Podcast appearances and mentions of Chris Christie

President Trump has a serious message for Vladimir Putin. Jake Tapper gets a taste of who the Democrat Party really is. Bill Maher has a message for liberals. Scott Pelley from CBS News is worried about free speech, apparently. NDI Tulsi Gabbard declassifies documents on how the Biden administration labeled Americans who opposed administration policies. COVID vaccine is no longer recommended for young children and pregnant women. Will there ever be accountability for the harms caused by the COVID vaccine? Billy Joel has a brain condition that's taking him off tour. Southwest Airlines' big changes have arrived. Alan Alda … dead or alive? Elon Musk has learned that politics is a bad investment as his DOGE cuts fade away. Is the gold still in Fort Knox? Consumer confidence is higher than expected. Laura Loomer stealing Pat's "Unleashed"?? Was Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) behind the autopen signature of President Joe Biden? What's next for South Africa? FBI opening up new investigations around January 6 and White House cocaine. More information about the public Macron spat. Chris Christie is fat. Canada ready to be the 51st state? Secret Service troubles continue. 00:00 Pat Gray UNLEASHED 00:47 Trump is Upset at Putin 02:12 Jake Tapper's Son Attacked Online? 07:19 Bill Maher's Message to Liberals 09:59 Scott Pelley Warns Americans of a Continuous Attack 12:46 Tulsi Gabbard on Domestic Violent Extremists 18:18 RFK Jr. Makes COVID Vaccine Update 34:07 Chewing the Fat 49:37 Ron DeSantis on DOGE 56:38 Where's the Gold at? 1:05:18 Consumer Confidence Report 1:05:53 Apprenticeship in the USA 1:08:40 Loomer Unleashed 1:12:21 Liberals Continue to be Racist Towards South Africans 1:16:13 Dan Bongino's Pay Cut? 1:19:23 Emmanuel Macron Deepfake? 1:26:49 Kamala Harris Reminds the World She's Unemployed 1:27:31 Chris Christie Running for POTUS? 1:34:18 Secret Service Fight Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The Rich Zeoli Show- Hour 2: 4:05pm- On Monday, President Donald Trump signed an executive order that is intended to lower the price of pharmaceutical drugs domestically—explicitly mentioning a “most favored nation” pricing model which will require companies to charge Americans no more than what they are charging citizens of foreign countries. Currently, Americans typically pay more per drug than Europeans, for example—despite pharmaceuticals being developed in the United States. 4:10pm- While speaking with the press, President Trump hilariously noted he has a “brilliant businessman” friend who is “seriously overweight” and “takes the fat shot drug.” The friend told Trump that he currently pays significantly more for the drug in the United States than he does in London. But which friend was the president talking about? Matt and Justin speculate that it could be Elon Musk. Chat GPT suggests it could be Chris Christie? No chance. Artificial intelligence has failed us. 4:30pm- Bill D'Agostino—Senior Research Analyst at Media Research Center—joins The Rich Zeoli Show to breakdown some of the best (and worst) clips from corporate media: Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) dismisses the idea that we are in a constitutional crisis (despite prompts from Meet the Press's Kristen Welker) + New Jersey Democrats cause a commotion at an ICE detention facility.

The Rich Zeoli Show- Full Show (05/12/2025): 3:05pm- Over the weekend, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and U.S. Trade Representative Jameson Greer met with China's Vice Premier for Economic Policy He Lifeng in Geneva, Switzerland. By the meeting's conclusion, an agreement was reached to pause onerous tariffs between the world's two largest economies for 90-days. U.S. tariffs on Chinese imports will be reduced from 145% to 30%, while China's tariffs on American imports will go from 125% to 10%. While speaking from the White House on Monday, President Donald Trump said, “we achieved a total reset with China” and that his administration's negotiators will continue to seek remedies for China's unfair trade policies—which have included currency manipulation, unbalanced trade, and intellectual property theft. 3:15pm- On Friday, Newark Mayor Ras Baraka alongside Congressmembers Bonnie Watson-Coleman, LaMonica McIver, and Rob Menendez visited the Delaney Hall Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention facility in New Jersey—at one point trespassing which led to a confrontation with ICE officials and the eventual arrest of Mayor Baraka. ICE has released bodycam footage of the altercation which shows Rep. McIver attempting to physically shove past ICE agents. Rich notes that because of the enormous sum of “earned media” surrounding the confrontation, Baraka—a candidate for New Jersey governor—might have a real chance to win the Democratic Party's primary next month. 3:40pm- According to a report from Politico, internal polling suggests that Senator John Fetterman's (D-PA) support with Pennsylvania-based Democrats has faded—with only 46% having a “favorable” opinion of him currently. 4:05pm- On Monday, President Donald Trump signed an executive order that is intended to lower the price of pharmaceutical drugs domestically—explicitly mentioning a “most favored nation” pricing model which will require companies to charge Americans no more than what they are charging citizens of foreign countries. Currently, Americans typically pay more per drug than Europeans, for example—despite pharmaceuticals being developed in the United States. 4:10pm- While speaking with the press, President Trump hilariously noted he has a “brilliant businessman” friend who is “seriously overweight” and “takes the fat shot drug.” The friend told Trump that he currently pays significantly more for the drug in the United States than he does in London. But which friend was the president talking about? Matt and Justin speculate that it could be Elon Musk. Chat GPT suggests it could be Chris Christie? No chance. Artificial intelligence has failed us. 4:30pm- Bill D'Agostino—Senior Research Analyst at Media Research Center—joins The Rich Zeoli Show to breakdown some of the best (and worst) clips from corporate media: Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) dismisses the idea that we are in a constitutional crisis (despite prompts from Meet the Press's Kristen Welker) + New Jersey Democrats cause a commotion at an ICE detention facility. 5:05pm- Prior to signing an executive order on Monday, President Donald Trump applauded his administration for successfully negotiating a ceasefire between India and Pakistan. 5:10pm- Over the weekend, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and U.S. Trade Representative Jameson Greer met with China's Vice Premier for Economic Policy He Lifeng in Geneva, Switzerland. By the meeting's conclusion, an agreement was reached to pause onerous tariffs between the world's two largest economies for 90-days. U.S. tariffs on Chinese imports will be reduced from 145% to 30%, while China's tariffs on American imports will go from 125% to 10%. While speaking from the White House on Monday, President Donald Trump said, “we achieved a total reset with China” and that his administration's negotiators will continue to seek remedies for China's unfair trade policies—which have included currency manipulation, unbalanced trade, and intellectual property t ...

In this conversation, former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie discusses the current state of the Trump presidency, highlighting both pleasant and unpleasant surprises. He critiques the Democrats for their lack of listening and leadership, emphasizing the need for a more centrist approach. Christie also addresses economic challenges facing the Trump administration and the Democratic Party's struggle to define its identity. The conversation touches on the importance of unequivocal support for Israel and the need to combat antisemitism, particularly on college campuses. They explore the potential for a constitutional crisis as Trump's legal battles unfold. Christie also discusses the complexities of Donald Trump's relationship with the legal system, the impact of Democratic strategies on Trump's empowerment, and the choices voters face in upcoming elections. He reflects on Joe Biden's leadership and misreading of the political landscape, while also drawing lessons from Ronald Reagan's presidency. Christie emphasizes the importance of reaching across the aisle and the need for politicians to listen to the public. He concludes by sharing his future plans and commitment to public discourse. Takeaways Trump's administration appears more organized than before. Christie criticizes the DOJ's handling of indictments. The Democrats need to listen to the public's concerns. Economic challenges could impact Trump's approval ratings. The Democratic Party lacks strong leadership and direction. Christie advocates for a centrist approach within the Democratic Party. Support for Israel is crucial for political alignment. Antisemitism on campuses needs urgent attention. University leaders must prioritize student safety. The potential for a constitutional crisis looms over Trump's legal issues. Trump respects the courts despite his rhetoric. Democrats empower Trump by labeling everything a crisis. Elections are about choices, not just referenda. Biden's leadership style may lead to Trump's return. Reagan's lessons include helping others and listening. Reagan would be baffled by current immigration rhetoric. A president willing to lead can unite the country. Christie believes in the power of persuasion in politics. Biden's misreading of the political landscape is concerning. Christie plans to take a breath before his next steps. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today, we're breaking down the latest headlines, starting with the possibility of Cuomo running for NYC mayor—could it actually happen? Kristi Noem weighs in on FEMA, while South Carolina is literally on fire. Bondi makes waves on Fox, and Melik Abdul calls out Zelensky on CNN for his lack of diplomacy.Meanwhile, Trump meets with Zelensky, but he and J.D. Vance quickly shut him down. Rubio absolutely wrecks Kaitlan Collins with facts, and an old Biden-Zelensky call resurfaces, raising new questions. As expected, liberals lose their minds, while Chris Christie's Trump Derangement Syndrome is on full display and Susan Rice fawns over Ukraine.We also take a closer look at Ukraine's recruiting tactics, and Putin's latest mineral deal offer—what's the real motive? As Trump prepares to address Congress, Chris Murphy decides to sit it out in protest. Meanwhile, Elon Musk's comments on Social Security spark debate, and we discuss why it's more important than ever to protect him.And of course, we wrap things up with the latest Oscar news!Keep your data safe from data brokers with our sponsor AURA. Visit https://Aura.com/Chicks to start your 14-day free trial today.Shop the first-ever MEGA Sale going on now. Code CHICKS to save at https://MyPillow.com/Chicks plus get free shipping on every order!

Steve Hayes was joined over the weekend by Chris Christie, the former governor of New Jersey, at the 2025 Principles First summit in Washington, D.C. The two discussed why Christie initially endorsed Donald Trump in 2016, the Trump administration's decision to side with Vladimir Putin, and where the line of a “constitutional crisis” is. Watch the interview here. The Dispatch Podcast is a production of The Dispatch, a digital media company covering politics, policy, and culture from a non-partisan, conservative perspective. To access all of The Dispatch's offerings—including members-only newsletters, bonus podcast episodes, and regular livestreams—click here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Joy Reid sobs as she addresses cancelled show; Kash Patel confirmed as FBI Director and Dan Bongino appointed as deputy director of fbi; The View responds to Jane Fonda's speech at SAG Awards about "woke;" MSNBC just dropped anti-DOGE propaganda piece of fired federal workers; Chris Christie says it's illegal for Elon Musk to make US workers explain their work week or lose jobs; Jemele Hill on CNN#joyreid#msnbc#theview#sagawards#janefonda#trump#elonmusk#doge

Send us a textWhat if the principles of yesteryear could illuminate the political chaos of today? Join us as we embark on a nostalgic yet critical examination of the Reagan era, drawing audacious parallels with the current political landscape under Trump. We question the controversies surrounding DEI initiatives and their real impact on Black small businesses, pondering whether tampering with so-called "natural hierarchies" risks systemic upheaval. Our disdain for the upcoming "Values First Summit," or as I cheekily dub it, the "Losers First Summit," is palpable as we poke fun at figures like Mark Cuban, Chris Christie, and John Bolton, who are poised to challenge the Trump revolution.Expect no punches pulled while we dissect the uproar over Julianne Moore's "Freckleface Strawberry" being scrutinized in military school libraries. This isn't just about a children's book—it's a microcosm of the ongoing battle between freedom of expression and regulatory compliance. Simultaneously, we navigate the thorny political landscape of Ukraine. President Zelensky's potential land concessions and the looming election pressure reveal the need for Europe to step up its game in confronting Russian aggression. Are European nations too reliant on the U.S., or is there still hope for genuine international partnership?Lastly, prepare for a no-holds-barred critique of media personalities who flip allegiances like it's going out of style. We expose the double standards plaguing political discourse, spotlighting figures like Bill Maher who blend common sense with extreme agendas. As we channel the wisdom of Reagan, we're reminded of the enduring value of authentic, principled voices in an era of shifting loyalties. It's a whirlwind exploration of politics, media, and global affairs with a hearty side of satire.

Chris Christie, former governor of NJ and 2024 presidential candidate, joined the Guy Benson Show today and discussed the latest embarrassing display by current NJ Governor Phil Murphy. Governor Murphy hinted that he would be harboring an illegal immigrant at his house from ICE, and former Governor Christie reacted to the move, calling it "just wrong." Christie and Guy also discussed some sports, as Christie's NY Mets recently acquired MLB superstar Juan Soto. Christie and Guy also discussed their Super Bowl predictions, and you can listen to the full interview below! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The second Trump administration is off to a chaotic start. To better understand the President's mindset and motivations, we're joined this week by Trump friend-turned-foe, former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie. Plus, we delve into issues like DEI and meritocracy, and consider how both parties might evolve in a new Trump era. Follow The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart on social media for more:  > YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@weeklyshowpodcast > Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/weeklyshowpodcast > TikTok: https://tiktok.com/@weeklyshowpodcast  > X: https://x.com/weeklyshowpod   > BlueSky: https://bsky.app/profile/theweeklyshowpodcast.com Host/Executive Producer – Jon Stewart Executive Producer – James Dixon Executive Producer – Chris McShane Executive Producer – Caity Gray Lead Producer – Lauren Walker Producer – Brittany Mehmedovic  Video Editor & Engineer – Rob Vitolo Audio Editor & Engineer – Nicole Boyce Researcher & Associate Producer – Gillian Spear Music by Hansdle Hsu — This podcast is brought to you by: ZipRecruiter Try it for free at this exclusive web address: ziprecruiter.com/ZipWeekly Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today on Welcome to Cloudlandia, We start with the mysterious drone sightings over New Jersey, exploring the thin line between conspiracy and curiosity. These nocturnal aerial visitors become a metaphor for our complex modern world, where information and imagination intersect. We then investigate the profound impact of cultural icons like Mr. Beast and Kylie Jenner, examining how influence transcends traditional expertise. Our discussion reveals how public figures navigate changing landscapes of leadership and visibility, offering insights into the evolving dynamics of success and social capital. The episode concludes by challenging our approach to information consumption. Drawing from personal experiments and wisdom from thought leaders like Warren Buffett, we explore strategies for staying informed in a noisy digital ecosystem. Our conversation provides practical perspectives on navigating media, understanding cultural shifts, and maintaining perspective amid constant information flow. SHOW HIGHLIGHTS We explore the presence of drones over New Jersey, questioning whether they are linked to government surveillance or civilian activities, while considering the broader context of misinformation and conspiracy theories. Dan and I discuss the concept of anticipation being more stressful than actual experiences, suggesting it as a contributor to mental distress. The impact of cultural icons like Mr. Beast and Kylie Jenner is examined, highlighting their influence despite lacking traditional skills in their fields. We ponder on how cultural shifts are altering perceptions of corporate leadership, using a hypothetical scenario of a CEO's public safety being compromised. The dynamics of news consumption are analyzed, contrasting real-time news feeds with curated platforms like RealClear Politics to understand how they balance diverse political viewpoints. I share my experience with digital abstinence, noting the benefits of reduced distractions and the negligible impact of disconnecting from the continuous news cycle temporarily. The concept of "irrational confidence" is explored, discussing how it characterizes overachievers and can be cultivated over time to foster personal growth. We reflect on long-term investment strategies inspired by Warren Buffett, emphasizing the enduring need for certain products and industries. I consider the importance of balancing cultural awareness with the need to filter out unnecessary noise, contemplating changes in my information consumption habits. Insights from personal experiments in digital and media consumption are shared, emphasizing the importance of distinguishing between transient cultural information and lasting knowledge. Links: WelcomeToCloudlandia.com StrategicCoach.com DeanJackson.com ListingAgentLifestyle.com TRANSCRIPT (AI transcript provided as supporting material and may contain errors) Dean: Mr Sullivan. Dan: Mr Jackson are the drones looking down on you. Are the drones looking down on you. Dan: I mean, how many do you have up there? What is going? Dean: on with these drones. Dan: Yeah, I bet there's just a bunch of civilians fooling around with the government. Dean: Yeah, I wonder you know like you look at this. I think it's so. I wonder you know like you look at this. I think it's so amazing that you know we've had a theme, or I've been kind of thinking about this, with the. You know, is this the best time to be alive or the worst time to be alive? And I mentioned that I think probably in every practical way, this is the best time, but the anything in the worst time to be alive column just the speed and proliferation of, you know, conspiracies and misinformation and the battle for our minds. You know, keeping us in that. You know everything is just enough to be. You know where you're uncertain of stuff. You know there's a lot of uncertainty that's being laid out right now in every way. I mean, you look at just what's happened in the last. If we take 2020, fear you know. Dan: Well, tell me about it. I'm not very much of that 2024. Tell me about it. I experience very much of that. But why don't you tell me about that? Because I want to note some things down here. Dean: You know what? Dan: Every month, more money comes in than goes out. What more do you need to know besides that? Dean: I agree with you. I'm seeing the light here. It's just on the top level. We went through an election year which is always the you know the highly funded, you know misinformation campaigns or you know putting out there. So everybody's up on high level. Dan: Are you talking about lies Are? Dean: you talking about lies? Are you talking about lies? Who knows Dan? Dan: When I was growing up we called them lies. Why so many extra letters? I mean lies, that's a perfectly good Anglo-Saxon word. Why is Greek and Roman stuff in there? Dean: I think that's the thing, If we just simplify it. But if we bring it down to lies and truth, it's much more. Dan: I like lies and truth. Dean: Yeah, it's much more difficult to discern the lies from the truth. Dan: Yeah, he's telling a lie here, folks, his mouth is moving Exactly. Dean: You know that's the truth, but I just look at that. It's like you know the things that are. You know the things that are happening right now. Like you look at even with the government, even with the congressional hearings or announcements on, almost just like a matter of fact, oh yeah, there's aliens, there's totally aliens. There's. They've been here for a long time. We've got some in, we've got all the evidence and everything like that. But you know, carry on, it's just kind of so. It's so funny. Stuff is being like, you know, nobody really is kind of talking about it. And then you get these drone situations in New Jersey, all these drones coming out and the government saying I know nothing to see here, nothing going on there. Dan: Well, my take if you're going to be using drones. New Jersey would be my choice. You know I put drones over New Jersey. Not a lot happening there. Dean: All the memes now are that it's some highly sophisticated, you know fast food delivery service for Chris Christie. That's all the meme things. They're on a direct pipeline delivering fast food to Chris Christie. That's just so funny. Dan: Yeah, yeah. Well, you know, I mean the whole point is that civilians could do this. I mean, I think everybody probably has the you know, or certain people do have the technological capability now to put up drones, you know, and just put some lights on them and put them in the night sky I'm sure anybody does that and then you know, and then you'll be on social media. Dean: Somebody will film you and everything like that you know it's at night and they're mysterious. Dan: Always do it at night, never do it during the day You've got to use the right words to describe them too, dan, you've got to use the right words they're mysterious drones. And if you practice you can get them to fly. In formation it looks even more interesting. I'm swooping a little bit in formation, everything else, well, I don't believe there's aliens. Dean: Okay, good Everything else yeah. Well, I don't believe there's aliens, so you know I mean. Dan: I don't believe there's anything more alien than people I've already met. That's what. Dean: I mean yeah. Dan: You know I've met some alien thought forms on the part of some people. But see, I think you got to make a fundamental decision about this up front. This is worth thinking about or it's not worth thinking about. Yeah, okay, so I made the decision. It's not worth thinking about that. If something new develops, I'll probably know about it in a very short period of time, and then I can start responding to it. Yeah, but about six months ago a new resolution plunked into place in my brain, and that is I'm not going to react to an experience until I actually have the experience. Dean: So say more about that. Dan: Rather than making up a fantasy or the possibility that there's an experience to be it. Actually you're getting. I think mental illness is having an experience before you've actually being afraid of an experience before you've actually had it. It's the anticipation of having an experience that I think causes mental illness. Dean: That's true, isn't it? Dan: Yeah, I mean, that's like yeah, I haven't seen Probably not the only thing, probably not the only thing about mental illness, but I think that would qualify as an aspect. It certainly is a paranoia, certainly an aspect of paranoia, yeah, but things are moving. I think we're witnessing one of the greatest innovations in the history of the United States right now. Can I tell you what it is? Would you be interested? I'm all ears. Yeah, President is elected, and then there's this period from the day after the election until the inauguration. Dean: Yes. Dan: And it's basically been fallow. Nothing grows during that time and Trump has just decided why don't I just start acting like the president right after the election and really create a huge momentum by the time we get to the inauguration? Let's be so forceful right after the election that all the world leaders talk to me. They don't talk to the existing president. That's his name. I forget what I forget Joe, joe, joe. All right, that's the name, that's the name of the beach, that's the name of the beach, I just find it remarkable how, around the world, everybody's responding to the incoming president, not to the actual president. That's the truth. I think he's, and he's getting people. There's foreign policy changing. You know there's foreign policy, mexico, their foreign policy you know, their export import policy is changing. Canada export import policy is changing. Canada export-import policy is changing. And all he did was say a word. He said I think we're going to put a 25% tariff on both of you. And all of a sudden, they're up at night. They're up at night. Dean: I happened to be, in Toronto when all that was being announced. I happened to be in Toronto when all that was being announced and all the news was, you know, that there's an emergency meeting of all of the premiers to discuss the reaction to Donald Trump's proposed tariff. You know, you're absolutely right. Everybody's scrambling, everybody's. You know, they're definitely, you know, thinking about what's coming. You know. Dan: And then he goes to Paris for the opening of, you know, they're definitely, you know, thinking about what's coming, you know. And then he goes to Paris for the opening of, you know, the you know, the renovation of Notre Dame Cathedral. Yeah, looks good, by the way, I don't know if you've seen the pictures. It looks really good. I was in there. You know I've been to Paris, I think I've been to Paris three times and I went the first time. I said, oh, I've been to Paris, I think I've been to Paris three times and I went the first time. I said, oh, I have to go to Notre Dame Cathedral. And I went in and I said, gee, it's dark and dingy and I'm not sure they even clean. You know, clean the place anymore. And all it takes is a little fire to get everybody into cleanup mode, and boy, it looks spectacular. So Trump goes there and it's like he's the emperor of the world. You know, all the heads of state come up and they want to shake his hands and everything like that. I've never seen anything like that with an incoming president. They want to get on his good side and everybody's giving them money for his inauguration. Mark Zuckerberg's giving them money. The head of Google's giving them money for his inauguration. Mark zuckerberg's giving them money. The head of google is giving them money. Jeff bezos giving them money. Abc's giving them 15 million. That'll just go into his library library fund. Yeah, and everything else. Wow. You know, I've never seen them do this to an incoming president before. Yeah, time magazine called him the person of the year Already. I didn't even know there was a Time magazine. Dean: I'm actually thinking. I've been, I've been like thinking, dan, about my 2025, you know information plan and you know I've been kind of test driving this idea of you know, disconnecting. Where I struggle with this is that so much of the insights and things that I have are because I, on top of culture, you know, I think I'm very like tuned in to what's going on. I have a pretty broad, you know, observation of everything and that. So where I struggle with it is letting go of like at the vcr formula, for instance, was born of my observation and awareness of what's going on with mr beast and kylie jenner and these, you know, that sort of early thing of knowing and seeing what's going on you know before many of our contemporaries kind of thing. Right, many of our people are very decidedly disconnected from popular culture and don't pay attention to it. So I look at that as a balance. That part of it there's a certain amount of awareness that is an advantage for me might be affected if I were to be blissfully unaware of what's going on in culture, you know. Dan: Yeah, I don't know. I mean you could put Charlotte on to the job you know, yeah, and that's so I look at that. Charlotte. For our listeners, charlotte is Dean's AI sleuth. She finds out things. She's a sleuthy integrator of things that Dean finds interesting. You ought to talk it over with her and say how can I stop doing this and still have the benefit of it? Dean: Yeah, my thing. I think that where there might be an AI tool that I could use for this, but Charlotte, from what I understand, is bound by her latest update or whatever. She's got access to everything up to a certain date. She doesn't have real time information in terms of the most recent stuff. Have you heard, by the way, dan, what is? We're imminently away from the release of ChatGPPT 5, which is supposedly I want to get the numbers right on this. Let me just look at a text here, because it's so overwhelmingly more powerful than ChatGPT 4. The new ChatGPT5 has 10 trillion gpus compared to chat gpt4, which is 75 billion. So the difference from 75 billion to 10 trillion sounds like a pretty impressive leap. Sounds like a pretty impressive leap, and that'll put it over the top of you know, the current thing is a 121 IQ, and this will bring it to being smarter than any human on the planet. Dan: And so we don't even know, but not at doing anything particular. Dean: No, I guess not. I mean just the insight processing, logic, reasoning, all of that stuff being able to process information. I'm still amazed I was talking. Dan: When it comes out. Three months after it comes out, will you notice any difference? Dean: I don't know. Dan: That's what I'm wondering, my feeling is that I'm not even sure what cat GPT is two years after it came out, because I haven't interacted with it at all Right, I've interacted with perplexity, which I find satisfying. And you know, yeah, there's an interesting. I read an interesting article on human intelligence and it said that by and large, there's an active, practical zone to human intelligence where you're above average in confidence and you're above average in making sense of things, and it seems to be between 120 and 140. Dean: Yes, 120, 140. Dan: And about 40, 140,. Your confidence goes down as you get smarter and your awareness of making sense of things gets weaker, gets weaker. And from a standpoint of communicating with other people, the sweet zone seems to be 120 to 140. Dean: Yeah, yeah, I think you're right. I think that, yeah, yeah. Dan: You've got above average pattern, You've got above average pattern recognition and you've got good eye-hand coordination you know, in the artisans of the word that you can see something and take action on it quite quickly. You have the ability to do that, and probably in new ways, probably in new ways so you don't have a lot of friction coming the other way. You know when you do something new? yeah, but iq, you know, iq, iq is one measurement of human behavior yeah but there's many others that are more prominent, so yeah, I think this is you know, I think silicon Valley has a big fixation on IQ because they like to compare who's got the biggest. They like to compare who's got the biggest, but I'm not sure it really relates to anything useful or practical beyond a certain point. Dean: Well, it's not actionable. There's no insight in it, not like knowing that you're Colby, knowing that we're 10 quick starts is useful information. Dan: Yeah, it's like having six quick starts together with some alcohol. Right, it's a fun party. Dean: Yes, like you said your book club or your dinner clubs, our next-door neighbor our next-door neighbor's husband and wife and Shannon Waller and her husband. Dan: Our quick start out of the 60 is 56. We just have the best time for about three or four hours Good food, the wine is good and everything else. We just have the best time for about three or four hours Good food, the wine is good and everything else. And regardless of what happens transpires during those four hours, the world is completely safe from any impact. Dean: Right, exactly, it's so funny it's not going to leave the room. Yeah, everybody's safe, yeah. Dan: Go back to culture. What do you mean by culture when you say? Dean: culture. What? Dan: do you mean by culture? When you say culture, what do you mean? Dean: I mean, like popular culture, what's happening in the world right now, like having an awareness of what, because I'm a good pattern recognizer and I see and I'm overlaying things. I'm curious and alert and always looking for what's with Mr Beast and recognizing that neither one of them has any capability to do the thing that they're doing. Mr Beast didn't have the capability to make and run hamburger restaurants and Kylie didn't have any capability to run and manufacture a cosmetics company, but they both were aligned with people who had that capability and that allowed them to have a conduit from their vision, through that capability, that if they just let people know their reach that they've now got a hamburger restaurant and you can order on Uber Eats right now or you can click here to get my lip kits. You know, access to those eyeballs, that's all. So I look at that and if I had not, if I had been cut off from you know, sort of I would say I'm in the tippy top percent of people of time spent on popular culture. I guess you know, and I look at it as I look at, it's a problem in terms of a lot of time and a lot of you know that mindless stuff you would think like screen time, but all the inputs and awareness is just monitoring the signal to get and recognize patterns. You know. So I'm real. Yeah, well, let me throw you a challenge on the culture side. Dan: get and recognize patterns, you know. So I'm really sorry, yeah, well, let me throw you a challenge on the culture side. Dean: Yeah. Dan: Okay. So in New York City there's going to be a meeting of you know, I guess it's a shareholders meeting for a big health insurance company and the head of one part of the health insurance company is walking down the street. Somebody shoots him in the back and kills him, kills him the CEO, and they, yeah, they catch up with him. You know, a week later and you know he's arrested in a McDonald's in Pennsylvania and they find all sorts of incriminating evidence that he in fact is the person who was the shooter. And now he's got, you know, he's got sort of a manifesto about that. These CEOs are doing evil and even though he doesn't think that his action was an admirable action, it had to be done. I would say that's a cultural factoid because up until now being a CEO is like being an aristocrat in our capitalist society. I get a CEO and now the CEOs are trying to be invisible and they're hiring like mad new security. So all the status value of being a CEO got disappeared on an early morning sidewalk in New York City because somebody shot him. Shot him in the back, you know, I mean it wasn't a brave act, shot him in the back, but the reason is that you, as a CEO, are doing harm to large numbers of people and someone has to stop you. I would say, that's as much a cultural fact as Mr Beast or Kylie Jenner. Dean: Yeah, I mean, would you say that again? Dan: I mean, I think, every CEO in the United States. Dan: United States has instantly changed his whole schedule and how he's going to show up in public and where he's going to be seen in public where he doesn't have large amounts of security, with one action broadly communicated out through the social media and through the mainstream media. He just changed the whole way of life for CEOs. I would say that's a cultural fact. It's a negative one. You're talking about positive ones, but I believe for every positive thing you have, there's probably a corresponding negative one. I'm struck by that You're just not going to see CEOs around anymore, and I mean, half the value of being a CEO is being seen around and they just removed the whole reward for being seen around, just removed the whole reward for being seen around. Dean: Yeah, I wonder, you know like I mean. But there are certain things like other I don't know that it's all CEOs. You know, like I think, if you are perceived as the part of the vilified, you know CEOs, the almost back to Occupy Wall Street kind of things, if you're a CEO of a company that's viewed as the oppressor, like those insurance things, but I don't know if that's true for the CEOs of NVIDIA and OpenAI and Tesla, and you know what I mean. Dan: I think, if you're yeah, I wonder, but we'll see, but we'll see, we'll see. Dean: Yeah, yeah, are you the people's CEO? You know, I think. Dan: Yeah, I mean my yeah. Somebody once asked me about this, you know. They said how well known would you like to be? And I said just be below the line where I would have to have security. Dean: Right, yeah, if you look at it, can you think of anybody? Dan: I wander around Toronto on my own. I go here and I go there and everything else, and nobody knows who I am. That's my security. Dean: Nobody knows who I am yeah, but you wonder, like you know, if you look at the level of fame of you know you? You've mentioned before the difference between Warren Buffett and Mark Zuckerberg. Warren Buffett is certainly very famous, but nobody's mad at him. I guess that's part of the thing. He's very wise, or viewed as wise. Dan: He's usefully wise. Dean: Yeah, exactly. Dan: Investing according to his benchmarks and his strategies has proved very valuable to a great number of people. Dean: Agreed. Dan: Plus, he's got a fairly simple, understandable lifestyle. He still lives in the house he's lived in for the last 40 years, still drives a pickup truck and his you know the entrance to his home is filled with boxes of Diet Coke. Dean: Cherry. Dan: Coke Cherry Coke, cherry Coke. Dean: Cherry Coke, not Diet Coke. No, I'm not. That's a subject, I'm not an expert in Cherry Coke. Dan: Cherry Coke, not Diet Coke. That's a subject I'm not an expert in. Dean: That's the funniest thing. Right, that's one of my top two. Dan: Warren Buffett, you have merit badges in that area. Dean: Yeah. But I think culture, you know, I don't know, I'm trying, it's a slippery beast, this thing culture you know, it's a slippery, slippery beast and you know there's I think that's part of the thing, though it's like the zeitgeist you know is, I think, having an awareness zeitgeist gosh, you just had to slip in a german word, didn't you? Dan: you just had to get a german word, yeah I've been sort of fixated on schadenfreude for the last month. I've just been why I've just been watching the democrats respond to the election and I'm fully schadenfreude. I've been fully schadenfreid for the last month. But zeitgeist, the spirit, I think that translates into the spirit of the times. Dean: Yes, that's exactly what it is. That's what I meant by. That's what I meant by. I'm very like, I think I'm at the tippy top of the you know percentiles of people who are tuned into the zeitgeist, I think that's. I would be self-reportedly that, but yeah, and I don't know, but at the cost of there's a lot of useless stuff that gets in there as well, you know, and negative, and you're faced with all of it. So, my, my filter, I'm taking in all the sewer water kind of thing and having to filter it through rather than just, you know, pre-filtering, only drinking filtered water. Dan: You're getting rid of the fluoride drinking filtered water. Dean: You're getting rid of the fluoride. Yeah, exactly, winter haven. Florida, by the way, is one of the first in the country to be getting rid of fluoride on the oh no, this will happen really quick. Dan: Oh yeah, it was just that. Dean: I, I just said I just saw that winter haven was like one of the first movers you, you know, polk County Florida is removing and, by the way, polk County Florida is now fastest growing county in the country. So then, so there you know, 30 something, 30,000 something people that we grew by, yeah, so, new. Dan: You're to date right, you're to date Over the last 12 months, over the last 12 months. I guess that's how they measure it yeah. Dean: So my thought, dan, was that I was looking to. You know, like my tune in to the zeitgeist is on a daily, real-time basis, I'm getting the full feed, right. No, no filters. Yeah, what I was thinking. What I was wondering about was if I were to change the cadence of it to more sort of filtered content, like I would say what you do, your, you've chosen a filter called real clear politics. Right, that's your, that's your filter, and you probably have five or six other filters that are your lens through yeah, it would be the go-to every day. Dan: You know I start the morning and. I go on my computer, I go to the RealClear site. So it's. RealClear comes up as RealClear politics, but then they have about eight other RealClear channels. RealClear politics, RealClear markets, RealClear world. Realclear defense, energy, health science, you know, and everything like that. But the beauty of it is that they're aggregators of other people's output. So you know everybody's competing to get their articles on real clear. You know the New York Times competes to try to get. You know, get every day maybe one or two of its headlines, supposedly for most of my life. The most important newspaper in the world and they have to compete every day to get something of theirs onto the real clear platform. And it seems very balanced to me, right to left from politics. You know, politically, if I look at 20 headlines, I would say that five of them are real total right, five of them are total left and there's a lot of middle. There's a lot of middle about things like that, you know about things like that, you know, and then I'll punch on them, and then that takes me right to the publication or the site that produced the headline, and then I might see three or four things and I discover new ones. I discover new ones all the time. And it's good and there's a lot of filtering that's being done, but I do. They're not interpreting these articles. They're just giving you the article. You can read the article and make up your own mind about it. Now they do some editing in some cases because they interpret the headlines and they have a sidebar where there's topical areas where it's clear to me that real clear has created the headline. That's not the originating. Dean: You know the originating source of the article that's kind of like that's the drudge playbook, right yeah? Dan: I used to like drudge but he went wacky. He went wacky so I didn't read him anymore. Dean: Yeah. Dan: These guys are pretty cool. They're pretty cool. They've been going now for a dozen years anyway, as I've been aware, and they seem really cool. You know they carry advertising. That's not if I'm thinking of horses. I don't get horse ads, you know. 10 minutes later you're done. Dean: Something like that. Dan: But they do have their advertising model, but I don't, you know, I'm not interested in buying anything, so it doesn't really affect me, but that's really great. You know what's really interesting. Peter Zion, you know I'm a big fan of his. And he's got a blog and he came out about a month ago saying I'm going to put in a new approach and that is, you'll always get your free blog and video to go along with it. So it's written and then it's also got the video, but it will be a week later than when I put it on, and if you want it right away, it'll cost you this much. And I'm giving all that money to some cause. Okay, so I'm fundraising for some cause and I just went a week with no Peter Zine and then I started getting it every day and it makes no difference to me whether I got it last week or this week, okay, and so I just waited a week and I'm right up to date again as far as I'm concerned. Dean: Right yeah. Dan: Like when Syria fell. You know, the Syrian government collapsed last week and he had nothing on it until seven days later. I want to go over, but he's adjusting his format now. He says I'm going to give you four stages to what's actually happening. So you know, he's experimented with something and he's finding that he has to adjust his presentation a little bit just for people saying you know? You know, I'm going to tell you over a three-day period what happened. This happened on the first day, this happened on the second day, third day and this is where we are on the fourth day, and everything else and that's good. I like that. Everything else you know and everything, but that's part of the culture. You know it's part of the culture. Dean: Yeah. So my thought like my sense of culture. Dan: it's what culture is. Whatever's happening right now that you're interested in, yeah, it seems to show some interesting movement. Dean: Yeah, I think you're, I think you're right. I mean, my thought was of experimenting, was to go to more of a rather than a minute by minute, always on direct feed to the zeitgeist is going through a daily. You know, I had a really interesting two days at strategic coach in Toronto just a couple of weeks ago, when you know I was. I referred to it, as you know, workshopping like it was 1989 with my phone. Dan: You were practicing, practicing abstinence. Dean: Yeah, I was, and what I learned in that was, and I did it two days in a row with zero contact with the outside world, from nine o'clock to five o'clock when the workshops were going on, no checking in at the breaks or at lunch or, you know, no notifications. You know dinging while I'm in the workshops. It was certainly anchoring, you know, presence to me in the in the workshops, but also noticed that nothing really happened. You know like I didn't miss anything in that five, in that nine to five period. You know I got a bunch of emails over the day but there were maybe two or three that were like for me or of any real interest or necessity for me. You know I have two inboxes. I have a, you know, my, my dean at dean jackson. My main mailbox is monitored by, you know, people, stakeholders in the, you know, because sometimes an email will come in and if it has something to do with our realtor division, diane is in there and sees that and can respond, or Lillian is able to respond. But then I also have my own, a private email just for me, that I give to my friends, and whenever you email me, that's the email that you use and those ones are not. Those aren't seen by anybody but me. But there's even far fewer of those that come through than come into the main one. Dan: Well, it's an interesting experiment that you're doing here, because it seems to me that one is the world is changing all the time. As far as news is concerned, the world is. I guess that's what news means. You know that things are changing, but if you don't pay attention to it over a long period of time and you don't feel inconvenienced, by it then, probably, it wasn't important probably it wasn't important, yeah, you know, and like I'm in six and a half years now with no television you know right and and you know, I've gone through two, two full presidential elections without watching television and yet I don't feel that I've missed anything important by not watching television Because I have real clear politics and I have a computer and I get videos. I can go to YouTube. And if somebody's giving a talk somewhere I can watch, where on television you would never get the whole speech. You know you would be broken up with commercials and everything like that. And then you have some commentators telling you what you were supposed to think about that, which I don't really require that I'm perfectly able to understand what I'm thinking about it and everything like that. So I don't know, I don't know. Well, my thought experiment. Dean: You know what you? Dan: should do is say what kind of cultural information is sugar and what kind of cultural information is protein, I get it, and so that's kind of where I was thinking. To me that's where you're going. Dean: I'm thinking about slowing down the cadence so, and to have a daily, like you know, something like real clear and you know there's thinking about where that is filtered sort of thing for me, thinking about where that is filtered sort of thing for me. And then weekly, you know, like I think, if I just looked at, if I went to print as a thing, if I were to say, you know, time Magazine, newsweek, the Inc Magazine, people Magazine, like I think, if there were some things that I could and the Weekend Wall Street Journal, I think with those you could, that would be kind of a really good. I don't think I would miss out. Dan: I'm really big on the Weekend Wall Street Journal, I think that's a great print. That's a great print medium. I literally haven't read Time magazine. I don't know, maybe 20 years or, but it seems like they're probably on top of what's even if it's slanted, you're going to get a sense of what the core thing is. Dean: That's actually right. Yeah, I know. Dan: A lot of Democrats canceled their subscription over the last three or four days because Trump person of the year. Yeah exactly. See, now, that's an interesting piece of information, yeah yeah, what they wrote about him I don't find interesting, but the fact that certain readers they must have made him look good, you know, for that sort of cancellation, you know you know it's like this is being categorized as the kiss the ring phase. Dean: That's what abc there was being characterized. That time magazine kissed the ring by making him person of the year abc. You know, kissing the ring, giving him 15 million dollars, and well, they didn't $15 million. Dan: Well, they didn't give him $15 million, they were required to give him $15 million yeah exactly, and George Stephanopoulos has to apologize publicly for defaming him as he should. As he should, yeah, for defaming him, you know, as he should, as he should. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Dean: So Trump's got to have at least one court case. Dan: Trump's got to have at least one court case going in his favor. Dean: Yeah. Dan: Yeah. Dean: But I look at that as you know, that's a really. I think that would be a really useful thing. Would certainly get me back three or four hours a day of yeah you know, of screen time. It would give me more dean time to use, because it would certainly condense a lot of that but you have some interesting models that are, I would say, are cultural models. Dan: I would say more cheese, less whiskers is a cultural model. I mean, if you have it as a thought form, you can see, you can simplify happenings around you. You know, that seems a little bit too much whiskers, exactly, too much whiskers. Yeah, that seems like a fine new cheese. Yeah, that seems like a fine new cheese. For example, taylor Swift gave $100 million in bonuses to everybody who helped her on her tour. Dean: I don't know if you saw that. It's crazy $200 million. Dan: The truck drivers, the ones who got $100,000. They got $100,000. And her father delivered the checks. That seems like a really. That's like a fondue, that's not just cheese. Dean: That is only the finest cheese fondue. Yes, exactly, that's so funny. Dan: when they hit it big, they're real jerks and they're real pricks and she's not. She's showing gratitude. That's very much a cheese. That was a very cheesy thing for her to do. In your model, that's a very cheesy thing for her to do. Yeah, in your model, that's a very cheesy thing. Dean: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I look at you know another thing that's happening is I don't know whether you've followed or seen what Deion Sanders has done with Colorado football over the last two seasons, but he basically went from the basement of 1-11 team the worst team in college football to the Alamo Bowl in two seasons and Travis Hunter just won the Heisman Trophy and he could quite possibly have the top two draft picks. Dan: His son didn't win the Heisman Trophy Hunter. Oh, you're saying Travis Hunter? I? Dean: was saying Travis Hunter. He could possibly have the top two picks in the NFL draft between Jadot and Travis Hunter and it's just, I mean, it fits in so perfectly with my you know, 100 week, you know timeframe there. That that's, I think, the optimal. I think you can have a really big impact in a hundred weeks on anything but to go from the basement to the bowl game is like it's a really good case study. But that really is. You know, I often I think there's so many things that play like a crystal clear vision of what he was trying to accomplish In his mind. There's no other path than them being the greatest football team, the greatest college football team in the country. That's really it. Building an empire. That's certainly where he's headed and his belief, that's the only outcome. You know it's so. I was. I read a book and, by the way, I'll have an aside on this, but I read a book years ago called Overachievement and it was a book by a sports psychologist at Rice University and his assessment of overachievers people who have achieved outsized results. One of his observations is that, without fail, they all have what he characterizes as unreasonable confidence or irrational. That's irrational confidence. That's what it is, and I thought to myself like that's a pretty interesting word pairing, because who's to say how much confidence is rational, you know, yeah, it's kind of it's it's and first of all, I. Dan: I don't think the two words even have anything to do with each other I don't either. Dean: That's why I thought it was so remarkable. You know, I think irrational confidence I mean, yeah, spoken by. Dan: spoken by someone who I thought it was so remarkable, irrational confidence. I mean spoken by someone who probably has very little. 0:46:50 - Dean: I mean interesting right Like people look at that, but I thought I've overlaid it with your four C's right Is that commitment leads to courage? Yeah, that commitment leads to courage First of all. Dan: I think it can be grown. I'm a great believer that commitment can be grown, courage can be grown, capability can be grown, confidence can be grown. It's a cycle. It's a growth cycle. It's like ambition. It's like ambition. I'm much more ambitious today than I was 30 years ago way more ambitious and 30 years ago I was 50. That's when most people are kind of are peaking out on ambition when they're 50. I mean I was in the valley 50 years ago, compared to where I am now, but I've always treated ambition as something that you can grow, and my particular approach is that the more you can tap into other people's capabilities for your projects, the more your ambition can grow. It's an interesting thing. Irrational confidence. Dean: Yeah, and I thought that you know, so it's pretty interesting. Dan: There must be a scale somewhere, you know, get on the scale, please. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Rational, oh, he's above. Rational, above irrational, oh, that's totally irrational confidence. Dean: yes, he's just setting himself up for disappointment. That's like I think're in the confidence of living to 156. That's irrational. Yeah, it is till I fail, exactly. Yeah, but that's okay, it's not going to make any difference to you. I always love your live, live, live pattern. It's not going to affect you. Dan: Live live, live, go on. Dean: I saw somebody doing an illustration, Dan, of how long it takes for the world to adapt to you not being here, and the gentleman had his finger in a glass of water and he pulled it out. Dan: Watch, yeah, watch, how long the hole lasts. Dean: It's the truth, you know, yeah, yeah. Dan: I don't know if you got a hold of that book. Same as Ever, the Morgan Household book. Dean: I did. I've read it and it's fantastic. It's good, isn't it? It really is it kind of calms you down. Dan: You know it kind of calms you down. You know I told Joe Polish I said you know how to get that guy as a speaker. I think he's great and anyway, you know he said he makes he has that one great little chapter on evolution. How long it takes, you know, like evolution, three or four million years, and he says stuff that you know is lasting over a long period of time you know is really worth paying attention to, really worth paying attention to. You know that and I find one of the things that you know at my advancing age at my advancing age is that I can see now things that were are equally true today as they were 50 years ago yeah, I see that too. Dean: Absolutely see that too. Absolutely, see that through. I'm on the cusp right now. Like you know, we're coming into 2025. And so this is the first time I started thinking about 25 years ahead was in 1999. That 25 year timeframe, you know, and certainly when I made those, you know five or three stock in. You know investment decisions. But looking back now, you know there were clues as to what is what was what was coming. But there are certainly a lot of through line to it too. You know, like I think, what I did choose was you know it's still Warren Buffett, it's still Berkshire was a great as a 10 times or more stock over 25 years. Starbucks and Procter and Gamble they're equally. Those were durable choices. But you know what was what I could have, what was there? Looking back now, the evidence was there already that Amazon and Google and Apple would have been rocket ships. You know guessing and betting, dan. It's like guessing and betting with certainty. Or you know where you think, like I think, if we look and maybe next week we can have a conversation about this the guessing and betting for the next 25 years, you know. Dan: Yeah. Dean: Yeah. Dan: I think he Warren Buffett. He said that Gillette, I like Gillette. He said I think men are going to still be shaving 25 years from now. Dean: That's what he said. That was. What was so impactful to me is that he says I can't tell which technology is going to win, even five years from now, but I know that men are going to go to bed and they're going to wake up with whiskers. Some of them are going to want to shave them off. King Gillette is going to be there, like he has been since 1850. Dan: And it's like railroads, he's very heavy into railroads. We're going to be moving things. People are still going to be moving things. Dean: I had a really good friend. Dan: Trains will still really be a good way to move things from one place to another. Dean: Isn't that funny. I had a good friend in high school. His big insight was he wanted to start a pallet company because no matter which direction things go, you're still going to need to stack them on a pallet and move them. Put my mom there. So funny which direction things go, you're still going to need to stack them on a pallet and move them, put them around there. Dan: you know so funny that pallet. They're really good. Yeah, I love it All right. All right, we're deep into the culture, we're into. It's an interesting word. It's an interesting word but anytime you talk to somebody about it, they have very specific examples that are their take on culture. And you talk to someone else and maybe culture is everybody's views on culture. Maybe that's what the culture is. Dean: Maybe, maybe, all righty. Okay, have a great day. I'll talk to you next week. Bye, bye. Dan: Okay, have a great day. I'll talk to you next week, okay, bye, bye, okay Bye.

 Clay is joined by David Marchick, the author of the acclaimed book, The Peaceful Transfer of Power: An Oral History of America's Presidential Transitions. The transfer of power in 2021 was not peaceful and it was not efficient. The transfer of power in 2025 will certainly be peaceful, but President-elect Trump is deliberately violating norms that have been in place in U.S. politics for most of a century. David Marchick's book explores the history of transitions: Buchanan to Abraham Lincoln, arguably the worst in our history, all the way to G.W. Bush and Barack Obama in 2008, perhaps the finest and smoothest transition in our history. We spend some time talking about the transition in 2016-17 from the Obama to the first Trump administration, when Chris Christie worked for months to vet hundreds of potential appointees and provided a brilliant roadmap for Trump, only to see his dozens of binders literally tossed into the dumpster by Trump's son in law Jared Kushner.

[00:18:25] Del Bigtree [00:36:50] Chris Christie [00:55:12] Matt Taibbi [01:13:35] Michael Goodwin [01:32:00] Brad Meltzer Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

John and Todd discuss the finer points of Luigi Mangione, the details of the case, the Pelosi connection, several suspicious coincidences, and more. They also find time to address Trump tweeting AI-generated Chris Christie and the Theater Kid Occupied Government. outro // https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qC1NXV1cF8o

This week on the JTrain Podcast, Jared Freid sits down with his hilarious friend and comedian Nimesh Patel for a packed Chit Chat Wednesday! They dive into Nimesh's life as a new dad, sharing what's surprised him most about fatherhood. Jared also quizzes Nimesh about the looming TikTok ban and how the app has played a major role in his career—leading to a shocking revelation that leaves Jared speechless. Lastly, they get into the mysterious drones over New Jersey, sparking wild theories and laughs.Plus, Nimesh reflects on his roots in New Jersey, shares why Indian comedians like him and Akash Singh crush it in New Brunswick, and talks about adding an eighth sold-out show to his run this week. Whether they're debating aliens, AI, or the best way to roast Chris Christie, Jared and Nimesh's conversation is as entertaining as it is unfiltered.The two break down the wild, unpredictable ways performers make money—from TikTok paychecks to finding five figures sitting unclaimed—and what happens when comedians finally figure out the passive income game.Nimesh also gets real about life as a new father: the sleepless nights, constant learning, and humbling realization that babies don't come with an instruction manual. It's a mix of comedy, relatable truths, and behind-the-scenes stories of juggling stand-up success, finances, and family.Whether you're a creator, a parent, or someone who just wants to know where your money might be hiding—this episode's for you!Email your questions to jtrainpodcast@gmail.com or DM the pod on Instagram @jtrainpodcast

The Detroit Lions Super Bowl dream seems over, Eli Zaret joins us, drone mania, a female school shooter in Wisconsin, Drew Crime, Devon Scillian signs off, Hannah Kobayashi returns, and the internet hates Heisman Trophy winner Travis Hunter's girlfriend. Eli Zaret drops by to recap the Detroit Lions' devastating loss to the Buffalo Bills, the silly new onside kick rules, David Montgomery out for the year, Lions season ticket prices skyrocketing, Matt LaFluer's nemesis Fahad Yousif passed his NFL test, the Steve Yzerplan running out of steam, De'Vondre Campbell quits on the San Francisco 49ers, Kansas City Chief WR DeAndre Hopkins de-pants'd, Colorado's Travis Hunter wins the Heisman, Tom Brady's GOAT Collection auction, flag planting legislation in Ohio, Donovan Edwards opts out of the bowl game, Caitlin Clark is the Time Magazine's Athlete of the Year, the Detroit Tigers making moves and more. The internet really thinks Travis Hunter's girlfriend is the worst. Crystal Mangum FINALLY admits to being a liar in the Duke Lacrosse debacle. It's the 30-year anniversary of the D'Wan Sims disappearance. Talk Tuah hasn't dropped a new episode in 2 weeks. Hiding from something? Drew and BranDon appeared on the latest episode of Who Are These Podcasts? Check it out here. Drew Crime: The suicide of Bob Richards. “Radio DJs” Steve and DC played a part. Devin Scillian signed off with one of the greatest drops of all-time. Marc fought the law… and Marc won… even though he shouldn't have. Jamie Foxx vs White girls. He is getting into fights at his birthday dinner too… stitches required. Critics love his one-man-show. UHC CEO murderer Luigi Mangione was going to get busted regardless. His lawyer says he's crazy. The internet LOVES this dude. Tim Walz doesn't know what a ‘flex' is. Internet famous yodeler Mason Ramsey has a Lambo. Bashar al-Assad has a badass car collection. Alabama Barker released a turd rap song. The was a school shooting in Wisconsin today. The shooter was a 17-year-old girl. We demand more information on the Kentucky Judge murdered by a sheriff. Jerry Springer: Fights, Camera, Action is coming to Netflix! Marc insists you stick with The Kings of Tupelo: A Southern Crime Saga on Netflix. People are losing their minds over flying drones. Donald Trump blames Chris Christie. Ohio wants to shoot them down. Stephen A. Smith vs the Dems. ABC and George Stephanopoulos lose big to Trump over the Nancy Mace spat. Oscar Pistorius has a new girlfriend. Hopefully he doesn't kill her like the last one. Nancy Pelosi fell and broke her 84-year-old hip. Mitch McConnell falls all the time. David Hogg is out looking for attention again. Hannah Kobayashi is back in the US. They're returning the GoFundMe money, but you have to act fast. Ryan Borgwardt is up to no good. Visit our presenting sponsor Hall Financial – Michigan's highest rated mortgage company. If you'd like to help support the show… consider subscribing to our YouTube Channel, Facebook, Instagram and Twitter (The Drew Lane Show, Marc Fellhauer, Trudi Daniels, Jim Bentley and BranDon).

The Rich Zeoli Show- Hour 3: 5:00pm- Pastor Corey Brooks—CEO of Project H.O.O.D. (Helping Others Obtain Destiny)—joins The Rich Zeoli Show to discuss his recent editorial for Fox News: “Jordan Neely's father played a role in his death. Don't ignore America's fatherhood crisis.” You can read the full article here: https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/jordan-neelys-father-played-role-his-death-dont-ignore-americas-fatherhood-crisis 5:20pm- Reacting to The Department of Justice Inspector General's January 6th report which revealed that the FBI had 26 informants on the ground during the riot at the U.S. Capitol, Stephen A. Smith explained: “Here we are yet again finding even more evidence to Donald Trump's claims.” 5:30pm- While appearing on CNN with Jake Tapper, Mitt Romney predicted that J.D. Vance will be the Republican Party's 2028 presidential nominee. 5:40pm- Biden Races to Sell Off Border Wall Parts Before Trump Takes Office. James Lalino of The Daily Wire reports: “The Biden administration is using its final weeks to haul a massive amount of border wall materials away from the southern border to be sold off in a government auction, an apparent effort to hinder President-elect Donald Trump's effort to secure the border.” Some sections of the wall are going for as little as $5.00! Is there anything Congress can do to stop this? You can read the full report here: https://www.dailywire.com/news/exclusive-biden-races-to-sell-off-border-wall-parts-before-trump-takes-office 5:50pm- Audio of the Day: Chris Rock's hilarious SNL opening monologue, Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson makes her Broadway debut, and Donald Trump posts his greatest Chris Christie joke of all time.

The mystery of the suspicious drones flying around New Jersey continues getting more mysterious. Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas attempted to downplay the situation by saying there's "no threat or nefarious activity." But is what he says credible? Multiple government officials from New Jersey, including Chris Christie, report these drone sightings as anomalies. Pat Gray joins Glenn and Stu to give his theory on what these suspicious drones are being used for. Was the multiverse theory just proven scientifically correct? Google claims to have accessed parallel universes with its new supercomputer, but it's already being questioned. People are buying paperback Bibles in record numbers. Glenn relates those two stories together and discusses what they may mean for society. Glenn's daughter Cheyenne Grace joins to discuss her No. 1 Christmas album and the process of its creation. Glenn explains what's happening in the Balkans, which makes him a little nervous. Glenn and Stu lay out what tariffs are typically used for and what Trump intends to do with them.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In the 5 AM Hour: Julie Gunlock and Hans Von Spakovsky discussed: President-elect Trump takes in Army-Navy game with powerhouse posse Larry Hogan Posts Drone Videos Drone Manufacturer’s theory on the drones Where to find more about WMAL's morning show: Follow the Show Podcasts on Apple podcasts, Audible and Spotify. Follow WMAL's "O'Connor and Company" on X: @WMALDC, @LarryOConnor, @Jgunlock, @patricepinkfile, and @heatherhunterdc. Facebook: WMALDC and Larry O'Connor Instagram: WMALDC Show Website: https://www.wmal.com/oconnor-company/ How to listen live weekdays from 5 to 9 AM: https://www.wmal.com/listenlive/ Episode: Monday, December 16, 2024 / 5 AM HourSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Today's Sponsor: Blinkisthttps://thisistheconversationproject.com/blinkist Today's Rundown:Suspect in CEO's killing wasn't insured by UnitedHealthcare, company sayshttps://www.yahoo.com/news/suspect-ceos-killing-wasnt-insured-042141594.html  Sean 'Diddy' Combs abandons attempt to get released on bailhttps://abcnews.go.com/US/diddy-abandons-bail-attempt/story?id=116779769   Crystal Mangum confesses to lying about being raped by Duke lacrosse players in 2006https://www.foxnews.com/sports/crystal-mangum-confesses-lying-about-being-raped-duke-lacrosse-players-2006  Syrian Prisoner Freed by CNN's Clarissa Ward May Have Been Intelligence Officer in Hidinghttps://www.thewrap.com/cnn-duped-syrian-prisoner-intelligence-agent/   Chris Christie says he saw drone above his home amid reports of strange lights in NJ, other stateshttps://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2024/12/15/chris-christie-drones-nj-mayorkas/77006854007/?tbref=hp    Beyoncé takes home first award in country music category at 2024 Billboard Music Awardshttps://www.usatoday.com/story/entertainment/music/2024/12/12/2024-billboard-music-awards-beyonce-country-award/76953582007/    Internet Erupts in Memes Predicting Fall of Gmail After Musk Hints at XMail Launchhttps://www.msn.com/en-in/money/news/xmail-coming-soon-elon-musk-hints-at-gmail-rival-launch/ar-AA1vU7Ce?ocid=finance-verthp-feeds    Marshall Opting out of Its Bowl Game After Losing Over 25 Players to Transfer Portal https://athlonsports.com/college/marshall-thundering-herd/college-football-team-opting-out-of-its-bowl-game-after-losing-over-25-players-to-transfer-portal-report   Lawmakers tell Apple, Google to prepare for TikTok banhttps://thehill.com/policy/technology/5039982-tiktok-ban-apple-google/?tbref=hpJimmy Carter to skip Trump inauguration due to declining health but would go if he couldhttps://www.yahoo.com/news/jimmy-carter-skip-trump-inauguration-161238217.htmlBecome a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/things-you-might-not-have-heard--2318856/support.

TRENDING - Trump shares meme mocking Chris Christie, Luigi Mangione and Diddy lawyers are married, WNBA owner gripes about Caitlin Clark's 'Athlete of the Year' nod, and the internet is divided over an SNL skit about Luigi Mangione.

Unexpectedly, Brad and Steven are back this week due to a faulty airplane. The guys are talking the drones over New Jersey, Chris Christie, Chanukkah, and once again, about how old they are. Spoiler alert: right now, Steven is considerably older than his father-in-law was when Steven got married(!). Happy listening! You can listen to The […]

Curtis discusses the mysterious drone sightings that have been occurring over New Jersey and Staten Island for the past three weeks. He critiques Governor Phil Murphy, dubbing him 'half in the bag' for his apparent alcohol dependency and failure to attend key meetings. Curtis also highlights responses from various politicians and government agencies, including the Pentagon, local law enforcement, and Congress members such as Jeff Van Drew and Josh Gottheimer. The script debunks claims about these drones being linked to foreign adversaries or U.S. military, and revisits Louis Farrakhan's 1987 'mothership' claims, suggesting possible connections. Curtis calls for a citizen army to combat the drones much like the patriots of the Revolutionary War, proposing Chris Christie's patrolling of the Jersey Shore. Additionally, Curtis addresses legal complexities and potential deportation issues involving illegal immigrants and the sanctuary city policies in New York. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On this episode of the SeventySix Capital Sports Leadership Show, Wayne Kimmel interviewed Dave Rebuck, Special Advisor to our portfolio company IC360. David L. Rebuck was appointed by Governor Chris Christie in 2011 as Director of the New Jersey Division of Gaming Enforcement. Before that, he served for 23 years as a Deputy Attorney General, specializing in policy guidance and regulatory reform. He played a key role in the legalization and implementation of internet gaming in New Jersey, with the state launching its online gaming platform in November 2013. Rebuck was instrumental in New Jersey's efforts to legalize sports betting, culminating in the U.S. Supreme Court's 2018 decision to overturn PASPA, allowing states to legalize sports wagering. Additionally, Rebuck led the opening of Hard Rock and Ocean Resorts casinos on the same day in June 2018.He holds a BA from Gettysburg College, a master's degree from the University of Vermont, and a law degree from Widener University. In 2013, he was recognized as Regulator of the Year by the International Masters of Gaming Law and is a member of the New Jersey Bar. Dave Rebuck: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/david-rebuck-295930111/

This week, Axe and Heilemann are joined by former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie! The Hacks dive into Christie's unique insights as Donald Trump's former Transition Team Chairman to explore what a second Trump term might look like: which cabinet picks are likely to stick, and which ones are simply Trump's way of flipping the bird. Plus, the guys unpack the Hunter Biden pardon drama and ask Christie for his thoughts on the Kushner ambassadorship—an ironic twist, given their history.

It's been 15 years since the premiere of MTV's ‘Jersey Shore.' At the time, the show stirred up mixed feelings: it irritated locals, offended media members, and even bothered the state's highest elected official. It was also a bona fide sensation. Even after everyone's anger and fake tans have faded away, there's still a lot to learn from the battle between ‘Jersey Shore' and the State of New Jersey. In this narrative feature, Alan Siegel takes a closer look at a pop culture war that, in some ways, is still raging today. Featuring exclusive interviews with Nicole “Snooki” Polizzi and former New Jersey governor Chris Christie, Alan investigates what exactly ‘Jersey Shore' taught us about representation in the media, regional identity, and what it means to be a “Guido.” Host: Alan Siegel Producers: Devon Baroldi and Vikram Patel Sound Design: Devon Baroldi Mixing and Mastering: Scott Somerville Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Molly Jong-Fast and Ruth Ben-Ghiat talk Trump's weird obsession with “bad boys” as he taps more unqualified loyalists to fill top administration jobs. Plus, Rep.-elect Janelle Bynum on flipping her Oregon congressional district blue.

So how can The Dude and The Boss save America? According to the cultural critic, David Masciotra, Jeffrey "The Dude" Lebowski and Bruce “The Boss” Springsteen, represent the antithesis of Donald Trumps's illiberal authoritarianism. Masciotra's thesis of Lebowski and Springsteen as twin paragons of American liberalism is compelling. Both men have a childish faith in the goodness of others. Both offer liberal solace in an America which, I fear, is about to become as darkly surreal as The Big Lebowski. Transcript:“[Springsteen] represents, as cultural icon, a certain expression of liberalism, a big-hearted, humanistic liberalism that exercises creativity to represent diverse constituencies in our society, that believes in art as a tool of democratic engagement, and that seeks to lead with an abounding, an abiding sense of compassion and empathy. That is the kind of liberalism, both with the small and capital L, that I believe in, and that I have spent my career documenting and attempting to advance.” -David MasciotraAK: Hello, everybody. We're still processing November the 5th. I was in the countryside of Northern Virginia a few days ago, I saw a sign, for people just listening, Trump/Vance 2024 sign with "winner" underneath. Some people are happy. Most, I guess, of our listeners probably aren't, certainly a lot of our guests aren't, my old friend John Rauch was on the show yesterday talking about what he called the "catastrophic ordinariness" of the election and of contemporary America. He authored two responses to the election. Firstly, he described it in UnPopulist as a moral catastrophe. But wearing his Brookings hat, he's a senior fellow at the Brookings Institute, described it as an ordinary election. I think a lot of people are scratching their head, trying to make sense of it. Another old friend of the show, David Masciotra, cultural writer, political writer. An interesting piece in the Washington Monthly entitled "How Francis Fukuyama and The Big Lebowski Explain Trump's Victory." A very creative piece. And he is joining us from Highland Indiana, not too far from Chicago. David. The Big Lebowski and Francis Fukuyama. Those two don't normally go together, certainly in a title. Let's talk first about Fukuyama. How does Fukuyama explain November the 5th? DAVID MASCIOTRA: In his. Well, first, thanks for having me. And I should say I watched your conversation with Jonathan Rauch, and it was quite riveting and quite sobering. And you talked about Fukuyama in that discussion as well. And you referenced his book, The End of History and the Last Man, a very often misinterpreted book, but nonetheless, toward its conclusion, Fukuyama warns that without an external enemy, liberal democracies may indeed turn against themselves, and we may witness an implosion rather than an explosion. And Fukuyama said that this won't happen so much for ideological reasons, but it will happen for deeply psychological ones, namely, without a just cause for which to struggle, people will turn against the just cause itself, which in this case is liberal democracy, and out of a sense of boredom and alienation, they'll grow increasingly tired of their society and cultivate something of a death wish in which they enjoy imagining their society's downfall, or at least the downfall of some of the institutions that are central to their society. And now I would argue that after the election results, we've witnessed the transformation of imagining to inviting. So, there is a certain death wish and a sense of...alienation and detachment from that which made the United States of America a uniquely prosperous and stable country with the ability to self-correct the myriad injustices we know are part of its history. Well now, people--because they aren't aware of the institutions or norms that created this robust engine of commerce and liberty--they've turned against it, and they no longer invest in that which is necessary to preserve it.AK: That's interesting, David. The more progressives I talk to about this, the more it--there's an odd thing going on--you're all sounding very conservative. The subtitle of the piece in the Washington Monthly was "looking at constituencies or issues misses the big point. On Tuesday, nihilism was on display, even a death wish in a society wrought by cynicism." Words like nihilism and cynicism, David, historically have always been used by people like Allan Blum, whose book, of course, The Closing of the American Mind, became very powerful amongst American conservatives now 40 or 50 years ago. Would you accept that using language like nihilism and cynicism isn't always associated--I mean, you're a proud progressive. You're a man of the left. You've never disguised that. It's rather odd to imagine that the guys like you--and in his own way, John Rauch too, who talks about the moral catastrophe of the election couple of weeks ago. You're all speaking about the loss of morality of the voter, or of America. Is there any truth to that? Making some sense?DAVID MASCIOTRA: That's a that's a fair observation. And Jonathan Rauch, during your conversation and in his own writing, identifies a center right. I would say I'm center left.AK: And he's--but what's interesting, what ties you together, is that you both use the L-word, liberal, to define yourselves. He's perhaps a liberal on the right. You're a liberal on the left.DAVID MASCIOTRA: Yes. And I think that the Trump era, if we can trace that back to 2015, has made thoughtful liberals more conservative in thought and articulation, because it forces a confrontation and interrogation of a certain naivete. George Will writes in his book, The Conservative Sensibility, that the progressive imagines that which is the best possible outcome and strives to make it real, whereas the conservative imagines the worst possible outcome and does everything he can to guard against it. And now it feels like we've experienced, at least electorally, the worst possible outcome. So there a certain revisitation of that which made America great, to appropriate a phrase, and look for where we went wrong in failing to preserve it. So that kind of thinking inevitably leads one to use more conservative language and deal in more conservative thought.AK: Yeah. So for you, what made America great, to use the term you just introduced, was what? Its morality? The intrinsic morality of people living in it and in the country? Is that, for you, what liberalism is?DAVID MASCIOTRA: Liberalism is a system in and the culture that emanates out of that system. So it's a constitutional order that creates or that places a premium on individual rights and allows for a flourishing free market. Now, where my conception of liberalism would enter the picture and, perhaps Jonathan Rauch and I would have some disagreements, certainly George Will and I, is that a bit of governmental regulation is necessary along with the social welfare state, to civilize the free market. But the culture that one expects to flow from that societal order and arrangement is one of aspiration, one in which citizens fully accept that they are contributing agents to this experiment in self-governance and therefore need to spend time in--to use a Walt Whitman phrase--freedom's gymnasium. Sharpening the intellect, sharpening one's sense of moral duty and obligation to the commons, to the public good. And as our society has become more individualistic and narcissistic in nature, those commitments have vanished. And as our society has become more anti-intellectual in nature, we are seeing a lack of understanding of why those commitments are even necessary. So that's why you get a result like we witnessed on Tuesday, and that I argue in my piece that you were kind enough to have me on to discuss, is a form of nihilism, and The Big Lebowski reference, of course--AK: And of course, I want to get to Lebowski, because the Fukuyama stuff is interesting, but everyone's writing about Fukuyama and the end of history and why history never really ended, of course. It's been going on for years now, but it's a particularly interesting moment. We've had Fukuyama on the show. I've never heard anyone, though, compare the success of Trump and Trumpism with The Big Lebowski. So, one of the great movies, of course, American movies. What's the connection, David, between November 5th and The Big Lebowski? DAVID MASCIOTRA: Well, The Big Lebowski is one of my favorite films. I've written about it, and I even appeared at one of the The Big Lebowski festivals that takes place in United States a number of years ago. But my mind went to the scene when The Dude is in his bathtub and these three menacing figures break into his apartment. They drop a gerbil in the bathtub. And The Dude, who was enjoying a joint by candlelight, is, of course, startled and frightened. And these three men tell him that if he does not pay the money they believe he owes them, they will come back and, in their words, "cut off your Johnson." And The Dude gives them a quizzical, bemused look. And one of them says, "You think we are kidding? We are nihilists. We believe in nothing." And then one of them screams, "We'll cut off your Johnson." Well, I thought, you know, we're looking at an electorate that increasingly, or at least a portion of the electorate, increasingly believes in nothing. So we've lost faith.AK: It's the nihilists again. And of course, another Johnson in America, there was once a president called Johnson who enjoyed waving his Johnson, I think, around in public. And now there's the head of the house is another Johnson, I think he's a little shyer than presidents LBJ. But David, coming back to this idea of nihilism. It often seems to be a word used by people who don't like what other people think and therefore just write it off as nihilism. Are you suggesting that the Trump crowd have no beliefs? Is that what nihilism for you is? I mean, he was very clear about what he believes in. You may not like it, but it doesn't seem to be nihilistic.DAVID MASCIOTRA: That's another fair point. What I'm referring to is not too long ago, we lived in a country that had a shared set of values. Those values have vanished. And those values involve adherence to our democratic norms. It's very difficult to imagine had George H. W. Bush attempted to steal the election in which Bill Clinton won, that George H. W. Bush could have run again and won. So we've lost faith in something essential to our electoral system. We've lost faith in the standards of decency that used to, albeit imperfectly, regulate our national politics. So the man to whom I just refered, Bill Clinton, was nearly run out of office for having an extramarital affair, a misdeed that cannot compare to the myriad infractions of Donald Trump. And yet, Trump's misdeeds almost give him a cultural cachet among his supporters. It almost makes him, for lack of a better word, cool. And now we see, even with Trump's appointments, I mean, of course, it remains to be seen how it plays out, that we're losing faith in credentials and experience--AK: Well they're certainly a band of outlaws and very proud to be outlaws. It could almost be a Hollywood script. But I wonder, David, whether there's a more serious critique here. You, like so many other people, both on the left and the right, are nostalgic for an age in which everyone supposedly agreed on things, a most civil and civilized age. And you go back to the Bushes, back to Clinton. But the second Bush, who now seems to have appeared as this icon, at least moral icon, many critics of Trump, was also someone who unleashed a terrible war, killing tens of thousands of people, creating enormous suffering for millions of others. And I think that would be the Trump response, that he's simply more honest, that in the old days, the Bushes of the world can speak politely and talk about consensus, and then unleash terrible suffering overseas--and at home in their neoliberal policies of globalization--Trump's simply more honest. He tells it as it is. And that isn't nihilistic, is it?DAVID MASCIOTRA: Well, you are gesturing towards an important factor in our society. Trump, of course, we know, is a dishonest man, a profoundly dishonest--AK: Well, in some ways. But in other ways, he isn't. I mean, in some ways he just tells the truth as it is. It's a truth we're uncomfortable with. But it's certainly very truthful about the impact of foreign wars on America, for example, or even the impact of globalization. DAVID MASCIOTRA: What you're describing is an authenticity. That that Trump is authentic. And authenticity has become chief among the modern virtues, which I would argue is a colossal error. Stanley Crouch, a great writer, spent decades analyzing the way in which we consider authenticity and how it inevitably leads to, to borrow his phrase, cast impurity onto the bottom. So anything that which requires effort, refinement, self-restraint, self-control, plays to the crowd as inauthentic, as artificial--AK: Those are all aristocratic values that may have once worked but don't anymore. Should we be nostalgic for the aristocratic way of the Bushes?DAVID MASCIOTRA: I think in a certain respect, we should. We shouldn't be nostalgic for George W. Bush's policies. I agree with you, the war in Iraq was catastrophic, arguably worse than anything Trump did while he was president. His notoriously poor response to Hurricane Katrina--I mean, we can go on and on cataloging the various disasters of the Bush administration. However, George W. Bush as president and the people around him did have a certain belief in the liberal order of the United States and the liberal order of the world. Institutions like NATO and the EU, and those institutions, and that order, has given the United States, and the world more broadly, an unrivaled period of peace and prosperity.AK: Well it wasn't peace, David. And the wars, the post-9/11 wars, were catastrophic. And again, they seem to be just facades--DAVID MASCIOTRA: We also had the Vietnam War, the Korean War. When I say peace, I mean we didn't have a world war break out as we did in the First World War, in the Second World War. And that's largely due to the creation and maintenance of institutions following the Second World War that were aimed at the preservation of order and, at least, amicable relations between countries that might otherwise collide.AK: You're also the author, David, of a book we've always wanted to talk about. Now we're figuring out a way to integrate it into the show. You wrote a book, an interesting book, about Bruce Springsteen. Working on a Dream: the Progressive Political Vision of Bruce Springsteen. Bruce Springsteen has made himself very clear. He turned out for Harris. Showed up with his old friend, Barack Obama. Clearly didn't have the kind of impact he wanted. You wrote an interesting piece for UnHerd a few weeks ago with the title, "Bruce Springsteen is the Last American Liberal: he's still proud to be born in the USA." Is he the model of a liberal response to the MAGA movement, Springsteen? DAVID MASCIOTRA: Well, of course, I wouldn't go so far as to say the last liberal. As most readers just probably know, writers don't compose their own headlines--AK: But he's certainly, if not the last American liberal, the quintessential American liberal.DAVID MASCIOTRA: Yes. He represents, as cultural icon, a certain expression of liberalism, a big-hearted, humanistic liberalism that exercises creativity to represent diverse constituencies in our society, that believes in art as a tool of democratic engagement, and that seeks to lead with an abounding, an abiding sense of compassion and empathy. That is the kind of liberalism, both with the small and capital L, that I believe in, and that I have spent my career documenting and attempting to advance. And those are, of course, the forms of liberalism that now feel as if they are under threat. Now, to that point, you know, this could have just come down to inflation and some egregious campaign errors of Kamala Harris. But it does feel as if when you have 70 some odd million people vote for the likes of Donald Trump, that the values one can observe in the music of Bruce Springsteen or in the rhetoric of Barack Obama, for that matter, are no longer as powerful and pervasive as they were in their respective glory days. No pun intended.AK: Yeah. And of course, Springsteen is famous for singing "Glory Days." I wonder, though, where Springsteen himself is is a little bit more complex and we might be a little bit more ambivalent about him, there was a piece recently about him becoming a billionaire. So it's all very well him being proud to be born in the USA. He's part--for better or worse, I mean, it's not a criticism, but it's a reality--he's part of the super rich. He showed out for Harris, but it didn't seem to make any impact. You talked about the diversity of Springsteen. I went to one of his concerts in San Francisco earlier this year, and I have to admit, I was struck by the fact that everyone, practically everyone at the concert, was white, everyone was wealthy, everyone paid several hundred dollars to watch a 70 year old man prance around on stage and behave as if he's still 20 or 30 years old. I wonder whether Springsteen himself is also emblematic of a kind of cultural, or political, or even moral crisis of our old cultural elites. Or am I being unfair to Springsteen?DAVID MASCIOTRA: Well, I remember once attending a Springsteen show in which the only black person I saw who wasn't an employee of the arena was Clarence Clemons.AK: Right. And then Bruce, of course, always made a big deal. And there was an interesting conversation when Springsteen and Obama did a podcast together. Obama, in his own unique way, lectured Bruce a little bit about Clarence Clemons in terms of his race. But sorry. Go on.DAVID MASCIOTRA: Yeah. And Springsteen has written and discussed how he had wished he had a more diverse audience. When I referred to diversity in his music, I meant the stories he aimed to tell in song certainly represented a wide range of the American experience. But when you talk about Springsteen, perhaps himself representing a moral crisis--AK: I wouldn't say a crisis, but he represents the, shall we say, the redundancy of that liberal worldview of the late 20th century. I mean, he clearly wears his heart on his sleeve. He means well. He's not a bad guy. But he doesn't reach a diverse audience. His work is built around the American working class. None of them can afford to show up to what he puts on. I mean, Chris Christie is a much more typical fan than the white working class. Does it speak of the fact that there's a...I don't know if you call it a crisis, it's just...Springsteen isn't relevant anymore in the America of the 2020s, or at least when he sang and wrote about no longer exists.DAVID MASCIOTRA: Yes, I agree with that. So first of all, the working class bit was always a bit overblown with Springsteen. Springsteen, of course, was never really part of the working class, except when he was a child. But by his own admission, he never had a 9 to 5 job. And Springsteen sang about working class life like William Shakespeare wrote about teenage love. He did so with a poetic grandeur that inspired some of his best work. And outside looking in, he actually managed to offer more insights than sometimes people on the inside can amount to themselves. But you're certainly correct. I mean, the Broadway show, for example, when the tickets were something like a thousand a piece and it was $25 to buy a beer. There is a certain--AK: Yeah and in that Broadway show, which I went to--I thought it was astonishing, actually, a million times better than the show in San Francisco.DAVID MASCIOTRA: It was one of the best things he ever did.AK: He acknowledges that he made everything up, that he wasn't part of the American working class, and that he'd never worked a day in his life, and yet his whole career is is built around representing a social class and a way of life that he was never part of.“Not too long ago, we lived in a country that had a shared set of values. Those values have vanished. And those values involve adherence to our democratic norms.” -DMDAVID MASCIOTRA: Right. And he has a lyric himself: "It's a sad, funny ending when you find yourself pretending a rich man in a poor man's shirt." So there always was this hypocrisy--hypocrisy might be a little too strong--inconsistency. And he adopted a playful attitude toward it in the 90s and in later years. But to your point of relevance, I think you're on to something there. One of the crises I would measure in our society is that we no longer live in a culture of ambition and aspiration. So you hear this when people say that they want a political leader who talks like the average person, or the common man. And you hear this when "college educated" is actually used as an insult against a certain base of Democratic voters. There were fewer college-educated voters when John F. Kennedy, Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan ran for president, all of whom spoke with greater eloquence and a more expansive vocabulary and a greater sense of cultural sophistication than Donald Trump or Kamala Harris did. And yet there was no objection, because people understood that we should aspire to something more sophisticated. We should aspire to something more elevated beyond the everyday vernacular of the working class. And for that reason, Springsteen was able to become something of a working-class poet, despite never living among the working class beyond his childhood. Because his poetry put to music represented something idealistic about the working class.AK: But oddly enough, it was a dream--there's was a word that Springsteen uses a lot in his work--that was bought by the middle class. It wasn't something that was--although, I think in the early days, probably certainly in New Jersey, that he had a more working-class following.DAVID MASCIOTRA: We have to deal with the interesting and frustrating reality that the people about whom Springsteen sings in those early songs like "Darkness on the Edge of Town" or "The River" would probably be Trump supporters if they were real.AK: Yeah. And in your piece you refer to, not perhaps one of his most famous albums, The Rising, but you use it to compare Springsteen with another major figure now in America, much younger man to Ta-Nehisi Coates, who has a new book out, which is an important new book, The Message. You seem to be keener on Springsteen than Coates. Tell us about this comparison and what the comparison tells us about the America of the 2020s.DAVID MASCIOTRA: Well, Coates...the reason I make the comparison is that one of Springsteen's greatest artistic moments, in which he kind of resurrected his status as cultural icon, was the record he put out after the 9/11 attack on the United States, The Rising. And throughout that record he pays tribute, sometimes overtly, sometimes subtly, to the first responders who ascended in the tower knowing they would perhaps die.AK: Yeah. You quote him "love and duty called you someplace higher." So he was idealizing those very brave firefighters, policemen who gave up their lives on 9/11.DAVID MASCIOTRA: Exactly. Representing the best of humanity. Whereas Ta-Nehisi Coates, who has become the literary superstar of the American left, wrote in his memoir that on 9/11, he felt nothing and did not see the first responders as human. Rather, they were part of the fire that could, in his words, crush his body.AK: Yeah, he wrote a piece, "What Is 9/11 to Descendants of Slaves?"DAVID MASCIOTRA: Yes. And my point in making that comparison, and this was before the election, was to say that the American left has its own crisis of...if we don't want to use the word nihilism, you objected to it earlier--AK: Well, I'm not objecting. I like the word. It's just curious to hear it come from somebody like yourself, a man, certainly a progressive, maybe not--you might define yourself as being on the left, but certainly more on the left and on the right.DAVID MASCIOTRA: Yes, I would agree with that characterization. But that the left has its own crisis of nihilism. If if you are celebrating a man who, despite his journalistic talents and intelligence, none of which I would deny, refused to see the humanity of the first responders on the 9/11 attack and, said that he felt nothing for the victims, presumably even those who were black and impoverished, then you have your own crisis of belief, and juxtaposing that with the big hearted, humanistic liberalism of Springsteen for me shows the left a better path forward. Now, that's a path that will increasingly close after the victory of Trump, because extremism typically begets extremism, and we're probably about to undergo four years of dueling cynicism and rage and unhappy times.AK: I mean, you might respond, David, and say, well, Coates is just telling the truth. Why should a people with a history of slavery care that much about a few white people killed on 9/11 when their own people lost millions through slavery? And you compare them to Springsteen, as you've acknowledged, a man who wasn't exactly telling the truth in his heart. I mean, he's a very good artist, but he writes about a working class, which even he acknowledges, he made most of it up. So isn't Coates like Trump in an odd kind of way, aren't they just telling an unvarnished truth that people don't want to hear, an impolite truth?DAVID MASCIOTRA: I'm not sure. I typically shy away from the expression "my truth" or "his truth" because it's too relativistic. But I'll make an exception in this case. I think Coates is telling HIS truth just as Trump is telling HIS truth, if that adds up to THE truth, is much more dubious. Yes, we could certainly say that, you know, because the United States enslaved, tortured, and otherwise oppressed millions of black people, it may be hard for some black observers to get teary eyed on 9/11, but the black leaders whom I most admire didn't have that reaction. I wrote a book about Jesse Jackson after spending six years interviewing with him and traveling with him. He certainly didn't react that way on 9/11. Congressman John Lewis didn't react that way on 9/11. So, the heroes of the civil rights movement, who helped to overcome those brutal systems of oppression--and I wouldn't argue that they're overcome entirely, but they helped to revolutionize the United States--they maintained a big-hearted sense of empathy and compassion, and they recognized that the unjust loss of life demands mourning and respect, whether it's within their own community or another. So I would say that, here again, we're back to the point of ambition, whether it's intellectual ambition or moral ambition. Ambition is what allows a society to grow. And it seems like ambition has fallen far out of fashion. And that is why the country--the slim majority of the electorate that did vote and the 40% of the electorate that did not vote, or voting-age public, I should say--settled for the likes of Donald Trump.AK: I wonder what The Dude would do, if he was around, at the victory of Trump, or even at 9/11. He'd probably continue to sit in the bath tub and enjoy...enjoy whatever he does in his bathtub. I mean, he's not a believer. Isn't he the ultimate nihilist? The Dude in Lebowski?DAVID MASCIOTRA: That's an interesting interpretation. I would say that...Is The Dude a nihilist? You have this juxtaposition... The Dude kind of occupies this middle ground between the nihilists who proudly declare they believe in nothing and his friend Walter Sobchak, who's, you know, almost this raving explosion of belief. Yeah, ex-Vietnam veteran who's always confronting people with his beliefs and screaming and demanding they all adhere to his rules. I don't know if The Dude's a nihilist as much as he has a Zen detachment.AK: Right, well, I think what makes The Big Lebowski such a wonderful film, and perhaps so relevant today, is Lebowski, unlike so many Americans is unjudgmental. He's not an angry man. He's incredibly tolerant. He accepts everyone, even when they're beating him up or ripping him off. And he's so, in that sense, different from the America of the 2020s, where everyone is angry and everyone blames someone else for whatever's wrong in their lives.DAVID MASCIOTRA: That's exactly right.AK: Is that liberal or just Zen? I don't know.DAVID MASCIOTRA: Yeah. It's perhaps even libertarian in a sense. But there's a very interesting and important book by Justin Tosi and Brandon Warmke called Why It's Okay to Mind Your Own Business. And in it they argue--they're both political scientists although the one may be a...they may be philosophers...but that aside--they present an argument for why Americans need to do just that. Mind their own business.AK: Which means, yeah, not living politics, which certainly Lebowski is. It's probably the least political movie, Lebowski, I mean, he doesn't have a political bone in his body. Finally, David, there there's so much to talk about here, it's all very interesting. You first came on the show, you had a book out, that came out either earlier this year or last year. Yeah, it was in April of this year, Exurbia Now: The Battleground of American Democracy. And you wrote about the outskirts of suburbia, which you call "exurbia." Jonathan Rauch, wearing his Brookings cap, described this as an ordinary election. I'm not sure how much digging you've done, but did the exurbian vote determine this election? I mean, the election was determined by a few hundred thousand voters in the Midwest. Were these voters mostly on the edge of the suburb? And I'm guessing most of them voted for Trump.DAVID MASCIOTRA: Well, Trump's numbers in exurbia...I've dug around and I've been able to find the exurbian returns for Pennsylvania, North Carolina, and Arizona. So three crucial swing states. If Kamala Harris had won those three states, she would be president. And Trump's support in exurbia was off the charts, as it was in 2020 and 2016, and as I predicted, it would be in 2024. I'm not sure that that would have been sufficient to deliver him the race and certainly not in the fashion that he won. Trump made gains with some groups that surprised people, other groups that didn't surprise people, but he did much better than expected. So unlike, say, in 2016, where we could have definitively and conclusively said Trump won because of a spike in turnout for him in rural America and in exurbia, here, the results are more mixed. But it remains the case that the base most committed to Trump and most fervently loyal to his agenda is rural and exurban.AK: So just outside the cities. And finally, I argued, maybe counterintuitively, that America remains split today as it was before November the 5th, so I'm not convinced that this election is the big deal that some people think it is. But you wrote an interesting piece in Salon back in 2020 arguing that Trump has poisoned American culture, but the toxin was here all along. Of course, there is more, if anything, of that toxin now. So even if Harris had won the election, that toxin was still here. And finally, David, how do we get rid of that toxin? Do we just go to put Bruce Springsteen on and go and watch Big Lebowski? I mean, how do we get beyond this toxin?DAVID MASCIOTRA: I would I would love it if that was the way to do it.AK: We'll sit in our bathtub and wait for the thugs to come along?DAVID MASCIOTRA: Right, exactly. No, what you're asking is, of course, the big question. We need to find a way to resurrect some sense of, I'll use another conservative phrase, civic virtue. And in doing--AK: And resurrection, of course, by definition, is conservative, because you're bringing something back.“Ambition is what allows a society to grow. And it seems like ambition has fallen far out of fashion.” -DMDAVID MASCIOTRA: Exactly. And we also have to resurrect, offer something more practical, we have to resurrect a sense of civics. One thing on which--I have immense respect and admiration for Jonathan Rauch--one minor quibble I would have with him from your conversation is when he said that the voters rejected the liberal intellectual class and their ideas. Some voters certainly rejected, but some voters were unaware. The lack of civic knowledge in the United States is detrimental to our institutions. I mean, a majority of Americans don't know how many justices are on the Supreme Court. They can't name more than one freedom enumerated in the Bill of Rights. So we need to find a way to make citizenship a vital part of our national identity again. And there are some practical means of doing that in the educational system. Certainly won't happen in the next four years. But to get to the less tangible matter of how to resurrect something like civic virtue and bring back ambition and aspiration in our sense of national identity, along with empathy, is much tougher. I mean, Robert Putnam says it thrives upon community and voluntary associations.AK: Putnam has been on the show, of course.DAVID MASCIOTRA: Yeah. So, I mean, this is a conversation that will develop. I wish I had the answer, and I wish it was just to listen to Born to Run in the bathtub with with a poster of The Dude hanging overhead. But as I said to you before we went on the air, I think that you have a significant insight to learn this conversation because, in many ways, your books were prescient. We certainly live with the cult of the amateur now, more so than when you wrote that book. So, I'd love to hear your ideas.AK: Well, that's very generous of you, David. And next time we appear, you're going to interview me about why the cult of the amateur is so important. So we will see you again soon. But we're going to swap seats. So, David will interview me about the relevance of Cult of the Amateur. Wonderful conversation, David. I've never thought about Lebowski or Francis Fukuyama, particularly Lebowski, in terms of what happened on November 5th. So, very insightful. Thank you, David, and we'll see you again in the not-too-distant future.DAVID MASCIOTRA: Thank you. I'm going to reread Cult of the Amateur to prepare. I may even do it in the bathtub. I look forward to our discussion.David Masciotra is an author, lecturer, and journalist. He is the author of I Am Somebody: Why Jesse Jackson Matters (I.B. Tauris, 2020), Mellencamp: American Troubadour (University Press of Kentucky), Barack Obama: Invisible Man (Eyewear Publishers, 2017), and Metallica by Metallica, a 33 1/3 book from Bloomsbury Publishers, which has been translated into Chinese. In 2010, Continuum Books published his first book, Working On a Dream: The Progressive Political Vision of Bruce Springsteen.His 2024 book, Exurbia Now: Notes from the Battleground of American Democracy, is published by Melville House Books. Masciotra writes regularly for the New Republic, Washington Monthly, Progressive, the Los Angeles Review of Books, CrimeReads, No Depression, and the Daily Ripple. He has also written for Salon, the Daily Beast, CNN, Atlantic, Washington Post, AlterNet, Indianapolis Star, and CounterPunch. Several of his political essays have been translated into Spanish for publication at Korazon de Perro. His poetry has appeared in Be About It Press, This Zine Will Change Your Life, and the Pangolin Review. Masciotra has a Master's Degree in English Studies and Communication from Valparaiso University. He also has a Bachelor's Degree in Political Science from the University of St. Francis. He is public lecturer, speaking on a wide variety of topics, from the history of protest music in the United States to the importance of bars in American culture. David Masciotra has spoken at the University of Wisconsin, University of South Carolina, Lewis University, Indiana University, the Chicago Public Library, the Lambeth Library (UK), and an additional range of colleges, libraries, arts centers, and bookstores. As a journalist, he has conducted interviews with political leaders, musicians, authors, and cultural figures, including Jesse Jackson, John Mellencamp, Noam Chomsky, all members of Metallica, David Mamet, James Lee Burke, Warren Haynes, Norah Jones, Joan Osborne, Martín Espada, Steve Earle, and Rita Dove. Masciotra lives in Indiana, and teaches literature and political science courses at the University of St. Francis and Indiana University Northwest. Named as one of the "100 most connected men" by GQ magazine, Andrew Keen is amongst the world's best known broadcasters and commentators. In addition to presenting KEEN ON, he is the host of the long-running How To Fix Democracy show. He is also the author of four prescient books about digital technology: CULT OF THE AMATEUR, DIGITAL VERTIGO, THE INTERNET IS NOT THE ANSWER and HOW TO FIX THE FUTURE. Andrew lives in San Francisco, is married to Cassandra Knight, Google's VP of Litigation & Discovery, and has two grown children.Keen On is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit keenon.substack.com/subscribe

In today's Hot Topics, the co-hosts weigh in on a new ad from a political nonprofit telling women it's okay to vote in your own self-interest instead of following the lead of their husbands. ABC News political contributor Chris Christie weighs in on Donald Trump suggesting Liz Cheney be put in the line of fire as he criticized her as a "war hawk." Plus, he says Donald Trump's display of confidence for the election is a "setup": "If he wins, he can say, 'We're geniuses...' If he loses, he can say, 'See, it was stolen.'" Patti LuPone joins to weigh in on the election, she talks starring in Broadway's “The Roommate” alongside Mia Farrow and rooming with her co-star Aubrey Plaza. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Tia Levings, New York Times bestselling author of A Well-Trained Wife, opens up about her harrowing escape from Christian fundamentalism and reclaiming her life. Tia discusses the impact of religious pressure, the lies behind Christian nationalism, and her healing journey from trauma. Learn how Tia chose progress over fear, created healthy boundaries, and now advocates for societal change.If you have any questions about this episode or want to get some of the resources we mentioned, head over to LesleyLogan.co/podcast. If you have any comments or questions about the Be It pod shoot us a message at beit@lesleylogan.co. And as always, if you're enjoying the show please share it with someone who you think would enjoy it as well. It is your continued support that will help us continue to help others. Thank you so much! Never miss another show by subscribing at LesleyLogan.co/subscribe.In this episode you will learn about:Insights into the dangers of Christian fundamentalism and nationalismHow Tia navigated trauma from religious control and rebuilt her identityThe impact of high-control religion on self-development and individualityTia's healing process and journey to reclaim her life after escapingHow she uses visioning and journaling as tools for self-growthEpisode References/Links:Tia Levings InstagramTia Levings WebsiteA Well-Trained Wife! Pre-order LinkReligious Trauma ResourcesGuest Bio:Tia Levings is the New York Times bestselling author of A Well-Trained Wife, a memoir detailing her escape from Christian patriarchy. Her next book, The Soul of Healing, releases with St. Martin's Press in 2025. Tia's work sheds light on the abuses of Christian fundamentalism, religious trauma, and evangelical patriarchy, and she has been featured in Salon, HuffPost, and Newsweek. A sought-after speaker, she's appeared in Amazon's docu-series Shiny Happy People and her social media content has garnered millions of views. Based in Jacksonville, Florida, Tia is a mother of four and enjoys hiking, travel, and painting. If you enjoyed this episode, make sure and give us a five star rating and leave us a review on iTunes, Podcast Addict, Podchaser or Castbox. DEALS! DEALS! DEALS! DEALS!Check out all our Preferred Vendors & Special Deals from Clair Sparrow, Sensate, Lyfefuel BeeKeeper's Naturals, Sauna Space, HigherDose, AG1 and ToeSox Be in the know with all the workshops at OPCBe It Till You See It Podcast SurveyBe a part of Lesley's Pilates MentorshipFREE Ditching Busy Webinar Resources:Watch the Be It Till You See It podcast on YouTube!Lesley Logan websiteBe It Till You See It PodcastOnline Pilates Classes by Lesley LoganOnline Pilates Classes by Lesley Logan on YouTubeProfitable Pilates Follow Us on Social Media:InstagramThe Be It Till You See It Podcast YouTube channelFacebookLinkedInThe OPC YouTube Channel Episode Transcript:Tia Levings 0:00  We've all had hard, bad experiences, but it's what I was able to do with it that I'm able to move forward and do more things as a whole person. I don't consider myself broken anymore. I don't consider myself scarred. I consider myself whole. And to get there, I did everything that healing has to offer.Lesley Logan 0:20  Welcome to the Be It Till You See It podcast where we talk about taking messy action, knowing that perfect is boring. I'm Lesley Logan, Pilates instructor and fitness business coach. I've trained thousands of people around the world and the number one thing I see stopping people from achieving anything is self-doubt. My friends, action brings clarity and it's the antidote to fear. Each week, my guest will bring bold, executable, intrinsic and targeted steps that you can use to put yourself first and Be It Till You See It. It's a practice, not a perfect. Let's get started. Lesley Logan 1:02  Be It babe. Get ready. If you haven't read the book that we're going to talk about, then you need to take a pause and order her book. It is very informative, is very important, is very needed. We have our guest, Tia Levings, today and I'm actually going to try to make this as quick as possible, because I just want to get into her brilliance. So she is the New York Times bestselling author of A Well-Trained Wife, and she does have another book coming out. And she escaped the patriarchal fundamentalist Christian life, where there was just so much trauma and abuse that she was going through. And then we talk about her journey in that. And also we talk about why she's doing what she's doing today, and what's so important about it. And she's had so many be it till you see it, moments in her life, like truly so many, and she still is. And I just find her absolutely one of a kind and truly amazing. And I am so excited for you to hear this podcast. So take away your distractions. Enjoy this and if you haven't read A Well-Trained Wife, then please do. It's a beautiful book, and it's an important example of things that are happening to women and people every day. And you know, it's very easy for us to judge what we don't know, and then we can know it, and we can have some empathy for it, and we can also kind of understand why things are going on and how also can we reach out? What is it that we can do? So here's Tia Levings. Thank you so much for being a listener on the show. Thank you, Tia, for being a guest on the show. I'm so excited for everyone to hear you, and if they don't know you yet, to know you. All right, loves Here you go. Lesley Logan 2:35  All right, Be It babe. I'm gonne be honest. I don't fangirl very much. I'm a fan girl a little bit for now, because I have heard this woman on another podcast over a year ago, at the time they're recording this, and then when I heard she was gonna have a book and I'd have to wait till the summer of 2024 and I was like, I hate the publishing world. Why are we waiting so long? Tia Levings is our guest today. She is the author. She's a bestselling author. New York Time's Bestselling Author, congratulations, of A Well-Trained Wife. I absorbed this book as quickly as I could. And then I was kind of bummed that I put it down, and I was like, well, I, maybe, I should have (inaudible) much longer. Tia, in case they don't know you, can you tell everyone who you are and what you rock at? Tia Levings 3:10  Yes, I am the New York Time's Bestselling Author of A Well-Trained Wife. I'm still practicing saying that. It's my memoir of escape from Christian patriarchy, and I educate on the abuses in Christian fundamentalism online. So a lot of people meet my work through either just like you did, an interview or my reels or my social media platform. Lesley Logan 3:28  Yeah, your reels have been so informative. So we're recording this right now in the summer of 2024 we're before the election, and one of the things that I've loved about your work that you've put out there is explaining to people why some of these rules and laws and things people want to change, why people would want that to happen? Because I can sit here and go, why would anyone want that? And then you're and then you're so good be like, well, this is how they live, and this is why it's like that. And so it's been really fascinating. I was able to share with my husband, and then as I listen to your beautiful book, I would tell Brad, I pause and go, here's what's going on in her life right now. I would share with him, so he probably feels like he knows you, too. So you have your book, and it's about your story. And in the beginning of your book, you talk about being a young girl going to church. And it took me back to my parents were very into church, went every single Sunday, we also were church hoppers. So there's part of your story that part of me goes, oh, my God, this could have been me. I went to a Christian university. I went to Assemblies of God. So, speak in tongues, you know, dance in the aisles. A little more fun. Tia Levings 4:35  A little more fun. Lesley Logan 4:37  Just a little more fun. But you had stomach issues and anxiety and just like this worry and fear and so but I noticed that in your book, as you tell your story, you also then continue to try to be this good Christian woman. And I was like, oh my god, she was being it till she saw it in a way that was negatively affecting her. So can we talk a little bit about, about like, Why? Why you were doing, why were you trying to fit in so much, and how did that affect you? Tia Levings 5:07  I love this question because what you're really describing is faith. And faith is the idea that you can become this thing, you can grow in this way that you aren't yet, but if you do these things, then you will achieve this and you trust that you will get there. And that's tangled up in fundamentalism because they drop the promise constantly that if you follow this formula, you will achieve this promise. And the promise they kept showing me was acceptance, love, blessing, prosperity, happy family, happy husband, happy parents. I am a very sensitive person, and I came onto this planet with a lot of big feelings and a lot of raw nerve endings and expressing out how do I get loved? What do I have to do in order to be loved and accepted and safe? And I'm hyper aware to everything. So I think that there is a personality piece to this. I think there's a cultural piece, a family history and generational trauma piece. There's a lot of things that went into little Tia became a people pleaser, really, at a very early age, and I was in a culture that sent almost exclusively messages that I needed to change myself in order to be desirable, so I was very eager to follow those formulas and fake it till I make it because I didn't want to burn in hell. I didn't want rejection. I didn't want, I didn't want to be miserable or unhappy or called a heretic or, you know, cast out so that, that's it. Lesley Logan 6:34  Yeah, and I think how many young people, especially young women, you know, I think you describe a lot of our listeners, highly sensitive, highly empathic. You know, they would say that they're a people-pleaser. And we've said on the show before, guys, people-pleasing has gotten very few people anywhere. Yeah, if you have found someone who people-please their way to the top, please, by all means, send in my way. I'm happy to figure this out, but it broke my heart, because I was like, oh, my god, yeah. I remember being like, oh, how do I be even better at being this Christian girl who shows up because you don't want to be the, of course, you don't wanna be the things they say could happen to you, and, of course, you want all the things that they promise. So it is interesting how your sister, you mentioned in your book, is not the same way, did not end up in the same path. Tia Levings 7:20  Monica, she's just not as sensitive. I don't know how to describe it. We come from the same family, but she's just not as sensitive. She's sensitive in a different way,. I think. She understood that exteriors were exteriors and internals were internals. And I think there's some, probably some family stuff that is just her experience of our family is different than my experience. And so to give you an idea, I was born with a tooth and I had colic. I was my mom's firstborn. We have a very different bonding experience than my sister, who was born compliant and affectionate and calm and so she didn't have, I think, the same creative rage, I think, to feel wanted (inaudible) she was wanted. Lesley Logan 7:21  Wow. I think if you were a firstborn, I was gonna say, are you firstborn? Because there's something like, I am a firstborn. I also think, my siblings and I were born, my mom was 21 when she had me, and 25 when she had my brother. There's three of us in there, so she. Tia Levings 8:20  Everyone has a different experience of your mom. Lesley Logan 8:22  Yeah, everyone has a different experience because, you know, that's a young mom, first of all, with not a lot of help, and she ended up having some postpartum issues that definitely affected how my brother was even raised, and so it's so, you are correct there, and I think that's really important for us to dive into. And I think when you guys read her book, you'll understand. You might have a sibling or a cousin, like, how did you end up like this? But it's just like, it's a, we, no one is like, a constant. You know, we're all kind of changing. Okay, so I want to explore some things. You mentioned fundamentalism. I think there's an interesting problem in our life today that there's Christians and then there's Christian nationalism and there's fundamental, like, can you kind of explain some of the differences? Because I know that there might be some Christian listening, who might I'm not trying to discount or make fun or truly ignore, that that is something that you might believe in. But there are differences in what Christianity was, or it should be, or is, and then what Christian nationalism, fundamentalism, is. Tia Levings 9:21  Yeah, thanks. I like being able to draw these distinctions, because I think they're just really relevant to where we are today. And my number one pushback that I always receive is not all Christians. And I'm like, I am very aware that all Christians are not the same, painfully aware, that is, that has been the glaring truth of my life. So at least, bottom, you know, Christianity is a belief system that the only thing you need to belong is belief, is proclaim your belief. And so a lot of people have used the word Christian throughout history because it's so broad and it's just part of our world religions and our and our archeological history, it means different things in different time periods. And so I think in like, I'm Gen X and when I grew up in the 80s, Christianity was pretty like it was a lifestyle. It was a belief choice. It was a belief system, different than Catholicism or Judaism or Buddhism. But it's just one of the world's religions, and there was a mainstream presentation of it. And in previous times in history, maybe there was more agenda attached to it, but in the 1980s it really felt like you could just decide to be Christian or not. You could take your kids to church. You could be more devout or not. There wasn't a larger framework and agenda you were buying into when you decided to be a Christian. It was your decision for your life, and it was your personal walk with Christ. That is not what it is today. Today it is in a political movement. It is buying into entire ideologies and groups that don't really have anything to do with Jesus whatsoever. Whereas I was more familiar with different denominations and flavors of Christianity when I was growing up, like you mentioned, Assemblies of God is different than Southern Baptist, but we have enough in common that we might sit at the same table. It's not like that anymore among Christians and Christian nationalists, because they're so divorced from Jesus. Christian nationalism, buys into this fundamentalism that's been rising over 50 years, that's been, that has a political agenda that has dominionist theology at its core, which is that Christianity should take over the entire globe and they truncate or that's not the word I want, they co-opt into evangelisism, because that's how the Mets, the Methodists spread. You evangelize your belief system, either through your lifestyle, your words and deeds, or through active missions. And so it helps spread this message. But it's, it's one of the lies I hope to uncover with my work the most, because this, what I'm from, is not just an alternative lifestyle or a belief in Jesus. This is a political ideology bent on dominating the rest of the culture, and that's why it's important to unpack it and examine it. Lesley Logan 11:54  Yeah, I think I'm an elder millennial and so I grew up in the 80s and the 90s, and I never remembered people's business of politics even entering a conversation on a Sunday. It just wasn't (inaudible).Tia Levings 12:09  Technically, it's a law for them to tell you how to vote, and we kind of adhered to that back then. Lesley Logan 12:13  Yeah, we did. And you just kind of loved everybody you know. And my parents were those Christians, like, you moved in the neighborhood, and they would show up at your door and they bring you food. And if someone passed away, they're like, how can we help you? How can we like, they took my mom, took pregnant teenagers off the street who've been kicked out of their houses. That's the type of person we were and if you're nodding along because that sounds familiar to what you're used to, that is not what they're preaching today. Because it's really like, it's I don't see them taking anyone's kid in. I see all them wanting to kick everyone's kids out that don't believe it in the way they believe. And that, to me, is so antithetical. And you're like, what Bible are we reading? How are we doing this? Tia Levings 12:55  Today is about legislative morality and making their views make, by force, making, forcing you to comply with the way they believe and getting involved in politics to the exclusion of any American plurality or democracy, and it's taken them years to get here. This didn't just happen. This is not one President's fault. This is a long standing strategy that does involve our lifespan, but we were too little, and it was too new to really be a force in our formative years. Lesley Logan 13:23  Yeah, so I guess, like you've read this, you wrote this amazing book, and in this book, you talk about and I also found it very fascinating, because you say, people say, not all Christians, and in your marriage, in your life, in this world, you went through many different types of different churches, and they seem to just get, continue to get worse and worse. As far as, like, what you as a woman could do and even what your kids could do, you know, obviously, with, the book is here, so you've got out, so we're not spoiling anything, but you all have to, like, the story is just incredible. You have to read it. But I guess I want to go to the after the book, because after the book ends that part of your life, because there's another be it till you see it moment, like you went through a healing process. It just is intense. And I guess maybe we can talk a little bit like, what does years of abuse or years of control do to a body? And how did you get to a place where you could actually write them? I mean, you're a writer, so that's not the problem. But like, get the point where you could actually tell the story, and not almost relive it? Tia Levings 14:24  Yeah, I love that question too, because it's really more my focus once I get this off my chest, you know, I have to tell you what broke me before I can tell you how I healed from it. So I have another book underway called The Soul of Healing. And the contrast of these two books is that in the beginning of A Well-Trained Wife, I'm a child who should be developing as a child. I should be developing my sense of self through normal child development, which is denied you in high control religion. They do not want to nurture individuality. They do not want you to become your best and highest self. They don't want you dreaming and daydreaming of what you can become. You're supposed to become what they want you to be. That's the whole goal. Tia Levings 14:58  When I was in recovery when I broke out of that, I was faced with a dilemma. I had to become someone, become who I am. But I had had no self-development. There was no foundation there. There was just like this broken heap of rubble to put back together and say, okay, I'm going to kind of make a person out of this. And I couldn't have done it without vision and imagination and healing. I did it with 10 years of trauma therapy and putting myself back together. As far as the challenges go, like, what's broken? How can I heal this? How can I address this trauma? All of that happened, and the writing was a piece of that. The writing was, it started out as a therapeutic journal, and then it developed into a novel, because I thought I would tell this hard story with some distance, emotional distance to it. But that's where I was at the time. I wasn't able to say this happened to me. And then it was a book with a pseudonym, because I tried someone else's name on that didn't fit either. And then finally, as I get through my healing and I have become Tia, I'm ready to tell my story of what happened to Tia. And all of that is becoming who I wanted to be, and it's, it's a building process. I have a vision board that somewhere in the middle, there, I eventually hung alongside of it a victory board, because my visions were coming true, and I had needed to mark them as accomplishments, and I became a real different, I have a different life today that you can see in pictures, because they came they came true. Lesley Logan 16:20  Okay, hold on, okay, I love a vision board, like, I still have this vision board. You don't know this yet, but my listeners do. I had three stints in my life where, like, I was without address and, I never had to sleep on the streets, I always had a car or a couch to crash on. So I'm very, very grateful. And I was also had a job, and so I like also tell people it's just sometimes expensive to get into housing. But I, during one of my last stint of that, I did a vision board, and my new apartment was so small I had to, like, just put it in the closet, and I would pull it out every once in a while, and I'd go, oh my god, that's happened. Oh my god, that's happened. But I didn't realize I should have put a victory board, and so now we should all have almost like a book. It opens up and you could, oh, you're great. So okay, so okay, okay, this is so good. The amount of be it till you see it you've had then you had a be it till you see it to become Tia. That is something I don't think we ever give people credit for. I'm sure there's so many people are like, oh, look at her. Now she got out, and now she's this, you know, spokesperson, who's just like, charging up and trying to call these people out, but there was 10-plus years of you becoming you.  Tia Levings 17:25  Yeah, it's very important. I was a shocked, broken mess in 2007 when I escaped, and that was a time when there wasn't the same amount of resource trauma, informed resources didn't really exist yet. Language didn't exist. I certainly wasn't in a habit of accurately naming my experiences. So I had to learn how to call what happened to me by its actual name. I had to learn how to externalize the story with honesty and stop putting like rose-colored glasses on and daydreams and idealism. I had to stop protecting so that I could be honest from the page. That's one of the things you see reflected in my book, is that I speak very plainly about really hard things. That's the reflection of being able to say what happened to me in no nonsense terms, that was a growth step. And so all of that together builds to somebody who has a voice and has learned how to use it. It's not something I had. In 2007 I couldn't have ordered a pizza because I stuttered and stammered too badly to have a conversation with a stranger without so much anxiety that I would have just shut down. And today I can do an interview like this. That all took practice. Like, right now, I'm practicing because I want to be able to do Tiktok lives. And I've never gone live on Tiktok before, two days ago. So I'm practicing in five minute increments on Tiktok. It's that kind of like little have a vision of where I want to be and I want to, I need to practice the mechanics of it, and so I give myself time to practice and envision and all of that. But there's also a lot of grief work involved in that. I don't want to gloss over the grief work, because being able to envision what I want for Tia meant I had to first contend with what it cost me. I can't just envision myself back to 20 and start over. I have to have a new vision for Tia at 50. What does Tia at 50 look like, and what can she do with what she's been given? Lesley Logan 19:14  Oh, my God, you're 50.Tia Levings 19:15  I am. Lesley Logan 19:16  Oh my, gorgeous. Anyways, I know because that's the other thing I don't think people even give themselves credit for. They like leave the job, they leave the relationship, or they leave the religion, and then they don't realize that there is a grief process, because you are grieving what was, what you lost in doing that, what, you can't get time back? I can't imagine you going through all the things you went through in trying to heal yourself and also be a parent to your beautiful children. And so, because we have so many moms who listen when you have a baby and you didn't even have them at the hospital, you had your first at home. I still, somehow, they still insert mom guilt, somehow it comes in. It's not, it's like, so how, what did you have to tell yourself to go through that? Because you had to also give yourself permission to take care of you so that you could take care of them. Tia Levings 20:09  Yeah. So during the years that I was healing, I was raising four children and also going through a vicious divorce and custody investigations. And, you know, it wasn't pretty, it wasn't bad. I just saw it ends with us, and I got so angry because she hands over, in the movie, this is a spoiler, in the movie, she hands her newborn to her abuser and says, I would like a divorce, and no mom from abuse is going to, number one, put her newborn in the father's hands and give him potentially volatile news, that's not going to happen. But also he's like, oh yeah, I think we should, oh yeah, I agree with you. Thank you. No abuser says that. That is not what it's like to leave domestic abuse. So I had a big process to go through, and I had children to raise and life to change, and I had been, you know, always resisting the internal fundamentalism in our home in their early childhood and try to raise them the way that I wanted to. But it was a different scenario when I had teenagers and I didn't have fundamentalism, telling me I had to churn out this cookie-cutter. So it was kind of wild west in some regards. I had a second husband during those years. We had that to contend with. And so there was a lot, there was a lot happening. And just like knowing what TIA is, isn't, it was a question. It was, still a question, I hope it's always a question. The only thing I promised myself was that everything that I'd been through had already taken enough time. It had already taken my life. It took my past. It took my childhood. It took my children's childhood. It took my virginity. It took all the glossy imagery that they promised and never delivered on. It was not going to get my present and it was not going to get my future, because that was the only thing I had control over. So that was my promise to myself, was it changes from here on out. Lesley Logan 21:47  Yeah, thank you for bringing up that movie. I haven't seen it. I saw your post on it, and then I saw, like, people are, like, backlashing up, like, lively, and they're trying to figure out why. And I'm like, I don't think it's any of these reasons. I think what people aren't saying is what they can't always articulate what you did so well, just like, this is unbelievable. This is not how it works. And they didn't have anyone who got experience with it on that movie. Because I just think that you would really, yeah, so, but that's a different episode. Okay, so here's the thing that I find fascinating about you, and I'm so grateful for you, because you're putting towards the things like, I like, even though I grew up somewhat in my, I don't think I ever there's parts of me I watch Tiny Happy People with you in it. I was like, oh, I do think my parents got that book at some point. We were never on the blanket, but we were spanked sometimes. I was like, this is because God loves you. And like, I was, so there's some interesting things that I think my parents tried out and then also let go of because they were very much into football. And my grandparents' version of church was watching, oh, my god, I can't think of it right now, but it's like a Sunday night prayer movie with angels. It's not coming to my mind, but like. Tia Levings 22:52  Touched by an Angel? Lesley Logan 22:53  Touched by an Angel. Yes, we watched every Sunday. My grandma's like, this is church, we're going. So I had some outside influence I think that really kept my life away from that. But, so you, but you have now, because you can, you can pinpoint these things, what I find so fascinating is that you are spending time trying to help people understand what fundamentalism is, what we're looking at here. And I, one, commend you, and I'm grateful for you. But two, and I'm also wondering like, why are you doing that? Tia Levings 23:21  Because somewhere around 2015, yeah, I think it was 2015, I realized that everything I'd run away from, and then I escaped and with the risk of my life and losing everything and leaving everything behind, all of that was coming from my country, and there was be no, there was no hide and be quiet and be anonymous about it anymore. It was you need, you have a story to tell. You know what it's like to live in that America because you lived in that America, being the only people who can tell what it's like to live in Project 2025, or the Christian patriarchy, to that extreme, is somebody who's lived it and but there's not very many people who can talk about it. They are, if they survived at all, if they got out, they haven't done the work to tell the story without re-traumatizing themselves, they haven't, don't necessarily, have the same talents and gifts for clarity or for being able to write or being able to put themselves out there. And so I knew I'm like, well, there's a handful of people who can do this, and I'm one of them, and I have a responsibility to tell the story and to get the workout. The situation has only intensified as I made that decision. My book is timely and we knew that two years ago, we knew that four years ago, and it just keeps getting more timely. And I'm like, please read it before the election. Lesley Logan 24:35  I know, that's why I posted today, because I was like, I don't think I get this I want, I'm gonna try get this episode out for the election. But I was like, how can I get this book in everyone's hands because what kills me is that people continue to say on any post about Project 2025, oh, Trump's doesn't know anything about this. And I am like, okay, because there's a picture of him with the, like, you want to just go, you want to shake people. You're like, what are you doing? We can't shake them, that would be abuse. But your book is so timely. And also you can spot things and almost, in a way, translate, because it is all English. It's just that it's a different worldview. So it's a different language, and you can translate it. For those of us who are going, what is going on and what does this actually mean? Tia Levings 25:18  Even with Project 2025, the mechanics of it matter. So Trump not only knows about it, but he's president because of it. The Heritage Foundation, you might remember this, there was a push in the first Trump election, in the, in that election cycle. Two, they didn't like him, the Evangelicals didn't like him, and they wanted to pick someone like Ted Cruz or Chris Christie. And there was this debate over who's going to be the Republican candidate, and Trump was popular, but not so much with evangelical voters, more with the MAGA crowd. Then all of a sudden, boom, Jerry Falwell Jr. and Franklin Graham endorse him, and it's like this pivot. Everyone's like, what we're endorsing Trump now? The reason why they did that was because they're involved with the Heritage Foundation and the architect of Project 2025. Project 2025 founders and architects decided that a popular president could get their Supreme Court justices in and can get their legislation through. So they went with the most popular president and put him in office as a figurehead. He's there because of them. So it is bigger than him. It is ludicrous that he would pretend that he doesn't know about it when 80% of his administration was staff appointees from those organizations, it was 110 conservative organizations. And so that's why it also will outlast him if they swap him with another candidate, for example, Vance, or anyone else like him, if they're endorsed by the founders of Project 2025, we are in the same boat and that's what lands us with this legislation, with the Supreme Court appointees we've had, and with Speaker of the House, Johnson, like that kind of trend. Lesley Logan 26:52  I know that's the thing that so, concern's the wrong word, sometimes you're just like, okay, how, it's, you start to go, how do you take a group, this is such a huge group of people, and if we escape one at a time, like Tia, you escaped, we're going to be in this forever. Obviously, you're sharing these amazing things that are helping us understand it. How do you see a possibility for us to, I don't, I don't want to say, break the spell, but help them see that I feel like they don't realize they're being used, and that, I think pisses me off the most, but they're being used, and that Tia Levings 27:24  They're being (inaudible) not wrong about that. They're under mind control. They're under a spell. We know that in our bodies, you know we can feel that in our bodies. What I do about it is I choose the other way. I choose light, I choose life. I choose energy and progress. I want humanity to continue evolving and progressing as a society, not going back to puritanical times. There is a reason why we're not Puritans anymore, like, many reasons. We like progress and technology and goodness and education and rights. There's, our society moved forward because we don't want to be like The Scarlet Letter and Nathaniel Hawthorn and you know, all of, all of the things that were true in the 1500s. We choose life. So I choose life. I choose to go forward. That means I choose political ideologies and groups that maybe I don't agree with 100% but they're moving in the right direction. They're protecting my agency to continue to vote. I wasn't allowed to vote in Christian patriarchy. We will lose our right to vote in Christian patriarchy. I don't want that, so I vote for people who protect my right to vote. That makes sense? Lesley Logan 28:25  Yeah, no, it totally does. With all this stuff where you have to kind of like, especially right now, especially in the time that we're in, guys, I think we're 74 days out from when we're recording this. How are you protecting, so how are you protecting yourself? Because every day you have to look at this crap and translate it for the rest of us, it really, absolutely, is like a touch point of my day to see what you're okay, I'm not crazy. This is what I'm seeing. This is very helpful. And, oh, this is why it's going on. So you are definitely helping so many people who are trying to figure out what they're seeing, right? But how are you protecting yourself? And I guess, continue to be it till you see it as being Tia? Tia Levings 29:00  Yeah. So Tia needs a lot of time to sit on the floor. I need time to be unplugged. I need time to stretch and move and get sunshine and walk. I'm really clear on my boundaries, and I use them every day. I also like a good, flexible boundary, not a rigid one. So that means sometimes I take a little step back and then take a few days off. I'm fortunate that my, I mean, it's the twisted curse of content that I make, it's still really timely and relevant, which allows me to repurpose older content sometimes when I need to take a little break from always diving into the most current issue. I'm also really grateful that there are so many other voices joining this that I'm not the only one out there. There's a lot of creators that all have their own strengths for explaining things, interpreting things, and sometimes there's a current event that'll come up, and I'll just like, I'm sitting this one out. I've got the middle of (inaudible) book release, or I've got something else, let the others carry it, and they do. And I know that we're not like, putting our heads together and deciding that, but I know that we're all doing that. We're all aware that this is a movement, and it's a counter-movement of intelligence and love and strength, and sometimes we need to set it out. It's also, interestingly enough, many of us are introverted, and so I noticed that you do what we can do, and then we understand that that's where our limit is, and I go take care of my needs, like my nervous system regulation is my top priority. So that's what I mean when I say I need to go sit on the floor. If I'm feeling overwhelmed or tired or something, I'll just sit down, and let the planet support me, and let everything, like all the energy fields, just kind of come down and the energy drop. Lesley Logan 30:35  Thank you for sharing that I think so many people here need to hear like you, to have gone what you went through, and also to be so aware of what you need, that is a superpower, because there are so many people here who haven't gone through that journey, who do not know how to sit down. Tia Levings 30:51  Right and we're caught in this new cycle full of urgency, and my promise to myself, one of many, but one of them is that I resist urgency. I want a life that resists urgency. So if someone's prodding me to hurry or push or forcing me to do something, I'll go the other way, just to spite them, because I'm not going. I was like, when I was a toddler, I would sit down. My tantrum style was to sit down and throw a fit and I think, oh, she just knew what she was doing. She just knew. No, no, I'm not going in there. No, you can't make me. Channel my inner two-year-old a little bit.Lesley Logan 31:22  Yeah. Oh my gosh. I think you mentioned that in your book, and you mentioned you have a second book. So I feel like I don't, you probably can't talk too much about it, but did you always know you were gonna write the second book? Did it come through after this first one was finished? Do we get to have more Tia? Like, more?Tia Levings 31:39  It's called the soul of healing, and it's how I healed and how you can, too. It's a survivor's guide to do the thing that I did, because that's the follow up question I always get, and why we're having this interview. You did this, you went through this big story, and you put yourself back together, and that's what's fascinating. It's not, so, just a parade of the bad things that happened to me. We've all had hard, bad experiences. But it's what I was able to do with it that I'm able to move forward and do more things as a whole person. I don't consider myself broken anymore. I don't consider myself scarred. I consider myself whole. And to get there, I did some things that, I did everything that healing had to offer. So I was like, this really is a second book. It was, this book would have been way too much for that. So it sold really well, really quickly, in preorders. And that meant I was given the opportunity to sell the next one so close, on the heels of it. So The Soul of Healing comes out in 2025, probably in the summer, early fall. Lesley Logan 32:38  Great. We don't have to wait because, like, too long, because, like, I already knew I was gonna buy a year ago. I already knew it was a deal. And let's just say, I think maybe the hard conversation is like a lot of us are hoping that come this election, that things will go the way joy is presenting itself, and then we'll just move on. And can you give, be the bearer of bad news, but the bearer of honesty, which is, what if they lose, hopefully they lose, what can we expect? Maybe, you're not a future teller, but do they just keep going? Because that means they just do. They've had 50 years of trying, so what do you see? Tia Levings 33:14  I think that if they lose, which I which I ardently hope they do. Because it's terrifying if they win, if they lose, that we'll see a large chunk of people quietly awaken when their disillusionment falls away, when they see the emperor has no clothes. It gets contagious, becomes contagious, and so I think we will have societal change. There will always be a core of fundamentalism. You know, running through the tradwife movement is massive, and it is part of this. Those are people who are not going to like spin on a dime because it's November and the election went one way that I don't think they're the majority. So I think that the more we move forward, the more we crowd out antiquated ideas that don't bear good fruit. And generations, I have a lot of hope in generations, this new rising Gen X and below. I've always had technology. They have access to more psychological information than any other generation in all of humanity. I have hope for that. I think that's going to take us optimistic places.Lesley Logan 34:17  Yeah, I do. I believe. I believe it too. I hope for that. Okay, I mean, I just want to spend all I just want to hang out with you. So, just so you know, I'm coming through Georgia, can we have coffee? We're gonna take a quick break, and then we're gonna come out and find how people can find you, follow you, get your book, and then your Be It Action Items. Lesley Logan 34:37  All right, Tia, where do you like to hang out? You mentioned TikTok lives? Where can people just absorb as much of your amazingness? And where can they buy your books? Tia Levings 34:45  Yeah, I'm on every social platform except for Twitter. Don't do Elon. I'm at @TiaLevingswriter on all of those. I hang out on Instagram the most, and I do have a private readers group if you want to do book discussion and help me launch my books, it's AWTW readers, it's free, it's just private, so that we can talk about stuff, and I might have my substack, TiaLevings.substack.com, which is the anti-fundamentalist, where I share an active deconstruction process in our headlines, family news, current events, and we'll also what I'm deconstructing personally now, and I'm on TikTok. Like I said, I'm trying new things. I've always been unafraid of technology. I want to learn how to do it, but it's really just enough time and bandwidth things. So we'll see what happens there. I just realized I was feeling a little intimidated by a process, and I wanted to deal with that, so that's why I'm doing that. Lesley Logan 35:36  Thank you for, that's a great little, like, yeah, we for (inaudible) why don't we explore wine and see what's going on? You don't have to, but you can just at least understand it. Okay, you've given us so much and, oh, by the way, you have, I believe you have a freebie on, like, the fundies thing as well. If you're in a fundamentalist situation, you're like, unclear. If your family is like, you have that as well in your sites as well. Tia Levings 35:57  Yeah, if you go to tialevings.com I have tons of resources on there, and one of them is the Fundie Cheatsheet. You'll get it if you sign up for my emails and it, it gives you all like the insider terms of what I'm talking about, where I'm from, and also peaks to see where it's going. Lesley Logan 36:11  Yeah. Okay, super cool. Okay, so bold, executable, intrinsic, targeted steps to be it till we see it. What do you have for us? Tia Levings 36:19  Oh my goodness, these were hard to narrow down. My bold, my bold steps, okay, so spend time with yourself is the number one. Like tune out all the noise. Learn how to sit in silence. Learn how to move in walk. I do this when I'm walking a lot, and I try to become my own best friend. I pay attention to my nerves and what's coming up in my body, and I honor that, even if I don't have language for it. And then I spend a lot of time envisioning. I don't believe you can become something with intention unless you can see it. So I need to be able to see it. So I do vision boarding my journaling. I've practiced many times in the mirror being able to speak or smile or do the things. So whatever it is I'm trying to be. I try to really spend time envisioning what it's like to live a daily, ordinary life as that person, and then make those changes as I go. I don't know if those are beady enough for you (inaudible).Lesley Logan 37:13  They are. They're brilliant, they're brilliant, they're wonderful. Yes, they're as amazing, more amazing. I thought they'd be from you. Just, yeah, you should know, you probably do already, because you've done so much work, but you're a gorgeous, incredible, smart human who is so generous. And I'm just so grateful that we got to have this moment and that you took time out of your busy promotion of your amazing, bestselling book, because it's really important to me, and I think every one of my listeners needs to hear it so listeners needs to hear it. So thank you. So you all are going to get the book if you haven't gotten already, because I told you to.Tia Levings 37:48  Thank you so much. Thank you.Lesley Logan 37:49  Oh, are you kidding? Like, I have only ever self-published and I did a terrible job of it, and that's so hard. Well, first of all, first of all, I didn't know you should have an audience first. So there's that. It's still, people still get it, and it's such a niche book anyways. But I have had so many friends who written books, so many people who've been on this it is so hard to authentically get on the bestseller list. It is very easy, if you're a dick on the side that we won't discuss, to have your family buy a bunch of books for you or your friends or a group you know, but you for you and other authors like you, authentically getting there because single people bought a book and told their friends about it. So you, just like incredible achievement, and I hope you continue to celebrate. Lesley Logan 38:35  Thank you again for being here. You guys, how do you use these tips in your life? Make sure you tag Tia and tag the Be It Pod and get her book for your friends, because this, for us to overcome what is actually trying to happen, and not just the US and many, many places where they're trying to control women, specifically, we have to be educated on what it looks like so that we can make sure it doesn't happen. Because we can be it till we see it in the ways we want to be and the life we want to have and we want a vision. So thank you, Tia, so much for being here. Until next time, everyone, Be It Till You See It. Lesley Logan 39:01  That's all I got for this episode of the Be It Till You See It Podcast. One thing that would help both myself and future listeners is for you to rate the show and leave a review and follow or subscribe for free wherever you listen to your podcast. Also, make sure to introduce yourself over at the Be It Pod on Instagram. I would love to know more about you. Share this episode with whoever you think needs to hear it. Help us and others Be It Till You See It. Have an awesome day. Be It Till You See It is a production of The Bloom Podcast Network. If you want to leave us a message or a question that we might read on another episode, you can text us at +1-310-905-5534 or send a DM on Instagram @BeItPod. Brad Crowell 39:45  It's written, filmed, and recorded by your host, Lesley Logan, and me, Brad Crowell.Lesley Logan 39:50  It is transcribed, produced and edited by the epic team at Disenyo.co. Brad Crowell 39:54  Our theme music is by Ali at Apex Production Music and our branding by designer and artist, Gianfranco Cioffi. Lesley Logan 40:01  Special thanks to Melissa Solomon for creating our visuals. Brad Crowell 40:04  Also to Angelina Herico for adding all of our content to our website. And finally to Meridith Root for keeping us all on point and on time.Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/be-it-till-you-see-it/donationsAdvertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

We already have a trial run of fascism under Trump from the billionaire class. Liz Cheney is giving Republican women a Harris permission slip. Chris Christie destroys Lindsey Graham. Subscribe to our Newsletter: https://politicsdoneright.com/newsletter Purchase our Books: As I See It: https://amzn.to/3XpvW5o How To Make America Utopia: https://amzn.to/3VKVFnG It's Worth It: https://amzn.to/3VFByXP Lose Weight And Be Fit Now: https://amzn.to/3xiQK3K Tribulations of an Afro-Latino Caribbean man: https://amzn.to/4c09rbE

Here is the proof that Donald Trump's plan would crater the economy. Trump's Madison Square Garden Hate Fest describes what his administration would be. Chris Christie slams Lindsey Graham. Liz Chaney speaks on abortion. Subscribe to our Newsletter: https://politicsdoneright.com/newsletter Purchase our Books: As I See It: https://amzn.to/3XpvW5o How To Make America Utopia: https://amzn.to/3VKVFnG It's Worth It: https://amzn.to/3VFByXP Lose Weight And Be Fit Now: https://amzn.to/3xiQK3K Tribulations of an Afro-Latino Caribbean man: https://amzn.to/4c09rbE

After Trump sycophant Lindsey Graham appeared on This Week and hyperventilated about how much better Trump would be than Harris, Chris Christie destroyed Graham with his own words. Subscribe to our Newsletter: https://politicsdoneright.com/newsletter Purchase our Books: As I See It: https://amzn.to/3XpvW5o How To Make America Utopia: https://amzn.to/3VKVFnG It's Worth It: https://amzn.to/3VFByXP Lose Weight And Be Fit Now: https://amzn.to/3xiQK3K Tribulations of an Afro-Latino Caribbean man: https://amzn.to/4c09rbE

This week on the Mark Levin Show, this is an election between those who believe in Americanism and the corrupt America-hating ruling class, establishment elite. That's why you see people like Liz Cheney and Chris Christie back Kamala Harris. The ruling-class establishment Republicans would be perfectly fine with a Republican president who wants to transform America. Later, Israel was getting ready to attack and the Iran spies in this administration leaked their intel to an Iranian front group. Also, the media continues to work on behalf of Kamala Harris, Harris had an interview with NBC News. Kamala Harris and her supporters will do anything but run on her record and what she really believes. It's not a mistake that Gen John Kelly, Gen Mark Milley, and Liz Cheney all oppose Donald Trump. Kamala Harris doesn't know why she's running for President - except she wants power. The left wants Kamala to win so they can put Trump in prison. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

In today's Hot Topics, the co-hosts weigh in on radio host Charlamagne Tha God sparring with CNN's Anderson Cooper about how the media covers former Pres. Trump. Chris Christie joins to discuss his advice for Kamala Harris to win undecided voters 10 days before the election and his ideal election outcome. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

On this week's episode, Jeremy enters his dog in a beauty pageant and Scotty is hunting for Eagle Rare. Dan Campbell is being ridiculed from Chris Christie and that makes me laugh, and bands from the 2000's are coming back! Have you ever slept in your parent's bed when they were out of town, and how old is too old to start over? What are some terrible weight loss tips, and What are the dumbest things to brag about? Enjoy another episode and keep on laughing!

On Monday's Mark Levin Show, this is an election between those who believe in Americanism and the corrupt America-hating ruling class, establishment elite. That's why you see people like Liz Cheney and Chris Christie back Kamala Harris. The ruling-class establishment Republicans would be perfectly fine with a Republican president who wants to transform America. Also, Donald Trump is right, we do have enemies from within. We have a political party that wants voter fraud and wants to eliminate the Electoral College. A party that doesn't believe in parental rights - that's the enemy from within. The Democrat Party fears that Trump represents We The People - our interests and our desires.  You need to vote like your lifestyle depends on it because it does. Later, Iran has all of Israel's classified information as a result of the Biden-Harris-Blinken-Sullivan regime. This ruins America's credibility in the world. Afterward, Washington Examiner's Gabe Kaminsky calls in to discuss his deep dive investigation into George Soros' purchase of over 200 radio stations which was fast-tracked by the FCC. There is concern because we don't know how much foreign ownership is involved in this purchase. Finally, Bernie Moreno calls in to discuss his Senate race against Sen Sherrod Brown. No matter what Brown says he is no moderate. If Brown ran on his actual record and actual beliefs, he would be defeated quickly. The only choice he has is to lie. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Czabe connects with his boy "The Cincinnati Flash" aka BRYANT HATCHER to discuss watching whatever was on back in the day as kids. Czabe has a whole list of NFL "who woulda' thought's".... of stats, facts, and nuggets. Mahomes is bad, but still undefeated. The Commanders lead the league in scoring. Mike Tomlin's gamble pays off. Fan ejected for Lambeau Leap goal-line stand? Shanahan is 0-40 in *this.* Chris Christie is a fat loser. The Browns have still not scored 20. And much more.....Our Sponsors:* Check out Indeed and use my code CZABE for a great deal: www.indeed.com* Check out Troll Co Clothing and use my code czabecast20 for a great deal: www.trollcoclothing.comAdvertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

Note: "Act 1" was a separate published audio podcast.Double Note: I lost power so the podcast ends abruptly.*Get a FREE 7 day trial to Patreon to "try it out."*Watch the show live, daily at 8AM EST on Twitch! Please click here to follow the page.Email the show on the Shoreliners Striping inbox: eric@ericzaneshow.comTopics:*The rest of, "EZ lost Pooh Bear points."*Kentucky woman in custody for turning momma into "stew." *JC from Q100 picked a fight with EZ, today. *Helicopter crashes into unlit radio tower. EZ sends story to JC who owns a radio tower that is unlit.*Dan Campbell responds to fat fuck, Chris Christie.*Donald Trump talks about Arnold Palmer's cock.*Arnold Palmer's daughter responds to Trump talking about her Dad's big, fat cock.*Asshole of the Day BTYB TC PaintballSponsors:Werner Roofing, Kuiper Tree Care, Berlin Raceway, Vouch,  Frank Fuss/ My Policy Shop Insurance, A&E Heating and Cooling, The Mario Flores Lakeshore Team of VanDyk Mortgage, Shoreliners Striping, Blue Frost IT,Interested in advertising? Email eric@ericzaneshow.comContact: Shoreliners Striping inbox eric@ericzaneshow.comDiscord LinkEZSP TikTokSubscribe to my YouTube channelHire me on Cameo!Tshirts available herePlease subscribe, rate & write a review on Apple Podcastspatreon.com/ericzaneInstagram: ericzaneshowOur Sponsors:* Check out Mint Mobile: https://mintmobile.com/ZANESupport this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/the-eric-zane-show-podcast/donationsAdvertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

The Lions lead the NFC after surviving the Vikings, Rock and Roll Hall of Fame show review, Uber Driver v. Doritos Eater, Rosie O'Donnell prefers the Menendez Bros over her daughter, and Arnold Palmer was hung according to Donald Trump. We're LIVE on YouTube following the Detroit Lions thrilling victory over the Minnesota Vikings. Sports: Eli Zaret drops by to recap the 1st place Detroit Lions, Sam LaPorta is missing and driving fantasy owners nuts, Chris Christie vs Dan Campbell, the Tom Brady NFL ownership conflict of interest, Cleveland Browns QB Deshaun Watson was injured today and it looks pretty bad, Michigan's quarterback carousal continues, the upward trending Michigan State Spartans, Ashton Jeanty might surpass Barry Sanders' greatest season ever, the New York Yankees advance to the World Series, the return of Javier Baez, rant against sports sponsorships… then reads a sponsorship! An Uber drive takes on a Doritos eating passenger. Since no one asked, Corey Feldman weighs in on the Diddy debacle. Rosie O'Donnell's daughter is arrested for child neglect as her baby plays with meth pipes and dirty underwear. Rosie is too busy with the Menendez brothers to help. We get a call for Christine. Politics: Ted Nugent really wants Marc to vote for Donald Trump. Donald Trump “worked” at a McDonald's to dunk of Kamala Harris. Antonio Brown spoke at a Trump rally. We roll through the biggest political donors at this time. Gen Z will dump you if you don't follow their political views. Trump mentioned that Arnold Palmer had a massive hog. RR HOF: The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame went down Saturday night. Zendaya look pretty good. Kool & The Gang rocked it. Peter Frampton and Keith Urban ripped it. No music for the MC5. Demi Lovato showed up for some reason. Sammy Hagar was HOT BLOODED! Kelly Clarkson belted some stuff out and showed up Lou Gramm. Mary J. Blige brought her umbrella holder. Boyd Tinsley was in full-jerk mode and missing. The Footloose soundtrack might be the worst ever. Drew declares Adventureland a better soundtrack. Britney Spears butchered The Rolling Stones' Satisfaction. The Gallagher (Liam & Noel, not Ron & Leo) brothers will be separated during their upcoming tour. Unrecognizable: Susanna Hoffs. Richard Karn and this lady. One Direction's Liam Payne was a menace in his Argentina hotel. Sarah McBride is making Trans history. Check out Field of Greens and use promo code Drew and visit our presenting sponsor Hall Financial – Michigan's highest rated mortgage company. If you'd like to help support the show… consider subscribing to our YouTube Channel, Facebook, Instagram and Twitter (The Drew Lane Show, Marc Fellhauer, Trudi Daniels, Jim Bentley and BranDon).

Mike gives us his favorite underdog on Saturday and reacts to Chris Christie's comments about Dan Campbell

7:00 HOUR: Chris Christie calls Dan Campbell classless, Maxx Crosby speaks on his future

From 'Baseball Isn't Boring' (subscribe here): Rob Bradford catches up with former NJ Governor and member of the Mets Board of Directors, Chris Christie to discuss his love for baseball, his love for the Mets, and much more To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Joining Playbook's Eugene Daniels on this episode of Deep Dive are two pollsters who know how to find the signal in what has been a very noisy election. John Anzalone aka “Anzo,” was Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton, and Barack Obama's pollster. And Greg Strimple is a veteran of John McCain, Chris Christie, Rick Perry, and John Cornyn's campaigns. Together, they dissect why this election's polling is so close despite all the crazy news; who the swing voters are that both Trump and Harris are spending millions of dollars to reach; and if ticket-splitting is about to have a resurgence.  Ryan Lizza is a Playbook co-author for POLITICO. John Anzalone is the founder of Impact Research. Greg Strimple is the founder and president of GS Strategy Group. Kara Tabor is a producer for POLITICO audio.  Alex Keeney is a senior producer for POLITICO audio. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

SEASON 3 EPISODE 33: COUNTDOWN WITH KEITH OLBERMANN The good news? Trump says if he loses, he won't run again in 2028. The bad news? Trump lies about everything. Strong polling numbers nationally and in the swings including a 16-point surge in Vice President Harris's approval score, and polling on how popular Project 2025 is (it isn't, and it isn't by 57% to 4%). Huge fundraising numbers. Mark Robinson's entire campaign leadership team quit to save their own skin, so he tried to frame it as "staff changes" (yeah, the rest of the race, I'm changing from having a staff to not having one). The Robert F. Kennedy Junior/Olivia Nuzzi story first gets more hilarious by the moment (like the fireworks explosion scene in 'Naked Gun') and then Kennedy reverts to being the Eternal Scumbag with a proxy saying on the record that he hopes to sue Nuzzi and then make "criminal referrals" because that's how you deal with a problem the proxy describes as Kennedy being "chased by porn." You don't, you know, warn the person, then call her employers and tell them to make it stop.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Chris Christie yesterday said Donald Trump is to blame for Mark Robinson. Bullshit. Trump isn't to blame. Republican voters are. They chose Robinson. Just like they chose Kari Lake. Just like they chose Trump. Respectfully, it's time for tough love for Trump voters. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Whoopi Goldberg reflects on the 23rd anniversary of the 9/11 terror attacks: "Our hearts, as they are always, are with everyone who lost loved ones, everyone who was traumatized by this, our hearts go out to you." In today's Hot Topics, the co-hosts weigh in after Vice Pres. Kamala Harris and former Pres. Donald Trump debated for the first time with just eight weeks until Election Day. ABC News political contributor and former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie shares his takeaways from last night's heated presidential debate between Vice Pres. Harris and former Pres. Trump. Usher stops by and discusses his landmark year performing at the Super Bowl, selling out a Vegas residency, getting married and his new concert film, "Usher: Rendezvous in Paris." Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Behar sits down with executive producer Brian Teta to recap the political guests of the past week – including White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre and her budding friendship with former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie – she talks wearing a "brat" green outfit on the show today and answers listener questions on friendships beyond the Hot Topics table, whether there will be a show on election night this year, and more! Have a question or want advice from Brian or a co-host? Call or text us at (347) 391-5022 and or leave us a message here: https://woobox.com/ytnyjj. Messages may be used on a future podcast. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In today's Hot Topics, the co-host discuss former Pres. Trump's 92-minute speech to close out this week's Republican National Convention and how his assassination attempt impacted the event. Former 2024 GOP presidential candidate, New Jersey governor and ABC News contributor Chris Christie shares his takeaways on this week's Republican National Convention. In honor of the show's 6,000th episode, the co-hosts take a trip down memory lane with a game of “Let's Re-View,” featuring some of the craziest moments on the show. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This week, Axe and Murphy were joined by former New Jersey governor and recent GOP presidential hopeful, Chris Christie! The Hacks draw on Christie's experience preparing Trump for past debates to discuss his mindset heading into the Biden debate, his legal saga and fear of jail, Nikki Haley's endorsement, being the adult in the room, leaf blowers, surrogates, and much more.