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It's the John and Gordy show.
This is high five plus.
And
that's the way it is.
We'll do it live.
On 92.7 FM, WMDX.
Take it away, boys.
So much to talk about.
Oh, man.
A little time.
I know.
I know.
Misting outside.
Yes.
It's drizzly and Temperatures in the upper 50s getting into the mid 70s a little bit later on today The rain should clear out the drizzle should go away and we'll see a mix of clouds and some sunshine
currently about 58 and if you're thinking about well Do I wear a jacket or raincoat to a carry an umbrella?
Should I check my windshield wipers?
What should I do?
What should I do?
Well, we don't have any help.
We
can't help you.
That's right
But we can help you maybe win some prizes here.
How about a pair of Brewer's tickets this time around, John?
As we get ready to announce the keyword.
Do you have any key, do you have any contest, let's see.
Do we have any music available?
Let me just see.
Here, let's play it.
You got something?
Because it makes it sound more exciting, right?
If we have a music
better, let's put this music
up.
All
right, here we go.
It's time for our text-to-win contest, our Scotty summer text-to-win contest.
Ready?
The keyword this time around, this is for a pair of Brewer tickets.
Grill is the keyword.
Grill, a G-R-I-L-L.
Grill.
Have you seen girl or grill?
No, grill.
Like a, you know, you put a hamburger on the grill, right?
I mean, grill out
like a... Yeah,
grill.
like a tailgate party grill.
Yes.
You have to show you a picture.
It's a grill.
Okay, grill.
You're grilling me about a grill.
Stretch that
out.
I l l. So here's what you do.
Okay.
This is your chance to win a pair of Milwaukee Brewer club level tickets.
These are great seats.
And every entry puts you into our grand prize drawing of a Wisconsin Dell's getaway or a Door County getaway.
It's your choice if you're the grand prize winner.
As I mentioned, the keyword is grill.
Download the Civic Media app.
It's easy to do.
Get it on your Apple or Google stores and then click on the WMDX area there.
Use the text button to send that keyword grill in for your chance to win in this statewide contest.
We will notify
you in
a couple of days if you are the winner.
All right, the word is grill.
All right, text us
and print that out.
You know, there's a new feature on our app, by the way.
This thing that is right in the middle.
Right in the middle.
Voice note.
Yeah.
Like you can send us a voice note.
Well, don't do
it now because, you know, you want to text in the
grill.
People are used to doing this.
This isn't something brand new, like breaking.
But it's on our app now.
Now it is.
Yes.
So you
could
let me test it out here.
OK.
I'm just going to push the button.
Try it.
Really?
Yeah.
And see what happens.
We can check it later here.
OK.
Send us a voice message.
Tap to record it says.
OK.
Tell that Peterson fellow to shut his piehole.
OK.
I've had enough.
Okay, so I'm gonna submit that.
All right.
And, oh.
Oh, it must be really busy right now because of the text.
Oh, yeah.
Okay.
Yeah, it
says an error occurred while sending your voicemail.
So it's probably busy.
There's too many texts coming in.
Yeah.
Yeah, they're coming in fast and furious.
We'll try it again later.
But no, it's a really cool thing.
It is testing it out.
It's very neat.
All right.
Over to you.
All right.
I want to just give a heads up to everybody out there.
We talked about Palantir.
yesterday and this is a story my son gave me about a week ago.
I finally got to it yesterday and then all of a sudden all day long that story blew up.
Everybody was talking about it and now I have a few Palantir stories and what is Palantir?
It's a data
mining
system Software that is being implanted in every one of the departments of the Trump administration So they can data mine our information and no more about us how we vote our medical records what we spend money on That
doesn't seem like a good idea.
This is big brother
It is.
That's completely like Animal Farm.
Yeah.
So we've got three cuts here.
We've got one that we're going to feature today from Truth Matters.
They had a really nice piece on it.
And it kind of adds to the information that you need to know about Palantir.
Okay.
And then we've got a couple of web wisdoms on it as well.
So today, and we'll start off the seven o'clock hour with a cut.
For the rest of the week here, but we'll start off with truth matters.
They found some background on Palantir This is really insane.
It's a you know, it's a musk power grab that he and Peter teal
The co-founder of Palantir have put in place, and that's why he was going in each one of the departments that Elon was, and they were actually implanting this and putting this in place in many of the departments so they could coordinate this information from department to department.
It doesn't centralize it, but it allows each of the departments to be accessible to the other department if they want to know something about you and me.
All right, so let's get to cut 36 here and listen to Truth Matters.
version of Palantir.
Last year, Palantir CTO Shamsankar put out a presentation and white paper called The Defense Reformation.
He cites the last supper, which was a secretive 1993 meeting between defense industry executives and the deputy secretary of defense.
Over a dozen companies walked in, and only a few walked out.
That dinner is often cited as the origin of our consolidated military industrial complex.
And to me, I think this was the definitive moment that kicked off the financialization.
of defense.
From that point forward, it became all about buybacks and dividends and leverage ratios.
Criticizing the financialization of the defense industry, calling out stock buybacks, that doesn't sound like a defense executive.
That sounds more like the exact argument about the defense industry
that we have made before.
I think what's interesting to me about Palantir is how they co-opt the language of revolution.
But Sankar's
argument did work on somebody.
Uncle Sam.
The Defense Innovation Board, an advisory group within the Department of Defense, cited Sankara's presentation multiple times in their 2024 report on why the DOD needs to divert more of their budget to emerging technology.
That's giving money to Palantir.
There's a reason Palantir just replaced Ford Motors in the S&P 100 in the months after Trump was elected.
The Trump administration is an ideal customer for what Palantir is selling.
First, there are many former Palantir employees sprinkled across the Trump administration, from inside Doge to foreign policy advisors to high-level technology appointees.
And Palantir co-founder Peter Thiel, heavily invested in the company, is also heavily invested in President Trump and Vice President Vance.
He was a major campaign donor to both.
Then the stated goal of DOGE is to streamline and combine government data, which is exactly what Palantir does.
The way that the government is defrauded is that the computer systems don't talk to each other.
And
obviously, Karp is lovin' it.
Disruption at the end of the day exposes things that aren't working.
There'll be ups and downs.
There's a revolution.
Some people can get their heads cut off.
Like, you know, it's like, we're expecting to see really unexpected things and to win.
And what is winning?
According to Palantir, this is CTO Shamsankar in 2021.
Turning to government.
We continue to advance our mission of becoming the US government's central operating system as we extend our footprint across defense, healthcare and civilian agencies.
The government's operating system.
They want everything to funnel through Palantir.
Palantir already has contracts with the IRS going through taxpayer data to save auditors time by finding the easiest audits to pursue.
Now, Wired reports, Doge will likely hire Palantir to create unified software for the entire IRS, a mega API that would allow anyone with access to view and possibly alter all IRS data in one place.
Wow.
That's all of your financial information.
And they have multiple contracts with the Department of Health and Human Services, including nearly $100 million to support HHS's core administrative data and applications, to manage, ingest, and access data securely across business domains.
HHS's core responsibility is Medicare and Medicaid.
That's control over millions of Americans' health records.
and their access to healthcare.
So what does it mean for one contractor to have all that power, data, and taxpayer money as profit, especially as AI gets involved?
As we kind of increasingly live in a simulated world, we lose touch with reality and the human decisions that matter, and we move closer towards governance by algorithm.
Not only made by decisions,
of automated artificial intelligence systems, which is a problem, but more importantly, subject to decisions made by the people who are influencing these AI systems and creating them in order to fill an agenda for whatever their profit seeking or control seeking objectives are.
And when I see Doge kind of going into every agency and addressing the IT department first, I see it as an opportunity to try to change reality
itself.
OK, well,
what could
go
wrong?
Seems like they figured it all out.
It just seems like it's going to be a real problem.
And it's scary as heck.
I mean, the music certainly did add to it.
But Palantir, we've got another cut coming up a little bit shorter cuts in the next couple of days here.
We'll start off each.
in every seven o'clock hour with another segment of Palantir because this, I think, is really going to change how things are dealt with in every one of the departments that are so important to the American public.
Why do they have to have the need to do all this, collect it all and have it all?
They're saying, well,
small government.
They believe in small government, Gordon.
Small
government.
It seems like even bigger government takeover stuff.
Okay, look on a lighter note.
I have another story to counter.
I could counter the depressing Palantir story.
I am going to lighten everything up here and investigation has revealed that the Florida State funded school vouchers were used for over 8,400 Disney Universal and SeaWorld tickets.
Wait, what?
Yes.
We'll bring this up with
Tim Slacker tomorrow.
Okay.
Yeah.
Unbusted pencils when he's in here at 635.
Anyway, this is WESH TV2 Investigates recently took a closer look at the guidelines for how Florida's school choice scholarship money was spent in addition to items like TVs up to 55 inches, the Nintendo Wii, and in-home internet.
tickets to some of Florida's central theme parks can also be reimbursed with your school voucher.
Well, that doesn't seem right.
Does it?
No.
Is that what
school
vouchers are all about?
This is the law down there in Florida.
One theme park ticket or pass per student can be reimbursed for up to two hundred and ninety nine dollars plus tax to receive the reimbursement.
Get this.
Families must fill out a form answering this question.
What is the educational benefit of this item?
So there I'm going to Tomorrowland.
I'm gonna find out of what the future holds.
Yeah,
I
don't
know.
Sure, that would
be a good way to do it.
There's always a questionnaire to everything.
There is.
8,400 students had theme park ticket reimbursements.
That's quite a few.
But get this.
6,000 of those 8,400 were homeschooling kids.
As opposed to scholarships for private schools, these are homeschoolers and
the parents
thought, let's take them to the theme park.
Why not?
It's a field trip.
Yes, that's what it is.
Maybe that's what it is.
Right here.
It's a field trip.
It's choosing vouchers for field
trips.
Makes sense to me.
Okay.
Well, coming up in about 15 minutes, Mike McCabe will be joining us
as he
does every Wednesday.
I want to remind you the key word this hour in the seven o'clock hour for the Scotty Summer Text-to-Win Contest.
The key word is grill.
You can text us on the Civic Media app.
Grill is the word.
And up for grabs this time around, Brewer's Tickets.
We'll be back with more of John and Gordy in the morning right around the corner.
Stay with us.
You're listening to Civic Media.
Stay up to date on the latest news and information for your local community and Wisconsin by signing up for our free email newsletter.
Visit civicmedia.us slash email to get
started.
92.7 John and Gordy on a kind of a drizzly morning here kind of yeah 58 degrees or so yeah, but it feels warmer than that because high dew points in your dew point thing I hate I'm gonna make everybody hate dew points and this program High today of 77.
Okay.
All right.
Well, we can deal with that
But yeah, it is, it's cloudy, it's overcast, it's a little drizzle out there this morning.
We have to apologize, you know, we don't have Brittany, she's a little under the weather, so that's why I gave the weather forecast this time around.
Thank you for doing that.
From the WMDX Weather Watch.
But now let's go to the phone lines and talk to Dick, who's been waiting an awful long time.
Sorry about that, Dick.
We had so many other things to get to, but.
You know that now they're going to know
That I buy cheap beer.
That's the worst thing about all that intelligence are gathering.
Yeah.
Yes.
Yeah.
The situation in the war that's going on overnight.
Now we learn that they take out a bridge in Crimea.
Yeah.
And then on this nonsense about not having the cards, I think Trump would be an easy peg in a poker game because.
If I wasn't really looking at Zelensky, you know, I would maybe think he's playing with a stack deck Mm-hmm not no cards right seems to have all the cards
Yeah, and he never told Trump that he had this
no
no this trick up the sleeve
and we're not gonna be privy to much of the information inside
The you know game any more going forward.
I don't think
yeah That's the that's the reason why we shouldn't have a president like this
Exactly, but no, I would if anything I'd accuse them of having a stack deck that in this case I'm glad he does
Yeah, absolutely good point.
All right, dick.
Thank you for that call 608-879-8255 is our number eight seven nine talk,
you know
A lot of people out there want to be doctors, you know, like RFK Junior wants to be a doctor, researcher, and medical expert, okay?
Now Ron Johnson is getting in on it, and this is truly stunning stuff.
Please do not reelect this guy.
My God.
Okay, Ron Johnson, call for the state.
Our state, Wisconsin, to lift its vaccine requirements for kids attending schools.
Oh boy.
Really?
Yes.
Johnson took the position, same position basically of RFK Junior, saying illnesses in kids can be attended to with better hygiene and sanitation.
There you go.
There is a solution to all the problems.
You know,
measles.
By the way, on the measles thing, that's really now an up outbreak.
There's
more than a thousand
cases of measles in the US, and it's continuing to grow.
Well, apparently they're not taking their vitamin C.
Oh,
sure.
Well, it's not just in kids.
It's not just kids that get measles,
by the way.
That's true.
Anyway, yeah, it's growing.
But thank goodness in this state, you know, children are required.
to get their vaccines.
But it's a state law.
Ron Johnson knows better.
He wants to get rid of that mandate because I don't know why.
By the way, a little while ago, we were testing the voice note thing.
Did
we get another voice note there?
Just to see if it works for us.
I think we did, but I don't think it was
your original voice note, John.
I think we got it from... It was mine, actually, but go ahead.
from Troy.
Okay,
let's hear it.
Can we hear it?
Yeah, let's see how
it
worked out.
Okay.
Troy from Mount Horrib.
Tell that bittersing guy to shut his yap.
Okay, thank you for that.
So
you can go to the Civic Media app.
It's clear as a bell.
And yeah, can we hear
that again?
I'd like to hear that again.
No, no.
Yes, let's hear it again.
Go ahead.
Troy from Mount Horrib.
Tell that bittersing guy to shut his yap.
Okay.
All right.
So if you'd like to straighten the point, I'm thinking that's going to be a drop in here on the show.
You're right.
A regular
thing.
We can make that
happen.
Yeah.
So that's on the Civic Media app.
Just look for the voice note button on our WMDX site.
I
don't think this is a good addition to our website.
Oh, I think
it's perfect
work on
this.
Okay.
All right.
And you can find that on the Civic Media app along with the text.
You can text us as well.
You don't have to use the, in fact, don't use the voice.
No, I think it's, you know, collect them and start using them against me.
I'm feeling persecuted now.
Oh, sorry.
Yeah, I know you're a very sensitive guy.
Can't take the criticism, right?
Yeah.
Okay.
28 past the hour.
I want to remind you our keyword this hour is grill.
This you can text to us on the Civic Media app.
We have brewers tickets up for grabs, club level seats, and of course every entry that you make puts you into the grand prize drawing of Wisconsin Dell's getaway or a Door County getaway.
Again, the keyword this hour is grill.
And there'll be other keywords at 11 a.m.
that hour in
the 2 p.m.
hour and 4 p.m.
hour.
You can get complete rules at civicmedia.us.
Everybody's familiar with this contest already.
Okay.
All right.
Let's let's move on to something here.
A mega trick is just a minute or speaker.
Mike Johnson posed this bit of deception.
He said they've congressional budget office always is off on their estimates by by way of example.
They were off on the projections of the tax cuts and jobs acts and the first Trump administration by one trillion dollars.
The problem is
They do not use what we call dynamic scoring.
Now the thing here that Mike Johnson isn't telling you that he's included the pandemic.
which skews that and kind of ruins any predictions that the CBO had because that, of course, devastated the economy at that point.
And dynamic scoring is using the numbers of the budget, but it also includes other things that may improve the economy, they say.
So it's not used often, but Republicans love to use it because it makes their numbers look so much better.
Well, we'll keep an eye on that.
Everybody
keep in track of this.
Okay.
Yes, we are.
29 past the hour coming up right around the corner.
Mike McCabe will join us as he does every Wednesday morning on John and Gordy in the
morning.
This is Pam Yankee, the fabulous farm babe.
Listen, when you vote for John and Gordy for best of Madison, it's like voting for brats, the packers, the badgers, or cheese.
Yeah, that's John and Gordy, cheesy.
Yeah, cheesy.
We
talked about it an awful lot too.
Thank you, Pam.
Well, today is National Cheese Day,
so it all
makes perfect sense.
Yeah.
735 cloudy, a little bit of drizzle out there, but it looks like that's ending.
We'll see some sunshine peeking through the clouds a little bit later on today.
This portion of John and Gordy in the morning brought to you by our friends at Madison Hearing Aid Center.
They're at 4706 Cottage Grove Road in Madison offering fast and flexible appointments, individualized care,
Helping people change their lives with improving the quality of life through better hearing.
Jim and Sarah will help you out if you have hearing problems.
Go to their website.
They've got a hearing test to get you started right there on the site.
MadisonHearingAidCenter.com.
That's MadisonHearingAidCenter.com.
Okay.
And Mike McCabe joins us
as he
does every Wednesday.
Good morning, Mike.
Good morning.
Good to have you here.
Good to be here.
Substack Author, and you have a couple of recent posts here that we're gonna certainly talk about, and your latest one is a short little span of attention.
Tell us about that title, specifically about the topic as well, what you're dealing with here.
Well, the title comes from a Paul Simon song, you can call me Al.
But the article's really about how
We digest information, how information is presented to us, how our attention spans have gotten shorter and shorter and shorter over the course of time.
You're looking at me on that one.
I'm sorry, what did you say?
I have a short attention span.
That's why we cover so many topics on this show.
I really just can't focus.
Well,
I got a birthday gift from some friends.
They gave me this book that was made by the New York Times.
It's a bound collection of the front page of the New York Times on my birthday from the year of my birth to the present
time.
And it was this voyage through history, the front page of the New York Times.
On that particular day,
for all the years that I've been alive.
But the first 30 pages or so of the book was really history of the times.
And I saw this caption, this photo caption in this section of the book that said that in September of 1987, the heaviest newspaper ever was printed.
It was, it was,
it was
the, according to the-
Paper boys had a tough time.
It was a rough day for the
paper
boys.
Yeah, a lot of
hernias.
Because the
New York Times on that day in September of 1987 was 1,612 pages.
What?
And weighed 12 pounds.
What in the world?
A
single, a single day's newspaper was 1,612 pages.
And I
saw
it, and it was 12 pounds, and I thought, that cannot be true.
But it was in a publication that was by the New York Times itself.
I started looking up, you know, looking into this.
I found a Washington Post article by a media critic of the Washington Post who also cited this one edition of the New York Times, 1,612 pages and 12 pounds.
And I found other sources.
I even looked at the Guinness Book of World Records.
And there
it was,
the New York Times.
Wow.
And it was 1,612 pages.
Well, what was their intention with that?
I mean, what was in that paper?
The
thing is, I looked it up and it wasn't a particularly...
noteworthy news day.
It was a Monday,
right?
And you know, I think that's where it was wrong.
The Guinness Book of World Records said it was September 13th, which was a Sunday.
But the Times and the Post article and everything else said September 14th of 1987, which would have been a Monday,
which is crazy.
Which is crazy because
the Sunday paper is always
bigger than the Monday papers.
So
even right there, it just goes to show that in the news business, you always have got to be
You've always got to be clarifying and you've always got to be revising and you've always got to be correcting when mistakes have been made.
And I think right there, probably there was a mistake.
I'm guessing it was September 13th of 1987.
There was this ginormous Sunday paper.
Well, let me just kind of clarify too.
I mean, for the listeners to just imagine this, three of those newspapers would weigh about what a bag of dog food.
It's like carrying a bag of dog food, three
newspapers.
Yeah, can you imagine the
poor kid
on a bicycle lugging those things around?
Yeah.
And so one of the things I did is I looked up, I found this article about how often you would have to send out tweets on Twitter to provide a comparable amount of information.
And I did some math because they were looking at another more recent edition of The Times when they did this calculation.
So I did the math for that.
for that September 1987 edition of The Times.
And what I found is that you could send out a tweet every hour around the clock, never stop.
Just send a tweet every hour, seven days a week, every day of the year for three quarters of a century, and not tweet out as much information as was in that single days edition of The New York Times.
which says a lot about how the news gathering and news reporting has changed.
And just what incredible detail the news was described in, as recently as 1987.
And
some good sales ads too, I'm sure the people who have sabled a little bit.
But here
was the thing that really blew me away, is that as I was researching this,
really thinking that I was gonna find evidence that that was an urban myth.
There I ran into a little artifact online from the New York Times archives that a shop foreman, somebody who was actually in the room assembling that day's paper, said again, it was 1,612 pages, it was 12 pounds.
but also said there were over two million lines of type in that day's paper.
Two million, thirty thousand lines of type in
a
single day's paper.
And is that similar to today?
That is way bigger than war and peace.
Way,
way, way bigger than war and peace in a single day's newspaper.
So the level of detail, you know, yeah, there must have been a whole.
bunch of ads in that day's Sunday paper.
But yeah, if there were really two million lines a type, in that format, six column paper, that's five to six words per line of type.
We're talking 10 million words.
How did they set the type at that?
I was just
going to say, they weren't still doing it by hand type setting.
I mean, they were using computers.
Not by
1987.
That was already been digitized.
But you go back in the
New
York
Times
history, and yeah, they were setting type.
pouring molten melt to create the, you know, the ability to print the, print the
paper on it.
Well,
how much paper did they use?
I mean, how many, what was their circulation?
I was going to say, the papers in those days were huge.
Right.
Bigger than that.
Yes.
Much bigger
format.
And one of the things they said is how the paper has
shrugged over the years.
Why the paper was.
Yeah, the
paper was wider.
It was, there were more, more pages, more, bigger pages.
Heavier paper, I think
too.
And, and yeah, and there were people who,
would sit for the whole week and just devour the Sunday New York Times.
There was so much information shared.
And now Twitter became a big deal because it was 140 characters, not 140 words, but 140 characters per message.
And so it really goes to show in the...
course of a single lifetime, how much journalism has changed, how
much the
news gathering and consumption habits of Americans have changed.
Yeah.
And how much harsh our attention spans
have shrunk.
Talking to Mike McCabe here, some stack of author and blogger.
And also in your recent blog here, you're talking about the Washington Post publisher, Phil Graham.
with just a few items of interest here about, for example, Henry Ford didn't really build the first automobile, right?
There are a few others.
People thought these, all these things were true.
Like
Galileo
didn't
invent the telescope.
You've got a few others.
Well,
Christopher Columbus didn't discover America.
Thomas Edison didn't invent the light bulb.
Abner Doubleday did not invent baseball.
But there was a time where all of those things were believed to be true.
And I mentioned it because Phil Graham, who the former publisher of The Washington Post, has always been credited with being the very first to call news the first rough draft of history.
Yeah.
There you go.
Yes.
And it was a famous Phil Graham quote.
He apparently said it in a speech, I think, in 1963.
Later it's been found that he got that line from somebody else and
it
had been
said
for years
and years.
He took the line from somebody else and
made something out of
it.
And said it in a speech and then got credited for this.
And they actually engraved this saying in cement in media museums around the country that Phil Graham had said this.
And it turns out that as with Edison and as with Henry Ford and as with Christopher Columbus, he wasn't actually the first to say it, which, again, goes to show that we always have to be questioning.
We always have to then be challenging things and making sure that it actually is true.
And we have to, we have to correct mistakes when those mistakes are made.
That's, that's a central principle of journalism.
Was that like the first example of patriotic indoctrination?
Do you think?
I mean, in the fifties and sixties, come on, you know, the buckled shoes, you know, the Thanksgiving, you know, with the, you know, all of this stuff.
Now you just mentioned all these things, these truisms, but, you know, we were told those things.
It was a patriotic thing to celebrate.
Americans and all of this and see how wrong they were.
And if we go back to patriotic education, this is the kind of stuff we'll probably get more of.
And
to me, it's very really pertinent.
to think about the importance of treating today's news as only the first rough draft of history.
Because as we look at faithfully telling the story of this country and reporting history, there is an awful lot of clarification and correction that needs to be done.
And
we can't get to this point where we simply again indoctrinate people in myth.
in mythology when it comes to American history.
We need to teach the actual story.
And teaching the actual story means continuing to explore the truthfulness
of that story
and making corrections as we go along.
Well, especially in the age of social media and social, I mean, how can you keep up with correcting this story when everybody's
pitching in their own... Making up stuff and throwing it out
there.
just tossing it into the
internet.
Now, Tom in Jackson lived my life as a paper boy.
He said, I delivered the Milwaukee Journal back in the seventies.
I did it in the sixties.
And on Sundays, the paper could be an inch thick and heavy.
I
rode a
bicycle with baskets in the back and when fully loaded, the front tire would come off the ground.
That's a hard way to ride a bicycle.
And I had like bags, paper bags that I had, you know, on each shoulder on each side of my body and the baskets filled.
And
think of the wear and tear on your body if it had been the New York Times that you were delivering.
All right.
It is 7.48.
We'll come back with more with Mike McCabe in just a moment on John and Gordy in the morning.
Stay with us.
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John and Gordy in the morning.
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Is that what it's called?
It's called voice note.
Voice note.
Yes, do that.
Expertate attention.
It's a good idea.
We're talking about attention spans.
We'll be talking about more of that in just a moment with Mike McKay.
Just a moment.
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OK?
All right, Mike, you brought up in your column and substack the idea that Trump may need a television show.
in the White House in order to give him his daily briefing.
A little
video briefing.
Yeah.
Because he can't read.
What an idea.
You know, he's got his entire staff, his entire administration is from television.
You know, they could actually just create a White House TV show for us daily and have, you know, Caroline Levitt out there with her own talk show, talking to the press.
These are the intelligence briefings, though.
This
is what's going
on
in the world
every day.
Once a week, right?
Well, it's every day.
Traditionally, they were thought to be every day, but Trump doesn't take them any
more
than once a week, sometimes less than
once a
week.
And so Tulsi Gabbard, the intelligence director, thought that maybe they needed to...
present the intelligence briefing, which usually comes like in a binder with all these, you know, with top secret documents and written descriptions of these challenges around the world.
And, you know, but maybe they need to put it in a format that looks like a Fox News broadcast.
Of
course they do.
To get his attention.
Not to stress your attention span, guys, but
this
does tie in to what I was just writing about and where we've gone from the New York Times being 1,612 pages on a single day to the point where the president of the United States doesn't wanna pay attention to intelligence briefings.
And the intelligence chief for our nation thinks that maybe we should make them look like...
Fox News broadcasts to get his attention and help him digest this information.
And when I saw that story, I thought, this is so America 2025.
It really is.
We've gotten to the point where, you know, and here I am writing on Substack, writing these articles, and maybe I should just turn them into something that looks like a Fox News broadcast to get more people's attention.
But the written word is important.
And we do need people who are willing to sweat the details and to make sure those details are right.
And then people need to, we need to read and we need to write.
You know, I'm just sitting there thinking, who would be the best person to...
you know, provide the message, you know, Jesse Waters, maybe he sounds panicky most of the time.
So that might be a good choice or Judge Jeanine, you know, you never know.
She's pretty boisterous when she's had a few.
So how about
Maria Bartoloma?
I don't get his attention.
She believes everything she's told.
She comes in with the right idea.
And then, you know, somebody tells her something and she's instantly changes their mind.
It's
fun to
watch.
It's
just sad that it's come to this.
I mean, really, I mean, this is the guy in charge.
This is the leader of the free world.
This is the guy... What?
Yeah, we all have bad attention spans.
It is reflective of our culture as a whole.
We can pretend like it's just the president of the United States who's like this, but it's a reflection of our culture as a whole.
And not that long ago, we had people who were waiting anxiously for the Sunday New York Times to land on their doorstep, and they would spend the whole week just devouring the thing from beginning to end.
That's right.
Well, I don't know, you know, I guess we've been accused of having a short attention span, you know, by a Catherine who has made that point over and over and over again.
I hope you guys don't think that I wrote this article with you
in mind.
I really wasn't trying to send you a message or anything.
Well, Mike,
we'll have to talk about your next appearance if you're on a show, and maybe we'll reconsider that.
But, you know, this is what happens because, you know, this is the cell phone generation now, right?
And that's what it's all about.
It's always distracting us.
We're constantly looking at these phones.
And now, you know, the high tech guys are saying that the phones are on their way out and we're going to be wearing glasses now with all the information and be able to take phone calls and everything.
Everybody be wearing glasses or having brain chips installed.
Yeah, no, that's a crazy one from a lot.
You know, he thinks that's how it's going to happen.
But you know, that that's going to be tough for upgrading.
All part of our world.
Mike, thank
you for being with us.
We'll see you again next Wednesday.
Really?
I think we'll have
a little discussion after the
show.
See if that's true.
Coming up tomorrow, Jim Santel, attorney at law will straighten us out legally.
And Tim Slecker will be discussing
the latest of education.
Busted
pencils.
And Stephanie Miller's coming up next.
This portion of the show brought to you by Virlo Mattress of Madison.
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Stephanie Miller's coming up next.
John, have a great day.
Gordy, same to you.
And many more.
Thank you.
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