38 Burst results for "Baker"
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"Give the Bread Dough to the Baker, Even If He Eats Half of It"
"The value of expertise in a world brimming with DIY tutorials and a do -it -yourself culture, the age -old adage, give the bread to the baker, even if he eats half of it, resonates with timeless wisdom. This proverb underlines a fundamental truth, the importance of entrusting tasks to those who are skilled in their respective fields, even if it means incurring higher costs. The cost of amateur work attempting to lead to subpar outcomes, additional expenses, or even catastrophic failures. For instance, a homeowner might attempt a complex plumbing job to save costs, only to create a bigger issue that requires professional intervention. This scenario illustrates the hidden costs of amateur work, which can often exceed the expense of hiring a professional from the outset. The baker's half, a fair exchange the just a monetary cost but also represents the value of expertise, experience, and the assurance of quality. When we pay professionals, we aren't just paying for the physical labor or the end product. We're also paying for their years of training, their specialized tools, and their ability to foresee and solve complex problems. In the professional sphere in the professional world, particularly in fields like medicine, law, or engineering, the stakes of amateur intervention can be extraordinarily high. As a physician, for instance, I understand the critical importance of specialized knowledge. In healthcare, entrusting a complex medical procedure to a generalist rather than a specialist can have dire consequences. Economic implications While it might seem cost -effective to cut corners by not hiring professionals, the long -term economic implications can be profound. Businesses that skimp on expert input might face operational failures, legal challenges, or reputational damage, all of which can be far costlier than the initial savings. Conclusion The essence of the proverb, give the bread to the baker, even if he eats half of it, is not about literal bread or bakers. It's a call to acknowledge the value of professional expertise and the wisdom of investing in it. Whether in our personal lives or professional domains, this principle guides us to make decisions that prioritize quality, safety, and proficiency over short -term savings. In the end, the extra cost paid to a professional is not just an expense, it's an investment in quality, peace of mind, and ultimately, success.
The Doug Collins Podcast
Fresh update on "baker" discussed on The Doug Collins Podcast
"OK, Tom, you've had 33 years, you're like my dad. My dad was a Georgia State Trooper for 31 years. He started in the mid early 60s, retired 31 years later. I see your sort of path is a long one as well. Tell me how you, let's just start off the podcast by saying, how did you get started with the FBI? I mean, what brought you there? OK, well, as I explained in my book, my granddad had been a police officer in New York, in Brooklyn actually. And then his two sons who I knew quite well, my uncles had both been police officers and as I was growing up, I'd hear their stories, their adventures kind of inspired me. So as I got to the finish of college, I, I wanted to join the New York City Police Department. However, a couple of people talked to me and told me I could join the FBI and that's what I did. All right. Well, in doing so, now tell us a little bit about your career before we get into some of the stuff right now, because I've had more dealings than I ever thought about having in the last few years with the FBI and the problems that are having, and we're going to get into that a little bit, but I do want people, and I mean this sincerely, you know, coming from a law enforcement background, my dad and a lot of my family members, you know, I'm still firmly convinced that most of the FBI's problems are sitting in, uh, off of Pennsylvania Avenue up there for the most part and not in the local field offices. I think they're out, you know, wanting to do a good job, but they're, you know, leaderless right now in many ways. So sort of talking about how, you know, how was it breaking in, in the, in the, cause that would have been still the Hoover era that, I mean, you came in in an interesting time, uh, and how did back then, I know they moved you a good bit, just talk a little bit about that. Oh, they moved us a lot. Uh, but let me tell you, Doug, um, it was a great adventure. And, uh, I created a sub theme in my book of the good, the bad, and the ugly, because I didn't want it all to be the ugly, this, this terrible stuff, as you say, in leadership and culture that's happened in the past few years, so I, I told a lot of the adventures, um, the historical cases that I, I'm not saying I was a central character in, but I had knowledge of, I was on the scene, uh, including the attempted assassination of President Reagan, later the investigations of the Pan Am 103 and TWA crash, and there's a lot of public interest in a lot of these historical cases, but when we were in those days, and this is a significant point that I make in the book, a lot of our time in the classroom was spent on the Constitution, uh, because we were a law enforcement agency, we are orientated towards the Constitution, and, and of course, in the Constitution, a lot of the time was sent, spent on the Bill of Rights, particularly the Fourth, Fifth, and Sixth Amendment, and what was very interesting, and, and a lot of people, some defense attorneys find it hard to believe when I tell them this, but we were told that we should not view the Fourth, Fifth, and Sixth Amendment as an obstacle to be overcome, that we should embrace it, and, and it went so far as one instructor gave us all a pocket-sized copy of the Constitution and told us to keep it on, in us, with us, in our pocket, and when we're interviewing a citizen, or when we're searching somebody's home, if we have the Constitution in our pocket, we won't go wrong, we won't go off the track, and a lot of us took that seriously. I know it sounds to some people as corny, but that's, that's how serious the Constitution was in our training in the FBI, the pre-September 11th FBI. Well, I can understand that, and, and going back to your time, do you, because I, you know, just from popular myth and, and, and just in real work, the FBI was always sort of held out, you know, differently depending on, you know, how it was working, I mean, some good, as you said, good, bad, and ugly, I mean, you go back through history here. Um, how did you see, before we get into some of the day stuff, how did you see the 60s, 70s, you know, into the 80s, because that would have been the, you know, the, the early part of your career into the sort of the middle and middle management part of your career, how did you see the FBI change? Um, because it was, it was definitely a whirlwind change from the older days, you know, from the Johnson administrator, the Hoover administrator, you know, moving through, you know, with, with, into more of a modern, you know, facility, if you would, how, how did that, uh, how was that in law enforcement for you from the FBI perspective? Doug, that's an excellent question. There were a number of changes going back earlier. One of the most significant thing was the FBI always, and this is in a lot of the history books was called upon, uh, and some say it was just J. Edgar Hoover, but it was the FBI was called upon by the national leadership, whoever the president was at the time, FDR, certainly in world war II, then Truman, then Eisenhower, then Kennedy, then Johnson, Lyndon Johnson was called upon, uh, to get them information about what was going on. And we had the pike committee, uh, and, and similar committees in the mid seventies pointing out certain abuses that came about, not just with the FBI, but with the intelligence community in general and the way they were handled. So what happened then the Congress of the United States, which you were once part of wisely enacted the foreign intelligence surveillance act. We hear so much about now Pfizer and what that did, that set up a legal framework for obtaining intelligence on foreign agents resident in this country. And, and we all know, uh, that a lot of these people work out of embassies and other diplomatic establishments. So Pfizer was enacted in 1978. Judge William Webster had just become the FBI director. He set up the gold standard for using Pfizer. The law initially required that the director of the FBI and the attorney general had to sign off on any individual Pfizer warrant. And Judge Webster was meticulous about this. All of these applications for Pfizer warrants were reviewed very carefully and closely, but they were only to be used on foreign agents, not U S citizens, and only to gather intelligence, not to gather evidence. And then those early years, we now know because of the reports, there were only a couple of hundred every year. Then we had the September 11th attacks. And after that, Pfizer was amended and amended again and again, and now can legally be used against U S citizens. Uh, and we saw that in the Carter page thing where there were four Pfizer warrants against him. That's a perversion of the original intention of the act. The act was never intended to gather information from U S citizens. Uh, there are, there are procedures in criminal code for using electronic surveillance on U S citizens. And it requires a higher standard of probable cause than the Pfizer warrants do. I think that's one of the big changes and that, that abuse, that situation can be corrected by the Congress. Yeah, I agree. And that's one of the things we were trying to do when I was there, especially in the last part, I think that's very important for listeners to understand on this podcast. And again, you write about it in your book again, as we'll, we'll call it as the fall of the FBI, how once a great agency became a threat to democracy, this sort of hits that right there. Because what we were seeing was is when you expanded it through the Patriot act through the, uh, other things that expanded this out, it was no longer when it, as you sort of rightly say, when it was first pointed out as foreign agents on American soil, and now it's been opened up to where you have American citizens or, uh, you know, under this as well. And what we were trying to do again is to keep it, you know, I think some of the checks and balances you always talk about having the pocket constitution, but having somebody others, because you know, now, uh, you know, Tom, the reality is you've had the inspector general, uh, you know, say, and DOJ inspector general and others say that it is been abused and that the, the FBI abused the Pfizer process. They have sent wrong information to the court. We know that Comey has signed off on Pfizer warrants that were, uh, that he did not, uh, have the, uh, verification. We saw that in the Russia collusion issue. We saw it on everything. There's gotta be a balance here where you can't have political agendas and a, in a law being used without some kind of at least check and balance, which doesn't always tip, which wouldn't tip off those that you're trying to get information on, but protects it before it ever gets started. Well, you're absolutely right. And in loose in allowing it to be used against Americans and loosening up the requirements, for instance, as I said, originally it was the director and the attorney general had to sign off on every, the final application, uh, that's been expanded and expanded. And now in both agencies, there's a half a dozen people who can sign off on it. It's become promiscuous. The use of Pfizer, uh, when they were only a couple of hundred a year back in the seventies, eighties and nineties. Now there's four and 5,000 a year. These statistics are, are made public about a year after the fact. So it's being widely used. And, and we, we saw that the sloppiness beyond sloppiness, but it was sloppiness in the Carter page warrant, which really opened up a window into the whole situation. Uh, I think not only the Congress has a role to play, but actually the judiciary who approves these, they have to get a tough and questioning what's put before them. I agree. And I think federal judges are finally starting to do that a little bit, but again, there's that equal balance and, and, and, and I'm going to hit this before we go back to something else. It seemed like we did the old analogy after nine 11, that we were willing to trade our privacy, willing to trade, you know, this, our freedoms for security. And you had those in power who were willing to say, look, and they use the excuse of, we don't ever want to have another nine 11. Well, again, nine 11 was an anomaly. Was it terrible? Yes, it was awful. And we need to, you know, we should have done more with some of the countries actually involved with that. But to give up the amount of stuff, do you think Tom, that people really realize, and this is funny because my producer and I, we talk about this all the time. Do you really think that people realize how much the government actually knows, uh, about them or have the ability to know about them? Doug, you just hit on it and you started to get into something that's very, very important. Uh, and I know you're a bit of a starry in yourself. Whenever there's been a crisis in, in, in our history, there are things done that seem justified at the time that in retrospect were an abuse. And I'll go all the way back to the American civil war and Abraham Lincoln, now a beloved president and truly was a great man, but he suspended habeas corpus. He, he enacted a lot of things that were in violation of the rights of Americans at that time. Then we had world war two under FDR. We were attacked by the empire of Japan at Pearl Harbor, but yet there were things done on the West coast of the United States by FDR in the internment of Japanese citizens were interned. That was a gross violation of rights. And everybody today acknowledges and agrees with that. And I submit to you that similar things happened after the September 11th attacks. And, and some of it happened specifically with an inside the FBI. Yeah. Well, and that is true. And it goes back to something now in, you know, I want to tie something together and let's see if we can play this together a little bit. You talked about, you know, the pot committee, you talked about the issues of intelligence coming out of the late seventies. Uh, a lot of it doing with, I mean, again, when I dealt with impeachment and I dealt with going back to history, because one of the things that I wanted to be sure of, at least from our perspective, when they were trying to impeach Donald Trump was, is I was looking at the historical nature of it because frankly it is, it had not been done. It was not being done properly then. But if you look at how it was done earlier, you began to see the patterns. And one of the ones that I actually looked at a great deal was the Nixon impeachment, uh, hearings, which lasted multiple years by the way. And then the abuse of, uh, or, uh, really of intelligence and intelligence gathering. Um, interestingly enough, the sixties, late, the, with the, the civil rights movement with the hippies, the everything else that was going on that time. Um, one of the more interesting ones was to me is it came out of that is, you know, the, the FBI was moving a little bit more and more toward when you're earlier in your career, away from some of that mission that you talked about and whether it was, you know, you go back to the Chicago seven, you go back to a lot of these issues around civil rights and other things and what they were gathering. And then it became Congress, like you said, that said, okay, wait, wait, it took a major thing like Watergate to really bring it on. Do you think we're at a point now to where this major enough to where you can have maybe Republicans and Democrats agree? We don't need this kind of observation going on unchecked. Well, yes. And, and let's hope so. Uh, uh, as you know, your colleague, your former colleague, Congressman Jim Jordan, has had a series of hearings. Some of them are wonderful. I mean, really important information to light, but for the most part, the Democrats are sort of stonewalling it and throwing up obstacles at every turn with a few exceptions. And I think maybe we'll see more and more exceptions among the Democrats. Let's hope so because these, these threats to Americans rights affect people on the left as well as on the right. Uh, and I think when, when you get to the issue of controlling free speech, which we saw in the Twitter files, uh, monitoring free speech, uh, a lot of Democrats are now starting to, to, to express some concern about that as well. So perhaps we'll get the bipartisanship that allowed the reforms that happened after Watergate to happen again. And speaking of that, Tom and any, you know, from your perspective, um, did it shock you as much as it did some of us? Not, I mean, again, I say shot, but I mean, we knew some of this was going on, especially when we were having to do the, you know, we're investigating and stuff, but it is still stunning to me that the FBI, I mean, the one of the latest that we've heard is the FBI and we're not even got into the Biden administration or anything else. We're just from a, from an intelligence and from a censoring point of view, we're now finding out in the last couple of months through what Jim and others have done there on these investigative committees, that FBI was taking basically requests from places like the Ukraine and other places and taking them to social media to get what they wanted taken down. I mean, can you ever imagine a time in which the FBI was being used as a messenger service for, for censorship? Well, that, uh, that specific example you gave about the Ukraine, that's the Ukrainian intelligence service that is so in completely outrageous. Uh, and, and there was in the, in the one of the hearings only about two weeks ago. Oh, and I'm sorry, I forget the, uh, the woman's name, but a Congresswoman from Indiana, um, was particularly outraged about that and knew that very incident very well cause she had been briefed on it. And this was one, uh, Chris Ray, the director of the FBI was testifying, and she asked him about that. And he, he's, he really stonewalled her and was very evasive. It was extremely extraordinarily disappointing. And she got quite angry with him trying to express herself. And the fact of the matter is, as she explained, the Ukrainian intelligence service, everybody in Western intelligence knows has been totally, uh, infiltrated by the Russians. The current president of the Ukraine, Zelensky knows that has admitted that and acknowledged that and has fired or dismissed something like 600 employees from that agency. But yet we have the Ukrainian intelligence service making a request to the FBI to take down certain social media postings posted by us citizens and they did it and pray and in trying to answer her said to her, well, it's a very complicated situation. We can't explain it here now. I mean, what a, what a poor answer. He should have been ready to give an answer. He actually should have been ready to set step forward with Congress that very day, uh, make good use of his time, admit there's been problems and, and commit to cleaning them up. Yeah. Victoria sparks is the, uh, Congresswoman of Indiana that brought that up. And it was an interesting point of view, but look, I've had similar issues with Chris Ray. I've known him with him, been known for now multiple years and had to deal with him in Congress when he was a FBI director and very con very frustrated that he at what a, you know, again, we go back to a lot of things. Perception is reality and the perception is, is that he's not handled the issues inside his own department and they may have gotten rid of some people, um, they were going to anyway from Comey to McCabe to struck to, to, you know, some others, or I think, you know, again, the discussion is, is, or, you know, still there. Um, but I mean, this, it's just not the culture has not changed and I'm hearing from more and more FBI agents in the field, uh, over time that they're tired of answering for this for really what they believe is the stupidity of Washington, uh, in these cases, because let's, let's turn quickly to that. And, you know, it is amazing to me what we saw in like the Mueller investigation, what we saw in this operation crossfire hurricane, um, you know, back and forth it, if that doesn't scare both left and right, I'm not sure what will. Well, you're absolutely right. And, uh, and I'm, I'm very sure you're familiar with Chris Ray, cause I know he's originally based there in Atlanta, Georgia. But what he's consistently done, and it really is frustrating to a lot of us is he keeps saying, well, the bad apples have been fired. We've gotten rid of the bad apples. Uh, but he, he's not looking at the underlying cultural problem and addressing the underlying cultural problem. Uh, to me, that's, that's the entire issue. That is what has to be done. I agree with you. And I think that's, you know, again, until something changed, but also you have a, uh, frankly, an attorney general that is, is just asleep at the wheel. And, you know, that's another issue that you have here. One of the things let's turn quickly, also as well to really the updated version of what's going on now, because I see this and Tom in particular, there are many conservatives or part from party and even demo, you know, even liberal Democrats who are saying this as well, it has become so obvious the different standards in which the FBI opens investigations into conservatives. I'll just use that as the terminology, not part political party, but I'll say conservatives or somebody around Donald Trump. Uh, as opposed to somebody around a bill, uh, Hillary Clinton or a, uh, Joe Biden and this investigation into, I just love from a field officer perspective, this hunter Biden investigation and this whistleblowers that are now came out with IRS, because I'm sure you probably worked with IRS agents as well. Can you just describe for Americans maybe in, you know, non legally, just how bad that is? Well, it's, it's, it's very bad. And number one for all Americans, the perception does exist and widely that there is this imbalance. That's number one. That's not healthy that we have that. The people don't think justice is even handed in the hunter Biden laptop investigation. It really has been mishandled terribly. I say hunter Biden laptop investigation, as you now know, it's broadened out more into a Biden investigation, but initially, uh, when those intelligence officers made that statement just before the election, the last presidential election that this information smacked of Russian disinformation, uh, the FBI already knew that the laptop was genuine. I mean, the laptop was incredible and I'm not plugging other people's books, but Miranda divine wrote a book just based on the information in the laptop. And of course, hunter Biden had all his texts, his schedules, his, his emails in that, in that, uh, in that email, uh, in that, uh, laptop and the FBI has the technical availability, uh, within a matter of, uh, days, if not a matter of hours to analyze a laptop and determine if it's genuine, they had already determined that. So this thing went forward. Uh, the bad information got put out there, which was unnecessary. Uh, and now we know back in December, uh, and raise acknowledged this, uh, an ASAC assistant agent in charge in the Washington field office was allowed to leave, walk out the door because they found he had been slowing down the laptop investigation. So there's been a lot of foot dragging in that. It has to be addressed. Now we have information, which once again, thanks to the Congress has come to light with the suspicious activity reports, the filings by banks about suspicious money movement and other informant information. It's clear this to anybody. It's clear there's some, something wrong there, perhaps a big corruption scandal. And yet for almost five years, since 2017, the same year Chris Ray became director, this, this thing has been piddling along, making very little progress. Well, it is. And I think you look at that and I'll just give the comparison here. Look at the disinformation, the lack of concern, the, and this brought out in the hearing the other day that they, the Democrats were actually saying, well, he was not president. He was a candidate. Well, the let's, okay, I'll take that premise that Biden, you know, that they, that he was a candidate. So we shouldn't have done some of this stuff to him. Let's just say you accept that. Then what was the problem in 2016? When coming straight off of Jim, Jim Comey basically playing the only law enforcement officer in the country and also playing a lawyer at the same time as attorney general saying, you know, well, the no reasonable prosecutor would bring anything against Hillary Clinton after bleached emails, everything else. And then here's what Tom, a lot of people don't realize that less than 15 days, I think it was, I have to go and check my timeline 15 to 20 days from that event in Cleveland at the Republican national convention was the beginning of the questioning of Donald Trump and the way of operation crossfire hurricane that then continued on before the election and through the election of 2017 this is struck and, and others. It, I mean, you, I mean, I, I mean, I can be understand partisan. I've been partisan, you know, in many things in my life, but I just can't understand overlooking the obvious, just problem here. So the question comes, is this a problem of a DC bureau that has become inbred in many ways to thinking the same way, doing the same thing, going to the same parties, going to the same thing and promoting each other. They don't get out in the field much anymore. And the separation from your field offices to the agents who are out there doing it every day. Doug, uh, it's all of that new. You gave a specific example there, but it goes back to the change in culture. And unfortunately this, this began, uh, days after the September 11th attacks. As you, as undoubtedly, you know, but a lot of people don't realize it. Bob Mueller, Bob Mueller of special counsel, fame and infamy, became the director of the FBI just two or three days before the September 11th attacks that happened on a Tuesday on the following Saturday morning. He was summoned to the presidential compound in camp David, Maryland to give a report of the investigation. At least that's what he thought he was there for. And in those, essentially three and a half days between Tuesday and Saturday morning, the FBI had done what it does best investigate. And they had identified all 19 hijackers, their financing, their past travel, their associates, their connections back to Al Qaeda. And when he was done presenting that report, expecting some praise instead, George W. Bush looked at him and said, I don't care about that. I just want to know how you're going to prevent the next one. Bob Mueller said he left that meeting bounded, determined to change the culture of the FBI. And he used that word culture. He wanted to change it away from a law enforcement mindset to an intelligence mindset that had some bad and unintended, unintended and very bad consequences. Yeah. Well, and it does, because it takes you away from the, the thing that you do best and that is investigate. And you know, you, you came up with the, you know, the, the leaders of the movement, we started seeing the videotape. And then that look afterwards, we started seeing how the FBI has certain knowledge. We had CIA had certain knowledge. We had, uh, other intelligence communities had other knowledge and nobody was talking to each other. That is a problem. And that was something that could be addressed. But this overreaching gauntlet of, of the Patriot act, which I got to know Jim Sensenbrenner very well. Jim was a committee, the chairman of the judiciary committee. When that was written, he was the lead sponsor on it. And I got to know Jim very well, especially in his later years in Congress and the perversion of what was put in there bothered him greatly. And if you watched any of the hearings and Mueller and others, he was always very, very abrupt and very quick to say, that's not what this was about. This was supposed to be, you know, you've taken this law and abused it in essence is what he said. Um, going forward, how, I guess maybe a question, this is, and I'm not sure I have an answer here. So this is sort of open-ended. How do we get out of this mess? Well, that's, that's key. Uh, the number one thing, the FBI and the department of justice have to do a lot of it themselves internally in changing the culture. Granted, that's not easy, but it can be done. It's done in the corporate world from time to time. People have written books about a changing culture in the corporate world. The first thing you have to do of course is recognize the problem. And that's what Chris Ray seems to have been reluctant to do. He keeps ascribing all the problems to the bad apples. Uh, but there are concrete things within the FBI and the department of justice that can be done. One is Mueller centralized these so-called sensitive investigations at headquarters. That was a mistake. He did it first with the September 11th attacks and then it was done with the Hillary Clinton emails later under Comey and the Russian collusion investigation. So you lost the layers of traditional layers of review. For example, typically in the FBI, a case is run by a case agent in the field. He's closely supervised by his field supervisor. Then there's a special agent in charge of that office reviewing what that person does and only later does headquarters get involved in looking at it. What Comey and Mueller did, they did away with all those layers of review on these headquarters specials. So you have a situation which we saw it's documented now, thanks to the Durham report in the, uh, in the Russian collusion investigation where you have one guy in headquarters, a very high level executive struck Peter struck a deputy assistant director making the decisions in the case and then also doing the investigations in the case. He opened that case on a Sunday. He wrote the opening communication. He signed out the opening communication himself and on Monday morning he went, flew to London, England to conduct the first interview in that investigation. As is now documented by the Durham report, which, which by the way, validates a lot of the things I assert in my book, there was no justification for opening that investigation whatsoever. It was really a travesty and be changed. Getting away from this headquartered, headquartered, centered management and devolving management again to the field offices. Well, I think this is an important thing, you know, time that we've been talking about. I think people have on this podcast, we've talked about it a great deal. Um, I wrote about, uh, some of this in my book on the impeachment, but what you're dealing with is again, goes back to the real heart of this culture folks. Um, and so I, you know, not giving away your book, you've done a great job talking about these issues. Folks, if you want to learn more about this, uh, the, this is Tom Baker, Thomas Baker. He's with 33 years with a special agent with the FBI. He wrote a book called the fall of the FBI, how a once great agency became a threat to democracy and Tom, I'm sure you can get that book anywhere. Is that right? Yes. It's available on Amazon where most people get their books and on bonds and noble. I appreciate you mentioning it. No problem. Well, we're going to put a link in it here in the, uh, notes, uh, for the podcast. So folks, if you want to go, just click on the link, you can go purchase book. Tom, thank you so much. We may swing back with you later. As we continue to see this fall out, I'm hopeful for change, but I'm very frustrated in the fact right now that there's not a mechanism for that change. And as someone who's been in DC a great deal, knowing the how it works and how it doesn't work, uh, this is going to be a continuation of a problem, but Tom, you've, uh, you've laid out a lot of issues here. Love to get back with you. Maybe sometime we'll go back and talk to the sixties and seventies, because that was sort of the, uh, the wild West, if you would in, in, uh, FBI, and you were just getting your teeth cut then. Okay. Well, thank you, Doug. I'd be glad to do that. And thank you for all the good you do. Well, thanks so much. You have a great day. And if folks that's, uh, uh, the, it for the Douglas podcast, you know, where to go, Doug Collins podcast.com, click on there, hit subscribe. You get, uh, get all the information just like this. This is a great discussion folks about what actually is going on in the FBI, why it became part and Tom laid out something that's very interesting. And that is the move and the culture shift away from the traditional role of FBI investigating and doing those things to this more intelligence role that I think is exactly right. The centralization in Washington DC has now made it a politicized role and that's got to actually change. So folks, you take that into consideration. We'll see you next time on the Doug Collins podcast. Hey everybody. It's my pillows 20th year anniversary and over 80 million. My pillows have been sold. Mike Lindell and my pillow wants to thank each of you and every one of you for giving you the lowest price in history on their, my pillows. You will receive a queen size, my pillow for 1998 regular prices, $69.98 and just $10 more for a king size. You will receive diff deep discounts on all my pillow products, such as bedsheets, mattress, toppers, pet beds, mattresses, my slippers, and so much more. This is a time to try out something other than the amazing products that you've had your eye on. Go to my pillow.com, click on the radio podcast square and use the promo Collins, C O L L I N S, to receive this amazing offer on the queen size, my pillow for 1998 or call 800-986-3994. This offer comes with a 10 year warranty and 60 day money back guarantee. It's time to start getting the quality sleep you deserve. You know how I know that because I sleep on my pillow every night, go to my pillow.com and use promo code Collins, C O L L I N S or call 800-986-3994 today and go, Hey everybody, it's Doug Collins. Welcome back. I got another special time. I get to set aside on economics and all things metals and the economy. And I did do it with my friend Charles Hornegan. He is just a legacy precious metals. You know him, you've seen him, uh, advertise on my podcast. You've seen him, uh, all over. A lot of our friends talk about this because we want to give you the options out there that you need to make good financial decisions. Um, Charles, I want to talk today. Let's, let's learn a little bit more about gold and silver just in the economies of scale. I guess when we look at this, everybody goes to gold and silver and we know that what are some of the things if you're investing, if I'm investing in this, because you always hear about stocks and what affects stocks, you know, uh, oil, you see business numbers, you see the GDP. What actually have you seen over time that affects gold and silver or other metals, but specifically gold and silver, I think it'd be a good question for folks. You know, there's two facets when you're looking at metals, right? There's the, um, the industrial value, you know, gold not used as heavily as say, silver is an industrial metals. Um, but it's, it's a facet, you know, there, there's an actual physical demand for the product to be built into equipment, silver, especially everything that we do nowadays has an electronic component to it somehow some way, right? If you're conducting electricity, you're silver. That's just what works in, you know, electronics, gold for your higher end electronics that you have that there. So there's, there's the industrial metal and that's important, but where most people look at your precious metals is for the economic factors, right? It's for the currency value. And it's an important thing there. And one of the best things to know about, you know, gold and silver is there are metals that work counter to the dollar. Okay. Um, I used to say the anti dollar investment, and then I just don't love that term because I'm not against the dollar per se, but, you know, this is the counterbalance to the dollar. So as the dollar gets weaker, and when I say weaker, I don't mean it's comparison to the rest of the world. The dollar is still for now, the currency of choice. It is being challenged. Um, the brick nations are challenging it very hard. Um, and we just had, you know, you know, treasury secretary, uh, Janet Hill and say, yeah, we're, we're losing strength that we had, but that's not the weakness that I'm talking about. I'm talking about the weakness of the purchasing power of the dollar. Right. And we see that in some call an inflation. Um, I don't like the word inflation because people think inflation is only bad when it's in the five and higher percent, but inflation is bad at 2%. Right. If you think about it over the course of your lifetime, if you lose 2% of your purchasing power every year, by the time you're ready to retire, there's not much left. And this is why every grandparent's favorite conversation is the, what I could buy it for in my day. I remember going to the store, I went to the movies and for a quarter, I saw a movie and double feature and I got popcorn and a Coke and everything up. I get it. I was also walking uphill both ways. We get it. Um, and now that quarter doesn't even pay the tax on those items. Exactly. You can't even get it out there. Well, you bring up an interesting point. And I think sometimes we think of, uh, you know, again, markets, and I know there's this quote world market that we think of when you think of what I'll say is traditional stock market investments, but really, truly the, the first board, I'll say, if you look at it from a perspective, worldwide market, if you would, has always been toward the metals, gold and silver, even, you know, even just stuff that you don't do with diamonds, things like that. That's always been that tangible asset. Is that, does that give you a better perspective of a worldview that you're going to have these things in there and they're not named dollar, you know, pound all these other things. And it should, and it does give your perspective. You know, gold is the, is the only asset that central banks buy around the world. They don't buy real estate. They don't buy, um, office buildings. They don't buy acreage. They have the currency of the country they deal with and gold central banks have been owners of gold since there've been central banks, because it's the original store of value. It always has been, it always will be. It's something that people recognize around the world. It's easy to convert to currency. It's easy to convert and exchange with other currencies. And that used to be the basis of, of, of, uh, you know, international trade was gold. So the history is there for it. And, and, you know, the thing too, is that it stands the test of time. It has, and it always will. It's maintained value. You know, if you look at where gold was just 25 years ago, you know, $600 an ounce, we're at $1,900 an ounce now. And that kind of right lock and step with you look at the cost of, uh, price increases of just our everyday items. It's right there with it. It's doing its job. It's protecting your purchasing power, silver, the same thing. Silver is actually up more than that. You know, back when gold was in the six hundreds, silver was in the $5 range. Here we are $24, you know? So it does what it's meant to do. I think where people get challenged by it now is we have 24 hour access to pricing and markets and things like that. People have become addicted to the overnight success, right? But every overnight success has shown overnight failure as well. What they say, what goes straight up, comes straight down.
Crypto Critics' Corner
A highlight from Tweets, Trolls, and Superstars in the Sam Bankman-Fried Trial (Feat. Katie Baker)
"Welcome back everyone, I am Cass Pianci. I'm joined as usual by my partner in crime, Mr. Bennett Tomlin, how are you today? I'm doing pretty well, how are you Cass? I'm doing good. We're joined by a super special guest today, Katie Baker from The Ringer. She's been covering the Sam Bankman -Fried trial. Katie, welcome, it's a pleasure to have you on the podcast. Thanks for having me. I was just talking about how I'm very happy to be here. I've been a fan of you guys for a while, so this is exciting. It's exciting for me too, because you, we'll put it in the show notes, but you did an article very recently, well, I guess it was a week ago now, but it's called Caroline Ellison was supposed to shock this SBF trial, instead the defense team has. I think this is like the best article I've read about the Sam Bankman -Fried trial. It makes you feel like you're in the courtroom. So I just recommend everyone go read the article because you feel like you're there and you're like social media awareness, which Bennett and I haven't gone into this in depth a lot, but like, I think social media actually played a really significant role in this and you seem to have the pulse on that. And I'm just, yeah, like, I'd love to pick your brain on that. I don't know where you'd wanna start, but just like maybe just your delve into Caroline's social media, reading the books that she's read and like all of that stuff. I'd love to hear your thoughts about that stuff. It's funny. It's like, I'm thinking about it as you're talking and I'm like, you know, I've always had a little bit of the degenerate in me. So I've always kind of followed like what's going on on whatever the kind of latest social media is. But like in the context of this case, I mean, I write for the ringer, which is, you know, I've been sitting in the courtroom and people say, oh, who are you here with? And I say the ringer and they either know it or they don't. And if they don't know it, I have to then say it's a sports and culture site. And here I am in a courtroom for a fraud, you know, a crypto fraud case. But to me, it is like a sports and a culture and a finance and a politics and a tech story. And I'm kind of trying to cover it in that way. And to me, it's all those things. And, you know, and I've always been someone who's been like extremely online, terminally online, ever since I was a teenager moderating IRC chats in the nineties. And before I was a journalist, I worked in finance and did that kind of during the rise and fall of the, you know, the pre and post global financial crisis. So I love, I love fraud. I love charlatans. But like, I do, not to say that, but I've been, it's been, you know, in my kind of career, which has changed here and there, it's been interesting just to see, you know, whether it's sports or entertainment or whatever I'm covering, like to see the characters and the people who convince people to give them a lot of money. And, you know, just when you think like, there can't possibly be like a new weird fraud character that supersedes this last one. Like there's always someone and this is the latest someone. And so that's how I'm kind of approaching this. There always being another fraud someone is, I think. There's always another fraud someone. I mean, like, honestly, you guys have so many of these, like micro characters and I say micro, and it's like to the tune of like, you know, imagined and real and sometimes invested upon billions in this space, which has been so funny about covering this trial. The E's with which they're switching between M little M's and double M's and B's and big B's and, you know, talking about sums of money. Like they always have to explain to the jury, like this looks like it says a thousand dollars, but that means a billion dollars, you know, just like the way they keep these spreadsheets are very round numbers. And so that's been kind of funny to see like the, not just funny, but like very telling of the case. It feels apt that you're covering it as like a cultural, you know, event because as you said, it is like a new fraud, but it's also a huge, massive fraud. It's gambling, it's international. It's like, it's all of these things at once. And it's crazy to me how much of this is like on Twitter or like, you know, you guys are, you were like going through her Tumblr. I guess we're into a new time, you know, like this didn't happen with Bernie Madoff. This didn't happen in the OA crisis. People were not hunting on Twitter to find what someone said about, I don't know, mortgage backed securities. That wasn't happening. Cass, there's a scoop in there if you find Ben Bernanke's Tumblr.
The Doug Collins Podcast
Fresh update on "baker" discussed on The Doug Collins Podcast
"This house, wherever the rules are disregarded, chaos and mob rule. It has been said today, where is bravery? I'll tell you where bravery is found and courage is found. It's found in this minority who has lived through the last year of nothing but rules being broken, people being put down, questions not being answered, and this majority say, be damned with anything else. We're going to impeach and do whatever we want to do. Why? Because we won an election. I guarantee you one day you'll be back in the minority. And it ain't going to be that fun. Hey, everybody, welcome back to the podcast. Glad to have you with us today. You do not want to miss a minute. Yeah, stick with us. You're already here. So, hey, just grab a coke, go down the highway and listen to us as we go. Today, we've got a great show. Baker's own from former FBI agent, 33 years of service. And he is going to talk about, you know, really where the FBI started going off the rails and how it is affecting people today, how it's affecting the FBI, the standing in the world, but also thinking how investigations are not being done, to be honest, and how the political bias has come into it. You know, one of the interesting things that he and I talked about was the fact that the FBI moved from an investigative organization to an intelligence gathering organization. And we're seeing this every day. I mean, whether it be from the issues we're playing with the pro-life protesters, we're seeing it with school boards, we're seeing it with the I mean, frankly, after the Hunter Biden investigation, the Donald Trump investigation and others, this political bias is becoming more and more obvious. And it's really contributing to this perception that has become reality of a two tier system of justice here in the country. He's got a great new book out. You're going to hear all about it after the break. Tom Baker, former FBI agent, is going to be here to talk about all of this today on the Collins podcast. Hey, everybody, you know about legacy precious metals, legacy precious metals. You hear from we talk once a month, we talk about legacy precious metals, talk about precious metals being part of your portfolio, how they're your navigator. Well, now they're not only navigating in a new way. They're actually giving you a new way to buy gold and silver. In fact, legacy precious metals has developed a revolutionary new online platform that allows you to invest in real gold and silver online. In a few easy steps, you can open an account online, select your metals of choice and choose to have them stored in a vault or shipped to your door. I'm more of a ship to my door kind of person. I enjoy having them with me, but they can do it either way. And you can now do it online. It gives you real access to a dashboard where you can track your portfolio growth in real time. Any time you'll see transparent pricing on each coin and bar. This puts you in complete control of your money. This platform is free to sign up for. Just visit LegacyPMInvestments.com and open your account and see this new investing platform for yourself. Gold hedges against inflation and is against and against a volatile stock market. A true diversified portfolio is just more stocks and bonds, but a different asset class. This platform allows you to make investments in gold and silver no matter how small or large with just a few clicks. Remember, do as I have done. Go to LegacyPMInvestments.com and get started today. And now you've got a new tool to help you along in your investments. Hey, everybody, it's MyPillow's 20th year anniversary. And over 80 million MyPillow's have been sold. Mike Lindell and MyPillow wants to thank each of you and every one of you for giving you the lowest price in history on their MyPillow's. You will receive a queen size MyPillow for $19.98. Regular price is $69.98 and just $10 more for a king size. You will receive deep discounts on all MyPillow products, such as bed sheets, mattress toppers, pet beds, mattresses, my slippers and so much more. This is a time to try out something other than the amazing products that you've had your eye on. Go to MyPillow.com, click on the radio podcast square and use the promo Collins, C-O-L-L-I-N-S to receive this amazing offer on the queen size MyPillow for $19.98 or call 800-986-3994. This offer comes with a 10 year warranty and 60 day money back guarantee. It's time to start getting the quality sleep you deserve. You know how I know that? Because I sleep on my pillow every night. Go to MyPillow.com and use promo code Collins, C-O-L-L-I-N-S or call 800-986-3994 today.
CoinDesk Podcast Network
A highlight from CARPE CONSENSUS: Caroline Ellison Takes the Stand
"This is Carpe Consensus. Join hosts Ben Shiller and Danny Nelson as they seize the world of crypto. Hello and welcome to Carpe Consensus. This is a podcast from the CoinDesk podcast network and I am Ben Shiller here at CoinDesk. I'm a features editor here. And joining me today is the great Danny Nelson. He is a business reporter here and he is hot footing it here from the SBF trial. Hi, Danny. Hello. Well, today I will say I don't live in New York City. I live in Philadelphia. And today is one of those rare days in the month of October that I will be in Philadelphia. But throughout this week, I will be coming to you guys from New York City, from Manhattan downtown at the courtroom itself. Great. So Danny, we're going to talk to Danny today about the early rumblings of the trial, which has been going about a week now. And Danny has also been recording some snippets from the trial from the ground there, which we're going to play later in this recording for you. So, Danny, how's the trial going? Ben, the trial is going pretty well. The press pool is developing a sense of camaraderie because we have to get there so early in the morning, like we're recording today on Monday the 9th. Tomorrow, Tuesday, Caroline Ellison is going to testify. And I think that I'm going to get there at 5 a .m. Like that's my goal because that's the hottest ticket. Everyone wants to see the ex -girlfriend testify. It's going to be the highlight of the trial unless Sam himself takes the stand. And we just can't miss it. And for me, at least I want to be there in the room where it happens. So that means getting there really early. So Caroline Ellison is the head or former head of Alameda Research. Why is she so crucial to this case? Well, the big question is what happened to this money? This $8 billion in dollars in crypto that just went poof, just got deleted when FTX went to put. Apparently, allegedly, Alameda had a big role in doing that, whether that was from stealing the money, whether it was from just borrowing all of it, never repaying it, giving that money out to other people. And she was the head of that operation. So she should know pretty well what caused that money to go away and also what role Sam Baker Freed had. I'm really excited for that. I'm also excited for the cross -examination where I can only imagine that the whole love story is really going to get drilled down by the defense lawyers, because it's really just there's a lot that was wrong in Alameda and FTX. And one of the things that was wrong is you really shouldn't have two CEOs of two companies having a very adversarial personal relationship because that's just not good for any two businesses that work very closely together. And Ben, it's also worth noting that throughout the trial, we'll be bringing our listeners, you guys, little snippets that I record from outside the courthouse in New York City. And we'll be hearing some of those later today. So Danny, you've been at the courtroom every day. Just take us inside that courtroom. What's it like down there? Is it busy? Does it feel different from a normal reporting gig at Coindesk? Oh, it's so different. Most of the days at Coindesk, I'm shifting between my bed and my desk, just staring at Discord and wondering what it's like to be a real reporter. Not that what we're doing isn't real reporting, but like the whole idea of being on the ground up close and personal, witnessing the events. It's not something you can get every day in online a primarily reporting environment, which is what all of crypto journalism is and what a lot of journalism is these days, really. But in the courtroom, you're just entirely focused on what's happening there. We don't have our phones. We don't have our computers. We don't even have our smartwatches. If we have smartwatches, I don't. But all of the electronics you have to check in with the marshals at the beginning of the day and get the back at the end. So you have nothing to do but pay attention. And what you're paying attention to is this. It's not really a circus, but it is this really carefully coordinated. It is a performance, I guess, where the prosecutors are attempting through questioning witnesses to make a certain case. And then the defense team is through the same process trying to discredit that case. That is fascinating. One of the things that really fascinates me about this whole case is family the drama. I mean, you talk about it being a kind of theatrical piece. I mean, it's kind of like a Chekhovian sort of family drama here, isn't it? I mean, you've got the kind of wonder kid, the illustrious parents who got involved and were apparently very greedy themselves, you know, asking their son for money all the time to do their kind of pet projects. What do you make of this kind of family dynamic as it takes place in the courtroom? Well, the family is there. I don't know if Sam's brother has been in attendance. I don't think he has, but his parents certainly are every day. His mother and his father are, I think, in the second or third row just watching everything unfold, just like we are. It adds to this sense of something surreal is happening. Maybe 15 feet away from me, I'm looking at the back of Sam's head. Then to my right are the parents. In front of me, the prosecutor is the defense of the judge. And then there are other courtroom characters too. Sometimes Martin Shkreli shows up. There's Ben McKenzie, that actor who wrote a book. There are these sketch artists too, because you have to remember in a federal courtroom, there are no cameras allowed. But the media gets around that by hiring these oil pastel artists who sketch what's happening. And I love watching them work just to create a sense of what's going on because you have to find different ways of documenting what's happening in this courtroom because we don't have cameras. And I'll add to that, that although none of us reporters inside Coindesk are professional artists, we are certainly trying to moonlight as them during this trial. Nick Day, who is anchoring our coverage, he is using his own creativity to try to capture these moments himself. With some pretty high ranking on Google, I'm told, little sketches. So everyone should look up SPF trial sketch. Maybe you'll see some of our work. You can tell because it's the ones that aren't professional looking. Yeah. Not only a good writer, but also an emerging sketch artist, all of us. Something like that. So you talk about this strange environment where there are no electronic devices and people don't have their smartwatches. I mean, this is kind of a forced act of kind of digital detoxification. What does that feel like? It must be quite strange. Well, it is at least for the regular reporters. If you're a court reporter, which is to say, you only ever cover what's happening in the courtroom, regardless of what case it is, then you do get your electronics. Lawyers also get their electronics. But for the reporters, we have to invent new ways of doing things. For Coindesk, our MO right now is to beat anyone we're able to beat, which means having a system whereby we can take snippets of life inside the courtroom and get them out the door before the day is over. So we take turns running pieces of paper on which whoever's writing that day's story has written some element, whether that's a really spicy question or a characterization of the jury or something colorful about the judge. We run that outside, get our phones back from the check -in, and call it into our editors. They type it up, they send it out, and then that person goes back in. It sounds like a scene from a 1920s Hollywood movie, the golden age of journalism, where people were passing pieces of paper around. So, Danny, just take this forward. So we've got Caroline Allison. Who are the other major witnesses that we have to look forward to? She's the big kahuna, I gotta say. She's the one that everyone wants to hear the most from. Beyond Caroline, we still haven't heard from Nishad Singh, who was the fourth member of this inner circle. Once again, that's Gary Wong, who was the CTO. Caroline Allison, the CEO of Alameda Research, the trading firm. Sam himself, FTX and the head of everything. And Nishad Singh, who was director of engineering within FTX. All four of them allegedly knew what was happening with these shady business dealings. We haven't heard from Nishad. So he is the big one beyond Caroline. I'm looking forward to the mooch, if the mooch testifies, which he might. When we went down to the Bahamas conference over a year ago now, that was put on by Anthony Scaramucci's Skybridge, as well as FTX. So he wasn't privy, I don't believe, to the whole fraud, but he was a victim of it. And he's always colorful on CNBC. I think he'll do the same in the courtroom. And just to round this out, what about SPF himself? Do you think his team has made a decision as to whether he'll testify or not? And that must be a massive gamble for them to put him up there or? Well, it is and it isn't. If the trial is really going poorly and none of the questions are going the defense team's way, and it seems like he's already cooked, then the stakes might actually be pretty low, right? There might be no downside and unlimited upside for him to testify. We're still only one week into this thing. It's going to take possibly six, maybe longer, who knows? So it's too early to tell for sure. I would say it's usually unlikely for a defendant to take the stand just because you could usually only do more harm than good. But Sam is so, I'd say, convinced of his own innocence in this, that he might decide to take the stand regardless of what his lawyers say. The judge did remind him at the start of this trial, he has the right and it is his decision alone. If he wants to testify, his lawyers can advise him what to do, but they can't make him do anything. So Sam is known for throughout this whole collapse time, making his own decisions, he might make another one of his own decisions right here. So Danny, I mean, apart from the main protagonists in the trial, are there any other people worth watching in the courtroom? Certainly. There is first and foremost, the jury, the 12 people who will actually decide whether Sam Beckman Fried is guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. It's hard to tell how one should read their reactions, if there are any reactions at all. But there are certain people in the jury that do seem to have reactions when something is especially surprising, I guess. It's hard to tell because what's surprising to me is different from what's surprising to them, presumably because I know so much already about what we're talking about in the courtroom. But sometimes jurors not off for a couple of minutes during really boring things. Other times they'll let out a little giggle. One guy was definitely bemused when prosecutors played the Larry David FTX Super Bowl commercial, which you have to admit was a really good commercial. He was very, he chuckled a lot at that, one of the jurors did. I also am very fascinated by what they're wearing. Sometimes they show, like none of the jurors are showing up in suits as the legal teams are. Some of them though, as the trial progresses, they're dressing up. Like if one day one guy is wearing just a random branded tee, the next day he's wearing a button -down shirt. So maybe that corresponds with how seriously the jurors are taking the trial. If they're dressing up, maybe they're thinking, oh, I understand the gravity of this. I don't know. It's hard to tell. It's also, there's just something that's fundamentally strange about, well, the people who decide Sam's whether guilty or not, they're just supposed to be normal people. Like, I don't know, I don't think there's a better system of rendering justice in this country. I'm just fascinated by that because I've never actually seen it play out firsthand. And I also never really watched Judge Judy. But of course there's no jury in Judge Judy, it's just Judy. But there is a sort of paradox here that the less you know about crypto, the less you know about SPF and what's been going on in the world in the last year, the more appropriate you are for jury service in this case, right? I guess that's exactly correct, right? Like, you don't want people who have already formed their opinion based on what we in the media are saying happened. Like, I'm pretty confident when I report something that is true, but I'm not attempting to make a case. I'm not attempting to defend or prosecute someone. I'm just trying to convey what I understand to be the facts. And the way that that process works is very different from the one in the courtroom. I mean, the mainstream media has come on strong at the beginning of the trial and it's been reporting on SPF's haircut and the witnesses and some of the atmospherics around the trial. Do you expect them to keep it up for six weeks? It seems unlikely to me that they would really have that focus. I mean, the mainstream media moves very quickly, probably more quickly than we do in the specialist crypto media. Do you think they'll be there at the end, the way they're there at the beginning? I think that some of the heaviest hitters will be there at the end. They've already been there for the beginning. They'll be there throughout. I know that the New York Times is going to be there every day. The Journal also going to be there every day. There's a Fox Business producer who's been there every day at the trial. I think he's going to be there throughout the six weeks. So there's a strong base of the regulars that I'm starting to become familiar with as we wait every morning to get into the courtroom. And they're all saying that they're going to be there throughout. There's a lot of tail end interest of people who don't show up early enough to get into the courtroom itself. I don't know if they're going to be there every day of the trial. I don't think they will. Like already, in the first week, the days when there were no star witnesses, they were definitely quieter than the other days. But right now, we're going through the moments where everyone, everyone, everyone, everyone is showing up. OK, we'll leave it there. That was Danny Nelson. And we'll be returning to lots more coverage of the SBF trial, the trial of crypto as some are calling it. And we'll be back with more much later.
Bloomberg Daybreak Europe
Fresh update on "baker" discussed on Bloomberg Daybreak Europe
"Including things critical like minerals and the energy sector now a little earlier our colleague Francine Lacroix was joined by the US Assistant Secretary of State for Energy Resources Jeffrey Pyatt for an exclusive conversation he that says raw materials will be a key part of making the transition to clean energy a success it's very clear that we're not going to meet our climate targets unless we can deliver these critical minerals that are so important to the clean tech supply chain at a much greater than market -paced volume so we need more cobalt more lithium more copper no more nickel more zinc a lot of that is happening and is going to happen because of the inflation reduction act and the incentives that are provided there but also our bipartisan infrastructure act in the United States and all of the work that's being done by Department of Energy by Department of Defense to help both build the energy security aspect of our critical mineral resource but also as you say a to develop the volumes that we're going to require we can't do this alone which is why I'm here in London today China has massive subsidies right for their industries and critical minerals is what you just laid out enough to counter some of that that makes it easier for them to extract so China's dominance of the market is a function in the first instance of their first mover advantage the fact that they spent a decade acquiring these resources we're trying to better make a offer based on market principles driven by the private sector driven by the high ESGs are so that important to my government but also to our European partners our partners in Asia so it's less about subsidizing than it is about building a structure in which countries are able to say China's not the only off taker here and that's a lot of what we're doing it's what I've been doing this this week in London had a terrific conversation yesterday for instance with the Nigerian mining minister who was very very keen on how do I get more Western companies into my country and is that concrete action I mean are we going to see a result in the next couple years because there's always a timeline problem so you're already seeing some of that action in the United States it's being stimulated by the inflation reduction act and the incentives that the inflation reduction act creates for u S or FDA partner supplies of these critical minerals we're negotiating an agreement with the UK right now and with the European Union that would provide those same FTA level accesses to the US market but again this is a this is about building international partnerships we can't succeed in meeting the climate crisis alone the United States is eleven twelve percent of global co2 we have to bring along the rest of the international community I also want to ask you about the oil price cap in Russia is it working it is it's working we're trying to do two things at once here we're trying to reduce the resources that Putin uses to pursue this terrible war against the people of Ukraine but we're also trying to maintain stability in a global energy market has profoundly destabilized by Russia's actions we're going to continue to work to tighten the noose on Russia's energy revenues we've done that through our sanctions action against production we've also done it with sanctions action against ship owners who are found to be circumventing the price cap coalition set up so when you look at the price of oil it's about $75 a barrel is this a good time to actually buy some of that to put in these strategic petroleum reserves so the administration is moving ahead on rebuilding its but SPR again that's a domestic function which I'm not involved with and the key issue here is how do we reduce the revenues that Russia has available to it but it's important are we going in the right action so many questions actually on you know what happened with Russia is that sanctions have not worked to the full extent that a lot of people thought would they so I think it has in two senses first of all Russia's revenues are down you just look at this October compared to last October but also significantly what the future pretends you've had the withdrawal of major international oil companies from the Russian market the technology services providers like Baker and and SBJ have reduced their exposure crucially the International Energy Agency assesses that by 2030 Russia's oil and gas revenue will be down by fifty five zero percent which is an enormous price that Putin is paying for this unnecessary war of aggression that he's unleashed when you look at the complex energy energy complex for the U .S. I know the Strategic Petroleum Reserves are around forty five percent lower I under think President Biden what's the optimum do you have an optimum amount of how you would replenish them or something that you do focus on other things I mean I focus on the the the international aspect of this I mean the the clear the clear picture is the United States is energy secure we have become for the world's instance largest gas but exporter we're committed to using that resource in a way that benefits global markets in a way that's predictable reliable and reduces volatility so that was the U State .S. for energy Assistant Secretary resources of Jeffrey part they're speaking to plan bags fancy lacquer okay it is a time to check on in the markets 953 here in the city it's very briefly just letting you know that European stocks the is benchmark up five -tenths of percent and U .S.
The Eric Metaxas Show
A highlight from Terry Schilling
"Ladies and gentlemen, looking for something new and original, something unique and without equal. Look no further. Here comes the one and only Eric Matt taxes. Hey, folks, welcome to the program, Chris. Where are you? I am. I am in New Jersey, but you're just across the Hudson River. Yes, I mean, I'm outside. I am I am now at that point in my travels, where I don't know where I am. I have to actually stop and think. And I'm not kidding. People think I'm kidding. Can people say does that happen to you? It normally no, but it just happened. I'm in San Antonio, Texas. That's a good place. San Antonio, Texas. And there's people like I'm I'm I'm in a hotel room. So there's people banging. Can you hear the banging? They're doing construction outside the window where I'm doing this radio program. Ladies and gentlemen, I don't know what's happening. It's like I'm a war correspondent. We have coming up in this hour, a Terry Schilling, we're going to talk we want to talk yesterday a little bit about Columbus Day. But obviously, with everything going on in Israel, we didn't talk about Columbus Day. So we'll talk a little bit about Columbus Day with Terry Schilling. And then we're going to talk about the Biden administration's. You know what, I can't even talk about it now. It's too disturbing. But we're going to talk about that with Terry Schilling in hour two, we're going to bring our friend Jason Jones on to talk about what's happening in Israel. Jason Jones has been in the war zones of the world. Like our guest yesterday, Laura Logan. Yeah, your stance this stuff. Yeah, Jason is particularly qualified. He came on a couple years back on the show with some Yazidi folks he had helped extract out of Northern Iraq. I mean, he's, he's like the real deal. He's basically GI Joe. He's unbelievable. Well, frankly, when people tell me these things, I think you did what I don't you know, I don't I can't imagine. But anyway, we'll talk to him an hour or two. And I and we'll probably bring on Jeremy Tedesco from the Alliance Defending Freedom, to talk a little bit about that, as most people know, we're doing a fundraiser for the Alliance Defending Freedom. And I say it over and over, but people ask me, Eric, what, what can I do? Everything's going insane. What can I do? And there are a number of things you can do. One thing you can do today, folks today, is you can give to the Alliance Defending Freedom, if you know who they are, if you understand what they do, you understand that giving something to them, whether a little bit or a lot, you're doing something very valuable, very important. I'm not just saying this, this is really, genuinely true. The Alliance Defending Freedom. They're heroes fighting for religious liberty in the courts. I just posted something on my Twitter feed yesterday. Jack Phillips. This guy's a baker, folks. He's a baker. Think about it. Think about what you do in life, right? Like you're not some muckety muck, whatever, you're just doing something. We all just do something. This guy's just baking cakes. He runs the masterpiece cake shop in Colorado. For 11 years, the woke nuts that hate him because he's a Christian, have been going after him and going after him. It has been 11 years of lawsuits. Alliance Defending Freedom won the first one, crushed it, but they keep coming after him. It's been 11 years and he hopes that the lawsuit that the Alliance Defending Freedom is working with him on now might finally get this to go away. But this is an average citizen. I've met him a couple of times. This is not some freedom fighter, somebody in the political world. The guy owns a private business, a small business, and he has been attacked. They're coming for all of us. If you don't stand with those who you can stand with now, it's the Martin Niemoller poem. First, they came for this group, and I didn't stand up because I wasn't one of them. Then they came for this group, and I didn't stand up because I wasn't one of them. Then when they came for me, there was no one left to stand up or to speak for me. We are living through that right now. This is the cancel culture. They're trying to wipe him out. They're trying to wipe out Mike Lindell. They may succeed. I just want to say, folks, everybody has to stand up and do something. I'm asking you to go to metaxas .com and to give to the Alliance Defending Freedom. You'll see the banner there. This is very important. Please do what you can. I also want to say, typically, I say if somebody out there wants to give a gift of $10 ,000, they can do so. We can have dinner some place. If I get to your neck of the woods. Just last night, I had dinner here actually in San Antonio with a lovely couple who had given $15 ,000 to the CSI campaign from about a year ago or whenever that was. I put it out there that if someone wants to give $10 ,000, it will be my joy to figure out a time in the next year where we can have dinner together someplace. I will say that this offer is for this week only. I've just gotten so busy. The offer stands for this week only if you give to the Alliance Defending Freedom because of the show. But after this week, I will not be able to do that or I'll have to double the price or something because I simply can't fit it in my schedule anymore. Yeah, I was just going to say the price for dinner with Eric has just gone up. Well, in all seriousness, this is a corporate decision. Right. I'm joking, but I know personally, your schedule and your life right now, it's literally every minute of your time is accounted for and very, very valuable at this point. Yeah, no, it's true. I will say that if somebody wants to do that, literally the end of this week, I'll put this offer out there, but just for these few days for this week. Yeah. And I want to say that I've had the privilege of joining a couple times for some of these dinners when they were in New York and meeting some of these folks and just really some of my better memories being part of the show, actually just meeting these people in person. Yeah. Well, that's the whole thing is I get to meet these wonderful people that care about the same stuff that we care about. And it is a joy. And so as I say, anybody who wants to give $10 ,000 or more, we'd be delighted to work it out where we spend the evening together. And as I said, I did it last night. And it is a real joy to get to meet folks who care about this stuff on that level. But whatever you can give, most people can't think of giving anything like that. And I want to say, please just go to Metaxas .com. Sorry, Metaxas Talk. That's the radio website, MetaxasTalk .com. Give what you can, please. Because the Alliance Defending Freedom are on the front lines, folks. They're on the front lines, and they're fighting for us. People say that a lot. It's vague. This is not. This is really clear. They're absolute heroes. So I want you to go to MetaxasTalk .com. There's a phone number. The phone number is 855 -547 -5333, 855 -547 -5333. And I'm quite serious the about offer for dinner. But I'm also serious about the fact that it's just this week. I cannot really do this anymore because my schedule has gotten so crazy.
The Charlie Kirk Show
A highlight from Gaza: What's The Solution? with Joel Pollak and Steve Baker
"We get it. You're busy. You don't have time to waste on the mainstream media. That's why Salem News Channel is here. We have hosts worth watching, actually discussing the topics that matter. Andrew Wilkow, the next D 'Souza, Brandon Tatum, and more. Open debate and free speech you won't find anywhere else. We're not like the other guys. We're Salem News Channel. Watch any time on any screen for free 24 7 at SNC dot TV and on local now channel 5 25. Hey, everybody, the Charlie Kirk show, some bombshell January six revelations, and we talk more about Israel. Boy, there's a lot going on there and how I think that the neocons on the right are overreacting. Email us freedom at Charlie Kirk dot com. Subscribe to our podcast. Get involved with Turning Point USA at TP USA dot com. That is TP USA dot com. Start a high school or college chapter today at TP USA dot com. That is TP USA dot com. Become a member. Charlie Kirk dot com and click on the members tab. Charlie Kirk dot com. Click on the members tab and as always, email us freedom at Charlie Kirk dot com. Buckle up, everybody. Here we go. Charlie, what you've done is incredible here. Maybe Charlie Kirk is on the college campus. I want you to know we are lucky to have Charlie Kirk. Charlie Kirk's running the White House. I want to thank Charlie. He's an incredible guy. His spirit, his love of this country. He's done an amazing job building one of the most powerful youth organizations ever created. Turning Point USA. We will not embrace the ideas that have destroyed countries, destroyed lives, and we are going to fight for freedom on campuses across the country. That's why we are here.
The Eric Metaxas Show
A highlight from CMMThursday Hour 2 (Michael Torbin 231005)
"Welcome to the Eric Metaxas show. Did you ever see the movie The Blob starring Steve McQueen? The blood curdling threat of The Blob. Well, way back when, Eric had a small part in that film, but they had to cut his scene because The Blob was supposed to eat him, but he kept spitting him out. Oh, the whole thing was just a disaster. Anyway, here's the guy who's not always that easy to digest. Eric Metaxas. Ladies and gentlemen, I told you, I told you that in this segment I would bring on a senior counsel for the Alliance Defending Freedom, Jack Wagner. And as it turns out, he just corrected me. I'm mispronouncing Jack. He pronounces it Vincent, which is bizarre of Vincent. If you insist, Vincent Wagner, welcome to the program. Thanks, Eric. It's an easy mistake to make. Yes, yes, it is. No, you know, I was saying to you that I was getting confused because I mentioned Jack Phillips. A lot of people know the case of Jack Phillips, the baker who has been attacked and attacked and attacked in Colorado, and you guys at the Alliance Defending Freedom have been defending him. And the head of ADF, Kristen Wagner, no relationship to Vincent Wagner. You said there's there's an O in her name. That's right. She got two G's and an O that I that I like. Well, sorry, an extra G and an O that are missing from my name. What what what's that all about? OK, so in any event, I'm trying to confuse my audience. So but but I got an email from her this morning talking about you guys at the Alliance Defending Freedom, defending Jack Phillips, the masterpiece bake shop owner who I've met him several times, a humble man, a man of God who refuses to do what people tell him to do because of his faith. And he has been so attacked in Colorado. And if it weren't for you guys at the Alliance Defending Freedom, he would just be literally out of business, bankrupt. I mean, that's one thing that maybe a lot of people are aware of that the Alliance Defending Freedom has done. But the fact that that battle goes on, can you say a little bit about I mean, this has been many, many, many years that ADF pro bono for free has been defending this hero, Jack Phillips in Colorado. Can you say why that's still going on? Well, Colorado and folks in Colorado haven't haven't let Jack move on with his life. I mean, just this week, the Colorado Supreme Court agreed to take Jack's case again. So the fight continues. And like you said, Eric, don't charge Jack a dime. We don't charge any of our clients a dime. We do this all for free to protect Americans freedom. And you may be already familiar with the five areas we focus on. Jack's falls within the category of religious liberty. We want to protect all Americans freedom to exercise their religion, not just think about it privately in their house or in the church pew, but to exercise it in society to protect religious freedom, protect the free speech of all Americans. You know, that comes up a lot lately on college campuses and where a lot of those cases are and protect the sanctity of life. We we played a big role in last year's victory in Dobbs. Our team, our life team was helping the state of Mississippi defend the law that the Supreme Court eventually held was constitutional and overruled Roe on.
Abundant Encounters
God Speaks Through Dreams Because We Have to Interpret Them
"Going to be continuing this story of Joseph in Genesis chapter 40 of the Passion Translation. This is going to be the cup bearer and the baker in their dreams. And it's just such a cool story and it's so cool to think about how God speaks spirit. You know, it's not English. It's like, I mean he speaks English too whenever he wants to, but he speaks spirit. So dreams make sense to him. He speaks through dreams because we have to interpret them. And as we interpret, he gets to make impressions and he gets to speak in that into our interpretation. so, well, this is a great story and I hope you enjoy it. Here we go. Some time later, both Pharaoh's chief steward and chief baker deeply offended their master, the king of Egypt. Pharaoh was angry with his two officers, the chief steward and the chief baker, so he incarcerated them in the palace of Potiphar, the captain of the guard, in the same prison where Joseph was bound. The captain of the guard placed them under Joseph's charge, and they remained in custody for some time. Then, one night, they both dreamed, the steward and the baker, officials of the king of Egypt. They each had a prophetic dream with different interpretations. When Joseph came to them in the morning, he saw they looked miserable, so he asked Pharaoh's two officials who were under his custody, what's wrong? Why the sad faces? We had dreams last night, they answered, and we have no one to interpret them. Joseph said to them, God can interpret your dreams, please tell them to me. So the chief steward shared his dream with Joseph first. He said, in my dream I saw a vine with three branches in front of me. I watched as it budded, then immediately it blossomed and its clusters ripened into grapes. I was holding Pharaoh's cup, so I took the grapes, squeezed them into his cup, and handed the cup to the king. Joseph said to him, God has given me the interpretation of your dream. The three branches are three days, in three days Pharaoh will pardon you and restore you to your post. You will once again hand Pharaoh's cup to him as he used to do as his steward. When things start to go well for you, remember me and please be kind and mention me to Pharaoh so that he might release me from here. For I was kidnapped from the land of the Hebrews and I have done nothing here to deserve being thrown into the dungeon. When the chief baker saw how favorably Joseph interpreted the dream, he said to him, let me tell you my dream. I saw three wicker bread baskets stacked on my head one above the other. In the top basket I saw all kinds of bread and pastries for Pharaoh to enjoy, but the birds came and ate out of the basket above my head. Joseph said, God has given me the interpretation of your dream. The three baskets were three days and three days Pharaoh will behead you and impale you on a pole and birds will eat the flesh of your corpse. Three days later it was Pharaoh's birthday and he threw a huge feast for all his household. He singled out among his servants the chief steward and the chief baker. He pardoned the chief steward and restored him to his post and the steward handed Pharaoh his drink. But he had the chief baker beheaded and impaled on a pole. So Joseph had accurately interpreted both their dreams. But the chief steward completely forgot about Joseph and never remembered him. That's so cool how empowered Joseph is with his relationship with God. He he is able to just come to the rescue with these guys. For some of us we've really had some tormenting dreams or confusing dreams. A lot of dreams are confusing. And um I think we've talked about before but the subconscious the unconscious the part of us that is always kind of working the autonomic part of us and all those those areas that don't necessarily get a voice in our conscious mind sometimes they have things to say and it can be helpful to personify those things. Not the things but the subconscious that way we can listen for what's the voice what's being said as a Christian we are we have access to the Holy Spirit and in that access every time we have a dream and we ask for an interpretation we can have an encounter with the spirit of wisdom the only interpretations that ever go well are the ones that come from the interpreter Holy Spirit is the interpreter between us and spirit he is a spirit but he lives and has made his home inside each of us so he serves an awesome function so when we have a dream or if we want to help a friend or something like that to analyze their dream and the first stop is the Holy Spirit watching Joseph respond to these prophetic dreams as the Passion translation calls them and they obviously end up being very prophetic about their lives but it was interesting watching him just grab a hold of this cycle God told me God has given me an interpretation for your dream
Telecom Reseller
A highlight from Whitepaper: The emergence of Automation and AI for Customer Service, Podcast
"This is Doug Green, and I'm the publisher of Telecom Reseller, and I'm very pleased to have with us today Blair Pleasant. Blair, thank you for joining us today. Thanks, Doug. Good to be here. I'm glad to see you again. And we also have with us Anna Baker of EnReach. Anna, thank you for joining me today. Hi, Doug. Thank you for hosting us. We're going to be talking about one of my favorite topics, actually two of my favorite topics, automation and AI. And we're going to be talking specifically about a new white paper that just came out a couple of weeks ago, the emergence of automation. And we're going to be sort of diving into this topic. What I like about what we're going to be talking about this morning is, you know, everybody, literally, everybody is talking about AI and automation nonstop. Here we're going to be talking about it in a practical manner. We're going to talk about how it actually can be applied in the field for contact centers and other applications as well. So before we dive into that, Anna, you know, I think our readers and listeners and so on see EnReach all the time, but tell us briefly what your company does. OK. Yeah. So EnReach is a unified communication provider in Europe. We're one of the biggest players there. And we provide our communication services through partners to the smaller and medium businesses. And on the other hand, we also have integrated communication solutions for for Salesforce or for Microsoft, which we provide to the bigger companies and my team as part of EnReach. We focus on the AI part. So we've built a conversational AI platform, which we're probably going to talk about a bit today. And the idea, basically, that you guys have been talking about for a while is actually using AI, making it work for companies, for applications and so on. Am I right about that? Yeah, that's right. Yeah. The thing we discussed with Blair is we showed some cases in which we use AI to fully automate certain conversations. I think one of the examples in the white paper is about a taxi company. You can imagine how narrow these conversations typically are about people ordering taxis and how AI can really help smoothen that process or even completely automate the process. So, you know, staying with that for a second and maybe before and after, how do businesses perceive AI? Is it still an unknown or is it becoming more known? I think it's becoming more known. I mean, if you if you open LinkedIn, you can't get away from AI. And most people have played with with things like chat GPT. So in that sense, it's known. I think the thing that is still unknown is what I can do once you connect it to the data of your company. So where in chat GPT, if you chat with it, you can ask general questions. Once you connect it to the data of your company, you can ask really specific questions and get specific answers. I think this is where you now see a lot of applications is pulling the generic AI conversational AI functionality into the company space and connect it with the company's data. So, Blair, you know, in starting to work on this, how is the digital world of social media smartphones and apps impacted customer service? Yeah, basically, customers want to be able to interact with companies and brands, you know, how they want and when they want. They don't want to have to go through multiple IVR menus before they can reach an agent or get the information that they want. And more and more people are using tools like WhatsApp or Facebook Messenger for all types of things. And they expect to be able to use those channels for customer service as well now. And mainly, you know, people want to be able to get service when they need it, how they need it, you know, not just during business hours. And they're really tired of, you know, the IVR and they want more intuitive ways of interacting with organizations. And one thing is that, you know, we're finding the use of, you know, social media and apps and, you know, all these other things. It's going across demographics and generations. You know, people think, oh, you know, WhatsApp is just for, you know, 20 -somethings or 30 -somethings, but it's not. And so one thing I found is that, you know, regardless of age or, you know, whatever demographic, people want to use these tools and they are using these tools. You know, and staying with that for just a second, those tools are not just communication tools. They're emerging as basically a marketplace. They're the shopping mall. They're the place, especially in many parts of the world, where people transact everything from a haircut to buying a pair of shoes. Exactly. Yeah. So people are used to using these tools and these apps. So why shouldn't they be using it for customer service as well? And then and so, you know, businesses need to really think about this. They need to make that a part of their culture and not just something that's onto the side. Am I right about that? Oh, absolutely. And we're definitely starting to see it. You know, what used to be something kind of separate is now becoming part of organizations workflows and really the way that they do business. Santa, in customer engagement settings, how do you determine which processes are better suited for automation and which should be handled by live agents, which should be handled by live engines or maybe machine? Yeah. Yeah, I think it's all to do with whether customers allow these conversations to be automated. So if you're doing a really goal oriented conversation and it's short, you typically allow, they typically won't mind an automated process. And also from the other side, having short and narrow conversations are a lot easier to automate. And as the conversation gets longer, we see AI struggle with keeping consistent conversation and we'd rather have a human in the loop and an agent taking the conversation while the AI is supporting the agent in that conversation. Did I hear you say the word frustrate? Yeah, I think there still is a lot of frustration. I think there's frustration with the fact that the customers just want to get to an agent as quick as possible. On the other end, they're in the queue and there's many other customers trying to get to the agent. And our role is to make sure that those conversations that are, that can be automated, that can be routed more efficiently, are routed more efficiently so that we free up time for those lengthier conversations that do need agents. This sounds like it's a complicated thing. In other words, we have to make a number of important decisions if you're a company in applications about which calls go where. Yeah, typically it starts with kind of a routing. We ask people their intent, why people are calling or why people are reaching out. And based on that, we make a decision whether to see if we can help them by self service and automated service or whether we directly route to the to an agent. Because a certain conversation that doesn't make sense to try and automate you only frustrate. So let's stick with this frustration thing, because I think, you know, by the time someone's actually contacting a contact center, they're pretty frustrated sometimes. And so I need to I mean, Blair, I need to ask, is AI sometimes seen as a cost reduction tool? And can that be a problem? For some organizations, it is seen as a cost reduction tool. And down the road, I think more and more it will be. But I think right now, organizations are looking at it as a way to improve the service that they provide to customers. And you know, customers are demanding self service. You know, we know that, you know, again, across generations, across age groups, people want that self service capability and to be able to get what they need when they need it without having to, you know, wait in queue for an agent. So whatever organizations can do to help enhance self service is really seen as a benefit right now. And AI is really helping enhance those self service capabilities. And it's also helping agents be more productive when customers do talk to the agents. So I think it is seen as a cost reduction, but I think a lot of organizations are really seeing it as a way to provide better self service capabilities to customers and then also to enhance the agent performance and the agent's ability to answer and resolve the customer's issue when the customer does talk to the agent. You know, a lot of people talk about, you know, being able to replace their agents and saving money that way. But right now, it's really about agent augmentation. It's not about replacing agents and saving money that way. It really is about giving the agents the tools that they need to be more effective and to provide better service to customers. So down the road, yeah, we're going to see, you know, cost reductions based on lowering, reducing the number of agents. But right now, it's really about helping agents be more effective and helping customers get those self service capabilities that they want. Is it also about improving brand loyalty? Oh, absolutely. You know, if customers can get the information that they want, when they want it, how they want it, then that's definitely going to improve brand loyalty and customer loyalty. No doubt about that. But, you know, you were talking about frustration before. If it's a frustrating experience to customers and they can't get the information, then that impacts customer loyalty negatively. So that's why having the right tools that can really assist agents and assist customers is so important. So Blair, are consumers becoming more accepting of automated and self service environments? I'd say yes and no. You know, consumers really want to use self service and studies that I've done show that the large majority of customers will try self service before reaching out to a contact center. But that being said, a lot of people get really frustrated with automated and self service applications that can only answer specific types of questions and they don't always work as advertised. You know, I think the first generation of chatbots really didn't work very well. And customers got very frustrated, you know, frankly, personally, I hated using chatbots for the longest time because the experience was really bad. You know, it didn't provide the right answers. And half the time it didn't understand the questions. It didn't know where I was coming from. And a lot of people just gave up and stopped using this first generation. But I'd say in the past year or so, or maybe two years, the technology really has improved. And we have more conversational AI tools that do understand the questions and can provide better responses. And this is just going to keep getting better with generative AI that lets you ask questions in a more natural way and provide better responses that are easy to understand. So yes, it's been frustrating, but I think customers are becoming more accepting and will be as the technology keeps improving. So you know, Anna, you know, AI is usually perceived, I think, as a large enterprise solution. Is that correct? Can it be used with medium sized companies or even smaller companies? Yeah, I think the answer is yes and no. It's still a big topic. Integrating your data, integrating your system with AI is a lot of work. And enterprises spend a lot of money on that. And that's something that is hard for smaller businesses to replicate. On the other hand, providers like ourselves have already pre -integrated AI into the core of communication, which makes it the solution that is also achievable for those smaller players. Think about taking your IVR experience and upgrading it to a voice IVR, where instead of having to listen to the menu, you can just say, I have a question about my invoice, and the IVR system routes you to the right department. And this is something that we've basically built out of the box as a turnkey solution now. And with these large language models, it's also a lot easier to train and model for your company. So there are definitely solutions we see that are within reach for the smaller and medium businesses.
Dennis Prager Podcasts
A highlight from Whats My Line?
"There are people in this country who work hard every day, not for fame or fortune do they strive, but the fruits of their labor are worth more than their pay. Portions of the following program may contain pre -recorded material. You are listening to the best of the Dennis Prager Show. Hello my friends, it's Labor Day and I'm laboring. Dennis Prager here my and tradition on Labor Day is to ask you about your labor, your work, what do you do for a living, and I have been just fascinated by your ways of making a living. We don't realize, none of us realize, because we all live in a small world. It's impossible not to. You know X number of people, you have X number of relatives, and that's pretty much it. Now we don't live in a small world intellectually or philosophically and the like, but we do in so it comes as a fascinating surprise and it's quintessentially American the ways in which Americans make a buck. So what I do on Labor Day is I invite you to call in and tell me what you do and it could be absolutely prosaic. It doesn't mean you drill for oil in Tunisia. It doesn't have to be exotic. If you are in a profession or a line of work which many others are in, that's fine. First of all, I love to talk to people, which I would think would be a fairly common characteristic among talk show hosts, but it isn't. It isn't, interestingly. Off the air, a lot of these guys are quite introverted and are not people -people. It's not an attack at all, just a personality. But I am a people -person. I'm a people -person. And I love to talk to people. I talk to people, as you know, I've told you, in elevators, anywhere. And so I love to ask people about their work. 1 -8 Prager 776, which translates digitally into... Translates digitally into... This is the official one on LesWatt? Yes. Oh, really? He prefers... My prefers producer this to... Oh, I see. Well, they're both good. I don't know if I have a preference. Isn't there even a third? There are several. There are several. No, no, no. I understand that. I understand, but there's no reason not to use them. So dear Francesca Morris, who has volunteered her time to work on this Labor Day along with the Induplicable McConnell, Sean whose name is spelled... That was composed by yours truly, incidentally. There are areas where I just don't like to boast, but that is one I am really proud of. That is the only piece of music I have ever composed. I didn't orchestrate it, I didn't sing it, but I composed it. So what do you do for a living? It's Labor Day, and it's an appropriate question to ask, and I have a lot of fun. So do you. Are you listening? And it is, among other things you will see, an ode to America. Because unless crushed, the spirit of people, and this would be true anywhere. It's a values issue. It's not a DNA issue. There's no American DNA. And so unless crushed, which is what happens in the vast majority of the countries of the world, people just will do whatever they do. All right, so let's begin with Ambler, Pennsylvania, and Hugh. Hello, Hugh. Dennis Prager. Welcome on Labor Day. Hello, Dennis. Happy Labor Day to you, and I'm very thrilled that I'm number one on the list today. Thank you. Well, that is something. That is something. But I was just going to... I work in a grocery store, okay? A supermarket, if you will. I work for Whole Foods Markets, and I work in the store in North Wales, Pennsylvania. Right. I'll say hello when I'm in Philly. Oh, very good. I know you come here often. Yep. And I'm a baker. I work as a baker there. I go in early in the morning. What time? I usually get there around 4 30 a .m. Go on and wait. So Whole Foods, which I've been to many times, but I didn't realize... So the bakery bakes what? Well, we do actual scratch baking in the bakery. We take items. We don't just open boxes and bake the stuff. It's made from scratch. And what's the stuff you bake? Breads? Well, we do breads, but mostly we do cakes and pastries and what you would find in a neighborhood retail bakery. I thought... Maybe I have it confused with another store chain, but doesn't Whole Foods tend... Exactly. See, that's it. Yes. But the nice thing about me, I'm a fourth generation baker. Wow. Okay. I'm 59 years old, so I've been doing this since I was 10 years old with my father. And what the nice thing is about working with Whole Foods is the ingredients I get to work with. Like, we use only real butter. We don't use any of the artificial short means or anything. It's all real... Let alone God forbid margarine. They got God forbid margarine. I got two, two, two. So that's one of the nice things about it. But I know like little retail bakeries, they can't afford to use ingredients like that. But at Whole Foods, we can and we still do. And that's why people say, well... All right. Now it's my turn to ask you some questions. First, about the hours. So if you report to Whole Foods at 4 .30, what time do you get up? Oh, I get up around 3 a .m. And what time is your work day over? I usually work till about 1 o 'clock in the afternoon. Okay. All right. So hold on. Wait. So you come home and you take a nap? Take a little nap. I usually... When I'm napping, I have you on the radio by being... You know, that's very sweet. So either I help you nap or I don't help you nap. No, but I get to listen to you every day because I usually leave like around 1 o 'clock. That's nice. really No, no, it is really nice. So what time do you go to sleep? Well, I try to get to bed by at least 9. It doesn't always work that way. Right. Especially with the Republican convention, I was really struggling. Right. And I thought, why don't we get the big speeches like at 10 .30 at night on the East Coast? I was like amazed by that. Well, they have to do that. Both parties have to do that. So let me ask you this. Are you married? Yes, I'm married. I have two children. So I assume your wife doesn't go to bed at 9? No, she doesn't. So this is just the way it's worked out? It's always worked out that way. It's very good. Like in other words, when she comes to bed, she's very quiet. She doesn't come in there and wake me up or anything. But we do have our struggles with that. Yeah, look, everybody has struggled with something, but you're employed. Yes, I am employed now. And on the love meter, loving what you do, 1 to 10 hate, 1 just love 10. What is it? Oh, well, I'm working for Whole Foods. I'm an 8. It's a really good company. That's really not. What is your most proud production? The most proud thing that I make? Yes. I tell you what, I really enjoy the pound cake and the angel food cake that we make.
podcast – Lawyers, Guns & Money
A highlight from LGM Podcast: Talking Football with Rich Brooks
"The football isn't going to change it because the mighty dollar is doing it all. The greed and, you know, let's face it, players are getting paid, coaches are making exorbitant salaries that make no sense, really, that make no sense. This is the Lawyers, Guns and Money podcast. Hello and welcome to the Lawyers, Guns and Money podcast. My name is Rob Farley. Here with me is my colleague Eric Loomis. Eric and I have the tremendous honor to have as a guest on this Guns and Money podcast, Coach Rich Brooks. His biography is long, but it involves being the head coach of the Kentucky Wildcats. It involves being the head coach of the St. Louis Rams, and most notably for us, the head coach of our beloved Oregon Ducks. Sir, it is a tremendous honor to have you here with us this afternoon. It's a pleasure to be with you. I wanted to start just by asking, I know that you live back in Oregon, and I hope that your place is safe from the fires. We have had a lot of smoke. I have a son that lives up the McKenzie River about 25 miles, and his house burned down in the fires two years ago, and the fires are close to his house again, but the good news is he can't get to it because everything else is burned around it, but it's been pretty smoky, and the wind has changed, and it should be a good day for Oregon football on Saturday when they open, as long as the wind continues from the north or the west. Well, let's hope so, and you know, part of the reason that we wanted to talk to you is this is such a transformative moment in college football right now. I mean, you of course coached Oregon for 17 years. You also played at Oregon State, and the fate of those two schools in the current conference realignment has differed, and Oregon and Oregon State, after playing against each other for over a century, all of a sudden that may not happen anymore, and I'm wondering from your perspective, what your thoughts are about realignment and the ways in which it's affecting these two schools that mean so much to you? Well, you know, people don't remember, but when I went to play at Oregon State, graduated Nevada Union High School in Grass Valley, California in 1959, and played freshman football that year, and then varsity football 60 -61 -62, and had the pleasure of playing on a pretty good team with Terry Baker, who won the first Heisman Trophy west of the Mississippi, but in those days, Oregon State was independent. It was not part of the PAC -8 at that time. The league broke up over money.
Cinemavino
A highlight from Amadeus
"And welcome back to cinema vino. It's good to have you guys here with us. Ahoy, bitches. Yo, yo, yo, yo, yo. Got Travis Budd. One ones and twos. Sean Jordan. Threes and fours. Then Taylor Owens. Yo. And I'm playing nothing but the kick drum the whole night. Seven Nation whole time. Exactly. I'm Meg White the whole night. She rocked that kick drum. She did. She was four on the floor. One of the first songs I ever learned on drums. Yeah. Super easy. It's very straightforward. That and smoke on the water on bass. Just yeah, it's easy. Bam, bam, bam, bam, bam, bam, bam. Exactly. Summer chaos for us continues this week with my pick Amadeus. And I'm not exactly even sure why I picked this. I think it's something I hadn't seen in a while. Yeah, I think we had talked about wanting to do Amadeus. Yeah. And I think a clip of it probably popped up on YouTube because we talked about it. I was like, man, I don't really want to go back and watch that. It's been a long time. Yeah, I think since I was a kid. So it was interesting now. And then now watching the director's cut. So Travis, did you watch the director's cut? Yeah, I yeah, that was the first thing I saw. I got time. I think I watched the director's cut. Yeah. Not positive. And you did not. I did not. Yeah. I'd be curious to see you right here is talking about it. See what the differences are. Yeah. It was a scene. I was like, what the hell? Yeah. I think I watched it like three or four weeks ago at this point. Yeah. It's been a while. Yeah. It's been a minute. Wow. Bring it back up speed. So with this one, it was actually luck. So I did all regions for this wheel that we the random wheel picker and it came up for the Italian one. So that kind of fits the movie a little bit with Salieri. And so for this one, we have a Rosso de Multipulciano, a Prunello, which is fun to say. Yeah. Prunello is just a Sangiovese. It's another fancy way of saying Sangiovese. I think Sangiovese is a fancy way of saying Sangiovese. Exactly. So this comes from Multipulciano, which is a small town in the Tuscany region of central Italy. Sangiovese from this region get age one to two years in oak barrels or three if they are a reservo. Sangiovese is a classic example of what's called old world wine. So as the name implies, these wines exhibit, they're acidic, they're tannic, they're kind of bold, full bodied. This one has a lot of depth and complexity to it. You could do this with big, heavy Italian dishes, pizza, stuff like pot roast, just big meals in general. I mean, I think I get a lot of fruit on this one, kind of dark like current flavors. It's earthy. It's a little bit like oaky flavored. I mean, it's just a big, full bodied red wine. This is a classic, like heavy European wine. But yeah, I think you could do this with pizzas. I'm told you can do this with lamb. I don't eat a lot of lamb. I don't eat any lamb just because I was raised on the farm with lambs, so I can't eat it. But people have said that this is a good lamb pair. You can see that. But yeah, this is about a $25 bottle of wine. This is the Boscarelli Rosso di Multipulciano, just the region. So basically, this is like a red from Multipulciano. Sangiovese is one of the grapes you'll find in Chianti. So it's one of the components of Chianti, which is also in this region of Italy. So there you go. It's good, tasty. Exactly. A little bit about this movie, a little background. So this was released September 19th, 1984, coming up on 39 years ago. Grossing $90 million against an $18 million budget, nominated for 11 Oscars and won eight, including Best Picture, Best Director and Best Actor. F. Maria Abraham, who won Best Actor. He was competing against Tom Hulce, who was, it's the last time in recent memory that both two actors from the same movie were nominated for Best Actor together. Last time I heard Tom Hulce's name. Or my favorite, Pinto. Yes. Yeah. Only thing I can think of that he turned up in after this was Hunchback of Notre Dame, the Disney. He was the Hunchback. He's typecast. Exactly. So this was written by Peter Schaffer, who adapts his own stage play. He would also win the Academy Award. Mark Hamill was in the front running to play Mozart in this movie. I actually read that. But was not cast because the director felt he would be too recognizable as Luke Skywalker and he would be a distraction. Kenneth Branagh was also in the running for, but the director preferred American actors for the lead roles. He wanted to keep it for an American cast. They were like, you know what this German really needs? An American. Yes. Good, solid Midwestern accents. Let me do this some good. But yeah, this is a, it's a quasi biopic. It has the feel of a biopic, but it is not historically accurate. This is a fictional fictionalized version of Mozart's life. Okay. Basically Mozart's death was so shrouded in mystery that basically people like don't know what happened to him. And so this is like the, the play kind of imagines what might have happened. So it creates a rivalry between Mozart and Salieri. I mean, this is my head cannon though. Yes. This is what happened. Yes. Well, this is the only reason what people know Salieri's name and they, and when you say Salieri, they're like, oh, it's an archenemy or you're jealous. It's now, yeah, it's a trope of like the jealous, treacherous, mediocre person who's jealous of what he can't have. And so, and so basically, you know, Mozart died at 36. He's very young and no, they didn't have a good understanding of medicine. Obviously nobody really knows what happened to him. It's been everything from like some kind of mystery to poisoning like, you know, some kind of virus that, you know, they didn't ever identify it. It just kind of happened quickly and nobody knows. He just kind of ended up dead. That's what we now know is the day the music died. Yeah. That's before even Ritchie Valens was born. Who? Exactly. So basically this movie imagines that Salieri was the jealous, mediocre, you know, very ambitious, but underachieving composer who was, you know, basically killed Mozart by having him compose the Requiem, which he ended up never finishing. So it's almost like an unrequited love for Salieri. Yeah. You know, because he's so passionate about music and he's like, this gripped me from the day that I heard music. It's all I ever wanted to do, but I'm so bad at it. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, he's almost like an Ed Wood. So mid. Yes. Yeah. He's not terrible, but he's passionate and it's like, he loves Mozart's composing. He's just so insanely jealous of it. He could only become the court composer for a court where the King had terrible taste. Yeah. And it's like, to me, it's that thing about how you can only rise as far your ceiling is how far your talent can take you. It's like, you can work hard, but that will only take you to a certain point. It's like Mozart, which is blessed by almost like supernatural talent that came to music. I mean, he was a prodigy. He had just a natural ear, but that was like one, you know, one of the most talented musicians who ever lived. And it's like, you know, he was given, you know, automatically what Salieri prayed for and would never even got close to it. It's like Good Will Hunting. Yeah. Yeah. Oh yeah. You know, anybody else think that Salieri, like after watching it and I watched the director's cut, I'm like, Salieri should have been like a fucking Baker. Cause he's always like offering people food and they're like, Oh my God, what's this? It's cream cheese, cream cheese with spun sugar. And this, once you have these nipples of Venus, you know how they make it, they do this and this and this fucking cheesecake cheesecake. It was like, dude, just pivot. Just be a fucking Baker. Yeah. The Baker. I mean, you got that. He was definitely in the wrong trade. Yeah. You know? Well, not that he sucked at it. He just wasn't as baller. Nipples of Venus would be a great band. Yes. And it's like, he punished himself with chastity and all these other things. I mean, it's like he put himself through punishment to achieve his goal because he just immediately attributed all his success to God. And he was like, this is what you want. You want me to be celibate? I'll do it for you, buddy. And then renounced God. But once he truly saw like Mozart's was the marriage of Figaro, I think is where he chucked his cross into the fire. Now, see, that was cooler when Gary Oldman did it and then became a vampire. Yeah. Salieri does the same thing. He should get some vampire powers. Yeah. Can you imagine like the devil comes and it's just like Salieri. I will make you a great composer. That would have been a great movie. Yeah. That would be a great alternative fiction for this is like the devil comes along and Charlie Daniels style makes a deal with Salieri and says, you know, you can, you can have it all, but played by Nick Cage. Salieri gets to fuck all he wants, you know, would have been a different film. Yeah. Yeah. Could have all the nipples of Venus. Vamp dick. Yeah.
Bloomberg Radio New York - Recording Feed
Monitor Show 15:00 08-19-2023 15:00
"Just left them feels because it's not really clear what anyone can do with them. Not really clear what anyone can do with them. We'll see what happens there. We're monitoring it all for you here on Bloomberg Radio. And that was Linda Lu of Bloomberg News with Bloomberg's Paul Allen and Sherry Ahn. And that is it for this edition of Bloomberg Best. I'm Denise Pellegrini. This is Bloomberg. Stay with us. Top stories and global business headlines coming up right now. Broadcasting 24 hours a day at Bloomberg .com and the Bloomberg Business Act. This is Bloomberg Radio. More than 40 million people in Southern California are under tropical storm warnings. The National Hurricane Center says Hillary has weakened to a Category 3 storm with sustained winds near 115 miles per hour and is about 710 miles south southeast of San Diego. Ryan Baker has more. San Diego Mayor Todd Gloria says the city is prepared for Hurricane Hillary. I want to reassure San Diegans that their city is prepared to respond swiftly and effectively to the impacts of this storm may bring. The Los Angeles Director of Emergency Management says the storm could affect a wide area of the southwestern portion of the United States. This will impact not just LA County but all of southwestern California, potentially Arizona and Nevada also. I'm Ryan Baker. People on the Hawaiian island of Maui are bracing for what could be a devastating death toll as more than a thousand people are still missing. Search and rescue teams are digging through the ashes and rubble of what was the town of Lahaina. Family members of missing Lahaina senior home residents like Clifford Abihai are frantically searching for their loved ones who remain unaccounted for. I'm going to Hawaii. I'm going to find out information. I'm going to look people in the eye and I'm going to, you know, shred out and ask them, you know, what's been done. At least 111 people are confirmed dead and Hawaii Governor Josh Green has told CBS News.
The Bill Simmons Podcast
A highlight from Part 1: USAs World Cup Collapse, Basebrawls, Jets Optimism, Life in The G-League and The OC 20 Years Later | with Gabe York and Zoe Simmons
"Coming up, an unexpected two -part podcast cameo from me. It's next. We're also brought to you by the Ringer Podcast Network, where we turned over Sean Fennesey and Amanda Dobbins' big picture feed to Brian Raftery. It's a narrative podcast called, Do We Get to Win This Time? How Hollywood Made the Vietnam War. You can find it on the big picture starting on Tuesday. And it is an idea I'm really excited about because it came from a class that I did as a senior in college in 1992. Me and my friend Horgs talked a movies professor into doing a special Vietnam War movies class where we watched basically every Vietnam War movie that had been made up to 1992 and then tried to write a big picture term paper about it. And the thing that was really fascinating about that class and something that stuck with me was just that whole concept of Hollywood reinventing the entire Vietnam experience under the premise of, Did We Get to Win This Time? So we got Brian involved and he turned the idea into an awesome, awesome podcast. I even went and dug up the term paper that I wrote 31 years ago. I thought it was gonna be horrendous. It wasn't bad. I was kind of proud of myself, retroactively 31 years later. Anyway, Do We Get to Win This Time? How Hollywood Made the Vietnam War. It is gonna be in the big picture podcast starting on Tuesday. So that's one piece of business. Second, new rewatchables on Monday night. It is the 300th movie that we've done. It's a special one. We're doing National Lampoon's Vacation. It was time. Meet Chris Ryan, Van Lathan. Yeah, and Van was pushing for it because we wanted to do Christmas Vacation during the holidays and you can't do Christmas Vacation. If we do National Lampoon's Vacation, super fun. Can't wait for you to listen to it. And we'll be running the video at some point on the YouTube channel, youtube .com slash Bill Simmons, where we put up a whole bunch of rewatchables podcasts in case you missed it. Boogie Nights is up there now. Goodfellas, Independence Day, just a slew of them. So if you're bored and you wanna throw on some rewatchables and watch us make fun of each other, there you go. Last but not least, I don't wanna say this is the most important, but it's certainly the thing I spent the most time on. Our documentary that we did about the G League with Religion of Sports and Ringer Films, we combined, and it is premiering on Tuesday, August 8th. It is called Destination NBA, A G League Odyssey. It's really good. We immersed ourselves into the G League season. We followed Scoot Henderson, Gabe York, Ryan Terrell, Mason Jones, and Denzel Valentine. And the big question was, what is this world like? What's it like to be in the G League? And I am really proud of where we landed with it. And we even have, much later in this podcast, Gabe York is gonna come on. He's one of the five that we followed, and he's gonna tell us what it's like as you're holding on to your dream in your late 20s. We try not to spoil the doc too much with Gabe, but I really liked him. He's probably the guy that jumps out of the doc in the most sympathetic way. So look forward for you to watch it. It is prime video, Tuesday, August 8th, Destination NBA. A G League Odyssey. You love basketball, just watch it, it's good. So there you go. This is gonna be part one of a two -part podcast. Gabe is coming up later. My daughter Zoe Simmons is coming up later because we did a whole bunch of OC stuff on the Prestige TV podcast. I was even on two of the episodes. But I ended up watching season one of the OC. And my daughter was watching with us and loved the show. And she was born a year and a half after it premiered. So me and her broke down season one from the perspective of what is it like when somebody 18 watches the OC, a show that is now two decades old. The anniversary was actually August 6th. And what she liked, what she didn't like, what people aren't doing anymore for her kind of audience. And we just dove into it. So that is much later. First, coming out of the gate, I'm gonna open a six -pack because we have a lot to discuss over the past three weeks, all the stuff I missed. So that's gonna be part one. And then part two, which is gonna go up later on Sunday night, me and Rossello doing this evergreen idea that we've always wanted to do. And this seemed like the perfect time because nothing's happening in basketball. So that's gonna be part two later tonight. Part one coming up. First, our friends from ProJax. What's up? All right, I'm taping this. It is Sunday afternoon Pacific time. And I'm gonna open a six -pack. There's a bunch of stories in sports and culture that happened over the last three weeks. I was just writing stuff down, things that would have been fun for podcast segments. I was just like, man, I wish I could have given my thoughts on that. Just gonna rip through them. So I have six and then maybe a couple bonus ones at the end. The first one, the biggest one, was the US women's soccer team, which lost today in penalty kicks to Sweden, scored zero goals in the last two games, scored one goal in the last three games, and that was off a corner kick. You could feel from the beginning that something was off with this team. It was all the ways. You knew in a checklist of what are the red flags? There were just red flags galore. And the only person who was really calling it out in time over and over again was Carli Lloyd, who was doing the Fox studio show. And she was the one person in the horror movie who knows the house is haunted. And everyone's like, shut up. You're not being patriotic. You just wish you were still on the team. She was right. She was right from the get -go. This team, you could see it before the Vietnam game when it was like, look at the new Nike suits. Look at these new suits. And they're all like styling as they head into the locker room. And they're running commercials. And every player has a commercial. There's players who've never done anything of that commercials. And the vibe was just off. They only beat Vietnam three -nothing in a bracket where goal differential was gonna be super -duper important. And that was a huge red flag. And we did the usual thing that we've been doing since 2019, 2015 of, oh, well, they almost scored a bunch of times. Oh, well, if that had gone in or some bad luck. There was just an arrogance to this team. Like they were carrying themselves like the defending champs, the same way like the Denver Nuggets would go into next NBA season. Like we're the champs. I was like, yeah, you are the champs because the season just happened. The World Cup happened four years ago. Everyone's four years older or wasn't on the team. And you could see they wanted to build the team instead of around the identity of, here are these new up and coming awesome stars that are gonna be in your life. They were really latching on to Alex Morgan and Megan Rapinoe. Alex Morgan's 34, Megan Rapinoe's 37. I think one of the differences between the discourse with women's sports and men's sports is that in men's sports, we grasp for angles. And if somebody is disappointing in some way, we really go nuts. Like think of how James Harden's been treated over the last 12 years. So he's one of the 35 best players ever and has taken just an incredible amount of shit. Oh my God, the playoffs, look at his game log. Oh, he choked again. Alex Morgan, who scored twice in her first two games in the World Cup in 2011, she scored once in 2015 in seven games. She scored six times in 2019, five against Thailand in a game that was 13 to nothing, one in the other six, and then scored nothing in the four games this time around. If you take away that Thailand game, she has scored two goals in the last 17 World Cup games. This is the striker. This is the one who's supposed to be the most dangerous player in the field, who's supposed to produce goals. And she hasn't produced goals since the mid 2010s on the national level. And yet it's Alex Morgan. She was supposed to be the next one. We got to keep propping her up and pretending she's a superstar. She's not a superstar. She's really honestly never been a superstar. She certainly hasn't been as impactful as somebody like Abby Wambach was. So you have the team built around her. She's got to play. They play her the entire game, game two, the entire game, game three. She plays like 95 minutes in this game today, and they don't score goals. And the announcers just won't talk about it. It's like being on an AYSO team that your kid's on, and the coach is playing somebody at striker, and everyone's like, why don't they play Sally at striker instead of the coach's daughter? It's like, oh, you know, the coach's daughter. She's got to play there. So you have that, and then you have Rapinoe, who's 37 years old, who's just, unfortunately, great career, legendary, true legend, huge big time player. And when you hit your late 30s in soccer, it's a wrap. She looked like Yudana Rapinoe, not big Rapinoe, and comes out for the last 25 minutes of this game and can't do anything, and then misses the penalty kick. That's the thing. If you're beholden to past performance, you can't expect to succeed in the moment. And I did feel like, what were this team's strengths? Speed. They had Sophia Smith, who really was bad the last three games on the left wing. Like, she just, she couldn't even connect passes. Trinity Rodman, who's a beast. Lynn Williams, who's super fast and athletic and had some really nice moments the last two games. And then Alyssa Thompson, who's the prodigy, who's the, you know, potential tiger or LeBron of this team. 18 years old, best high school player I've ever had. They won't even throw her out there. But this was not a team that could connect passes. They weren't, like, especially creative. The coaching was just bizarre, and we'll never see that guy again. But it was like, the one thing they did have was speed, especially the forwards, and they just threw that away. And Alex, you know, couldn't do anything. So now they're out. It's the most disappointing finish of the last 25 years for the women's team. And it reminds me in a lot of ways that 2004 Olympic basketball team that we had, the USA team. And I tweeted this, I think after the second game, because that was a team that was between eras, like this one was, where all the best players on that 2014, the ones in their primes, weren't that good, except for Duncan. And Duncan was completely banged up. He'd played so many NBA games the last couple of years. I think his knee was hurt. But, you know, it was Iverson and Marbury. The talent, it just was a between eras. And you had guys on the bench, like LeBron and Carmelo and Wade, who were four years away. Kobe wasn't on the team. And it just felt generationally, like we caught that team in the wrong time. The style was wrong. And we learned all these lessons and we moved on. 2008, we win. There's a documentary about it. But this team felt like it was between eras. The Alex Morgan, Rapinoe era, which was basically done. And then you have this era coming up with Rodman and Sophia Smith and Alyssa. And, you know, it's just four years from now, we'll probably be fine. But they need to re -imagine this. And I think if you're gonna learn any lesson from this, it doesn't matter what happened four years ago. It's the World Cup. It matters what's happening now. So that's one thing. Second thing. So Jaylen Brown gets this huge contract, $304 million. Some people seem surprised that it was that much money. Chris Ryan even took a shot at it when we did our library watchables. Hurt my feelings a tiny bit. Mainly because I didn't really have a comeback. Rosella did something on his podcast about how this actually makes sense. This amount of money, when you think of how the salary cap has climbed just since 2015, and it's gonna keep climbing. And there's this world you can go into where you think about just how much everything is gonna cost in the NBA four or five years from now, that Jaylen Brown at $70 million isn't actually gonna be that intimidating. The same way we feel about Tobias Harris for $40 million now, or Klay Thompson, $40 million now. Yeah, you don't really wanna pay $40 million for Klay Thompson, but you can survive it. And I think that's gonna be where the Celtics land with Jaylen. Here's why they had to do it. They're the favorites on FanDuel right now. They're plus 470. The thing that made them the most special and has made them the most special for the last five, six years is the Jaylen Brown -Jason Tatum combo. They've been incredibly successful. The team itself has made five conference finals in the last seven years. They came super close to making the finals last year. I have now gone into the what if zone with that Celtics team where what if Tatum doesn't hurt his ankle on the first play? Do we beat Miami? They were close is the point. And when you're that close, you can't fuck around. This is not Bradley Beal resigning with Washington for 50 million a year when everybody knows you can't get past the eight seed with Bradley Beal. This is different. You're trying to win a title. You're trying to keep all your optionality open. The thing that's a little scary about it, nobody seems to totally know if he wants to be in Boston. This is something we've discussed on this pod. It's been floating out there. The fact that he wasn't happy about landing in the Kevin Durant trade rumors a couple years ago. And just in general, where the league is now, where as Woj called it, the transfer portal, where people get their contract first and then they decide what they want to do. And I think for the Celtics, they know they bought themselves a year with Jalen and they are still one of the favorites to win the title. And a lot of it's going to depend on health and Porzingis. You could also, I don't want to make the case, but you might be able to make the case that Brown had a fucked up hand last year. Cause he did. Cause he sliced his hand open. It was bleeding even during the Philly series. And maybe that was why his ball handling went sideways. Listen, you got to do the contract. It just breaks your brain. I remember a million years ago, Sports Illustrated and Inside Sports say every year they would have like a salary issue. And they would talk about these guys are making $1 million a year. And it seemed like so much money. And now where we're heading with the money, plus the NBA is the meteorites deal. The moment any of these guys becomes unhappy, what do you do? Because you're paying Jalen, let's say you're paying him 55 million a year. Plus he is the trade kicker, which the team has to pay. Right? So if he decides after a year, you know what? I'm tired of being the scapegoat. Everybody loves Jason. I'm like the middle brother of this team. I want my own team. I want to go to Houston or Atlanta. You got to trade me. What are the Celtics going to do? On top of who would want out, you don't have a lot of options and you turn into what the situation Portland's in with Deem. And then on top of it, it's so much money. It's impossible to get any sort of a fair trade for the guy. So they had to do it. And optionality the that comes out of it is frightening. I remember in the early 2000s, when the first time the contracts kind of went nuts and you would see that people get signing like six -year, $100 million deals, seven -year, $110 million deals. And the Celtics really, really stupidly traded for Vin Baker. One of the worst trades of the last 30 years for Boston Sports. A trade so bad, you knew it instantaneously. And I wrote a piece that you can probably find somewhere in the ESPN archives about it, where I compared it to the end of Thelma Louise when Harvey Keitel is running toward the cliff trying to stop the car from going off the cliff. That's how I thought about the Vin Baker trade when it happened. Then it happens and you just had this salary albatross. It's a salary cap league. And you're like, wow, we just threw away 20 % of our salary cap on this trade. There's going to be a couple of those that are just franchise killers. And whether that leads to them bringing back the amnesty clause, who knows? I wish, I've made this, I've had this idea before. I wish that they had a rule in there that if you drafted a guy, every year that he stays in the team, you get rewarded in some way from a salary cap luxury tax type thing, right? So Jaylen was 2016 draft, this would be his eighth year. Maybe like after the seventh year, because that's usually like the third contract. The guy stays in the team, maybe each year after that, he doesn't count for 2 % of the luxury tax, up to like 30%, something like that. The point is the Warriors should be rewarded for keeping Draymond and Klay and Curry from a tax standpoint, that they were that smart to draft those guys, keep those guys together. They should be incentivized, the players, to want to stay with them because there's some luxury tax stuff that the team gets. And the team should want to be incentivized to take care of those guys because it's also beneficial to them. I just wish they figured out some version of that rule. Anyway, Jaylen was always signing for $304 million. Talk to me in a year, I'll keep my fingers crossed. Next thing, I missed the running back pity party. This was crazy. The running backs all got together and they were really upset about how much money they made. And I don't know what to tell you. There's too many running backs and not enough running back spots. And I don't know if you're trying to build a responsible salary cap team in a collectively bargained era, why would you spend $30 million over two years on a running back unless the running back was awesome? Nobody even wants to spend more than $11 million on running back. So I knew that this was crazy when Damien Harris, who was on the Patriots, who I thought was really good. He's maybe not an elite running back, but a good running back, right? Somebody that if he had been on the Chiefs, he easily could have started for the Chiefs. And he signed with the Bills for like one year, 2 million. And when that happened, combined with Pacheco on the Chiefs' seventh round pick, they won the Super Bowl with him. It's just, this position's devalued. I work on this player, I've been actually working on it the last couple of weeks where I try to rank the players for blue chippers, red chippers, pink chippers, honorable mention, and have this whole point system. And so quarterbacks, Mahomes, who's the alpha of that position, he's worth 10 points. And you could even see this in the point spread. If Mahomes gets hurt, the Chiefs are 10 points, nine points, whatever, less than what they would be as a favorite. They'd switch to an underdog. And you go on down the line. Jalen Hurts, I had him as an eight. I had Joe Burrow as a nine. And you go on, you keep going down, and it's like, Geno Smith's probably a two. But then you look at some of the other positions and you have to value them the same way the salary cap values them and teams value them. Guards, they aren't worth that much. Running backs, sorry, they're not worth that much. My top running back was three points because ultimately running backs don't really matter that much. In the last like five, six years, I would say Derrick Henry was the only running back that you could definitively say, this guy almost won the Super Bowl. Like he was that good. Other than that, you know, it's plug and play, quarterbacks, it's receivers. It's much harder to find the number one receiver. Every team needs one. It's much more tangible if you don't have the number one receiver. And it's much easier to just kind of scrap together the running back position. And yet people went nuts about this. We ironically had this in the NBA with centers. You know, Vucevic, who's a really good offensive player, he signed for 60 million for three years, 20 million a year. And Jaylen Brown's going to make $52 million a year. Is Jaylen Brown two and a half times better than Vucevic? No, it's just, he plays a way more important position. You can only play one center at a time. You can patch together the center position. You could have like Isaiah Hartenstein for $8 million. You could, you know, get Robert Williams for 16. You don't need to spend what Phoenix did on Eaton where they're paying $8 and $30 million a year at center. And you don't really need to do that. You kind of feel obligated if you don't want to lose the asset. But I think the NBA is going to go this way eventually where unless it is Jokic or Embiid, the center or Bam Adebayo, it's a bonus. You could argue that was already an overpay. They gave him a huge extension. The Lakers just gave Anthony Davis $60 million a year as an extension. I would argue that's a little frightening. I feel like you could patch together the center position. What really matters in basketball is having the creator. And this was the argument five years ago with Luka versus Eaton for the number one pick. And I made this argument. It was like, go look at who wins the NBA title every year. It's always the people who have the creator. There's somebody who's on the perimeter of the ball in their hands. Even Jokic, who wins the title this year, he was a creator. He's not a typical center, right? He's basically their point guard on offense who could post up. So this happened in the NBA. Nobody went nuts. And this is happening in football. And is this where football is. If you want to make the most amount of money playing in the NFL, I don't know why you would be a running back. I would be a cornerback. I would be a wide receiver. I'd be an edge rusher. But if you're a running back, you know your shelf life's probably like five, six years. You know the money is not totally gonna be there. Now they're in this, like you have people like JK Dobbins, like, I might hold out. It's like, really? You didn't barely even play in the field. Barkley said he was gonna hold out. And then, you know, probably looked at it. And the money for Barkley is like 10, 11 million. That's unfortunately the market. So you can't fix this. They collectively bargained it. And until we get to the next CBA, I don't know how you fix it. I thought it was really weird. It felt like people had nothing to talk about. And it was like, ah, let's feel bad for running backs. All right, let's take a break. And then I'm gonna finish the rest of the six pack. All right, picking up on the six pack. We're gonna talk a little more football. I talked about the running back pity party. This is a different kind of party. The Jets optimism, which has just been stunning to me over the course of July. I have Jets fans in my life. These are people that usually have no hope and are very reminiscent of the pre -2004 Red Sox fans, just assuming the worst at all times. Why does God hate us? All that stuff. And now they have this crazy optimism based on the fact that they brought in Aaron Rodgers, who I did not think was very good last year, just throwing that out there. I wouldn't say he was bad, but for Rodgers, he was bad. I mean, we thought Rodgers was, he was the reigning MVP and we thought he was still one of the five or six most impactful players in the league. And I don't wanna read stats to you for the next six minutes, but deep balls, he was bad. Turnovers, he was bad. Leadership, he was bad. And the case for Rodgers coming back would be, well, he's gonna be rejuvenated. The Jets, New York City. This is his team. He got away from Green Bay. He's got Hackett back. I get it, but he's also at an age where we've really only seen Tom Brady succeed at a high, high level at the age that Rodgers is at. I was trying to figure it out. I have my QB ratings and I had, you know, the top tier is Mahomes and Burrow and Allen and Herbert and Hertz. Those have to be the top five. Then it drops off and it's Lamar Jackson and Lawrence. And then Rodgers, probably a hair underneath him with a chance to play himself up with those guys. But from what we saw last year, I'm not ready to put him there. So he's the 10th best quarterback in the league, probably. 10th or ninth best quarterback in the league, probably. Well, they have no offensive line. And I don't understand why people keep glossing over this where it's like, hey, Rodgers and Garrett Wilson, he's one of the best receivers in the league and Breece Hall's going to come back and the defense is really good. And it's like, yeah, the offensive line is terrible. Beckton and Dwayne Brown, sure tackles again. And then you have Robert Salah as the coach, who I cannot say I thought that Jets were crisply coached last year. Whatever he was doing with Zach Wilson was insane. No idea if that guy's even a decent coach. So I'm already worried about your offensive line, the age of your quarterback, and the competency of your coach. And that's before we get into the hard knocks curse, because for some reason they're doing hard knocks, the incredible Super Bowl hype already. And then we have the schedule, which is the AFC East has just got screwed by the schedules this year. The Jets, just for quarterbacks in 17 games, they got to play Josh Allen twice, they got to play Mahomes, Herbert, Hertz, Dak Prescott, and Deshaun Watson. And then they also have to play Miami twice. We'll see what we get out of two this year. And then a really good Pats defense. And then Denver, who knows, they might be rejuvenated. So Danny Dimes, they have to play him. It is a brutal schedule, so you have that. And then on top of everything else, you're the Jets. I was there with the Red Sox before 2004, and this is probably just as bad, where you just think the worst possible things can happen is all the time. You're not allowed to have optimism when you're Jets fans. You can be cautiously optimistic. There was an entire Curb Your Enthusiasm episode once, season 10, episode seven, about being a Jets fan. And it was called, I think, the ugly section. Nick Kroll was the maitre d'. And part of the episode was about, he would put these people in different sections of the restaurant, depending on how attractive they were. But there was this other plot, Larry's buddy who loved the Jets, kills himself. And Larry becomes convinced it was because of the Jets, that the Jets killed his friend. This was only a couple of years ago. So now they get Aaron Rodgers, and everything's good. And they're gonna win the Super Bowl. I don't see it, guys. I don't wanna step on my football stuff too much, but I'd be shocked. And Lombardi points out the defense that everybody's ready to compare to the 85 Bears. Lombardi said they had two turnovers over the last eight games last season. So that means something too. I am dubious, to say the least. If you're gonna tell me a tortured franchise actually turns it around this year, I want a tortured franchise that doesn't have expectations. Because the Lions are another one. Everybody's ready to put them in the Super Bowl or close. And the only case for them is just pretty explosive offense. They couldn't stop anybody last year. And the NFC is terrible. But that's another one where is that a fan base that should be super excited and have a ton of hype? The one that's kind of lurking that fits in this group is the Browns. Because the Browns are actually super talented. They're in a winnable division. Burroughs already hurt. And I think they're four to one to win the AFC North on FanDuel, something like that. Their over -under is, I think it climbed up.
Bankless
A highlight from ROLLUP: Curve Exploit | BASE Memecoins | Richard Heart vs SEC
"Binance could face fraud charges from the Department of Justice. But what is the Department of Justice waiting for? Bankless Nation, happy first Friday of August. David, what time is it? Oh, Ryan, it's the Bankless Friday weekly roll up where we cover the entire weekly news in crypto, which is always an ambitious endeavor, yet we persevere into this bullish frontier. I'm claiming it's bullish this week. It's a very bullish week to me. I think it's a bullish week. David came down from the mountains bullish. Okay, so what was the elevation of Matterhorn and how did that go? The elevation of Matterhorn was 14 ,690 feet. Mark that number, Bankless listeners. You can't necessarily judge a mountain by its elevation. Matterhorn is very steep. Yeah, it was great. But that elevation is high though, right? That elevation is high as far as mountains go. I mean, high is relative. I wouldn't call it super high. Like Everest is 26 ,000 feet or something like that. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I was definitely like feeling the altitude, that's for sure. Did you see my comment? That's going to be the elevation of Matterhorn is going to be the top price of Ether during the next bull cycle. So give us that number again. 14 ,000 what? 14 ,690. There it is. It has been prophesied. I'm looking forward to like as Ether pumps through this nice bull market. It's like, oh, it passed my summit at Baker. Oh, it passed my summit at Pollux. Oh, it passed my summit at Rainier. You need to tweet that every single time it does. Yeah, that's great. Well, it's great to have you back, Dankless. It's really good to be back. I'm Dankless.
The Dan Bongino Show
Matt Palumbo: PolitiFact Hides Joe Biden Speaking to Hunter Biden
"Throw a question that you're a really good analyst what's going on the political space right before we came on the air uh... peter baker at the new york times i mean a devout leftist this probably a communist he tweeted out this thing that that i thought you get a kick out of it trumps last defenses what about ism and um... responded back what about ism is great like what about a set of constitutional principles we don't violate like if you're we're going going to prosecute trump first free speech and objecting to election results but i want to see clinton al gore in jail to correct any what about ism is a great thing and we shouldn't run from that i think he exposed himself yeah i don't know what you think a double standard is apparently an indictment of us nowadays but there is again a double standard writing that statement it's incredible yeah i i just i get a kick out of it because they seem to think that's an insult what about ism you you should engage in all the time it it like you said it's it's us saying hey we live in a institutional republic where we believe everyone's held to the same standard you have a series of god -given rights if they're violated before for you know one group republicans and then protected by democrats of course going we're to call it out so i had a lot i know you're a critic of the media like i am but yeah i actually i was researching uh... what politically acting about all the stuff this week and uh... right before the show and uh... so so as we know you know the smoking gun from devin arthur is that hunter and his father joe he knew about other's each business arrangements joe was playing a role so politically act is trying to sort of obfuscate and the way they characterized it is that devin arthur's revelation was that joe biden spoke to his son hunter not not about anything in particular just that the father and son happened to talk to each other like as if that's something need we would a whistle -blower to learn so that's another way that they they they just straw man what reality is i'm like he's not
Mark Levin
Kamala Harris Is the Real Person Dividing Our Country
"Up the Marxism, when you stand up the racism, when you stand up to the sexualizing of your children, when you stand up to their teachers union, when you stand up to their phony experts like Fauci in Washington DC, they're the ones shutting down social media sites, they're the ones taking the law and power. We're the ones trying to divide? We're the ones trying to divide. No. An agenda to attack the importance of diversity and equity and inclusion. First of all, nobody's attacking the importance of diversity, except the Democrats. Now ladies and gentlemen, who was it that was standing in the Harvard school way doors to stop Asians from getting entry? The Democrats. Not us. And by the way, in the 1920s Harvard did the same thing to Jews. So did Yale, so did Princeton. All these sanctuaries, if you will, for the left Ivy League. They did it. Was it the plumber? Was it the electrician or the truck driver back then? Was the it butcher, the baker, the candlestick maker? It was them. They did it. Equity? Nobody fought for equity. Marxist principle. Notice they don't talk about under the law. That's so yesterday. Go ahead. The unity of the Rainbow Coalition. These wrote extremists legislation and brought litigation to the United States Supreme Court of Thurgood
My Bed and Astrology by Astro✨dim
Out of Bound Moons, Explained
"Out of bound moon is when the moon is either above the tropic of capricorn i mean below the tropic of capricorn or above the tropic of cancer um why are those points important well that's how far the sun goes and you know sun is king sun is king i get it like your love is king shaadei song anyways so the sun is king the sun has control of the planets everything revolves around the sun and in earth's perspective right the sun from earth's perspective right goes up to the tropic of cancer when it's the summer solstice in the northern hemisphere so just recently just yesterday the sun was exactly you know the the middle of the sun was exactly at the tropic of cancer which is 23 degrees north um 20 degrees is some change i think 20 degrees 46 minutes north oh wait no 20 23 degrees 27 minutes i always get the minutes wrong but it's that basically right around 23 degrees north if we were to use coordinates right 23 degrees north and then 23 degrees south is the tropic of capricorn and for the northern hemisphere folks that's our northern um our winter solstice and for the southern hemisphere folks that's their summer solstice right and so you know if a planet happens to go beyond those you know that those bounds then you know astrologers notice that those planets all have a little bit more edge to them um a little bit more eclectic unconventional unique um different they go about things very different and i feel like the perfect example of this um if y 'all remember seeing the astrophotography map um episode of josephine baker that i did um and she has venus out of bounds and how she just literally busted door wide open with dance and song her voice was different her dancing style is different she was naked and dancing you know what i mean her style was just fly she was goofy while dancing and you know it was a time where you have to be pretty and cute and have a specific type of voice and it had to be classical and she just did things different and everyone loved it that is that that is so out about venus that is so out about venus is she is an embodiment of
The Eric Metaxas Show
Thomas Baker Reveals How Mueller's Decision Led to FBI's Downfall
"Back. Talking to Thomas J. Baker. The book is The Fall of the FBI. You were just talking about how the culture of the FBI was once what it was. But then it became infected by the intelligence agency culture. How did that happen? Who oversaw that? It was started with Mueller. Mueller was made the FBI. Bob Mueller of special counsel fame was made the FBI director only a few days before the September 11th attacks. Which happened on a Tuesday. That Saturday morning he was summoned to Camp David by President George W. Bush, he thought, to give a report of the FBI's investigation. So essentially there were about three and a half days between that Tuesday attack and that Saturday morning. Mueller gave the report and the report was absolutely outstanding. In these three and a half days, the FBI had done what it does best. Investigate. And they had identified all 19 hijackers, their financing, their travel, their associates, their connections back to Al Qaeda. And when he was finished with this report, he expected, he's told us this, he expected praise and thanks. Instead, George W. Bush looked at him and said, I don't care about that. I only want to know how you're going to prevent the next one. Later that morning, George Tenet of the CIA presented a plan of action going forward. Bush, when he was done talking, Bush said, that's great. He turned and faced Comey and said - Excuse me. He turned and faced Mueller. I misspoke. He turned and faced Bob Mueller and he said, that's what I want to hear. Mueller said he left that meeting bound and determined to change the FBI's culture, and that's a word he used, from that of a law enforcement agency to the culture of intelligence. Now, if some people could make an argument after September 11th, there might have been a need for some of that. But it had bad consequences, terribly bad consequences that bared evil fruit down the road.
The Eric Metaxas Show
"baker" Discussed on The Eric Metaxas Show
"It has to be reined in. It has to be corrected. Well, listen, I guarantee you that the two groups you just mentioned are already on that list. Anyone whom the powers that be think of as not sufficiently secular, who take their religion seriously. You remember senator Weinstein from California daring in her questioning of Amy Coney Barrett to say that the dogma lives loudly within you as though that might be some hindrance to her being a great justice and a great American. So this kind of enforcement of a secular religion already exists among the cultural elites and we see it being promulgated. Of course, by the FBI, by the folks in big tech, they have a sense of who their enemies are. And so if you take your faith, particularly seriously, you're a bad guy. It was no different under the Nazis. I had the privilege of writing a book about Dietrich bahnhof and the Nazis and I know that if you were just a dim witted church goer who couldn't care less really about whether it's true or false, you just would show up. You were not a threat. If you took your faith seriously, you were a big threat, and they had it out for you, and I know because it's I documented in my book on Ben hoffer that the SS every year made it more difficult for a person of faith to be a person of faith. They didn't start in the beginning, but every year they tighten the news so that eventually if you want it to be in the SS, you could not attend Sunday church services because they had a secular agenda. It's dramatically similar in the cultural elites today and we see this being played out. So we've talked about that on this program, but it's so telling to me that it is the establishment of a religion. It's a secular religion, it's making, listen, we know that George Washington understood these ideas. George Washington, who was not Jewish, wrote to the folks in the truro synagogue. Our founders understood the sanctity of free expression, freedom of religion, freedom of speech, understood these things are elites today not only don't, but seem to have a contempt for these kinds of things. And that's, of course, at the heart of what we're talking about, your book is called the fall of the FBI, how a once great agency became a threat to democracy. Do you believe this book is getting in the hands of people who might be able to do something about this? I hope so. I know there are people in the FBI hierarchy and in the Department of Justice who have read it, whether they've absorbed it, whether they agree with it, it's still in contention, but it does get their attention and I know that articles I've written in the Wall Street general, for instance, publications like that wind up in the director and the attorney general's daily press summaries. So it has to stimulate some thought. And that's the I'm taking a lot of abuse from a lot of people, and I took some in Congress last week. But I think it's worth it. I think the effort by a lot of people to change the culture to help protect Americans rights and liberties is worth it is noble it may not succeed, but it's worth the effort. Well, it's just a privilege to have you on this program. Thomas baker, thank you. Thank you for the book. Folks, it's called the fall of the FBI. How a once great agency became a threat to democracy. This is something that needs fixing again, Thomas baker, thank you so much..
The Eric Metaxas Show
"baker" Discussed on The Eric Metaxas Show
"Back. I have the privilege of speaking to Thomas baker 33 year veteran of the FBI, someone who just testified in front of Jim Jordan's committee, just days ago about the collaboration that we have seen. The politicization of the FBI working with big tech, this is all a nightmare, these things are threats to democracy is putting it a little mildly, but the book is called the fall of the FBI. So Thomas baker, please continue. Where are we? Where do you see these things going? Well, what they Twitter revelations that Twitter files have documented is that the FBI are certainly a team within the FBI of analysts and agents where direct collaboration collusion, if you will, with Twitter and other social media companies to suppress, to monitor free speech, that's something the federal government should never be doing. The constitution, the First Amendment of the Bill of Rights, guarantees, freedom of speech, and of course dream of press and religion as well. And the FBI in the past was always, we would train and talk, we would have be guarantors of those first ten amendments and not to see them as any obstacle or challenge. What happened here with Twitter and this is very well documented now when people on the right and the left should both be upset about this. The FBI who would be forbidden as part of the federal government to monitor speech to sensitive speech, they engage Twitter and Twitter private company went and suppressed speech and the initial rationale for it was they didn't want to see Russian collusion while Twitter now in the Twitter files have told us there was very little Russian a foreign interference. It was the speech of Americans, even sarcasm and jokes with censored. That is very threatening, very frightening. And it is so different from the FBI I grew up in. When we were new agents. And this was for decades. It was like this. Most of our classroom training was spent on the constitution, particularly the Bill of Rights and the fourth 5th and Sixth Amendment. We were told that we should not see them as obstacles to getting our job done. We should embrace them. And we had legal instructors who gave us a pocket sized copy of the constitution. And they told us, keep it in your breast pocket. And when you're interviewing a citizen, when you're searching somebody's home, if you have that in your breast pocket, you won't go wrong, you won't go off the track. And believe it or not, many of us did keep it in our breast pocket and it gave us a consciousness of the constitution. That seems to be totally lacking in today's FBI. And there's this whole cadre of people intelligence analysts who have risen up who don't interact with citizens in searches or interviews, the way special agents do. And they're the ones that come up with all kinds of estimates and all kinds of schemes to monitor speech. And we saw this again just a few days ago when one memo surfaced from an intelligence analyst proposing to include traditional Catholics, Roman Catholics who preferred to use Latin in their services as potential domestic terrorism. Of course. This is so off the reservation. It's so dangerous if it's Catholics today, it could be fundamental protestants tomorrow or traditional Jews the next day. It's a terrible, terrible thing..
The Eric Metaxas Show
"baker" Discussed on The Eric Metaxas Show
"We're talking to Thomas baker, the book is the fall of the FBI. How once great agency became a threat to democracy. This is important stuff. We'll be right back. My pillow is excited to bring you their biggest betting sale ever get the Giza dream bed sheets for as low as 29 98, a set of pillowcases for only 9 98 and rejuvenate your bed with a my pillow mattress topper for as low as 99.99. They also have blankets in a variety of sizes, colors and styles. They even have blankets for your pets, get duvets, quilts, down comforters, body pillars, bolster pillows, and so much more. All the biggest discounts of the year are happening right now so don't miss out. They're also extending their money back guarantee for Christmas until March 1st, 2023 making them the perfect gifts for your Friends, your family and everyone you know. So go to my pillow dot com and use promo code Eric or call one 809 7 8 three O 5 7 and you'll get huge discounts on all my pillow betting products, including the Giza dream bedsheets for as low as 29 98 and get all your shopping done now while quantities last, again, use code Eric and save my pillow dot com. Folks, welcome.
The Eric Metaxas Show
"baker" Discussed on The Eric Metaxas Show
"Well, again, it's horrifying, absolutely horrifying to me how, you know, and you hear this over and over again. We basically sell our freedoms for what we think is perceived safety, but at some point you give it all away. And that's what's been happening. And the elites who have access to these powers, they have taken advantage of it. Do you see that you said you testified in front of Congress very recently, obviously, because they're looking into the collaboration of big tech with the FBI with the CIA, it's a horrifying thing to see these very, very powerful actors working together, so do you have hope that the current Congress may try to enact some of this legislation? Well, once again, I'm an optimist. I hope so. What really has to happen is it has to be bipartisan, the people, the Democrats, as well as the Republicans, have to recognize the threat that these abuses impose. And last Thursday when I testified before Senate and Jordan selects up committee, this Twitter, these Twitter revelations became a key item there. And anyone who looks at this because it's all out there now and it's well documented. This is really bad stuff. Really bad stuff. Well, it is. But as you know, what we call the mainstream media, there are loads to report on this very honestly because they've colluded with the larger narrative. In other words, they thought that, you know, if this is designed to hit Trump and his allies, we're not going to stand against it. We're not going to throw our own people under the bus. So to me, it doesn't seem likely that it's going to be bipartisan. And although logically it ought to be, but I don't know where you would see hope that it might be, excuse me, we're going to go to a break folks..
The Eric Metaxas Show
"baker" Discussed on The Eric Metaxas Show
"Back. I'm talking to the author of the fall of the FBI how once great agency became a threat to democracy. Thomas baker, you were just telling us how what we now call Pfizer foreign intelligence surveillance act. Was abused obviously by those who were enemies of Donald Trump, very creepy, the way these kinds of things happen. Very smart people looking for loopholes and looking for ways to do things. They ought not to be able to do. So talk about that a little bit. What exactly happened? Remind us. Okay. Well, as I said before, the Pfizer act was initially a reform, and things operated rather well under it for a long time. What has happened, particularly after September 11th, it was loosened up and loosened up. At first, the Pfizer applications for monitoring each one had to be signed by the director of the FBI and then by the attorney general, Kim herself, and so this led to very carefully reviewing that and this one in the FBI went in effect when the judge William Webster was the FBI director. He had a team of law clerks, read every word in those. I mean, it had to be perfect. So I've got a lot of scrutiny. What's happened since then, this requirement has been loosened up and loosened up and loosened up so there's a whole wide range of officials who can approve these things. And from just two or 300 a year and by the way, these numbers do get disclosed publicly a year or so after the fact. So from just about 200 a year for a long time, have to September 11th to jumped up to a thousand a year, and now it's up in the past year or two to three and 4000 every year and we now know from the work of the DoJ inspector general that hundreds of these are being directed at U.S. citizens. Okay, so the point is to get permission for the FBI to spy to surveil American citizens. We have these fisa courts set up and what you're saying is that over time it became more and more abused until we now know that what happened with Trump before he even was elected or inaugurated that these kinds of things were being enacted, presumably at the behest of Obama and his people or at the behest of Hillary Clinton and her people. So you talk about the politicization of the FBI. This is it in a nutshell. That's a big part of it. And as I said, I'm going to say this again, this is one particular issue that the Congress can directly address that the Pfizer law is act is a product of Congress and comes up for renewal periodically. They can ratchet it back to where it's directed only at foreign agents, not at U.S. persons. That's a key reform Congress can make and Pfizer is so invasive. It goes beyond most people think of it as what is in their minds from movies and television. It's wiretapping, listening in on somebody's phone calls. But in fact, today, it defies her act authorizes the picking up of all sorts of communications digital. Your emails, your texts, everything of this nature, it authorizes physical intrusion, research, a surreptitious search of somebody's residence or their business office. It's a very intrusive tool and should only be used against foreign agents..
The Eric Metaxas Show
"baker" Discussed on The Eric Metaxas Show
"Well, Eric, I would agree with your whole synopsis of that period. Just point out one additional salyan fact is that most everything who did, he was doing in response to requests or pressure or implied requests from the presidents at the time, whether it was FDR, Eisenhower Truman, Nixon, LBJ, he was responding to them. And that's what we have to guard against really. He was just an instrument of political interference in American lives. It is extraordinary. It's very, very ugly. And in that sense, it is bipartisan. So what were these committees? And others, what did they do? What were they reacting to specifically in the 70s when they decided to make these reforms to the FBI, which obviously have evaporated. But what were they at the time? What are you summoned? Well, they evaporated, but the church committee and the pike committee committees in Congress that exposed a lot of these abuses by the FBI and the intelligence agencies more broadly, the CIA and the NSA as well. What they did, the reforms that grew out of those committees, essentially put everybody back in their own box. It was again reiterated that the CIA and the NSA should not would not operate in this country nor operate against American citizens or in the term actually as U.S. persons would include legal aliens and U.S. corporations. There was a lot of internal reform in the FBI and the DoJ at that time, this is in the late 70s. Now they came up with the various attorney general guidelines to domestic and international investigations. And most specifically impertinent now again is the Congress passed the foreign intelligence surveillance act, which gave us the foreign intelligence surveillance court, which codified how the FBI could collect intelligence in this country on foreign agents. That whole structure and the first year of the Pfizer act was 1978. That whole structure worked very well for several decades. The act was only used against foreign agents only to gather intelligence. Now we see it's been loosened up, loosened up, and now there are abuses are taking place. Okay, we're going to come back what happened. We will come back and talk about the fisa court and all this talking to Thomas baker, the book is the fall of the FBI. Tell me why relief factor is so successful at lowering or eliminating pain. I'm often asked that question just the other night, I was asked that question, well, the owners of relief factor tell me they believe our bodies were designed to heal. That's right, designed to heal, and I agree with them. And the doctors who formulated relief factor for them selected the four best ingredients, yes, 100% drug free ingredients, and each one of them helps your body deal with inflammation. Each of the four ingredients deals with inflammation from a different metabolic pathway. That's the point. So approaching from four different angles may be why so many people find such wonderful relief. If you've got back pain, shoulder, neck, hip, knee, or foot pain from exercise or just getting older, you should order the three week quick start discounted to only 1995 to see if it'll work for you. It has worked for about 70% of the half a million people who've tried it and have ordered.
The Eric Metaxas Show
"baker" Discussed on The Eric Metaxas Show
"You could also text the keyword Eric to 9 one 9 9 9. You'll get a link to make your life saving gift text, Eric to 9 one 9 9 9, or to give you a gift by phone, call the toll free number 8 four four 8 6 three hope 8 four four 8 6 three hope. 8 four four 8 6 three hope. God bless you. Folks, welcome back. My guest today is Thomas baker, a 33 year veteran of the FBI who has written a brand new book called the fall of the FBI, how a once great agency became a threat to democracy. It's a, it's a major thing for someone like you who obviously joined the FBI, what? Over 50 years ago to come to this very heartbreaking conclusion, Thomas, where did you grow up? It sounds like you grew up in the New York area. Well, you're right about that, Eric. I grew up in New York City. I joined the FBI in New York City at the young age of 21, so as I said at the beginning of this interview, essentially the FBI has been my entire adult life. And so there's nobody who could see better from the inside what we're talking about. You saw this happen. Do you think that there's hope for the FBI? Because the part of me that when I see these institutions, these three letter agencies weaponized and politicized, I want to say defund the FBI. In other words, the idea that these people charged with protecting Americans would become politicized and would, in many cases, become the enemies of patriots. What they did to Roger Stone, what they did to so many others, it's nothing less than despicable and horrifying and I, I don't know enough to know what one can do, but it is astonishing to me that that level of politicization could be happening. Where do you see, do you see hope that it could be depoliticized at this point? I am by my own nature, always an optimist. And that is why I wrote the book. And that's why I'm on shows like yours, talking about this urging the FBI to reform. I love the FBI. I would not personally advocate defunding it, although I realized that's a tool of constitutional tool that Congress has to bring about pressure. I urge the FBI to reform from inside a U Eric mentioned certain laws after September 11, you mentioned the patriotic act. Another act that was changed greatly that we had on the books since 1978, but after 9 11 was changed, is the foreign intelligence surveillance act, which set up a framework for legally surveilling for intelligence purposes foreign agents who are resident in the United States. So 99% of the cases is the FBI utilizing that act. What happened over the years in particular after September 11th, its coverage was broadened and broadened. It was amended and amended and now it is used contrary to its original purpose to surveil U.S. citizens as we saw very visibly in the car to page incident. Carter page a U.S. citizen in my estimation should have never been surveilled under that act. If they legitimately suspect that he was an agent of a foreign government, he could have been approached under the espionage act or any one of a number of other acts, but to surveil U.S. persons, which is happening regularly now under the foreign intelligence surveillance act, I believe, is an abuse. And that's an abuse that Congress can address. Well, I guess that's the question. Is.
The Eric Metaxas Show
"baker" Discussed on The Eric Metaxas Show
"Thank you, Eric. I just want to let my audience know doing 33 years with the FBI. You know a little bit about that organization. Perhaps even more significantly, you were the first FBI man on the scene when president Reagan was shot outside the Washington Hilton and you directed the FBI's are you oversaw the FBI's handling of that. It's hard to believe that that's over 40 years ago now. When did you retire from the FBI? Are we talking from the FBI approximately 20 years ago, but I'd like to point out that in these past 20 years, I stayed very, very engaged with the FBI as a consultant and on some advisory panels and also serving on the board of directors of the Justice Department, federal credit union with other FBI executives. So I've continued to remain engaged and in touch with the FBI. Well, again, Thomas baker, congratulations on the book, the fall of the FBI, how a once great agency became a threat to democracy. That's a big thing. For someone like you to make that claim, you're not going to get any pushback from me because it seems obvious that that is what has happened. So what led you to write this book? What did you see inside the FBI that made things change to where a horrifying thesis and statement which I think is a fact, it could be true that the FBI, which was once a great organization, could become a threat to democracy in a threat to America. How did you, how do you say, when did you begin to see this?.
The Eric Metaxas Show
"baker" Discussed on The Eric Metaxas Show
"A toast. To our new college grad who fills us with so much joy. Almost as much as when we're in our RV, all the world is your oyster kiddo. And ours too. Now that we're covered with progressive, dad and I can hop in our RV anytime we want, might even splurge on a retractable awning. Oh, look out. Sorry, what was I talking about? Protect your loved one with an RV policy from progressive. Take as little as four minutes to see what you could say that progressive dot com progressive casualty insurance company and affiliates. Folks, welcome to the Eric metaxas show, sponsored by legacy precious metals. There's never been a better time to invest in precious metals, visit legacy p.m. investments dot com that's legacy p.m. investments dot com. Welcome to the Eric metaxas show. It's a nutritious smoothie of creamy, fresh yogurt, vanilla protein powder, and a mushy banana for your mind. Drink it all down. It's nummy. I won't vanilla. Here comes Eric metaxas. Folks, welcome to the program. You know that this being the air from Texas show, it's the show about everything. We like to talk about everything. We don't always get to talk about everything, but we try. Today, we're talking about something very significant. I call it the FBI. That's my just personal abbreviation for the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Anyone paying attention knows that the FBI sadly has fallen on hard times and that's being very, very polite about it. We have with us, Thomas baker, who was with the FBI for 33 years who has written a brand new book very important book folks called the fall of the FBI, how a once great agency became a threat to democracy. Thomas baker, congratulations on the book, and thanks for coming on this program..
The MMQB NFL Podcast
"baker" Discussed on The MMQB NFL Podcast
"Hello and welcome to the MM QB NFL podcast. I'm Gary Graham. And I'm Conor. Connor, we have what the media is turning a pre Christmas hodgepodge Tim show here. We are going to talk about the surprise firing of John Robinson, the now former Titans general manager. We're going to talk about here are some teams who are picking in the top 5 who have good records. How did this come to be? What do we think about this? And we are also going to ask the question that I think all of Americans ask themselves. Would you coach the Houston Texas? The worst game show ever. Man, I would totally watch it. You just bring people on. And just a yes or no answer. And then you just move on to the next verse. No. But we're starting with Baker Mayfield. Quarterback
The MMQB NFL Podcast
"baker" Discussed on The MMQB NFL Podcast
"Would think they had gotten that Intel, yeah. Yeah. I think they've been in on this for quite some time. And so I think that they were just kind of like, hey, we need to we need to get rid of baker. We need a way to do it. That basically puts it all on him. And so we're going to hold hands with deshaun Watson real quick in the hallway. Baker's going to see it. He's going to flip out and then we're going to let him force his own way out of town and then we can tell the fans like, hey, you know, we were just trying to make the team better. So that's it. First of all, that is incredibly cold, what 7th grade Connor did to that poor girl who certainly didn't deserve it. I immediately regret telling that story, a and you know why, because I can still, I can still Jenny used to make fun of me for bringing up my dating history on podcasts, but I can also see, I can also just feel her disapproval from that, you know? And her presence is still, it looms large on this show. It does. It really does. And by the way, we are going to have her on probably next week to talk about the Desean Watson situation and just really continue just torrent of misinformation or misconstrued information that is coming out about these cases as we move on. He's going to play again in the NFL. It's just, it's a little bit gross right now. As far as baker goes, though. So we've talked about this. You've seen Baker Mayfield, I've seen Baker Mayfield, we've all seen Baker Mayfield play like a quality starting quarterback in the league. And this was not sort of a flukey, oh, well, he was, you know, just got a little bit hot or he had a cyst in that. It is a good system, but I don't think that system lifted his lifting him up in the same way that, say, if you watch like.
Sincerely Fortune
"baker" Discussed on Sincerely Fortune
"I didn't see that there and when i came and i started doing stand up and i started doing these open mic. I just saw people that were really as lost as i was. And you know it was like we had. We had time to sit on the street all night. Barking and getting people to come into a comedy show so we do five minutes. It's like do you know how little you have to have going on in your life for that to be something where you're like. This is a good way to spend the night. Oh yeah. I remember those days. Yeah the comedy store toll. Two in the morning Yeah i guess. I won't do anything but this And it was like it gave me a home. It gave me like a place to really get to know who i who i am and while i was doing it i was like. Oh this is that thing. I was supposed to. This is the thing that i missed my whole life and and it was crazy because people have been telling me since i was a kid like my dad was always like. You're funny. you know you should. You should be doing comedy. And i remember being so insulted by i i mean it was. It literally hurt my feelings. Every time he said it. I thought comedy was like that's like a loser. Profession losers wall so you came from a very interesting family of Love politics right. I mean yeah yeah. Father worked for jewish reagan. W bush was a secretary of state right. Yeah jayme yeah. James baker yeah area state and he was so he That's wild when. I see like your comedy because you talk about your very liberal. And that that's so synonymous the you know. Bush reagan obviously with very conservative views. So it's it's so interesting that i mean that part of your background. Well it's funny. Like i remember thinking as i started. Stand up like i was like. I can't tell anybody about this lookout. Really can't tell anybody then. The longer i did it the more i was like. Why wouldn't i. Why wouldn't i tell anybody about. This is like a crazy story And also you know. It was difficult for me to talk about because they. I'm not very close with my side of my family. I'm not like really close with my grandparents. I'm not super close with my daddy than like. I had to email my dad to tell him. I was getting married because we hadn't talked in like two years. You know yeah so. It was like one of those things where i was like Just seen i'm engaged and just see now. I know it's weird between not so just letting you know you know it was like back and anyway so it is like a strange thing to have this very wealthy political and browns and.
Get Up!
"baker" Discussed on Get Up!
"To develop <Speech_Music_Male> into <Speech_Music_Male> what they think <Speech_Music_Male> you are going <Speech_Music_Male> <Advertisement> to be so <Speech_Music_Male> <Advertisement> <Speech_Music_Male> when you get paid off <Speech_Music_Male> a production <Speech_Music_Male> usually. <Speech_Music_Male> It's you're <Speech_Music_Male> making a super <Speech_Music_Male> bowl run or <Speech_Music_Male> it just happens <Speech_Music_Male> to fall in the right <Speech_Music_Male> places but of <Speech_Music_Male> course eighteen <Speech_Music_Male> wants to sign <Speech_Music_Male> a player early <Speech_Male> before they go <Speech_Male> out there and they <Speech_Male> do all the crazy production <Speech_Male> at a young age. <Speech_Male> And then you gotta <Speech_Male> pay somebody. Forty <Speech_Male> million or fifty million dollars <Speech_Male> a year so <Speech_Male> for me. <Speech_Male> I just wanna see a more <Speech_Male> accurate <Speech_Male> passer from the pocket <Speech_Male> third and tenth third <Speech_Male> and fifteen third <Speech_Male> long whatever it is <Speech_Male> dropback pass <Speech_Male> throw the ball accurately <Speech_Male> because <Speech_Male> he definitely benefits <Speech_Male> from that running <Speech_Male> game. <SpeakerChange> Which <Speech_Male> every quarterback would. <Speech_Male> Yeah and <Speech_Male> then d- would <Speech_Male> you mentioned you need <Speech_Male> to see the same <SpeakerChange> kind of <Speech_Male> thing and baker but <Speech_Male> mike also brought <Speech_Male> up his size. <Speech_Male> Do you think it's fair <Speech_Male> to judge baker on <Silence> his size <Speech_Male> <SpeakerChange> <Speech_Male> <Speech_Male> absolutely not. I <Speech_Male> mean we've seen guys who <Speech_Male> are undersized <Speech_Male> dinners <Speech_Male> lead. The drew brees <Speech_Male> the russell wilson's <Speech_Male> column. Erred those <Speech_Male> guys are thriving and <Speech_Male> yes. We're not going <Speech_Male> to mistake. <Speech_Male> Would not going to mistake. <Speech_Male> Baker mayfield for michael <Speech_Male> vick there but <Speech_Male> within the scheme <Speech_Male> that they run he's <Speech_Male> you know he had a pretty <Speech_Male> good year last year. <Speech_Male> My whole thing. Is <Speech_Male> i wanna see baker. <Speech_Male> I wanna <Speech_Male> see it again. <Speech_Male> You know instead of just <Speech_Male> going off a one year. I <Speech_Male> want to see him. I wanna <Speech_Male> see him again. Dude <Speech_Male> put up the same type <Speech_Male> of numbers even better numbers <Speech_Male> <SpeakerChange> than what he <Speech_Male> did last year if he does <Speech_Music_Male> that. Pay that man. <Speech_Music_Male> Yeah <Speech_Music_Male> jeff. <Speech_Music_Male> i'll end with this thought. <Speech_Music_Male> I want to get your take on <Speech_Music_Male> <Advertisement> this. You follow <Speech_Music_Male> <Advertisement> these deals. You <Speech_Music_Male> <Advertisement> talk to these front opposites <Speech_Music_Male> given <Speech_Music_Male> the timing and everything else <Speech_Music_Male> <Advertisement> do you think. There's a legit <Speech_Music_Male> <Advertisement> shot and you could be paid <Speech_Music_Male> <Advertisement> like a top ten <SpeakerChange> quarterback <Speech_Male> <Advertisement> in his extension <Silence> <Speech_Male> <Speech_Male> top ten quarter. <Speech_Male> But yeah i mean yes <Speech_Male> because if <Speech_Male> you think about a top ten quarterback <Speech_Male> you're talking <Speech_Male> in terms of payment. <Speech_Male> You're talking about taking <Speech_Male> the last ten quarterbacks <Speech_Male> to get paid <Speech_Male> and that happens <Speech_Male> over a span <Speech_Male> when it's just a constant <Speech_Male> movement <Speech_Male> it's the constant <Speech_Male> reset of the market. <Speech_Male> So yes <Speech_Male> i do. Think he'll be paid <Speech_Male> like top ten <Speech_Male> quarterback but <Speech_Male> every time we see <Speech_Male> a quarterback like that get <Speech_Male> paid. We're always we always <Speech_Male> have sticker shock. <Speech_Male> You gotta get over <Speech_Male> that as an organization. <Speech_Male> You've just <Speech_Male> got to recognize <Speech_Male> that you've gotta find <Speech_Male> your guy commit to <Speech_Male> them and pay <Speech_Male> them within <Speech_Male> reason. <SpeakerChange> What the market <Speech_Male> dictates <Speech_Male> right. And that is <Speech_Male> a fact of life <Speech_Male> in the nfl. <Speech_Male> All right guys. <Speech_Male> Thanks so much. <Speech_Male> We'll talk a little bit <Speech_Male> and just a second. But i <Speech_Music_Male> take <SpeakerChange> on at the top <Speech_Male> of the hour. They're <Speech_Male> debating if the <Speech_Male> nba finals <Speech_Male> is over. <Speech_Music_Male> And if it is just <Speech_Music_Male> too early to compare <Speech_Music_Male> mahomes to the <Speech_Music_Male> <Advertisement> goat <SpeakerChange> <Speech_Music_Male> that more
Get Up!
"baker" Discussed on Get Up!
"Back with you on get up and let's go on the clock. Afc north northeastern thirty seconds on the clock. And we'll start with our football guys. Rob rob big. Ben be the worst quarterback in the afc north. No way i know. He's not commuter. Words listen last year you have to understand. They had the worst running game in the nfl. They could not run the football. And when you are one dimensional in the nfl teams game plan against you accordingly. So for me. I think that big ben. He's not gonna fall for cliff year. They're going to have better offense line play. They're going to run the ball better so no i don't think he's going to be the worst in the division at all. No i can't do it. I can't do it too. Big ben respect them. Okay can't do it. The big bend. Jeff we'll lamar jackson. When a playoff game you know this feels like. I'm hating on lamar here and i'm not meaning to necessarily i don't think that they do though. I think it's so difficult especially in that division even to get into the playoffs and then once they do that assumes that they'll in fact win that game. I think it's going to be tougher. Baltimore to even sneak themselves in to the playoffs. And that's with an expanded playoff format. So i know that's tough I just i think that's the truth when it comes to the baltimore ravens season and i think a point. It's a tough division so damian. Would you pay baker. Mayfield top quarterback money. No i wouldn't pay baker mayfield top quarterback money i think he he made strides in the right direction last year in his first year under kevin to face key but listen i need to see more. I think you know. Baker may for eight a lot off of play action. I need to see more in the drop. Back pass game from baker mayfield more consistency in that area and listen. I will just be right now. I would just be afraid to fall into that. Juerg golf hossam. Winston situation panic early and come to regret those contracts. I just need to see a little. Bit more out of baker mayfield before i are paying top dollar as an eagles fan. I know what that situation is like in. Eat my friend. You know who else thing about baker trying.
Awards Chatter
"baker" Discussed on Awards Chatter
"Hi everyone and thank you for tuning into the three hundred ninety. Four episode of awards chatter the hollywood reporter awards. Podcasts i'm the host gothenburg and my guest. Today is a legendary star of hollywood's golden age who is currently celebrating the sixtieth anniversary of her. Start in the movies. Indeed in one thousand nine hundred ninety six. She made her name in both. George stevens is giant which appears on the american film. Institute's list of the one hundred greatest movies of all time and in elia kazan's baby doll which established her as both a sex symbol. First rate actress brought her best actress oscar golden globe and bafta award nominations and led to her receiving special golden globe for best new star of the year. No one else alive today. With marilyn monroe co starred with james dean and clark gable and was directed by not only stevens and kazan. But also everyone from john ford and william wyler through bob and david fincher and few have ever had a hugely successful careers as she did. In both hollywood and europe. Carol baker over the course of our conversation the ninety year old and i discussed how she wound up in vaudeville and then in hollywood why she loved her role in baby doll but resisted similar sexy parts in the years that followed which led to her being suspended by warner brothers and paramount and ultimately relocating to europe. What in her later years inspired her to begin writing books including her fourth and most recent two thousand nineteen agatha christie. Like mystery. who killed big al. What she makes of the metoo movement she had some rather shocking things to say about bill cosby when we spoke the day before his unexpected released from prison. Plus much more and so without further ado. Let's go to that conversation so lovely to see you and an honor to have you do this. Thank you very much. Well i'll tell you what i mean. It seemed to me that what a bunch of great anniversaries. It's your big milestone year. It's the sixty fifth of baby doll and giant. It's you've got all your your latest book quite recently right so i figured this is a wonderful as good an occasion as any to celebrate you. This wonderful yes. Because i did just published. My fourth book is a fun fun. Mystery tongue in cheek fun but there is a lot of mystery in it and it's on amazon and it's called who killed big l. Send you gloppy. Should use fun. Thank you. I certainly will and i enjoyed your auto biography as well and we got a lot to talk about if your if your game so i'm going to start though right at the very beginning and if i can just ask you. Can you share with our our listeners. Where were you born and raised in. What did your parents do for a living. I'm was born in pennsylvania in johnstown and i was depression baby so my grandfather baker was very well. The in johnstown. He had a bar a restaurant a bowling alley and he lost everything and committed suicide now. His two boys one my father and my uncle. We're going to inherit the business. So they went to penn state and they were both football stars. They weren't thinking about making a living right. So what happened is that we all had to move in together. My father mother my aunt and uncle my grandmother who was the darling of all the she could do anything she could make anything. She could do anything. She really kept us all going. Her name was only lean away l. I n. e. which i think is a beautiful name and then way you know like everybody else. We recover when war came along the war economy. At point i was living in young. Would and then later we went to pits would spur twenty miles east of pittsburgh. And that's what. I sort of consider my home because i was a teen preteen a teenager in greensburg now. I thought it was really interesting that you kind of knew early on. It seems like that you were meant for bigger things than the average person. Because as i understand it your parents split up you go to work in in a factory i guess after high school. And you just say this is not what i meant for a a meant for thank. You got me so. I had been taking those stupid dance lessons like everybody takes but in my my mother had moved to florida but my father was still in greensburg and Our attic floor was wooden and it was all beat up anyway. So i'm really really practice. Specially tap dancing and then at a certain point. My mother said you know. Would you like to come to florida well. It was wonderful. Because in florida. Using young girls for everything. I was writing on floats and i got my first job. Dancing got twenty dollars. I was absolutely thrilled. And then i did went other places with my mother. She was great. I had no pianist or anything. She had to to see where the needle went and put on my rhetoric the precise spot but at one point i was invited to come to daytona beach and it was the international convention of judicials so i met a magician. There of he was hurt. Tired he was very famous. Name was burling hall and his stage. Name was the great volksrust. He was retired and he came up to my mother. And i asked if i could please hold the other end of the turban while he burned it. So i send us one melissa. Sure why what. And then afterwards he came up to me and my mother and he said look. I'm retired. But i am no inventing magic and i have invented a magic act called the magic jewel act and i invented for a woman and i would love if you would come to my wife and i spent some time learned the act and then i'll send you on the road with it. Yes and my mother was sensor could score. you know. She never thought anything was impossible. So i learned the magic act. And he brought me in to One of the old hangovers vaudeville. Call kemp time out of the carolinas. And so i i did mine magic act and i also had to dance mcclure's and they said to me we'd like you to work with the baggy.
Audible Orgy
"baker" Discussed on Audible Orgy
"Season person from the last season on. I'm trying to do something else. That's i'm gonna let the people know that you know i own. I could be girl even with my hoodie is style yeah. Today's episode. yeah. I'm excited to talk to this guy. Because he is like making waves. And i love it to see when people are making waves. The acting industry is not that big. Believe it or not. You know faces but it's not that big and were spread so fast so this dude. Let me tell you sean. Baker is a name. If you don't know what you need to get to know it. I he is an actor writer on. Let me see if you recognize it shaft. Recognize it. recognize samuel jackson. No-one on the dick wool. Fbi that's my show. You know what i'm saying. I'm not gonna give you on any spoilers on it. you gotta start from sees the one kachuck. He is also on the new. Jim crow majority rules. And he's a part of this amazing project out with kevin durant called swagger where they focused on the youth career of kevin durant in the aau circuit. I'm mckanie fan all day. So i can't wait to see that big fan over here absolutely so without further ado. Y'all welcome up going to be the.
Resilient Life Hacks
"baker" Discussed on Resilient Life Hacks
"Guest. Today is connie baker. She is author of the book Stay on build resilience and thrive while facing cancer. Although her lessons. Apply to anybody facing anything so i really excited to hear what she has to share. She has a bunch of other experience in the medical field and working with children. And even the builder of the pain scale of the faces from one to ten that you see a lot so thank you so much for joining us. It's great to have you here. It's great to be with you elizabeth. Thank you for the opportunity to speak to. Your audience are sounds like you've been a lot of places done. A lot of things had a lot of adventures. I have. i'm grateful for all of them even the good the bad ones. So so tell us about your story where you learned about resilience. Well i would say you now. I grew up in a strong christian family of a real authentic christian family. And i had strong faith but one one thing that i discovered as an adult is that i. I didn't regulate my response to stressful situations very well and that started being evident in my body and i had various illnesses that we're really stress related and so i am. It was in two thousand nine that i began. I was going through a very difficult time in my life. And the most difficult time i've ever had and i learned about a heart math which is a program that helps build resilience and coherence through very simple techniques. And i can share with you if you'd like later on it's really easy but that began. That was transformative for me. Because i began changing the way i responded to life and i i became became well and and was able to make decisions based on my heart intuition and my relationship with god And.