Speaker 1: This is Alec Baldwin and you're listening to Here's the
Speaker 1: Thing from iHeart Radio.
Speaker 2: Everything Ends.
Speaker 1: Jeff Bezos has said that Amazon will eventually go bankrupt.
Speaker 1: Some believe Apple will also go out of business, and
Speaker 1: my guest today believed that we may be nearing the
Speaker 1: final days of the Fox News empire. Michael Wolfe is
Speaker 1: the author of The Fall, The End of Fox News,
Speaker 1: and The Murdoch Dynasty. Journalist Michael Wolfe has been a
Speaker 1: publishing powerhouse for decades. He is the author of eleven books,
Speaker 1: including The Man Who Owns the News Inside The Secret
Speaker 1: World of Rupert Murdoch, the pre eminent biography of the
Speaker 1: Fox media mogul. He's served as media critic and columnist
Speaker 1: for New York magazine, Vanity Fair, British GQ, The Hollywood Reporter,
Speaker 1: and The Guardian. He's also the founder of the news
Speaker 1: aggregator website newser and the recipient of two National Magazine Awards.
Speaker 1: He now has another accolade to add to that list.
Speaker 1: He's the first repeat guest on this podcast. I first
Speaker 1: spoke with Michael wolf in twenty eighteen live at town
Speaker 1: Hall in New York City to discuss his number one bestseller,
Speaker 1: Fire and Fury inside the Trump White House. This week,
Speaker 1: Michael Wolfe and I returned to town Hall for a
Speaker 1: live conversation about his latest book, his writing process, and
Speaker 1: his unique brand of journalism. Please join me and welcoming
Speaker 1: my guest author, Michael Wolfe. Now, it occurred to me,
Speaker 1: because you know everything about these subjects, that I wanted
Speaker 1: to go a different direction and not talk so much
Speaker 1: about the book and the murdocks at first. I wanted
Speaker 1: to talk about your methods and your techniques in writing.
Speaker 1: I thought about that famous quote by Janet Malcolm that
Speaker 1: accompanied the Journalist and the murderer of that article she
Speaker 1: wrote for the New Yorker magazine quote, every journalist too
Speaker 1: is not too stupid. We're too full of himself to
Speaker 1: notice what is going on. Knows that what he does
Speaker 1: is morally indefensible. He's a kind of confidence man, praying
Speaker 1: on people's vanity, ignorance, or loneliness, gaining their trust and betraying.
Speaker 2: Them without remorse.
Speaker 1: Now, when you begin a project and you're interviewing various people,
Speaker 1: you must have your methods and techniques. You make a
Speaker 1: list of people you want to interview. There are obviously
Speaker 1: people you want to interview, you.
Speaker 3: Know, I think it's different from that I've been doing
Speaker 3: this for such a long time that I'm around. I'm
Speaker 3: just always there, and people cease to notice me being there.
Speaker 3: And actually I think that they find sometimes I think
Speaker 3: that there are two means and one people, and often
Speaker 3: very powerful people.
Speaker 4: They find me to be the soul of discretion.
Speaker 3: I become a kind of confident. I mean, they just
Speaker 3: they like to talk, want to I like to listen,
Speaker 3: you know. I have no animus toward them, like many
Speaker 3: other journalists might. I have no no political bone to pick.
Speaker 3: I'm just there. I'm just I'm just listening. I am
Speaker 3: I am like a palace reporter in the court of
Speaker 3: whoever Murdoch or Trump or or what have you.
Speaker 4: And people get used to me being.
Speaker 2: There and then let down their guard.
Speaker 4: Yeah, they let down their guard.
Speaker 3: They treat me like I'm supposed to be there. And
Speaker 3: I think that they think that I'm have their best interests,
Speaker 3: or that I'm that I'm somehow we're on the same plane.
Speaker 3: And and then I go home and the pen starts
Speaker 3: to write, and it doesn't necessarily align with that other
Speaker 3: person who was who was there before.
Speaker 2: It's interesting how you say you were there.
Speaker 1: Yes, you've been doing this for a long time, and
Speaker 1: I find that, you know, that's a component of human nature.
Speaker 1: I had a couple examples. One where I went to
Speaker 1: go meet the head of a studio and I went
Speaker 1: and sat with this guy at a restaurant in La
Speaker 1: and I did something that I rarely do is I
Speaker 1: didn't say a word for an hour and a half
Speaker 1: and I let him do all the talking, and no
Speaker 1: matter what he said, I was so engaged.
Speaker 2: I was like, no, you're kidding, did they really?
Speaker 1: And every he just went on and on in an
Speaker 1: unbroken monologue for an hour and a half.
Speaker 2: I go home and my agent calls me. He goes,
Speaker 2: what did you do? I go, what do you mean?
Speaker 2: He goes, he loved you and people want to talk.
Speaker 3: It's all you have to do is listen. When I
Speaker 3: did my Murdoch biography and this was set up and
Speaker 3: there was a lot of talk, and you know, he
Speaker 3: finally agreed and I showed up for the first interview.
Speaker 3: I showed up and we spoke probably for quite some time,
Speaker 3: an hour and a half perhaps, And at the end
Speaker 3: he said, have you gotten what you need? And I thought,
Speaker 3: I thought that what the world was going to end?
Speaker 3: I mean, this was you know, And I said, you know,
Speaker 3: I have I have some more questions. And I remember
Speaker 3: he got up very slowly from his seat and he
Speaker 3: went around behind his desk and he wrote me into
Speaker 3: his date book for the next week. This little thing
Speaker 3: went on for nine months. At the end it was
Speaker 3: always have you gotten what you need? And that once
Speaker 3: I said I want to go see your mother objected
Speaker 3: to her because he didn't.
Speaker 4: He said, well, why do you want to do that?
Speaker 4: What's she going to tell you?
Speaker 3: That I was an okay son, And I said, well,
Speaker 3: you know, I you know, and she was ninety nine
Speaker 3: at the time. And then and then he kind of
Speaker 3: he said, he said, okay, I get it. You need
Speaker 3: a color graph. That's an old newspaper man.
Speaker 1: Now, when you when you go see his mother, when
Speaker 1: you were in the early stages of this, Obviously, Murdoch's
Speaker 1: been around for a long time. He's been a famous
Speaker 1: media magnet and so forth here in the UK or
Speaker 1: you know, Australia, what have you. He's been around for forever.
Speaker 1: So where does it begin, Like when you want to
Speaker 1: talk to him, do you kind of warm him up,
Speaker 1: and it's like small talk and it's just some biographical questions.
Speaker 1: What's the method when you sit down with someone like him.
Speaker 4: It's to supply him with a piece of gossip.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 3: That was it's like you can see like he's the
Speaker 3: fish and then he he just goes for it.
Speaker 4: And so you had to have a piece of piece
Speaker 4: of gossip.
Speaker 3: And you know, so I was showing up every week
Speaker 3: or sometimes twice a week, and I didn't have that
Speaker 3: much gossip.
Speaker 4: So what you could do is just make it up.
Speaker 3: It didn't make any difference to him me or like
Speaker 3: he appreciated it as much and I and then I
Speaker 3: would often find that you would, you would make up
Speaker 3: a piece of gossip and then forty eight hours later
Speaker 3: it was all over town.
Speaker 1: Right now when you see you make it up? Is
Speaker 1: there an art to making up gossip? You feed to
Speaker 1: Rupert Murdoch?
Speaker 2: Do you?
Speaker 1: Is it like Biden has a secret Canadian family? Or
Speaker 1: what's the gossip in lined with what's it?
Speaker 2: You know?
Speaker 3: It was like Michael Bloomberg is going to buy the
Speaker 3: New York Times, Right, Michael Bloomberg is going to buy
Speaker 3: the Times?
Speaker 2: Yeah, get ready?
Speaker 3: And then that became a rumor, swept, swept everywhere that was.
Speaker 3: So it's curious because Rupert then gets on the phone
Speaker 3: because he's a newspaper man, and so he starts to
Speaker 3: spread it, and then people start to call around and
Speaker 3: ask if this is true, and suddenly it's everywhere.
Speaker 1: But isn't it funny how you say that I went
Speaker 1: to the book party with you the other day, and
Speaker 1: you're in a room for the people, all of them,
Speaker 1: you know, many of them, the highest levels of the
Speaker 1: most elite media in New York, books and publishing and
Speaker 1: the Times and so forth. These are people who write
Speaker 1: for the Post or something, you know, and they're there,
Speaker 1: and what they all have in common I found, when
Speaker 1: I thought they had in common, was this idea where
Speaker 1: they just crave information. They are obsessed and addicted to information.
Speaker 1: Everybody they talked to you literally see the movie How
Speaker 1: do people move around? Especially when they're all good no,
Speaker 1: these kind of highbrow, you know, well educated, very smart
Speaker 1: people and with these really really important positions in media,
Speaker 1: and you see them moving around. What they do is
Speaker 1: they go to different groups of people and they mingle
Speaker 1: and they're like, any new information here, now, next gone.
Speaker 1: They're there to call information. They want to learn things,
Speaker 1: they want to gossip. I mean they're gossip. So you
Speaker 1: take advantage of that fact, just make it up. What
Speaker 1: was about Murdoch's childhood and how did he grow up
Speaker 1: that you think prepared him. You know a lot of people,
Speaker 1: I know he came from a pretty privileged family. Know
Speaker 1: they were well to do.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean he came from the most privileged family.
Speaker 3: I mean he grew up in Australia, in Melbourne, and
Speaker 3: he was the absolute aristocracy of his father of Australia,
Speaker 3: which was a kind of otherwise level nation except for
Speaker 3: Rupert Murdoch. His father ran the most important media company
Speaker 3: in the country.
Speaker 1: Right, And so was it just predestined that he would
Speaker 1: go in that direction? Did he ever have any kind
Speaker 1: of wild oats he had to sew or was?
Speaker 2: Yeah?
Speaker 4: No, he did.
Speaker 3: I mean he went to I mean, he didn't really
Speaker 3: get along with his father. He went to Oxford, you know,
Speaker 3: had you know, a bust of lenin and his father
Speaker 3: had to send emissaries to say, you know, shape up, kid.
Speaker 3: And then his father died and he inherited his father
Speaker 3: actually didn't own the media company. This was you know
Speaker 3: a company owned by its investors, and all Rupert was
Speaker 3: left with in the end was a single newspaper from
Speaker 3: there seventy years later.
Speaker 1: Now, to get back to your own bio, if you will.
Speaker 1: You were born in Patterson, New Jersey. I was, and
Speaker 1: you graduate high school. I guess it's around seventy one,
Speaker 1: roughly was, and so you were kind of posted we're
Speaker 1: in kind of an interlude there and the civil rights
Speaker 1: movement of the sixties and Kennedy is killed and King
Speaker 1: is killed and Nixon becomes president just three years before.
Speaker 1: Did you have a period of where you were involved
Speaker 1: in that, You were an activist? Were you political when
Speaker 1: you were younger?
Speaker 3: Well, I was in high school, so my parents wouldn't
Speaker 3: let me go to demonstration, so they wouldn't I think
Speaker 3: I was. I once wrote a piece about Christopher Hitchens,
Speaker 3: who claimed to be you know who was a sixties activist,
Speaker 3: and I said.
Speaker 4: Oh, no, no, no, wait a minute. He was twelve at
Speaker 4: the time, but.
Speaker 1: He tried to spread some gossips it wasn't true. Also,
Speaker 1: he just was trying. Now, but when you get out
Speaker 1: of high school seventy when you go to college, where
Speaker 1: are you going to grad because you went to Columbia
Speaker 1: Graduate School.
Speaker 5: Correct, No, I wasn't undergraduate at Columbia cub what'd you
Speaker 5: study history?
Speaker 2: History? And was writing something that was on your mind? Yeah?
Speaker 3: I went to work for the New York Times when
Speaker 3: I was a junior at Columbia to do what started
Speaker 3: at the bottom the guy who fetched the hot dogs.
Speaker 2: Did they eat a lot of hot dogs at the time.
Speaker 4: Oh? They did. That's that's it's all they ate in
Speaker 4: those days. And they looked at.
Speaker 1: And they looked at yellow skin. When you but but
Speaker 1: you leeve the Times? How long were you there before
Speaker 1: you left to go to New Times? I was there
Speaker 1: for about a year. I hated every second. Why because
Speaker 1: I figured that The Times is probably, especially back then,
Speaker 1: a destination for most writers. Why did you feel comfortable
Speaker 1: just walking away? What didn't you like about it?
Speaker 4: The smoke? There was so much smoke, and it was
Speaker 4: and it was so gray, you know, it was.
Speaker 3: All men, and they were gray men.
Speaker 4: And and they all had.
Speaker 2: Ticks, facial ticks.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, I mean hot dogs and cigarettes will do
Speaker 1: that time.
Speaker 3: I mean it was like and and you and you
Speaker 3: had a vision, Oh my god, the rest of my
Speaker 3: life could be here.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 3: And when I when I left, when I told them
Speaker 3: that I was, I was going to leave, and I
Speaker 3: had done. You know in this time, you know quite well,
Speaker 3: you kind of get these promotions and you're you begin
Speaker 3: that you can't sit down, and then you get a
Speaker 3: seed and it's vaguely Deckenzie and and and I said,
Speaker 3: I'm I'm gonna quit.
Speaker 4: And they were like, well, you can't quit.
Speaker 3: What will you do? Well, you know, I don't know.
Speaker 3: I'll be a you know, try to be a freelance writer.
Speaker 3: And then they would tell you how much money a
Speaker 3: freelance writer made, and that was that was your fate.
Speaker 4: So you had to stay.
Speaker 3: You need spam. Yeah, And I was like, I just can't.
Speaker 3: I just couldn't stay another minute.
Speaker 1: Now, when you leave The Times, describe for people who
Speaker 1: don't recall, what was New Times.
Speaker 2: It was a new magazine.
Speaker 3: Yeah, when I got out of When I left The Times,
Speaker 3: it was a fantastic time in New York. There were
Speaker 3: independent magazines all over the place. An old editor of mine,
Speaker 3: John Holmans, who died two years ago, used to describe
Speaker 3: this as the late renaissance of the magazine business. It
Speaker 3: was a fabulous time and place people paid you rather well,
Speaker 3: and there were you know, if this magazine didn't watch
Speaker 3: your piece, then that magazine would watch your piece. You
Speaker 3: could just kind of go up and down Madison Avenue
Speaker 3: and sell your wares. It was a fantastic time.
Speaker 1: Now, describe for me, because you write your first book.
Speaker 1: Your first book is published what year, nineteen seventy nine,
Speaker 1: So it wasn't that long.
Speaker 2: You were very young when you publish your first book
Speaker 2: twenty five.
Speaker 4: It was a book called White Kids.
Speaker 2: About I ask. It's about white kids.
Speaker 3: Literally, it was about I see. I was early on
Speaker 3: to the you know, making fun of white people.
Speaker 1: During this period, I would imagine your hopscotching back and forth.
Speaker 1: But I mean you once you become an enormously successful writer,
Speaker 1: I would imagine books preoccupy all your time. But we'll
Speaker 1: get to that in a minute. The difference between writing
Speaker 1: for books and magazines, how would you describe that. You
Speaker 1: wrote for so many big magazines and you're getting a commission,
Speaker 1: they're telling you what to do work.
Speaker 4: It's not that different.
Speaker 3: You know, you're sitting there by yourself for a rather
Speaker 3: extended period of time, but it's a similar thing. You're
Speaker 3: telling stories in a similar way. I mean it's a
Speaker 3: narrative form, you know, beginning, middle, and end, which a
Speaker 3: magazine piece. That's what a good magazine piece is too. Now,
Speaker 3: the important thing to realize is that magazine pieces were
Speaker 3: different than you know, these magazines had singular voices. You know,
Speaker 3: you opened the magazine, these magazines, and that was a
Speaker 3: great thing about magazines, and you entered a world, a
Speaker 3: kind of you know, these extraordinary and kind of complete worlds.
Speaker 3: You know, I often describe it is that the successful
Speaker 3: magazine they build a world like a kind of club,
Speaker 3: which you read it because actually you feel you are
Speaker 3: not in the club. You know, you read Playboy magazine
Speaker 3: because you know, it made you feel like everybody was
Speaker 3: having sex. But you you read Rolling Stone and you
Speaker 3: felt that everybody was incredibly cool but you and Vanity Fair.
Speaker 3: Everybody was super glamorous, but you that created this this
Speaker 3: real formula of entering building these worlds. There's still these
Speaker 3: brand names around of Vanity Fair. That culture just doesn't
Speaker 3: exist anymore, and people who work who made their living
Speaker 3: in that culture don't really exist anymore.
Speaker 1: Well, now everything is shifted because of digital and everything,
Speaker 1: because of online and the expediency of the So now
Speaker 1: The Times is like a magazine. You pick up the
Speaker 1: newspaper to get a deep dive on a story, and
Speaker 1: a magazine is like a book. You know, you're really
Speaker 1: going to sit down and spend two hours reading of
Speaker 1: the New Yorker magazine. So the way that the digital imperative,
Speaker 1: the way that online news sources have just pushed everything
Speaker 1: into another bin, is kind of horrifying to me, because
Speaker 1: you don't I'm of a generation now where I think
Speaker 1: you're never going to get the facts online. I mean,
Speaker 1: almost almost impossible from some venues. And also my perspective
Speaker 1: is that when I was younger, it was like ninety
Speaker 1: percent facts and information of news and ten percent opinion.
Speaker 1: And now that's been flipped. You beat articles in the Atlantic,
Speaker 1: good writers, You beat the articles in all these places,
Speaker 1: and it is a lot of opinion and this much fact,
Speaker 1: you know, and I find that appalling.
Speaker 3: I mean, that's partly because opinion is cheap. You don't
Speaker 3: have to do the reporting on opinion. You don't have
Speaker 3: to good, you don't have to find yourself. You know,
Speaker 3: much of the opinion is about the Trump era, and
Speaker 3: that's easier than actually finding yourself in the Trump White.
Speaker 1: House, now you have three books in a row about Trump.
Speaker 1: Your last book, Too Famous, the Rich, the Powerful, the Wishful,
Speaker 1: the Notorious, the Damned was about quote, monsters, media whores
Speaker 1: and vain glorious figures unquote. And now Rubert Murdoch. You
Speaker 1: spend a lot of time with unsavory people.
Speaker 4: I get along with them.
Speaker 2: They're my people, my metier. Yeah, they're metier. What's it
Speaker 2: like for you?
Speaker 1: Many of the ownership class who I'm friendly with, some
Speaker 1: of them, I'm friendly with somebody who knows them. And
Speaker 1: I go around these people and they all admire Murdoch
Speaker 1: to the hilty, because I mean, you know, the number
Speaker 1: one in New York money is money. If you made
Speaker 1: a big pile of money, people admire you, unless you're
Speaker 1: a criminal, and and even then they might tip their
Speaker 1: hat to you now and then another party. But Murdoch,
Speaker 1: I mean, I'll never forget. There were friends of mine
Speaker 1: who I thought politically they would at least not express
Speaker 1: any positive feelings about. But they all admire Murdoch deeply.
Speaker 1: Did you get that sense? You know, well, what are they?
Speaker 3: They admire him because not really because of the money,
Speaker 3: but because of the power. And the power is the
Speaker 3: currency of our time. Who has the power? Who has
Speaker 3: more power? I mean having more money? Nobody really cares
Speaker 3: about about that. It's it's what do you have the
Speaker 3: money to buy more power? In the probably in the
Speaker 3: late eighties. Murdoch at that point had or he established
Speaker 3: his effective empire newspapers around the world. He had bought
Speaker 3: twentieth Century Fox, he had started the Fox Network, he
Speaker 3: had bought Sky Television in the UK. And I had
Speaker 3: actually proposed the biography of him then and no one
Speaker 3: was interested. He was a kind of low rent sleeves ball.
Speaker 3: Why would you want to write a biography about him?
Speaker 3: Twenty years later, and so much in the culture had changed,
Speaker 3: then suddenly I made the same proposal, and that was
Speaker 3: suddenly this was now a seventh figure project with everybody
Speaker 3: bidding on it. So something very very clearly had changed
Speaker 3: in the way we would regard people like Murdoch, who, otherwise,
Speaker 3: if you stripped it away, is just a tabloid publisher.
Speaker 3: He contributes nothing and has ruined many things.
Speaker 1: Journalist Michael Wolfe. If you enjoy conversations with astute authors,
Speaker 1: check out my episode with Sam Wasson, author of The
Speaker 1: Big Goodbye. His book on the making of the movie Chinatown.
Speaker 1: What was it about Evans that he wanted to have
Speaker 1: great films that made money and won awards.
Speaker 6: He loved it, he loved it, he loved show business,
Speaker 6: he loved movies, he loved people, he loved talent. It's
Speaker 6: actually that simple. I asked him this question. I said, Evans,
Speaker 6: is it as simple as you bet on talent? Do
Speaker 6: you have an easy job? And he said, you goddamn right,
Speaker 6: It's true.
Speaker 1: To hear more of my conversation with Sam Wasson, go
Speaker 1: to Here's the Thing dot org. After the break, Michael
Speaker 1: wolf shares what kept Rupert Murdoch from acquiring CNN. I'm
Speaker 1: Alec Baldwin and you're listening to Here's the Thing. Author
Speaker 1: Michael Wolfe is known for infiltrating some tight circles, from
Speaker 1: gathering information at cocktail parties and martini lunches to being
Speaker 1: a fly on the wall in Trump's White House. The
Speaker 1: result is three books on the Trump administration and two
Speaker 1: on Titan Rupert Murdoch. Yet from time to time he's
Speaker 1: received some criticism from the media on the veracity of
Speaker 1: his reporting. I wanted to know how he felt about
Speaker 1: getting under the skin of his fellow journalists.
Speaker 3: I think most journalism is kind of crappy. I think
Speaker 3: it's I think it's boring. I think it's repetitive. I
Speaker 3: think it's kind of sour puss literal, it's humorless. It's
Speaker 3: you know, and no one really has has much interest
Speaker 3: in character or apparently much ability to express what character,
Speaker 3: what makes someone what they are? You know, I think
Speaker 3: it's also more and more journalism is a negotiated reality.
Speaker 3: You make deals with the pr people, or you have
Speaker 3: to negotiate with the institution that you work for. And
Speaker 3: everyone works for an institution, so it's lawyers, editors, layers
Speaker 3: of editors, often fact checkers, and in the end, you know,
Speaker 3: it's it's a kind of a committee product. And I
Speaker 3: kind of not to be too high falutin, but but
Speaker 3: I try to make a distinction, be at least for myself,
Speaker 3: between being a journalist and being a writer.
Speaker 4: You know, I'm.
Speaker 3: Interested in in, you know, why people do things, how
Speaker 3: they got to be who they are, how they talk,
Speaker 3: how they smelly, how they roll, and maybe the in
Speaker 3: the end, the big difference I see between myself and
Speaker 3: everybody else is it's just me. I don't work for
Speaker 3: a company. I don't work for It's on the page.
Speaker 3: You just get me, and you can be assured of that.
Speaker 3: It's not something else, it's not some other committee.
Speaker 1: I find these things interesting because I didn't pick up
Speaker 1: on this. I watched chunks of Succession. I didn't really
Speaker 1: binge that show that much, which people indicated to me
Speaker 1: was somewhat about the Murdoch family and their dynasty.
Speaker 2: Did you watch Succession?
Speaker 1: Yes you did, And did you see knowing as well
Speaker 1: as you do the Murdoch schematics.
Speaker 2: Did you see the Murdoch's vividly in those portrayals?
Speaker 4: No, no, it isn't.
Speaker 3: I mean, it's about a Murdoch like structure of a family.
Speaker 3: But you know, the Succession guy is a kind of
Speaker 3: ordering on violence all the time. Rupert is not like
Speaker 3: that at all. Rupert is incredibly mannerly, courtly. You'll be
Speaker 3: received in the most gracious way. Tucker Carlson was describing
Speaker 3: this to me, his relationships with Murdoch and pointing out
Speaker 3: the same thing, it's so nice to be with him.
Speaker 3: And then Tucker said, of course he's a savage, but
Speaker 3: you never see that. And the savagery is always carried
Speaker 3: out by someone else. He himself is incredibly conflict averse.
Speaker 3: He doesn't do that anything to avoid a conflict. You know,
Speaker 3: within the company, they say, one of the best things
Speaker 3: to do is to be hired by Murdoch because then
Speaker 3: he would pay you a lot of money. But they said,
Speaker 3: but even better is to be fired by Murdoch, because
Speaker 3: then he would really pay you a lot of money.
Speaker 1: Do you recall how was Fox News received when it
Speaker 1: was first launched and they and were they as ham
Speaker 1: fisted in their right wing a few points.
Speaker 3: I mean, the first thing what Murdoch wanted was he
Speaker 3: had tried to buy CNN.
Speaker 4: They wouldn't let him buy CNN.
Speaker 2: So he wanted in the government.
Speaker 3: No they being CNN, I mean the owners of CNN,
Speaker 3: you know, just kind of because he was still regarded
Speaker 3: as a kind of a low rent sleeves ball. So
Speaker 3: he said, you know, damn them, and I will start
Speaker 3: my own news network. And he hired Roger Ales. And
Speaker 3: Murdoch is a cheap skates, So it was, you know,
Speaker 3: it was starting this network on the cheap. But it
Speaker 3: really was not about any particular political viewpoint, I mean,
Speaker 3: other than the general Murdoch tabloid sensibility, and it was
Speaker 3: Ales who came in and said, no, there's this unserved
Speaker 3: audience and we can serve it with the kind.
Speaker 1: Of so Als was more responsible for the total DNA
Speaker 1: of the network.
Speaker 3: I mean, Murdock has literally nothing to do with with
Speaker 3: the creation of Fox. It's Ales who says, you know,
Speaker 3: let's just serve up kind of I mean, Al said
Speaker 3: said to me in one discussion, he said, you know,
Speaker 3: you know this was in I think twenty sixteen, somewhat
Speaker 3: before before he died, and he said, he said, you know,
Speaker 3: the people you know they live now, they live in
Speaker 3: two thousand and six, he said, the people I program
Speaker 3: for they live in nineteen sixty five, you know. And
Speaker 3: that's that kind of thing, you know. You know, he
Speaker 3: built a network which really looks like television from nineteen
Speaker 3: sixty five, looks like that kind of daytime quiz show.
Speaker 4: Television time.
Speaker 3: Well it's it's that, but even more it's more the
Speaker 3: you know, the girls, the graphics whatever.
Speaker 4: You know.
Speaker 1: It was the girls meeting the correspondent to the blonde
Speaker 1: Fox type.
Speaker 3: See yeah, and then he figured out you could you know,
Speaker 3: Als is a political guy. He figured out that politics
Speaker 3: was actually kind of you know, narrative drama. You could
Speaker 3: monetize politics. Politics is conflict. Just emphasize the conflict and
Speaker 3: it becomes irresistible and people tune in, and soon enough
Speaker 3: it's the most profitable news operation that there has ever been.
Speaker 2: Exactly.
Speaker 1: They're the envy of everybody in that industry, people who
Speaker 1: will admit it. I had a little brief moment where
Speaker 1: I was going to do an interview show for MSNBC,
Speaker 1: and I was sitting there with the people that ran
Speaker 1: the show over there, and I was talking about, you know,
Speaker 1: simple things like my sets. What kind of set would
Speaker 1: we have? And I said, I'd like to have it
Speaker 1: be a little bit different from you. I said, most
Speaker 1: of your sets are like some Soviet police station. They're
Speaker 1: all like white, and everything's lit really brightly and everybody
Speaker 1: looks like shit. And I said, I'd like to do
Speaker 1: something a little bit differently. And I'll never forget. We
Speaker 1: were having these meetings and I wasn't saying the right
Speaker 1: thing to engender the love of the people I was
Speaker 1: going to go work for. And one woman who was
Speaker 1: a longtime producer walked up to me outside in the
Speaker 1: hallway and I'll never forget.
Speaker 2: She said to me. She goes, I need to tell
Speaker 2: you something. I go, what's that?
Speaker 1: She goes, everybody here used to work at the Mothership,
Speaker 1: meaning NBC regular news, broadcast news, network news. She was
Speaker 1: an hour over here, and we're all getting paid, and
Speaker 1: she said.
Speaker 2: And nobody is watching.
Speaker 1: As a pause, and she went, so sh she said,
Speaker 1: stop complet like, we're here doing a job. And this
Speaker 1: whole game is rigged by carriage fees that they pull
Speaker 1: off when they kind of give people the boys and
Speaker 1: pill of MSNBC Murdoch's children. Was it inevitable, like did
Speaker 1: James Murdoch always kind of indicate the people he was
Speaker 1: going to go the way he went?
Speaker 2: And was it inevitable that Lachlan would prevail?
Speaker 4: No?
Speaker 3: No, it was seesaws back and forth and has for
Speaker 3: nearly nearly twenty years, you know. But the interesting thing is, okay,
Speaker 3: that this is set up and this is the succession.
Speaker 3: What is not true in the success The key point
Speaker 3: here is that Rupert Murdoch cannot pick his own successor.
Speaker 3: He bargained that right away on his second divorce, he
Speaker 3: got divorced in California, community property state could have sundered
Speaker 3: the empire. Instead, his then wife Anna made a deal
Speaker 3: one hundred million dollars virtually a tip at that point,
Speaker 3: if you'll freeze the trust for the existing children, that
Speaker 3: means no other children can If you have other children,
Speaker 3: which he did, they can't be part of the trust,
Speaker 3: and you can't change the terms of the trust. The
Speaker 3: terms of the trust is when you die, there are
Speaker 3: four votes that will determine what happens. So he agreed
Speaker 3: to that, and then ever since been stuck with this.
Speaker 3: He can't appoint his successor that in the end it
Speaker 3: will be the decision of his four oldest children, and
Speaker 3: that alignment has has shifted in.
Speaker 1: That like succession wasn't a big part of succession them
Speaker 1: jockeying to succeed the father.
Speaker 3: Yes, yes, but he always had the power to appoint
Speaker 3: someone else.
Speaker 1: You imagine, you don't get your next crop of children,
Speaker 1: don't get any piece of the action. And so he's
Speaker 1: having dinner with Wendy Dang and he says, I've got
Speaker 1: to tell you that and if we were to have children,
Speaker 1: they wouldn't be able to inherit any of my fortune.
Speaker 2: And she's like, let's skip dessert.
Speaker 4: This actually happened. And then she made that.
Speaker 2: That's gossip I made up. I learned that from you.
Speaker 4: I mean she threw him out. It was, it was
Speaker 4: a thing.
Speaker 3: And then he had to go to his other children
Speaker 3: and say and say, you know, literally on bended knee
Speaker 3: and that banded knee is is I will give you.
Speaker 3: They didn't have any real money because it was all
Speaker 3: tied up in shares, and he said, I'll give you,
Speaker 3: I'll pay you, I'll give you, I'll give you money
Speaker 3: if you cut in your half siblings, your half siblings.
Speaker 3: And they each got fifty million dollars and they cut
Speaker 3: in the siblings. Well then yes that at that point
Speaker 3: that that was it. I mean they would all since
Speaker 3: after that get two billion dollars. But but anyway, they
Speaker 3: cut them in. But they didn't give the new siblings
Speaker 3: any kind of vote, so they just got they get
Speaker 3: the money.
Speaker 2: Here's fifty million.
Speaker 1: But just keep your mouth shut in Now, what surprised you,
Speaker 1: if anything that you can say about Murdoch that you
Speaker 1: got to know about him, Like, what surprised me was
Speaker 1: I learned of during this research that he supported Obama?
Speaker 2: Is that true? He did? He did? What do you
Speaker 2: think that was about.
Speaker 3: Well, he supported Obama because Obama was going to win
Speaker 3: number one, but number two, you know, enormous pressure from
Speaker 3: his children. You know, his children are you know, we're like,
Speaker 3: you know, okay, Obama, I mean, this is a you know,
Speaker 3: the the world is changing. We have to do this.
Speaker 3: This is important and we should be there. And so
Speaker 3: you know, Murdoch is you know, begrudgingly okay, you know,
Speaker 3: let's just I can hear the mumble now.
Speaker 4: And he did it.
Speaker 3: And in fact, and he sat down with Obama, they
Speaker 3: got along and he did it. I mean he supported
Speaker 3: Blair in the U. Okay, this is not unknown unknown
Speaker 3: territory for Murdoch. Who's gonna you know, I mean the
Speaker 3: first and foremost of all his political positions is who's
Speaker 3: the winner, and then after that the power it's you know, yes,
Speaker 3: then it's like, you know, okay, who's the you know,
Speaker 3: who's gonna who's gonna protect my money?
Speaker 2: More?
Speaker 1: Now you spelled it out for us that a lot
Speaker 1: of the decisions that involved Fox News was Ales territory.
Speaker 1: Uh so is Ale's the one that hired all that
Speaker 1: talent totally Als is the one who identified Hannity or riot.
Speaker 3: Murdoch is not a television guy. Murdoch doesn't even watch
Speaker 3: television news. You know, he can't sit there, He gets up,
Speaker 3: he leaves, he leaves the room. He's not a television guy, certainly,
Speaker 3: not a television programmer, not even a television executive. So
Speaker 3: this was entirely Ales' business. And you know, Ales once
Speaker 3: told me that Murdoch had made a vow.
Speaker 4: They had a.
Speaker 3: Written agreement that Murdoch would never interfere. Now, Murdoch has
Speaker 3: made that written agreement throughout his career and always broken it.
Speaker 3: But he did not break it with Fox because a
Speaker 3: it was television. I mean, he always broke it in
Speaker 3: terms of newspapers because he could put out a newspaper
Speaker 3: but than anyone at least he believed. But he never
Speaker 3: felt that way about television. Plus, on top of that,
Speaker 3: it was making so much money, unbelievable amounts of money,
Speaker 3: even for Murdoch. It was staggering and breathtaking.
Speaker 1: Sure, now, someone told me that not all the people
Speaker 1: who are these stars, if you will, the leading lights
Speaker 1: of Fox News, really believe everything that they're engaged with
Speaker 1: on the air, like Hannity or whatever. I mean, I've
Speaker 1: always had the lowest opinion of these people. I've always
Speaker 1: said that Hannity was a guy who, like you, filled
Speaker 1: in when somebody drops it at their desk that somebody's
Speaker 1: in a studio at Fox and they dropped dead, and
Speaker 1: Hannity's like a janitor there or something. They get in
Speaker 1: the booth kit you're going to be you're doing the
Speaker 1: show tonight, Like he just fell into it because I mean,
Speaker 1: to me, Hannity has a rufer.
Speaker 4: He was the roof for O'Reilly always called them the roof.
Speaker 1: But the point is is that someone told me these
Speaker 1: people don't necessarily embrace everything that they say on the air.
Speaker 2: Is that true?
Speaker 3: Well, it's television, right, who embraces everything they say on television?
Speaker 3: You're there to cater to an audience on whatever, and.
Speaker 2: Doesn't reflect their own feelings.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I mean, you're there.
Speaker 3: You're going to maintain ratings or you're going to be
Speaker 3: fired somewhat. The difference is that Fox is that the
Speaker 3: ratings are even bigger than everywhere else. You're going to
Speaker 3: get more you're being paid more money. The response is
Speaker 3: more intense. So you're you're you're on the program.
Speaker 1: Yeah, Well, the last couple of questions I want to
Speaker 1: ask you about media in general.
Speaker 2: And then, as you know, we live in a world now.
Speaker 1: When I was a kid, it was an appointment to
Speaker 1: watch the news. It was six o'clock Cronkite, Huntley Brinkley.
Speaker 1: We had a relationship with media, and the world wasn't
Speaker 1: pulsing us with news. You know, Now you have a
Speaker 1: device in your pocket and you're able to find that
Speaker 1: everything in real time, in an instant and much of
Speaker 1: it that and much if it's something more important that
Speaker 1: you can have no hope of influencing whatsoever. And I'm
Speaker 1: wondering which was better? Was it better then when we
Speaker 1: could consume news and think about it, but it had
Speaker 1: its place in our lives in my opinion, and then
Speaker 1: we lived our lives the rest of the time, you know,
Speaker 1: I mean, or the way we live now, where we
Speaker 1: live in this hot tub.
Speaker 2: We're in the fucking hot tub all day long.
Speaker 1: The news, the news, the news, what's happening to And
Speaker 1: again much of which was what are you supposed to
Speaker 1: do about it?
Speaker 2: What are you supposed to do about it?
Speaker 3: I actually think it might be something more complicated than that,
Speaker 3: which is that most people don't listen to news. I mean,
Speaker 3: remember people get their news from cable news. These are
Speaker 3: audiences of I mean Fox says will do two million
Speaker 3: a night. You know CNN will do six hundred thousand
Speaker 3: a night. These are relatively small nunder.
Speaker 2: A million, yeah, does under a million?
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean these are small numbers compared to the
Speaker 3: news that you're talking about when it was twenty million
Speaker 3: or thirty million in a NII. So we have that
Speaker 3: kind of thing. News is more intense but servicing fewer people.
Speaker 3: But then we have this other side of this in
Speaker 3: which people are involved with this political culture, but they
Speaker 3: don't really follow this political culture.
Speaker 4: It's more a.
Speaker 3: Point of identity than it is of information or events
Speaker 3: or anything that we would otherwise have associated with politics.
Speaker 2: Murdoch is old. Murdock is very old.
Speaker 3: I got to call last week from the Daily Mail.
Speaker 3: They said they were running down a rumor that we've
Speaker 3: heard Rupert is dead.
Speaker 1: We did that on thirty Rock. Yes, don geis. They
Speaker 1: put him in the freezer, been torn anyway. The point
Speaker 1: is that when Murdoch is gone, I mean he's alive now,
Speaker 1: and who knows his how much he has his hand
Speaker 1: and things now, even though he's retired.
Speaker 3: Well he hasn't really, you know, that was a weird retirement. Know,
Speaker 3: I'm I'm going to step I'm not going to step down.
Speaker 3: I'm going to step back. What does that mean, I'm
Speaker 3: going to step back. What it probably meant immediately is
Speaker 3: that he doesn't want to testify, looking for a way
Speaker 3: out of testifying. In this other big case, this Smartmatic,
Speaker 3: another voting machine company that when they're selling Suing for
Speaker 3: I think two point seven billion dollars.
Speaker 2: In boldened no doubt by the.
Speaker 3: Yeah, no, and so and and he can't testify when
Speaker 3: he you know, the deposition that he gave and dominion
Speaker 3: was a catastrophe. So they're trying to trying to get them.
Speaker 1: But when he's work, when he's when he really is
Speaker 1: not stepping back, But he's gone, I mean in terms
Speaker 1: of not just not passed away, but eventually, eventually, I
Speaker 1: guess he won't. Maybe he'll find a way to have
Speaker 1: an influence on the company after his dad. Who knows,
Speaker 1: but he But what do you think is going to happen?
Speaker 1: His kids just don't seem to have the same skill
Speaker 1: set he does.
Speaker 2: Is that fair?
Speaker 3: I mean, they're they're rich kids. They each have, as
Speaker 3: I said, two billion dollars in their pocket. So that
Speaker 3: creates a whole different sense of motivation. Clearly, you know,
Speaker 3: I mean think Lachlan now runs the company and wants
Speaker 3: to hold on to his job. James, his brother, wants
Speaker 3: to take the company from him. I will take the
Speaker 3: company from my brother. I will turn Fox News into
Speaker 3: a force for good air, quotes.
Speaker 1: Author Michael wolf If you're enjoying this conversation, tell a
Speaker 1: friend and be sure to follow Here's the Thing on
Speaker 1: the iHeartRadio app, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.
Speaker 1: When we come back, Michael wolf answers listener questions from
Speaker 1: our audience at town Hall in New York City. I'm
Speaker 1: Alec Baldwin and you're listening to Here's the Thing. I
Speaker 1: spoke with Michael Wolfe live at town Hall in New
Speaker 1: York City about his latest book, The Fall, The End
Speaker 1: of Fox News and the Murdoch Dynasty, before he answered
Speaker 1: some questions from the audience. I couldn't help but wonder
Speaker 1: if wolf is aware that he resembles curiously his book's subject,
Speaker 1: Rupert Murdock.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 5: No, no, all the time, all the time. Yeah, because
Speaker 5: I mean vaguely you do you? Yeah, no, it was
Speaker 5: part of him trusted thought he.
Speaker 4: Was talking to him so disconcerting.
Speaker 2: He trusted you.
Speaker 3: He sort of would look at me sometimes and kind
Speaker 3: of notice this. And and I said to him, I said,
Speaker 3: you kind of look like my grandfather.
Speaker 4: He says, your grandfather says, I look like you.
Speaker 2: I love this. Steve from New Jersey. How can Fox
Speaker 2: News save itself? Can it?
Speaker 3: It's a funny question that presupposes that Fox would want
Speaker 3: to save itself.
Speaker 4: Fox believes it doesn't need to say it is the winner.
Speaker 3: Yeah, but I mean James Murdoch does probably have the
Speaker 3: votes or could possibly have the votes to take Fox
Speaker 3: and to turn it into something the opposite of what
Speaker 3: it is. How he does that? And he would have
Speaker 3: to do that on the back of his shareholder's money,
Speaker 3: which would probably not make them happy, but he could.
Speaker 3: He's a decent television executive. He ran Sky News, which
Speaker 3: is a pretty down the middle product.
Speaker 4: Could happen.
Speaker 1: Marissa from Brooklyn asks would you go on Fox News
Speaker 1: to promote your book if you were asked?
Speaker 3: You know, this is an interesting thing in that not
Speaker 3: only am I banned from Fox News and this is
Speaker 3: this is a Murdoch thing. But they can't say my
Speaker 3: name on Fox News, which has spared me a lot
Speaker 3: of grief because that whole part of the world doesn't
Speaker 3: know that I'm, you know, not in agreement with them,
Speaker 3: that I that I write books about Donald Trump that
Speaker 3: they probably would not like, which as a matter of fact,
Speaker 3: that I can tell this the Here's the last time
Speaker 3: I saw Rupert Murdoch. This was in twenty sixteen. I
Speaker 3: had been visiting Roger Ayles, whose office was on the
Speaker 3: second floor, and I came down on the elevers. I
Speaker 3: was alone in the elevator, and the doors opened the
Speaker 3: lobby and there's Rupert Murdoch and here's me. Now, Rupert
Speaker 3: and I had spent a year together, so we were
Speaker 3: extremely well known to each other, and we had not
Speaker 3: spoken in a long time because he hated my book.
Speaker 3: And we're looking at each other and we don't know
Speaker 3: what to do. I mean, it's like both of us.
Speaker 3: And I finally put out my hand and I said hello, Ruper.
Speaker 3: He throws up his hands so as not to have
Speaker 3: to shake my hand, charges pass me into the elevator
Speaker 3: twenty sixteen, knocks my shoulder as he goes by, and
Speaker 3: then I step out and think, well that went well.
Speaker 3: I got another elevator's story. I'm on the elevator. This
Speaker 3: is in two thousand and nine. I has just spent
Speaker 3: the morning with Murdoch in his apartment in this building.
Speaker 4: It was a Trump building on fifty ninth.
Speaker 3: In Park Park, where, yeah, where Avonka and Jared live
Speaker 3: or lived. So we're talking and having coffee and then
Speaker 3: we leave together. We get on the elevator, go down
Speaker 3: a couple of floors, elevator stops, elevator's doors open, and
Speaker 3: Donald Trump gets onto the elevator with us, and Murdoch
Speaker 3: greets him in a friendly, neighborly way, and Murdoch is,
Speaker 3: he's just an incredible mumbler, you know. The first thing
Speaker 3: he talks into us, it is an exciting and Donald
Speaker 3: Trump turns to me and says, do you ever understand
Speaker 3: a word?
Speaker 1: He says, A rare moment of insight by Donald Trump.
Speaker 1: Last question is from Don from New York City. How
Speaker 1: do you know I love this? How do you know
Speaker 1: when or if your sources are bullshitting you, they're just
Speaker 1: making it up?
Speaker 2: How do you know? I mean?
Speaker 3: It's a good question, and I guess the answer is, well,
Speaker 3: you don't, but you become very close to these people.
Speaker 3: I mean, this is not just you know, you know,
Speaker 3: I'm calling somebody up and saying, can you tell me
Speaker 3: blah blah. I end up in long relationships with these people,
Speaker 3: you know. And this is people within the Murdoch circle
Speaker 3: who I've now known for years and years and years,
Speaker 3: and people in the Trump circle who I've now known
Speaker 3: for well since twenty sixteen, and over the course of
Speaker 3: three books. So you kind of come to understand who
Speaker 3: they are, what their agenda might be, and then also
Speaker 3: the test of time when they told me that, then
Speaker 3: did it turn out to be true? Or how true
Speaker 3: did it turn out to be? And that's sort of
Speaker 3: the game, the inexact science of what we do.
Speaker 2: I'll use well, this is my last question.
Speaker 1: I'll use one example, which is the FINCINN regulations, the
Speaker 1: regulations that are prohibited for many, many years, network television
Speaker 1: from producing their own programming fin Sin, which was killed
Speaker 1: by Clinton of all people, because supporters of his and
Speaker 1: media wanted it to be killed because they weren't making
Speaker 1: enough money. The network television audience was eroding, so they
Speaker 1: needed to be able to be more competitive. So they
Speaker 1: needed to be able to produce their own shows. So
Speaker 1: you have NBC launches, NBC Studios, ABC Studio. They're going
Speaker 1: to make their own product. And when you put a
Speaker 1: show on NBC. I'm not going to pick on them,
Speaker 1: but any network you put a show on that what
Speaker 1: they demand as they're vague to put your show on
Speaker 1: the air is become appalling. Like it was like you
Speaker 1: used to give the networks twenty five percent of the
Speaker 1: profits at the back end of the show. Then it
Speaker 1: went to fifty. Now I think it's like sixty five
Speaker 1: or seventy. When you come and work for them and
Speaker 1: they control the network, they pocket a lot of money
Speaker 1: now to even put you on the air. It's like
Speaker 1: Paul Newman told me about shelving fees. So one of
Speaker 1: the problems when he sold Newman's own products, he had
Speaker 1: to pay payola to the supermarkets to put his stuff
Speaker 1: on an eye level shelf. You don't want your stuff
Speaker 1: down here, you want it up here at eye level,
Speaker 1: and you have to hand them a check for two
Speaker 1: hundred and fifty thousand dollars to that store to put
Speaker 1: your product on the right shelf. So all this hocus
Speaker 1: pocus that these companies do Finns in the fairness doctrine.
Speaker 1: The government has become nonexistent in regulating media in this country.
Speaker 1: Do you think that's a problem. And if you were
Speaker 1: to make a change, a regulatory change im media today,
Speaker 1: what would that be.
Speaker 3: Well, the background now is the media business is collapsing,
Speaker 3: the television business is collapsing, the movie business is collapsing.
Speaker 3: So all of this stuff controls, not controls whatever is
Speaker 3: at this point kind of immaterial. We are going into
Speaker 3: a period of radical transition out of which I mean
Speaker 3: no one yet can imagine what the shape to come
Speaker 3: is going to be. I mean, it is going to
Speaker 3: be very different. And what will media if it will
Speaker 3: be something other than what we think of it now.
Speaker 3: Other people will be in charge than those now. You
Speaker 3: know Murdoch, he is both lucky and smart and based
Speaker 3: in two thousand and eighteen, basically sold off most of
Speaker 3: his company. I mean, he got out of the entertainment
Speaker 3: in business, twentieth century Fox, all the cable stations except
Speaker 3: for Fox sold TODs sold to Disney at the top
Speaker 3: of the market. And matter of fact, the only things
Speaker 3: that he kept were things that Disney didn't want. He
Speaker 3: would have sold those two, but they didn't want Fox
Speaker 3: for obvious reasons, and there were other things they couldn't
Speaker 3: take for regulatory reasons. But Murdoch, being Murdoch, understood, you know,
Speaker 3: let's take the money and run.
Speaker 1: Let me just say this, which is that I can't
Speaker 1: think of anybody in my lifetime who's had more of
Speaker 1: an influence on our society and our culture than Rubert Murdoch.
Speaker 1: When I grew up, we lived in a world where
Speaker 1: there were political opinions you had that were not very measured.
Speaker 1: They were very volatile, They were very very bitter, they
Speaker 1: were very very judgmental, they were harsh, and you kept
Speaker 1: those opinions to yourself. The society that I grew up in,
Speaker 1: in terms of media and people on TV, that was
Speaker 1: a kind of a there was a professionalism to them
Speaker 1: that was just this is absent today. And what Murdoch
Speaker 1: did was he unleashed the monster, if you will, of
Speaker 1: Fox News just encouraging people to complain and complain and
Speaker 1: bitch and not solve any problems. These people are all
Speaker 1: about destroying. They're not about building anything. All they do
Speaker 1: is destroy everything in their path. And I want to
Speaker 1: say that that an understanding of that in terms of
Speaker 1: how that happened and who the person is who's in
Speaker 1: charge of that.
Speaker 2: Murdoch.
Speaker 1: I'm so grateful to have you with me because this
Speaker 1: is a wonderful book, and I encourage everybody here to
Speaker 1: buy this book and read. You know, who is Murdoch
Speaker 1: and a historical context in our lives in terms of
Speaker 1: media and our country and the world. This is a
Speaker 1: great opportunity for you to learn about that by reading
Speaker 1: this one.
Speaker 3: Well, if I can just add, it is also catching
Speaker 3: him at this moment, the inflection point of a good
Speaker 3: story like this, of having a man who has devoted
Speaker 3: his life to amassing this level of power, more power,
Speaker 3: more influence for a longer period of time than anyone
Speaker 3: in our Again, that's not.
Speaker 2: Good for our country. And then liberal or conservative.
Speaker 3: Yes, And then but here we catch him losing it.
Speaker 3: And that's when you really start to see who someone
Speaker 3: is and the pathos, the tragedy in its own way
Speaker 3: of what you can't take with you.
Speaker 1: Well, I want to say this is our first repeat customer.
Speaker 1: This is our second interview here at town Hall about
Speaker 1: his book. We did Fire and Fury before. How huge
Speaker 1: I mean, look at me huge book. It's amazing how
Speaker 1: you do somebody for a while and you don't stop.
Speaker 2: Even my wife said that to me.
Speaker 1: I'll sit there, I go I want to go to
Speaker 1: dinner and I want to have dinner, maybe some Japanese food.
Speaker 1: And my wife was like, will you stop? I mean,
Speaker 1: what's wrong with you? So anyway, I want to say
Speaker 1: thank you to the great, great, great journalist and writer
Speaker 1: Michael wolf Thank you so much, thank you. My thanks
Speaker 1: to author Michael Wolfe. This episode was recorded at Town
Speaker 1: Hall in New York City, where produced by Kathleen Brusso,
Speaker 1: Zach MacNeice, and Maureen Hoben. Our engineer is Frank Imperial.
Speaker 1: Our social media manager is Danielle Gingrich. I'm Alec Baldwin.
Speaker 1: Here's the thing is brought to you by iHeart Radio.