The Megyn Kelly Show - 20230213_what-are-objects-were-shooting-down-woke-super-bow

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Feb. 13, 2023 - The Megyn Kelly Show

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UFOs Over Alaska 00:15:07
	Welcome to the Megan Kelly Show, your home for open, honest, and provocative conversations.
	Hey, everyone, I'm Megan Kelly.
	Welcome to the Megan Kelly Show, and happy Monday.
	Millions of Americans tune in to watch the Super Bowl while simultaneously wondering if we are being invaded by aliens.
	That is the actual headline today.
	Would have been the perfect time for President Biden to possibly, I don't know, appear for an actual news interview and address the bizarre but very real growing concerns about possible alien life over the continental United States and oceans around us as well.
	And Canada, by the way, even CNN is taking the president to task for being too silent on this.
	There is a lot to discuss today, and I am so happy to be joined by an old Fox News pal to discuss it all.
	This is going to be fun.
	Rick Leventhal is here.
	He is the author of the new book, Chasing Catastrophe.
	He's also co-host of the Rick and Kelly Show and The Daily Smash with his wife, Kelly Dodd, of Real Housewives fame.
	Rick, it's so good to see you.
	How are you?
	You too, Megan.
	I'm doing fantastic.
	And I'm so proud of you and all that you've done.
	I'm following your career and your success, and it's amazing.
	So good for you.
	Oh my gosh, it's wonderful to lay eyes on you.
	We go way, way back, you and I.
	And I'm so happy to see this book.
	And I was like, oh, great.
	This is a great excuse to get the band back together and talk about old times and Fox and media.
	But let's kick it off of the news because it's so plentiful today, Rick.
	My God.
	The thing about the aliens, I mean, it's crazy to me.
	This is real.
	Like we're actually having serious discussions about whether we're being invaded and why.
	Over the past eight days, we've had to shoot down, by my count, now, four unidentified aerial projectiles.
	I can't remember what we call them, Steve.
	UAPs, phenomenon, phenomenon.
	That's the official term, not UFOs anymore.
	So, just to get the audience up to speak, we've had, okay, so there was one off the South Carolina coast last Saturday, you know, a week, 10 days ago.
	Then on Friday, we shot one down, smaller balloon or object.
	The military is calling it an object over Alaska.
	Then on Saturday, we shot one down over Canada.
	Then yesterday, we shot one down over Lake Huron.
	They're everywhere.
	They're everywhere.
	And here's what the military is saying.
	Okay, the Air Force commander who's running NORAD.
	This is the same guy who said, well, we, you know, there were a few during the Trump administration too that we didn't know about because we have a domain awareness gap, which now apparently they've solved and they're everywhere.
	And he said, when asked by a reporter if extraterrestrials might be involved, General Van Herck responded he would leave that to the Intel agencies, but quote, I haven't ruled anything out.
	He says, let the Intel community and the counterintelligence, right?
	He says, I'll let them figure that out.
	I haven't ruled out anything at this point.
	We continue to assess every threat or potential threat unknown that approaches North America with an attempt to identify it.
	He said, unlike the Chinese spy balloon, all three UFOs or AEPs guns down over the weekend were of a similar size and speed.
	We're calling them objects, not balloons for a reason.
	This is the first time within United States or American airspace that NORAD has taken this kind of kinetic action against an airborne object.
	So what do you make of it as a seasoned reporter who's covered a lot of breaking news over your time, including military news?
	What do you make of it?
	It's bizarre, first and foremost.
	And I think the reason why people are freaking out is because the military isn't giving a whole lot of information.
	It would seem as if if they knew that these were some sort of alien spacecraft, that they would, if they knew it, then they should share that information.
	If they knew it, then they would be tracking that spaceship to the ground and then collecting it.
	And I don't know, do they take it to, what is it, Area 52?
	What's the place in Nevada?
	Right.
	51.
	Yeah, thank you.
	51.
	Maybe 52 is the next one they're going to open up.
	Do we need something?
	I mean, it's as hard as it is to believe that that might actually be the case.
	It's also kind of, it would be presumptuous to assume that we're the only, you know, intelligent life forms in this universe.
	And it's only a matter of time before we do have spaceships buzzing overhead.
	But if they were alien spaceships, why would they shoot them down?
	You know, why wouldn't they just sort of corral them somehow or try to bring them to the ground so they could talk to the alien pilots on board?
	The whole thing is, but they were, I mean, we are getting conflicting reports now.
	It's actually kind of creepy.
	Let me let me read you what they're saying.
	Okay, please.
	That we're getting, we're getting differing descriptions of the objects and whether, like how problematic they were.
	Hold on, I'm checking my notes just to get the latest because some pilots said that they seemed to have some sort of control or that they were they were messing with our control, our controls, and other pilots said, no, they didn't see that.
	Here it is.
	Pilots gave different accounts of what they observed coming near the object.
	A source briefed on the Intel told CNN.
	Some pilots said it interfered with their sensors, our pilot sensors.
	Other pilots said they did not experience that.
	A little bit more, the latest object, I think this is the one that they got on Saturday, appeared to be a small metallic balloon with a tethered payload.
	Who knows what that means?
	What the hell is a tethered payload?
	Okay.
	So just to be more realistic, in all likelihood, these are probably similar to the balloon that China flew over the U.S. They're intelligence gathering UAVs, right?
	So they sent them up over our airspace to suck whatever they can out of our out of our air that might help them with their spying.
	And we do the same thing.
	So these are unmanned aerial vehicles that they fly way high in the sky to try and gather as much intelligence as they can.
	Why all of a sudden we're finding them?
	Sorry, my earpiece is falling out.
	Why all of a sudden now the military is finding them and shooting them down is a good question.
	I think you mentioned something about how they plugged a hole in their systems and now they're seeing them.
	It's good news, I guess.
	But why did it take this long?
	We kind of know why.
	Yeah, because this guy, again, who this get his name correctly, General Van Herc, again, domain awareness gap prior to right now, he came out and told the New York Times after the transit of the Chinese spy balloon last week, NORAD adjusted its radar system to make it more sensitive.
	Way to go, NORAD.
	As a result, the number of objects it detected increased sharply.
	In other words, NORAD is picking up more incursions because it is looking for them.
	I mean, this is crazy.
	So how many have there been all this time for the past 10 years, right?
	And like, is it true that we're just now picking up on things that have been there all along?
	Or is it the case that actually there is an uptick in what's coming over the United States because it's coming, I don't know, from where?
	Well, it certainly seems as if now they're seeing them because they're trying to see them, whereas before they were most likely there and we just weren't either looking for them or we weren't properly applying the technology we have to find them.
	So I think what this tells you is that we've been spied on for a very long time by who knows who.
	And now we're starting to see those spy technology and we're shooting them down, which is great if you don't want to be spied on.
	But it's also a reminder that there's a lot of stuff that we probably have already given them and we've been exposed for a long time.
	Yeah.
	And you pointed out that, you know, what do we have over there that made us reluctant to shoot down spy balloon number one, right?
	Is that is that playing into our reluctance to shoot this thing down and let it cross over the entire United States before we did anything about it?
	Now, Mrs. GOP Representative Mike Turner of Ohio, now he says we're trigger happy.
	Look, I was shooting down everything.
	He says, look, it's preference.
	There's no one on board.
	I'm fully, I fully support it as long as there's no one on board and it's not ours.
	It doesn't belong here.
	They're violating our airspace.
	So get them out of here.
	Waiting for them to cross the entire country seems to be like shooting yourself in the foot because you're letting them get everything they can possibly get.
	And by the way, I'm sure they're real time streaming that to whatever base they have somewhere.
	Exactly right.
	It's not like it needs to get back home for it to deliver all the information.
	It seems like it is transmitting.
	So why would we let it go all the way across the United States?
	Even the Democratic Senator John Tester of Montana, which has been the site of at least one of these, comes out and says, this is craziness.
	He says, what's gone on the last two weeks or so, last 10 days, has been nothing short of craziness.
	The military needs a plan to determine what's out there and then determine the dangers that go with it.
	So this is, you know, a bipartisan concern.
	And is it weird, do you think, Rick, that like now we've got four, okay, we got four in eight days that the president hasn't addressed this at all?
	I mean, because Americans already were a little freaked out about UFOs or UAPs.
	We had the whole big report last year about what's really out there and are they being transparent with us?
	And the answer is, no, they're not.
	It's almost more suspicious.
	Like it's only going to add to the conspiracy theories or the concerns about aliens the longer he stays silent about it.
	Well, let me just say this.
	If President Trump were still in office, you know, he'd be talking about it.
	And he'd be like, we're going to shoot down everything in the sky that's not ours.
	We're going after all these things.
	You know, he would not be hiding in the White House, not doing a Super Bowl interview and not talking about aircraft being shot down or unmanned aircraft being shot down over the United States.
	He'd be out front on it.
	And I think the American people deserve that.
	You know, right now, citizens from the West Coast to the East Coast are out there with their binoculars.
	Like every citizen NORAD wannabe is out there like, I see it.
	I see it.
	Yeah.
	There's another one.
	There's a great meme online.
	Debbie Murphy, my producer, sent it to me of this.
	Megan, there could be hundreds of them.
	There could be hundreds of them up there.
	We don't know, do we?
	NORAD's probably identifying multiple right now.
	We're going to shoot them all.
	I'm going to get my little slingshot and see what I can do.
	There was one, she sent me this meme of this person.
	It was like, I see it.
	I see it.
	It turned out to be bird poop on their window, which could easily be confused for it.
	It looks similar to the balloon.
	But this is our future.
	I think it was the first one that the balloon they said was like three times the size of a school bus.
	So I kind of get why they wouldn't want to just shoot it down randomly, but the odds of it hitting something, as long as it's not over a major city or populated area, the odds of it hitting something meaningful are pretty slim when you think about how spread out everything is across most of America.
	Well, in that one, they first spotted it over Alaska.
	So why didn't they just shoot it down over Alaska, which they've now proven is completely safe and they can do, right?
	They spent eight days telling us, oh, well, this, that, the other thing.
	They're perfectly capable of shooting these things down over Alaska because they then did that with one of these smaller, quote, objects.
	Uh-huh.
	Well, I'd like to talk to the pilots who are flying up that high, who targeting these things.
	Oh, my God.
	They got a good look at it.
	I'd like to know what they saw.
	And I think that the military, while I understand the Pentagon is tight-lipped and a lot of this stuff is classified, but give us a little more.
	Give us a little better sense of what it is exactly that's flying over the United States, a little better sense of what it is that you're shooting down and why you're shooting it down.
	I think they could give us a better picture of what's going on.
	Something's happening in Montana, too, because like I say, we had the one off the South Carolina coast, started in Alaska, spotted in Montana.
	Then we shot it down, the Chinese spy balloon last two Saturdays ago.
	Then we get another thing in Alaska, which we shoot down.
	Then we get something over Canada, which NORAD shoots down.
	Then we get the thing over Lake Huron, which we shoot down.
	But in the midst of all this, in the midst of all this, yet another report out of Montana.
	This is Saturday.
	Airspace briefly closed over Montana before being quickly reopened after a radar anomaly prompted a jet to investigate.
	Fighter jets were scrambled and airspace over a town, forgive me, I don't know how to pronounce it, Havre, H-A-V-R-E, a town of 10,000 people 30 miles south of the Canadian border, was shut, the airspace shut at 7.50 p.m. before being reopened about 50 minutes later.
	They're saying that, let's see, Montana Congressman Matt Rosendale said he was told the Pentagon would follow the object, but they were unable to shoot it down because it was dark.
	Then NORAD issued a statement shortly after, leaving it unclear whether there was indeed an object at all or whether it was a false alarm.
	My God, I'm sorry, Rick, but I'm going to have to do it.
	It reminds one of this famous scene.
	Watch.
	It's a scene from Independence Day as the aliens invade.
	And that guy's reaction sums it up.
	That's next, Megan.
	That's next.
	Well, got to wonder, like, let's just spend a minute on what if, what if it isn't from the Chinese?
	Okay.
	Like, what?
	There's a reason this guy wouldn't rule it out, right?
	The NORAD commander wouldn't rule it out.
	I'm not ruling anything up.
	What if it is from another planet and they're like doing some recon?
	You know, it'd be kind of cool if it was.
	Let's be honest.
	It'd be a lot more sexy if it was from another world than if it was from China or some other country that wants to spy on us.
	The likelihood is it's another UAV of some kind of spy technology, and they're gathering all of the electronic intelligence they can every chance they get.
NORAD Commander's Uncertainty 00:07:18
	What's in Montana?
	I don't know, but something good must be in Montana because they're spending a lot of time over there.
	Yes.
	I think that, you know, the question remains is how many more are there?
	Are there really that many that they can shoot down that many in a short amount of time?
	And who knows?
	I mean, it probably doesn't take that much to build these things.
	And we know how far the technology has advanced over the last few years.
	So, I mean, I don't know, but aliens.
	This isn't over.
	This isn't over.
	We're going to get more and more reports now that NORAD's paying attention.
	But here's a couple.
	Here's an interesting twist.
	So I've been mentioning Air Force General Glenn Van Herc, right, of NORAD.
	And he's saying we haven't ruled anything out.
	We can't ruled anything out.
	We continue to assess.
	Okay, so that got people's attention, right?
	It appeared in the New York Times.
	And this is courtesy of Mediite, which is paying attention to the reporting on this.
	So he doesn't rule out aliens.
	And the New York Times reports that.
	And the original quote included the quote I read to you from Glenn Van Herck, right?
	But then, then, okay, let me just read from the Mediite report.
	So the New York Times Pentagon correspondent Helene Cooper, who co-wrote the article, asked about this tidbit, right?
	You can't rule anything out during the presser with Van Herck.
	And she says, because you still haven't been able to tell us what these things are that we're shooting out of the sky, that raises the question.
	Have you ruled out aliens or extraterrestrial or ETs?
	And if so, why?
	Because that's what everyone's asking right now.
	And that's where he goes on to say, I haven't ruled anything out.
	We continue to assess every threat.
	After the presser, the article of the New York Times was changed.
	And that paragraph I read to you was removed.
	At a different point in the article, it now has this added.
	Asked during a news conference on Sunday whether he had ruled out ET origins, General Glenn Van Herck, the commander of the Air Force's Northern Command, said, I haven't ruled out anything at this point.
	And now the New York Times reports it this way, Rick.
	But in interviews Sunday, national security officials discounted any thoughts that what the Air Force shot out of the sky represented any sort of alien visitors.
	No one, one senior official said, thinks these things are anything other than devices fashioned here on Earth.
	And the report goes on to say, although this is the Mediite report, although that does update and add to the story on the subject of the public's imagination regarding UFOs, it leaves out entirely the news earlier reported by the Times that the Biden administration was making private assurances to people that we were not being invaded from space.
	Reporting that no longer appears anywhere in the article.
	This is insane.
	I have to say, Megan, in my 35-year reporting career, I don't believe I ever asked a question of any official about whether or not something was an alien life form or an alien spaceship.
	I don't think I ever asked that question.
	I think perhaps the person who was answering the question was just trying to cover all his bases and didn't know if he was authorized to say in fact that it wasn't that.
	So maybe he was just trying to keep all options open or keep people guessing.
	But I think it's most likely not.
	It sounds like they probably pulled the New York Times aside after the press conference and said, listen, guys, you know, I appreciate the question.
	Don't fan those.
	It's not a U.S. fuel.
	Don't fan those fires.
	Okay, the fact that you never asked anybody, hashtag part of the problem, Rick, hashtag part of the problem.
	Why weren't you on this?
	Okay, but here's the best.
	Here's the best, best piece of this whole story.
	Okay, so we did, we did shoot one down.
	NORAD shot down, you know, the Air Force shot down all the ones in the United States.
	And NORAD, which is a North American group that targets any sort of air threats, worked with Canada to shoot down the one over Canadian airspace.
	And what we're told is that this was approved per a White House statement by both President Biden and Justin Trudeau.
	They both approved the shoot.
	I mean, I'm sorry, but I can't think of two more feckless leaders sitting there like, what do you think?
	What do you think?
	What do you think?
	Okay, sorry.
	But Justin Trudeau, like the fact that he had to approve anything.
	Okay.
	I'm sure we made the decision.
	So Corrine Jean-Pierre gets asked about it on MSNBC over the weekend.
	NORAD shot it down over Canadian airspace.
	What's going on?
	Oh my God, Rick Leventhal.
	Please listen to this soundbite and listen to the last word in particular that she says.
	Why is the American military shooting something out of the sky over Canada?
	Because it's part of NORAD.
	There is a, the NORAD is part of like a part of a, it's a, it's a, what you call a coalition, a corporation.
	Exactly.
	And so that's why we were able to do that.
	Again, we didn't do it on our own.
	We did it in clearly in step with Canadia.
	What's it called?
	A coalition?
	Canadia?
	Canadia.
	It literally sounds like a disease you get in college if you're not careful.
	Not for the record, I've never had Canadia.
	Never.
	But I have been to Canada.
	But you've, you know, you've been with the military overseas, right?
	It sounds like, oh my God, he needs some antibiotics for his Canadia.
	You got it over there in Iraq.
	What the hell is that?
	I mean, what is going on?
	This is why I never wanted to cover politics in Washington, Megan.
	This is why I stayed in New York City for most of my career.
	I didn't want anything to do with those knuckleheads on Capitol Hill.
	Okay.
	So what's not that?
	Her job is to be an effective communicator, Rick.
	She's kind of one step away from our business.
	It's literally her job to communicate clearly.
	Yeah.
	How's that going?
	How's she doing?
	Horrifying.
	I miss John Spicer.
	Me too, actually.
	I can't even watch those news conferences anymore at the White House.
	I can't.
	I can't watch it.
	It's just so ridiculous.
	It's embarrassing, right?
	I have secondhand embarrassment.
	I think so.
	I think it's a good word.
	She never heard of NORAD.
	And once again, because it's a pattern with her, refused to do her homework before making an appearance about it, right?
	Like, I recognize most of us aren't talking about NORAD every day.
	I was saying the other day, it's like, to me, it makes me think of war games.
	We're now at DEF CON 1.
	But I don't have her job.
	And I wasn't about to go on all the Sunday shows talking about the three or four, however many had been at that point, unmanned aerial vehicles that we had shot down, including one with Canada, which was done by NORAD.
	Like, do your damn homework.
	Try a little.
	Stop embarrassing yourself, womankind, and the American people by being so inarticulate and obviously uninformed.
	You'd think that you would be fully briefed, fully read up.
	I mean, I'm sure they gave her talking points, but maybe practice it a little bit, maybe rehearse it, get to know your information better, get to know the subject you're talking about, and then talk about it.
	Do we think that she knows it's Canada?
	And not Canadia.
	Where is Canadia?
	Scared.
	Scared.
Singing for Giants 00:14:38
	Okay, so that was my favorite story.
	All right, so let's switch to the Super Bowl because there were things coming down from the sky and there were balls being thrown across the sky at a much lower altitude.
	By the way, just FYI, the objects we shot down were reportedly around 20,000 feet.
	Chinese Spy Balloon was more like 40,000 feet.
	That's why the Biden administration is saying it was fine to shoot down.
	Like we had to shoot it down because it was a potential airplane airspace, unlike that Chinese balloon.
	We got all this heat for not shooting until it got over South Carolina waters.
	Okay, so Super Bowl last night.
	Did you watch it?
	Of course.
	Yeah.
	I watched the whole game.
	Who are you rooting for?
	I was rooting for the Chiefs.
	I love the Chiefs.
	And I grew up in the DC area when we used to have a team called the Redskins, and they were my team.
	And the Redskins are in the same division as the Eagles.
	So I hated the Eagles, hated the Giants, and I can't root for the Eagles because they were one of the enemies of the Redskins.
	So, of course, I rooted for the Chiefs and I was very happy to see them win.
	I wasn't happy that I didn't hit any of my squares.
	You know, I had some Super Bowl box squares.
	Yep.
	You know, those pools.
	And I haven't won in like, I don't know, five or six years.
	So I was very disappointed in that.
	But the game itself was terrific.
	I mean, this was one of the best Super Bowls I think most of us have ever seen.
	It was a really good game.
	It was.
	It was exciting.
	Even for the non-sports person like me.
	My husband's, he's on a guys' weekend with his buddies.
	So all from Philly.
	So they watched it together.
	But I watched it with my kids.
	We did the box thing.
	It was funny because we had to fill some in because we didn't have enough people.
	Anyway, and we filled it in with like, if you, if they, if it's this score at the end of the first quarter, you have to say the, everybody in the family has to say the alphabet backward, which is what happened.
	If it's this, I can actually do that.
	It's hard.
	It's more challenging than I would have thought.
	Anyway, so I will tell you, I won them all.
	Can you actually won right now?
	All the boxes?
	I won them all.
	I won every single one.
	Oh, I was nice.
	I didn't take their money.
	I told them they're going to have to do whatever I said this week, which is a better pain to me.
	Well, you know what I was doing?
	It was like, okay, if each team scores a field goal before the end of the quarter, then we'll hit our numbers.
	All right.
	Now this team has to score a touchdown and a safety safety.
	Miss the extra point.
	You know, stuff like that.
	None of it worked out.
	It's funny how it does stop you from rooting for your actual team.
	It becomes all about what your chart is and whether you're going to hit your bet, right?
	It's like you couldn't care less about the team you're rooting for.
	It's like when I played fantasy football, you know, all I cared about was if my running back on the Chiefs got over 100 yards and scored two touchdowns, I didn't care what the game was happening in the game at all.
	And, you know, I'm rooting for the receiver on the other side because he's on my team too.
	So it just changes the game completely.
	But, you know, I do love football and I love the spectacle of it.
	And we were at a party here in Newport Beach and had a great time.
	Slightly hungover.
	Can you really do the alphabet, say the alphabet backwards?
	Can I hear that?
	Oh, yeah.
	Z-Y-X-W-B-U-T-S-R-Q-P-O-N-M-L-K-G-I-H-G-F-U-D-C-B-A.
	Why do you have that skill?
	You know, we were driving cross-country.
	My family was when I was like 15 years old.
	I'm sitting in the back seat of our Oldsmobile Cutlass Supreme.
	I'm bored out of my mind.
	So I just wrote down the alphabet on a piece of paper and then just started practicing reading it backwards.
	I don't know why I did that, but since the age of 15, I've been able to say it pretty much as fast as I can say it forward.
	I can say it backwards.
	Oh my God, that was amazing.
	Who knows?
	And that is a skill I've never revealed before, Megan.
	I'm breaking news.
	Thank you.
	Right here, right now.
	I mean, honestly, like we, we used to sing.
	We used to sing songs in the back of my parents' station wagon.
	We didn't do anything useful.
	That's useful.
	I taught myself something.
	I encourage all young people today to do the same thing.
	You never know when it'll come in handy.
	Yeah, they're learning absolutely nothing.
	They're playing games on the iPad, but now I'm resolved to try harder.
	Remember all those songs you'd sing?
	It was like the 99 bottles of beer on the ball and give God your glory, glory.
	It was like all those camp songs in the back seat of the big station wagon, which was so unsafe.
	Did you have the one where like you were in the way, way back?
	We're like with this rear end.
	Ours didn't have the seat in the way back, but we did have a country sedan, a Ford country sedan.
	And sometimes we'd sit in the way back, but there were, you know, no seatbelts, obviously.
	We're just rolling around back there.
	We, we were like high class.
	We had the little like living room in the back of the way, way back of the station wagon.
	That's fair.
	And it said the little, it would open up and they were like, there was a little seat there.
	Oh, yeah, I remember that.
	Did you have a conversation on the side?
	Yes.
	Of course.
	Of course.
	How many people died that didn't have to as a result of that?
	You were living large.
	Dangerously, right?
	Dangerous.
	Good God.
	One small fender bender and you're a goner.
	Oh, put their child back.
	So, Super Bowl.
	All right.
	So, back to the Super Bowl.
	So, I had to root.
	I know the rule is if you love like the Giants in the same league, you're supposed to root against them.
	But I had to root for the Eagles, even though they're part of the same league as the Giants because of my husband.
	We have a rivalry anyway.
	I like the Giants and he likes the Eagles and we're fighting over our children.
	So, I rooted for them because Doug loved them.
	And I really did want them to win by the end.
	And then I will tell you, it was like the Chiefs played well.
	And I think Mahomes is really cool.
	He's such an interesting player.
	Like, he's such a, like, how does he make those short little surprising shots everywhere?
	He misses nothing.
	It's like he wants the ball to go in a certain spot and he makes it under against all odds.
	However, I was not a big fan of Travis Kelsey, right?
	From the Chiefs.
	He's got the brother on the Eagles.
	He was fine during the game, but what was with his bitterness after the game?
	I'll play you the sock.
	Man, one of y'all said the Chiefs were going to take it home this year.
	Not a single one.
	Feel that?
	Feel it.
	And on top of that, next time the Chiefs say something, put some respect on our name.
	We had an unbelievable run.
	And man, it feels good.
	Not man, one of y'all said the Chiefs were going to win it.
	Look at us now.
	Oh, my God.
	Come on.
	Be a good winner.
	Ornament said they were going to win.
	Really?
	I think probably half of America at least thought the Chiefs were going to win.
	Why would he say that?
	Why so bitter after winning?
	It was the pregame.
	One of them was the pregame show.
	One of them was a post-game.
	I don't know.
	Steve is telling me.
	One of the winningest teams in the NFL over the last few years.
	And by the way, I'm a big fan of Travis Kelsey on the field.
	The guy is amazing.
	And Mahomes, too, playing through injury.
	You know, ankle injuries are tough.
	And he hurt his ankle again in that game, but he stayed in the game.
	And he actually scrambled for, I don't know, 20, 30 yards at one point on his bad ankle and never showed any sign that he was.
	I guarantee you that guy is hurting today and will be.
	But he knew that he would have plenty of time to recover once the game was over.
	And I love the fact that he just sucked it up and played hard till the end of the game.
	And Kelsey's a monster, all right?
	I've had that guy, he was on my fantasy team like two or three years in a row.
	I picked him every year because I knew he would produce and he's awesome.
	I think he's in second all time in touchdowns in Super Bowls.
	He's a really good player, but saying that nobody picked them is ridiculous.
	I guess Steve Kracker is telling me it was during the Guest Box pre pre-show game.
	Nobody picked them.
	But who cares?
	Like who that then proves everybody wrong doesn't just go out there and say like, yeah, you know, they didn't believe we could do it, but we did it.
	And thanks and love everybody.
	Like he's bitter, like he's mad about the pregame predictions.
	I thought it was a low moment for him.
	He should stay classy like his mama, who had a boy on the Eagles and a boy on the Chiefs and wore a great jersey that was split right down the middle.
	Chiefs and Eagles.
	What did you say, Abs?
	Yeah.
	She needs to know where she got it because we have to do this in my family since we're Giants and Eagles fans.
	We tried to create that in my family.
	But anyway, that was a nice storyline.
	Just one down there.
	All right.
	So there's a lot more to go through with the Super Bowl.
	The Rihanna halftime show, the old female flyover, the Joe Biden stiff arm to the Fox interviewers.
	We're going to pause, do a quick break and pick it up there with so many more Super Bowl storylines.
	What did you think of the Super Bowl?
	Did you like it?
	Did you like the halftime show?
	Did you like the commercials?
	Email me, Megan at megankelly.com.
	Can I tell you, like, it wasn't as bad as it's been in years past, but it was a woke Super Bowl and it was annoying.
	Why do we need the all-female flyover?
	Which they, Fox, I mean, even at Fox, they were sure to highlight it's an all-female flyover.
	Oh, okay.
	All right.
	Thank you for reminding me that women can be pilots.
	I didn't know that.
	And then, of course, we had to have the black national anthem in addition to the regular national anthem, which is totally divisive.
	There is no reason to have a black national anthem sung before the Super Bowl.
	But there's one national anthem.
	It unites us all.
	It's about love of country.
	There's no point in dividing us by race going into something that is already unifying as a country.
	And then we had a parade of left-wing celebrities all over the ads, from Amy Schumer to Ben Affleck, who won't even act with a Republican.
	He refuses to act across anybody who's openly Republican to Serena Williams.
	Like you could go down the list.
	And all I could think was like, they don't get it, right?
	The people who put together the entertainment, who put together the ads, they're not even trying to like think about the other half of the country.
	They're just pandering.
	They just want to pander, pander, pander.
	And it's fine.
	The game is great, but it is a slight irritant as you're watching the game.
	I have to agree.
	And I wonder why that is, why this keeps happening.
	Why can't we be united?
	Why can't we all be included in anything and everything entertainment-wise?
	I didn't know that Ben Affleck wouldn't act with Republicans.
	I never heard that before.
	I do know that there are a lot of actors in Hollywood who are afraid to be honest about their political leanings because they're concerned about being canceled.
	And that's happening in every industry.
	So I'm not surprised, but I am disappointed.
	Yeah.
	And didn't hear, so we'll get to your family and all that, but you married a real housewife from Orange County.
	Yeah.
	And she's no longer on the show.
	But my understanding is there was some blowback against her for pushing back on some of like the mask mandates and some of the overreaches by the Fauci administration.
	Like even as a real housewife, she was getting blowback for just taking positions, which are very accepted now.
	And she has a lot of fans who are convinced that the only reason she's no longer a housewife is because she didn't agree politically with the leanings, the left leanings of Bravo and Andy Cohen, who runs that franchise.
	She believes and many of her, most of her supporters believe that the only reason she's off the show is because she dared to voice her opposition to mask mandates, to schools closing, to businesses closing, and questioned the efficacy of masks and the other things that people were doing to allegedly try and protect us.
	And Megan, I'm sure you saw that study that came out recently that said that masks, it turns out, were only about 5% effective in keeping people from getting COVID.
	5%, which is negligible.
	So Kelly was right.
	She was really right all along about how ridiculous it was, right about shutting down.
	Why would you shut down schools?
	Why would you make little kids wear masks when they're the least likely to suffer any kind of consequences from it?
	You know, she was willing to put herself out there and she was too real for the real housewives.
	Right.
	Right.
	Exactly.
	You can't be real on the real housewives or elsewhere if you're Republican or if you're at all conservative or even just heterodox in your views when it comes to their sacred cows, whether it's COVID and the vaccines and the masks or BLM or the trans, you know, radical trans ideology.
	These are certain things you're not allowed.
	No, there will be no divergence of opinion on these sacred cows.
	Right.
	You have to toe the line.
	You have to agree with what the government is telling you or else, you know, if you dare to speak up, and I've never seen anything like this.
	I'm sorry, my camera.
	And in the last two years, this whole world, the whole environment has changed so dramatically where any alternative voices are being silenced or ridiculed.
	I mean, The world has just turned on its side, and I really don't understand why.
	And I don't get where we're going.
	And I hope that it doesn't continue.
	Well, it's like ironic to me because Fox ran promos for Greg Gutfeld and his late night show, which is doing great.
	And I love to see it.
	I mean, this guy who worked so hard started Red Eye.
	It was like this middle of the night thing, and Greg toiled away on it when nobody was watching.
	And then it became a cult hit.
	And now he really is the king of late night.
	He's crushing Cole Bear and Fallon and Kimmel.
	And you love to see it.
	So Fox gave him promos, but on the same program, right?
	So why did he become number one?
	Because he's doing comedy.
	He's not afraid to push back against the Biden administration or some of these things we're talking about.
	And it's working, but still, we're supposed to celebrate Amy Schumer and Ben Affleck and the all-female thing and the National Black Anthony.
	It's like they don't get it.
	The American people are not into this.
	Well, a lot of people needed someone like Guttfeld to do a late night show because the others were cookie cutter and they were all appealing to the same audience.
	And there are a lot of conservatives out there who felt like they were being made fun of every night on the late shows.
	And why would they watch that?
	But you know, Guttfeld's actually telling jokes that they can pick and laugh at.
	So he's doing very well.
	I was on Red Eye with him many, many times.
	In fact, I did Guttfeld to promote my book, Chasing Catastrophe, a couple of weeks ago.
	The guy is really clever and really funny.
	And it was a great little promo.
	And I was really happy to see that.
	And I'm happy for his success as well.
	But, you know, it's again, it's just sort of this trend to ignore anyone who doesn't agree with, I don't know, the current administration.
	And he's funny.
	I mean, he's just, he's always been clever and he's generous with his guests too.
	I had some early appearances on Red Eye, which were really fun in my career.
	How about Rihanna?
	I will say Rihanna came back for the first time since 2016.
Rihanna at the Grammys 00:06:04
	She hasn't dropped an album since 2016.
	And I was excited to see what would happen.
	I'm not going to lie.
	I was kind of underwhelmed.
	Well, I was wondering how much of the music she was actually singing.
	It appeared to me that she was lip-syncing for most of it.
	She might have sang some pieces of one of the first couple of songs, and maybe at the end, a little bit.
	But honestly, Megan, all I kept focusing on was how you kept hearing her voice, even when she wasn't opening her mouth or holding the microphone near her mouth.
	I saw the same thing.
	It's a lip-sync show.
	It's not like an actual concert.
	I don't know.
	I love those floating platforms.
	Those things were really cool.
	And I saw there was some kind of tether.
	Like they were, they were locked in, or she had something holding her from behind just in case something went wrong.
	What it looked like to me.
	But I mean, to be surfing above the field like that on some plastic shield when you're pregnant, as it turns out, you know, that was pretty ballsy.
	I think I laughed.
	Somebody online, somebody online was like put in the Donkey Kong guy, you know, like because you're on Donkey Kong, you go up and down the platform.
	Yeah, yeah, yeah.
	It kind of looked like that, didn't it?
	Listen, she's got great music.
	You know, I do like her music, or at least some of it.
	But my whole thing is, you know, I appreciate real artistry and I want artists to sing.
	And I get that the acoustics might be bad or it might, you know, she wants to sound good.
	She wants to sell more records.
	But, you know, just, I don't know, just sing.
	Don't pretend to sing.
	Well, I do.
	It would be nice if she would dance.
	People are like, oh, well, she was pregnant.
	Well, you can dance when you're pregnant.
	Why are we pretending that that's not a possibility?
	Like, of course, everybody was like, did she not lose her baby weight?
	Because she had a baby in May.
	She's nine months postpartum because you could tell she had a baby bump.
	And it was like, well, that's nine months is a little far to be looking like pregnant still.
	And it's really she's pregnant.
	Didn't they say that she actually is pregnant?
	Yes, but before she revealed that, like her spokesperson didn't come out and say she's pregnant until after the performance.
	So everybody was looking at the baby bump, being like, is she just celebrating like the old baby bump?
	Is this a new baby bump?
	What is happening with the baby bump?
	Well, I could tell you that my wife and her girlfriends at this party last night were all focused on the baby bump.
	They all noticed it and they said, she's pregnant.
	Looks like she's pregnant.
	So that was the buzz at halftime.
	I will say, tip of the hat to her for the tease because she said something like, I might bring a special guest, which is kind of cute.
	But I mean, she didn't bring any, you know, normally they'll bring in some other stars, like a surprise.
	She wasn't really dancing.
	And I just got to say, like, to me, it felt a little phoned in.
	Even the New York Times had a review out today saying she got up there, she kind of phoned it in.
	She made sure to promote her makeup brand while she did her movie.
	Oh, yeah.
	That was clever.
	That was kind of clever.
	It's probably a little harder.
	I don't know.
	You know, she boy, she said she was boycotting the Super Bowl a few years ago over the whole Colin Kaepernick thing.
	She was asked to do the Super Bowl, I think, in 2019 and turned it down.
	And there are a lot of people who are questioning her commitment to whatever cause it was that she was trying to promote by saying, oh, you sold out.
	Why'd you do the Super Bowl now when you wouldn't do it four years ago?
	That's a good question.
	Because she said, What kind of a person would I be if I didn't stand with Colin Kaepernick and that if I sold out and did this the Super Bowl show?
	And now it's like, Well, you tell us what kind of a person are you?
	Because you're out there doing it.
	Person who wants to make money on their makeup line.
	Right.
	Exactly.
	So I'm not sure.
	I feel like when the New York Times is kind of discussing it as lackluster, I don't know.
	I thought the notwithstanding the fact that Ben Affleck is kind of a jerk and won't act with Republicans.
	I thought his Dunkin' Donuts commercial was kind of cute.
	I'm not going to lie.
	With J-Lo.
	It was cute how she was like, What are you doing here?
	I don't know if people have seen it, but we have the little bit of it.
	What are you doing here?
	Perhaps me if I'm like, is this one just you when you say you want to work all day?
	I got to go, guys.
	Grab me a glaze.
	Oh, it was kind of cute.
	Those two, I don't know.
	What's the over-under on that marriage?
	12.
	Well, actually, we talked about that on our podcast, the Rick and Kelly show, and the Daily Smash on YouTube.
	Kelly and I talked about that.
	And I think I gave them two years.
	I think she gave him a year and a half.
	I think that's about right.
	I think I'll take the under on even 18 months.
	We were having a good time with that video from the Grammys when she shushed him.
	You know, like she said, like, show some, like, smile.
	Like, don't act like because he became this meme, and everyone was talking about how miserable he was at the Grammys.
	And he never like woke up.
	It didn't look like he ever really put a smile on his face.
	He just wanted to sit there and look unhappy.
	And she was not happy with him being unhappy.
	This looks like one of the problems of this relationship.
	He's obviously got a massive problem with alcohol that I don't know whether it's under control at the moment or not, but he's struggled with it over the years.
	I think he's sober now, but she doesn't drink at all.
	She's very driven.
	She seems very organized.
	She seems like an A personality.
	He's more like curmudgeonly, kind of dour.
	He is like, this is that clip at the Grammys to me was emblematic of what we know about their relationship.
	And I maintain the reason that they reunited in the first place was not out of love.
	It was a PR move on her part because she got cheated on by A-Rod.
	And J-Lo wasn't going to sit there being the victim of A-Rod.
	She went out there, reunited with somebody to change the narrative.
	That's how PR works.
	And the next thing you know, you saw Ben Affleck and J-Lo on this yacht.
	And suddenly in like two seconds, they're back in love.
	Meanwhile, she was engaged to A-Rod, like, you know, the day before.
	And now they went ahead and got married.
Fox Interview Collusion 00:14:04
	And it's just not, I don't think so, Rick.
	You know, there's a reason why you break up with someone.
	Everyone's had a breakup.
	And everyone, a lot of people probably have gone back to the X and then remembered why they broke up in the first place.
	And then they broke up again.
	So to think that, you know, this is going to last a really long time would, I think, be, I mean, you're kidding yourself if you think it's going to last.
	And I'm not, no disrespect.
	If they do last, great.
	I'm happy for them.
	Maybe, maybe they were meant to be all along.
	But typically, when you have a relationship and it doesn't work out, it's because of issues between the two people that are not going to resolve themselves by being apart for a few months.
	Typically, I'm not saying it can't happen.
	I just don't think it will.
	All right.
	I got to ask you something sports related, which I almost never do, but I am kind of curious.
	So a lot of Eagles fans are very angry about that one last penalty against the Eagles guy that cost them, what was it, 15 yards?
	And then before you knew it, the Chiefs were close enough to, you know, score the last time.
	Did you think that was BS?
	Like he, that he held him, like he touched his jersey.
	It seemed like nothing to me, but I don't know anything about football, but I do think it was kind of an aggressive call by the ref and it may have cost the Eagles the game.
	Well, if it's the one that I think you're talking about, I saw that defender grab him two or three times as he was trying to make his way down the field.
	Now that kind of stuff goes on.
	If it's the same play I saw, to me, it looked like a hold.
	But, you know, they sometimes they call it, sometimes they don't.
	But at that key moment in the game, if you're holding the guy and he can't get to the ball, well, then I support them calling that penalty.
	I mean, it's one of those things where it's sour grapes, right?
	Because it's like the Eagles had many chance to win that thing last night, many chances.
	And they didn't make it happen.
	They were up by a lot, you know, at the half.
	And this is slowly but surely their lead was eroded.
	And that guy, Mahomes, just pulled a rabbit out of a hat.
	It was, it was like magic watching him.
	And I also think, you know, that's, that's experience too.
	Now, those guys have been in the Super Bowl, I don't know how many times in the last few years.
	And so they're used to being there on that stage.
	And the Eagles hadn't been there in a while.
	And these players have probably never been there.
	Forgive me, I don't know the background of every player, but experience is one of the best things you can have going on to the, you know, into the Super Bowl.
	Any sporting contest, if you've been there before, you're better off than the guy who hasn't.
	Now, last but not least, one thing we did not see in that Super Bowl was Joe Biden.
	He, after all this weird back and forth, he was going to sit.
	Well, he never said he was going to sit, but typically he would sit with the FNC anchors, Fox News Channel.
	They said they extended the invitation.
	He stiff-armed them.
	Then suddenly the White House comes out and says, we agreed to an interview with Fox Soul, which literally nobody has ever heard of.
	It's some like streaming platform related to Fox.
	Nobody, nobody knows about Fox Soul.
	And after some, and they said that Vivika Fox one of the interviewers and Mike Hill.
	And Vivica Fox is an actress who was literally a Biden surrogate during the campaign.
	So he was going to sit with her, but not with Brett Baer.
	And Fox was going to allow it, Rick.
	They were going to allow it.
	And apparently the White House pulled the plug on it for some reason.
	Vivika Fox and Mike Smith were traveling to DC.
	They said they were there waiting for him.
	In any event, to me, this is a disaster for Fox.
	They never should have agreed to an interview with Fox Soul, much less with somebody who was actually a surrogate for Biden over the FNC anchors.
	They didn't treat Brett Baer correctly, I think, Fox.
	And Joe Biden was, I don't, you know, he was, shall we say, chicken.
	He was too chicken to sit with the real news anchors, and it's it's to his chagrin.
	He should be embarrassed.
	What do you think?
	Well, obviously, I think he should have done an interview with Fox, and he should have done an interview with Fox anchors.
	It could have been Brett Baer, it could have been any one of the news anchors at Fox News Channel.
	He should have sat down with them.
	That's what presidents do every Super Bowl.
	It's a terrific opportunity to talk about your agenda, to talk about what's happening in the world.
	That would have been an opportunity for him to talk about the things that are flying over our heads that our military keeps shooting out of the sky.
	What's going on?
	And to not say, I can't do that, ask, answer real questions, and we all know why he can't sit down and answer questions.
	And then to say, okay, I'll do it with Fox Soul and then to cancel again is just emblematic of the administration hiding and deflecting and ignoring what America wants to know.
	It really was.
	It was a missed opportunity for Biden.
	I know that FNC tried hard to get it.
	And when there was that period of time where they were saying he would sit with Fox Soul, but not with Fox News Channel, and Fox Corporate was going to air it, which they were reportedly prepared to do.
	All I could think was Roger Ailes is turning over in his grave right now.
	He would why do you have to work hard to get that interview with the president on the Super Bowl when there's a hundred million people watching?
	Why would you have to work hard for that?
	Right.
	He, but he, he would never, never have allowed Fox Corporate to sell his anchors up the river like that.
	He had that kind of power within the Fox organization.
	And Fox should be grateful this did not go forward.
	They should be grateful that there was not some absurd sit down between an actress who actively campaigned for him.
	Forget Mike Smith.
	I mean, whatever, but just her mere presence there would have ruined the whole thing for those reasons.
	Instead of its main anchors, they should be glad it didn't happen.
	And Joe Biden missed a great opportunity.
	All right.
	Stand by, quick break.
	And then much, much more with Rick Leventhal when we come back.
	We will talk about his new book, Chasing Catastrophe, which he really has done to some huge measure of success in his life.
	Rick, on the subject of the president refusing to sit with Fox for the Super Bowl interview, this news just coming across the transom.
	They had some thoughts on it over at the CNN morning show, which no one is watching.
	I mean, truly, like, I think more people might watch Fox Soul and listen, listen to that crew, including Don Lemon, reacting to that news, plus the fact that there was a shot at the Super Bowl of Rupert Murdoch sitting next to Elon Musk in one of the boxes in one of the boxes in the Super Bowl.
	Listen to the horror.
	When you talk about reshaping truth in the media ecosystem and you see Elon Musk and Rupert Murdoch sitting there together, that gets people to wonder.
	And for some, it is confirmation that, see, that's why he shouldn't have done the interview with Fox.
	It's all they're all in collusion out to get Joe Biden and liberals and the administration.
	Were you that surprised, though, to see them sitting next to each other?
	I really, I don't think I was that surprised.
	It stood out, but it wasn't like, oh, wow.
	No, it seems like the most predictable thing in the world.
	I was kind of surprised that they actually, like, wow, they actually did it because it's a little frightening, I must say.
	It's frightening.
	Really?
	Collusion.
	Collusion.
	To see the head of Fox News Channel and the Wall Street Journal and New York Post and other media conglomerates sitting next to Elon Musk, the head of Twitter.
	It's a little bit different.
	I have news for Don Lemon.
	All of these major billionaires always hang out together.
	Okay.
	All the time.
	They go to Davos.
	They go to Montana.
	They go to all these other stuff.
	And they hang out.
	Because who else are you going to hang out with?
	You're going to hang out with the mega rich like you.
	So, ooh, it's not.
	It's not collusion.
	I mean, there was collusion going on.
	I think you brought it up earlier, Megan.
	There was a lot of collusion going on with the entertainment situation and with the people who are being featured on the advertising.
	But I don't think that was collusion.
	I think that was just a couple of guys who are very, very wealthy hanging out and watching the Super Bowl.
	It's so crazy, like how the left gets scared.
	They get scared of the fact that Elon runs Twitter.
	I can see why they might be scared because, you know, Twitter was doing the bidding of the Biden administration and was going after Trump every day of his tenure.
	And now, oh my God, Elon Musk took over Twitter.
	So, oh, okay, now it's collusion.
	And now, like, so his reasoning is Biden was right not to sit with the Fox News channel anchors because the man who owns FNC knows Elon Musk.
	Wait a minute.
	What's the what is like follow that logic through?
	So why would you sit with news anchors whose boss knows the guy who runs Twitter?
	Because Twitter, what, it's mean to Joe Biden?
	Is that what he thinks now?
	Say what you will about Donald Trump, whether you loved him or hated him.
	He didn't dodge reporter questions.
	Well, he did dodge a Super Bowl interview one time.
	Well, listen, he had press conferences pretty much every day.
	When he was coming to and from the helicopter, he didn't just wave.
	He would stop and talk and he would answer a lot of questions.
	I mean, the guy was transparent in that regard.
	He was accessible.
	Very accessible and very entertaining.
	And now we have a guy who, as far as I can tell, can't really finish a sentence, loses his train of thought, gets names wrong, forgets where he is.
	It's a sad situation, in my opinion.
	It's probably why he didn't want to sit down and do an interview with a Fox anchor because he would have been exposed as someone who can't carry on a meaningful conversation and can't answer questions for 15 minutes straight without help.
	One step above his moronic press secretary, Secretary Canadia, right?
	He's like one step above her to be charitable.
	Like his communication skills are about where hers are, Miss Nobel Prize, Nobel Prize.
	His word search, his stumbling around, his loss of train of thought.
	Remember when he confused, I think it was Title 42 with the COVID lockdowns, like he was all over the Supreme Court case.
	He does like he loses his train of thought in a way that's really disturbing for the leader of the free world.
	So I'm sure it would be funny if it weren't so sad.
	I mean, it's sad for us, right?
	Because we're heading now into an election where they're saying he's going to announce and he's going to announce soon.
	And he's the Democrats' last best hope.
	Like there's not a real secondcomer there.
	And if the Republicans run Trump, we could be right back to where we're going.
	This is why I don't like covering politics because it's just ridiculous what's going on.
	I don't, I don't know how people do it.
	I don't know how journalists do it.
	My whole thing, when I was working as a correspondent, a senior correspondent at Fox News Channel, I wanted to cover real news.
	I wanted to go where the action was.
	I wanted to go to the front lines of the war.
	I wanted to go where the hurricane was supposed to hit.
	If there was a terror attack or a plane crash, I want to get as close to the scene as I can and then tell viewers about it.
	I don't want to go down to Washington and sit there in press conferences and congressional hearings and listen to people listen to themselves talk.
	I wanted to cover stuff that actually mattered to people.
	And, you know, even though you'd like to think that government matters, maybe eventually it does.
	There's so much nonsense between the inception to the conclusion of whatever it is they're trying to get done that I just couldn't see myself being in that situation.
	So what about that?
	So this is interesting to me because you really are like a war correspondent.
	You're, you're a rugged guy.
	One of the very great things about you.
	But when we were all at FNC together and you were watching Carl Cameron, right?
	Campaign Carl Cameron, who was great at what he did, neck deep in politics all the time.
	Are you thinking, thank God, that's not my job.
	Yeah.
	But, you know, he was perfect for it because he was a big nerd and he was a wonk and he knew all the ins and outs of everything congressional.
	So he was the right guy for it.
	Plus, you know, he almost had that, I don't give a damn attitude to go along with it.
	So he took it with a grain of salt, a big one, and put a great spin, not a spin, but, you know, the way he reported it wasn't a typical congressional reporter.
	He, he, he made it, he made it fun and interesting and was real.
	And that's the thing that I think any reporter should should be first and foremost is as real as possible.
	Because viewers know if you're talking, you know, if you're not being honest with them.
	And my whole thing was always to just tell it like it is.
	You could never tell with Carl Cameron what side of the aisle he favored.
	You really couldn't.
	He broke news that was, I mean, he broke that President Bush like drunk.
	Remember when President Bush was running the first time, George W. Bush, and oh God, my God, I'm testing my own memory now in 2000.
	He broke the story about his drinking.
	Anyway, my point is he's done lots of breaking news on Republicans and Democrats.
	And I could never tell where he stood politically until Trump.
	And then he left Fox.
	Then he got very, very hardcore anti-Trump.
	And it was surprising to me to see him come out so strongly against the channel, against Trump.
	I never, I never knew.
	I never knew while I worked with him.
	The only other thing I knew about Carl was that he liked to drive fast like I do.
	Like he was, he was a madman behind the wheel.
	Yeah, madman.
	Everyone talked about him.
	They would talk about me and him in the same sentence because we both like to drive fast.
	Okay.
	So here's the thing about, that we knew about you, Rick, was that yes, wherever it was dangerous, you'd go.
	You were the first, you know, number, number one with your hand up.
	But also you had a history with the ladies.
	You're like, you were known as a bit of a ladies man.
	The ladies love Rick Leventhal.
	I'm sorry to break it to you here.
Adrenaline and History 00:02:39
	I know you're a happily married man, but you always had lovely ladies who are after you or on your arm, confirm or deny.
	Well, I mean, I guess I'm grateful.
	And I've been blessed.
	I've been busy.
	I'm not sure what you want me to say about this, except that I'm finally actually lucky in love.
	I have the most amazing woman in my life.
	Kelly is just everything I've ever wanted.
	I mean, she is stunning.
	She is funny.
	She's smarter than anyone knows.
	And she is super sexy.
	And she is a hard worker.
	She is an amazing cook.
	Like this woman makes me meals every day.
	And they are one is better than the rest.
	We have the best time together.
	And I just, I'm just so happy.
	I was never going to move to California ever in my life until I met Carol.
	And it took five minutes.
	And I'm like, I'm moving to California.
	I'll do it.
	I had to be with her.
	You both seem very much in love.
	It seems like very fireworky in a good way, not in the J-Lo, Ben Affleck scolding each other openly way.
	And I have to say, I'm very happy to see it because I know there have been like ups and downs in the love life and so on, as there are for most people, but you've always been such a solid, nice guy.
	So as your friend, I wanted to see you well settled.
	I'm so happy to see you well settled.
	Yeah, I mean, settled is one way to put it.
	You know, our life is still, you know, kind of chaotic.
	We're all over the place.
	You know, we're doing shows from home.
	We built a house, remodeled a house in Palm Desert.
	Back and forth to that all the time.
	We're launching a pickleball line.
	We've got paddles and balls that we're about to start selling online.
	And, you know, I'm not even sure what's next, but we're always busy.
	We're doing a lot of different things and having a great time doing it.
	How does your lifelong need for adrenaline factor in?
	Because, you know, I mentioned some of the things that you've reported on.
	It's no accident you were one of the first in Afghanistan and Iraq.
	And, you know, all these hurricanes, like, it's no accident.
	It's no accident.
	You were down to ground zero on 9-11.
	Like, there's something in you that's both a combination of lucky as a reporter, but also just, I don't know, an adrenaline junkie.
	Well, that for sure.
	I got a great rush out of being there and racing to scenes and being first on the air and being in the middle of a Cat 4 or Cat 5 or a war zone.
	You know, I really did feed off of it.
January 6th Chaos 00:15:14
	And to me, it was such an honor and a privilege to be in Iraq where I am right there with Marines.
	Their 20, the 20-year anniversary of that's Christian Galdobini, my cameraman in Iraq.
	And we were embedded with the third LAR and the 223 Marines.
	It's been 20 years.
	I'm going to a couple of reunions in the next couple of months because these guys, you know, they invited me and I'm definitely going to go.
	But it was something that I definitely needed to do.
	I wanted to be the guy who was there.
	I wanted to tell those stories.
	And I was so glad that I had a chance to do it.
	But Megan, you know how it is?
	After 35 years as a journalist, there came a time when I kind of didn't want to have to leave home on a moment's notice again for a day, a week, or a month.
	I didn't want to have to do that for another three years.
	I guess I felt like I'd been reined on enough, that I'd been out the door enough, that I paid my dues.
	And it was, I felt like it was time for me to just take a little step back or maybe a big step back and just, I don't know, write a book.
	So I did.
	I wrote Chasing Catastrophe.
	And, you know, it's some of the greatest stories I covered behind the scenes, stuff that people didn't know happened, stories that I never told before that occurred during some of these big events.
	And I'm proud of the book.
	I think it's a good read.
	Everyone who I've spoken with who's read it seems to think so.
	And I also recorded the audio version of the book.
	So it's my voice reading my book.
	I don't know if you've done that, Megan, but it's not easy to read a book out loud that you didn't write intending to read out loud.
	It's not like a TV script.
	I mean, some of these sentences are page long.
	I did the audio on my book, Settle for More.
	And what I remember about it was like holding back tears in the sad scenes.
	You know, it was a very, it was emotional for me.
	Well, you know, it's funny you say that because my first chapter is about 9-11.
	And I was, I believe, the first reporter to go live nationally at the scene.
	And that experience, the whole day was in the weeks and months that followed was so devastating and so just difficult to handle.
	I poured my heart into the chapter on 9-11.
	And at the end of the chapter, when I was reading it in the audio booth, I broke down.
	I couldn't finish the end of the chapter.
	I started sobbing in the audio booth.
	And the guys who were in there were like, whoa, what do we do about this?
	And I just, I was like, I just needed a minute to compose myself.
	And I did.
	And then it took me a couple of tries to get through it.
	But I mean, it was, I still get chills when I see video from that day or talk about it or read about it.
	I mean, it's, it's part of me.
	I definitely suffer PTSD from being in the dust cloud, from watching the towers fall and for, you know, trying to make sense out of what was happening around us that day.
	It was just so awful.
	But it was important for me to put it on paper.
	And I think it's a powerful chapter.
	Oh, you are one of the reasons we know exactly what happened on 9-11.
	You were one of the few reporters actually there when the towers fell with the dust cloud, not knowing if you were about to live or die.
	And every year on FNC and all the channels, there would be a 9-11 retrospective.
	And your reporting was always featured heavily.
	I'm sure it still is.
	You with the dust all over you.
	We have a little bit of that.
	Let's show the audience it's sought to.
	How close were you to the building when I was in front of the door of Five World Trade Center evacuating the people out of the building?
	We got a lot out.
	And then it just blew.
	Back it up.
	Back it down.
	Back it up.
	All right.
	Here we go again.
	Here we go again.
	I don't know what's going on, but this second building is collapsing, I believe.
	I don't know.
	I don't know, but this happened before.
	We can see the top of the building from here.
	Oh, yeah.
	Oh, there it goes.
	There it goes.
	Oh, when he comes down.
	We do need to put it down now.
	I think we need to put it down now.
	Here we go.
	Oh, my God, Rick.
	Chills watching that.
	That we had a tape rolling in the truck that day.
	One of those big one-hour three-quarter-inch videotapes, I think it was, or half-inch.
	And it recorded that whole thing that you just watched and everything else that happened.
	And somehow, Megan, I managed to hang on to that tape.
	And Fox is probably going to be knocking on my door for it.
	I don't know where it is right now, but I was able to transcribe it.
	And on that tape are the four and a half minutes that Pat Butler, the engineer, and I spent inside the truck when we ran from the first cloud from the first tower when it fell.
	Our conversation, you know, what the F is going on.
	The phones don't work and Pat's trying to call and call and call and cursing and cursing.
	And we're like, what are we going to do?
	What are we going to do?
	Like just a sheer chaos and confusion.
	And then we go back outside when the smoke starts to clear and it's a whole different landscape with that moon dust all over everything.
	And anyway, I had the whole thing and I was able to transcribe it.
	And that's in the book.
	And this is the first time that that conversation has been shared with the world.
	And I don't know.
	I mean, I just think it's compelling and it's a representation of just how insane that day was.
	The instincts of a reporter come into direct conflict of the instincts of a man to survive, right?
	The reporter is told to stay in the midst of the danger and get the story.
	And a human's instinct is to run and preserve your life, which you understood was definitely potentially in jeopardy in that moment.
	Yep.
	But I wasn't going anywhere.
	I knew what my job was that day.
	And I knew that we were in a unique position to be able to report on what was the biggest story in the world at that moment.
	And we didn't go anywhere except to hide in an alley when the second tower came down.
	And then we're going right back into the street and resumed our reporting.
	I mean, this was, I knew, I knew the importance.
	I knew what we needed to do.
	And I just had to brace myself.
	You know, I had to put up that emotional wall and not let myself get caught up in What a normal reaction would be and just try to focus on what my job was, which was to try and separate rumor and fiction from fact and relate to viewers what exactly was going on around us, which I did for, I don't know, 14 or 16 hours that day.
	And then, you know, every pretty much every day after that until I packed up and went off to Afghanistan.
	But, you know, I do give a lot of credit to the crews who were down there seeing the most awful things that they could have imagined seeing.
	And obviously, the most credit goes to the firefighters and police officers who were brave enough to rush toward the fire, trying to save lives.
	And so many of them lost theirs.
	It was just, it was the worst day I've ever experienced.
	And, you know, obviously the first chapter in my book.
	The last piece of that tape where you guys have clearly put the camera down, but you can turn it off.
	And you can see that eerie silence where you hear a siren and like, that's it.
	And this is lower Manhattan.
	I mean, it's, you know, that's a bustling area with, you know, typically you'd have thousands of people on the street.
	And, you know, where we were our satellite truck was parked at Church and Warren.
	And church is basically Sixth Avenue when it gets all the way downtown.
	And so we were about five blocks from the World Trade Center site, just up the street.
	And a jet engine and a big gear had fallen into the street from when the plane hit the tower and was sitting right in that intersection, just across the street from us.
	And the, I think it was the FBI had put up some crime scene tape and were taking photos of it when the first tower fell.
	And after we came back outside and there was that moondust all over all over everything, the tape was still there and the engine and gear were still there, but now it's covered in that dust.
	And my recollection is the agents came back out and they started taking more pictures because now the crime scene has changed, but it was all right there.
	It was all right around us.
	And the people who were coming out of that cloud, who I, you know, my job was to try and interview people.
	Most of them I didn't want to try and stop because they were clearly in shock.
	But I wanted to try and get a sense of what they had seen and interview them if I could.
	So I was very tentative.
	I did try to talk to people and some people willingly talked to me and told me some of the most insane stories I'd ever heard in my life.
	And I didn't have follow-up questions because I'd say, what did you see?
	What did you hear?
	And they're like, I was on the 80th story and I came down 80 flights and or I saw the plane hit the tower and blah, blah, blah.
	It was just the greatest test I think any journalist could ever face.
	Absolutely.
	Extraordinary.
	And the reporting that you guys all did that day, that's the reason I became a reporter.
	I was a lawyer on 9-11 in Chicago watching the coverage, riveting.
	I mean, as a reporting matter, it was just stellar what you and others were doing.
	And it was the day I thought, this is what I want to do.
	I want to provide this kind of public service to my country.
	I can do it and I want to do it.
	And what I'm doing isn't anywhere near this important.
	And just like, I don't know, Rick, when there was danger, of course, in the moment, but there were lurking dangers that you probably weren't even aware of, like the toxins from that soot and the smoke.
	And you were down there for weeks.
	You know, I talked about this with JD all the time.
	Janice Deen, one of my closest friends, because her husband, Sean, was a firefighter who lost all of his fellow firefighters on 9-11.
	And they worry about it every day.
	You know, if he's going to come down with one of the cancers that the guys got working at ground zero, and you were right there.
	Do you worry about that?
	Talk about your future.
	I think I was fortunate in that they kept pushing the media further and further back hour by hour and then day by day.
	So eventually we were a few blocks north of the smoking pile.
	So we weren't breathing that air up close every day like some of those firefighters were.
	I did wake up with a cough three days after 9-11, like a bad cough.
	So two or three days after.
	But that was the only symptom that I recognized.
	And fortunately, I haven't had any health issues that I'm aware of that I could blame on what I breathed that day.
	But you're right that so many people suffered deeply.
	So many people lost their lives after the fact because of awful cancers and other things that they contracted from being in that toxic environment.
	Can I just ask you, because we just heard this from President Biden, the State of the Union, talking about how January 6th was the worst threat to democracy since the Civil War.
	And it makes me so angry, Rick, to hear him and others talk about January 6th that way.
	Without, I mean, in that instance, he's ignoring World War I, World War II, but ignoring 9-11.
	These morons, these pundits who actually talk about January 6th explicitly in terms of 9-11, saying this was worse.
	January 6th was worse than 9-11.
	They don't, is it just, is it ignorance?
	There's something inhumane about that comment.
	100%.
	But the thing that struck me when January 6th happened, and I don't support what happened on January 6th, but I also didn't support the burning and looting of buildings across America during the protests that went on for months and months and months leading up to January 6th.
	And all the rest of the mainstream media was saying, oh, this is just isolated fires.
	Oh, these are peaceful, mostly peaceful protests.
	Where was the outrage when people were burning buildings and destroying businesses and rioting and looting across America?
	Where was the outrage when that was going on?
	All of a sudden, that was okay because people were expressing their First Amendment rights.
	And that was okay.
	But then when a group stormed the Capitol building, all of a sudden it's a threat to democracy.
	Why?
	Because it's the Capitol.
	What about storming the mom and pop grocery store that was forced to close forever?
	What about taking over downtown of so many major metropolitan areas?
	What about the crime that was rampant?
	That to me was a much bigger threat to democracy, a much bigger threat to the quality of life that we all enjoy here in the United States.
	That's what bothered me that all of a sudden the media is like, oh, see, they're bad people.
	But what about the other bad people who were doing all that stuff for the last six, eight, 10 months?
	I just, I couldn't wrap my head around why one thing mattered and the other thing didn't.
	You've waived your moral authority because you didn't speak up when these horrific behaviors were happening.
	You didn't care because BLM.
	You just wanted a virtue signal.
	And now you want us to take you seriously as our moral arbiters.
	Well, we don't.
	That's what happened.
	We don't.
	And spare us your indignation over January 6th when you didn't care at all when cops are being shot and attacked and killed in some instances in some of these protests.
	And you're going to lecture us about the Constitution and the Constitutional Rights.
	What about when the BLM protesters got in people's faces and said, say it, put your fist up right now, say it.
	Say BLM.
	What about that?
	Did that offend your dignity as a promoter of First Amendment and constitutional rights?
	Because it did for many of us.
	The whole thing was such an outrageous.
	My wife was fined $16,000 by Bravo for unnamed, unspecified reasons, which primarily we think was because she wore a hat that said drunk wives matter as a joke that someone gave her at her wedding shower.
	She had put it on for a photo for 20 seconds and Bravo forced her to make a public apology.
	She's like, of course, Black Lives Matter.
	I don't have to support the organization.
	And this hat is a parody.
	It's a joke.
	It's, I'm, I'm often drunk and I'm a wife.
	I'm a housewife.
	So what's the big deal?
	Like, right.
	And as it turned out, BLM was a sham.
Halloween Costume Controversy 00:04:21
	And, you know, allegedly, there was a lot of fishy stuff going on.
	Where did all those millions of dollars go?
	Besides buying homes for some of the people who were in charge.
	Yeah.
	And, you know, the whole thing was just so ridiculous and so twisted.
	And we were all forced to toe the line that someone else drew because they said that's what that's what we needed to do.
	It was also disappointing to me.
	No, I saw you guys got hit too.
	I mean, I know what this is like, but you got hit over Halloween where you dressed as Alec Baldwin.
	And then if you got blowback because it was like not sensitive to the victim.
	It's like, it's Halloween.
	It's about insensitivity.
	At least Halloween is not a holiday for PC mongers.
	Let me just say this.
	Okay.
	The original intent was to be a cowboy and an Indian, right?
	As correct as that might be.
	My wife happens to be 20, I think 28 or 29% Native American.
	So she was going to be a Native American and I was going to be a cowboy.
	And then at the very last minute, because Alec Baldwin had been in the news because he had just shot someone on the set of his film, someone said, well, why don't you put a little blood right here and you could be Alec Baldwin?
	And like an idiot, I did it.
	And I'm not proud of it because I wasn't considering that a woman died and that people would say, what are you doing?
	He killed everyone.
	Like, I'm amazed that you're still in the apologetic posture on this.
	It's Halloween.
	People go as Jeffrey Dahmer.
	They go as Jeffrey Dahmer.
	I know, but I should have just gone as a cowboy and everything would have been fine.
	But, you know, and I never meant any disrespect to the victim's family.
	I also am not a fan of Alec Baldwin.
	So that came into play because I used to play softball with him in the artist writers charity game in East Hampton every summer.
	And the guy was kind of a jerk.
	So I was like, oh, yeah, I'll be Alec Baldwin because, you know, he's on the hot seat right now.
	And I'm so jaded from covering news for 35 years that I didn't think twice about what other people might think about what I was doing.
	And it was only after the fact that it made every, I mean, it was a news week, okay, that I was Alec Baldwin on Halloween.
	My God, it's just like the, of course, the sensitivity, the extreme sensitivity over what you can and cannot do on Halloween is just absurd.
	I mean, there was a college not long ago that was recommending that its students, to avoid risk of offending anybody, just dress up as letters of the alphabet.
	Halloween itself is going to be canceled soon, right?
	Like you're not just costumes are going to be banned.
	Any attempt at fun, Halloween is there to provoke.
	It's really not about just dressing up as a letter.
	I mean, if you could see some of the costumes people used to wear at Syracuse where I went, you'd be horrified by today's standards.
	That was back 88 to 92, but it was funny and nobody took offense.
	They understood this is part of the baked in nature of the holiday.
	Right.
	But the world has changed, hasn't it?
	And you can't offend anyone.
	Halloween was always my favorite holiday.
	I used to dress up as a character from Rollerball.
	Remember the movie Rollerball?
	Yeah.
	I think James Codd was in the original.
	Yes.
	And I would wear roller skates and I had a jersey and, you know, pads and shoulder pads.
	And I would go down to Georgetown because I lived and grew up in the DC area.
	And I'd skate around Georgetown on Halloween night.
	They closed the streets.
	It was a blast.
	That wasn't really offensive.
	I think I could get away with that costume today.
	But Cowboy and Indian, Kelly took a heart, got all kinds of flack for dressing up.
	Even though she wasn't.
	You can't wear that headdress.
	It's cultural appropriation.
	She's Native American.
	It's her culture.
	29%.
	Okay, I'm sorry she's not 50 or 100%, but come on.
	Like you said, like, why can't we just dress up as whatever we want?
	Because that's what you do on Halloween.
	Yeah, I know.
	It's absurd.
	It's like the whole thing was that.
	Anyway, the whole thing is just ridiculous and I'm sick of it.
	And I refuse to live like this.
	I'm just not, I don't accept these absurd standards that other people are imposing on us.
Cultural Appropriation Debate 00:03:13
	And it's fun to push back.
	You know, it's like, if you don't push back, then they're going to win.
	Then they will get rid of Halloween.
	And I don't know what will go next, but I don't want to live like this.
	And so, and even if it, the Alec Baldwin thing, okay, no, it wasn't in good taste.
	It's Halloween.
	You're not supposed to be in good taste.
	But half of the costumes out there are like these inappropriate jokes that are turns on what's in the news.
	And nine times out of 10, it's only funny if it's somewhat gruesome.
	Like it's almost a coping mechanism.
	It's sort of like what comics do, where they take something out of the headlines and try to find a funny slant on it.
	You, you get offended?
	Stay inside.
	Don't go outside on Halloween.
	Stay inside and watch, you know, Stephen Colbert, and you're going to be perfectly happy or just as miserable as you always are, but you're not going to be our problem.
	All right.
	Let me pause it there.
	So much more to get to with Rick Leventhal, the one and only.
	It's so great to catch up.
	We'll be right back in two minutes.
	So, Rick, in addition to your war reporting, which the book goes into in just vivid and very telling detail, including the sort of the embed training that you had and how Geraldo didn't take it and went over there and blew it.
	Remember when he revealed the location of our trips, that whole thing?
	There's great behind the scenes stories on all of this.
	But let me take you to some of your hurricane reporting because I learned some new facts about you and your hurricane reporting.
	You used to go, no matter how dangerous the hurricanes were.
	And here's just a little taste of this for the audience on the kind of things you'd have to do so that you could manage the reporting.
	This is SOT5.
	And I had to upgrade my eyewear to some swimming goggles because we're really in it now.
	The beach is right over there.
	And this is Atlantic Avenue.
	And it is whipping off of there now.
	Oh my God.
	I was at the anchor desk for a lot of that reporting when you were out there.
	I was, you know, snug and cozy in my 72 degrees studio, but you were out there.
	I mean, was there ever a moment doing the hurricane stuff that you were scared?
	Yeah, the first one, Hurricane Hugo in 1989 in Charleston, South Carolina.
	It started as a five.
	I think when it hit us, it was a really strong three or a four.
	And I was in 120 to 130 mile an hour winds hugging a brick wall trying to make my way back to our room to take shelter until the worst of it passed.
	That's in that whole story is in the book.
	It was definitely a moment where I prayed and thought that I was about to die.
	But I did love covering hurricanes.
	I had my hand up for every single one of them.
	I wanted to be there.
	That what you just showed was from Daytona when we came around a corner and it was like a wind tunnel coming off the beach and it just blasted us.
	Paul Celeste was a cameraman.
	It almost knocked the camera off his shoulder.
	But that kind of stuff was, you know, it was thrilling.
	It was also really difficult because no matter how many layers of raincoats and rain pants you have on, you're going to get soaked.
	And you're going out there for 10, 15 minutes at a time, coming back in, trying to warm up, going back out again.
	It's a grueling, exhausting experience, but it was also really exciting and I loved it.
Hurricane Wind Tunnel 00:05:46
	There was a funny story in there about your baseball cap and Roger Ailes.
	Oh, yeah.
	Another story that I never told.
	We were covering a hurricane.
	I think it was on an island down in Georgia and no, Alabama.
	And I had my Fox News baseball cap.
	But if you face the wind in a baseball cap, you probably know if you've ever done it, high winds, it's going to blow your hat right off.
	But if you turn it around, you can keep it on your head.
	And when your hair is wet, as you probably know, your hair doesn't look good when you take your hat off.
	So I'm, you know, maybe a little vain.
	So I turned my hat around backwards, which I've done many times.
	And I did the news.
	I was on Shepherd Smith's Studio B show.
	And I see my producer on the phone.
	And as soon as I get off the air, he goes, Roger called the control room.
	And I was like, yeah.
	And he goes, and this is relayed by the producer.
	He said, if you ever wear your hat backwards on the air again, it'll be the last time you're on Fox News.
	And I was like, what?
	I can't wear my hat backwards?
	It would have hurricaned my head.
	For whatever reason, Roger did not like the look, that backwards hat look.
	And I never wore my hat backwards on the air again until, God rest his soul, Roger Ailes died.
	And then I did another hurricane and I turned my hat around because I didn't want to lose it.
	I can relate fully to this.
	I did not do hurricane coverage for Fox, but a couple of things.
	So he never wanted me.
	I would be outside of the Supreme Court and it would be so hot.
	It would be when all the big decisions break in June in DC.
	That's hot.
	And you'd bake in front of those white buildings with the camera on you and the Klieg lights.
	I mean, you'd just be baking.
	And so I'd want to put my hair up, like just back or whatever, because, you know, you don't want your hair all over your face.
	So I just stuff it back in two bobby pins.
	That's all I ever do.
	When my hair is up in the back of my head, it's just two bobby pins.
	I have very thin hair, so it's easy to shove.
	And he called down immediately and he was like, get your hair down.
	I'm like, what do you mean?
	He's like, it looks too elegant.
	It's alienating.
	I'm like, elegant?
	It's two bobby pins.
	What do you, how is there nothing elegant about it?
	You want me to turn around and show the audience what I'm doing?
	And he never went.
	And now I see sometimes like Dana Perino will wear her hair up on Fox News channel.
	I think Roger Ailes would never have allowed that.
	The only reason she's getting away with that is he's not there anymore.
	I'll tell you.
	I know the guy took, I know he, he took a lot of heat.
	And I know that there are a lot of stories about things he did that he shouldn't have done, but he was always, you know, a great boss to me.
	I know that everyone who worked at Fox when he was running the place respected him.
	I mean, his state of the network addresses, as you may remember, he would do them quarterly in the newsroom.
	You could hear a pin drop.
	It would be packed in there.
	And the guy was a genius and he was an innovator and he created a really special network.
	Yeah.
	I'm not supporting anything that if any of those stories are true, you know, they are.
	He shouldn't have gone there.
	And I don't support that, but I do appreciate his genius and I appreciate the way he treated me because he was always really, really good to me.
	I know.
	It's confusing.
	It's complicated because he was the greatest leader Fox News ever had and ever will have.
	And he's the reason Fox News exists.
	And he kept, you know, he kept his hand on the steering, his hands on the steering wheel in a way that really led Fox to become the force that it did.
	And, you know, with all due respect to the current leadership, it's just, it hasn't been the same since he left.
	However, and for me, it's, it's complicated too, because he shouldn't have had that job given what he was doing to women.
	And it's not just my own situation.
	I've spoken with younger girls who he really hurt.
	So it's like he, he abused his power.
	You know, he abuses power and he and he never should have been allowed to hold that post for as long as he did.
	We just were all so scared of him that we didn't come out with it.
	You know, and so even now, like I can talk about how he would not have allowed Fox Soul to embarrass Fox News channel the way that they almost allowed.
	Never.
	That's because of his strong leadership.
	But it's like what he was doing behind the scenes made him unfit to lead.
	Well, and unfortunately, that sort of thing happens in corporations across America and around the world.
	He was not alone in his abuse of power.
	And, you know, he's not the only network boss to abuse his power.
	I mean, from what I've heard, pretty much all of them did.
	Yeah.
	Studio bosses, corporate leaders.
	You know, it's, it's unfortunate, but it happens.
	And so, yeah, it shouldn't be tolerated.
	But he wasn't alone in his alleged discussions.
	That was one good thing about the Me Too movement is that, you know, there's that period where Ailes fell.
	And that was, God, it was summer of 16.
	And it took another year for the New York Times to break the Harvey Weinstein scandal that NBC refused to air, even though they had it.
	Yeah.
	And they just refused because they had their own predator running around NBC, a couple of them.
	And it took a year.
	So all these news organizations were looking at Fox like disgusting, filthy place to work, toxic for women, which it wasn't toxic for women.
	There was one guy who was out of line and it happened to be the CEO, but it wasn't like, oh my God, what a terrible place to work.
	And then they started falling like, you know, dropping like flies, Rick, right?
	It was like, oh, how's it?
	What's it like working for Matt Lauer?
	That seems like a, like a joy.
	How about Charlie Rose?
Harvey Weinstein Scandal 00:09:13
	How's that going?
	Or who am I, I'm not thinking of the name over at CBS, the guy CBS, yes, Les Moonves.
	Les Moonves.
	My God, the story's about him, right?
	We could go down the list and suddenly these other news organizations were a little less interested in covering the Me Too stories.
	Anyway, it's all the water under the bridge, but it's complicated with Roger.
	It brings up a lot of feelings for me too.
	And I understand your love for him and respect for the way he treated you.
	And I share in that too, ironically and weirdly.
	One of the other big stories that you that you broke, people may not know this because you had to break it via Twitter, which is kind of weird.
	Why they didn't just pop you up on the FNC when you had this news.
	I actually don't totally understand to this day, but you broke the news of Hillary Clinton's collapse down at ground zero in 2016, like two months before the election.
	You had that story because you'd been working your sources for years in New York City and somebody gave it to you.
	You had it solid.
	I had a great, so I had a lot of great sources.
	You know, my time overseas with the Marines, all the terror attacks I covered, I gained a lot of respect from law enforcement, federal agents, state, local police.
	You know, I had a great network of guys I could turn to.
	A lot of them were members of the Joint Terrorism Task Force.
	So when stuff would hit the fan, I would just start texting my boys and be like, hey, what's going on?
	What do you know?
	In this case, a guy called me, a high-ranking, I don't want to say who he was or where he worked to this day, but he was down at ground zero in uniform where the dignitaries would arrive and then depart after the ceremony, the memorial ceremony on 9-11.
	And he called me because Hillary Clinton came stumbling past him with two Secret Service agents holding her up and helped her get into her van a half hour before she was scheduled to depart.
	And he called me in a fellow, where are you right now?
	I'm like, I'm down at ground zero covering 9-11.
	What are you doing?
	He goes, you're not going to believe what I just saw.
	And I'm like, what's up?
	And he goes, Hillary Clinton looked like she was about to die.
	And he went into detail about what she looked like and what had happened.
	And I was hearing a story that no one was reporting.
	And my producer at the time was like, you can't go on the air with that.
	No one else is reporting it.
	I'm like, yeah, but this guy saw it firsthand.
	He just, she said, call him back, confirm it.
	So I called back my guy.
	He's like, buddy, her shoe came off.
	And her follow-on detail had to pick up her shoe off the ground and jump in the car behind her to take her to the hospital.
	I think they're on their way to the hospital right now, which they were.
	And then they diverted to Chelsea's apartment.
	And I had it.
	No one else did because my guy called me and gave me all the details.
	And so I had a live shot coming up with John Scott at the top of the hour.
	But prior to that, yeah, I put it on Twitter.
	I tweeted out like three or four tweets about Hillary Clinton having some sort of medical episode.
	I went with a single source because my source was as solid as sources can be.
	And my tweet got, and I don't know if you can see it there, but that tweet got thousands and thousands of retweets and shares.
	And I had never had a tweet go viral before, but I, but these did.
	And I was told, and this is in the book, Chasing Catastrophe, that Trump at the time running for president was down there at the ceremony sitting next to Chris Christie, Rudy Giuliani, and Bernard Carrick.
	And I think it was Carrick who saw the tweet, pass it to Giuliani, who passed it to Christie, who passed it to Trump.
	And they all read it at ground zero that I, my reporting, that Hillary had just left.
	And they were kind of like, my understanding is like chuckling amongst themselves.
	That's two months before election day.
	Oh, yeah.
	And it could have swung the election.
	And the Hillary campaign would not answer our questions.
	Did it happen?
	What happened?
	Where is she?
	How is she?
	It took them, I think, eight hours before they finally came out with a statement.
	And it didn't help her at all.
	And it wasn't that I hated Hillary and had to break this.
	It was news.
	It's news.
	And CNN went on the air and started criticizing my reporting for the next two hours saying, oh, Fox is the only one saying it.
	You can't trust anything they say.
	Of course, it was Fox reporting this until that firefighter, God bless his soul, who happened to be near my guy and shot a 20-second video of Hillary stumbling and having to get that's that's I think that's the video right there.
	This is the video.
	You can see them holding her up and it matched exactly what my guy told me and what I reported.
	And because of this, you see her, she almost fell because of this video.
	They had to stop criticizing me and turn their attention to the Hillary campaign and say, what, what's going on with your candidate?
	And then they were forced to tell the truth or their version of it.
	My God, the media, it's just so disgusting and so biased in so many ways.
	It's not to say there aren't great moments like the reporting you did all those years.
	And I have similar, again, back to conflicted feelings about it because I love the job.
	I love what the press is capable of.
	And I love my own history in it.
	You know, we talked about the 9-11 thing, watching you, watching Ashley Banfield on 9-11 within three years.
	I was at the Fox News channel reporting on 9-11, the anniversary of the 2010s.
	You made a very fast rise.
	You did.
	Yeah.
	But it was because I accurately sort of aligned with something that I knew would be good for me and that I would be good at, you know, like figuring out where to, where your talents lie and how to best use them.
	That's half the battle of doing well at a job.
	But I remember on the five-year anniversary of 9-11, Rick's, I was dating Doug.
	I had just met Doug and I had to go to the Pentagon to do reporting as part of our, you know, team coverage.
	I was a young correspondent.
	And it's just like something about 9-11 and reporting that's always stayed with me and your role in it has always been hugely important.
	And those things, that my point is, that's what I think of when I think of what's good about the press.
	What does the press do that's important?
	Is it just a disgusting organization?
	No, the answer is no.
	There's still honest reporters out there and there's a history to be proud of.
	But man, less and less of it by the day, by the day, right?
	I mean, when you look around at the landscape today, how do you feel about journalism in America?
	I've never seen the environment so fractured.
	I've never seen so many shortcuts being taken.
	It bothers me immensely, the way things are being reported, the way stories are being told.
	I was always about doing it straight up, being real with the viewers, getting as many facts as possible on the air, being aggressive and telling the truth.
	And I think that there are a lot of corners being cut.
	And it bothers me that we're not getting the news that we should be getting.
	And I would encourage people to watch our show every day on YouTube, The Rick and Kelly Show.
	If there's room for more than one podcast in your life, The Daily Smash on YouTube and The Rick and Kelly Show on patreon.com, where Kelly and I tell it like it is, uncensored and unfiltered.
	So, you know, that's how I'm still being a journalist, Megan, by working with my wife now, but telling stories the way the way they should be told.
	Well, I think that's amazing because one of the themes of the book and our conversation today is that you, yes, you have chased catastrophe, but you never found the one, like truly the one, but then you found Kelly.
	And I don't think it's any accident you stepped away from your time at FNC once that happened.
	You stepped away from New York, something you thought you wouldn't do.
	And now you found a different way to be a part of the news, but also service your soul, right?
	Like nurture your love and be with this person who certainly sounds like your soulmate.
	So I feel like now nailed it.
	Well done.
	Thank you.
	Thank you for that.
	I feel very fortunate to have founder.
	I feel very fortunate to be where I am.
	I still love the, I still love being a journalist.
	I consider myself a journalist still to this day.
	And I love the stories that we tell.
	I'm very proud of my book.
	And I think people will really get a kick out of reading it.
	I am doing a book signing, Megan, this coming Saturday at Fashion Island, the Barnes and Noble at Fashion Island in Newport Beach.
	If anyone's in that area and wants to come down, noon on Saturday, it's going to be a good time.
	Jeff Lewis and his crew are coming down from LA and we have some special guests coming.
	I never heard anybody say a book signing is going to be a good time.
	What are you offering?
	Like it's going to be drinks?
	We have a very, really fun host.
	We're going to do some Q ⁇ A and I encourage people to show up.
	I think they're going to really enjoy it.
	And I encourage them to buy the book, of course.
	All right.
	Well, let me know when you're out here on the East Coast.
	And I definitely will come if you're out there in LA with the beautiful weather and the beautiful people.
	Check out Rick and his wife, Kelly.
	So good to see you, my friend.
	All the best to you, Rick Leventhal.
	Thank you, Megan.
	Thanks for having me on your show.
	I'm proud of you too.
	My earpiece keeps falling.
	Next time, I'll get better.
	I'll get better headphones.
	Next time.
	No worries.
	And don't forget, folks, the book is called Chasing Catastrophe, and it is well worth your time.
	Thanks for listening to the Megan Kelly Show.
	No BS, no agenda, and no

Chapters

00:00:30 UFOs Over Alaska
00:15:37 NORAD Commander's Uncertainty
00:22:56 Singing for Giants
00:37:34 Rihanna at the Grammys
00:43:39 Fox Interview Collusion
00:57:43 Adrenaline and History
01:00:22 January 6th Chaos
01:15:37 Halloween Costume Controversy
01:19:59 Cultural Appropriation Debate
01:23:12 Hurricane Wind Tunnel
01:28:59 Harvey Weinstein Scandal