Full Episode - Chuck’s Experience At The Correspondents’ Dinner Shooting + America Is A Tinderbox… In More Ways Than One

This is an iHeart podcast, Guaranteed Human.

This episode of the Chuck podcast is brought to you by Ethos.

And what Ethos does is it helps you find life insurance.

Let me tell you why life insurance bailed me out.

My father died when I was 16.

We didn't have a lot of money when it happened.

And we were in a pretty tough financial spot after it happened.

I'm an only child. Suddenly my mother's single.

Single mother. She had a job. Suddenly lost a job looking for

another job. And we were struggling.

You know, my dad didn't leave us in the best financial situation.

But he did make one purchase. He bought a life insurance policy.

Wasn't a huge chunk of change.

But it was enough when we found it.

And when I say we found it, meaning we went through his desk and we found,

oh, look at this. Let's see if there's anything here.

And it helped us out at a time that we really needed it.

And that's why I think it's important that if you can,

especially if you have young children,

if you can get life insurance, you should get it.

Life is full of unexpected emergencies, unexpected things happen.

It is an extra bit of security.

Something you can leave and help out at a time when you're not,

you're not there to help.

So what does ethos do?

Well, ethos makes getting life insurance fast and easy.

And it's 100% online.

You can get a quote in seconds.

You can apply in minutes.

And you can get same day coverage.

They will find you the right fit.

There's no medical exam.

You just answer a few simple health questions online.

You can get up to $3 million in coverage.

And some policies are as low as $30 a month.

And you'll get your lowest rate from their network of trusted carriers.

So take 10 minutes to get covered today with life insurance through ethos.

Get your free quote at ethos.com slash chuck.

That is ETHOS.com slash chuck.

Application times may vary and rates may vary.

Well, happy Monday and welcome to another episode of the Chuck Todd cast.

I need list to say what what I thought I was going to be focusing on with this

episode has changed quite a bit.

But let me give you a quick rundown.

Look, I'm going to give you my first day in account of what happened at the

White House course finance dinner from my point of view.

Yes, I attended as a guest of national journal.

I will literally share all the details on that.

And then take a step back and just sort of talk about this moment that we're

living in politically, basically through my political anthropologist glasses here.

Because I think there's no doubt that we don't have the political

leaders to deal with the moment that we need to be dealing with at the moment.

And I will get into all of that.

But we just this is a this is this is the the worst set of political leaders

that we could have to meet the moment that we need.

Which is why we need clearly we need new leadership in this country collectively.

And this is across the board left right center, etc.

We will get I will get into that.

My interview today is actually with a meteorologist that the chief one

and one of the senior meteorologists that works for an incredible news resource called Watch

Duty, which monitors wildfires around the country, basically trying to get better data out there

for for news people, local news all over.

And it's a fascinating conversation about where we're at the technology that's necessary,

how hard it is to prepare for wildfires.

Frankly, I don't think we fully appreciate just how bad it could be out west in general.

But here's the deal with wildfires.

This isn't just a California issue.

This is an issue that is in more than a dozen states at right at this moment as you're listening.

Just want to you know, this isn't an each of your vegetables though.

Interview, Pete is just a tremendous,

tremendous character, frankly, started as a firefighter when school's meteorologist.

It's just his story is interesting.

It is definitely worth your time.

Of course, this is Monday, which means I have a new time machine segment.

And we are going back to a story that would eventually

help create the name for one of the most popular bands of my generation.

So there's your clue.

There's your clue to what historical event I will be taking a deep dive in with the time machine.

This weekend, of course, we will do questions from you.

And yes, despite the events of the weekend, I do have a few thoughts

in my compartmentalized brain on sports, the draft, and all things from there.

But look, let me start with, I figure the best thing I can do is just sort of take you through

take you through what I what I did with the dinner.

And it really, my evening begins at 6 p.m. Eastern time.

I'm walking out of the house.

And just to give you a full picture, I had planned to go to the after party.

My friends at MS now had invited my wife and I to the after party there after party.

And we were planning to attend.

I was attending the dinner itself as a guest of national journal.

I've been doing a lot of work with them lately.

National journal for many of you knows my former as a former employer of mine.

I've been doing some brainstorming together.

And we're in this collective world.

And so that's why I was attending.

That's who's who's guest I was.

My wife was going to meet.

She did, this was one ticket.

So she was going to we were going to meet essentially at the at the after party about 11 p.m.

And as I'm leaving the house and the Uber at 6 p.m. I turned to my wife and I say,

I hope I'm not making a mistake.

And what did I mean by that?

I just set it out loud and I had a lot of sort of trepidation about going.

I hadn't been to the dinner in probably four or five years.

I used to, frankly, when I had a job on Sunday mornings,

some of you might might know.

So I had stopped doing the Saturday night dinner.

Sometimes I would go for basically like the first hour and leave early,

frankly, just to get a tiny bit of rest before the next morning.

Sometimes I didn't go at all.

It's just, you know, it's just, it's just a,

it can be, it's a, it's a, I used to joke with when I was in my 20s, the dinner was fun.

When, by my 40s, it became work.

But I was going.

I look, I'm doing a lot more in the media entrepreneur space and this is it.

So there's certainly a lot of interesting people that I am working with.

I'd like to be working with.

And I thought this was be as good of a time as any to connect with some people.

But I knew that there was going to be a lot of protests.

I knew there was going to be a lot of tension.

And so when I said that to my wife, she was like, why did, you know,

she sort of haunted her as I laughed.

And then of course, we all thought about it a lot after the incident itself.

And I'm not going to sit here and say I thought violence was going to happen.

You know, I didn't know if it was going to be just, you know,

was I walking into something that I didn't really want to be a part of.

It's probably a better way to describe it, right?

I think I told you, I think I expressed earlier.

I thought, look, this is one thing people need to understand.

This is not the president's event.

This is the, this is the White House press associations event.

He's an invited guest.

It is tradition to invite the president, hard stop.

He chose to come for the first time.

This is not his event.

And this is an important point because this is not an event to be out of the White House.

If he doesn't feel comfortable coming, then he doesn't come, right?

This is a trade association event for White House press,

for members of the White House press corps at the end of the day.

So I sort of, I found the sort of,

hand-ranging about, you know, whether press should attend or not.

This is not the president's dinner.

Look, everybody made their individual decisions about who they invite,

right?

And that's a different decision and you can hold individual

organizations accountable for who they choose to invite or not.

But at the end of the day, we're journalists.

And I just wanted the story.

You have to have good sources in order to report, period.

And so I understood the criticism of those that say,

oh, don't give them a platform, don't do this, don't do that.

At the end of the day, it was his choice to come.

And you know, the press can, to me,

a good journalist should be able to handle that situation.

And should be comfortable going in, you know,

nobody's asking you to become a maggot cheerleader or a left-wing activist.

If you're going there to be an activist, don't go.

Right? That, you know, if you're more interested in being an activist,

then you shouldn't have gone.

But look, I thought all of that was overrated on that front.

So,

but I knew the protests were going to be large.

And I've certainly been to that hotel so many times.

I knew that there were alternative ways to get into the hotel.

So I was very careful where I had the uber drop off.

In fact, I knew I was going to decide it.

I was going to basically, for those of you familiar,

where they help them go in the back way,

go in the other, you know, and don't come in on Connecticut Avenue.

I basically came in behind sort of between,

essentially,

strapped off not quite at the corner of Florida Avenue and

Colombia, excuse me, in 18th, but close-ish.

It's basically like 19th and Florida.

Because I knew I could walk now.

With those terrible tuxues, I even double-socked.

Knowing I was probably going to be walking more than usual in order to,

little did I know how much I was going to end up walking

after the event says it was.

So, look, I was pretty, you know,

I get dropped off by the uber walk in,

get in the, essentially, the back way without,

without going through any of that protestor stuff that was taking place,

which was on the other side of the hotel,

which is basically where Florida and Connecticut

come together, which is essentially where the Hilton,

the Washington Hilton is.

And if you're wondering, I'm getting into the Hilton,

you know, there is no magnetometer to get into the hotel itself.

This is, look, there's a reason why this dinner is always held at this hotel.

They have a unique situation where you really can

take the ballroom sections and essentially secure it away from everything else,

which is what they have done.

In my experience, I've been going to these dinners.

Like the first one I went to was probably in 1995, 1996, something like that.

And it is, you know, this is why there's been chatter about moving it to the convention center,

or moving it to some other places.

But this really is sort of a unique ballroom.

You know, every community has come in.

I can't believe this is at a Hilton,

like sort of mocking the idea that it's at a Hilton,

no offense to my friends at Hilton.

But it's always been kind of a butt of jokes that this fancy black tie dinner

is at a Hilton.

But this ballroom setup is an incredibly unique setup

after the Reagan assassination attempt.

They even created more secure areas.

They basically,

they have some of the easiest ways for a highly secure individual to be brought in and out of the hotel,

more so than really any other hotel in the city,

especially with a ballroom like that of that size that they can do.

So it is why it's there.

And they've always, the hotel itself has always sort of been

divided like that when this dinner is here.

So you can just like walk into the lobby,

which is where I went.

You just go into the lobby and I was going to the Pre-Cocktail Parties,

National Journal's Cocktail Party,

to go most, a lot of times,

if you're an invited guest,

that's how you pick up your ticket,

as you go to the, your sponsoring organizations,

Pre-dinner event.

It's sort of been what a lot of news organizations do.

So you ignore all that.

And it was, you know, you could tell.

I mean, it was pretty heavy with the protesters.

The rain probably made it.

It was, did I bring up?

It was raining at that point in time.

So everybody is sort of, you know,

they went with your hairdos and stuff like that on that front.

So we get into the dinner and it's the usual.

Everybody is magged that you,

before you can get to even the ballroom area.

There is a set of magnetometers that everybody goes through.

And essentially, just about everybody,

you don't not only go through a magnetometer,

but if there's anything that pops up in the magnetometer,

you get the wand.

And it's pretty, if you've ever been to any presidential events,

it's very similar to that.

If you've ever been to even a sporting event

where the president was going to be there,

you'll notice that sometimes there's a little bit more

extra security, you go through magnetometers

and there's a person wandering.

This was the same setup.

And then the dinner itself, you go down a set of staircases.

Yet another set is sort of almost like a sunken,

you come in at one level and the ballroom itself is like further down

and you walk down.

It's two sets, two flights of stairs.

This is important because I don't, the attacker,

the gunman did not get even down one flight of those stairs.

It's two flights of stairs to get into the ballroom area itself.

So in the ballroom, they serve,

they're serving the salad first and everybody was done with the salad.

And the timing, I was fascinating because it's sort of,

so the shots ring out right about one minute after the,

there was probably 200 weight staff.

That all came out at the exact same time.

This was sort of a bit of an orchestration and it's almost,

it's the server ballet, if you will, that we've,

we've, it's always, it's very impressive how it's done where essentially

every table is cleared and every table is served pretty much simultaneously, right?

It's an incredibly quick turnover.

So you have this rush of people come out.

So my initial thought, then, so this rush of people's coming out and you see,

and you know, the tables are all close together and it's pretty crowded anyway because people are,

it's still early in the dinner.

So there's still a little socializing.

People are doing a little table hopping to, to see, to catch up with people, you know,

you might get a text.

I'd got a text from a friend of mine.

It was two tables over that I didn't see until after the incident itself.

So, so we're sitting at the dinner.

Everybody's finished in the salad and, you know, they just,

they had just finished the head table introductions.

Um, president of wider sports association basically said, okay, now we're going to,

now we're going to serve dinner.

So everybody, so it was actually going to be a quick pause in the program.

I think as far as timing events is the minute dinner was served that

it was going to be pretty soon after that that we were going to hear from the president.

So the, the rush of, of wait staff floods the ballroom and it's about a minute

later in, in, in my recollection that I heard, you hear the pop pop pop and that's

what I heard pop pop pop some of you saw I did a preliminary Instagram last night that,

that went on a few of my socials just to give you a quick sense of what I saw.

So you hear this pop pop pop and I'll be honest at first, you know, you're not,

you don't expect to hear gunshots and so you don't automatically assume that's what you heard.

And I didn't within, you know, it's sort of like within two seconds, do you

sort of realize Jesus? I think that was gunshots.

But that like the first thing in my mind was, oh, what just, what accident just happened?

I mean, is the president himself said did somebody drop a tray?

It just, just felt like an accident because again, this is a case where you're visuals

in your audio can sometimes be in conflict.

What did, what were we all seeing? We were seeing this rush of people

of waitstaff coming to essentially do the do the appetizer plates clearing and the entree

serve. And so that's in your head.

So any noise you hear, I think automatically you're just associating with what you see.

And then you realize pop pop pop and then somebody heard shots.

And then you saw a whole bunch of people just dropped to the ground,

including all the waitstaff. I will confess I was a little slow getting to the ground.

I was like, continuing to just try to, and even even when I knelt on the ground,

my table mates were like, get down. And then like, like, oh, my head up to try to get a sense because

I was trying to, I generally heard where I, you know, where I heard, where I thought I heard

the shots from turned out to be exactly where the shots came from, which is it felt like it was

coming from behind the entrance to the ballroom. And the question was, were these shots had fired

in the ballroom? And it's now pretty obvious to me because of the why they weren't loud,

loud. They were loud enough to hear the pop pop pop. But then you realize it was not in the ballroom,

right? So everybody says we're first looking around here. Do we hear anybody screaming? Do you

do you see any paramedics? And then you realize, okay, nobody was shot in the ballroom.

It was clearly coming from the, at this point in time, I don't know whether it is right outside

the doors where they come in down those two flights of stairs I was talking about. Or if it was

further up the two flights of stairs sort of where the magnetometers are before you go walk down

after you've been cleared of security. And again, I'm just trying to put you in my shoes at this time.

This episode of the Chuck Todd cast is brought to you by Seoul. So if you love that end of the day

unwind, but hate the hangover, Seoul's out of office is for you. These sparkling THC drinks and

gummies give you the same relaxed social feeling without the alcohol, without the calories,

and without the crash. Seoul is a wellness brand that believes feeling good should be fun and easy.

Seoul specializes in delicious hemp derived THC and CBD products designed to boost your mood

and help you unwind. Their best selling out of office gummies were designed to provide a mild,

relaxing buzz boost your mood and enhance creativity and relaxation with five different strengths you

can tailor the dose to fit your vibe. So also has a variety of products specifically designed to

help you get a better nights rest, including their top selling sleepy gummies, a fan favorite for

deep restores sleep. Look, I have made no secret. I am a believer in this stuff in cannabis

and hemp derived. I do not partake in alcohol for the most part. I think this stuff is a lot

safer than alcohol, a lot less addictive than alcohol. And yes, I have to say I love these

drinks. It is the glass of wine. And you know, after work, that's what this is. So no hangover

and no excess calories like this. I'm a big fan. So bring on the good vibes and treat yourself to

Seoul today. Right now, Seoul is offering my audience 30% off your entire order. Go to getsole.com and

use the word podcast. That's getsole.com promo code podcast for 30% off. And yes, I too am a customer.

Now, one of my witnessing is we're on the floor. There's a few things. One is obviously you see

you start to see a parade of security detail. First of all, there was security everywhere. And in

fact, it's probably pretty clear that there were a handful of tables where they were undercover

security, right? There was just too many people in that room not to have something like that.

You immediately see probably a hundred law enforcement throughout the ballroom. Essentially,

just trying to clear everything, right? Everybody guns drawn. They're trying to clear everything. And

then you have these security details. And I think most of these people were associated with

a security detail. I don't know this yet for a fact, but it seems that way because you'd start

to see this parade first. You know, I think I saw hegseth get escorted out. I saw Scott

peasant get escorted out. I saw Mike Johnson get escorted out. I saw Steve Scalia get escorted out.

And so you started to see those folks getting escorted out. Then there's a lockdown in the room,

right? As you might expect as they're now in hindsight, it's because the main entrance to the

ballroom was a crime scene. So, you know, I think they were trying to make a quick determination to

see if this was some sort of conspiracy. I could tell you what I first thought is, oh, this person

come in with the wait staff and then use that moment, you know, I probably watched too many movies,

right? You know, you have too many movies in your head and you start thinking about different

things. Although there is a there is a weird movie life imitates art aspect to the the alleged

assassin who apparently got a room in the hotel, which by the way is a security loophole,

which I'm going to get to in a minute. So, at this point, everybody, and it looks like we're sealed

in. And then you're then the question is, and you know, everybody's comfortably, you know,

starts popping their head up and we're all trying, we're all trying to work. You know, I mean,

everybody, you know, is just trying to, we're all trying to find out what happened. You have a room

full of of reporters plus self-important people, plus actually important people and everybody

want everybody wants to know what the hell is going on and everybody's trying to figure out what's

going on. And you know, at first, it's just simply everybody trading, did you hear gunshots?

Did you see had did you see anybody get hit and that was just sort of the determination,

was there anything anybody hurt within the moral? You know, trying to figure out if anybody had

gotten in, you know, was it was it was it somebody who took a shot, you know, with did the shots

come into the ballroom, right? And that is, you know, now it's like I said, the the sound was not

loud enough to have been in the ballroom, which is why it wasn't 100% convinced it was gunshots right

away. Now I know exactly what I heard, I heard the gunshots based on behind closed doors to flights

up, but within earshot of where we were, right? So now I understand now I can process why they were

you know, sort of heard, but not just dominant as far as the audio in that, the audible nature of

the sound. So then they about it's pretty fast that they make the determination that they can

open the doors. And then the minute they open the doors, they decide it's let's evacuate.

But they don't, they just basically encourage everybody to leave. I will be honest with you when I

saw that there was a door open and people were starting to trickle out before they made the

announcement. I was like, first of all, I, you know, the table I was at, we sort of just in our own

little like, well, we all looked at each other, we toasted and we're like, well, we're never going

to forget this dinner. And so it was just one of those things we all realized we sat there together

and that we will never forget. I was sitting next to a woman named Nicole who I knew a little bit

through a old friend of mine back in the day of sitting next to another gentleman named

Wajwado who had not met before. But we're all, we're all connected now.

Now, um, Jeff do four of national journal, the editor in chief was at the table. He did a fine

update, by the way, on news fear last night. I hope you caught that. Um, so you have that sort of,

we did have that little bonding moment as a table. And I think other of my guests as other tables

did that same thing. It's just such a real thing that you're with. And then it was sort of like,

all right, good luck, everybody. Um, and at that point, I'm ready to evacuate. And it looks

like everybody's going in one direction. And I'm like, if they really want us out of this building,

you know, and finally one of the security folks says, look, go follow exit signs. And it was like,

you don't have to tell me twice. So I end up going through the kitchen at some point. I was like,

just following around the hotel staff, somebody recognized me was really nice. And basically help,

um, help me navigate through the kitchen at that point. I think I, um, it was, there was just all

sorts of security personnel back there, just sort of huddling. And I was kind of the first one

through the doors. And there was clearly going to be a whole slew of people on me. And I end up

coming out of an exit. Of course, that I've never been out before at the Hilton. So the hotel backs

up against, I believe it's Wyoming, it gets Wyoming Avenue, sort of where T Street and Wyoming

Avenue go behind it. And I end up there. And I just decide, all right, I'm going to walk as far

away from the hotel as I can and go find an Uber. So that's my plan. I walk up about a half a

block. And all you do is you start running into groups of people in tuxedos, right? And, and, and

formal wear. Um, all trying to debate what to do, right? Are they going to reopen the dinner?

Um, as far as I was concerned, I was done with the dinner. Um, I, you know, this was not,

I was not going to be in the closed end event. I've been through enough of this. I've had enough

death threats and, you know, my feeling is I'm not getting very close anymore to, to, to that world

until we sort of get to a better place as a country. But I'll get to that in a few minutes.

And so I'm like, well, it may be hard to get a ride out of here if I stay too close to that area.

So I'm, I'm walking, I end up running into the federmans. Um, on the corner, I think it was

at the time. I think we were on the corner of Columbia and Wyoming. Um, as you know, John

Federman is not hard to miss. And which is him and his wife, they were on a corner. Uh, and so I

went up, you know, we, um, recognized me and we, we, we waved over and he was, they were looking,

they had, they had had a driver, which was not surprising. Many US senators do have somebody that

they're, you know, they get a driver for the night or maybe it's a driver all the time. But

that's, um, so he was looking, they were looking for their ride. He, by the way, couldn't have been

nicer. He was trying to, he was trying to convince me, don't know, we can give you a ride. I'm like,

I'm good. I'm going to, I'll walk up, um, go walk up a couple more blocks and I'm just going to

get home. I had suddenly had my kids wondering what the hell was going on at my wife was, so at that

point, I'm trying to keep them up to date. Everything's okay. I'm fine. You know, this is, this is not

about me. We're, we're all good. Um, and then, um, it was in, and in fact, where I didn't,

I filled my video as I was waiting for my Uber there at the corner of Columbia and Adam's

Mill is sort of as you're walking towards Woodley Park and that Woodley Park area. What's

interesting is the Uber driver picks me up and he goes, Hey, were you at the dinner? What happened?

And so he goes, I just, listen to this eerie thing. He goes, I just dropped off an elderly woman

who was going to the dinner who was telling me this whole story about being there when Reagan

was shot. And it's like, and so he was just sort of processing his own that own sort of weirdness,

if you will. Um, so that was my, um, that was my experience. I end up getting home about 10 o'clock,

9.45, 10 o'clock. Um, we decided, uh, that's, I, you know, I didn't care whether the

after parties were on or not. It was like, you know, I, I think we're good, right? I'm not

interested. And the best now was going to be in the Dupot Circle underground. It's like, hmm,

don't know if I want to be underground, right? And sort of a, a, a guarded space like that

a little bit because we are, I think we are living in a, we're, we're, we're living in a tender box.

And that's, and that's the thing. So look, this is what it felt like being in that room, right?

That's what it sounded like. And that's how fast it all happened. And so, you know, that's,

that's the instinct I had last night was simply to describe it. And then perhaps start to move on,

right? You know, unfortunately, we've become used to this. This is weirdly normal now.

Um, and if it were just an isolated event, I think it'd be easier to move on.

But the truth is, this doesn't feel isolated anymore. And the fact of the matter is we know we are

living through something different. It's not just more political anger. We've had angry periods

before. Um, and it's not just more division. We've had that too.

What feels different now is a growing comfort with the idea of violence. We've normal,

we're normalizing it. Not just the act itself, but the idea that it just sort of, hey,

it's a part of it. It's a part of politics. You just have to accept it.

Hmm, I'm not there. But we do. We have the willingness to imagine it. Now we have the willingness

to justify it, to talk about it as something that exists just one step away. That's what feels new.

That's why before I walked out of the door, I wondered if I was making a mistake.

Not because of what the dinner could or should be. But we know we're living in, we're not living in

normal times. So I can tell you this from experience. I've covered politics for decades now.

Going back to the 90s, early 90s, campaigns, presidencies, moments of real national tension

after 9-11, I worked in an office right across the street from Saudi Embassy at the Watergate.

And yet I've never dealt with anything like this. Not in terms of threats, not in terms of the volume,

and not in terms of the tone. That is until about 10 years ago.

Some time in 2015, things started to change. The start of the Trump era. And once it started,

and it didn't stay contained, at first it felt targeted in one direction.

Right, when my face was on the back of the pipe bomber's van that they found in Miami,

when I had FBI agents visiting me to let me know I was a target of this,

nobody in the administration, by the way, cared, called any of these reporters at the time that I

digress. So then it felt targeted in one direction. Then it spread. And now, let's be honest,

it feels ambient. It's everywhere. Like it's just a part of the environment. Violence and politics

go in hand in hand. Not in America. That wasn't the way it was supposed to be in America.

Now, many people are asking, the Donald Trump caused this.

And I understand the instinct, there's no doubt I'm making the case that he's responsible for the

era. But it is the wrong question. Because we can argue it forever. Supporters will say it's

the rhetoric against him. We're already seeing that. Right, there's this determination by his most

devoted supporters to just say, hey, the assassination is a leftist. This is the left. It's all the

Democrats fall. Right? Critics of Trump will say it's his rhetoric. This is the guy that introduced

political violence and mainstreamed it. The point is, we're going to spin in this loop all day,

and we're not going to get anywhere. All we're going to do is foment more violence.

It's not going to solve the problem. But it doesn't mean we can't identify

how this got normalized. So that's the better question we need to be asking. What has been normalized

and how are we going to get out of this? Because presidents don't just govern.

They set the tone. They set the tone for the country. They define the boundaries of acceptable

behavior. It is a choice to pardon violent extremists that attack the Capitol. That's a choice.

And over the last decade, these boundaries have shifted quite a bit. You can hear it in the

rhetoric. Let's go back to the beginning. Donald Trump at rallies in 2016, talking about wanting

to punch protesters, suggesting they should be carried out on stretchers, offering to pay

the legal fees of anybody prosecuted for violent political violence on his behalf.

At the time, it sounded like WWE inspired bullshit performance, right?

Crowd work, if you will. But the language matters.

Right? Most people may hear it just as

idle rhetoric, innocent rhetoric, but not everybody. Because over time, what starts as performance

becomes a permission slip. And then fast forward to just the last few months.

After the death of Robert Mueller, the President of the United States actually posted the following

quote, Robert Mueller just died. Good. I'm glad he's dead. That's not ambiguous. That's the

President of the United States celebrating the death of somebody he believed was a political

adversary. I say he believed because all Robert Mueller wanted to do is to get to the fricking

truth of what the Russians did and whether any Americans helped. Or how about earlier this year,

when he just posted, a whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again.

It's not normal American political rhetoric. It's not normal political rhetoric period,

but certainly not the behavior that we should expect from an American President. It's existential

language. And even in moments of tragedy, mocking the death of someone like Rob Reiner,

suggesting his death was somehow tied to his political views. Again, this is the President,

this is the tone being set by the President of the United States.

And there's another shift that's happened at the same time. And it's just as important.

And it's this idea that politics is responsible for everything.

If you're struggling, it's not your choices or circumstance, it's someone else's fault.

It's a political grievance, blame a politician, blame a party, blame the press.

Because you can't look yourself in the mirror and realize you made bad decisions.

You need someone else to blame. Donald Trump never does self-reflex. Oh, he's has to blame

someone else. And once you start to believe that, once you internalize this idea that your

problems are caused by all these other people, you're not that far from believing they should pay for

and then you hear something just bizarre like we heard last night after this incident when the

President chose to have a press conference. And the President was asked whether he was the intended

target. And part of the answer is this idea that he basically said, well, only the great presidents,

the great ones, as he said it, have to deal with this. Lincoln, Kennedy.

He viewed being targeted as kind of a validation, a badge of honor.

Huh, implying that if you didn't get, if you're a president that wasn't targeted for assassination,

like he's been, then you're not a successful president. You're not trying to do big things.

Think about all this for a second. Is that de-escalation?

That's reframing something dangerous and un-American as somehow proof of greatness?

This? Turning risk into mythology? This is something we should all be concerned about because if he's

basically resigned himself to be martyred, well, then no wonder he took a risk like he has with

Iran and he essentially is putting all of us in an economically precarious position.

And this is, but this is where the presidency matters because whether intentional or not,

the president creates the political weather. Not every storm, but it's the climate.

He's very divisive. He thrives on divisiveness. His supporters want the divisiveness.

They feed off the divisiveness and he knows it and he does it and it's more and it's more and you

know what happens. People think there's only one way to respond.

This episode of the Chuck Toddcast is brought to you by Wildgrain. Wildgrain is the first bake

from frozen subscription box for sourdough breads, artisanal pastries and fresh pastas.

Plus all the items conveniently bake in 25 minutes or less. Unlike many store-bought options,

Wildgrain uses some simple ingredients you can pronounce and a slow fermentation process that

can be a lot easier on your belly, little gut health there, right, and richer in nutrients

and antioxidants. There's also no preservatives and no shortcuts. The Wildgrain boxes are fully

customizable in addition to their variety box. They have a gluten free box, a vegan box,

and a new protein box. I will tell you I have done the gluten free box. I have done it a second time.

I have also used the code, the Toddcast code. If you use the promo code Toddcast to check out,

you get $30 off. I've already used it as a gift to somebody else who loves this bread. It is hard

to find good gluten free bread. It is fantastic. They give you step-by-step instructions. I really

dig this. There is nothing like having an artisan bakery in your freezer to chase away the winter

chill. Now is the best time to stay in and enjoy some comforting homemade meals with Wildgrain.

I obviously highly recommend it. It is worth giving Wildgrain a try. Right now, Wildgrain is offering

my listeners $30 off your first box plus free croissants for life. Come on. When you go to wildgrain.com

slash Toddcast to start your subscription today, that's $30 off your first box and free croissants

for life when you visit Wildgrain.com slash Toddcast or simply use the promo code Toddcast at checkout.

This is a sponsor I absolutely embrace, so use that code.

And the climate is shifted. Behave your shifts with it. The barrier moves. What once felt

unthinkable becomes thinkable. Then, sayable and eventually for a very small number of people

doable. And it doesn't stand one side. Escalation invites escalation. That's how being a divisive

leader works. One side raises the temperature, the other responds. And before long,

you're not looking at two sides anymore. You're looking at reflections, sort of out of a fun house

mirror, same intensity, same language, same sense of urgency, existential threats,

just pointed in different directions. And this is where the language matters again and again and

again, because everything now is framed as some existential challenge that we're all dealing with.

Every election, every issue, a battle for civilization itself. Have you seen that? It's the

battle for the West. Violence being announced. Sometimes you're going to have, if you want to save

Western civilization, how many people have you seen use ridiculous rhetoric like that?

They're part of the problem too. Because if everything is existential, then anything becomes

justifiable. Any rhetoric, any tactic, any escalation. The reality is, we are a country of

350 million people who agree on some things and disagree on a lot. And for a long time,

we managed that because we had leaders who didn't lean into being divisive, who backed off

when they realized the temperature had been too hot. This president never knows how to turn

the temperature down. Never. Even last night in his attempt to do it, he glorifies the violence

as some sort of reflection of his greatness. This is, like I said, he needs, that's a separate

issue. And maybe this is, look, I, he's a human being and he's been targeted multiple times for death.

So it might be a coping mechanism. And we should have empathy for that.

But he chose to be the leader of all Americans. And he's pitting Americans against each other on

purpose. He has to turn it down. We have one president at a time. No other political leaders have

the power that he has to do this. He can't do it. He is incapable of doing this. That's the

unfortunate part. But people around him need to restrain him better.

Because here's the part that should worry everybody. It only takes one person.

One unstable, angry, perhaps isolated person

who has absorbed all of this over the last decade.

And they decide, boy, they have no choice but to act. And that's it.

So when the broader culture is reinforcing grievance, reinforcing blame,

reinforcing confrontation, that person doesn't feel like an outlier.

They feel in some distorted way like they're acting within the logic of this moment.

If we were a healthy political culture, those impulses would be rare. They'd be contained,

marginal. But right now they're not. Not because most people believe in violence. I think it's

pretty clear most of us don't. But because the environment is no longer clearly rejecting it.

And this is where leadership matters the most. Because in moments like this,

someone has to step in and lower the temperature. It isn't going to come from the speaker of the house.

It isn't going to come from the Senate Democratic leader, the House minority leader,

the Senate majority leader, the governor of Colorado or Pennsylvania or California,

New Yorker, Florida, whatever. It has to be the president. Someone has to say this is not who we are.

But he's built an entire brand claiming this is who we actually are.

Someone's got to step in here and say this stops now. We got to turn the temperature down.

We got to not govern in the most divisive ways possible.

We don't have enough of that. We don't have, like I said, I don't know if we have the leaders

to meet the moment we need. We're going to say it's what presidential primaries about.

I don't know if the two political parties are capable of producing a leader that can meet the

moment. I think the leaders exist. I fear the party bases won't allow those leaders to approach.

That is why you've seen me so lean so hard into an independent third or fourth parties here,

because we kind of, we need to force a reconciliation in these two parties to just

change their ways, starting with the president and the Republican party.

But instead, we keep moving forward in this cycle. It's a little more escalation.

It's a little more normalization. It's a slightly lower barrier each time.

And the question isn't whether this will happen again. It's whether we're doing anything to make

it less likely. And right now, it doesn't feel like we are. And that's the uncomfortable truth about

all of this. Our political culture was certainly had heated rhetoric, but it wasn't this

actively violent. Now it's actively violent. It's a regular basis.

Reporters, members of Congress. And I see that literally we have, Congress right now is half filled

with people that have been produced by this culture. So they don't even know how to engage in

rhetoric to turn the temperature down. Instead, it's escalation, escalation, escalation.

And I can hear the what aboutism. I've seen it on the right, and I'm seeing it

pop up on the left now. But the fact is, looking at this through the lens of being a political

anthropologist, this is what happens. You stoke violence, you celebrate violence,

you pardon violent actors and violent criminals, you consistently pardon white collar criminals all

the time, just because they're your friends. And you create a you create a world where

people don't respect the rule of law. People don't respect the normal barriers of America of

civilization. So I saw one thing, we need some bipartisan commission on political violence,

give me a fricking break. We don't need a committee or a commission to figure out how this happened.

We know how it happened. This era that we live in is being led by somebody who celebrates political

violent rhetoric. And it has increased and increased and increased. And you're going to get

reactionary politics in response. I said it before, my greatest fear was the the election of

Trump the second time was going to have people decide that the normal rules don't apply.

And it's time to quote fight fire with fire as you've heard. And there is no worse outcome

for our near term politics than a response to this is fight fire with fire. And yet that's

that's the situation that feels like we're in. I would suggest to some of my legacy media

colleagues, let's not sanitize this. I'm already sniffing a lot of sanitization here.

This is not an isolated incident. This continues to be a culmination of a normalization

of violent rhetoric and violent events. Pure and simple. A few things about the future of this

dinner security wise, there were two loopholes this attacker exploited. If we are to believe

everything we're hearing from government and unfortunately because of the track record of this

justice department, needless to say, it is hard to find second and third sources when the

governments in charge of all the information. So let's just say I'm 80% confident in what we're

getting, not 100, certainly not 90. But if we take to understand that this attacker took

trains to get to DC, well, what's the loophole by taking trains? There's you don't put your bags

through any act trade machines on on Amtrak, right? If you went from LA to Chicago shape,

you're just sort of, you know, so he could bring everything he wanted to bring in no one was

inspecting anything, right? That we don't have any of that via on the train system. There's never

been a magnetometer that I've ever gone through getting on Amtrak. You can bring anything you

want on that Amtrak train. No one's looking at your bags. Yes, there is, yes, there is

dogs that sort of sniff around and perhaps they're bomb sniffing dogs and things like that.

But they're not there to sniff whatever weapons you might be deciding to pack with you.

So there's loophole one and then loophole two was looking a room at the hill.

Now, when I've traveled overseas and stayed in the same hotel as a president,

and I would say about half the time that I traveled with the president when I was a White House

correspondent, not even less than half the time did I actually stay at the same hotel as the

president. Most of the press corps stays at a separate hotel, frankly because of security issues.

But the press pool, if you're going to be traveling in the presidential motorcade and on Air Force

one in and out, the press pool does stay at the same hotel. And when you stay at the same hotel

as a president overseas, everybody goes through security magnets right at the lobby of the hotel.

I've that has happened to me every time I've traveled overseas. Or if I've stayed domestically

in the same hotel that the president is overnighting. But we don't do that for hotels where the

president is just going to be there for an hour delivering a speech. But this is, you know,

so those are the two security loopholes. But I do want to say from the get go because there's

a lot of people trying, this was a security failure. Actually, it wasn't. Security worked.

Security, the security parameters worked as intended. He didn't get through the, he got

nabbed in the first line. Now you may argue that the first perimeter should be further.

And there's, you know, okay, well that probably, you know, but how this was secured, it worked.

Nobody got hurt. Nobody was killed. Yes, we have one secret service that got that got hurt.

Thankfully, he's he's he survived the because it was wearable approved that.

But the security perimeter worked. There was not a failure on that front. And I think that's

an important fact that we have to just, you know, because there's this as everything. There's

almost a knee jerk overreaction, right? Well, we got to do this. You got to do this. Got to be

somebody to blame here. You know, this, they're not getting paid and all this stuff and people

won't spend it. We got to have the presidential ballroom. What are you talking about? This has

nothing to do with building the presidential ballroom. And the presidential ballroom is not about

security. The White House is a secure space. The building of the presidential ballroom is because

he just wants to have giant events. You want to have much bigger events. He wants to put his stamp

in the White House. There's the Truman balcony. He wants the Trump ballroom. All right. It's a

vanity project. We all know it's a vanity project. It is kind of gross that there's that that

that there's this attempt to use this incident as as a rationale to somehow have the government

speed up the building of this vanity renovation project. How about going and solving the

the war of choice you made in Iran? First of all, number one, but number two, this is not. And again,

this is not a White House dinner. White House state dinners. That's on the White House grounds.

You know, are we going to never have presidents leave the bunker of the White House anymore?

Look, we're a democracy. We've chosen this freedom, which means and the president himself noted this.

You cannot have security. There is no such thing as a 100% security from somebody that is

determined to do something like this. There's just attempts to minimize the damage that can be done

by a lone wolf who snaps. And that's what our that's what the Secret Service does quite well.

But it's kind of I just please this is as dumb and silly of a spin attempt to try to use this as a

way to rationalize the building of the ballroom for for this for mythical for this mythical security

issue. And then please White House is a very secure space. The size of the ballroom is not about

security. Just realize that. As for, look, the White House press dinner, you know, this I wish there

were no cameras at it. There were no cameras that he wouldn't draw the attention. If it doesn't

draw the attention, it's less likely to be a magnet for violence and for protest and for all of these

things. We don't the grid I ended and wasn't put on camera. I wish the grid I didn't state off

the record, but it's not been put on camera. I guess they invited cameras finally one year, which is

a terrible idea. But you know, it's just a trade association dinner. The US Chamber of Commerce

throws them center for American progress, the Congressional Black Caucus, the Congressional

Hispanic Caucus, everybody throws their sort of organizational annual dinner. You know, it is not

a crime. It is not some sort of violation of journalistic principles for journalists to get

together and have dinner and celebrate their their their industry. The celebration of the event

was the mess was the giant disgusting mistake. And by the way, that's on us as a press court.

Right. We allowed it to become this because it became, frankly, a great way to appease advertisers

that news organizations were desperate to appease so that we could

keep our newsrooms afloat.

All right. Coming up my conversation with Pete Kern. He's the staff one of the staff

meteorologists at watch duty. It's this incredible new resource that was a lifeline to people during

the Palisades fire in Southern California. This is a national wet basically weather tracking app

just for wildfires. And just to give you a sense, this is not just a California thing.

As of right now, I am taping on Sunday afternoon, this introduction. Okay. As of right now,

according to watch duty, there are more than a dozen states with active wildfires and I'm right

at this time at 2 p.m. Eastern time on Sunday, Nevada, California, Montana, New Mexico, Colorado,

Nebraska, South Dakota, Minnesota, Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Massachusetts, and New Hampshire.

Over a dozen states. Okay. You could debate how the climate has changed.

You cannot debate that climate has changed. It has changed. And we are dealing with more of these

issues around the country. And more importantly, this summer is going to be, you want to,

I talked about America being a tender box for political violence.

The West is an actual tender box. And it's going to be a rough, rough summer if we're not careful.

And if the winds are blowing the wrong way. So we'll sneak in a break. I want to come back to my

conversation with Peter. Well, my next guest is, uh, fills the role of a staff meteorologist

for an organization called watch duty. And as many of you know, I've been obsessed with the,

the local news problem that we have all across the country, it doesn't matter media,

market like I do in Washington or where my guest is in Southern California.

It doesn't mean that local news is getting the coverage that is necessary.

And the focus of the conversation with this organization has to do with wildfires and wildfire

season, which of course is such a huge issue in California, being a Floridian. It's the equivalent

of constantly having to be prepared for hurricane season or tropical storms. That consumes pretty much

everybody's half of everybody's brain in Florida, just like wildfire season consumes about

half of everybody's brain in Southern California. And I see Pete is nodding along here in agreement.

So, but what I find fascinating about watch duty is it's filling a role that traditional

local media once filled. And we know with all the cuts, this is missing. And in some ways,

this might end up being a more trusted and a better way to do this. So part of this is also

highlighting something new in the information ecosystem. So let me bring in Pete Curran,

staff meteorologist for watch duty. Pete, nice to meet you. Good to meet you, Chuck. Thank you

for having me. So look, we're on the, I used to ask this of one of my oldest and closest friends,

Liz in LA. And he's now fond of saying, there is no such thing as wildfire season,

unless you want to call all 12 months of the calendar a season. Do you concur with that these days?

Absolutely. Right. We all know for years that the fire scene has been getting longer. And if you

talk to any firefighter and you ask them, after it's been a tremendously rainy winter perhaps,

and you ask them, what do you think about fire season? And they will say without missing a beat,

it will be the mother of all fire seasons because there will be new growth and that growth will dry

out and it will be really bad. And if we've had zero rain, and it's been a really dry winter,

and you ask the firefighter what kind of fire season they will say, it will be the worst fire season

ever. So it's a standard answer. That's the way it is in California. We've, when I started in

the fire service, so that's my background. I started as a firefighter. I spent entire career in

in the fire service. And you know, we used to have a regular fire season, right? It used to start,

you know, in Southern California, we would start maybe late May early June with some grass fires,

and then as the season progressed and the summer got hotter. But we were done with bi-typically,

you know, November 1st, right after the Santa Ana's comedy. So fire season in California was the

equivalent of what hurricane season traditionally was, which is June 1, November 30th. That was

approximately fire season out west. There you go, right? And so there was a tremendous, right? All

the fire service, their staffing and logistics and resources, all based on that. And so now it's

a change in that for the last obviously decade that we've sort of turned into a year-round fire season.

Tell me about watch duty. I know where it got on my radar, one of my producers, Lauren

Gardner, he lives in LA. And I remember during the fire in California, the palisades in particular,

watch duty became just a must-have app. All of a sudden, everybody, it was one of those,

you know, it must be an odd thing for you guys to say your biggest growth period was during one

of the worst disasters ever, right? That's never a comfortable place to be. And yet the reason

you grew is you had information that people found to be factually correct and helpful.

Look, you said you were firefighter before. What was the information flow

to the public pre-watch duty in your mind? Sure. Because one of the roles I filled was there's a

situation unit leader on a incident management team. So I can tell you what that information flow

was. And that is twice a day we take a snapshot of the incident. And that goes, they fill out a

very official form and that's percentage of containment, how many acres, how many resources on

the fire. So that would be updated twice a day. And so the information to the public and the media

and everything else would happen about 6 a.m. in the morning and 6 p.m. In between those hours,

there really wasn't specific information about the incident. So now with watch duty,

we have an army of reporters, of contributors that are looking at this incident in real time,

they are digesting radio traffic on radio scanners, listing to the real time information they're

looking at cameras, the wildfire cameras that are pointed at the fires. They're looking at satellite

imagery of hotspots and things like that. So they are able to report in real time things like

where the fire is moving, how fast is, are there any evacuations. So they vet this information,

they make sure that it is valid through a number of sources before it appears on the app. So only

vetted information appears on that app as official. But for years before this existed, so how did

you farm, when you were on these incident teams, did you just have a collection of local media that

was paying attention? You tried to have relationships with different TV meteorologists or how did it work?

So there was on every incident management team, there's a public information officer,

PIO shop, and they may have one to 20 people depending on how big the fire is. So those folks would

do outreach to the local media. But also, but they would always have to key only off of those official

twice a day, ICS 209 reports is what they call. And so they could only sing whatever was on those

sheets. But yes, previous to watch duty, it would be the PIOs, but mostly it would go to the

National Interim, see fire center, very official places that would release this information,

the maps that you see, the fire perimeter maps, the acreage, that's where it would come from.

And you guys are fully private, is it nonprofit, is it NGO, how would you describe it?

It is fully nonprofit donor supported app. This all started, John Clark Mills was in the

the tech industry, Silicon Valley, around 2021, purchased a home, and then was immediately

threatened by wildfire. And he found that there was no one place that he could go to find out about

evacuations, to find out about the fire movement, to find out about what was happening. And so his

thought was, shouldn't there be such a thing, this one stop shop? And he made it, he made it happen,

and that's what watch duty is. So let's talk about this season, there's been all, it was a wet

winter. So that that that, but as you said, you know, you can, you can spin a wet winter, means

new growth, means more fuel for fires, or a dry winter means even drier condition, more fuel

for fires. I mean, is it really heads, we lose tails, you lose?

This season, it is, is pointing in that direction, right? So as you know, we had a pretty wet winter,

but what we didn't have was a lot of snow, right? So even though, let's say in California,

it's not a big snow pack. We're about, right? So and not just in California, we're talking about

to the entire west, Colorado, the lowest snow pack ever, right throughout the west.

Hey, man, we got plenty of your snow. We got plenty of that out east. It was a crazy, we got more,

there was a stat, Pete, you'll love this. I think we had, Denver had more days over 70, and we had

more snow out here. I mean, it was just crazy. It's been a crazy season. And so, right? I mean,

we're seeing things that the handwriting is on the wall, right? So in February, we had a 280,000

acre fire in Kansas. Then in March, 680,000 acre fire in Nebraska followed by another 250,000 in mid-March.

When does that happen? That never happens. So then March, I mean, that's supposed to be winter,

right? Still sort of moist and wet. No, in low-lying areas. So the plains were the first wake-up call,

a 680,000 acre fire in mid-March is a wake-up call. Then in California, we have the hottest

March on record ever, right? Then we start seeing a marine heat wave caused by this March, right?

So off the eastern Pacific, we have the hottest, the Scripps Institute is reporting sea surface

temperatures, the hottest they've seen. Now we have what, last week, a category five typhoon in

the western Pacific in April, right? So my comment previously was the handwriting is on the wall.

And if you're a fire manager, if you're in this business, if you're a fire behavior analyst,

if you're looking at those fuels and you are not realizing these signs, then your head is in the

sand. It's going to be a very significant season. How, you know, look, I'm being an East Coaster,

I'm, you know, like I said, we're all in, and if you're a Floridian, you're an amateur meteorologist,

a hurricane expert. We all think we're hurricane experts. I spent years at the hurricane center,

you bet. And so, but I feel very ignorant when it comes to fire season and all of that for,

for again, proximity is everything. How hard is it to forecast fire season? And I mean,

and how connected is it to La Nina and El Nino? And I know we're about to do a flip.

Right. So great question. So as the forecasters are looking at this season, what are we looking at?

Right? Well, first we're looking at that, the things we just talked about, the dry smooth snow pack.

We know that all of the things that burn, right? Which is what? Grass, brush, timber. Those things

are drying out in record ways because normally we would start fire season with grass fires.

But the heavier stuff, the timber would be wet from the snow. Well, guess what? We don't have the

snow. So now we have a scenario where all the fuels are drying out rapidly. And we're going to

enter into a scenario where we're going to start to have these 100 acre fires, 200 acre fires in

California and all the sudden, the timber that wouldn't normally burn is now going to be receptive

to burning a month or two earlier than it would be. So, so we're looking at in all areas,

a scenario where throughout the west, throughout the Midwest even of a significant fire season.

So we look at these models, we look at the weather models. Obviously you know a wildfire is driven

by slope, topography, fuel, and weather, weather being the most difficult to predict, right? So

when I go to a fire, I'm looking at the winds, I'm looking at, is there a cold front?

Are the winds going to change direction? Is there lightning? Right, typically a lightning bust

from a decaying tropical system, actually. Right? So we do have tropical cyclones that might come up,

the Baja Spine of Mexico, even though the water is too cold for them to sustain themselves.

You just talked about the warm water, though. I keep like the minute you said that, it's like

there you go. There's you're going to see something we've never seen before, like landfall on

the west coast of one of these typhoons. Right. So two years ago, we had a decaying tropical storm.

It was still troppin' the storm as it entered this southern US first time ever,

but it brought abundant lightning over California that started all these fires that went

for months. So this year with that hot water, the El Nino, the developing issues on the sea

surface temperatures, we could certainly see tropical activity further north. We're already

hearing from the fishermen. You want to know about El Nino? You talked to the fishermen. If they're

catching these big fish that they don't normally catch in those waters, that's the first sign,

and that's what we're hearing. Wow. Yeah. With a hurricane, there's some preparation.

Yep. Walk me through what you'd be telling, what you are telling people in Southern California,

because unlike a hurricane, there's not a, I assume it's not like you can track, well,

that we know a fire may start in this 10-day period. You don't have that kind of precision

like we do with organized storms. So, you know, that I assume is the hardest part to get people

to prepare. It's, you know, where the human species are procrastinators. I think we've learned

this now over time. 100%. So what we're telling the people is, and what the drumbeat has been,

right, certainly the LA wildfires in 2025 was a wake-up call to harden your home against wildfire,

right, to be ready to evacuate, to have a go kit, not unlike, you know, a tropical scenario.

But really, when you're talking about wildfire, and we saw this in the LA wildfires, right, the wind

blows the embers into the built environment, it gets into the addicts, into the eaves,

then you're losing the house. It starts the fence on fire. It lights the playground equipment

on fire in your backyard, the wood that may be stacked. So, trying to mitigate those issues is

a big thing, right? So we call it zero zone, which means the four or five feet closest to your home,

whatever that is, planters, whatever. Move all that combustible material away from your home.

Try to cover up your addict vents with a fine enough mesh screen that prevents those

embers from going in, and basically just be smart. Clear your property of anything that's combustible,

because once those embers start flying, and they're going on mile or two beyond where the fire is,

there's very little, right, you've lost control of the ability to get out in front of that.

It's going to light anything on fire that's combustible. So that's a real challenge in trying

to get people to harden their homes, be ready to go to ready to evacuate. That is really the key

moving into fire system. Does dampness matter? You know, you'll see some people hosing their

backyards if they know a wildfire is coming, you know, all of that. What is the level of help,

something like that does? So, you know, if they went down their roofs, they went down the fuels,

it can help for a while, you bet, it might. But as you can imagine, once a wildfire is moving into

an urban interface, everybody's doing that, right? The firefighters are trying to tap the

hydrants, everybody's on their hose, right? And so that water pressure that the firefighters

desperately need now is going to go down. And what happened during the Palisades fire?

Absolutely. And then what happened as soon as you burn a home, right? Imagine all that plumbing

that now is exposed, right? The toilet, all of that plumbing now is. So then you have water

really. And you multiply that in the hundreds and then commercial buildings that have commercial

sprinkler systems that are now flowing because those pipes and burn. So that is part of the problem.

You have free flowing water and you lose water pressure.

So we've learned that there are resiliency measures and how you keep a roof from flying off.

And it turns out, hey, three inch nails are better than, than an inch and a half nails.

Do we need, is it better housing material? Like what, what's, what's some, you know,

you know, I'm old enough to remember when people worried about whether they're homes in California

or earthquake resilient. Now it seems as if I'd be more concerned about whether my property was

fire resilient more than I would earthquake resilient. So what is, what is that you, you describe

the outside? Is there different types of building materials we had ought to be thinking about? Do

we want one story, not two story? I mean, I just, like, let's assume we're living in this hellscape

now for a while. Okay. I mean, you know, it is what it is. How do we live with this threat in a way

that won't feel like you're constantly having to evacuate? So another great question. So we know

that the, the, the better you can harden your home when we talked about the outside,

but I was involved in the, in the after action analysis of the LLWFIRES. And we went through

those communities. We saw blocks that were decimated by wildfires. And then we saw an entire

block untouched standing brand new homes built to certain specifications. And so to your point,

what was that? That was a non combustible roof material, right? So any kind of composite material

on your roof that doesn't sustain combustion, right? So the old wood, shade shingles roofs,

those are just waiting to catch on fire. Should we just want them? Is it something that maybe,

I mean, look, you're not, I'm not asking you to be a politician or a regulator. But if they were

asking your expert opinion, we'd be like, you know, this shouldn't even be allowed. Like, for

instance, in Florida, I don't think you should have manufactured housing. I'm not saying manufactured

housing doesn't fill a role. But if you're in a, in an environment that you could get 50 or more

mile an hour, when's these things blow right over? I don't think it's illegal. So let me tell you

a secret. It's not so secret. But when firefighters go into a community and they have a fire coming

into an entire urban interface, they're going to send a bunch of fire engines to the block. And the

first got spokes in that block are going to do an analysis or an assessment within 10 minutes

of which homes have been hardened and which haven't. And those homes that have that

shake shingle roof that have overhang of growth materials, um, power lines, things like that,

combustible materials, right? They know that's a problem house versus the house that's got,

right, a composite material roof, a glass that's maybe double paying glass, right?

So the, the external pain of the glass cracks need, but the inside maintains. We saw that in

the, in Los Angeles. So other things that you can do, the, we also found that fences wouldn't

fences. They catch on fire. They bring the fire to the house because the fences usually

grab up to the house. So yet a composite fence, right? Do you think that's that, man, that's that

plastic, maybe plastic or, right? Some, some sort of metal fence, whatever you want to do,

aluminum, um, that, that doesn't sustain because that is what we found brought fire to the house

that ended up burning the house down. And now it's on video, right? We see homes have those

cameras. We watch it happen in mail time. So, um, let's talk about power companies.

Um, what, what is the level of power line burying, uh, in California? How, I, you know,

I know in Florida every time there's a, you know, new construction, they bury power lines, but,

yeah, if it's grandfathered in, it's grandfathered in, uh, what's the situation in California?

Same situation. So, um, we know it's, it's, it's no news that the power companies,

have had, uh, failures where those lines have, have started fires, uh, in California,

large wildfires in the past. Uh, that's certainly not news. Uh, and as these are identified,

and they can, they bury those power lines. Um, we know that, that in high winds, uh, there's

arcing, uh, they have power line failures, uh, falls into combustible grass. And so that's

what started the whole, um, public safety power shutoffs, the PSPS, right? So I'm sure you've read

that, uh, when these red flag warnings, when these high winds are expected in high fire danger

corridors, they will preemptively shut down the power to those areas. Uh, and so we've been living

with that for, you know, five years plus now. Uh, and so it is arguably, uh, either, either,

or it doesn't, I was just going to say, I mean, it doesn't feel like it's worked, hasn't?

Well, so hard to say, right? So it depends on if, if they shut it off and they avoided a fire,

would we know? Yeah. Can they shut off, can they shut off the power lines into Los Angeles

in the middle of a regular business day? Uh, because those same circuits also, uh,

provide power to the wild line interface, right? So it's a problem for the power companies.

I get it, uh, but the more they can bury that stuff, the more they can harden those areas. And so

really, uh, I've seen in the last five years, the power companies, they have been very,

trying to be very proactive with fire danger. They've hired a lot of meteorologists that do nothing,

but they put, you know, sensors and all their high power transmission, uh, towers,

which is great information to meteorologists, right? So that's where we get a lot of our data

is from these, uh, utility weather stations that they put up. Uh, they are trying to forecast fire

danger. They're trying to preemptively do these public safety power shutoffs. Uh, but it's still a

problem. It's still a problem. How do you, right? Can you ever really just, I mean, the real answer

was just shut off the power when there's a red flag warning, but I don't think the public would like

well, the real answer though is bearing is sort of forcing the burial power lines. I mean,

I know the way, you know, even here in Virginia, they, the way the power company works is if they

have a certain number of neighbors could say, no, then well, they're not going to bury power lines

in this, in this community. It seems like at some point, it ought, it's, at some point, it's not

going to be a choice. Now, the question is, is it something, is it an insurance premium

that you risk seeing quadruple? If you don't do it, if your neighborhood doesn't have buried

power lines, the everybody's going to pay more in, in, in, in homeowners insurance or not. I mean,

you know, sadly, it usually is how you get behavior to change is when there's a financial penalty

you're in center. Absolutely. So much like the tropical situation in the, in the southeast,

right, every time there's a fire, our insurance rates go up. And I believe that it is going to

end up being like you stated that areas that don't have buried power lines that are have exposure

to higher potential of fire danger are going to end up footing that bill to try to bury those lines

because we're certainly paying for it in insurance costs for fire danger. Right now, all that stuff

is assessed by fire danger when I moved into my house. My insurance said, well, we can't, we're

going to have to cut cancel your homeowners insurance because your house is right up against

a lodline area. Our high resolution satellite imagery dictated that your house was up against,

yes, up against Berlin. And I said, that is irrigated association vegetation. Does your satellite

differentiate? And they're like, really? I go, yes, this is green irrigated vegetation. And they

go, okay, you're fine then, but that's what we're up against. So you had approved you weren't a

fire risk and you could individually make that happen? Didn't matter that I was a fire behavior

analyst and meteorologist that's been occurring the fire service. And I said, listen, I know about

this and I'm not an urban wildland interface, but right, it's the embers. It's the wind speed

and the ember cast is all they have to say is you're within three miles of the urban interface.

You're exposed to embers. So when do you start losing sleep when there's a high wind warning?

When, when, you know, what is what is sort of when you're, you know, going, I better have,

ready, I better have the coffee going. So the answer is, yes, when we start seeing

the fuels that are going to be what we call receptive fuel bed, the probability of ignition.

So if the grass or the brush, the timber, whatever it is is dry enough and we already talked about

it, that we know it'll catch fire if there's an ignition. And then you add some hot dry winds

or a cold front passage that's not going to rain. That's when the red flag warnings go out. That's

when my role in watch duty is to provide this weather information to the watch duty so they can

proactive, right, in terms of staffing, in terms of beefing up the reporters that are going to be

watching in the certain areas. So I pin point that the areas that are going to be the highest

fire danger. And internally watch duty would do things to make sure that they're ready for that.

So they're trying to proactive rather than react to these to these high fire danger, fire weather

situations. We're taping late morning, early afternoon on Tuesday, April 21st. Would you say

that the danger right now is already elevated and you're in any day now we could get the wrong,

some campfire gone awry because of the conditions that because of the conditions you just described

over the last 90 days. I would say that we are maybe not this month, but probably a few months

away from that. So really starting in June is when you think this is going to be a really,

really ugly summer. I think and if you add the potential of maybe some lightning from a decaying

tropical system so as soon as, you know, so we start in the Pacific May 15th, you guys start June

1st, we start, you know, a couple weeks earlier. All we need is something like that to kick off what

is certainly going to be a very significant fire season. I am very concerned. All of my co-workers

are very concerned. I think it's going to be a very active fire season.

When it comes to, it's interesting to me that you're, were you firefighter before your

or meteorologist? Well, it isn't. I'm an odd duck in that way and then I came to it backwards,

so check you're absolutely right. So and that's why I got interested in meteorology. So I think

you'll find this interesting. So I spent, I was a firefighter, paramedic here in Southern California,

got promoted and spent really 28 years in the fire service in Southern California and during

that period of time, they started sending me as part of these teams to these large wildfires.

And it was at those large wildfires that I realized how weather, how important weather was and how

it basically drove the cadence of the incident. And so I started taking a few classes as much as I

could. I was already a reserve for FEMA and I was considering maybe taking an early retirement and

going back to school to earn a meteorology degree, which is right at that point in my career,

it was unheard of. So I did that. I sold my house. I grabbed my then 84 year old mom,

moved lock stock and barrel to Miami, Florida. I went to school at FIU and earned a meteorology

degree while working at the National Hurricane Center for those three years while I was there,

get to fly through a hurricane. And so as soon as I was done with school, I came back, went back on

the same incident management team as I had been on as a situation unit leader, but now as the

incident meteorologist. So I was able to get qualified as an I met, which is the guy that goes

out to the fire. I sit in the tent. So instead of running up and down the hills with the back

the hose, I get to be briefing the folks on the potential fire danger and making sure that

everybody stays safe because weather is the number one issue when it comes to being prepared for

wind changes, lightning, thunderstorms. It's a big deal when I'm out there. And I'm usually

out there for at least two weeks at a time. Well, my daughter's about to graduate with a degree

in oceanography and a minor in meteorology. There you go. There you go. Miami. So obviously South

Florida, a pretty good haven for weather education. Let me ask you on the meteorology front.

How, you know, a staff meteorologist for a fire department now. Did that exist 20 years ago?

Yeah, I didn't think so. And now it's a normalized position. No, it's it's becoming more normal.

These large organizations, especially state organizations, califier and California,

I seem like the LA fire department, the big fire departments are doing this, right? Yeah. And they

have a fire behavior analyst. So that is the guy that matches the weather with the potential

fire behavior in the fuels condition. And so they call them an F ban fire behavior analyst.

And so these positions now to your point are endemic in most of these large organizations. And so

when I go out on a fire with the fire team, I sit next to a fire behavior analyst. They need my

weather information. I need their fuels information. We produce the fire with a forecast that goes out

to all the firefighters. We do that twice a day. Just to give an example, how much it obviously

this has changed firefighting. It has changed certainly some procedure. You were on the front lines

before this this world existed. Now, now you see it. How would you say what's what's been some

of the best practices that have been created now that meteorology and experts like yourself are

infused into the firefighting protocols? So it's made a huge difference. And sadly, it's taken

fatality incidents to, you know, for wildfire incidents in the past to really forge that

notion that weather is super important to these teams. So in the 90s, really, we started seeing

meteorologists show up to wildfires. Now it's unheard of that one of these teams would go out to a

fire without a meteorologist. So we branch what the National Weather Service. We basically have

them on a constant chat. All right, because they're the ones responsible for issuing the watches

warnings. So we're in lockstep with them. I'm attending briefings online with them. They're

saying, Hey, do you see this? Do I see the wind starting at this time? So I carried that information.

I hone it. The forecast, I write my own forecast for the fire. Very detailed to the topography

that we're in because winds and complex topography is not easy for the weather models to do.

And we hone that forecast. But what I really want to say is the fire behavior, the fire weather

that we've been seeing every year, every year we see more significant fire behavior that we haven't

seen before. I'll give you an example. Fire tornadoes. When we used to talk about a fire tornado,

we would all think, well, that's a fire world. It's a little rope area of an instability. It's

maybe a couple feet wide. It goes 20, 25 feet in the atmosphere. And then it's because of the

instability caused by the fire and the heat on the ground. Starting in 2019, the car fire in

Reading, California, half mile wide, rotating, real, honest to God, tornado caused by a law fire.

Never seen that before. So now we're seeing them every year. So fire seasons are getting

longer. Fire behavior is getting more significant. The challenge is to firefighters is becoming

more significant. So you think about the firefighting community, which is where I came through that

environment. And the way we teach our new folks is by the old guys teaching the new guys.

This is what I saw. This is what I did. Now, you know, in a situation where we're seeing

fire behavior, we've never seen before. So that old guy teaching the new guy paradigm

is now not working anymore. Because the new guy is seeing it for the first time,

right? Along with the old guy, right? So that is a challenge to the fire service.

And we're having to redefine what that is every year. What's the data stream you're not getting

that you wish you did that would improve your forecasting?

Oh, holy cow, you know, meteorologists live in data, you know, that, right? So I'll give you

an example. We use remote automated weather stations called Ross, self-contained weather stations

that we can put in the backcountry that are solar powered. They don't require connectivity

in terms of, you know, any hardwiring. So they broadcast up to a satellite and every hour,

we get temperature humidity, wind speed, wind direction, brant, barometric pressure,

every hour. Well, is that frequent enough for you?

Sure. Yeah. The utility weather stations, yeah.

Five minute, five minute data from the utility stations, five minute data from most of the

other stations. So one thing we could use is more frequent updates. The reason that it is the

way it is, is because each one of those stations after broadcast up to a satellite,

I'm a very narrow window to do that. And that there's only so much bandwidth, if you will. So,

but the technology gets better every year. Now we have a lot of different satellite systems. So maybe

that will change. But we live and die by data. The wildfires in Los Angeles, part of what happened

on the Eaton fire in the Altsadena area was because of mountain wave, what we call a mountain wave

phenomenon. So when strong winds flow over topography, we get very turbulent winds on the

side of that topography. I would love to be able to time that if we had some wind profilers,

some lidar, microwaves, we could time when those were happening because the firefighters on

the ground would say about every 30 and 45 minutes, we have a violent burst of winds. And then it

would back off for another half hour, 45 minutes. And then we have another 100 miles an hour

recorded on that fire. So if we could provide that warning, if we could get more in the details,

save lives. So the more data, the better meteorologists live and die by the data.

Look, this is becoming a bigger problem. Is this is it changing climate? Is it house seasonal?

Is it house cyclical? Is it when it's La Niña? Is it less of a concern than when it's El Niño?

I mean, run run through all of those variables for me. So nobody in the scientific community,

and I think you would agree with this, um, is denying that there is climate change. Nobody in

my business is denying that there's global warming. We know that for a fact, right? We can

empirically point at data. The oceans getting hotter and every year get hotter. The temperatures

get right every year, right? 2023 was the hottest year ever until when until 2024. And then

that was the hottest year that ever, right? So every year, we're having that hottest year ever.

We're certainly seeing the effects of that in the wildfires with the lengthening fire season,

with that fire behavior that we talked about. Now this year, we're going to add a strengthening

El Niño. It certainly looks like that. So we already have this what they're officially calling

the blob, that hot marine area in the eastern Pacific of sea surface temperatures. So the blob,

as they're calling it, is certainly going to help the development of the El Niño, which takes

place in the equatorial Pacific. So if we are headed into what the European weather models are

calling a potential for a super El Niño, what is that? That's anything over two degrees over

average warming in that area of the equatorial Pacific? So if we're entering into a super El Niño,

what does that mean for the tropical activity in the Pacific? What does that mean for wildfires?

Does that mean more lightning? Right, so climate is changing. We're trying to react to it as fast

as we can, but it's certainly as a foothold in the wildfires in the west, the fire behavior that we're

seeing. It's been one year after another. We're on our continent. We're used to the western part

of the continent being the most susceptible to wildfires part of it. It's more open, so lightning

strikes are more likely to trigger them. What is the increase we're seeing in wildfires and other

continents? And what does that tell you about our future on the west coast? Well, we know that we're

seeing wildfires globally. Their length, their seasonal fire scenes are growing as well, right?

Australia every year in New Zealand. Every year has very significant fatality wildfires.

Central America, South America, the jungles. We've seen those burning. We know that that's a problem.

So I think it's the evidence is there that globally we're seeing an increase in fire activity,

and it concerns me and our community a great deal. When I first started,

you would have a firefighter of vacancy very seldom. We would hire a handful of people every year

because it's a competitive job. People want to be firefighter. And now it's a good job.

Good people like the hours flexibility, right? We can't hire enough, right? We go from one

academy to the next. As soon as one academy is the next one starting. You say you can't get enough,

are you still getting an increase in people wanting to be firefighters? You just have more demand

or are fewer people actually wanting to be firefighters? A lot of people want to be firefighters

to your point. I love the schedule. It's a great job. It's the right I delivered babies. I flew

in helicopters. I did all those things. One of my best friends from high school is still better

that he failed the firefighters exam and see how I think he tried it three times. It's a great job.

But it gives you a front row seat really to seeing all the things that we've talked about. So,

like I said, in my career, we had a finite fire season. Now I'm seeing a fire season that doesn't end.

Now I'm seeing fire tornadoes. Now I'm seeing tropical weather activity in San Diego.

Now I'm seeing all of these things that when I started run herd of and having the manpower to

have to adjust it. So, we know fire season, the way that the federal law fire goes, we follow

fire season around the nation. So, in this time of year, usually the Southwest, Arizona,

New Mexico, Texas, Panhandle, that's typically what starts burning first. And so, the federal

resources may focus in on those areas. And then typically, as soon as the monsoonal rains come,

maybe in June, then there's a shift, right? And while fire moves up to the Pacific Northwest,

and it's Washington, and it's Oregon, and it's Northern California. And then as we get later

into the season, right? August, September, then California, right? Other parts of the West

start burning. And so, the federal government, all the U.S. forces, the Bureau of Land Management,

all those federal agencies, right? The fixed-wing aircraft, the rotary-wing aircraft, all the things

that the big stuff that everybody needs, that gets shifted around. So, check my question is,

what happens if it all happens at once? And that's a concern you have. And that's a concern I have.

If the monsoons don't come on time, and the Northwest starts burning at the same time,

then how are we shifting those manpower staffing logistics? How are we shifting that like we normally do?

Well, this is a pretty good place to land this plane on. So, what you're saying is,

we are not prepared, sort of, federal, state, local, the collective. If multiple regions in this

country experience fire season at the same time, and what you're saying is, because of the sort of,

we've got sort of all these conditions that are coming together at the same time, the likelihood

of this is what? Is it 10%, 20%, what do you, how would you put it? I would put it higher than that.

I would put it at 30 or 40. We're going to have multiple regions unfired at the same time,

and then this is going to be a stretching of resources that maybe we're not prepared for.

And let's add to that. What do you think has happened with those federal

wildfire agencies over the past year? Right now, we have not been expanded. We've shifted a lot

of things. We're basically taking all the federal resources under one roof now. How do you think

firefighters like change? Yeah, about as well as all of us do, right? You ask any firefighters,

there's two things they don't like. The way things are and change. I know. Look at the American

voter. You need change, but I want that change. Exactly. So, yes, I have a concern that we're going

to have overlapping fire seasons that is going to challenge us in terms of our resource and

capabilities this year. I did. And I think, look, I'll tell you the biggest

issue that I worry about just sort of politically on this is that there's this perception,

this is a West Coast problem. And you're talking to me about Kansas and Nebraska. Last time,

I checked me, one of those states around the West Coast. Like this is essentially West

to the Mississippi problem, isn't it? This is the year. Right. The wake up call was a 680,000 acre fire

in Nebraska and March. That was the wake up call. If we can do that, now we're really in trouble.

So Colorado, the state of Colorado, they had a bad season a couple years ago. Yeah. And we know

the lowest, yeah. Absolutely. The least snowpack on record ever to their record keeping the the

Colorado state of Colorado are a red flag warning, right? Is something that the national weather

service issues when they have significant fire weather, right? I think the state of Colorado has

been under red flag warning. I think at least 30 times in the last month and a half. So now you're

the fire chief. I hate to say you're like, what does that do? That numbs people, doesn't it?

Well, that's my point. That's what I'm going to ask you. So if you're the fire chief and I tell you

that there's a red flag warning. And you're going to respond to that. Do you respond the same way

30 times later? It's the same issue that occurred in Los Angeles. This happens with hurricane

watches versus warnings and how long to team. Yeah. You know, I went through her infamous hurricane

called Hurricane Andrew. And when that hit, one of the reasons it was it was so devastating

is it South Florida had gone through like 20 misses. Yeah. I feel like in my childhood. So people

just got used to it. Oh, we're all experts. You know, it's going to turn north because they all turn

north. And then this one didn't turn north. It only takes one. Well, and that's and that's always

the case. Well, man, I learned a lot here. I know it sounds like, look, you're not a you're not

an activist. But if you could sound the alarm, you'd like to get more people paying attention to

that we need. We doesn't sound like we have the resources to deal with what we could be facing this

calendar. Yeah. I think it's going to be a very significant year. I think folks need to prepare

to do all the things that we talked about, harden your home, download watch duty,

one stop shopping back. You guys are in our notification. You're not just a California

nation. Right. It's a nation. We're on the colonists. You bet. Okay. On wildfires. Correct.

Currently, we're focused on barfires, but we're probably going to expand to other areas.

There's a good chance that flooding. Right. So we're seeing a lot of

similar issues with the forecasting on flooding is not as accurate as we wish it were.

Well, it's a challenge, right? So there's this sort of an insidious thing, right? There's

a lot of reasons that flooding occurs, but we can use the watch duty paradigm and machinery

and focus on flooding also. Yeah. It seems like we're pretty good at hurricanes because they're

they're an even regular storms because you can track them, right? Is this for its flooding? Yeah.

Yeah. With the other stuff, there's too many other variables that it's just hard to account for.

Right. You've got, so we had the significant flooding in the last few days in the Great Lakes

region, right? Michigan, Wisconsin, major flooding, those rivers, right? So they had very slow

moving thunderstorms that rained. Some of them two inches an hour and and sat for days at a time.

So they're still dealing with very significant flooding, but there's the surprise flooding, right?

The very unfortunate accident that occurred last year in Texas, right? In the hill country

with the fatalities, right? So those were slow moving thunderstorms overnight, non-moving,

causing that. So we feel that we can focus our watch duty army and kind of help with with that same

issue. Well, regardless of where anybody is on the politics of climate change, the issue is we

need to do more warnings and be able to mitigate and be able to respond. And it seems to me that

that's, I really hope it isn't politics that is slowing down the amount of resources going into

this. I think just as we've never had better data, we've never had the ability to be better at this

than now. We just need the political will to fund these entities, right? We need to respond

and we need to not be fatigued by warnings. And we need to right really pay attention to what's

happening. We have the data. We just have to respond to it. Pete Curran.

Very great to meet you. I really learned a lot. Man, you're pretty good at this. You've got

a good meteorologist also got to be able to communicate the science. You speak American. You don't

just speak English. So I appreciate it. I'm used to having to brief firefighters, right? You

got 30 second attention span. You got to get in and get out. There you go. Yeah. Nice work.

Good to meet you, Pete. Thank you, sir. Appreciate it. Thank you, Jeff.

So bottom line download watch duty. As a hurricane guy, I'm obviously one of these amateur

meteorologists. Now my daughter is about to get a minor in meteorology. So I'm going to have

actual professional meteorologist in the family. But as somebody grew up in Florida,

more worried about hurricanes and wildfires. I've always been more focused on that.

But after we're watching what's happening, particularly west of the Mississippi,

it's pretty clear. We need to up our game when it comes to attempting to forecast for wildfire

dangers. So anyway, watch duty not always to your time. Hope you hope you downloaded if you live

in an area that could be under threat. All right. It is Monday, which means we're going to jump

into the time machine. This weekend history avoided. We have a lot to choose from. I mean,

in the, you know, we've the White House correspondence weekend. And I know there was another infamous

White House correspondence dinner that I also attended. The Donald Trump also attended

that had a huge news event. But we didn't know it was happening at the time. It was happening.

And of course, it was the famous Ben Laden raid. That is actually something that happened

this week, but it's not the moment I am choosing to focus on and do is our history lesson of the

week. Instead, we're going to go back to the Cold War to 1960. Did you figure out the clue,

by the way, that the incident was the inspiration for one of the most, for the names for one of the

most famous rock bands of my generation? Have you figured it out? Have you still haven't found

what you're looking for? But let me begin. Just months before this week in 1960, the Cold War

looked like something that could be managed in Moscow, vice president Richard Nixon and Soviet

leader Nikita Khrushchev stood in a model American kitchen arguing about appliances,

about prosperity and about which system worked better. It was a tense confrontation,

but it was contained. It made the rivalry between the two superpowers look like something you could

stage, frankly. But within a year, that version of the Cold War would start to fall apart.

Not because of one crisis, but because peace by peace, the story stopped holding.

So it's May 1st, 1960. President Dwight Eisenhower is preparing for a summit with Khrushchev.

There's cautious optimism, but beneath that diplomacy, the real Cold War is still being fought

in secret. You two spy planes flying deep over Soviet territory, high enough to be considered

untouchable. One of those planes is being flown by a pilot named Francis Gary Powers.

Fly across the Soviet Union, photograph military sites, return. That was the mission.

The assumption is simple. Even if detected, they can't stop you. You're just too high in the sky.

That was until May 1st. Turns out, a Soviet missile reaches that altitude. The plane is hit.

But powers ejects. He survives, descending by parachute to Soviet territory.

And like many pilots on missions like this, he's actually carrying something else,

a coin with a concealed poison needle inside a last resort. He doesn't use it.

Back in the United States, officials lose contact with the plane.

They assume the pilot did not survive.

So the United States, through the CIA, decides to tell a story. It wasn't a spy mission.

It was a weather plane that drifted off course, plausible, deniable,

the kind of story governments tell themselves and tell the public all the time.

But this time, the other side knows exactly what happened.

Khrushchev has the wreckage. And he has the pilot alive.

But he waits. He lets the United States tell the world its story. Repeat it.

Stand by it. And then he reveals the truth.

The pilot is alive. He confesses. It was not a weather plane. It was espionage.

Well, the Eisenhower-Khrushchev summit collapses. The real damage isn't diplomatic.

It's credibility. Because the issue wasn't the spine. Everyone assumed that each side was

spying on the other. The issue was the story. More so for the public.

The United States told one. And it didn't hold.

We're supposed to be the good guys, the truth tellers.

Well, once that happens, a different question starts to creep in. That wasn't true. What else is it?

And here's what's striking. Remember, this doesn't stop there. Within a year,

the United States backs an invasion of Cuba. A force of Cuban exiles lands at the Bay of Pigs,

expecting support, expecting momentum. And instead, it falls apart in less than four days.

Captured, defeated, exposed. And for the world watching, including Americans watching at home,

there's no ambiguity about what it was. It was not a spontaneous uprising. It was an American

backed operation that failed quickly and publicly. President John Kennedy goes on television and

takes responsibility. But by then, the image is already set. At the same time, the United States is

deepening its involvement and Vietnam. Not all at once, but step by step. Advisors become

deployments. Support becomes commitment. Always described as limited. Temporary. Tell it isn't.

And let's not forget. This false story lands in a country that had just come out of the Arab

Joseph McCarthy, where Americans had already seen claims made with certainty and trust stretched

too thin to hold. So one incident can be dismissed. Two starts to raise doubts. By the third,

people aren't just questioning the event. They're questioning the explanation. Sound familiar?

The early Cold War wasn't just a contest of power. It was also a test of credibility.

And in just a few years, a spy plane shut down. A failed invasion for a coup perhaps. A war

explained one way, but experienced another. The United States didn't just face pressure from

abroad. They began to lose something at home. Trust. By the way, this was all before Watergate.

Sometimes the turning point in history isn't something that happens. Isn't something

isn't when something happens. It's when people stop believing the version of it that they're being told.

The trust deficit that we're all experiencing right now with government, with institutions in general,

sometimes we forget. This began even further than we realized.

So there you go. Now do you know what you're looking for? Now do you get the clue I was giving you out there?

All right. Let's take some questions. First one. I love this. Steve Frank, Newport Beach,

California, fellow member of the two first names club. Yes, you are. But I bet you don't get

called Frank Steve, right? Because Steve's not in the last night. It's like with me. It's like,

I understand getting my last name confused for a first name. Just like with you, Steve.

But where I struggle is like, wait a minute. Do you really think my last name's Chuck?

And just like, you really think your last name is Steve, right? That's the

toys funny to me when they when people say, well, I'm not sure which name it is. Well,

which one's least likely to be a last name? But anyway, I'm guessing you have the same frustrations

that Todd said I do. But hey, I turned my head for Chuck Wartot at this point. I'm guessing you

turned your head at Steve or Frank at this point. All right. Here's your question. Huge

fan going back to the hotline days. And now I'm here and there are Chuck Todd trading cards.

Remember you mentioning losing your quote, new music pipeline after your kids left for college.

And I'm in a similar spot. My daughter and I are even thinking about starting a podcast to bridge

the gap across generations. I love that idea. What advice would you give amateur podcasters trying

to turn an idea into something real? Even if it's just for a small audience, Steve Frank.

The number one thing is consistency. You know, the biggest, you know, the reason why most

podcasts fail is people get tired of doing it after two episodes, four episodes, eight episodes.

Stick to a schedule, stick to it. It is one of those if you've ever heard of hockey, you know,

the whole quote unquote hockey stick moment, right? Well, the reason it's called a hockey stick moment

because like in any sort of anything you're building, sometimes it's a business, sometimes it's

an audience, whatever it is. It's like you, you know, a little, a little, a little, a little,

and then boom, right? It feels like it all happens at once. Look, I'll be honest. As I've been

building this audience, it was sort of like we were grinding, we were grinding, and we were grinding.

And then suddenly we, about six months in, we had our first bike, right? And you know, the key is

consistency. It is posting. Look, you've got to be platform agnostic. You've got to go everywhere.

You've got to, you know, when it comes to music, you've got to be in, you've got to sort of be

on top of the big moments in the, it that are happening so that you can, because unfortunately,

the way the algorithms work, right? You don't get, you don't get, you can have a great podcast,

but if you don't make it into the algorithm, people aren't going to see it, right? It isn't going

to get shared. So you've got to sort of ride trends when they exist and try to be relevant

around them, right? Like a simple thing might be, you know, everybody's talking about us,

you know, maybe there's a certain new Taylor Swift album. So, you know, ride the Taylor Swift wave

without doing Taylor Swift, and you know, you know, just do like, you know, it's like something adjacent

so that you can sort of make it into the algorithm and get some attention for what you're doing.

But that's really, and there's almost, there's different, frankly, it's just different ways

each one of them work. I mean, my guess is your, your daughter might be better at it,

at figuring out which algorithms work best for which audiences, et cetera. Look, the other

challenge you're going to have is music rights, right? So be sure to know your, know the limitations,

you know, YouTube will just not include, you know, you may post something, but if the music,

they don't think you have the rights to the music, you know, all of a sudden, you forget.

So it could cost you traffic. So you do have a little bit of an extra challenge on the licensing

issue. So know your fair use rules very well. You know, you could do what my friend Tony Cornheiser does,

which is he only plays music, people send in and get permission from the owner of the license

to Arrett, and they're very, you know, they're very, they make sure they have permission and writing.

You know, they're still waiting for Paul McCartney to give them permission, right? Is the joke.

So you are going to need to know some of those rules. I mean, it is what makes music podcasts,

I think, quite difficult because of the licensing issues, right? Because in order to showcase music

and to share music, you want to play a clip, right? So, you know, be learning what your clips are,

or, you know, things like that. But then, but again, I go back to the single most important thing is

consistency of production. You know, if you're going to be twice a week, always be twice a week,

always be at the same time and be consistent, right? The minute you start being an inconsistent

updater of your podcast, you will not build an audience. People will forget. You'll stop being in

their feeds, et cetera. So it is the number one, it doesn't matter what topic you're doing.

Consistency in a schedule. And frankly, once a week is probably not enough if you want to grow,

grow an audience long, long term. But if you're going to do it once a week,

realize it may take upwards of a year for you to feel, you know, so be sure you enjoy doing it

for yourself, regardless, and just be consistent. That's the consistent about updating. That

matters more than anything. Good luck. Let me know when you get it up and running. We'll promote it.

All right. Next question comes from Patrick and LA and he says, hey, Chuck, let's say, quote,

asking for a friend on this one, how does a nation apologize to the world?

Well, what you do is you don't go about just, I would, I think this is going to be a really

tougher for the next president than you realize. What I think you have to do is just

other countries are not going to just take our word. It doesn't matter how much they like the

next president. So it isn't going to be a matter of apologizing. It is making agreements and

making America's word verified, not just trusted, but verified, right? It means putting pen to paper.

It means getting congressional authority when you need congressional authority. It means sort of

following the rule of law as you're going about. I don't, if we just go around saying,

sorry for the behavior of our last president. Frankly, I think that all that does is

divide us more, right? We need our next president to not divide us. And you know, you may disagree.

Look, there were some tactics that I disagreed with my predecessor and how he went about it.

But he had the best, he had the best interests of the United States. In mind, I just disagree with

how he went about doing it. And I think he inadvertently alienated allies, right? That is how I would

sort of dispassionately say it. And I know you're going to have a hard time trusting us. So here's

what I pledged to you. When we sign this agreement on tariffs, it's putting here, I'm taking it to

Congress. I'm essentially, I'm, it's like, I'm getting a notarized. I'm getting it. It's a version

of that, right? We don't notarize, but you get my point, right? It is, it is not just, I don't think

it's just, I'm sorry, it's behavioral changes. And it is verifying the trust that we're asking for.

Right? We've, you know, the famous phrase, trust, but verify. We're going to, we're going to,

we're not just taking the word of the Soviets. We're going to create a system where we can verify

that they're keeping that word. And I think unfortunately, America's next president is going to have to

create a verification process for our allies to know that we're going to keep our word. Because that's

the thing that we've got to fix. Yes, apologizing might, might be politically feel good for your

political base, but I actually think going about it as, as a straight-up apology to her is probably

self-defeated. Nick from Michigan writes, Hey, I've been reading that Republicans are openly

hoping that Alito will retire from the civilian court and hopes it will just turn out from

Republican voters in the midterms. What do you think? Go to Supreme Court vacancy, meaningfully

increased positive outcomes for the GOP, the cycle. Well, the answer to that is it could, but this

is why you have some Republicans wanting this now because 2018, which was overall a pretty big

Democratic year, particularly in the House, Democrats actually lost two sentences. And it was

Missouri and Indiana. Now they were two tough sentences to hold to incumbents who were sort of kind of

accidental winners the previous time, right? Claire McCaskill, one thanks to Todd Aiken,

legitimate rape comments, and Joe Donnelly won because Dick Luger lost the primary

to a guy named Murdoch and was just considered two off side of the mainstream for Indiana.

So the next reelection was always going to be hard, right? They sort of were accidental winners

in 2012, a little bit, and it was no doubt they were uphill battles. And then the Kavanaugh

confirmation turned raw, personal, partisan, polarizing, and Indiana and Missouri are redder states,

and it fired up a base. Claire McCaskill believes, but for the Kavanaugh hearings, if there's no

Supreme Court vacancy, there's just no debate about a Supreme Court. The Republican base stays

demoralized and she might have been able to eat it out. That's what she believes.

It certainly made it harder for Democrats in red leaning areas where the base was fired up

about Kavanaugh. So that's what this is about. And so it means, you know, now I might argue if,

you know, is it this is where what's good politics might not be good politics, right?

So take, you know, the left's going to want to oppose whatever nominee Trump makes to the court

on ideological grounds and there may be a good case to make it if you're on the left.

The question is, are you getting anywhere with it? This is a conservative,

Republican conservative, right? Alito has not exactly been a mainstream justice. He's sort of been

on the, he is, I think, in the majority, he's not in the majority as often as your barracks,

as your robberts, as your Kavanaugh's, as your kegans, as you all learn from a terrific conversation

and book from Sarah Esker. And so I probably, so I unders, so what you're seeing is Republican,

hoping to replicate what happened and thinking that all they, they just want to save this Senate.

And when you look at what would be seat three or four or five for the Democrats and their pickups,

you're looking at red leaning Ohio, red leaning Iowa, red leaning Alaska, right? This worked

in the red leaning states. It didn't work in swing areas or blue leaning areas, the Kavanaugh

outrage, but it did work in the red leaning battlegrounds. And when you look at the battle for

the Senate in particular for Democrats, they have to basically win in red leaning areas, Ohio,

Iowa, Alaska, Nebraska, right? Those four Montana, those five, all red leaning. And so

what the average Republican strategist is, hey, if we can have recreate the political environment

in October of 18 in October of 26, where the right feels marginalized and outraged by whoever

the Supreme Court nominee is, that that could save the Senate. So I'm skeptical this can work

a second time, but I understand, but I'm trying to explain why they think this. And that's what

they're pointing to. And it did work for, it did work for Republicans in 18. Next question comes from

Jeremy. He goes, Hey, love the podcast and appreciate the space you create for political deep

eyes. I'm currently living in Japan, but spends much of my adult life in Florida and grew up in Missouri.

I'm curious that Democrats can regain a foothold in Missouri, which has shifted from a swing state

to reliably red, even as voter support progressive politics, like marijuana legalization, higher

wages and abortion rights, whereas the disconnect is a branding messaging or something deeper,

and is the Missouri Democratic Party even trying to make the state competitive again? Thanks, Jeremy.

So I would answer the last question first. I don't think the Missouri Democratic Party is even

trying anymore. And I say that I'm being a little probably snarky about it, but it does feel like

a bit of a give up. Now part of it is the suburban swing voter in Kansas City now lives in the

can in across the state lines in Kansas. And I have a feeling that if you're blue leaning suburban

night in St. Louis, you might be on the Illinois side of things now, rather than in the Missouri side

of things, right? So whether it's on abortion rights, right? If that's something, you know, you're

going to live across the river, whether it's whether you're in Kansas, whether you're in Illinois,

right? Both of both states that have codified. So there's a small part of me that wonders if it's

become self-selecting over time, right? I take, you know, I've been saying that Missouri and Kansas

have essentially switching places, right? Missouri was a swing state that kind of had some

rural conservative vote, right? Kansas was the, you know, home-about-doll, right? Mr. Republican.

And what you've seen in the 21st century is that Missouri has become more like a southern,

you know, it has it is arguably, it looks more like a Arkansas or an Alabama in its rural areas

than it does like a Kansas and Iowa or in Illinois. And I just think that you've seen as sort of

Missouri was a Midwestern state in the 20th, culturally Midwestern in the 20th century. It is now

culturally southern, I think, in the 21st century. And then you've seen, like I said, the biggest

thing is the shrinkage of St. Louis in general, right? And this is what I think if you're really

wanting to understand how, you know, essentially St. Louis being gutted as a major city when I say

gutted, right? They had a lot of industries that just sort of disappeared. You go to downtown St. Louis

and it just feels like a shell of its former self. You know, this was a place that was a hub,

it was a headquarters for a major airline, TWA. Anisor Bush is really only symbolically

headquartered in St. Louis anymore, right? As in Bev, it's this huge international

operation, I think the CEO is actually in New York these days, not in St. Louis. Again,

they have the symbolic headquarters of Anisor Bush in St. Louis, but it is, it is, it is,

it is literally a shell of its former self. So, you know, there's a time St. Louis as a city was,

you know, closer to being Chicago and Dallas than it was being Wichita or

in Omaha. And I don't say that as nox, it's just shrunk. It shrunk in relevance. And then,

of course, you know, it's, it's, it had some international. It, it had magnets that attracted

new people into it and attract it. So as that disappeared, you almost had almost like a contraction,

certainly of St. Louis in the St. Louis metro area. So that, that's kind of what I chalk it up to,

like of long term, that this has just been a long term that the, the, the sort of demager

fine of St. Louis as a major city. And I kind of think St. Louis needs a revival plan,

the way Detroit got one, right? And, um, you know, I remember when, I think I've said this before,

I remember when the Amazon eight was, was doing a, a country wide search for a new place for

headquarters. I was really pulling for St. Louis. I've family there. I'm, I'm very familiar with it

previous previous iteration of my life. Um, and it's a, it's, it, it, I actually think it's a,

it's a terrific place to put a headquarters in the central part of the country that has an

easy to get to airport. Like, you know, it should be easier to get around than, than a Chicago or

even a Dallas. But both Chicago and Dallas have just sort of there, they're, they're the central,

they're the central tent poles, uh, in, in the middle of the country now for regional stuff or

gatherings and things like this. And St. Louis is just sort of given up that. And I just think that

that, you know, there's sort of the downsizing of St. Louis in general for a variety of reasons.

Why it has, um, has been a, is probably as big of a contributor to moving Missouri out of the

battleground as, as anything else. So if I were in charge of the national party for the

Democrats, I'd actually be, you know, you certainly, I think the, you know, I would be go, go,

go solve your St. Louis problem first, then start worrying about the rest of the state. And instead,

go, I think Kansas is ready to be a swing state. That's where I'd be invested.

Next question comes from Adam B Charlestown, West Virginia. He says, Hey, big fan here. Seeing a

recent interview with former presidents made me reflect on how despite political differences,

many still feel a level of respect for past leaders. Do you think Donald Trump will continue to

provoke strong polarized reactions long after his presidency or will time soften those divisions?

And if not, it's more about his leadership style or the modern media environment. Thanks for

everything you do, Adam B. Look, I'm inclined to believe it's his leadership style. You know,

it, like anything, you get out of something, what you put into it, right? If you,

if you lead with division, you're going to get division as a response. If you try to lead with

a sense of unity, you've been, if people don't agree with your definition of what unity looks like,

you're going to be received at least net positively as someone who, who wanted to bring people

together, right? You know, I was thinking about this when I was putting together that opening

monologue about sort of how Donald Trump has handled divisive times versus say how George W. Bush did.

George W. Bush made sure right after 9-11 to make it clear to the Muslim world we were not at war

with them and that people shouldn't be taking out their anger on members of that faith.

Went out of his way to do that after 9-11.

Do you think this president would have done that?

So my point is, is that I think that what you're experiencing is,

you know, and I think you could feel it in the, in the genuine affection that many Americans

have for George W. Bush who probably didn't vote for him at the second time. Perhaps,

or don't want to, or didn't vote for him the first time, or maybe didn't vote for him at all.

Because he care, you know, you know, you cannot say he didn't care about the country and he didn't

care about people. You may have disagreed with his tactics. You may have disagreed with his

policies, which you, you got a sense that he genuinely cared about the country and he genuinely

cared about everybody, even people that he disagreed with. You know, Donald Trump wants to deport

people that disagree with him. He's openly talked about it. So, you know, if you, you get back,

what you put into it. And to answer your question, will Donald Trump continue to provoke strong,

polarized reactions long after his presidency, or will time soften those divisions? It's up to him

to soften the divisions. It's not up to the rest of us. It's up to him.

Steve in Orange County, long time first time, as a recovering polysignor, your commentaries

bring back fond memories of lectures from my favorite political science professors in college

decades ago. That, can I just stop right there? Steve, that is the single best compliment you can.

That's, that's, that's, I am tinyly hoping I just want to be, I want to make it fun and interesting.

So thank you. During one of your recent podcasts, you said the writing is on the wall that Trump

is in lame, in lame dark territory since Trump almost certainly will not go quietly into the night,

like most of his predecessors, how likely is it that there will be a bigger faction of Republicans,

willing to push back against him without going the way of Jeff Flake Benzass or Tom Tillis?

Someone's besides Rand Paul at least, thanks. Well, I think, you know, as you see, it sort of,

it starts incrementally. If Thomas Massey survives his primary, I think that's another step and

you'll see more, one of these things is nobody wants to be first, but as, as, as more Republican

survive the wrath of Trump, then, you know, so Tom Tillis's protests worked. It got Trump

and the Justice Department to back down on their Trumped up charges against Powell, right?

As more Republicans see certain things work and the pushback works, then more will get comfortable

doing it. So I think it's one of those things. This is why, just politically, if you're Donald Trump,

you care so much about this, Thomas Massey, primary, more, really more than anything else because

he has put this guy on blast for almost a year now. And if he can't take him out,

and as Republican of an area as you can find in Kentucky, in, in theory, a mega area,

that will stiffen the spine of a lot of Republicans who maybe are quiet right now, but would like

to push back. So it's one of those things that every, every little incremental pushback of the

president, every stumble, every special election loss, only increases the courage of those who

realize they're the ones left holding the bag and the bill, and they'll, they'll start to get

a little and little, a little more each time. I don't, don't ever expect this to look like a rush

and a flip and a sea change. It will be one of those things more like the hockey stick,

where all of a sudden you're like, holy cow, third of the party's now voting against them really,

regularly. Now that might not happen until the summer of 28.

But you're starting, I do believe that it's sort of where in the stages, and it's one of those

things, it's like, you know, we never, we always know when, when recessions begin, but not until

after the fact, it's kind of with lame duck status, you know, is it right now? Has it already begun?

Did it, you know, did it begin with the, you know, with the 25 election? You know, we'll, we'll,

we'll post date this at some point, but we're in the, we're definitely in the, in the landing zone

of lame duck, of lame duckness. Take one more question. It's a number seven here.

Nasa, then we will save eight and nine.

For the next episode, Andy Y from Milleywake writes, you mentioned recently that Trump may be

setting Vance up to fail, and it made me wonder, if Vance sees that too, could he be positioning

himself to benefit it from it long term? Is there a scenario where he distances himself at the right

moment to capture voters who were aligned with Trump's agenda, but fatigued by him personally,

or are there risks of staying tied to Trump too high for that to be a viable strategy?

Best Andy Y from Milleywake, Wisconsin. Well, I, we actually, the question would be, have we had a,

but has Trump had a vice president who tried to do this? The answer is yes, right? I was thinking

about Pence the whole time that you were asking this question. And I know what Pence thought to

himself, starting in January of 2021, and frankly, thought all the way through when he started

running for president in January of 2023, that there was a scenario where he would distance himself

at the right moment, January six, that he could capture voters who were aligned with Trump's

agenda, that he was, you know, that he agreed with what Trump was trying to do. He just didn't

like what he was doing, and they were tired of him personally. That was Pence's theory of the case.

It is still Pence's theory of the case. I think long term, like I think he really is playing a

long game. He's trying to start an alternative to heritage that he wants to be the guy, if there,

if this version of the conservative movement collapses, and there's a lot of evidence that Trump's

movement will collapse at some point, Pence wants to be the guy organizing the next conservative

movement or sort of a revitalized version of it. So, but I ask you, I'll flip it to you.

Is that, you know, if that's a long game, you know, is, can both these guys be playing the long

game like this, right? Or I am more inclined to believe that the stain of Trump is too hard to get

rid of. And then it is too difficult to try to be, to try to be a half measure version of it.

We're going to find out, right? I think you're going to have a variety of candidates who say that

they're, you know, they're the real mega movement. And, you know, I think I think that's how Rand

Paul might position himself. And I think Pence's going to position himself as more of a traditional

conservative who's, who's also morally upstanding. You know, I think it's Vance that is,

you know, Vance has never really been a part of any, any, any political, you know, he's never

really had success being his own, having his own political identity, right? His entire political

identity was rescued by Donald Trump with that endorsement in the Senate primary in 2022. So

Pence had a political identity before Donald Trump, right? In fact, Donald Trump needed a mic

Pence. Donald Trump didn't need a JD Man. It's just the opposite, right? Vance needed Trump. So

that's why I'm skeptical that there's any sort of, you know, Rubio is more likely to have the

ability because again, he had a political identity pre-truck. Vance didn't really have a sustainable

pull, right? Not, you know, once he started running for office, he tried, he tried to do it with his

own political identity and couldn't. And instead, just sort of, if my most cynical version of it,

Peter Teal bought the Trump endorsement for Vance, hard-stop, right? In some form or another. And

here we are. And that's why I'm pretty skeptical on that. All right, a few draft reactions.

Number one, I'm really happy for Carson Beck. It's pretty cool that he's QB3. Look, he

understood he has been in two different offenses. And I think that that just helps you transition

better. So I do think he'll transition. Well, he does well in the scripted portion, you know,

he struggles a little bit when when offensive line protection falls behind and we'll see, I mean,

he was behind arguably one of the best offensive lines in the history of the University of Miami.

He's not going to have that right away at Arizona. But he's going to get a chance. I mean, I'm guessing

he'll be the starter by somewhere in the, you know, barring injury or something like that or just

a total inability to get the playbook, which I just find unlikely. You know, he's going to get

a real chance. And you just, you don't know if you're going to get a situation where you get a,

so I'm just happy he's going to get a chance to Arizona. We know it's uphill. You know, that's

a franchise that just never seems to get out of its own way, right? But how get have Trey McBride

to throw for that three. That's pretty good. He's got Marvin Harrison there. He's got Jeremiah

love. I mean, there's some interesting tools there. I mean, he's, so I'm happy for him. That's

exciting. I'm trying to remember the last time the University of Miami had two starting quarterback

simultaneously. And they got a felon. I think we have to go back to the Vitty Burnie era for that.

So that's that would be that would be fun. Look, you got to say, you got to give the packers credit

what they told the press before the draft is what they did. They said they needed work on

cornerback. First pick was a quarterback with a C, by the way, corner and that quarter.

A little bit of a project out of South Carolina, but huge athletic upside. But frankly,

this is what the packers do, right? They love to draft guys like that are just, you know,

have all this athletic ability, but you know, need a refinement here or refine it there.

They're believers in their system. And frankly, it usually works out pretty well.

I mean, you know, I would put the packers up against anybody in their record of particularly,

just feel like they kill it, frequently kill it in the second round. First round, they can be

all over the map. So let me list to say, I liked our first round pick this year because it was

Michael Parsons. We traded it away as part of that trade. So I like that. One other note that I

think is interesting about the draft that tell you know, so there's been all this stuff about NIL

and how the last three rounds of the draft, there was just, you know, the talent fell off a cliff

because those tweener players, those players that had some upside, they now stay in college

an extra year, they get refined and then they end up being drafted in one of the first three rounds.

So you have this, what you have right now is you have,

is you have the first, you know, I think the first

70 players off the board, all now, you know, they've all played quite a few snaps. There's a few

exceptions, Tyson Simpson's an exception. But they've all played a lot of college ball, right,

where there's fewer that are coming out early for the money because you're actually better off staying

getting the money, right? I mean, David Bailey is as good of an example as anybody, right? He's a guy

that contemplated going to Harvard, decides to go to Stanford, gets his degree early, then ends up

playing one year in Texas Tech and then becomes the number two overall pick, right? Cam Ward is another

one, right? From last year, Fernando Mendoza is another one, right? He could have after graduating

Cal left early and then would have been a third or a fourth round pick. So you've done all this,

here's something else that I noticed, right? The top 10 picks, first pick was in the playoff,

second pick was in the playoff, third pick was Notre Dame should have been in the playoff,

fourth pick was in the playoff, fifth pick was in the playoff, sixth pick was LSU, not in the playoff,

seventh pick was in the playoff, eighth pick was not in the playoff, neither was the ninth pick,

but the tenth pick was, right? You start to go through here and the first round is just

essentially the entire top 10, Indiana, Texas Tech, Notre Dame, Ohio State, Miami, Alabama,

Oregon, Georgia, Texas A&M, and then you look at the schools that weren't in the top 10 that

had players, LSU projected to be there, Arizona State of playoff team the year before Utah,

projected to be a contender for their Penn State was supposed to be there, Clemson was supposed

to be there, Florida, Florida was supposed to be better than they were, USC was supposed to be there,

you know, so it is, I think what you're seeing is just what NIL is doing, which is it,

you're going to have more prepared for more first rounders are going to be starters in the NFL

than ever before, more second rounders and more third rounders. Then you're going to have this

just sort of a lot more experimental picks. This is where I think over the next

couple of years, you'll start to see more of the foreign academies get into the fourth, fifth,

sixth round, where instead of drafting somebody who didn't get noticed by the power for conferences

and paid NIL money to come join them, you know, taking a flyer on somebody at North Dakota State,

they'd rather take a flyer on somebody that went through the Australia Academy or went through

the Canada Academy, went through Canadian high school or I just think you're going to see more of

more that more diverse because ultimately, you know, they want they want these picks to matter and

you may see also more teams trade away these fifth, sixth and seventh round picks and they start to

seem less valuable more experimental. But look, everything is we're still only two or three years

into like this feels like the first draft of the more mature NIL era. And it's why I think the

last part of the draft really is filled with guys that are probably not going to make the team.

Where before, you still thought you were drafting special teams guys in the sixth and seventh round.

And I think it's just less likely, less likely, you're going to have that.

All right, the next time I see you, how many NBA first round matchups will be over? Will it be done

will it be done in Houston? That's the big question I have, right? You will next here for me,

we will tape I will tape on Tuesday. You will next here from the air. How many series will be

officially over? By the time I drop on one team morning, one, two, or three. I'm going to guess

just, I'm going to guess two. I want to go with two, but we shall see. All right, with that,

I've gone quite a bit. Obviously, I had a lot to say about the weekend's incidents.

I heard from a lot of you appreciate it. Don't worry about me. I know we know, I do know,

I'd like to think I know how to keep my head on a swivel. And I sort of look at all of these

events with eyes wide open. But we all need to be vigilant out there. A little bit number one. And

number two, we all need to do our part to deescalate, depolarize our institutions, our geared towards

polarizations, the algorithms are geared towards polarizations. We as voters have to find less

polarizing people and be putting them in leadership positions. You know, we need to fix some of

the systems, right? We got to get rid of partisan primaries. No doubt about it. That's a massive

contributor to this. But the partisan leadership, right? Partisan primaries give us more partisan

leadership. And of course, we have a president who is intentionally divisive. And all of that trickles

down. So we all have some work to do, but it starts with demanding better, more moderate and

temperament. Moderate does not mean some sort of uncomfortable compromise between the left and

right moderate means for me, temperament matters more temperament and character,

matter more in making a president than ideology or policy position.

And with that, I'll see you in 48 hours.

This is an iHeart podcast. Guaranteed human.