and watchers, know very well. It's this guy's everywhere.
He's Waldo. He's everywhere.

Speaker 18 Okay, listen to Michael Lewis talking to Doug Brunt.

Speaker 74 One of the people we interviewed, I interviewed for this podcast, was Steve Bannon.

Speaker 74 My connection to Steve Bannon, he bought the movie rights to Liars Poker.

Speaker 44 Oh my God. I didn't know he was even in that business.

Speaker 74 You did know he was in that business. Where do you think his money came from? Seinfeld.
He went from.

Speaker 74 Steve Bannon was involved with Steve Bannon went from the Navy to the Navy to Harvard Business School to Goldman Sachs to Hollywood.

Speaker 44 Bannon told me, I just found this out like a month ago, that

Speaker 74 not only did he buy the movie rights, but he was so pissed off by how bad the script was they got out of a very fancy script writer that he went off in a little dark room by himself and wrote a Liar's Poker screenplay himself.

Speaker 16 He was obsessed with this script.

Speaker 74 Did you get to read it? Well, this is the next thing. I'm going to go see him, and he says he has a copy somewhere.

Speaker 41 So I want to read it.

Speaker 14 I want to see what he did.

Speaker 18 That would be amazing. I'm glad you played that crip.

Speaker 45 I got to follow up with Michael Lewis to find out how the band and meeting went.

Speaker 44 This is all sort of happening now.

Speaker 18 You call him and I'll call Steve. And we'll see whether this is happening.

Speaker 65 I would love to see that.

Speaker 61 Liar's Poker is an amazing book.

Speaker 37 It's a good thing.

Speaker 18 So Liar's Poker has not yet been made a movie.

Speaker 45 It has not been made a movie.

Speaker 39 But it's his first book.

Speaker 53 It was a breakout book.

Speaker 45 He tells so many amazing stories of how he first started writing.

Speaker 63 He's working at Solomon Brothers and Wall Street, and he writes, he has sort of a Jerry Maguire moment.

Speaker 47 He gets this article published about how bankers are paid too much.

Speaker 53 And it goes in the Wall Street Journal.

Speaker 65 And someone had sort of stuck their neck out to get him this job at Solomon Brothers.

Speaker 64 So he comes up the elevator feeling like I've written this.

Speaker 21 I'm in the journal.

Speaker 29 Like, this is so exciting.

Speaker 52 And the guy who got him the job is at the top of the elevator bay, like ashen, looking like, what have you done?

Speaker 54 Like, you can't do that.

Speaker 70 You can't work here and do that.

Speaker 54 You pick one.

Speaker 39 So he ends up actually writing financial articles under a, under a pseudonym for a while.

Speaker 37 But then he comes out with Liars Poker, which is an amazing book.

Speaker 18 This reminds me of a story when I was practicing law where we had a client who came to us already having had a default judgment entered against them.

Speaker 18 Like they had blown off this complaint repeatedly and the plaintiff got a default judgment against them because they failed to defend. Then they called us and said, will you help us?

Speaker 18 So I was a little person on on the totem pole. So they sent me in there like, go get this default judgment vacated for our client, which is an uphill battle.

Speaker 18 So I went in there and it was very contentious. And the other side, the plaintiff did not want the default judgment to go away.
We really battled.

Speaker 18 And the judge gave me a super hard time because the client had been completely derelict and defending. And

Speaker 18 it was just a funny and tumultuous time in my career. So long story short, they vacated the default judgment.

Speaker 18 And the court wrote this opinion, like in writing that you can still look up now where he really praised me and the oral argument, but he completely dumped on my client.

Speaker 18 I was so young, I was like, this is the greatest opinion ever.

Speaker 11 He loved me.

Speaker 18 I brought it back to Jones Day and I'm like, look what they said.

Speaker 18 And of course, the seasoned lawyers were like,

Speaker 18 this is not a great opinion for our client who now is like being ripped by a court on the record repeatedly for its dereliction duty. I'm like, but I got the right result.

Speaker 18 And look at all the priests for me.

Speaker 19 Kind of like that. Yeah.

Speaker 71 And like Michael Lewis, you went on to a great career.

Speaker 29 Yes. From there.

Speaker 54 It all, it all wound up.

Speaker 19 Different place.

Speaker 29 That's right.

Speaker 18 I'll wound up working out a different industry altogether, although some of the skills translated. Here's the other piece of news I wanted to talk to you about.
We've been trying to get this on.

Speaker 18 This has been out for a week now. The Atlantic dropped a piece called Accommodation Nation.

Speaker 18 And this piece, you may not have read it, but it is all about something that you're very familiar with.

Speaker 18 How many schools now, this focuses on colleges, but it's true in high schools and other schools too,

Speaker 18 have, quote, disabled students who need, quote, need extra time on the exams. It's gotten out of control.
Even the Atlantic is calling it an explosion over the past 15 years.

Speaker 18 The increase is driven by more young people getting diagnosed with conditions such as ADHD, anxiety, and depression, and by universities making the process of getting accommodations easier.

Speaker 18 The change has occurred disproportionately at the most prestigious and expensive institutions. Of course.
Right?

Speaker 18 Students, they write, you hear students with disabilities, it's not kids in wheelchairs, one professor at a selective university told the magazine. It's rich kids getting extra time on tests.

Speaker 18 Even as poor students with disabilities still struggle to get necessary provisions, elite universities have entered an age of accommodation.

Speaker 18 Listen to this. Individual universities.

Speaker 18 These are stats from the Harvard Crimson. Stanford, in 2014, 3% of the student body said they had a disability.
Today, 38%.

Speaker 18 Brown, 2014, 10%, now 22. Cornell, 2014, 5%, now 22.
Harvard, 2014, 3%, now 21.

Speaker 18 Yale, 2014, 8%, now 20%.

Speaker 18 The school with the lowest is MIT. They had 3% in 2014 and they have 8%.

Speaker 18 UC Berkeley, the number has quintupled over the past 15 years. Amherst, it's at 34%.
At one law school, which they don't name, 45% of the students receive academic accommodations. And listen to this.

Speaker 18 The Americans, it's because the Americans with Disabilities Act, which was passed in 1990, meant to make life fairer for people who have actual disabilities.

Speaker 18 And you have to provide a reasonable accommodation. But now it's been expanded to people who basically have any physical or quote mental impairment that substantially limits a major life activity.

Speaker 18 And even beyond that, now in 2018, 2008, Congress amended the ADA to restore the definition to include a list of major life activities that could be disrupted by disability, including learning, reading, concentrating, thinking, even if it doesn't.

Speaker 18 severely restrict your daily life.

Speaker 18 And now this depression thing, listen to this.

Speaker 18 Mental health issues have joined ADHD as the primary driver of the accommodations boom. The number of young people diagnosed with depression and anxiety has exploded.

Speaker 18 Okay, it doesn't need it

Speaker 18 after the release of the DSM-5, the symptoms need only to interfere with or reduce the quality of academic functioning. That's all.
Reduce the quality of your academic functioning.

Speaker 18 And for this, you get extra time or unlimited time on your exams or papers, or you can get out of homework, or you you can get the professor to, quote, not call on you without warning.

Speaker 18 That's happening at Carnegie Mellon, per the Atlantic.

Speaker 18 Ohio State says 36% there have these issues. You can get extensions on take-home assignments, permission to miss class.
You can get

Speaker 18 social anxiety disorder. If you say you have that, you can get a note so you're not called on in class.
And then some get housing accommodations, including single rooms and emotional support animals.

Speaker 18 One administrator told me, writes the author, that a student at a public college in California had permission to bring their mother to class.

Speaker 18 This became a problem because the mom turned out to be an enthusiastic class participant.

Speaker 18 This is deeply wrong, and we've all seen it.

Speaker 45 You know, as you're reading that and all the stats, and there are all these universities you're talking about, it's occurring to me, the real, I mean, this is something we've talked about a bit before, but with this story, The real problem here is the college admission process.

Speaker 40 It's so screwed up.

Speaker 18 And the parents.

Speaker 66 Well, it's the parents' fault and the university because the parents gear everything around the wrong goal. We're supposed to be preparing these kids for life.

Speaker 22 So

Speaker 52 offering these little cheat codes to get a better grade to get into the college is not preparing you for life.

Speaker 65 It's preparing you to get into the college that makes the parent feel good, like Junior got into an Ivy or whatever it is.

Speaker 66 And it's ruined not only academics, it's ruined athletics because that's the same thing too.

Speaker 63 Athletics used to be about teaching practice equals improvement and teamwork and all of these values that you get from sports.

Speaker 45 And in addition to just sort of having a rounded youth, having a rounded youth, that's like the way to get into college in the 70s and 80s. Now you're not rounded.

Speaker 65 You have to be a specialist in one thing.

Speaker 53 You have to be the best violinist or the best chess player so you can get into Yale or whatever.

Speaker 69 Well-rounded is not valued at all.

Speaker 65 And it's the same with these academics.

Speaker 63 If someone's like struggling on their SAT or on their math test,

Speaker 39 If they don't actually have a problem, giving them an extra hour to take it so they can get a little bit better grade, so they can get to a little bit better college is backward.

Speaker 66 You should be teaching them how, how are you going to survive in the world?

Speaker 55 Right.

Speaker 18 When you get out into the law firm or the investment bank or whatever you wind up doing, they're not going to give you extra time under the test. You've got to perform.
Someone's there.

Speaker 18 The client needs this result by 5 p.m., period.

Speaker 45 But no one is, no longer is anyone chasing a goal for their kids of how am I going to prepare this person for life?

Speaker 73 How are they going to be strong and self-sufficient, provide for themselves?

Speaker 47 It's all geared around a college application for an Ivy League school.

Speaker 29 Yes.

Speaker 18 As if that degree is your make or break ticket.

Speaker 37 That's why they play lacrosse 500 hours a month or squash or whatever it is.

Speaker 65 It's all about college.

Speaker 64 It's not about a great experience for my kid or my kid enjoying a rounded life.

Speaker 41 It's all, we're all so screwed up with all of this college stuff.

Speaker 47 It's really perverted everything.

Speaker 18 And this is so unfair because if you have a kid who just studies hard and goes into class and is ready to take the test,

Speaker 18 they get disadvantaged by this. They've got a kid with obviously equal abilities.

Speaker 60 Yeah, but has a little money, so they get a doctor's note that says he has this problem, it's diagnosed.

Speaker 18 Right. We could all get this note very easily and use it to advance our kids' future or get extra time for our kids on their tests.
This is not to disparage those who have genuine disabilities.

Speaker 18 There are that few. Those numbers in 2014 sound real to me, about 3%.

Speaker 18 But now it's gone from 3 to 34. Bullshit.
Those 31% are fucking faking it to get an academic advantage.

Speaker 18 And it's it's a disadvantage for the kids who just work hard and show up and want to color within the lines. They want to they'll play by the rules.

Speaker 45 You just have to hope that after college, when junior with the note went to Cornell and someone else without the note went to Syracuse.

Speaker 11 What?

Speaker 64 They're going to meet in the workplace one day.

Speaker 44 And who's going to win?

Speaker 19 Right.

Speaker 27 I'll see. Doug caught my illness.

Speaker 18 Well, Doug caught my illness. Sort of.
Sort of. I'll explain what happened.
But let me remind me to explain that in a second.

Speaker 18 I really think when I was reading this, I was like, okay, so then when you apply to college, you don't have to put on there that you got the extra time. The colleges don't get to know.
What?

Speaker 18 Yeah, you're not actually allowed to ask and you don't have to put it on there. So the colleges have no idea who took the SAT in nine hours.

Speaker 65 So do they have to resubmit the note when they get to college for the tests?

Speaker 14 No.

Speaker 31 No.

Speaker 18 Oh, yeah, yeah, of course. Yes, but who cares? By that point, their only goal is to get hired by Goldman Sachs or what have you.

Speaker 18 But I think, like, what if we just played this out and said, there's no time limit. There's no time limit on any tests.
Tests are now held like whatever.

Speaker 18 If you want to take your history test at your history class, which starts at 1 p.m. and most students have to finish in 40 or 50 minutes,

Speaker 18 whoever wants to stay for two hours can stay for two hours.

Speaker 31 Like, go ahead.

Speaker 19 All of you.

Speaker 18 You'll then have to make up the work. that you missed in the classes after that.

Speaker 18 Good luck with that. Like, that's a disadvantage.
That's a you thing. But, like, what if we just said to all students, if you want the extra time, you can have it.

Speaker 18 I actually think this could help solve it because this would be like a nightmare for the teachers. They wouldn't like it.
It would eventually kill itself, right? This system.

Speaker 18 And what would happen to like the kids with the disabilities wouldn't much like all the other kids having all the extra time either?

Speaker 61 Yeah, but they can take 10 more hours if everyone's.

Speaker 37 Yeah.

Speaker 31 I don't know. Actually, that would be good.

Speaker 18 I kind of am tempted by it. But so here's what happened with Doug's illness.
As you guys know, I was sick last week. I still have a hangover on the voice, but I'm fine.

Speaker 18 But Doug got it. Obviously, he's my husband.
So he got it. But yours was less bad.
Yeah. And would you like to tell the people how you fought it?

Speaker 31 I claim that

Speaker 65 when I first started feeling something, it starts in the throat.

Speaker 63 So as soon as I felt something, I'm like, oh my God, I had a couple things that were going to be hard to reschedule. I was like, I really would like not to get sick as I now am.

Speaker 45 So I started, I cut a lemon in half and I squeezed it into tea and I took a sauna.

Speaker 37 Like every, I've got one.

Speaker 18 Thank you, honey. Yeah, I was going to say you need the water.

Speaker 66 And I, and I did that basically every day for like five days.

Speaker 18 Took a sauna and squeezed lemon into tea. Yeah.

Speaker 18 And you were taking the Zycam.

Speaker 45 The Zycam, yeah, which is like, I don't know, zinc is in there and some other stuff.

Speaker 41 Yeah.

Speaker 18 And you think it minimized your experience?

Speaker 47 I think I, so I did get it, but I feel like I got it about 10% the level you had it.

Speaker 24 You were really hurting for a while because you lost your voice.

Speaker 64 And I never had it anywhere near what you had it.

Speaker 18 But I did have it. So you did want to discuss it.

Speaker 64 It is amazing.

Speaker 37 The difference, I don't know if this is a sex thing or what, but I do talk about it more when I'm sick and I'm a little bit of a baby and I want to just like be under the blankets and have someone tell me it's going to be all right.

Speaker 65 And meanwhile, Meg, like you've lost your voice, you're taking steroids so you can keep your voice.

Speaker 29 And I'm like, you know, I feel a little tickle.

Speaker 54 And you're like, would you shut the fuck up?

Speaker 18 I said, we don't have to talk about about Typhoid Mary over here, but we definitely should not spend too much time talking about that tickle.

Speaker 29 That was very funny.

Speaker 18 But I am sorry that I got you sick. Now that you actually have it.

Speaker 54 It's all worth it, honey.

Speaker 66 Watching our Christmas in Connecticut.

Speaker 18 Yeah, we actually fired that up this week for the first time in a year. It's so fun.

Speaker 18 I don't know. I love everything about it.
I love the way I feel when those Christmas specials are on the TV. I love, it's not even like, it's not like a great movie.
you know? It's

Speaker 64 just kind of weird in a few places.

Speaker 31 It's odd.

Speaker 35 It like gets the atmosphere going.

Speaker 18 Yeah, like she's kind of supposed to be married to this guy and cheating on him, but whatever. She's not, though.
She's not actually married to the guy.

Speaker 18 I just love the feeling. I love the, first of all, I love the feeling of old movies, right? It's like a very cool vibe.
And second of all, I love the cinematography with a sleigh ride in that movie.

Speaker 18 I love like all the snow outside. Yeah.
Reminds me of my childhood up in Syracuse, New York. I miss snow.
I miss tons of snow.

Speaker 18 Like I miss where snow is the default as opposed to green and brown in the winter. Well, brown and brown.

Speaker 18 And I just love this season so much. You know, like these little twinkling lights in the studio, I'd love to keep these past December.

Speaker 18 But even I, who am a die-hard Christmas fan, can't do it because when Christmas is over, you've got to move on.

Speaker 45 Come mid-January.

Speaker 63 You're just ready for warm weather.

Speaker 67 Yeah.

Speaker 18 It's enough. You got to clean it up and move on.
It only comes once a year, which is why you must treasure it for the next X number of days because it comes and it goes.

Speaker 18 So what are you getting me for Christmas this year?

Speaker 69 Not telling.

Speaker 18 We don't really do Christmas presents for each other. Is that true?

Speaker 62 Lately, it's like write a letter.

Speaker 67 Yeah, I love that. I think that's an important thing.

Speaker 31 And then I'll find a little something.

Speaker 18 One year, a couple years ago, it was either my birthday or Mother's Day. I don't remember, but you gave me a beautiful letter, which I always love.
That's really what I want every year.

Speaker 18 And

Speaker 18 a little dumb pillow.

Speaker 64 It was so funny. It wasn't even that nice.

Speaker 21 It was from CVS.

Speaker 18 No, it was a CVS pillow, like a shamrock.

Speaker 19 I'm like, what is it?

Speaker 45 Sometimes they acquire some nice merchandise.

Speaker 18 It doesn't go anywhere.

Speaker 35 It was cute.

Speaker 20 It was a little shamrock.

Speaker 31 It was like a statement pillow.

Speaker 18 Like, the house has been decorated by somebody who knows what he's doing.

Speaker 18 He will not approve.

Speaker 18 It was the thought of that count as I really loved it.

Speaker 55 Yeah.

Speaker 71 By the way, so I know you had Elliot Ackerman on earlier this week and you were discussing my lack of faction, which I cannot deny

Speaker 63 your observations there on

Speaker 73 my fashion, but I was bleeding edge on the quarter zip, which apparently is the thing now.

Speaker 18 Totally. You were black, diamond, sexy before it was popular.
Totally. We will find the episode with a fifth column to explain to the audience what that means.

Speaker 18 Although the diehard fans at the Megan Kelly show already know about your black, diamond, sexy.

Speaker 64 And how you're the saboteur.

Speaker 18 And I was wrong.

Speaker 18 I was wrong about it all.

Speaker 18 You were always sexy. It's just a question of.

Speaker 68 How sexy?

Speaker 18 And what it was encapsulated in.

Speaker 18 You got there. You got there in the end, babe.
Here's to that. Cheers.
Love you, honey. Love you, honey.
Merry Christmas. Happy New Year.
Don't forget to go and get Doug's new book.

Speaker 18 It's called The Lost Empire of Emmanuel Nobel. You guys are really going to love it.
I promise. And now I will hand it over to our pal, Emily Jashinsky, who has been patiently waiting.

Speaker 18 Thank you so much, EJ. We love you too.
She's hosting the MK Wrap-Up Show on Series XM 111. We'll see you tomorrow.

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

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