The Megyn Kelly Show - Truth About Kirk Investigation and Robinson Trial, Iran Questions, with Curt Mills, and Josh Duhamel on Keeping Politics Out of Hollywood  |  Ep. 1281
Aired: 2026-03-25
Duration: 02:18:07


=== Wrong Place, Wrong Time (14:32) ===

[00:00:41]  Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show, live on Sirius XM Channel 111, every weekday at New East.
[00:00:52]  Hey everyone, I'm Megyn Kelly.
[00:00:54]  Welcome to the Megan Kelly Show.
[00:00:55]  We've got a big show for you today.
[00:00:57]  Savannah Guthrie is speaking out in her first interview since her mother went missing.
[00:01:02]  Where's the lady?
[00:01:03]  We never found the lady.
[00:01:06]  Plus, actor Josh DeMell will be here, and that'll be interesting for us.
[00:01:10]  But first, we've got to tell you more about the shocking and senseless murder of 18-year-old Loyola University Chicago student Sheridan Gorman.
[00:01:18]  This poor girl.
[00:01:19]  It happened after 1 a.m. last Thursday while she was out with friends.
[00:01:23]  And unlike the left and corporate media, we have to discuss the alleged culprit, 25-year-old Jose Medina, an illegal immigrant from Venezuela.
[00:01:32]  By the way, we have a big follow-up for you on that terrible alder woman who said, Ah, wrong place, wrong time.
[00:01:38]  This guy chased her.
[00:01:40]  Chased her at 1 a.m. in the morning, wearing a mask, a black mask, and shot her in the back.
[00:01:47]  Oh, it's the wrong place, wrong time thing.
[00:01:49]  That's what you say when you took a Ferris wheel that broke and you were badly injured.
[00:01:59]  That's wrong place, wrong time.
[00:02:00]  Where you got hit by lightning.
[00:02:02]  Wrong place, wrong time.
[00:02:04]  This was a girl living her life like every normal 18-year-old in America who got targeted by an illegal for assassination, who chased her.
[00:02:14]  He clearly wanted her dead for no apparent reason.
[00:02:16]  It is not a wrong place, wrong time.
[00:02:19]  And we were all over that alderman yesterday.
[00:02:22]  We'll tell you what happened in a second.
[00:02:24]  The guy was apprehended by Biden's Border Patrol in May of 2023, but then released into the country.
[00:02:31]  This is not an anomaly.
[00:02:32]  That's what Biden did throughout his term as president.
[00:02:36]  Most of them were just let in.
[00:02:38]  If you got apprehended by Border Patrol, then they just turned you around and said, Oh, okay, here's your court date.
[00:02:43]  And no one ever shows up for their court date ever.
[00:02:46]  The very next month, he was arrested for shoplifting at a Macy's in Chicago, which should have led to a phone call by the Chicago PD to ICE saying, Yo, we have found an illegal here, and we caught him for shoplifting, but we're going to turn him back out because we don't prosecute crime in Chicago.
[00:03:04]  And you should, you might be interested in picking him up.
[00:03:07]  But Chicago is a sanctuary city, and Illinois is a sanctuary state, which means they don't cooperate with ICE.
[00:03:13]  They won't call, even if there's an ICE detainer on somebody where they know ICE is saying, Please hold the guy, which wasn't the case here, but even if that is the case, they don't call.
[00:03:22]  They say F off, pound sand.
[00:03:24]  No.
[00:03:25]  So, needless to say, when he got pinched for a shoplifting arrest, Chicago PD did not call the feds.
[00:03:31]  Not that under Joe Biden, the feds would have done anything.
[00:03:33]  It was the feds that released him to begin with.
[00:03:36]  So he was released from local custody, and a warrant was eventually issued after he failed to appear in court, according to ABC 7 Chicago.
[00:03:45]  So, what we have here is multiple acts already of lawlessness.
[00:03:49]  He came into the country illegally.
[00:03:52]  He then shoplifted.
[00:03:54]  He then didn't show up for his court date.
[00:03:57]  And an arrest warrant was issued for him.
[00:04:00]  And now he's killed somebody.
[00:04:03]  Not just any somebody, but a beautiful 18-year-old girl with her entire life in front of her, just trying to get an education in Chicago.
[00:04:11]  He's been charged with first-degree murder.
[00:04:12]  That's the right charge, and other felonies over Sheridan Gorman's murder.
[00:04:18]  He missed his detention hearing Monday.
[00:04:21]  This time, it's a pattern for him.
[00:04:24]  It's allegedly because he has tuberculosis and is in the hospital.
[00:04:29]  I don't know what to root for.
[00:04:31]  You know, it's like, do we root for the tuberculosis to get him?
[00:04:35]  There's no chance he has health insurance.
[00:04:38]  I'm sure we're giving him treatment on the taxpayer dime in Chicago.
[00:04:43]  Or do we root for him to get well again so that he can be tried, found guilty of murder, and hopefully be behind bars for the rest of his life, which will be justice, I suppose, as close as we can get, but will do nobody any good.
[00:04:57]  It doesn't bring Sheridan Gorman back.
[00:04:58]  It doesn't ease her mother Jessica's pain.
[00:05:02]  It maybe prevents the next girl from getting murdered by this fucker who never should have been here to begin with.
[00:05:08]  Forgive me.
[00:05:09]  Now, yesterday, we told you about this Chicago alderwoman, Maria Haddon.
[00:05:14]  She represents the district where this murder occurred.
[00:05:17]  Now, you would think your first reaction, if you represented the district, would be, oh my God, I'm so sorry.
[00:05:21]  Let me at least walk you through the multiple efforts I've done to make my district safer.
[00:05:26]  That wasn't it.
[00:05:28]  We played you a clip from her interview with Fox 32 Chicago last week.
[00:05:32]  We played it yesterday.
[00:05:33]  She gave the interview last week.
[00:05:34]  Sheridan was murdered on Thursday, where she said of Sheridan's murder, quote, it sounds like this might have been a wrong place, wrong time, running into a person who had a gun.
[00:05:43]  All lies.
[00:05:44]  I mean, like literally all lies.
[00:05:46]  As we promised you yesterday, oh, we called her office.
[00:05:50]  We did indeed call to find out if she had anything to add.
[00:05:55]  After we now know from the criminal complaint that Sheridan was shot in the back while fleeing, not just from any random person, but from an illegal immigrant who was dressed in all black and wearing a black mask.
[00:06:11]  Wearing a black mask doesn't sound like he was exactly up to any good that night on the pier along Lake Michigan, as young Americans were minding their own business, celebrating life.
[00:06:26]  This guy sitting there with his tuberculosis and dressed in all black with a loaded revolver and wearing a mask, obviously covering his face.
[00:06:40]  And then for no reason, there was no report of an altercation, of a teasing, of anything.
[00:06:47]  Not that any of that would justify this, but I'm just saying there doesn't appear to have been any trigger other than he saw a gorgeous young female American and decided to take her life.
[00:06:58]  And she ran.
[00:06:59]  She knew she was in danger.
[00:07:00]  She ran and he chased her and shot her in the back like a disgusting pig coward.
[00:07:08]  Well, the alderwoman, wrong place, wrong time.
[00:07:12]  Her office didn't answer.
[00:07:13]  And guess what?
[00:07:14]  Her voicemail was full.
[00:07:16]  We called many times.
[00:07:18]  Then we sent her office an email and got no response.
[00:07:21]  But just a few hours after that, Alderwoman Haddon releasing a statement on Facebook.
[00:07:29]  Yeah, because now that the national media is after her, she realizes she's got skin in the game.
[00:07:35]  She did finally apologize for her wrong place, wrong time remarks.
[00:07:41]  Her statement reads in part, quote, my comments were never intended to blame the victim or to imply that Sheridan should not have been out enjoying the park or that it was her fault she was shot.
[00:07:50]  I sincerely apologize for any additional pain my comments may have caused.
[00:07:54]  However, she once again fell down on the messaging.
[00:07:58]  First of all, she made no mention of Medina's name because he has to be protected, you see, unlike what he did to Sheridan.
[00:08:08]  He gets protected, or that he is an illegal immigrant, only writing, quote, the person who shot Sheridan is the only one responsible for her death.
[00:08:19]  What person might that be, Alderwoman?
[00:08:22]  The illegal?
[00:08:24]  Jose Medina?
[00:08:26]  You don't want to say it?
[00:08:27]  Because what?
[00:08:28]  It projects Hispanic.
[00:08:29]  People might know he's from Venezuela and here unlawfully, thanks to sanctuary city policies, you prefer and promote.
[00:08:40]  She referred to him only as the masked man, the suspect, and the person, never saying his name or that he was here illegally.
[00:08:48]  She said the community is grieving a life cut short by gun violence.
[00:08:53]  Yes, this is about the gun.
[00:08:56]  That's leave it to a progressive in Chicago to always make it about the gun.
[00:09:00]  Same thing on the south side of Chicago.
[00:09:02]  It's just gun violence.
[00:09:03]  If we could get rid of the guns, the gang members over there killing each other, not allowing 12-year-old boys to grow up, it would all stop.
[00:09:12]  Has nothing to do with the thug gang mentality that we've cultivated and allowed there for decades now.
[00:09:20]  And this guy, you know, had he not had access to a gun, she'd be alive.
[00:09:25]  He seemed pretty determined to kill her.
[00:09:27]  I'm going to guess that if Medina had a knife on him, Sheridan would still be dead.
[00:09:34]  This isn't about gun violence, you asshole.
[00:09:38]  And by the way, grieving a life cut short by gun violence, yes, by whom?
[00:09:42]  Thanks to whom?
[00:09:43]  You missed that in your statement.
[00:09:47]  Hadden, also appearing to take a shot at yours truly and others in what she calls conservative media, writing, quote, the fact that some media outlets are intentionally creating sound bites to misconstrue my words during this tragedy is also unfortunate.
[00:10:04]  It is unfortunate for you.
[00:10:06]  And it's thanks to your own behavior.
[00:10:07]  You have yourself to blame, madam.
[00:10:10]  She actually tries then to claim that she was taken out of context with her wrong place, wrong time comment.
[00:10:17]  See, now, let me tell you something, sister.
[00:10:19]  This is where things go really off the rails.
[00:10:22]  Because when you apologize for something, you say you're sorry, and then you STF you.
[00:10:28]  You don't then try to say, I'm deeply, deeply sorry, but I was taken out of context.
[00:10:33]  But people are wrongfully spinning my words.
[00:10:36]  Then why are you sorry?
[00:10:38]  Why would you be sorry if you've been taken out of context, if it's the media's fault?
[00:10:43]  That's a me problem, if that's what's happening.
[00:10:45]  That's not a you problem.
[00:10:45]  Why would you apologize?
[00:10:48]  Sorry, but you can't have it both ways.
[00:10:50]  Either you did something wrong or I did something wrong.
[00:10:54]  And I'm here to tell you, Alderwoman, I did nothing wrong.
[00:10:58]  I have you dead to rights.
[00:10:59]  And now your attempt to wiggle on your inane, disgusting comment is failing because unlike most other media, we actually do our homework here on the show.
[00:11:09]  We went back and took a look at the entire interview and you are screwed because you're lying to cover up your insensitivity.
[00:11:18]  I'm going to quote her statement directly.
[00:11:19]  Okay.
[00:11:20]  This is as part of her alleged apology to try to get out of the culpability for saying wrong place, wrong time.
[00:11:26]  She said, the interviewer, this is on the Facebook post last night.
[00:11:30]  The interviewer asked me whether Sheridan was targeted by the shooter and whether this was related to the duck walk killer who terrorized our community in 2018.
[00:11:44]  I replied, no, that this seemed to be a senseless, wrong place, wrong time tragedy, unquote.
[00:11:53]  Well, we pulled the tape and we didn't hear anything from Haddon or Fox 32 Chicago's Anita Blanton about a duck walk killer.
[00:12:03]  Here is the full exchange from last Thursday where Haddon made the wrong place, wrong time comment.
[00:12:10]  Watch.
[00:12:11]  We found out like, okay, this is a masked individual that pops out while she's with a group of her friends.
[00:12:19]  Should other people be concerned about their safety right now?
[00:12:23]  Or do we think that this is a targeted incident?
[00:12:28]  So from what I've been told so far, right, from what police know, from speaking to the students who were with her, it seems she might have that as they were just out.
[00:12:41]  You know, people go out to the beach all the time, right?
[00:12:43]  And they go out on the pier, they walk around.
[00:12:45]  So the kids were out doing normal, normal things people do in the neighborhood.
[00:12:50]  And it sounds like this might have been a wrong place, wrong time, running into a person who had a gun.
[00:12:55]  They might have startled this person at the end of the pier unintentionally.
[00:13:01]  But that's all we know.
[00:13:03]  So from what I've been told, what police investigation has turned up so far, what they've been able to share with me and with Loyola University, we don't believe there is cause for broader community concern at this time.
[00:13:19]  Absolutely nothing.
[00:13:20]  Absolutely nothing was teed up by that reporter or anybody else about the duck walk killer and whether this is part of a serial killer thing that happened back in 2018.
[00:13:28]  Nothing.
[00:13:29]  You're fucking lying.
[00:13:30]  Just own it.
[00:13:32]  And that bullshit about she might have startled somebody.
[00:13:34]  You're just making shit up.
[00:13:36]  He was there lying in wait with a gun dressed in black and a mask and chased her and shot her in the back.
[00:13:42]  Stop trying to minimize it.
[00:13:45]  You are hashtag part of the problem, madam.
[00:13:48]  She doesn't care.
[00:13:50]  She doesn't.
[00:13:51]  We read you her resume yesterday.
[00:13:53]  This is like a DEI obsessed leftist progressive.
[00:13:58]  I guarantee you, if Sheridan Gorman were black, her messaging would be entirely different.
[00:14:03]  She's going back to her priors because the perp here is a Hispanic from Venezuela and the dead American is a young, beautiful white girl from Westchester, New York, from Yorktown Heights.
[00:14:15]  Screw you, Alderwoman.
[00:14:17]  You ought to be ashamed of yourself.
[00:14:19]  Along with Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker, a Democrat who has been no better.
[00:14:23]  We told you yesterday about his statement where he also failed to acknowledge that the accused killer happens to be in the country illegally.
[00:14:30]  Does anyone think that's relevant?
[00:14:32]  Does anyone think it might be worth a mention to point out that this guy wasn't illegal?
[00:14:38]  And then Pritzker was asked about his message to Sheridan's parents, okay, because he decided to offer some empathy.
[00:14:46]  Thanks so much for her parents and to blame Donald Trump.
[00:14:53]  What do you say to Sheridan's parents, Tom and Jessica Gorman, when they blame policies, including those in Illinois, for their daughter's murder?
[00:15:00]  Well, this has been a terrible tragedy, and I know that the Gorman family has suffered mightily.
[00:15:06]  I agree there have been real failures.
[00:15:09]  Those failures, of course, extend beyond the borders of Illinois.

=== Attack on American People (10:52) ===

[00:15:13]  It's their national failures, a failure to have comprehensive immigration reform, a failure of the president to follow his own edict to go after the worst of the worst.
[00:15:24]  And in my view, we have a lot of work that we need to continue to do, but it is the job of the federal government to go after immigration enforcement.
[00:15:37]  The nerve, the absolute gall to blame the absence of comprehensive immigration reform.
[00:15:49]  Not a word about Joe Biden.
[00:15:51]  The guy came in under Biden in 2023.
[00:15:54]  Not a damn word.
[00:15:56]  It's about Trump and the absence of comprehensive immigration reform.
[00:16:01]  And then at the end, Trump and his policies.
[00:16:07]  Not only did Trump, of course, obviously run on reversing Biden's open border, which he did, and on deporting all the illegals, but then he tried.
[00:16:17]  Trump tried.
[00:16:19]  He tried sending ICE to Chicago, not any place in Illinois, to Chicago.
[00:16:26]  And the reason that didn't work out is because of that man, Governor Pritzker.
[00:16:31]  Had this man allowed Trump to send ICE into Chicago to clean up Joe Biden's illegal immigration problem, Sheridan Gorman might still be alive.
[00:16:43]  The reason Trump was stopped from doing that is that fat bastard.
[00:16:48]  It was Governor Pritzker who stopped it.
[00:16:51]  In fact, in the last few months, his attacks on Trump's immigration policies have been non-stop.
[00:17:00]  Here's just a small sample.
[00:17:02]  What President Trump is doing is unprecedented and unwarranted.
[00:17:08]  It is unconstitutional.
[00:17:10]  It is un-American.
[00:17:12]  Find a family who's enjoying today sitting on their front porch and ask if they want their neighborhoods turned into a war zone by a wannabe dictator.
[00:17:23]  Our small businesses suffer when our residents and visitors who are shopping and eating are made to feel unsafe by the jackbooted thugs roaming around a peaceful downtown.
[00:17:33]  Make sure that you understand that the ICE officials don't have a right to knock down doors to take people away thinking of you and doing everything we can to protect you.
[00:17:43]  So this is dangerous.
[00:17:44]  They shouldn't be doing it.
[00:17:45]  It's anti-American.
[00:17:46]  It's un-American.
[00:17:47]  It's an attack on the American people by the president of the United States.
[00:17:51]  ICE needs to take it down about three notches.
[00:17:54]  ICE is a bunch of untrained and unqualified people that it's like it's become some sort of secret police force for Donald Trump.
[00:18:02]  He actually had the nerve, notwithstanding that, to say this is a failure.
[00:18:07]  This happened because of Trump's failure to go after the worst of the worst.
[00:18:12]  Oh my God.
[00:18:14]  He fought him in the media.
[00:18:16]  He fought him in the courts.
[00:18:18]  He did everything within his power to get Trump and ICE out of Illinois and out of Chicago in particular.
[00:18:26]  And by the way, this guy, Medina, would not have been on the list of the worst of the worst because all he had prior to this was a shoplifting arrest.
[00:18:35]  Even under Tom Homan's protocol, that would not qualify.
[00:18:41]  It's unbelievable the nerve of this guy to actually try to blame this on Donald Trump.
[00:18:47]  I'm stunned.
[00:18:48]  I guess I shouldn't be.
[00:18:49]  I should be more cynical by this point in my news career.
[00:18:52]  I just, it's stomach turning.
[00:18:54]  A girl is dead.
[00:18:54]  Take some responsibility.
[00:18:56]  Change your policy.
[00:18:57]  Do something.
[00:18:58]  Do something resembling anything to keep your citizens, the Americans, safe.
[00:19:05]  And this isn't even touching on his refusal to fight crime in his state.
[00:19:12]  Never mind the disgusting Chicago mayor, who's 10 times worse than either this alder woman or the governor, if that's even possible.
[00:19:19]  But Pritzker wants a national future right now.
[00:19:22]  Pritzker wants to be the Democratic nominee.
[00:19:25]  There are some Democrats running.
[00:19:27]  There's not one I would vote for, but there are some Democrats running, I'm sure, who are like decent people who have just diametrically opposed political views to those of my own and maybe many of yours.
[00:19:38]  But this, this level of dishonesty, gaslighting, refusals to take responsibility when you're watching young 18-year-old American girls get shot to death is beyond FW.
[00:19:48]  This is incredibly cynical and dark and really exposes a depraved moral character, a depraved moral character.
[00:19:58]  And are we surprised?
[00:19:59]  This is the same family that's been shoving the transgender ideology on our kids in schools for years now, for decades now.
[00:20:08]  That's his family, the Pritzkers.
[00:20:10]  There's something sick about them.
[00:20:12]  Literally, they don't care about the health and wellness of American children, whether it's an 18-year-old girl named Sheridan Gorman or your children going to their schools, not wanting to be transitioned by teachers with an agenda without the inclusion of parents on even the notion that there is gender confusion by a child.
[00:20:34]  This is like the Pritzkers are villains in my view.
[00:20:38]  This is an evil family.
[00:20:41]  He's not the only Democrat with an extreme position on immigration that you know.
[00:20:47]  Here's House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries saying he still, still doesn't know whether Medina should be deported and he appears to know nothing about this case.
[00:21:01]  An illegal immigrant has been charged with murdering a college student in Chicago last week.
[00:21:06]  Do House Democrats believe if he's convicted, he's someone who should be deported?
[00:21:09]  I'll look into the case.
[00:21:12]  He doesn't know anything.
[00:21:14]  I bet he knows who Alex Predty is.
[00:21:16]  I bet he knows the name Renee Good.
[00:21:19]  Does he know the name Rachel Morin?
[00:21:22]  Do you think he knows that name?
[00:21:25]  You know, he might know Lake and Riley by this point since we have an act named after her, an actual law.
[00:21:32]  Do you think he knows Jocelyn Nungari?
[00:21:34]  Do you think he keeps up to date on the latest young American girl shot to death by an illegal that his party allowed into this country?
[00:21:44]  It was a very easy question.
[00:21:46]  A young American teenager was murdered and he's not sure that if the suspect is convicted, he should be deported.
[00:21:54]  It should be the easiest yes of his political career.
[00:21:59]  Like that, aren't you somewhat politically savvy?
[00:22:01]  Isn't that how you become the House minority leader like Hakeem Jeffries?
[00:22:06]  But that's him pandering to his Democrat base.
[00:22:10]  The pander is to never attack an illegal, right?
[00:22:14]  You know, why would you do that?
[00:22:16]  We're on the side of the illegals over on Team Blue.
[00:22:18]  Definitely the answer is I don't know.
[00:22:20]  At a minimum, it's, I don't know.
[00:22:21]  It's definitely not yes.
[00:22:22]  I want him gone.
[00:22:23]  My God, why would you say that?
[00:22:24]  That's political suicide on the left.
[00:22:28]  The heartlessness with which this is happening and being handled is stomach turning.
[00:22:36]  And there should be accountability for them at the ballot box and on the phone lines right now.
[00:22:42]  I mean, honestly, to me, it's, you know, we're going to talk about the Iran war later.
[00:22:49]  It's not good.
[00:22:50]  Trump's approval ratings are in a free fall.
[00:22:53]  He's losing double digits young men, independents, and so on.
[00:22:57]  You still have, of course, you have to vote Republican.
[00:23:00]  I'm sorry, like, I don't care how mad you are at the Republican Party.
[00:23:04]  This is what you get death on the American streets if you vote Democrat.
[00:23:09]  I am sorry.
[00:23:10]  If the Democrats weren't so insane, if it were like your granddad's Republican Party or Democrat Party, maybe, maybe.
[00:23:17]  But they don't care.
[00:23:21]  They're the ones who caused it.
[00:23:22]  They opened the borders without a thought for what it would do.
[00:23:25]  And now that it's catching up with them, that's what you get from Hakeem Jeffries.
[00:23:29]  I don't know.
[00:23:30]  I'll look into it.
[00:23:30]  Who the fuck is Sharon Gorman?
[00:23:32]  It's really what he's saying.
[00:23:34]  I find this disgusting.
[00:23:36]  And who was it, you guys?
[00:23:38]  We have, there's a soundbite who is like, oh, it was Chris Murphy.
[00:23:43]  Do we have that cut, Chris Murphy?
[00:23:46]  It's a soundbite that circulated in 2024.
[00:23:49]  He's from my new home state, Connecticut.
[00:23:53]  So he said this in 2024, but it's getting recirculated now.
[00:23:56]  This is just, this is the perfect evidence of the leftist attitude on this issue.
[00:24:02]  Listen to this.
[00:24:04]  Well, I mean, Chris, that's been a failed play for 20 years.
[00:24:07]  So you are right that that has been the Democratic strategy for 30 years, maybe, and it has failed to deliver for the people we care about most, the undocumented Americans that are in this country.
[00:24:21]  Undocumented Americans are the people we care about most.
[00:24:27]  There is so much that's wrong with that.
[00:24:29]  He won't say illegal.
[00:24:30]  He won't say illegal alien or illegal immigrant.
[00:24:33]  An undocumented American.
[00:24:36]  No, Senator.
[00:24:37]  The problem is they're not American.
[00:24:40]  There's no such thing as an undocumented American.
[00:24:45]  If you are an American, you are documented.
[00:24:48]  You have a birth certificate, probably a passport and a driver's license proving that you are an American.
[00:24:55]  Undocumented American is not a thing.
[00:24:58]  And what you're really trying to say is a nicer, dressed up, fake lying term for illegal immigrant.
[00:25:04]  And those are not the people you should care about most.
[00:25:07]  As one of your constituents, Senator, I urge you to care about my children and the other children of Connecticut more than you care about the quote undocumented.
[00:25:20]  I demand that you take steps to protect the Americans, actual Americans who live in this state and in all this country before you sing to us about the people you care the most, the undocumented.
[00:25:36]  What the F?
[00:25:38]  It's exactly that attitude that got Sheridan Gorman killed, that made people like Chris Murphy not object to Joe Biden's open border, Governor Pritzker, fight tooth and nail to keep ICE out of Chicago and Illinois, where they might have caught this guy.
[00:25:54]  And the next one just like him, who right now is still lurking in Illinois, thanks to these guys, or maybe Connecticut, or maybe your state.

=== New Leads Emerge (16:02) ===

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[00:27:09]  There's a lot happening in the news right now.
[00:27:10]  And of course, since Trump's attentions are international, so are most of the news media.
[00:27:14]  But this is an important story.
[00:27:17]  This is an, it's just the latest in an ongoing dark saga.
[00:27:24]  And let's just be honest, of in too many cases, young American girls getting killed by these monsters.
[00:27:34]  It's not all girls.
[00:27:35]  Of course, we did a long piece on YouTube, which is still up there.
[00:27:39]  I urge you to go look at it, highlighting some of the men too, the men and the women and the young ones who have been killed in America by these illegals.
[00:27:46]  Oftentimes it's police officers who are just trying to do their jobs.
[00:27:50]  Oftentimes it's innocents, all stripes and sizes, who get killed by drunk driver illegals.
[00:28:00]  But the ones who get attacked on the street tend to be young American girls.
[00:28:05]  Girls like 12-year-old Jocelyn Nangare, who was sexually assaulted by two of them before they threw her over a bridge in Texas.
[00:28:13]  Girls like that.
[00:28:18]  I refuse to stop calling attention to this.
[00:28:21]  I told you yesterday that Sheridan's mom, Jessica, we found out, is one of our Megan Kelly show community members.
[00:28:28]  She's one of us.
[00:28:30]  She's one of us.
[00:28:31]  She sat here day by day, just like you guys do.
[00:28:34]  And God bless you and thank you.
[00:28:36]  And watched this show and supported it and learned from it and participated in it.
[00:28:41]  And actually went so far as to show up at our White Plains tour stop in the fall, dressed in her red, white, and blue.
[00:28:49]  She and her sister and her friend wearing the Charlie Kirk freedom t-shirt.
[00:28:55]  And that day, just like all the rest of the days, especially in the fall, we were all mourning the loss of Charlie.
[00:29:01]  And clearly she and her family and friends felt it too.
[00:29:05]  In their freedom shirts and their stars and stripes.
[00:29:10]  Her love of this country ought to be sustained and verified.
[00:29:14]  And we ought to be worthy of it.
[00:29:16]  And we ought to elect leaders who are worthy of it.
[00:29:20]  Hakeem Jeffries, you're not it.
[00:29:22]  Chris Murphy, not you either.
[00:29:24]  Governor J.B. Pritzker, you're despicable.
[00:29:28]  Despicable.
[00:29:31]  Okay, I want to turn the page.
[00:29:34]  I want to just talk about this one story before we bring on a guy I've been wanting to talk to for a long time.
[00:29:38]  His name is Kurt Mills.
[00:29:40]  He runs the American Conservative, which is a publication that's all about being a conservative.
[00:29:46]  But they're more non-interventionalists.
[00:29:49]  So he's got some views we want to discuss.
[00:29:51]  But before we get to that, something extraordinary happened yesterday with many friends of this show about Charlie Kirk.
[00:29:59]  You know, not even indirectly, pretty directly.
[00:30:03]  Michael Schellenberger, you know him.
[00:30:04]  He comes on all the time.
[00:30:05]  Love him.
[00:30:06]  Great reporter.
[00:30:07]  He interviewed Joe Kent, the now former counterterrorism chief who quit over the Iran war and has been making the media rounds, including on this show last Friday.
[00:30:18]  And Schellenberger zeroed in with Joe Kent on Joe's suggestion that the Charlie Kirk investigation has been mishandled by the feds.
[00:30:28]  It's in the hands of the Utah state authorities now, but the FBI was very much involved in this.
[00:30:33]  And he suggested to me, to Tucker, to others, that there were potential international connections to Charlie's murder around Tyler Robinson in tandem with Tyler Robinson, unclear.
[00:30:49]  He's not saying Tyler did not pull the trigger, that were not adequately investigated, in his view.
[00:30:56]  We talked in part about a group chat that Charlie was part of prior to his death, in which he lamented what was happening with the pressures being put on him by Jewish donors.
[00:31:09]  He was angry.
[00:31:10]  He wanted it to stop.
[00:31:12]  And he made clear that he was considering giving back donations he had received from Jewish donors because he was so sick of being pressured not to have people like Candace at his events, not to platform people like Tucker.
[00:31:26]  And here is in part what was written in the texts that Joe has been discussing, Joe Kent, and that we now know were provided to Joe Kent by Andrew Colvett of Turning Point after Charlie's death, because Andrew thought, as well, this may suggest an Israeli link to Charlie's death, and I ought to tell the FBI about it, or in this case, the feds.
[00:31:50]  I happen to know that Andrew sent this text chain, not just to Joe Kent, but to one other Fed.
[00:31:56]  You know, those of you who are like, that must mean Joe Kent is the leaker, because it got leaked to Candace Owens.
[00:32:01]  Not necessarily.
[00:32:03]  It could have been somebody who worked for Joe Kent.
[00:32:04]  It could have been Joe Kent.
[00:32:05]  He denied it.
[00:32:06]  And it could have been this other Fed who Andrew provided the text chain to.
[00:32:10]  But here's what Charlie wrote.
[00:32:11]  This is 48 hours before he died.
[00:32:13]  Just lost another huge Jewish donor, $2 million a year because we won't cancel Tucker.
[00:32:18]  I'm thinking of inviting Candace.
[00:32:21]  Ugh.
[00:32:22]  Then Charlie writes, Jewish donors play into all the stereotypes.
[00:32:26]  I cannot and will not be bullied like this, leaving me no choice but to leave the pro-Israel cause.
[00:32:33]  And then the person he's corresponding with says, please don't invite Candace.
[00:32:36]  That might feel good short term, but it's not good long term in my opinion.
[00:32:40]  Like all groups, you're going to get a wide variety of opinions that that nasty free will thing that God bestowed on us makes life frustrating at times and goes on.
[00:32:50]  Okay, so this was turned over to the feds investigating Charlie's death.
[00:32:54]  And in Joe Kent's view, the possibility of an Israeli connection of some sort, whether a domestic or an actual international, like an Israeli, an actual Israeli, was not adequately looked into.
[00:33:08]  And I happen to know that there is at least one other lead on that front, which I'm not at liberty to divulge because it was given to me off the record and you cannot report off the record information.
[00:33:19]  That's all I'm going to say about it.
[00:33:20]  I have worked for a long, long time to get it on the record and I cannot get the permission.
[00:33:24]  That's fine, but I am guessing.
[00:33:26]  I've never spoken to Joe Kent privately.
[00:33:28]  None of my information comes from him.
[00:33:30]  But I am guessing that Joe Kent knows of this thing that does raise questions about Israelis.
[00:33:37]  Again, not to impugn Israelis at all.
[00:33:39]  I'm just saying it's not completely made up out of whole cloth.
[00:33:42]  There was at least one other suggestion that should have been run down.
[00:33:47]  That's all I'm going to say.
[00:33:49]  I don't believe the Israelis killed Charlie.
[00:33:51]  I think it was Tyler Robinson.
[00:33:53]  I think if he had help, it was by Trans Tifa.
[00:33:56]  But I don't begrudge anyone asking these questions because I've read the Charlie text chain and I know some other things.
[00:34:05]  And I just think it's prudent.
[00:34:06]  It's prudent given how important Charlie was to the conservative movement and to the Israel issue and his evolving state of mind on the issue, which was a threat to Israel and those who support it, you know, politically, I mean, that you would have to look into that.
[00:34:24]  You would.
[00:34:25]  He was assassinated by somebody.
[00:34:27]  So in any event, Joe Kent believes that too.
[00:34:32]  And Schellenberger asked him about whether now he's made himself a potential witness for the defense, meaning Tyler Robinson, at Tyler's eventual trial for Charlie's murder.
[00:34:47]  Listen here.
[00:34:48]  I mean, have you thought about that Robinson's defense attorneys may call you in to be a witness?
[00:34:57]  Yeah, no, I've considered it.
[00:34:59]  I understand.
[00:35:00]  I think there's just a lot of people that look at Tyler Robinson and go, this is not shocking at all.
[00:35:05]  There's nothing missing from this.
[00:35:09]  There's no evidence that he had accomplices.
[00:35:12]  And now you're just kind of speculating.
[00:35:17]  But more than because of who you are, that that could actually end up derailing the prosecution of the guy that murdered Charlie Kirk.
[00:35:26]  Yeah, I'm sure that's fair criticism.
[00:35:30]  From my vantage point, I don't see, I did not see, I should say, I did not see the investigation being thoroughly done.
[00:35:40]  I don't think what I'm going to say is going to knock the defense's socks off or the jury's.
[00:35:45]  So I am confident in what I know and what I'm saying.
[00:35:50]  And if I end up having to go play that role, then, you know, I'll do it.
[00:35:57]  But it seems to me that, you know, your testimony, you know, will be incredibly important to the Robinson defense.
[00:36:04]  Yeah, I mean, then honestly, so be it if it gets us to the truth.
[00:36:09]  So he says he has no desire to testify for the defense in this prosecution, but if called to talk about what he knows in terms of whether the feds investigated this or not, he'll do it.
[00:36:21]  Now, I just want to follow up with we asked Joe Kent when he was on about this issue because the FBI was investigating this case along with the Utah authorities and kind of asked him what he had to do with it.
[00:36:36]  Why was the National Counterterrorism Center involved?
[00:36:39]  Because what happened was he apparently looked at some FBI file and got his hands slapped by Kash Patel, reportedly, who didn't want him butting in, like a turf war kind of thing.
[00:36:48]  And I asked him about that.
[00:36:50]  Here's a little bit of that exchange when he sat down with me less than a week ago in SOT 25B.
[00:36:56]  Would that have been your job, Joe, to consider that piece or Kash Patel's?
[00:37:02]  A combination, but if there is foreign involvement, that's where the National Counterterrorism Center comes in, because we have more robust and broad authorities to investigate the foreign angle.
[00:37:12]  The FBI has the more broad and robust authorities to investigate the domestic angle.
[00:37:18]  So who has the ability to shut you down from that?
[00:37:22]  So really, the way it happened was initially it was just like, hey, the FBI says you guys can't look into the case file.
[00:37:27]  And when the case file is kind of where all the data is, and you're done.
[00:37:30]  You guys can't work here anymore.
[00:37:32]  You guys can't work on this case anymore.
[00:37:34]  We argued that we should still be involved in that case.
[00:37:37]  And we won the argument.
[00:37:38]  We got kind of put back on the case.
[00:37:41]  But then after a while, the government has a great way of making things just die in process.
[00:37:47]  And so essentially all of our requests, our ability to investigate, it was cut off.
[00:37:51]  Our requests to investigate were kind of taken away and sort of died in the process.
[00:37:57]  So you get it?
[00:37:58]  It would have been his job to investigate the international connection, if any, and Kash Patel's job to investigate what was happening domestically.
[00:38:07]  And he felt that there was a bit of a turf war going on and that they were slow rolled right out of the case, even once they'd been restored as having permission to look into it, that the government has a way of making that very difficult for you.
[00:38:19]  And he felt that that was done to him.
[00:38:21]  Clearly, he's speaking about the FBI.
[00:38:24]  I haven't spoken to Kash Patel.
[00:38:25]  I'm sure he would deny that, though, I feel compelled to say.
[00:38:29]  So Andrew Colvett and Blake Neff, who were also on this show two weeks ago, who worked for Charlie and are now doing Charlie's show in the wake of his death, were not happy with that exchange between Schellenberger and Joe Kent.
[00:38:44]  And here's some of their reaction yesterday.
[00:38:48]  I'd be shocked if Robinson's attorneys don't use this.
[00:38:51]  Well, of course, this is the obvious result of this.
[00:38:53]  That's what infuriates me is he's like endlessly, he's like someone who's vague posting on Facebook where he's like, ooh, there's things I might know.
[00:39:02]  People should know.
[00:39:02]  I might know.
[00:39:03]  But I can't tell you what those are.
[00:39:04]  But state what you actually think happened.
[00:39:06]  This really does have a potential to not only taint a jury pool, but to undermine the very prosecution of Tyler Robinson, who I am 100% convinced pulled the trigger and killed Charlie Kirk.
[00:39:19]  I am for asking questions.
[00:39:21]  This is why I shared the group chat with Joe Kent in the first place.
[00:39:25]  I'm not afraid of the answer to those questions.
[00:39:28]  If Israel had a hand in killing Charlie, I want to know.
[00:39:31]  What I'm telling you is that we've had six months plus since that time to track down all those leads, none of which have been corroborated, none of which have actionable evidence behind.
[00:39:41]  You have to have facts.
[00:39:42]  And the recklessness with which these accusations are being thrown out now has real world implications.
[00:39:49]  Okay.
[00:39:49]  I completely understand Andrew and Blake being upset about this.
[00:39:54]  They do not want to do anything to shore up Tyler Robinson's defense.
[00:39:58]  And I grant them total and complete grace on that reaction.
[00:40:02]  But as a legal matter, they really don't need to worry.
[00:40:07]  Okay.
[00:40:07]  And I'm going to get to why in one second.
[00:40:09]  But before I do, taint to the jury pool.
[00:40:13]  That's always something you have to worry about somewhat.
[00:40:16]  But in case after case after case, we have seen very, very ubiquitous media coverage.
[00:40:22]  And it can be handled in voider by prosecutors.
[00:40:27]  That's what they will do.
[00:40:27]  That's what they would have done in the Brian Kohlberger trial, where they would have explored the many, many media exposés on the case and the many, many theories that were circulating all over social media that Kohlberger didn't do it.
[00:40:41]  There's a large faction that maintains that to this day.
[00:40:44]  They were very loud on social media and had all sorts of theories and podcasts and so on about how he wasn't the killer.
[00:40:49]  Now he's, of course, admitted he was, but that was something that the prosecutors were going to have to deal with.
[00:40:55]  And prosecutors state to state in today's day and age have to deal with that anyway because it's a true crime community now.
[00:41:02]  You know, like I was just talking to my, well, I'll reveal this news later, but we may have a little true crime news for you coming up.
[00:41:09]  But it's growing and it's very popular.
[00:41:12]  And it happens in cases that you know about and cases that you don't, where there are very strong local, there's very strong local interest in it and becomes a podcast thing or internet fodder in some way, shape, or form.
[00:41:23]  It can be dealt with taint.
[00:41:25]  But the notion that it's going to go beyond that, that it's going to undermine the very prosecution of Tyler Robinson, as Andrew said.
[00:41:34]  And he said, who I'm 100% convinced pulled the trigger and killed Charlie, me too, same.
[00:41:38]  And Andrew and I have talked about it many times, privately and publicly.
[00:41:42]  The notion that it's going to undermine the prosecution, I think is incorrect.
[00:41:47]  And I think in Andrew and Blake's defense, they were set up to get to this point by the way Schellenberger, who I love, presented this.
[00:41:55]  He presented it as I've spoken with a constitutional law attorney, and that person says this is definitely going to play a role and this is going to potentially help Tyler Robinson at trial.

=== Prosecution Undermined (07:39) ===

[00:42:08]  I think Schellenberger spoke to the wrong person.
[00:42:11]  He spoke to, sorry, yeah, he spoke to the wrong person.
[00:42:15]  He shouldn't have spoken to a constitutional con law lawyer.
[00:42:18]  He should have spoken to a criminal defense attorney or a prosecutor, criminal prosecutor, talked to an actual criminal prosecutor or defense attorney.
[00:42:25]  This is not coming into evidence.
[00:42:26]  It's not coming into evidence.
[00:42:29]  It's just not.
[00:42:30]  The only way this theory about whoever, I don't even know who it necessarily would be, is it Israel?
[00:42:35]  Is it Jewish donors to turning point if you go off of the Charlie text?
[00:42:40]  I don't know who exactly the people who completely buy this theory think it is, but let's say it's one of those groups.
[00:42:47]  The only way that's coming in is if there is actual evidence to support it.
[00:42:52]  A text expressing consternation by Charlie is not going to open that door.
[00:42:57]  It is not.
[00:42:58]  Now, Joe Kent saying there were six major leads that pointed to the Israelis that were not pursued.
[00:43:06]  And here's what they were.
[00:43:08]  And can get really specific at maybe a pretrial hearing where they could get into that.
[00:43:12]  Maybe that could open a door.
[00:43:14]  That's not what he has.
[00:43:15]  That's not what he has at all.
[00:43:16]  In fact, Schellenberger really pressed him on like, what other evidence is there?
[00:43:19]  And he didn't cite any.
[00:43:21]  He wasn't able to say, trust me, there's a lot.
[00:43:25]  He seemed to just be saying, like, I got shut down on the investigation.
[00:43:28]  There was something there.
[00:43:29]  I wanted to pursue it.
[00:43:30]  And I smelled something, but I wasn't allowed to do anything.
[00:43:32]  Well, that's not going to be enough.
[00:43:34]  I mean, I'm sure Tyler Robinson's attorneys are going to be sad that it's not enough.
[00:43:38]  But my own instincts as a lawyer for 10 plus years, a litigator, and I've tried cases.
[00:43:46]  And then I checked with Arthur Aidala, who is a legit trial attorney, criminal defense, had one time been a prosecutor, and Matt Murphy, longtime criminal prosecutor.
[00:43:54]  So I've got both sides weighing in with me and a couple of others who I called all agreed, not one wiggled at all, saying there is not a chance in hell that this gets admitted by the Robinson defense and even less chance that Joe Kent gets called at a witness, unless there's some treasure trove of other evidence that Joe Kent remembers.
[00:44:15]  Oh, gee, there were those six clues.
[00:44:17]  It was the Israelis that I did send to cash and he didn't let me pursue.
[00:44:21]  That's not what's happening though here.
[00:44:23]  Okay, so I don't think they need to worry about what's going to happen at the Charlie trial.
[00:44:28]  And the last thing is, though, on this, I also don't think this settles the matter about whether someplace said clues might be present or why we haven't actually bothered to know.
[00:44:43]  We haven't bothered to actually investigate because I believe Joe Kent that he was effectively shoved off of this.
[00:44:50]  I don't know by whom.
[00:44:53]  I believe it for many reasons.
[00:44:55]  And I don't know why that happened.
[00:44:58]  But I'll tell you that, you know, when I talked to Joe Kent personally, he talked about there being additional leads that were not investigated.
[00:45:07]  And that's why when Andrew says, we've had six months plus since that time that I sent this to the FBI and, well, to Joe Kent and maybe another Fed to track down all those leads, none of which have been corroborated, none of which has actionable evidence.
[00:45:28]  That presumes facts not in evidence, that there has been an investigation of this angle of the story.
[00:45:37]  And I would submit we just don't know whether that's true.
[00:45:40]  What we know from Joe Kent is there wasn't.
[00:45:44]  And it's one of the many questions I think I still have about this case.
[00:45:48]  Why?
[00:45:49]  Why would you shut that down?
[00:45:50]  It's not the only one.
[00:45:51]  Where's the arrest of the Trans Tifa mob that clearly knew about this beforehand?
[00:45:57]  Who's investigating that?
[00:45:58]  Why does it take six months to figure out whether all the people posting that Charlie Kirk was going to get shot on September 10th, whether they, how they knew that?
[00:46:09]  Like, at least come out and tell us why.
[00:46:12]  Why hasn't there been an arrest?
[00:46:13]  Have you investigated anybody?
[00:46:15]  Who have you spoken to?
[00:46:16]  How did they know this?
[00:46:17]  Did they all just get lucky?
[00:46:21]  All right.
[00:46:21]  So it's not to stop with like the, it's an anti-Semitic.
[00:46:24]  It's not.
[00:46:25]  Fucking look at Charlie's texts.
[00:46:26]  All right.
[00:46:27]  It's just, let's just know.
[00:46:30]  Nothing should be off limits.
[00:46:33]  So I love Andrew and I love Blake, but I think that they're not right, that everything has been investigated.
[00:46:38]  And here's Joe Kent, again, less than a week ago to me directly, 25A.
[00:46:44]  And all I can really truly say is that there were additional leads that we needed to run down and fully investigate.
[00:46:51]  And then that just simply was not done.
[00:46:54]  Basically from the time that Tyler Robinson turned himself in and was arrested and his fingerprints were found on the rifle, they basically, they being the FBI, said, hey, this is now going to go over to the Utah law enforcement and we are not investigating anything further.
[00:47:11]  And there was a lot of back and forth about that because there were still, and again, not just my opinion, in the opinion of the National Counterterrorism Center, there was other leads for us to run down.
[00:47:22]  And I even spoke with members of the FBI who are kind of at the ground level and they agreed with me and we wanted to continue to investigate.
[00:47:29]  And so all I can say with authority right now is that there were additional leads for us to run down.
[00:47:35]  The scope that we had of foreign involvement, we did not get an opportunity to run down all of those potential leads.
[00:47:43]  And I think Charlie Kirk deserves justice and I think people deserve the truth about what happened on that day.
[00:47:49]  I'm not trying to be cryptic.
[00:47:50]  What I'm saying is that there were things that we still needed to investigate that were not investigated.
[00:47:57]  So to sum up, in my view, this is a matter of government accountability, responsibility, and open-mindedness to a real investigation that would cover any and all clues around who might have had involvement.
[00:48:15]  But I do not think in any way, shape, or form, as it looks right now, this results in any help to Tyler Robinson.
[00:48:23]  You cannot just say, there were things the government should have run down in my view, but they didn't, and get that in front of a jury.
[00:48:30]  That's not going to happen.
[00:48:33]  So I think there was a level of alarm yesterday on this that was perhaps not warranted, though completely sincere and understandable.
[00:48:44]  And I think we should take a deep breath on the trial of Tyler Robinson, which I think will be well handled.
[00:48:49]  I think he will be convicted.
[00:48:51]  There is a mountain of evidence against him.
[00:48:54]  And the only questions I have are: what's been done to investigate Trans Tifa?
[00:48:59]  And why haven't those leads that Joe Kent mentioned, again, at least one of which I've been told about, not by him, off the record, why aren't they being investigated?
[00:49:12]  Like, where is the definitive answer on that?
[00:49:15]  Because Joe Kent just left the counterterrorism a week ago.
[00:49:19]  He left as chief a week ago, and he would know if they'd been investigated.
[00:49:24]  So the answer cannot be we looked into it because it was his group that would have been charged with it.
[00:49:28]  His group would have been charged with it.
[00:49:29]  And what you heard him say there was they were effectively shut down on it.
[00:49:34]  Okay, so that's where that stands.
[00:49:36]  Love to get your thoughts on it.
[00:49:38]  Up next, I've never spoken to Kurt Mills, but I'm looking forward to.
[00:49:42]  He is here.
[00:49:42]  He is extremely smart and knowledgeable.
[00:49:44]  And I think we're all about to learn a lot.

=== Trump's Military Assets (17:20) ===

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[00:51:28]  Joining me now, Kurt Mills.
[00:51:30]  He's the executive director of the American Conservative.
[00:51:34]  Kurt, thanks so much for joining us.
[00:51:36]  Big fan and love the publication.
[00:51:39]  In the model of Pat Buchanan, who has been my own sort of sage over the past year, I've done a lot of reading of Pat Buchanan, and my God, he called so much of what we're experiencing right now.
[00:51:51]  And interestingly, it was diminished on the world stage by being called an anti-Semite, Kurt.
[00:51:55]  Patterns repeat themselves.
[00:51:58]  Indeed, indeed.
[00:51:59]  I would like to say that we improve as a species, but I think the jury's out.
[00:52:03]  Yeah, the same.
[00:52:05]  Let me kick it off with this.
[00:52:06]  General Staniel, General Stanley McChrystal, gave an interview to the New York Times.
[00:52:12]  He was, for our younger audience, the guy who commanded our troops in Afghanistan from like 2003 to 2008 and was very badass, was the one who really killed like the worst of the worst in terms of the enemy and was almost universally beloved by the troops, you know, Air Force guy, like Army, and then ultimately commanded the Air Force.
[00:52:34]  And he got booted by Barack Obama because he said something negative about Joe Biden, I think it was.
[00:52:42]  I think he was actually ripped on the vice president, and Barack Obama recalled him.
[00:52:46]  In any event, very, very well-respected general.
[00:52:49]  So he sat down and gave an interview to the New York Times and said something that really jumped out at me about people who are quote enjoying this war and what he says to them.
[00:53:00]  Here it is in SAT 19.
[00:53:02]  We could bomb Iraq pretty easily.
[00:53:04]  We could even take Baghdad with relative ease.
[00:53:08]  We could get rid of the existing government.
[00:53:10]  But once we wanted to change the reality on the ground, who actually controlled things, how things worked, now you're not at 30,000 feet.
[00:53:22]  You're at six feet, and you're the same height as your potential opponent.
[00:53:28]  And I tell people about this war: if you like this war, enjoy this first part because this is the best part.
[00:53:35]  Because everything after this will be harder.
[00:53:38]  You see the reality that all of the resentment you create through what you do now at some point comes back to you.
[00:53:49]  I think that for everyone we kill in bombing Iran, they have a brother, sister, father, mother, and they are unlikely to go, oh, yeah, it's okay.
[00:53:58]  You killed my father, but yeah, it was geopolitical necessity on your part.
[00:54:02]  That's not the way we respond.
[00:54:05]  And so sometimes it's necessary.
[00:54:08]  I don't deny that some wars are just and required, but no wars that I'm familiar with are neat, clean, or produce the kind of outcome we actually want.
[00:54:21]  They produce this messy thing that might be better than before the war, but it's not a lot better.
[00:54:28]  So, in short, we're risking a lot, and for what gain?
[00:54:32]  And he seems to be asking that same question here.
[00:54:35]  Similar question to what you've been asking.
[00:54:37]  Let me ask it this way to kick things off.
[00:54:40]  How do you think it's going right now in Iran?
[00:54:44]  Well, look, I think General McChrystal is a good man.
[00:54:47]  He's probably much more establishment than I am.
[00:54:50]  It's very interesting to see how he evolved over the last 15 years.
[00:54:53]  When he was ousted from the administration or from the leadership in the military, he was criticizing Barack Obama and also Joe Biden, really Joe Biden more than anyone else.
[00:55:04]  Back then, Joe Biden, say what you will, fought. internally against the surge that the Obama administration, the early Obama administration was trying to do in Afghanistan, something that I think, you know, years, as the years have wound on, it was something Barack Obama himself didn't really even really believe in.
[00:55:20]  And so I think it's big to see McChrystal say this.
[00:55:24]  His contemporary at the time, David Petraeus, before the Iran war, warned against this war pretty much.
[00:55:31]  He said that it was actually remarkable that the U.S. had been so lucky in the Maduro raid that no special forces members had been killed.
[00:55:40]  They could easily have been killed.
[00:55:42]  And so it is heartening to see, for better or worse, the sort of general class, the retired general class complain about some of the maneuvers here, which is not something that we saw nearly as much in the global war on terror, at least in the 2010s.
[00:55:56]  General Mattis is also out there ripping on it.
[00:55:59]  That was Trump's Pentagon chief, and he's also expressed major doubts about whether we can accomplish our goals in this war.
[00:56:05]  Keep going.
[00:56:05]  I think, look, I think the war is not going well.
[00:56:08]  If you define it as, I mean, the basic U.S. definition was we wanted everything in the world with no costs.
[00:56:16]  We wanted to kill the leadership of Iran.
[00:56:18]  We wanted to replace it peacefully with our people.
[00:56:21]  We wanted to keep Israel on side and we wanted to keep the mega coalition together.
[00:56:25]  That was basically the White House's goal.
[00:56:28]  And that obviously failed spectacularly.
[00:56:31]  The Iranian goal is survival.
[00:56:34]  And then additionally, within the Iranian government itself, there are probably partners, sorry, there are probably forces within the Iranian government that are actually pretty happy by how this has gone, all things considered.
[00:56:46]  There are basically two views on Ali Khamenei, the supreme leader.
[00:56:50]  View number one, he was keeping the system together.
[00:56:52]  And view number two, which I'm more persuaded by, which was that he was an 88 or 87-year-old gerodocrat that was in the way of more ambitious younger people, including maybe his son, depending on his position.
[00:57:06]  I mean, basically, the Iranians have developed into a a junta.
[00:57:11]  They are run by the Revolutionary Guards, and they have discovered a new toy, which is that they can shut down the Strada formuz.
[00:57:18]  They always theoretically knew that, but it's one thing to know something in theory and to see it in practice.
[00:57:23]  So as I zoom out here on March 25th, it is hard to see how the United States is better off for this war.
[00:57:31]  And if that is the goal, if the goal of a war is to have strategic gains, this war was a clear error.
[00:57:38]  It seems like, notwithstanding some of these setbacks, because this drone program that the Iranians have has been incredibly pesky, to put it mildly, we're getting ready to double and triple down.
[00:57:50]  Now, there's the big question.
[00:57:52]  The big question right now is whether Trump is actually going to use all the ground troops who are currently en route to the Middle East.
[00:57:59]  Today, it's been reported that the Pentagon is expected to order roughly 3,000 troops from the Army's elite 82nd Airborne Division to the Middle East in the coming hours, according to the Wall Street Journal.
[00:58:12]  And then there was another unit that had been dispatched.
[00:58:16]  We had Marines already and sailors en route.
[00:58:19]  And what people are asking is, are we actually going to use them?
[00:58:22]  Or is this just a scare tactic by Trump to improve our hand at whatever negotiating table we may or may not be at?
[00:58:32]  remains unclear exactly who's negotiating with whom and how, but do you think we actually are going to start unleashing thousands of American ground troops in Iran?
[00:58:44]  I think at this point, given how this has gone, every time that President Trump has mobilized military assets, he's eventually used them.
[00:58:51]  It might take, you know, he initially started mobilizing these assets in January.
[00:58:56]  He used them by the end of February.
[00:58:58]  So I think base case, we are going to do it.
[00:59:01]  I think that there is a mobilization and an effort to try to potentially take this thing called Carda Island, which is in the Persian Gulf right off the coast of mainland Iran.
[00:59:12]  I think his military value and financial value is dubious and overstated.
[00:59:17]  But I think hawks on Iran are going to persuade Trump to try to take it piece by piece.
[00:59:23]  And I think you could see it be a potential mass fatality event.
[00:59:27]  What is mass fatalities?
[00:59:29]  I mean, there could be hundreds of Americans killed and trying to take this thing.
[00:59:32]  Yeah, it's very, very, very, very worrying.
[00:59:35]  I'm not sure the decision is made.
[00:59:38]  I think Trump probably changes his mind on how to approach this war hour by hour.
[00:59:43]  He's a day-to-day player.
[00:59:45]  But I think that the base case that there is going to be some movement, I think they keep trying to move the over-to-window on this.
[00:59:51]  And I think at the beginning of the war, they said that, well, maybe we do a little ground troops.
[00:59:58]  And remember, before the run-up to the war, that was always seen as, you know, oh, only the only the realists and the restrainers are making all this noise about ground troops.
[01:00:07]  No one's talking about ground troops.
[01:00:08]  No one's talking about ground troops.
[01:00:09]  Well, lo and behold, March 1, the administration was talking about ground troops.
[01:00:13]  And I think they were for a reason.
[01:00:16]  It's mission creep.
[01:00:17]  That's what people are worried about on this.
[01:00:20]  It's the very same term my husband texts me when I'm inside the grocery store and I said I only had to go in for one item.
[01:00:26]  And 45 minutes later, he's still waiting for me outside.
[01:00:29]  Mission creep.
[01:00:31]  Only here we're talking about life and death.
[01:00:33]  And there is a real question about, no, it's just a minor incursion.
[01:00:36]  You know, basically this small excursion is how President Trump phrased it.
[01:00:40]  And now we've got literally thousands of American troops on their way to Iran.
[01:00:46]  And, you know, there was another former military guy.
[01:00:50]  This is former CIA officer Mark Polymeropoulos, who is making the rounds on podcasts.
[01:00:55]  And he said this yesterday, similar to what you just said.
[01:00:57]  Here it is, Sat 20.
[01:00:59]  There's some very good open source intelligence sites that we've seen a flow of the special operations commands, kind of lead elements, Army's Delta Force, SEAL Team 6, the Task Force 160.
[01:01:09]  That's the U.S. Special Operations Aviation, 75th Ranger Regiment.
[01:01:13]  They also have been going to the Middle East on C-17s, multiple flights over the last 48 hours.
[01:01:18]  So we're seeing the deployment of what are ground forces.
[01:01:22]  And so I think that's something that one should take note of in particular, because in the past, when Trump has done this, whether it's the Venezuela operation with Maduro or this initial kickoff in Iran, when he moves military assets, he actually uses them.
[01:01:38]  And in particular, we also have to remember that the Marine Expeditionary Unit, the one coming from the Pacific, that will be on station by Friday in the area too.
[01:01:49]  So that's another contingent of Marines.
[01:01:51]  So there are forces, there are ground forces flowing to the region.
[01:01:56]  The reason I think Trump would not do it are mostly political, right?
[01:02:02]  That he there the polls are overwhelmingly against this, including Republicans.
[01:02:06]  Only a smattering of Republicans want to see ground troops unleashed in Iran.
[01:02:10]  So Trump knows that.
[01:02:12]  And also, I think, notwithstanding the fact that he seems to have been dazzled by the presentations made to him by the military industrial complex and its supporters at Fox News and elsewhere, I do think that he's fundamentally anti-war.
[01:02:24]  Like, I think he got excited about what happened in Venezuela.
[01:02:27]  He got excited about what we did in Iran in June.
[01:02:29]  He had people he trusted and watched too much on Fox News get in his ear about how amazing this could be for us.
[01:02:35]  But I think at his core, I think he is anti-war.
[01:02:39]  And does he really want to be the guy that commands 3,000 to 5,000 American ground troops in Iran where he knows that death toll and those Dover, you know, dignified transfer ceremonies are going to go up in a way that will be truly difficult for the nation and him.
[01:02:55]  Look, I'm very concerned.
[01:02:58]  I would have agreed with you fully a month ago, but I think at this point, structurally, what is going on here is that until President Trump tells Israel and he tells Benjamin Netanyahu, no, this war will not end.
[01:03:12]  And so you've alluded to it.
[01:03:14]  There's a potential Islamabad shock track to negotiate a settlement to this war.
[01:03:21]  But the reality is the Iranians are not going to agree to the exact same package they turned down a month ago.
[01:03:29]  They feel, I don't want to say strengthened, but emboldened by how they've done the last three weeks.
[01:03:36]  And if Trump is not willing to broker an America-first peace deal with the Iranians, then I think he will have to go to war.
[01:03:46]  He will have to keep, he's already at war.
[01:03:48]  He will have to escalate in the war.
[01:03:50]  That's just my concern.
[01:03:51]  And, you know, I'm not sure it's the die is cast.
[01:03:54]  I'm not sure it's fait accompli.
[01:03:55]  You already have, you know, elements within Israeli society clearly anxious that Trump is going to cut bait.
[01:04:02]  You have neoconservatives in the United States, the Wall Street Journal editorial board, certain members of the Fox News, basically the Murdoch machine that are nervous about it.
[01:04:11]  So like, you know, I think it's always very dumb to think that history is written.
[01:04:14]  But I do think that unless he tells Netanyahu no, unless he tells Israel no, they're going to keep marching on this.
[01:04:24]  No talk of Israeli troops on the ground, by the way, just the Americans.
[01:04:29]  Here's, I wanted to run this by you.
[01:04:31]  Victor Davis Hansen, who we love, who went through a very scary surgery recently for a cancer scare he had involving his lung, is now getting back out there.
[01:04:42]  He's going to come on the program soon.
[01:04:43]  He's not yet healthy enough to do like a full hour sit down with us, and he will be here just as soon as he is.
[01:04:48]  But he's done bit pieces, you know, where he's appeared here or there for 10 minutes.
[01:04:52]  And we got to hear him just a little bit on Hannity.
[01:04:55]  This is on Thursday, so it's a few days old.
[01:04:57]  But here's how he described how things are going.
[01:04:59]  He's an honest broker, and he's a war expert, and we love him.
[01:05:03]  So I wanted to get your reaction as a more skeptical person around this war to what he's saying.
[01:05:07]  SAP 22.
[01:05:09]  And when people say, well, we didn't have an imminent threat, we didn't have an imminent threat when they took our hostages, when they blew up our barracks.
[01:05:15]  Nobody said, we better attack Iran because we need an imminent threat when they blew up our embassy.
[01:05:20]  They never, they always acted spontaneously with surprises, and we never knew what they were going to do.
[01:05:26]  So the idea you have to have a telegraphed imminent threat, it's not the nature of that regime.
[01:05:31]  It's lying, disguise, and dissimulation.
[01:05:34]  And that's their pattern for the last 47 years.
[01:05:37]  But nobody's taken them seriously.
[01:05:39]  Every president said, we're going to deal with this, all seven of them, and all seven of them did not.
[01:05:43]  And then all seven of them, when they got out of office, said, I regret that I didn't.
[01:05:47]  There's enough evidence to see how things are really going.
[01:05:51]  Europeans would never agree to go anywhere near Iran unless they thought the tide was turning and they think that we're going to win.
[01:05:59]  Otherwise, they would keep still.
[01:06:01]  And the reason that the Pepto nations of the Gulf survive is they have their finger in the wind and they're very attuned to the climate.
[01:06:09]  And when you have Al Jazeera praising the United States bombing campaign and saying that it's been underestimated and it's brilliant and effective, you get the feeling that they think not only should the United States finish the job, but it can and will finish the job.
[01:06:24]  And then when you start to see tactical aircraft like Warthogs and Apaches, that means that they're offering almost ground and sea support to hit targets.
[01:06:35]  There's nothing, there's no defense at all when you have that type of aircraft flying at will in Iranian airspace.
[01:06:42]  So you put it all together, and I think it's pretty clear that this robotope strategy that they have that we're going to tire before they are is dependent on just public opinion, the midterms in the United States.
[01:06:57]  And if Trump sees it through, and I think he will, I think they're going to fall pretty soon in two, three, four weeks.
[01:07:05]  What do you make of that, Kurt?
[01:07:06]  Yeah, I hope he gets better.

=== Public Opinion Shifts (13:36) ===

[01:07:07]  But I think that's a dissembling and inaccurate portrait of what's going on.
[01:07:11]  I mean, first of all, there's just basic facts he got wrong.
[01:07:13]  I'm not aware of any president who has been president during the Iranian or the Islamic Republic's existence that stated that they regretted that they didn't go harder on it.
[01:07:22]  In fact, it's the opposite.
[01:07:25]  Carter's presidency was destroyed by a failed special forces raid.
[01:07:29]  Carter's presidency was destroyed by trusting the Hawks and not working out a pragmatic deal with the new leadership in Iran.
[01:07:36]  Reagan didn't say anything of this sort.
[01:07:38]  Clinton ditto.
[01:07:40]  George W. Bush fought the Iran Hawks to his credit in his second term after making a mess of the world in the first term.
[01:07:47]  Obama signed a deal with the Iranians.
[01:07:50]  Biden, while probably more hawkish on Iran than Obama, didn't say anything to the contrary.
[01:07:57]  And his relationship with Netanyahu helped undermine him with the Gaza protests.
[01:08:01]  So, I mean, if anything, it was Trump who was the first president to relent to Israeli pressure on Iran.
[01:08:08]  So I don't know what he's seeing there.
[01:08:10]  You know, secondarily, like, look, you know, passes in prologue and Mr. Hansen's a nice man, but he was a vociferous champion of the Iraq War.
[01:08:18]  You know, he's the opposite of Pat Buchanan, the founder of our magazine.
[01:08:23]  And, you know, I think military historians occasionally can lapse into becoming war fetishists.
[01:08:30]  And I think his strategic analysis is just wrong.
[01:08:33]  I think he knows a lot about World War II and about ancient history and can give you way more details about those battles than I can.
[01:08:40]  But his prescriptive analysis is atrocious.
[01:08:44]  I mean, we would have done a lot better the last 25 years by just doing the opposite of what Victor Davis Hansen wanted geopolitically.
[01:08:51]  Oh, my beautiful VDH took a beating there, but he'll be back on and we'll ask him directly.
[01:08:56]  Now, I take your point.
[01:08:57]  You're basically saying he's way more hawkish than you are and that one quarter of the Republicans are, and that he hasn't always been right, like backing the war in Iraq, which I also did and have lived to regret.
[01:09:11]  In my defense, I knew nothing.
[01:09:12]  I was a young Fox News anchor.
[01:09:14]  I did as instructed by my bosses who are still pushing war on us all these years later.
[01:09:19]  Not to excuse myself, but just to contextualize it.
[01:09:23]  The consequences to Trump politically are already being felt and they are significant.
[01:09:30]  And, you know, as somebody who is an American conservative, I imagine you're alarmed about what I'm seeing and what you're seeing in these polls as well.
[01:09:39]  Like, I don't think it's all about the Iran war.
[01:09:42]  I think it has largely to do, mostly to do with the economy.
[01:09:45]  But being looking like you're distracted and focused on, you know, Iran instead of Illinois is not a great thing for any American president.
[01:09:54]  And Harry Anton over at CNN just did a rundown of the numbers and in particular the numbers on American men and how it's going for Trump with American men.
[01:10:06]  Hold on, we have it here, SAT 12.
[01:10:09]  Donald Trump and Republicans won in 2024 because of support from male voters.
[01:10:14]  The only way they can win, given the gender gap in this country, is support from male voters.
[01:10:19]  And male voters are abandoning Donald Trump.
[01:10:22]  In November of 2024, he beat Kamala Harris among them by 13 points, by 13 points.
[01:10:27]  Look at where he is now on his net approval rating.
[01:10:29]  Down he goes.
[01:10:30]  It's a 20-point shift away from Donald Trump.
[01:10:33]  He is now seven points underwater at this particular point among men.
[01:10:37]  I think it is very difficult for Republicans to do well in this midterm cycle if Donald Trump is underwater with men.
[01:10:44]  And look right here.
[01:10:45]  Whoa, yikes, yikes, yikes, yikes.
[01:10:48]  Men under the age of 25 on Trump.
[01:10:51]  He won them in 2024 by five points.
[01:10:54]  Look where he is now.
[01:10:55]  The net approval rating way down there.
[01:10:58]  Down we go to negative 19 points.
[01:11:00]  That's nearly, what is that, nearly a 25-point switcheroo against the president of the United States when it comes to men under the age of 45?
[01:11:09]  Those men that had switched their allegiances over to the Republican Party are seeing what the president is doing.
[01:11:15]  They don't like what the president is doing, and they have very much soured on the president of the United States.
[01:11:21]  That is no bueno, Kirkman.
[01:11:24]  No, I mean, it's a stake in the heart of what Trump is supposed to be about.
[01:11:28]  And, you know, it's not as if he should advance the concerns exclusively of men under 45, but no one can really deny that that was in a lot of ways his base and why he was reelected in 2024, why he did better than he did in 2020, and why he did better than he did in 2016.
[01:11:44]  And I think it belies, sorry, it reveals how sort of radical the war contingent actually is.
[01:11:51]  It's basically older Americans, older conservatives who, again, supported a lot of these mistaken wars in the 2000s and in the past.
[01:12:00]  And frankly, it is a bunch of cynical careerists and a lot of foreigners.
[01:12:06]  This war is extremely popular in Israel.
[01:12:08]  It's over 80% supported in Israel.
[01:12:12]  It's under 40% in the United States.
[01:12:14]  And as you mentioned, for any escalation, ground troops, et cetera, et cetera, it gets dismal from there.
[01:12:21]  The numbers just go down even further.
[01:12:23]  Last night, there's a special election in Florida in a House district that includes Mar-a-Lago, State House District 87 in Palm Beach.
[01:12:32]  And it's a local election, like a statehouse, not federal.
[01:12:35]  And it's been vacant since August of last year.
[01:12:38]  Trump won this district at the presidential level by 11 points last November, of November 2024.
[01:12:45]  Last night, a Democrat won.
[01:12:47]  She's a business owner, a military spouse, running for office for the first time.
[01:12:51]  She defeated the heavily favored Republican, John Maples, who, John Maples, had received Trump's complete and total endorsement.
[01:13:00]  And her own explanation on why she won was everyone's feeling the affordability crisis.
[01:13:05]  And the last thing Florida families needed when they're struggling is $4 gas.
[01:13:12]  That's the problem.
[01:13:12]  I mean, that's the other problem for Republicans, whether you want this war or support it or don't, is you don't want to lose the midterms and you really don't want to lose the White House over to the Democrats in 2028.
[01:13:27]  And the harbingers at the state special election level are all bad, universally bad across the board.
[01:13:34]  Like multiple red cities that Trump won in November of 24, now going Democrat in these special elections by double digits, sometimes as much as like 19 or 20 points to the dem in a Trump one district.
[01:13:49]  So these are warning signs that we need to pay attention to if we don't want a bloodbath in November and then the following presidential election.
[01:13:54]  And they're not getting better thanks to this war.
[01:13:57]  Yeah, I mean, I also think people are underrated to the degree to which Americans are increasingly independent, like literally registered independents.
[01:14:03]  I believe the numbers are approximating about 40%, depending on what surveys you believe.
[01:14:08]  So even if you see the polling of just quote Republican voters, it's a smaller and smaller slice of the country than ever before.
[01:14:16]  Same thing with Democrats.
[01:14:17]  Smaller and smaller slice of the country than ever before, at least in the modern era.
[01:14:21]  And so, you know, that's how you're going to get these wild swings where Trump can win a district by 11 to 15 points and lose it by five points less than 14 months later, less than 16 months later.
[01:14:33]  And so, you know, I would not be sitting pretty and sanguine in the White House that Trump is commanding a majority of Republican supporters on any given issue.
[01:14:44]  The reality is George W. Bush left the presidency at 22% approval rating.
[01:14:48]  What does that tell you?
[01:14:49]  Over half Republicans supported him, even as the economy tanked and he lost two foreign wars.
[01:14:55]  It's just sort of the nature of partisanship.
[01:14:57]  Over 80% of Democrats backed President Joe Biden in June of 2024, and the Democratic leadership cooed him 30 days later.
[01:15:05]  So these, you know, these, you know, these surveys of support are interesting only so far as they go.
[01:15:12]  There are tons of Americans who want to trust the president.
[01:15:15]  There are tons of Americans who want to Kamala Harris is not the president.
[01:15:19]  But I think mapping the enthusiasm for this war, mapping the enthusiasm for $6 gas is a tricky business.
[01:15:27]  And I would not be overconfident if I were President Trump's political advisors.
[01:15:32]  Well, that's the problem because you don't win election with just your party only.
[01:15:36]  And even if you just look at Republicans, the latest poll out today from Reuters shows one in four Republicans opposes this war.
[01:15:43]  It only has 75% approval rating across the entire Republican Party.
[01:15:49]  So that's not even, even if you got every single one of those, you know, three quarters of Republicans to go out there and vote for him, that doesn't win you an election.
[01:15:57]  You need all of the party and some independents generally to win.
[01:16:01]  And what we have here is he's got 25% of Republicans now opposing him.
[01:16:07]  We saw a poll the other day saying also 25% of the electorate that put him in office, which does include independents, are against this war.
[01:16:16]  So it's like he can say that the MAGA loyalists love the war, but he needs more than that to stay in office, to keep Republicans in office.
[01:16:24]  So you've got 25% of those who put him in office opposing the war.
[01:16:27]  You've got 25% now of Republicans who are opposing the war as it goes on.
[01:16:31]  And you have 69% of independents opposing the war.
[01:16:35]  69% of independents.
[01:16:38]  Obviously, 93% of Dems oppose.
[01:16:40]  They'd oppose anything he does.
[01:16:41]  But you cannot win an election with 69% of independents and 25% of Republicans opposing you.
[01:16:49]  I think the independent numbers by some surveys are worse than the Democratic numbers.
[01:16:53]  There is a contingent of basically older Zionist, sort of, I don't know, Biden-wing Democrat, basically.
[01:17:02]  You see it in the leadership choices of Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries.
[01:17:06]  They're a little loath to over-criticize the Iran war.
[01:17:09]  You would think the congressional Democrats would be all in on opposing this, but they're actually not.
[01:17:14]  It's actually the independents that are driving the opposition, I think, most vociferously in the country.
[01:17:20]  They just don't have representation in Congress, unfortunately, but they do vote.
[01:17:25]  That's true.
[01:17:25]  They do vote and they vote in the midterms and they vote in the presidency.
[01:17:30]  Yeah, they have a representative sitting right here.
[01:17:33]  I've been in long-term residents for many, many years.
[01:17:36]  Likewise, same year.
[01:17:37]  Yeah.
[01:17:37]  I always say I would not put on anybody's team jersey.
[01:17:40]  I just, there's too many like scoundrels in each party who don't represent my interests.
[01:17:43]  And nor do I sign on to anybody's uniform party platform.
[01:17:46]  I like being able to say, I'll make my decision when it's time.
[01:17:50]  What you're seeing right now is that you have a sort of empire strikes back moment of the Bushwing Republican Party, and they're using Trump as kind of a figurehead and mascot.
[01:18:00]  It's a MAGA drag act.
[01:18:02]  And these forces very much want to, once Mr. Trump leaves the scene, once he doesn't run for that third term, they thank him for his service.
[01:18:12]  They thank him for the Iran war.
[01:18:14]  And then they want to knife JD Vance.
[01:18:16]  And then they want to put Marco Rubio up or Ted Cruz up and go back to business as usual, circa 2015.
[01:18:23]  That's exactly right.
[01:18:24]  I mean, the nerve of Ben Shapiro and Mark Levin, both of whom are two original never Trumpers, to now cloak themselves in MAGA gear and act like they've been with Trump all along and really Trump is just doing the bidding of the Republican Party when Trump ran as a restrainer, as somebody who is against war.
[01:18:41]  And now they look at people like you and like me who believe Trump on that and who would really like to hold him to it as some sort of turncoats, you know, unpatriotic, disgusting.
[01:18:51]  It's like, wait, whoa, We're still where Trump said he was the entire time he ran and governed the first time.
[01:19:00]  Absolutely.
[01:19:00]  Absolutely.
[01:19:01]  I mean, I mean, it is, it is heinous and disturbing for the country that the command center, the nerve center seems to be of the White House's media operation at this point are people like Mark Levin, Ben Shapiro, the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, Barry Weiss's media outfits.
[01:19:22]  These are people who all vociferously oppose Trump.
[01:19:24]  They oppose Trump more, in my opinion, than Hillary Clinton.
[01:19:28]  The Clintons wanted Trump to be the nominee, right, to their error politically.
[01:19:34]  But the Never Trumpers actually burned their party cards.
[01:19:39]  Sometimes literally, not actually an analogy, they actually burned their party cards and they opposed Trump.
[01:19:44]  And why?
[01:19:45]  Because, you know, it wasn't so much, they said it was about his character and the bankruptcies and the divorces and all this stuff.
[01:19:50]  But I think they would have lumped it if he had been with them on foreign policy.
[01:19:54]  And he was loud, rude, and unsparing on the mistakes of the Bush presidency, on the Iraq war, on the unnecessarily, the lack of necessity of these foreign wars, how America was getting ripped off on the world stage, how it was wasting its time in the Middle East.
[01:20:09]  He was unsparing on that in 2016, and he was unsparing in 2024 as well.
[01:20:15]  In a lot of ways, Trump is best as a politician, as an insurgent.
[01:20:18]  I mean, that 2020 campaign was pretty lame, honestly.
[01:20:21]  The 2016 and 2024 campaigns were better because he was articulating this message.
[01:20:26]  And it is a complete act of retroactive continuity to try to argue that he always ran as a sort of Marco Rubio circa 2015 Republican.
[01:20:35]  The two hated each other.
[01:20:37]  Feeling sluggish, bloated, not quite like yourself, life constantly bombards us with silent threats.

=== Canceling Critics (15:23) ===

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[01:21:47]  Well, you know what people will say.
[01:21:48]  Well, he always made clear that Iran couldn't get a nuclear weapon.
[01:21:52]  Sure.
[01:21:52]  And that's really what led to this war.
[01:21:54]  Well, yeah, but I mean, but there's been a willing conflation between no nuclear weapon and everything else that was on the table.
[01:22:02]  So, number one, the guy that he just killed, the supreme leader of Iran, you know, they trust him, but he had issued a fatwa in the early 2000s against nuclear weapons.
[01:22:11]  So we just potentially removed the most major impediment within the Iranian system to them actually launching for a bomb.
[01:22:18]  His son or whoever is running Iran now, this sort of junta of eight or nine people in the IRGC, they may just lunge for a crude weapon at this time or even try to buy it from North Korea or something like this.
[01:22:28]  So number one, we've made it more likely that the Iranians will get a nuclear weapon.
[01:22:32]  Number two, there was a willful conflation in the negotiations by the Israelis, by the neoconservatives, by opponents of any diplomacy.
[01:22:43]  And I would include the Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, who cast a lot of doubts on diplomacy throughout this process.
[01:22:50]  There was a willful conflation between no nuclear weapon and no nuclear enrichment.
[01:22:56]  The Iranians wanted to maintain a pittance of enrichment to basically save face with their own population, somewhere around 3.5%, lower than Obama's JCPOA.
[01:23:07]  That is well, well, well below weapons grade, approximately 90%.
[01:23:12]  It's a fake issue.
[01:23:13]  And they knew, in my opinion, that Trump is not a details man.
[01:23:17]  He said it himself.
[01:23:18]  The deal can be a page long.
[01:23:20]  And there was a conflation between no enrichment and no nuclear weapon.
[01:23:24]  They don't, they can, they've been enriching since the end of JCPOA for years and they haven't got a nuclear weapon.
[01:23:31]  Right, exactly.
[01:23:31]  And so now we don't know what the idea is running Iran right now.
[01:23:34]  It's not an imminent threat.
[01:23:35]  I mean, I mean, VDH is wrong.
[01:23:37]  If it was an imminent threat, then it's been an imminent threat every day since Ayatollah Khomeini came down the plane in 1979.
[01:23:44]  And I'm 35 years old and I haven't lived in mortal fear of the Ayatollah all 35 years of my life.
[01:23:51]  Yeah, he hasn't been front of Loeb for you.
[01:23:54]  It hasn't been for you.
[01:23:55]  I got through the 90s, the 2000s.
[01:23:56]  Yeah.
[01:23:57]  So what do you make, Kurt, of the very active campaign to silence any critics of this war as anti-Semites?
[01:24:05]  Because not a day passes where a detractor, somebody who's got questions about this, doesn't get called that word.
[01:24:12]  The latest yesterday was the despicable Josh Hammer decided to take a shot at Tulsi Gabbard.
[01:24:19]  I mean, seemingly out of nowhere, because he found out that she had Joe Kent working for her as her chief of staff for a period of time and therefore decided to go for her.
[01:24:30]  Here it is in SOT 23.
[01:24:32]  Multiple people around the same time, last fall, I don't remember the exact date, that Tulsi Gabbard, who is the director of national intelligence and she was Joe Kent's boss as the director of the National Counterterrorism Center, he worked under Tulsi Gabbard.
[01:24:45]  I was told by numerous people who are very much part of the conservative ecosystem in D.C.
[01:24:50]  These are well-sourced people, strong connections to the White House.
[01:24:53]  They told me to be strongly on the lookout for Tulsi Gabbard and her office.
[01:24:58]  They basically said that Tulsi Gabbard is running something of a shadow operation from her office, that she is personally, I was told this, I've met Tulsi, you don't know her well.
[01:25:09]  I was told she's personally actually very anti-Semitic and that she is heavily involved in a lot of the anti-Semitic influencer operations.
[01:25:18]  As a woman who watches the MK show and came to one of my tour stops, the red-headed libertarian said on X, I was told by people closer to the White House that you are a gay vampire, Josh Hammer.
[01:25:29]  So, I mean, let's just go with that.
[01:25:30]  Like, I've been told, I've been reliably told she's an anti-Semite and she's running an anti-Semitic op out of the DNI's office.
[01:25:38]  I mean, what is this, Kurt?
[01:25:40]  Yeah, I mean, look, I hope VDH gets better.
[01:25:43]  And I know that Josh is not well.
[01:25:45]  I mean, that he presents with the visage and the self-control of an insane person.
[01:25:51]  That was like a vintage Alex Jones segment, but at least Alex Jones is hilarious.
[01:25:57]  Josh is and yeah, Josh is charmless, unfortunately.
[01:26:02]  And most of his columns are a declaration of war against the English language, and this is no exception.
[01:26:08]  So, I mean, look, it's just factually inaccurate.
[01:26:11]  Number one, I mean, the story of Director Gabbard, unfortunately, is he just hasn't been terribly effective.
[01:26:18]  She doesn't have a strong relationship with Trump.
[01:26:20]  I think that's part of why Kent resigned.
[01:26:23]  The idea that this woman is anti-Semitic is just, well, you're right.
[01:26:27]  There's a conflation of any criticisms of Israel with prejudice towards Jews, but it's just not. who she is.
[01:26:33]  If anything, honestly, this is maybe a bit in the weeds.
[01:26:37]  If anything, her views on Middle Eastern politics are actually a pretty hard line against Sunni political Islam.
[01:26:47]  I mean, if you listen to her speeches over the years, she's basically backed the Israeli line vis-a-vis Hamas.
[01:26:55]  And, you know, like it's just not accurate.
[01:26:58]  He is just doing a character assassination of her.
[01:27:02]  And, you know, to what effect?
[01:27:05]  I mean, I don't actually think ODNI is actually that effective.
[01:27:10]  They didn't stop the war.
[01:27:12]  I think that's why Kent left.
[01:27:14]  Well, it's also an indictment, an attempt to indict Joe Kent, right, who's become very inconvenient for the Josh Hammers of the world, who they've dubbed him an anti-Semite.
[01:27:24]  There's an active campaign underway to try to cancel yours truly.
[01:27:28]  And the sin that I have committed is I'm friends with Tucker Carlson.
[01:27:31]  I mean, literally, like, you can get canceled now for your refusal to cancel somebody.
[01:27:37]  It's like they've gotten really desperate.
[01:27:39]  And especially since the war started, it's gone times 10 to try to silence any critics of it, which is very weird.
[01:27:46]  Like I listened to you.
[01:27:48]  I listened to a lot of critics of the war.
[01:27:50]  I am a critic of the war.
[01:27:51]  I'm still a Trump supporter, but I have no problem hearing people who support the war justify it, say why they believe in it.
[01:27:59]  Like I, there are two sides to it.
[01:28:01]  I totally get that and respect the other POV.
[01:28:03]  I don't share it, but what's with the attempt by people like Josh to try to cancel, diminish, smear anyone he perceives as less than full throttle and support?
[01:28:16]  The story is older than I think you're implying, frankly.
[01:28:19]  I mean, it's interesting that the free press is now the home of sort of anti-woke, anti-culture, cancel culture.
[01:28:26]  That's how it was founded in 2020, 2021, 2022.
[01:28:30]  But the reality, if you look at someone like Barry Weiss's career, she actually came about on the scene at Columbia University by trying to cancel and get defrocked pro-Palestinian professors.
[01:28:42]  I mean, this is an old, old, old, old playbook that goes way back.
[01:28:48]  This happened to the magazine, our magazine's co-founder, William Buckley, who I'm sure is still liked by a lot of conservatives.
[01:28:55]  I'm not a fan.
[01:28:58]  Bill Buckley oversaw something called In Search of Anti-Semitism, which is basically a witch hunt book that went after Pat Buchanan and Gorfidow just for their criticisms of Israel.
[01:29:11]  And this is the early 90s, early 90s.
[01:29:14]  It's ubiquitous right now.
[01:29:16]  And what you mentioned Barry Weiss at Columbia, there's a debate amongst some in the American Jewish community about once we saw the explosion of anti-Semitism, actual anti-Semitism post-10.7 on so many of the college campuses.
[01:29:30]  I mean, like the ripping off of people's yarmulcas, they're getting in the faces of Jewish college students who are trying to cross the quad, screaming, you know, globalize the intifada.
[01:29:38]  That was crazy as shit.
[01:29:39]  Pulling down the pictures of the hostages who are still fighting for their lives.
[01:29:42]  That was crazy.
[01:29:42]  That was deeply wrong.
[01:29:45]  But we have seen a debate unfold in the wake of all of that about whether the answer is to put Jewish Americans into the category of DEI, like keep DEI and just put Jews in there too.
[01:30:00]  So it's like blacks and gays and trans and Jews.
[01:30:04]  And then there were many of us who said, that's the last thing we should be doing.
[01:30:08]  The answer is to eradicate DEI, DEI, and dividing us by skin color or religion or whatever.
[01:30:15]  That's the problem.
[01:30:17]  And the solution to the problem is not to enlarge the problem itself.
[01:30:20]  And to me, it seems clear that we lost that debate that, you know, being Jewish or forget Jewish, it's about like being pro-Israel, making Israel like a huge thing in your life and judging others by their opinions on Israel.
[01:30:34]  That's kind of gotten shoved into like a DEI category where now you get called an anti-Semite.
[01:30:39]  We were always told we criticize Israel and it wasn't anti-Semitic, but it turns out, it turns out that's just not true, Kurt.
[01:30:45]  I think the administration and facets of the administration are basically doing DEI for Jews only, actually.
[01:30:53]  They are preserving the DII playbook and tools, but just for Jews and just for against critics of Israel's wars.
[01:31:03]  And I mean, I think case in point, I believe the administration is re-suing Harvard.
[01:31:07]  And like, look, every single thing that happened on the campus protests in the past years is not defensible.
[01:31:13]  There's obviously above zero anti-Semitism in the country, but it's a country of 330 million people.
[01:31:19]  There's the First Amendment.
[01:31:20]  There's the right to protest.
[01:31:22]  Sometimes protests get out of hand.
[01:31:24]  And trying to smash these, I think, is going to be hugely counterproductive.
[01:31:29]  It's not working.
[01:31:31]  Israel's approval rating goes down and down and down and down in every survey.
[01:31:36]  And the Republicans, I mean, base case, one of the huge reasons they got thrown back into power that Mr. Trump was re-elected president was that people were fed up with the woke cancel culture of the early 2020s.
[01:31:50]  And for this administration to come in and now to try to, you know, pseudo-criminalize speech critical of Israel, I think, you know, doesn't pass the laugh test for the American people.
[01:32:00]  And there's going to be a major lane, in my opinion, for anti-war Democrats who want to run against this.
[01:32:07]  And then also, in my opinion, eventually right-wing anti-war critics as well.
[01:32:11]  I think the administration is making a huge error on this.
[01:32:13]  And I think, you know, look, I'm not sure it's so much being driven by Trump himself, but, you know, he's a coalition manager.
[01:32:20]  He's a sort of boss tweet figure.
[01:32:22]  And there are elements of his coalition that want to do this.
[01:32:25]  And like, look, I don't want to start a huge fight with this, but like, you know, there's someone like the Laura Lumer woman who's an utter fanatic and basically just has some sort of operation that is just trying to get people fired for their views on whether or not the Americans should support a foreign war, a war, by the way, that she criticized when Trump criticized it two years ago.
[01:32:48]  I just think shows how cynical and nasty and stupid, but also I'm very confident on the wrong side of history of all this is.
[01:32:56]  The Israeli hardline is running out of time in the United States and they know it.
[01:33:01]  I hope you're right because I tell you, this is not good for American Jews.
[01:33:05]  And I have, I mean, truly, I know it's like cliche, but look, literally, virtually all of my closest friends are Jewish.
[01:33:10]  I mean, I'd say 80% of them.
[01:33:12]  And to a person, even the ones who are really pro-Israel will say, these people don't represent me.
[01:33:19]  I don't judge people by how they feel about Israel, never mind how they feel about this war.
[01:33:25]  And I don't need everybody and their mother to get sued over anti-Semitism because they have the wrong poster board.
[01:33:32]  Like, I just don't think that normal American Jewish people are running around thinking, how does it affect Israel?
[01:33:40]  And how can I shut down other people's viewpoints that I find mildly offensive, even about Judaism?
[01:33:45]  You know, it's like I had a long talk with a friend of mine.
[01:33:47]  I was like, look, you know the number of like very, very conservative men I've had on this podcast?
[01:33:51]  I mean, like too many to count.
[01:33:54]  Do I think all of their views are perfectly equal when it comes to women and there's absolutely no sexism in their worldview?
[01:34:01]  No, I do not think that.
[01:34:03]  I don't give a shit.
[01:34:05]  Like, I just don't, like, who cares?
[01:34:07]  Like, okay, so we differ on a couple of issues and you may be this more this way and I mean more that way.
[01:34:12]  And neither one of us is perfect.
[01:34:13]  Nobody has the perfect, absolutely lovely worldview on everybody.
[01:34:17]  The point is, like, when do we start shutting down speech, shutting people out of the national conversation and hurling the nastiest allegations as defining of one's personhood?
[01:34:27]  When do we do that?
[01:34:28]  And against whom and for what purpose?
[01:34:30]  And what we're seeing right now is that allegation, the same way it was weaponized by the BLMers in 2020 to be, you know, everybody's racist, it's being weaponized right now by a certain contingent of Israel firsters to shut down any debate about this war or the Israel lobby AIPAC in America and their influence over our Congress.
[01:34:51]  No doubt.
[01:34:51]  I mean, I think you're picking up on a macro dynamic, which is the increasing separation of the American Jewish community from the interests of Israel or from the Israeli community, frankly.
[01:35:02]  And this has been going on for a number of years.
[01:35:05]  You know, people like Mr. Hammer are in a minority of Jews.
[01:35:09]  A minority of Jews vote Republican.
[01:35:11]  And then within that, a minority of Jews who vote Republican are inclined towards these types of politics, in my view.
[01:35:18]  And it is a cynical attempt.
[01:35:22]  I mean, and by the way, it's not just driven by Jews.
[01:35:25]  I mean, people like Senator Ted Cruz, Lindsey Graham, Tom Cotton, they clearly revel.
[01:35:32]  Rupert Murdoch.
[01:35:33]  They clearly revel at the opportunity to call someone racist for once.
[01:35:38]  Like, I mean, I just think, I think we shouldn't use this conversation at all.
[01:35:41]  Not to imply that there aren't genuine bigots and racists in this country.
[01:35:45]  And frankly, some of them are pretty separate are pretty strident critics of me because I try to advance a principled criticism of Israel, principled non-interventionism.
[01:35:59]  And I think there are people who actually want to agree with Benjamin Netanyahu, that they want the conversation to be about Jews.

=== Jews and DEI Debate (02:54) ===

[01:36:07]  And I think that plays into all the wrong people's hands.
[01:36:11]  And I think you can totally criticize the government of Israel.
[01:36:16]  You can totally argue that the United States should have nothing to do with this and that does not make you a bigot.
[01:36:22]  In fact, some of the most brilliant and principled critics of Israel for decades now are Jews and have been Jews.
[01:36:33]  Yeah, I do think that they try to make an example of certain well-known people as a warning to others.
[01:36:40]  It's losing its effectiveness.
[01:36:41]  It's a stay to hell in love.
[01:36:42]  It's losing its effectiveness.
[01:36:43]  It is.
[01:36:44]  I mean, you're to go after Tucker Carlson, who we both know.
[01:36:49]  This is going after the second most important conservative in the country.
[01:36:53]  It's not going to work.
[01:36:55]  And I mean, and Tucker's power only grows as a result of it.
[01:36:58]  Like his show is on fire.
[01:37:00]  People are thirsting for an alternate viewpoint.
[01:37:03]  And I think I'm sure he has a lot of independents and Democrats listening too, but I think there's a large strain of Republicans who would like to hear their own opposition to this war embodied by smart conversations.
[01:37:15]  And I don't focus on Israel anywhere near as much as Tucker.
[01:37:19]  I just don't have the interest.
[01:37:20]  But I'm also a critic of this war.
[01:37:22]  And it's been interesting.
[01:37:23]  We've had some audience say, I'm not interested in this.
[01:37:26]  And we've had tons of new audience come and say, oh, I'm very interested in hearing this discussion.
[01:37:30]  I'm a bit of an Iran nerd.
[01:37:32]  I like talking about this stuff.
[01:37:34]  But the reality is it's not us driving this.
[01:37:38]  This is all the administration is doing because of our relationship with Israel, right?
[01:37:42]  I mean, this is an administration that's ostensibly supposed to be about immigration and trade protection.
[01:37:47]  And yes, there are people working on that.
[01:37:49]  But what is sucking up all of the oxygen is the Iran war, is Israel issues.
[01:37:54]  And it wasn't just a Trump story.
[01:37:56]  It also happened to Joe Biden.
[01:37:57]  This relationship is bipartisan in being, I think, a pretty bad bag of goods for whoever the president of the United States is, unless we make a clean break with the Israelis.
[01:38:09]  So, Kurt, last question.
[01:38:10]  What do you think is going to happen this week?
[01:38:12]  Do you think Trump actually does unleash these troops, or do you think he takes the off-ramp because he's feeling the pressure at home with the gas prices and these politics that we went over and just declares a victory and gets the hell out of it?
[01:38:23]  I think we're probably going to do some sort of military operation unless Trump is able to will into existence this potential Pakistan side dialogue.
[01:38:34]  And I think there's basically one man, a lot of it's rumor at this point, but there's one man that potentially could come in as a sort of due ex Machina, and that is VP JD Vance.
[01:38:45]  If he does meet with some of these Iranians in South Asia, I think that's a game changer because I think the Iranians are done meeting with Wickoff and Kushner.
[01:38:53]  Yeah, that's right, because we bombed them the last time they were in the midst of those negotiations, and they therefore no longer trust them.
[01:39:00]  Kurt, great, great discussion.

=== Life Insurance Secrets (02:29) ===

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[01:40:57]  Hey everyone, it's me, Megyn Kelly.
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=== From Soap to Hollywood (03:41) ===

[01:41:31]  From small town, North Dakota to the bright lights of Hollywood, actor Josh DeMell first rose to fame on the daytime soap opera All My Children before making the jump to the big screen, starring in everything from romantic comedies to the Transformers franchise.
[01:41:47]  But these days, life looks a little different.
[01:41:50]  As a father of two with another on the way, DeMel has traded the hustle and bustle of Hollywood for a quieter, off-the-grid life in Minnesota, embracing the role he says matters most, being a dad.
[01:42:03]  And now he's channeling that real life experience in his latest project.
[01:42:07]  In his new film, Preschool, which he directed and stars in, he plays one of two fathers locked in an over-the-top battle to secure a coveted spot at an elite preschool.
[01:42:19]  The film spirals into a hilarious and relatable look at just how far parents will go for Little Junior.
[01:42:26]  Here's some of the trailer.
[01:42:28]  I will make absolutely sure that you have every opportunity that life has to offer.
[01:42:32]  Welcome to Pugsy's Academy of Excellence.
[01:42:34]  We only accept the best here.
[01:42:36]  A prepared child is a successful child.
[01:42:38]  Oh my God.
[01:42:39]  Excellent.
[01:42:41]  Unfortunately, this year, we only have one slot.
[01:42:46]  I know they have a strategy.
[01:42:48]  I just have to figure out what it is.
[01:42:50]  We need to know what Dennis will up against.
[01:42:52]  We are a brilliant team.
[01:42:53]  There isn't a single problem we can't fix.
[01:42:56]  We're just getting started, Todd.
[01:43:02]  Keeping in fights.
[01:43:04]  He's done it!
[01:43:06]  What's best for our children?
[01:43:11]  That is amazing and very real.
[01:43:14]  He's also here to break some news about the business he founded, Gatlin.
[01:43:17]  We'll get into that in just a bit.
[01:43:18]  Josh, welcome to the show.
[01:43:20]  Megan, I'm so happy to be here.
[01:43:22]  I've been hoping to meet you for a very long time.
[01:43:24]  So here we are.
[01:43:25]  Thank you.
[01:43:26]  Thank you so much.
[01:43:27]  It's great to have you.
[01:43:28]  Big fan.
[01:43:28]  And I'm an even bigger fan of your lifestyle and character choices.
[01:43:33]  I feel like you are one of those few rare beings in Hollywood that gets there, makes it big, and says, what the hell is this?
[01:43:43]  I'm out.
[01:43:44]  Like you keep your career going.
[01:43:46]  But when it comes to passing on values to the next gen, you've decided on something more sane.
[01:43:51]  So let's start there.
[01:43:52]  Why are you not raising your family in Los Angeles?
[01:43:56]  Well, we do spend part of our time here.
[01:43:58]  I have a 12-year-old who lives in Los Angeles, but he also comes with us up to Fargo, North Dakota, and the cabin that you see there all the time.
[01:44:07]  We spend most of the summer out there and a big part of the winter too.
[01:44:11]  It's just, you know, to your point, it was like, you know, my wife is from North Dakota, very much a family girl, very close to her family.
[01:44:20]  I am the same.
[01:44:21]  And it was just a chance for us to, I don't know, give them something else besides the big city.
[01:44:28]  You know, I grew when I bought that place 17 years ago, it was, it was a way for me to sort of relive my youth in a way, because I grew up in the outskirts of mine at North Dakota, out in the woods like Huck Finn.
[01:44:41]  And so when I bought this property, I think it was, that was the initial impetus for it.
[01:44:45]  And then as I, as I went on, I had Axel and now Shepard, and we have a little one on the way after a little girl on the way in June.
[01:44:52]  It's, you know, I really want them to be able to experience the things that I did, to get dirty, to, you know, figure out things on their own, to get off their iPads and to just explore.
[01:45:04]  And I think that that's, it's really been a huge blessing.
[01:45:07]  It's our happy place out there.
[01:45:08]  And I could live out there year-round if I could.

=== Elizabeth Banks Connection (06:16) ===

[01:45:13]  So what you're saying was the draw to Minnesota was not Tim Walz.
[01:45:18]  No, it was not Tim Waltz.
[01:45:19]  It was not Tim Walz.
[01:45:22]  Thank God.
[01:45:23]  Then we can continue getting to know each other.
[01:45:26]  That's a thing.
[01:45:26]  I'm thrilled to hear that.
[01:45:29]  All right.
[01:45:30]  So you start off as this rural kid and grow up, you know, dirt under your fingernails, like I did actually up in Syracuse, New York, too, like in the creek a lot of the time and making mud pies.
[01:45:40]  And I think that develops a good person on a number of levels.
[01:45:43]  But then you decide to try your hand in modeling first.
[01:45:46]  So I'm told.
[01:45:47]  And I'm told you actually made it so big that you beat Ashton Kutcher for male model of the year back in what, the mid-2000s?
[01:45:56]  No, that was the late 90s, but I didn't actually make it big.
[01:45:59]  He did.
[01:45:59]  Late 90s, okay.
[01:46:00]  It was, it was, I won a competition that was sort of like Zoolander in a lot of ways when I, when I really look back at it now, it was, it was ridiculous, but it was what I thought was my, you know, my rocket to stardom.
[01:46:14]  And it didn't turn out so much that way.
[01:46:16]  It was four years of grinding and, and, you know, you know, I won the thing and I thought that I was going to go on and, you know, do great things, but it, it, it, uh, it didn't turn out that way.
[01:46:25]  Ashton, on the other hand, went on and did that 70s show and got a Calvin Klein camp and just a bunch of different things.
[01:46:32]  So I was pretty bitter at him for a while.
[01:46:36]  But we've, we've buried the hatchet.
[01:46:38]  We laugh about it now.
[01:46:41]  Well, you have the chiseled good looks, which will always help you as a male actor and a male in general in life.
[01:46:47]  And it's no accident that you started on all my children, right?
[01:46:50]  Where it's like, back then, I'm sure they were like, he's hot.
[01:46:53]  If he can act at all, he's hired.
[01:46:56]  And it would turn out that you could do it all, which is why you became a big movie star.
[01:46:59]  But I do want to take us back as somebody who used to watch All My Children a lot back in the day.
[01:47:05]  Not in the more.
[01:47:06]  Yeah, sure.
[01:47:06]  When I was growing up, I loved all my children.
[01:47:09]  I watched General Hospital.
[01:47:11]  I had a few that I really liked.
[01:47:12]  But here you are in the following SAT 52.
[01:47:16]  Good morning, Rosalie.
[01:47:18]  The meal and the company were so charming the other day.
[01:47:21]  I thought I'd see what your breakfasts were like.
[01:47:24]  Did you happen to bring a different credit card this time?
[01:47:30]  I'm afraid not.
[01:47:32]  No huh.
[01:47:34]  But you were so clever about it before.
[01:47:36]  I don't care.
[01:47:37]  Andrew's here today.
[01:47:40]  What a shame.
[01:47:43]  We had such a great time.
[01:47:45]  When you talked about Tuscany, I felt like I was there.
[01:47:49]  Yeah, I started telling you about Switzerland.
[01:47:52]  You were asking me about skiing and Chamonix.
[01:47:54]  Because I've read about Chamonix.
[01:47:56]  But you've been there.
[01:47:58]  Oh, well.
[01:48:00]  Wait.
[01:48:02]  You don't have to go.
[01:48:04]  I got paid this morning.
[01:48:05]  Oh, no.
[01:48:06]  You can still be on me.
[01:48:07]  I couldn't let you do that, Rosalie.
[01:48:09]  Be my pleasure.
[01:48:13]  Really?
[01:48:14]  You talked me into it.
[01:48:16]  And of course, I can return the favor sometime.
[01:48:19]  I'll be right back with the menu.
[01:48:21]  Oh, yeah.
[01:48:22]  It's hilarious.
[01:48:23]  That's amazing.
[01:48:24]  So many stories.
[01:48:25]  Okay, that scene was the most impressionable moment of my easily my late 20s into my mid-30s.
[01:48:36]  Even now, I remember that scene like it was yesterday.
[01:48:39]  I couldn't tell you what I said in a movie last week or anything that I did like recently.
[01:48:46]  But that scene, because I was so nervous, I knew this movie on TV for the first time.
[01:48:51]  All I could think about was, oh my God, I'm going to be on TV.
[01:48:53]  All my friends back home are going to see this.
[01:48:55]  What am I going to do?
[01:48:56]  So I would, I would just, and I, and I, you know, was the breathing.
[01:48:59]  I couldn't, I feel it now.
[01:49:02]  It's like, it's like I regress back to that moment because that was like the one time in my leather duster and my mohair mock turtleneck.
[01:49:11]  With like one too many buttons undone.
[01:49:14]  It was like, and so I remember just being so nervous that I had to remember these lines and I was going to be on TV and it was just terrifying.
[01:49:21]  That the girl, by the way, is Elizabeth Banks.
[01:49:24]  Do you know who that is?
[01:49:25]  I thought that was Elizabeth Banks.
[01:49:28]  I was like, that looks exactly like Elizabeth Banks, who also, of course, went on to become a huge job too, which we also laugh about that because we were so.
[01:49:38]  Oh, thanks for bringing that one out, Megan.
[01:49:41]  Holy crap.
[01:49:41]  I was not expecting it.
[01:49:42]  It's funny because I could be wrong, but I think I spent last week with Elizabeth Banks where we went on vacation for our kids' spring break.
[01:49:53]  Justin Timberlake was 100% there.
[01:49:55]  He's married to Jessica Beale, who we also saw.
[01:49:58]  And she was with a hot blonde who looked remarkably like Elizabeth Banks.
[01:50:03]  And those two just starred together in one of those Netflix, you know, docu series or not docu series, but like a series that was really good.
[01:50:10]  And she looks amazing.
[01:50:11]  If it in fact was Elizabeth Banks, she looks awesome.
[01:50:14]  And so you guys have both made it big.
[01:50:16]  Probably was.
[01:50:17]  Yeah.
[01:50:17]  Thanks for being here.
[01:50:18]  I don't know.
[01:50:18]  But all right, so then you parlay that into a movie career.
[01:50:21]  And so like you could act, you got a bunch of Emmy nominations, won one, and then you decide there could be bigger things in store for me.
[01:50:30]  I'm going to try my hand at the big screen.
[01:50:32]  And not only do you get cast in big movies, but like the Transformers, like you can't, is that just an actor's utmost dream?
[01:50:40]  Any man on earth would love to star in this, no?
[01:50:43]  Yeah, that was, it was a big decision actually to leave all my children because I did it for three years.
[01:50:49]  It was for the first time, I felt like I had something.
[01:50:53]  I felt like I belonged in some way, although it took me forever until recently to actually feel like I belonged in this business because I felt like an outsider for so long.
[01:51:02]  But to leave all my children, because it was the first time I was in New York City, straight from North Dakota.
[01:51:08]  It was like I was making a little money for the first time.
[01:51:11]  And they offered me a contract to stay for three more years.
[01:51:14]  And I decided, you know what?
[01:51:15]  No, I'm going to, I'm going to, I'm going to go try my hand and see what happens.
[01:51:21]  And I left and moved back to Los Angeles.
[01:51:23]  And shortly after that, I got Las Vegas and then I got Winnedate with Tad Hamilton.

=== Feeling Like an Outsider (02:55) ===

[01:51:29]  And then shortly after that was Transformers.
[01:51:31]  So, you know, it was, it was, you know, I guess I just trusted that I could do it.
[01:51:37]  It was a, it was a scary move at the time.
[01:51:40]  But, you know, I guess if I were to give advice to any young person out there, just believe that you can go do it.
[01:51:47]  You know, you just gotta, you really gotta just trust.
[01:51:49]  But was that the before and after?
[01:51:51]  Like that, the Transformers thing had to be like where, okay, now everybody knows you.
[01:51:57]  That was, that was a big one because that production was gigantic.
[01:52:01]  It was, you know, Michael Bay had all the toys, helicopters and all the cameras.
[01:52:07]  And we had jets flying over.
[01:52:09]  We had DOD involved.
[01:52:10]  And we were on, you know, it was just, it was, because my stuff especially, because I did all the, all the military stuff.
[01:52:15]  And so it was, it was a big sort of collaboration with the U.S. military to pull all that off.
[01:52:21]  And they were really helpful in doing all that.
[01:52:25]  So it was that stuff in particular, seriously, and it was like massive explosions everywhere.
[01:52:30]  And it was, it was unlike anything I'd done before.
[01:52:34]  So at the time, I felt like it was, I felt like a tiny cog in a giant machine.
[01:52:40]  Looking back at it now, it was 10.
[01:52:42]  I did four of them.
[01:52:43]  See, one, two, three, and I did four of them.
[01:52:46]  And, you know, it was a huge boost to my career, to say the least.
[01:52:52]  Well, of course, since we subjected you to the All My Children clip, we will do the honor of now playing a Transformers clip, the later version of Josh.
[01:53:01]  Here it is.
[01:53:05]  F-22s, we're still waiting.
[01:53:51]  Okay, for the listening audience, Josh is decked out in his camo with his bike and so on.
[01:53:57]  And the question I have for you coming out of that is probably not the one you expect, but it seems to me if you get cast in a film like that, which is testosterone central and you feel like such a badass with the military and the guns and the camo and the pogs, and you're making it big in Hollywood at the same time with the recognition going through the roof, it might be a time for like church, God, a normie romantic partner,

=== Charlie Sheen Comparison (11:40) ===

[01:54:25]  like something or someone to ground you and remind you you're human.
[01:54:28]  Don't get too big.
[01:54:30]  Don't indulge too much in the excesses that are now going to become available to you.
[01:54:35]  Did that happen to you?
[01:54:36]  Wow, what a question, Megan.
[01:54:38]  So I'm so glad I'm here today.
[01:54:43]  Yeah, the truth is there are a lot of pitfalls in this business.
[01:54:48]  And, you know, I'm not going to say I was perfect, you know, but I did know that none of this was real.
[01:54:58]  You know, fame can come and go as it can go as quickly as it comes.
[01:55:03]  I did know that.
[01:55:04]  And I have a really tight-knit group of friends back home and family that I leaned on heavily during those times.
[01:55:11]  So I always stayed very close to North Dakota, very close to my friends.
[01:55:15]  I got a group of 20 friends that were on a, we're still every day on a thread.
[01:55:21]  So I think that helped me stay grounded.
[01:55:23]  It helped me sort of keep perspective on everything.
[01:55:25]  But you're right.
[01:55:28]  It can be a lot.
[01:55:29]  And thankfully, if you go back to all my children and the bit that I did before that, it wasn't like it all happened immediately.
[01:55:36]  It was like it was sort of a slow burn.
[01:55:39]  It still feels like a slow burn.
[01:55:40]  I don't feel like any of it happened quickly, but yeah, I mean, in God, family, friends, home, those are all things that really sort of kept me, and I think still keep me in this business today because it's easy to burn out.
[01:56:00]  Well, I ask it because I've spent a fair amount of time talking over the past year to Charlie Sheen.
[01:56:07]  And he's been so honest about his rocket propulsion to super fame and how he didn't really have that force to ground him and really started to feel like I can do whatever the hell I want.
[01:56:20]  There are absolutely no limitations on me, which was not good for him, right?
[01:56:24]  He's still dealing with the fallout from that.
[01:56:26]  So why, why, though, the temptation was there for you, didn't you succumb in the way my pal Charlie did, Charlie Sheen, or others, you know, who are less able to say no to those indulgences?
[01:56:39]  I don't know.
[01:56:40]  I'm probably not the, you know, the, the, the, the spokesperson for it, but I, but I, I, I've had enough experience in this business now to know that I was, again, very lucky to have a very tight-knit group of friends, uh, a very, a family that wasn't afraid to put my ass in check if I needed to be.
[01:57:01]  There you go.
[01:57:01]  can be it can be a very enticing uh an intoxicating thing you know because you got a lot of stuff thrown at you and if you don't keep some kind of perspective on what reality is and i always and i always knew this and i and i watched this growing up this is before i even wanted to get into the business is that i'd see guys rocket the stardom then burn out quickly um and i didn't want to be that guy I wanted to try to stay as humble and as appreciative.
[01:57:31]  And also I had a lot of jobs before this.
[01:57:33]  I didn't get into this business until I was 27 or eight years old.
[01:57:37]  And so I worked in construction.
[01:57:39]  I worked in warehouses.
[01:57:40]  I worked a lot of like grunt labor jobs for a long time.
[01:57:43]  And I think that that real life experience, as great as those jobs are, I didn't want to go back to them because I felt so lucky to even be in this position.
[01:57:53]  I still do.
[01:57:54]  So I think that.
[01:57:55]  And it just reminds you.
[01:57:56]  Yeah.
[01:57:56]  It reminds you what real life is like.
[01:57:58]  Exactly.
[01:57:58]  So I had a lot of real life experience.
[01:58:01]  One of the things I've noticed, you know, what happens in Hollywood if you, if you succeed is not only do you, you know, you become recognizable and the fans love you and all that and you get money, but then you get like an entourage that surrounds you with the most obsequious, absurd messaging about how amazing you are, which I also think is a damaging force, right?
[01:58:21]  It's like your agent and your manager and like whatever.
[01:58:25]  It just seems like such a fawning, ridiculous, I think the thing you said about having a family that's ready to kick your ass, that's the best possible influence, no?
[01:58:34]  Yeah, absolutely.
[01:58:35]  And I think that, I think that that could, it's a good message for a lot of people in the entertainment business these days.
[01:58:41]  I just feel like, you know, because you have a platform doesn't mean that you get to preach to everybody.
[01:58:47]  Ah, thank you.
[01:58:48]  Tell that to the Oscars.
[01:58:49]  I think I honestly believe that, you know, it's, we're very fortunate to be in this position.
[01:58:54]  And I spend a lot of time in the, you know, in the Midwest.
[01:58:57]  So I get to see what they actually think about, you know, us.
[01:59:02]  And they're not afraid to tell me.
[01:59:04]  And, you know, I have this, I'll never forget this.
[01:59:10]  I was going to play golf with a buddy in Georgia about 10 years ago.
[01:59:14]  And he's, he meets me at the airport with a t-shirt that says, nobody cares what actors think.
[01:59:24]  And I was like, damn, that's, that's really funny.
[01:59:27]  That's really good.
[01:59:28]  And that always stuck with me because it's true.
[01:59:30]  They don't, I mean, my job, and I don't, that's why I don't really take, I don't really, I have real strong opinions about things, but I don't really talk about it because it's, it's like, why?
[01:59:39]  You know, why would I, you know, alienate half my audience?
[01:59:43]  Because I respect their views on things, but I'm not going to preach to them.
[01:59:48]  They can believe what they want to believe.
[01:59:49]  I'm just here to, you know, make cool stuff.
[01:59:53]  I mean, speaking from people who are more, you know, on the right side of the aisle, I feel like that's all we want.
[01:59:59]  You don't need to share our points of view on the big issues of the day, but we do definitely do not want to be lectured by Hollywood leftists.
[02:00:07]  I don't think you're a leftist, but in any event, we don't want to be lectured about how we're worse than them because we don't share their values.
[02:00:13]  You know, it's like, I think more and more they're starting to get it.
[02:00:16]  You know, you like a couple of actors and actresses have made public statements about how like, I don't want to alienate, you know, Jennifer Lawrence said it and she's been an outspoken progressive, but she's like, I'm going to stop doing that because I don't actually want to alienate my fan base.
[02:00:31]  I'd like my art to speak for me.
[02:00:33]  We saw Sidney Sweeney, you know, decline to get drawn in when they made a controversy around her gene z it's and then we've seen it a couple of the award show not really the oscars but maybe it was the globes before that a couple of the actors on the red carpet being like i just want to act i don't i don't want to talk politics do you think this is a growing trend it should be I mean, it makes perfect sense.
[02:00:57]  I mean, why would you, if you really want to be successful in this business, why would you make half of your audience despise you by your political beliefs?
[02:01:07]  Maybe they don't care.
[02:01:08]  I don't know.
[02:01:08]  I mean, I look at it as a business decision.
[02:01:12]  You know, I want I want I'm here just to make cool movies, cool TV.
[02:01:17]  I'm here to make cool stuff.
[02:01:18]  And that's my, I'm a court jester.
[02:01:20]  You know, if I want to, if I want to preach to you about what I believe politically, I'll go run for office, which I'm not going to do, by the way.
[02:01:27]  Yes.
[02:01:27]  Thank you.
[02:01:28]  Or you can just email me.
[02:01:29]  It's fine.
[02:01:29]  It's Megan at MeganKelly.com.
[02:01:32]  In the midst of this crazy successful career and life, you found time to marry one of the most famous people on earth, the singer Fergie.
[02:01:44]  And how did that change life for you?
[02:01:49]  It was a big, it was a, you know, it was a huge sort of shift because suddenly I was, and she was a massive star at the time.
[02:02:00]  And so it was a, it was a big adjustment for me, if I'm being honest.
[02:02:05]  But, you know, Fergus is a very normal person at the end of the day, good mom.
[02:02:10]  We have a great relationship.
[02:02:11]  You have to navigate the like whose star is bigger and how does that make the other star feel?
[02:02:18]  Like a lot of Hollywood actors who are in a, you know, a joint relationship have spoken of that dynamic.
[02:02:24]  Yeah, probably.
[02:02:26]  It's probably my own ego more than anything.
[02:02:28]  I don't think it bugged her as much as it probably did me.
[02:02:33]  But, you know, she was she was a massive star at the time.
[02:02:36]  And it was a, it was suddenly you're, you're, you're sort of in that shadow a lot of times.
[02:02:42]  But at the same time, is there the same fear when you're, when you're a man married to a female singer who's such a star, is there's the same fear as like a woman would have when married to a male rock star?
[02:02:53]  Like he's going to cheat on me because he has thousands of women throwing themselves at his feet.
[02:02:59]  Is it like that when the spouse is a woman?
[02:03:02]  Like, does that happen to the female stars?
[02:03:05]  I don't know.
[02:03:07]  I don't know the answer to that question.
[02:03:08]  It never crossed your mind.
[02:03:11]  I don't know.
[02:03:12]  This is what's good about being Josh DeMelle.
[02:03:14]  You're like, we're good.
[02:03:15]  Trust me.
[02:03:17]  Listen, Ferg and I have a great relationship.
[02:03:21]  We parent our son, Axel.
[02:03:23]  She's a great mom.
[02:03:25]  I'm extremely happily married now to my wife, Audra.
[02:03:30]  We have a beautiful son and a little girl on the way.
[02:03:33]  And they have a great relationship, which is what I really care about is making sure that everybody's just copacetic.
[02:03:38]  You know, I just want, I just want peace and I don't want to be co-fighting between everybody.
[02:03:43]  And I think that, you know, they've all been thankfully very civil in the way they approach this whole thing.
[02:03:51]  Well, it says a lot about all of you that you've managed to navigate that one because that can be, that can be, it can go another way as you know.
[02:03:57]  It can be ugly, but thankfully it's not.
[02:04:01]  Yeah, that's, that's amazing.
[02:04:02]  So now you've got a new baby.
[02:04:03]  This will be your first girl coming in June.
[02:04:05]  Yeah, I got a little girl on the way.
[02:04:08]  All right.
[02:04:09]  So how are we feeling about that?
[02:04:10]  How about the pony?
[02:04:14]  What's scarier about raising a girl?
[02:04:15]  I grew up with three sisters.
[02:04:17]  So I knew that I just figured I was always going to have girls.
[02:04:21]  You know, I had a, my dog was a girl.
[02:04:24]  My three sisters were a girl.
[02:04:25]  I was, you know, everything around me was female.
[02:04:28]  And when I found out that I was going to have a son, Axel, it, it almost surprised me.
[02:04:35]  And then again, when I had Shepard, I was like, well, I'm a boy dad.
[02:04:39]  So when we, when we found out that we're having this little girl, I think that it was, I'm just, I'm just, I just can't wait to meet her.
[02:04:48]  You know, I just, there's, I think there's something about girls that is so different than boys.
[02:04:53]  You know, I think that, you know, she's got a great mother.
[02:04:58]  Audrey's an amazing mother.
[02:05:00]  And, you know, I'm just excited to meet her.
[02:05:03]  And, you know, I don't know what to expect.
[02:05:06]  You tell me, you have, you have two sons and a daughter, right?
[02:05:09]  Yeah.
[02:05:09]  And your daughter is going to be.
[02:05:10]  I expect you to be putty in her hands.
[02:05:12]  My daughter's the middle child.
[02:05:14]  But I expect, yeah, I expect she will rock your world.
[02:05:17]  And I've, in my experience, at least, girls come into the world knowing a lot.
[02:05:22]  Like she will know a lot and have strong opinions, probably at an earlier age than your boys.
[02:05:27]  They get there, but it takes them longer.
[02:05:30]  And I don't know.
[02:05:32]  She's sort of like arrived as sort of a boss.
[02:05:34]  You know what I mean?
[02:05:35]  Like together and with strong opinions and like good advice to give.
[02:05:39]  And it's, it's just totally different than the boys.
[02:05:42]  You know, I think you'll find it a completely different experience.
[02:05:46]  Of course, it's still parenthood, but like girls are very different and they're super fun in their own way.
[02:05:51]  Now, my girl's about to turn 15.
[02:05:53]  So she's at like that age where like they get more assertive and the parents are more of a liability than they are, but like we're still good.
[02:06:02]  And it's, it is very different from the boys.
[02:06:04]  So I'm so thrilled you're going to have both experiences.

=== Hormones and Wellness (10:27) ===

[02:06:05]  Yeah, me too.
[02:06:06]  You know, I feel like boys are just, girls are just more evolved than boys.
[02:06:11]  Honestly, boys are like little cavemen.
[02:06:12]  My little two-year-old is truly a caveman.
[02:06:14]  You've seen the movie The Last Dinosaur?
[02:06:17]  Spike, that little caveman?
[02:06:19]  Yes.
[02:06:19]  He's Spike.
[02:06:20]  Yes.
[02:06:20]  Right.
[02:06:20]  You know, and I think that, you know, girls just have, they're just, they can sit and they can play and they can focus on things where boys are just like all over the place.
[02:06:30]  Well, I always think of the movie Parenthood, where the little one is like ramming his head into the wall with a bucket on it.
[02:06:37]  Your boy will definitely do that.
[02:06:39]  You don't totally understand why, but somehow it's meaningful to him.
[02:06:42]  Meanwhile, your girl's doing like trigonometry.
[02:06:44]  Yeah.
[02:06:44]  So I look forward to that experience for you.
[02:06:46]  Now, speaking of girls, is that your inspo?
[02:06:48]  Because you started a company.
[02:06:50]  You didn't need to do this.
[02:06:51]  You're sustaining your lifestyle, I'm sure, with your acting, but you just, you started like a, like a wellness brand focused first on men.
[02:07:01]  And now just in time for your baby girl, you're expanding it to women.
[02:07:06]  So tell us, what is the brand?
[02:07:08]  What has it been doing for men and why the expansion?
[02:07:10]  Yes, by popular demand, we are now offering to women.
[02:07:13]  And so the way the company started was it's called Gatlin.
[02:07:19]  And a friend of mine, my co-founder, Fabian Calvo, came to me with this idea.
[02:07:24]  At the time, it was just a testosterone replacement therapy company.
[02:07:28]  And I was like, no way, no way am I going to be in the face of a testosterone replacement.
[02:07:32]  I do it, but I'm not going to tell people that.
[02:07:34]  It's my dirty little secret.
[02:07:36]  And the more I thought about it, the more I thought, you know what?
[02:07:41]  This has really improved my life in a lot of ways.
[02:07:44]  It's helped me stay young and active and all the things that it does.
[02:07:50]  And I thought, why not be the guy that shines a light on this thing and makes it okay for people to talk about it?
[02:07:57]  It doesn't have to be something taboo.
[02:07:59]  And we've built this beautiful company.
[02:08:02]  We've got, you know, it's fully concierge.
[02:08:05]  The website just dropped, the new website just dropped today.
[02:08:10]  We're now fully concierge.
[02:08:11]  So you have fully guided, licensed medical experts there to help with whatever questions you have.
[02:08:19]  And what's the website?
[02:08:21]  It's called Gatlin.
[02:08:21]  Gatlin.com.
[02:08:23]  And Megan, the beautiful because I watched you and Commissioner, FDA Commissioner Marty McCary talk about HRT for women.
[02:08:33]  And that was one of the impetuses for us to get into the female space because I didn't know all this stuff.
[02:08:39]  I didn't realize.
[02:08:40]  And also there was a girl that I worked with on Ransom Canyon who was having troubles with testosterone, believe it or not.
[02:08:47]  And some of her hormone levels were low, and she talks about this to me.
[02:08:51]  She doesn't tell anybody, but she talked to me about it when she knew we had this company and how that changed her life, and I just thought, you know what we got to get into this space, because there's so many women out there that can benefit from this.
[02:09:02]  Um hrt uh, you know, whether it's estrogen or progesterone or even testosterone for women, you know naturally, these things that we produce start to taper off as we get older, and there's there's so much science behind it now that it really can prolong your youth, it can keep you young, it can keep you active, it can keep you looking good, it's cognitive, it's bone density, it's, it's uh, you know, weight gain,
[02:09:29]  that's all these different things that that they found that actually can really improve your quality of life, and I think that um, that's really why I got into this was why not spread the word about it?
[02:09:41]  Yes the, the brain fog, also sex drive.
[02:09:44]  I mean, this is like you know.
[02:09:45]  I know you're married to a younger woman, but I will say like, when you get into your 50s, this can be an issue for a lot of women.
[02:09:51]  It doesn't tend to ever become an issue for men until much later.
[02:09:54]  But like, there can be a mismatch and it's hormones like go regulate your hormones, talk to a hormones doctor, go to Gatlin, look into whether you know what are your levels, how's your estrogen, how's your testosterone?
[02:10:07]  Because women have a certain level of testosterone that wanes as we get older and there's lots of things you can do.
[02:10:12]  You can do like a cream there's, but if you get even just your estrogen and your progesterone back to like, good levels um, the drive can be restored and that issue can not just be something that you have to live with.
[02:10:25]  These are things that we don't talk about enough.
[02:10:28]  But I want to stay for a second on the testosterone for men because um, one of my guys who works security for me, he's also a huge fan.
[02:10:36]  Now he's younger, he's like 41 and he loves it too.
[02:10:40]  What, what do you love about it?
[02:10:42]  Like why, why should a man be thinking about going on testosterone?
[02:10:45]  Well, I think it's the same for all of us.
[02:10:46]  As we get older these these these, these things that we actually naturally produce taper off and a lot of guys you know, starting in their late 30s uh, that those levels start to fall off, and you can.
[02:10:59]  You can supplement that with testosterone replacement therapy for women.
[02:11:03]  It's, you know uh estrogen progress, progesterone and even testosterone, and you can actually maintain that youthful vigor that you had in your 20s, in early 30s, and you can.
[02:11:15]  You don't have to go through what is traditionally seen as paramenopause.
[02:11:20]  I mean, eventually everything happens, but you can definitely prolong it.
[02:11:25]  And for me testosterone um, you know muscle, it helps you keep muscle on it, it keeps, it helps me stay athletic uh, sex drive um, you know all those things that just make me feel because I got, like I said, like we just talked about, I got young kids.
[02:11:42]  I want to be able to roll around in the dirt with them for as long as possible.
[02:11:46]  I need to stay as young as possible for them, as anything, you know I want to.
[02:11:51]  I want, I want my career to go as long as possible, but you know, for my kids, they need me and I need to be as as uh as as present as Possible.
[02:12:01]  Yes, I love it.
[02:12:03]  I have to say, so I'm doing HRT and I love it.
[02:12:06]  And I will say, like, it's resolved so many things like that were going wrong with me that I had no idea were hormone related.
[02:12:13]  Like I had very annoying dry eye and it's gone.
[02:12:17]  Like it's completely resolved the dry.
[02:12:20]  It's like crazy.
[02:12:21]  Who knew that that was related to hormones and other weird things that suddenly are no longer present?
[02:12:26]  You feel better, you look better, your skin is better, you feel more vibrant, the brain fog, like there's so many advantages to it, but people don't want to talk about it because I don't know, it's a sign of getting older or for some, you know, you say testosterone, you're like, what's going on down south?
[02:12:41]  Well, no, like it'll help you everywhere, including there, but like there's no shame in getting older and having these things happen and you saying, no, I refuse.
[02:12:50]  I'm going down swinging.
[02:12:51]  Yeah.
[02:12:51]  Well, I mean, you look amazing, Megan.
[02:12:54]  I mean, if anybody was a perfect poster child for HRT, it's you.
[02:13:01]  You really do look incredible.
[02:13:02]  And I think that it's, I think that it's, you know, it's true.
[02:13:06]  I mean, all those things that you just mentioned, you can actually, there's science behind it.
[02:13:11]  The data is there.
[02:13:13]  This stuff works.
[02:13:14]  And, you know, get your levels checked.
[02:13:18]  Find out exactly what, where you're at.
[02:13:21]  We have a whole fleet of licensed medical experts, the best in the world that can walk you through this because, you know, it's a scary thing to get into in the first, you know, the first, you know, just to step into it for the first time.
[02:13:35]  So, you know, we're fully concierged.
[02:13:39]  We can, we can walk you through this.
[02:13:41]  We have all the products.
[02:13:43]  All the products are made right here or compounded right here in the U.S. too.
[02:13:47]  So you're getting what you're buying.
[02:13:50]  Whereas some of these companies, you don't know.
[02:13:52]  And that's why I think the FDA is coming down on some of these companies is because you can't just click and just have, you know, GLP1 sent you.
[02:14:00]  You got to have a doctor sort of guiding you through this and helping you, making sure that you're getting what you're ordering.
[02:14:05]  And so we have the best products.
[02:14:07]  We have the best experts to help them through it.
[02:14:09]  And I'm so grateful.
[02:14:12]  I'm so grateful that you are an advocate for women and a proponent of this stuff, honestly.
[02:14:18]  Don't you think that we are, it's the dawn of a new day?
[02:14:21]  Like the days of accepting your traditional medicine doctor being like, you're getting older, deal with it, are done.
[02:14:28]  Like, no, there are all sorts of options when it comes to hormones or peptides or what have you, supplements that can actually make you feel better, look better, and weirdly, actually be biologically younger.
[02:14:44]  I mean, it's what, what's his name?
[02:14:47]  Brian, I can't remember his last name, the crazy guy online.
[02:14:49]  He's been on the show who's refusing to age.
[02:14:53]  But there are real life, Johnson, Brian Johnson, real life options for you to fight.
[02:14:59]  It's not to say we're all winding up in the same place eventually, but you can look good and feel good for so much longer thanks to this sort of, I don't know if you'd call it alternative medicine.
[02:15:10]  I think it's regular medicine that's just been looked down on for so long.
[02:15:14]  And I'll tell you something else, Josh.
[02:15:16]  You know, you have to get the mammograms as you get older.
[02:15:21]  And one of my doctors said to me, like, you know, getting older is not a disease.
[02:15:27]  Okay, I accept that, but you also don't have to go down without a fight.
[02:15:32]  Like you can actually stay looking, feeling, and in a way, being younger for even longer if you just do a little research, check out Gatlin, talk to a hormones doctor, what have you, right?
[02:15:43]  I mean, you're feeling it and so am I.
[02:15:45]  Yeah, absolutely.
[02:15:46]  I mean, I couldn't have said it better myself.
[02:15:47]  That's amazing.
[02:15:48]  It's, you know, and the beauty of it is, is once you get your levels checked, you find out that you're low and whatever, and you get, and you regulate to where you were in your 20s or 30s, whatever it is, you start to look better, you start to feel better, which makes you want to eat better, which makes you want to work out, which makes you a better sister, brother, mother, son, daughter.
[02:16:09]  It just elevates you, in my opinion, because you feel so much better about yourself.
[02:16:14]  And because of that, you're willing to do the things you have that oomph that you didn't have, that you've been sort of falling off of for the last several years.
[02:16:22]  So, yeah, I recommend people get their levels checked.
[02:16:26]  Come to Gatlin.com and we can get you back to the you you used to be.

=== Go To Gatlin.com (01:34) ===

[02:16:33]  Next thing you know, you too could marry someone like the 32-year-old Audrey.
[02:16:39]  This is all you have to do.
[02:16:40]  Go to gatlin.com and your life is going to improve.
[02:16:45]  Josh, I loved meeting you.
[02:16:47]  I want to tell the audience that your team has given our audience a special offer to get 20% off your purchase if you use the code mk at gatlin.com when you check out.
[02:16:57]  So that's great.
[02:16:58]  You'll get 20% off.
[02:16:59]  Thanks so much for being MK20, MK20.
[02:17:02]  Thank you so much for being here.
[02:17:03]  Megan, what a pleasure.
[02:17:05]  I've been a fan for a very long time.
[02:17:07]  Oh, I'm grateful.
[02:17:08]  And good luck with the movie, too.
[02:17:09]  Everybody's got to check that out.
[02:17:11]  Preschool was just released on St. Patrick's Day.
[02:17:14]  What a guy, right?
[02:17:15]  What a great guy.
[02:17:16]  Thanks to all of you for joining us today.
[02:17:18]  We will see you tomorrow.
[02:17:19]  We'll do it all over again then.
[02:17:23]  Thanks for listening to The Megan Kelly Show.
[02:17:25]  No BS, no agenda, and no fear.
[02:17:33]  Noen dager må man bare lufte hodet litt.
[02:17:37]  Kan Stratos da vel?
[02:17:39]  Den luftige melksjokoladen som bobler av glede.
[02:17:42]  Hva med en Stratos salty caramel?
[02:17:44]  Med fløyersmyk og salt karamell?
[02:17:50]  Kjærlighet er å lytte til hverandre.
[02:17:53]  Også til bilen.
[02:17:55]  Vi kan hjelpe deg å finne dekkene som passer perfekt til akkurat din bil.
[02:18:00]  Hilsnos and technique we have to do.
[02:18:05]  Tech time and the same thing.