August 15, 2024 • 49 mins
SERIES 3 EPISODE 9: COUNTDOWN WITH KEITH OLBERMANN
A-Block (1:44) SPECIAL COMMENT: Yesterday I said that the USA Today poll that had Vice President Harris down by five Florida was a great indicator of the Democratic tsunami that could be gathering but it’s not like she’s actually going to WIN Florida, and literally hours later in comes a new poll and she may actually WIN Florida.
She's ahead in all but one of the Cook Political Report swing state polls. There are three new national polls (including Monmouth's) in which she's ahead. She's grown the Democratic lead among Latinos from 5% to 19%. Democratic enthusiasm has shot through the roof. She's cut Trump's lead among non-college-educated white people almost in half. It's such a torrent that even Frank Luntz has noticed, says it will soon be time to start figuring out if her coattails will win the House and Senate for the Democrats and “The people who were undecided have all collapsed towards Harris. The entire electoral pool has changed. Kamala Harris has got an intensity advantage, and I haven’t seen anything like this happen – in 30 days – in my lifetime.”
AND REMARKABLY I'M GOING TO DEFEND TRUMP: Not his campaign, not his hate, not WHAT he said while he was on with Elon Musk. But his claim that the equipment gave him that lisp/slurred words/sibilant 'S'? He's right. Anybody who's ever worked with audio processors designed to improve phone signals knows exactly what happened here. We used to call it 1979 Comrex Martian Disease. I'll explain.
B-Block (23:50) THE WORST PERSONS IN THE WORLD: Internet trolls "Gunther Eagleman" and "End Wokeness" complain that the Ilhan Omar primary count didn't go fast enough, then went too fast, then they didn't like the outcome. Laura Ingraham complains Kamala likes curse words when Laura swears like a stevedore. And they play a prank on Liz Truss and she doesn't like it.
C-Block (37:10) THINGS I PROMISED NOT TO TELL: Last weekend somebody told me their career was over and asked if anybody ever told me that and I said yeah, in 2016. And 2001. And 1984. Oh and 1977. Haven't gotten me yet.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:04):
Countdown with Keith Olderman is a production of iHeartRadio concratulations.
Have you seen the lines at five thirty eight. It's
(00:27):
a torrent, It's an avalanche. It's the biggest hit in America.
I hate to steal from mel Brooks and the producers,
and I hate to lead with the polls again. But
yesterday I said that the USA Today canvas that had
the vice president down by five in Florida was a
great indicator of the democratic tsunami that could be gathering.
(00:50):
But it's not like she's actually going to win Florida.
And literally hours later incomes a new poll and she
may literally actually win Florida. Florida Atlantic Public Opinion Research
State of Florida Trump forty seven, Harris forty five, Kennedy five.
(01:11):
Or if you prefer just the head to head, it's
still Trump by five in Florida. The head of the poll,
Kevin Wagner, PhD. Quote. If this trend holds, we may
see a competitive race in Florida. Florida is in play.
Cook Political Report. Georgia Harris forty six, Trump forty six.
(01:31):
Georgia is in play. Cook Political Report. Nevada Trump forty
seven Harris forty two. Nevada is in play. Cook Political Report,
North Carolina Harris forty six, Trump forty four. North Carolina
is in play and she is ahead there. Cook Political
Report Wisconsin Harris by five, Cook Political Report, Pennsylvania Harris
(01:54):
by five, Cook Political Report, Arizona Harris by four, Cook
Political Report, Michigan Harris by two. Wisconsin is in play.
Pennsylvania is in play, Arizona is in play. Michigan is
in play, and she is ahead in all of them.
Oh and Cook Political Report. Kamala Harris favorability in May,
(02:16):
she was underwater by thirteen points. Not the president. She
was underwater by thirteen points in terms of approval now.
Cook Political Report finds Kamala Harris is viewed favorably by
forty nine percent of all voters and unfavorably by forty
nine percent of all voters. She has done the impossible
(02:38):
in politics. She has erased a large unfavorable score in
a matter of three months. Trump, he went from minus
five to minus six. Sorry, Donald, This cascade of polls
is not stopping. Monmouth Pole National still in the field
(03:01):
as of this Monday. Harris forty eight Trump forty three.
J l Partners Nationals still in the field Sunday, Trump
by two. Their previous poll five weeks ago was Trump
by eleven. She has cleared out nine points on a
Conservative Pollsters poll. And there is polling about where these
(03:22):
almost unbelievable polling numbers are coming from. Two months ago,
Equis Polling had Biden leading Trump among Latino voters in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada,
North Carolina, and Pennsylvania and Wisconsin by just five points.
Of the many red alert buttons flashing on the control board,
(03:44):
this might have been the biggest Well, they have just
pulled those seven battleground states again. Harris leads Trump by
nineteen points. She has basically quadrupled the lead over Trump
among Hispanics. And then there's the other startling growth in
a different demograph altogether. A political numbers analyst named Michael
(04:07):
Kayley looked at all those cook battleground states in which
Trump had been ahead by an overall average of five
points but now trails by four, and he went through
each state and her improvement in the head to head
matchups has been four point three points. So for versus him,
she's gained four and three tenths points in each state.
(04:29):
When you mix in RFK Junior and the other third
party candidates, her improvement has been six and three tenths.
In other words, Kamala Harris hasn't just kicked sand in
Trump's face. She's kicked even more sand in Kennedy's and
Stein's and Corneill West's. She's picking off some would be
(04:50):
Trump voters, she's picking up nearly all of the would
be Kennedy voters. And to circle back briefly to that
Monmouth poll, they have been gauging enthusiasm enthusiasms. In April,
per Monmouth, thirty six percent of Democrats said they were
enthusiastic about the Biden Trump election. Oh yeah, we're We're enthusiastic.
(05:15):
In June it was forty six percent. Now it's eighty
one percent. Enthusiasm drives turnout drives winning enthusiasms, and by
the way, Republican enthusiasms. It was seventy one percent in June.
Then Trump got shot at then Trump picked vance, then
(05:36):
Trump held the most boring fascist convention of all time.
It was seventy one percent in June, and after all
that happened, it was seventy one percent in August. The
inference there is Donald Trump is at his ceiling, not
his floor. Perhaps the most startling thing about these polls
(05:56):
is not so much the numbers as the volume. Like
I said, quoting the producers at the start, it's a torrent,
it's an avalanche. The polls are coming back so good,
so fast, that some of the interior numbers they contain
are only being analyzed days later. Remember the New York
(06:18):
Times poll that she was ahead by four in Michigan,
four in Pennsylvania, four in Wisconsin, the rust felt pole,
the one that truly deranged the Trump campaign. Wait, there
was more on the inside of the envelope, inside those polls.
How Trump is doing among his people, white voters with
(06:40):
no college education. In May, in the same polls in
the same states, Trump led President Biden by twenty five
points in this category. In August, in the same polls
in the same state, Trump leads Vice President Harris by
just fourteen points. Was twenty five is fourteen. Basically, she
cut the lead in half. As the CNN analyst Harry
(07:03):
Anton put it, if she puts up these numbers with them,
she'll win unquote no qualifiers she'll win, unquote the Washington
Post those parts of it that are still functional, like
the excellent work of Aaron Blake. The Washington Post is
still carving up the Financial Times poll data that showed
mind blowingly that Kamala Harris is now favored over Trump
(07:27):
to handle the economy. It's only forty two percent to
forty one percent. It is a virtual tie, and if
it were a tie, we'd all be saying, my god,
it's a tie. She's tied him on the economy, but
inside that summary number, which is not a tie, she's ahead.
Inside that number. Mister Blake of the Post has compared
(07:49):
it to earlier numbers on Trump versus Biden on the
economy in the NPR Marris poll and the Marquette Law poll.
In the Times poll, she is now doing between six
and nine points better than Biden was on the economy.
She's taken between four and seven points off Trump's lead
on immigration, She's taken four points off his lead on
(08:12):
foreign relations. And Blake also notes that she has expanded
the Democratic lead that Biden had over Trump on who's
better on healthcare. She's expanded it by twelve points. She's
expanded it on who's better on Medicare and social Security
by thirteen points, on who's better on abortion policy by
(08:33):
twenty three points. This is how crazy good crazy this
really is. This summarizes it. The bandwagon is a loading up.
Frank Luntz, the front runner of all front runners of
all time, goes on CNBC and says, if the election
(08:57):
were held today, not only would Kamala Harris be the
next president of the United States quote, but if it
continues in this direction, you have to start to consider
Democrats winning the Senate and Democrats winning the House. At
this point on the video, you can almost see the
producers getting in Andrew ross Sarkin's ear and saying, interrupt him,
(09:21):
for God's sakes, interrupt Lunce, and Sorkin does, and with
panic visible in his eyes, he trots out the Trump
is undercounted in polls mantra from twenty sixteen, and Lunce
still manages to say, it's not just the polls, it's
my own focus groups too, and in them quote the
people who were undecided have all collapsed towards Harris. And
(09:48):
Lunz then says the entire electoral pool has changed. Kamala
Harris has got an intensity advantage. I haven't seen anything
like this happen in thirty days in my lifetime, and
Frank Lunz is almost my age. He's sixty two, although
(10:08):
to be fair, his hair is only about seventeen. Okay,
(10:36):
I hope you're sitting down for this part because I'm
going to do something I've never done before. I think
I am going to defend Trump. Not about his speech yesterday,
the latest one that made no sense, where he said
the TV would turn off if it wasn't windy, or
how he really didn't get credit for the COVID outfits
everybody wore Woo. You will recall, though, that the other
(11:01):
night Trump went on with Elon Musk and to invoke
the music Celine Dion is trying to get him to
stop using at his rallies. It was like listening to
two of the officers aboard Titanic getting Drunker and Drunker
as they fulfilled their promise to go down with the ship.
The content was, what a shock, insane. Here's Trump, He's
(11:23):
deteriorating occasional bursts of structural lucidity, but he's still in
Hannibal Lecter eaten by sharks with frickin' laser beams mode.
And then there's Musk, sounds as if he's high as
a kite, having decided that he's going to rule the
world through money and proxies like Trump because Auric Goldfinger
is dead. Now here's Musk trying to get Trump to
(11:46):
become even more of a fascist, but a fascist who
likes electric cars. I'm not defending what either of these
simultaneously terrifying and comical monsters said, but getting almost as
much a tension as what they said is how Trump
(12:07):
sounded as he said it. He had an unbelievably bad
sibilant s you know, he had an esh. He had
an ash like a Monty Python sketch or a good
old fashioned gay bashing nineteen fifties comedian. He had an
ash like he was just clearing the anesthetic out of
(12:29):
his mouth after oral surgery. He had an ash like
Sylvester's suffering suck atash. And he claims it was a
screw up in the equipment somewhere, and he and Musk
later put out cleaned up versions of him, and everybody screamed,
oh yeah, Musk, use the AI to make Trump sound better.
(12:53):
Guess what Trump's right, the equipment did screw up. Everything
else is everybody else is wrong. I'm sorry. He's right
stoned or drunk or having another episode with whatever is
left over of his brain. Yes, he might be saying yes,
(13:14):
but other words would also sound funny and as funny
as his eshes sound in this clip. Everything else is normal,
well normal Trump insanity normal, But that's okay.
Speaker 2 (13:27):
That's the way I get treated, and I don't mind
that at all. What I can tell you is this,
we cannot have a Democrat. We cannot have her. She's incompetent.
She's as bad as Biden in a different Yeah, she
hasn't done an interview since his whole scam started, And
say what you want, This was a coupe.
Speaker 1 (13:45):
What I think that is ish. What I think that
is is a failure in a device that was used
to amplify his voice and simultaneously tamp down the background
noise to improve the phone line. He apparently did this
call with Musk by leaning over an iPhone sitting on
a table, because because he's an old man who doesn't
(14:09):
know how to use an iPhone, and they may have
tried to enhance what he sounded like. To make him
louder and the background less loud. That might have been
the reason for the forty five minute delay in getting
the damn thing started. We have had devices like these
for more than half a century now. I was introduced
(14:29):
to them in nineteen seventy nine at my first job
in network radio. The machine was called a com Rex.
I understand Comrexes have improved significantly since then. There are
other rival devices. I mean, hell, I used to have
a giant microphone that plugged into my laptop and it
allowed me to go on MSNBC from wherever I was,
(14:53):
and if it didn't sound right, there was a series
of dials I could twist to give my voice more
base or more clarity or whatever it was required to
get this thing with trump thish I should shay. This
sounded like a nineteen seventy nine Comrax. The machine in
(15:13):
those days was about the size of a large box
of tissues, but it felt like it weighed thirty five
or forty or one hundred and sixty pounds. I don't
know if it was made out of lead or what,
but I was twenty years old and carrying the thing
from my hotel just to a ballpark in the same town.
(15:34):
Used to leave me with muscle strains. The other thing
was the Comrades ran on those huge nine vault batteries,
but it took like a dozen of them, and it
ate nine vault batteries like candy. A dozen nine volt
batteries would last you about forty five minutes, and like
(15:54):
it needed anything else to go wrong, The on off
switch for this incredibly badly designed machine stuck out of
the front and it was the size of a pencil point.
So if you put your comraes in a bag and
you did not tape the on off switch into the
off position using duct tape, it would invariably switch on
(16:18):
while it was in your bag and eat the batteries
before you ever got to use it in the first place.
In any event, it used to alter the sound of
the human voice to make it into an unintelligible wine.
We called it Martian back at headquarters. You had to
have the other half of the com Rex device, the
D scrambler, the D Martinator. When it worked, it would
(16:42):
make you sound five percent better ten percent better, which
in nineteen seventy nine was a big deal. When it
didn't work, the only thing it would change would be.
It would give you a sybil in s just like
Trump with Musk the other night. This is Keith Alberman
speaking from Madison Square Garden, Schyanara. So the stopped clock
(17:07):
has had its one minute of validity. Trump is right.
He was not lisping, he was not slurring, he was
not drunk, he was not having an episode. He was
either being processed with a nineteen seventy nine Comrax or
the modern equivalent of a nineteen seventy nine Comrax. And
(17:29):
by the way, since I've already gone so far down
this road, if you think my memories of the comras
are a little surprising, I mean, forty four years after
I last used one, it feels like it failed me.
The day before yesterday, we had another sportscaster at my
first job UPI named Jack Russell. And if you told
Jack Russell to bring the Comrax with him on a story,
(17:51):
Jack would start swearing and his eyes would get red.
Long after both I and our boss Sam Rosen left
the network, one day, Sam's successor sent Jack to New Orleans,
I think for the Super Bowl, and it was just
as UPI began to run into financial trouble and they
(18:11):
would not give Jack an advance, so they made him
pay for his own travel on the promise that they'd
pay him back, and all sorts of other financial crap unfolded,
and Jack not only decided he had had enough of UPI,
Jack decided he had had enough of radio. So, according
to the story I was told by several ex UPI colleagues,
(18:32):
he left the office on Manhattan's East side, basically forty
second Street and Second Avenue. If you ever saw the
Christopher Reeves Superman movie, the Daily Planet building, that's where
we worked. He walked from there over to the East
River to a payphone placed perfectly right above the water.
He called UPI from that payphone. He swore at his
(18:54):
boss NonStop for several minutes. Many said, before I go,
I just want you to know that you should shove
this comrades where the sun don't shine. But since I'm
not gonna bother to come back and the office to
witness that, I'm just gonna do my own version of
it now. And according to this story, Jack held out
the phone receiver in one hand, fished the com rex
(19:15):
out of his bag with the other, and threw the
comrex into the East River. I am told that his
boss could clearly hear the forty pounds sound machine from
Hell hitting the water and immediately sinking to the bottom
release rotation splash. Also of interest here, Laura Ingram complains
(19:44):
Kamala Harris likes to curse. Let me tell you about
how Laura Ingram curses like a like a Steve Adore.
That's next. This is countdown.
Speaker 2 (20:03):
This is count with Keith Olberman.
Speaker 1 (20:27):
Still ahead of us on this all new editionive Countdown.
I was asked the other day by a friend who
was convinced that his career had ended, whether anybody had
ever said that to me. And I laughed and laughed
and laughed, and I told him, yeah, a couple of times,
but only as long ago as nineteen eighty four. And
then as I thought about telling you these stories in
(20:48):
which writers and general managers and business agents told me
I was done, I realized, actually, somebody told me this
long before nineteen eighty four. When they tell you your career
is over, they may be projecting in things I promised
not to tell. Coming up first, there's still more new
(21:09):
idiots to talk about. The daily roundup of the miss grants,
morons and dunning Krueger effects specimens who constitute two days
worse person's in the world Lebron's worse the character called
Gunther Eagleman, a right wing social media troll account, when
(21:29):
the author Philip Auswald identifies as defrocked and disgraced X
cop from Texas actually named David Freeman. Because nobody's named
Gunther anymore. Well, we couldn't use gun nut. Gun Nut
Eagleman doesn't sounds smart, does it? Anyway? Whoever he is.
He echoed a post by another bunch of clowns called
(21:51):
end Wokeness after ilhan Omar won her primary Tuesday night.
This is the version posted by end Wokeness Minnesota District
five eight pm. Polls closed eight fifteen PM, zero percent
counter eight thirty PM, zero percent counted, eight forty five PM,
zero percent counted, nine PM, zero percent counted, nine to
(22:11):
twenty two PM five point zero percent counted, nine thirty
seven PM ninety nine point five percent counted. Totally one
hundred percent legitimate, nothing at all suspicious. Congrats to ilan Omar.
You know what, I went to a baseball game once
and nobody scored in the baseball game for eight innings,
and so I left when it was nothing to nothing.
(22:33):
When I got home, they said the Mets had lost
four to three, and that's impossible because nobody scored for
eight innings. Morons plus is another wag noted first, the
vote counting was too slow for the fascists. Now the
vote counting is too fast for the fascists. The runner
(22:56):
up worser good old Laura Ingram or whatever that is
that replaced her on Fox that can barely move its mouth.
It's either Laura uh after way too much work, or
it's an animatronic Laura like in the Hall of Presidence
at the Apcot Center. Good Evening and our Ingraham when
(23:18):
the Ingram angle graphic on the show Curson. Kamala loves
her swear words. Okay, I got two on this. Number
one Even Politico noted that Trump has repeatedly used the
B word to describe Kamala Harris. So if we're going
to talk about who's calling whom what, let's start with
(23:41):
Trump calling her the B word, shall we the other point?
You will have to take my word on this, but
I think I may have mentioned this once or twice
before Laura and I went out on one date and
one cross between a date and a hostage situation, wherein
I was the hostage. This occurred in the previous century.
(24:03):
And if you think Kerson Kamala loves her swear words,
you should hear imprecating ingram like a longshoreman. But our
winner the former UK Prime Minister Liz Rent don't buy Truss,
who lasted fifty days on the job, famously failing to
(24:24):
outlast the live stream of a decaying head of Lettuce.
The British political prankster activists led by donkeys, likes to
install remote controlled banners behind unsuspecting speakers at public events
and then press the down button and guess who they
didn't They did do it to him who didn't know
(24:44):
what was being done to them, Liz trust I don't
know how they get away with this. Seems to me.
In the United States they'd call it a terrorist act.
It's hard to hear what's happening on audio. But as
Liz Truss is just droning on a sign descends reading
I crashed the economy and above that is ahead of
(25:08):
Lettuce with Liz's eyes on it, the last thing you
will hear is Liz getting up and and not very
very decors fashion. She's kind of sitting there with her
legs played, so when she stands up, she gives uh,
the people in the front row of view of the
(25:31):
the queen anyway, So as she gets up with this
delightful lady like gesture, she's walking off and she's saying,
that's the fuddy, he.
Speaker 2 (25:44):
Will, he will, questions life.
Speaker 1 (26:13):
Well, it's kind of funny, Liz. Plus, you have to
admit that whole bit lasted longer than your tenure as
Prime Minister. Liz, let us entertain you trust Two days
Worse Parson and the World. Over the weekend, a colleague
(26:47):
of mine explained that his career is over. It's done.
He's had all the chances, there are no more jobs
to get. It's all over. The business is dying, his
career is dying. It's finished. He's going to look into
something else, maybe selling used cars. And I said, boy,
oh boy, if I had ten million dollars for every
(27:07):
time I have been told my career was over, I'd
have a lot less money than I actually do. To
our number one story on the countdown, and good evening,
and welcome to the end of our careers, or more
particularly the end of my career. No, I'm not retiring.
I'm just quoting myself from nineteen ninety three in the
(27:28):
launch of ESPN two and the subject of career ending
announcements career ending announcements. Recently a colleague of mine told
me he was done, and I had to go through
all of the times I have been told I was done.
The first one was in nineteen eighty four. This would
(27:49):
be in a previous century that I know. To a
lot of younger listeners, seems like it might as well
be eighteen eighty four. I have told before the story
of my limited career in Boston, for which I waited
about a year to start and lasted about half as
long because I went to work at the wrong place,
in the wrong city, outside in the wrong suburb of Boston,
(28:10):
with the wrong boss, where they said, don't make any jokes,
and I said, what did you hire me for? And
I left very very quickly, and then they tried to
fire me while I was filling out the terms of
my contract and staying there until they could get a replacement,
and the whole thing went up in flames. And the
result of this was that the news director of the
station Channel five in Boston, a man who actually answered
(28:33):
to the name Philip Scribner Balboni went to the Boston
Globe TV sports writer when they had such things as
TV Sports Writers and said, Oh, it was such a
shame about Keith. He was potentially such a major talent.
I will not deny that the use of that phrase
did inspire me to some degree to get cracking on
(28:54):
my career. On the other hand, I didn't work for
nearly a year later, as I was taking care of
some family business back home and sort of put everything
about my own interest on the shelf off the record.
The general manager of the station I had worked for,
a man named James Coppersmith, said to my agent something
that made Balboni's statement look like a compliment. Coppersmith said,
(29:14):
he will never again work in our business. That got
me motivated. I believe I read recently that Coppersmith died.
In any event, I worked again in his business. The
punchline to this one, and they all have punchlines, is
that at some point around two thousand and seven, I
got an email at MSNBC and the return address was
(29:39):
Philip Scribner Balboni, and there was a great email from
my old brief news director Boston Channel five in Boston,
who explained that I had been potentially such a major talent,
and was quoted on the record as saying that, And
now he was saying how he watched Countdown every night
and was so proud to have been in there at
the start of my career. Not a word about the
(30:01):
other part about the oh, potentially such a major ten.
I guess he meant it in the past future, perfect
sense of the I don't know, my grammar education is
not what it should be. But he managed to wriggle
out of it. Never made any reference to it. And
the one thing about surviving repeated announcements that your career
(30:21):
is over is to never really go back and criticize
the people who were wrong about it, because they know
they were wrong, and your success is the best answer. Nevertheless,
this all came up, and I thought i'd retell it
to you because I had to retell it to a
friend who recently told me his career was over. But
as I said, that was just the first time that
(30:43):
had ever happened in a fully professional setting in two
thousand and one, and I was just reading this, I
guess about a year ago. It came across it somewhere online.
I was reading it for a punchline in and of itself.
It was a piece in Sports Illustrated by a man
named Chris Ballard, I believe, and Chris Ballard wrote an
(31:03):
article about my being fired by Fox Sports, which he
wrote as I had resigned from Fox Sports, and went
on to explain that I did not respond as Sports
Illustrated's request by emails and phones for comment, I never
received any of them, because it never occurred to him
that when they fired me and told everybody I had resigned,
(31:24):
they cut off my access to my email and my phone,
and they said to him when he wanted to talk
to me, oh, just send him an email, he'll get
back to you. And I didn't, and thus he made
me look like a jerk. In any event, the article
explained in two thousand and one that having gone through
ESPN and now ESPN's sort of mini me rival, Fox
(31:45):
Sports News, that there was nothing left for me to
do in the business. I had tried news briefly in
nineteen ninety seven and nineteen ninety eight. Clearly my career
in both fields was over. I could not possibly work
again in television in news or in sports. We're now
coming up next year. If I get to it now,
it's been twenty three, twenty four year. Okay, I recently
(32:10):
saw this article and was inspired to look for it
online because Chris Ballard was retiring from Sports Illustrated and
I'm still here. One question that came up as I
was retelling the story of my various career ending moments
that did not in fact end my career from my
friend who's very worried about this, was how I managed
(32:33):
not to have my career. And when Ballard's premise was
not completely wrong, he was certainly looking at what he
thought happened in television. He was not the TV sports
writer for Sports Illustrated for very long. It was not
a natural subject for him. Most people who did this
job thought that it involved simply watching sports on TV
(32:54):
and then writing what they thought as opposed to understanding
an industry or its complexities, or its parameters or its
sort of weird voodoo customs. In any event, I said, well, look,
it's not very difficult to survive these things. You just
have to acknowledge that perhaps your next job after some
sort of cataclysmic departure from an ESPN or a Fox
(33:17):
Sports or an MSNBC or wherever else, perhaps it's not
going to pay you quite as much as the last
one did. And so when my agent and I began
to look around for more work in two thousand and one,
and I might add that after Fox fired me, they
had to pay me for another eight months at one
hundred thousand dollars a year. And if you can't survive
(33:37):
on a job that requires you to do nothing for
eight months and pays you eight hundred thousand dollars that
you can salt away. If you can't survive on that
and enjoy your life while you're doing it, you're doing
things wrong. In any event, what I said was just
the next job. Just take a job that allows you
to do what you can do and do it well,
(33:59):
and you will succeed in it. You have talent a
lot of other people don't. You will be low costs,
so they're much more likely to overlook anything that happened
in the past, and most importantly, if it is successful,
you can then hold them up on the second contract negotiation.
So I went first to CNN after the Fox Sports
experience started to work for them for not a lot
(34:21):
of money, and although they did not ultimately exercise this,
they signed me to a contract to do the eight
pm show on CNN for a certain large amount of money,
and there were two finalists they wanted us lined up
in advance, and they made the clever decision to choose
Connie Chung instead of me. But they had sort of
reauthorized me. They had re established me. By it was
(34:43):
well known within the industry that I was the runner
up for the job at eight o'clock And within six
months of them saying, nah, we think Connie's the right
person to lead us into the future here, within six
months of that, I was doing the eight o'clock show
on MSNBC for in fact, twice what the agreement had
been at CNN, And within three years they'd signed me
to a new deal that was worth three times that,
(35:05):
more than I had ever made in my life. So
the key thing to it is to be flexible financially.
You sock them for the money while you're successful. And
then by the way, once again, if you can't succeed
in the business, if you can't succeed in life, when
you have received in one year anything north of three
(35:25):
million dollars in one year, four million dollars. Maybe I
forget what the actual financial floor is. But if you've
made that much money in one year and can't live
basically off that and simply interest from the bank that
that will provide you, If you can't do that, you
must have some sort of addiction to drugs, because guess what,
(35:48):
you can go a long way still. I mean, yeah,
it's true, four million dollars is what it used to be,
but guess what it is now. It's still really good.
I never failed to see one of these articles in
which somebody who's lost a job paying in you know,
the tens of millions of dollars, and so I always finished.
Now it's like, yes, he's finished. Now he can sit
(36:10):
on a beach, he can hire somebody to do his
exercise for him. He can sit on a beach and
eat the money, and it won't make a difference. He
doesn't have to do it again in any event. So
the pattern here that I have described already has continued
in subsequent years, even after I came back from the
dead after my experience in Boston, where I was dubbed
(36:32):
the dark Prints of TV Sports and was winning awards.
In Los Angeles, the next year. Although, to be fair,
after that quote in nineteen eighty four about how I
was potentially a great talent, I did get down to
about my last one hundred dollars in the bank. And
actually I actually had to borrow money from my dear
sister to get on the bus to take me to
(36:56):
the airport in New York so I could take the
flight to Los Angeles to start my job there. That's
how close I cut it. Another week and I would
have been borrowing money for food. That's where I was.
But you have to be willing to walk that tight
rope to pull this off in any event. So that
was Boston, became the Los Angeles job. In the Los
Angeles job, when they eliminated that, it's like, well, his
(37:18):
career is over now. The next job was ESPN. ESPN
led to NBC. When that didn't work out and I
pushed to get out of there, they sold me to
Fox for a million dollars and they paid me a
lot of money and continued to pay me a lot
of money even after they stopped putting me on TV.
And that led to a doldrum period where I got
to read about the guy who's now retired from Sports Illustrated,
(37:39):
explaining what network will sign him now? What team will
sign him now? Whither Keith? This is two thousand and one.
I was forty two years old. It's like I get
nostalgic reading that, going, Yeah, you were forty two years old.
They fired you at that point and people thought your
career was over. Yeah, but I was forty two. My
hair was dark most places in any event, So that
(38:03):
led into the MSNBC the c job, and the MSNBC job,
as sort of messy as that ended, the second one
anyway led to the Current TV job, and as disastrous
as that was, since it was kind of a confidence trick,
there was a day where between the money I got
for leaving NBC and the money I got for joining
Current TV, I made sixty eight million dollars in one day.
(38:26):
I had to see a lot of people afterwards to
get all of it, but I got just about all
of it. In any event, I'm now boasting back to
the point of this whole story. An old friend of
mine came in when I was doing the videos for
GQ The Closer and The Resistance in twenty sixteen. In
twenty seventeen, came in to watch me do this, and
(38:46):
started to ask very very graciously and very gently about, well,
isn't this something of a come down for you from
the MSNBC experience where you had a staff? And I said, well,
first off, the MSNBC experience consisted of two cameramen and
a floor director and me and sometimes a guest in
(39:06):
a studio. The staff, whereas they were all certainly dedicated
to the project, consisted of basically a core of six
or seven people. It never really felt like a big deal.
I know it had more influence than I was ever
led to understand, but it wasn't like, oh, well, you
know those movies that you did with Richard Burton and
(39:27):
Elizabeth Taylor and Tom Cruise, and now you're just sitting
at home with a camera. It didn't have that feel
in the slightest. And I said to him, did you
see the thing from CBS News the other day? And
he went, what thing from CBS News? I said, don't
you have the Google at the New York Times? And
he said yes. I said, Google, Social Flow, Facebook, and
(39:48):
he did on his phone and he read this political
pundit Keith Alderman found a way to channel concerns about
mister Trump. This is July twenty seventeen, started hosting a
series of political commentary and special interviews titled The Resistance
with Keith Olberman, with the first episode featured on GQ
on November sixteenth, twenty sixteen, reaching fifty four million people,
(40:09):
equivalent to one in six Americans. And I said, look,
I understand that if you measure things solely by the
idea that I'm on your TV every night, well, yeah,
that the doing a video and coming into a studio
that isn't really designed for TV and there's an echo
in it might seem like the end of my career.
Fifty four million people saw that video and interacted with
(40:32):
it in some kind. They either forwarded it, or watched it,
or put a comment on it, or sometimes all three.
That was, in fact the number one political video or
story on Facebook in the period of time after Donald
Trump's election. I think that's something of a success. And
I said, by this point, I don't need the damn money.
(40:53):
The money I'm making from doing this is going to
dog charities. Okay, So we could go on at length
about other small versions of that. I once went back
and forth with this guy who now I was one
of the people at Puck News who insisted that I
had not been negotiating with the then chairman of NBC,
Jeff she Shell, about returning to MSNBC in twenty nineteen,
(41:16):
twenty and twenty one, because NBC News had insisted it
wasn't true. And I said, who told you that? And
they said, a spokesman. And I said to this guy,
his name was Dylan Byers, I said, well, who was
the spokesman. Well, it's just supposed to be a spokesman,
I said, so. They wouldn't even put their own name
on it, not even a made up name Jim Jones,
NBC News spokesman, which would have been, by the way,
(41:38):
an appropriate name for a series of NBC News spokespeople.
They didn't even do that. And he said no. They
were insistent, there's never been any contact between you and
Jeff Shell. And I went hang on, and I called
up from my phone twenty three emails and texts from
Jeff Shell. I photo shot at them, I screen shotted
them and gave him to the guy. And I don't
(41:59):
think this guy Buyers has recovered since his worldview was
totally destroyed. He was writing a story about how I
had deteriorated to the point where I was hallucinating about
being in contact with Jeff Shell from NBC News or
from NBC about returning to NBC News and MSNBC when
we were deep into negotiations about it, and we're delayed
(42:21):
only by the pandemic. And as I pointed out here before,
the vetos of certain people working on the air at MSNBC,
most of whose careers I started. But that's another story
which I've already discussed. His whole worldview was shattered by
this because should do be he could not comprehend that
an NBC News spokesperson would lie to him, And he
(42:43):
really said this. He said, I don't understand why would
they lie to me? And I said, you don't have
to understand that the idea that they would not put
their own name on this statement might have suggested to
you that they were lying to you. Oh, I'll keep
that in mind. Well, he didn't keep that in mind.
But that's again another story about Dylan Byers, and we'll
get to him someday some day too, somewhere soon. Somebody
(43:05):
asked towards the end of July twenty twenty four about
my recent comeback and how I had just gotten back
into political commentary now with the new podcast, and I said,
it's two years old. On August first, it was approaching
five hundred episodes. We're doing like a million listens a week,
(43:26):
a million audience participants a week. I mean, it's challenging
certain hours on CNN for total audience. Good God, what
do you mean recent comeback? But this is, as I said,
if I had ten million dollars for every time somebody
told me my career was over, A career is sort
(43:49):
of over because I'm now of advanced years and now
I've done something that I really didn't understand until the
year twenty eleven, until I left MSNBC to go to
Current TV. And there was built into this answer for
a three month period of time where I could not
work anywhere in television. I had not had such a
(44:11):
period of time except for the aforementioned period when I
was taking care of family members who were in trouble
in nineteen eighty five after the Boston experience, I hadn't
had such a length of time without being on the
air somewhere, And in fact, during that period in nineteen
eighty five, I did a lot of freelance work just
to get the cash that I didn't have to borrow
from my sister, who was, by the way, seventeen years
(44:33):
old at the time. Yeah, Jen, have you got a
twenty Yeah? Thanks, I need to go buy a cigar.
In any event, I believe we had that conversation. In
any event, the point of this was, until twenty eleven,
I'd really not had a day or at least a
week without deadlines. Media deadlines. You have to have this
(44:54):
written by eight o'clock because the show is starting with
or without you. I hadn't had a day or a
week without those since I was sixteen years old. I
was to my shock, I found I I really enjoyed
not having those deadlines. And when we went back on
the air in Current TV in June of twenty eleven,
I was kind of disappointed, not because the studio was
(45:15):
actually not a studio but more like a you know,
a portal to Hell and not that part of it,
which was disappointing, but not as much as I really enjoyed,
you know, not shaving every weekday and not having to write,
you know, ten thousand words a day, and not having
to read the twelve seconds of script inside the twelve
(45:36):
second window before the sound hit, and just the number
of deadlines I suddenly didn't have. So since twenty eleven,
I decided to cut back to four days work a week,
generally speaking, that's my concession to my mid sixties. And
as I was preparing this to tell you this story
in light of the experience I had with my friend
(45:58):
who thought his career was over, and I was reciting this,
I realized that I had left out in telling him
the story, and I have deliberately left it out of
the chronological order of these tales of the actual first
time I was told my career was over, I had
forgotten completely about the day that the sports director what
was then a prominent radio station told me that not
(46:20):
only would he and the news director there not hire me,
even though I had been told I was a candidate
for a sports job there, but he told me that
I would never get a job in radio or television
of any prominence because of my attitude. No one will
ever hire you. His name was Ernie Jackson, and I
(46:41):
believe he left the town we were in to get
a job selling airtime on a radio station in Cincinnati.
And after that I don't know what the hell happened
to him. The news director was a guy named Bob Lynch,
and he shortly thereafter moved to a job that I
think he spent his entire professional career at traffic reporter
in a plane above the beautiful city of Rochester, New York.
(47:04):
The date that mister Jackson, on mister Lynch's behalf told
me that my career was over, the first time I
was told you will never again work in this business,
the first good evening and welcome to the end of
my career was October nineteen seventy seven. I've done all
(47:37):
the damage I can do here. Thank you for listening.
Please share this podcast with somebody who does not listen.
We are on a roll here. Perhaps it's all the
good news. The total audience last Friday was one hundred
and fifty thousand. If we do that every episode, that's
thirty one million a year. Brian Ray and John Phillip Shanelle,
the musical directors, have Countdown, arranged, produced and performed most
(48:00):
of our music. Mister Chanale handled orchestration and keyboards. Ray
was on the guitars, bass and drums. Produced by Tko
Brothers Our satirical and pithy musical comments are by the
best baseball stadium organist ever, Nancy Faust. Sports music is
the Olberman theme from ESPN two, written by Mitch Warren
Davis courtesy of ESPN. Other music arranged and performed by
(48:23):
the group No Horns Allowed. My announcer today was my friend.
Here's a coincidence, Nancy Faust. Everything else was pretty much
my fault as usual. So that's countdown for this, the
eighty third day until the twenty twenty four presidential election,
the one three hundred and sixteenth day since convicted felon
dementia Jay Trump's first attempted coup against the democratically elected
(48:46):
government of the United States. Use the September eighteenth sentencing hearing.
Use the mental health system. You've got it. President Biden
used presidential immunity to stop him from doing it again
while we still can. And anti Semitic, anti immigration, Republican
gun nuts, please stop shooting at Trump. Thank you. The
(49:09):
next scheduled countdown is tomorrow. Bulletins as the news requires
till the next one. I'm Keith Olberman. Good morning, good afternoon,
good night, and good luck. Countdown with Keith Olderman is
(49:34):
a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit
the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Countdown with Keith Olderman is a production of iHeartRadio concratulations.
Have you seen the lines at five thirty eight. It's
(00:27):
a torrent, It's an avalanche. It's the biggest hit in America.
I hate to steal from mel Brooks and the producers,
and I hate to lead with the polls again. But
yesterday I said that the USA Today canvas that had
the vice president down by five in Florida was a
great indicator of the democratic tsunami that could be gathering.
(00:50):
But it's not like she's actually going to win Florida.
And literally hours later incomes a new poll and she
may literally actually win Florida. Florida Atlantic Public Opinion Research
State of Florida Trump forty seven, Harris forty five, Kennedy five.
(01:11):
Or if you prefer just the head to head, it's
still Trump by five in Florida. The head of the poll,
Kevin Wagner, PhD. Quote. If this trend holds, we may
see a competitive race in Florida. Florida is in play.
Cook Political Report. Georgia Harris forty six, Trump forty six.
(01:31):
Georgia is in play. Cook Political Report. Nevada Trump forty
seven Harris forty two. Nevada is in play. Cook Political Report,
North Carolina Harris forty six, Trump forty four. North Carolina
is in play and she is ahead there. Cook Political
Report Wisconsin Harris by five, Cook Political Report, Pennsylvania Harris
(01:54):
by five, Cook Political Report, Arizona Harris by four, Cook
Political Report, Michigan Harris by two. Wisconsin is in play.
Pennsylvania is in play, Arizona is in play. Michigan is
in play, and she is ahead in all of them.
Oh and Cook Political Report. Kamala Harris favorability in May,
(02:16):
she was underwater by thirteen points. Not the president. She
was underwater by thirteen points in terms of approval now.
Cook Political Report finds Kamala Harris is viewed favorably by
forty nine percent of all voters and unfavorably by forty
nine percent of all voters. She has done the impossible
(02:38):
in politics. She has erased a large unfavorable score in
a matter of three months. Trump, he went from minus
five to minus six. Sorry, Donald, This cascade of polls
is not stopping. Monmouth Pole National still in the field
(03:01):
as of this Monday. Harris forty eight Trump forty three.
J l Partners Nationals still in the field Sunday, Trump
by two. Their previous poll five weeks ago was Trump
by eleven. She has cleared out nine points on a
Conservative Pollsters poll. And there is polling about where these
(03:22):
almost unbelievable polling numbers are coming from. Two months ago,
Equis Polling had Biden leading Trump among Latino voters in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada,
North Carolina, and Pennsylvania and Wisconsin by just five points.
Of the many red alert buttons flashing on the control board,
(03:44):
this might have been the biggest Well, they have just
pulled those seven battleground states again. Harris leads Trump by
nineteen points. She has basically quadrupled the lead over Trump
among Hispanics. And then there's the other startling growth in
a different demograph altogether. A political numbers analyst named Michael
(04:07):
Kayley looked at all those cook battleground states in which
Trump had been ahead by an overall average of five
points but now trails by four, and he went through
each state and her improvement in the head to head
matchups has been four point three points. So for versus him,
she's gained four and three tenths points in each state.
(04:29):
When you mix in RFK Junior and the other third
party candidates, her improvement has been six and three tenths.
In other words, Kamala Harris hasn't just kicked sand in
Trump's face. She's kicked even more sand in Kennedy's and
Stein's and Corneill West's. She's picking off some would be
(04:50):
Trump voters, she's picking up nearly all of the would
be Kennedy voters. And to circle back briefly to that
Monmouth poll, they have been gauging enthusiasm enthusiasms. In April,
per Monmouth, thirty six percent of Democrats said they were
enthusiastic about the Biden Trump election. Oh yeah, we're We're enthusiastic.
(05:15):
In June it was forty six percent. Now it's eighty
one percent. Enthusiasm drives turnout drives winning enthusiasms, and by
the way, Republican enthusiasms. It was seventy one percent in June.
Then Trump got shot at then Trump picked vance, then
(05:36):
Trump held the most boring fascist convention of all time.
It was seventy one percent in June, and after all
that happened, it was seventy one percent in August. The
inference there is Donald Trump is at his ceiling, not
his floor. Perhaps the most startling thing about these polls
(05:56):
is not so much the numbers as the volume. Like
I said, quoting the producers at the start, it's a torrent,
it's an avalanche. The polls are coming back so good,
so fast, that some of the interior numbers they contain
are only being analyzed days later. Remember the New York
(06:18):
Times poll that she was ahead by four in Michigan,
four in Pennsylvania, four in Wisconsin, the rust felt pole,
the one that truly deranged the Trump campaign. Wait, there
was more on the inside of the envelope, inside those polls.
How Trump is doing among his people, white voters with
(06:40):
no college education. In May, in the same polls in
the same states, Trump led President Biden by twenty five
points in this category. In August, in the same polls
in the same state, Trump leads Vice President Harris by
just fourteen points. Was twenty five is fourteen. Basically, she
cut the lead in half. As the CNN analyst Harry
(07:03):
Anton put it, if she puts up these numbers with them,
she'll win unquote no qualifiers she'll win, unquote the Washington
Post those parts of it that are still functional, like
the excellent work of Aaron Blake. The Washington Post is
still carving up the Financial Times poll data that showed
mind blowingly that Kamala Harris is now favored over Trump
(07:27):
to handle the economy. It's only forty two percent to
forty one percent. It is a virtual tie, and if
it were a tie, we'd all be saying, my god,
it's a tie. She's tied him on the economy, but
inside that summary number, which is not a tie, she's ahead.
Inside that number. Mister Blake of the Post has compared
(07:49):
it to earlier numbers on Trump versus Biden on the
economy in the NPR Marris poll and the Marquette Law poll.
In the Times poll, she is now doing between six
and nine points better than Biden was on the economy.
She's taken between four and seven points off Trump's lead
on immigration, She's taken four points off his lead on
(08:12):
foreign relations. And Blake also notes that she has expanded
the Democratic lead that Biden had over Trump on who's
better on healthcare. She's expanded it by twelve points. She's
expanded it on who's better on Medicare and social Security
by thirteen points, on who's better on abortion policy by
(08:33):
twenty three points. This is how crazy good crazy this
really is. This summarizes it. The bandwagon is a loading up.
Frank Luntz, the front runner of all front runners of
all time, goes on CNBC and says, if the election
(08:57):
were held today, not only would Kamala Harris be the
next president of the United States quote, but if it
continues in this direction, you have to start to consider
Democrats winning the Senate and Democrats winning the House. At
this point on the video, you can almost see the
producers getting in Andrew ross Sarkin's ear and saying, interrupt him,
(09:21):
for God's sakes, interrupt Lunce, and Sorkin does, and with
panic visible in his eyes, he trots out the Trump
is undercounted in polls mantra from twenty sixteen, and Lunce
still manages to say, it's not just the polls, it's
my own focus groups too, and in them quote the
people who were undecided have all collapsed towards Harris. And
(09:48):
Lunz then says the entire electoral pool has changed. Kamala
Harris has got an intensity advantage. I haven't seen anything
like this happen in thirty days in my lifetime, and
Frank Lunz is almost my age. He's sixty two, although
(10:08):
to be fair, his hair is only about seventeen. Okay,
(10:36):
I hope you're sitting down for this part because I'm
going to do something I've never done before. I think
I am going to defend Trump. Not about his speech yesterday,
the latest one that made no sense, where he said
the TV would turn off if it wasn't windy, or
how he really didn't get credit for the COVID outfits
everybody wore Woo. You will recall, though, that the other
(11:01):
night Trump went on with Elon Musk and to invoke
the music Celine Dion is trying to get him to
stop using at his rallies. It was like listening to
two of the officers aboard Titanic getting Drunker and Drunker
as they fulfilled their promise to go down with the ship.
The content was, what a shock, insane. Here's Trump, He's
(11:23):
deteriorating occasional bursts of structural lucidity, but he's still in
Hannibal Lecter eaten by sharks with frickin' laser beams mode.
And then there's Musk, sounds as if he's high as
a kite, having decided that he's going to rule the
world through money and proxies like Trump because Auric Goldfinger
is dead. Now here's Musk trying to get Trump to
(11:46):
become even more of a fascist, but a fascist who
likes electric cars. I'm not defending what either of these
simultaneously terrifying and comical monsters said, but getting almost as
much a tension as what they said is how Trump
(12:07):
sounded as he said it. He had an unbelievably bad
sibilant s you know, he had an esh. He had
an ash like a Monty Python sketch or a good
old fashioned gay bashing nineteen fifties comedian. He had an
ash like he was just clearing the anesthetic out of
(12:29):
his mouth after oral surgery. He had an ash like
Sylvester's suffering suck atash. And he claims it was a
screw up in the equipment somewhere, and he and Musk
later put out cleaned up versions of him, and everybody screamed,
oh yeah, Musk, use the AI to make Trump sound better.
(12:53):
Guess what Trump's right, the equipment did screw up. Everything
else is everybody else is wrong. I'm sorry. He's right
stoned or drunk or having another episode with whatever is
left over of his brain. Yes, he might be saying yes,
(13:14):
but other words would also sound funny and as funny
as his eshes sound in this clip. Everything else is normal,
well normal Trump insanity normal, But that's okay.
Speaker 2 (13:27):
That's the way I get treated, and I don't mind
that at all. What I can tell you is this,
we cannot have a Democrat. We cannot have her. She's incompetent.
She's as bad as Biden in a different Yeah, she
hasn't done an interview since his whole scam started, And
say what you want, This was a coupe.
Speaker 1 (13:45):
What I think that is ish. What I think that
is is a failure in a device that was used
to amplify his voice and simultaneously tamp down the background
noise to improve the phone line. He apparently did this
call with Musk by leaning over an iPhone sitting on
a table, because because he's an old man who doesn't
(14:09):
know how to use an iPhone, and they may have
tried to enhance what he sounded like. To make him
louder and the background less loud. That might have been
the reason for the forty five minute delay in getting
the damn thing started. We have had devices like these
for more than half a century now. I was introduced
(14:29):
to them in nineteen seventy nine at my first job
in network radio. The machine was called a com Rex.
I understand Comrexes have improved significantly since then. There are
other rival devices. I mean, hell, I used to have
a giant microphone that plugged into my laptop and it
allowed me to go on MSNBC from wherever I was,
(14:53):
and if it didn't sound right, there was a series
of dials I could twist to give my voice more
base or more clarity or whatever it was required to
get this thing with trump thish I should shay. This
sounded like a nineteen seventy nine Comrax. The machine in
(15:13):
those days was about the size of a large box
of tissues, but it felt like it weighed thirty five
or forty or one hundred and sixty pounds. I don't
know if it was made out of lead or what,
but I was twenty years old and carrying the thing
from my hotel just to a ballpark in the same town.
(15:34):
Used to leave me with muscle strains. The other thing
was the Comrades ran on those huge nine vault batteries,
but it took like a dozen of them, and it
ate nine vault batteries like candy. A dozen nine volt
batteries would last you about forty five minutes, and like
(15:54):
it needed anything else to go wrong, The on off
switch for this incredibly badly designed machine stuck out of
the front and it was the size of a pencil point.
So if you put your comraes in a bag and
you did not tape the on off switch into the
off position using duct tape, it would invariably switch on
(16:18):
while it was in your bag and eat the batteries
before you ever got to use it in the first place.
In any event, it used to alter the sound of
the human voice to make it into an unintelligible wine.
We called it Martian back at headquarters. You had to
have the other half of the com Rex device, the
D scrambler, the D Martinator. When it worked, it would
(16:42):
make you sound five percent better ten percent better, which
in nineteen seventy nine was a big deal. When it
didn't work, the only thing it would change would be.
It would give you a sybil in s just like
Trump with Musk the other night. This is Keith Alberman
speaking from Madison Square Garden, Schyanara. So the stopped clock
(17:07):
has had its one minute of validity. Trump is right.
He was not lisping, he was not slurring, he was
not drunk, he was not having an episode. He was
either being processed with a nineteen seventy nine Comrax or
the modern equivalent of a nineteen seventy nine Comrax. And
(17:29):
by the way, since I've already gone so far down
this road, if you think my memories of the comras
are a little surprising, I mean, forty four years after
I last used one, it feels like it failed me.
The day before yesterday, we had another sportscaster at my
first job UPI named Jack Russell. And if you told
Jack Russell to bring the Comrax with him on a story,
(17:51):
Jack would start swearing and his eyes would get red.
Long after both I and our boss Sam Rosen left
the network, one day, Sam's successor sent Jack to New Orleans,
I think for the Super Bowl, and it was just
as UPI began to run into financial trouble and they
(18:11):
would not give Jack an advance, so they made him
pay for his own travel on the promise that they'd
pay him back, and all sorts of other financial crap unfolded,
and Jack not only decided he had had enough of UPI,
Jack decided he had had enough of radio. So, according
to the story I was told by several ex UPI colleagues,
(18:32):
he left the office on Manhattan's East side, basically forty
second Street and Second Avenue. If you ever saw the
Christopher Reeves Superman movie, the Daily Planet building, that's where
we worked. He walked from there over to the East
River to a payphone placed perfectly right above the water.
He called UPI from that payphone. He swore at his
(18:54):
boss NonStop for several minutes. Many said, before I go,
I just want you to know that you should shove
this comrades where the sun don't shine. But since I'm
not gonna bother to come back and the office to
witness that, I'm just gonna do my own version of
it now. And according to this story, Jack held out
the phone receiver in one hand, fished the com rex
(19:15):
out of his bag with the other, and threw the
comrex into the East River. I am told that his
boss could clearly hear the forty pounds sound machine from
Hell hitting the water and immediately sinking to the bottom
release rotation splash. Also of interest here, Laura Ingram complains
(19:44):
Kamala Harris likes to curse. Let me tell you about
how Laura Ingram curses like a like a Steve Adore.
That's next. This is countdown.
Speaker 2 (20:03):
This is count with Keith Olberman.
Speaker 1 (20:27):
Still ahead of us on this all new editionive Countdown.
I was asked the other day by a friend who
was convinced that his career had ended, whether anybody had
ever said that to me. And I laughed and laughed
and laughed, and I told him, yeah, a couple of times,
but only as long ago as nineteen eighty four. And
then as I thought about telling you these stories in
(20:48):
which writers and general managers and business agents told me
I was done, I realized, actually, somebody told me this
long before nineteen eighty four. When they tell you your career
is over, they may be projecting in things I promised
not to tell. Coming up first, there's still more new
(21:09):
idiots to talk about. The daily roundup of the miss grants,
morons and dunning Krueger effects specimens who constitute two days
worse person's in the world Lebron's worse the character called
Gunther Eagleman, a right wing social media troll account, when
(21:29):
the author Philip Auswald identifies as defrocked and disgraced X
cop from Texas actually named David Freeman. Because nobody's named
Gunther anymore. Well, we couldn't use gun nut. Gun Nut
Eagleman doesn't sounds smart, does it? Anyway? Whoever he is.
He echoed a post by another bunch of clowns called
(21:51):
end Wokeness after ilhan Omar won her primary Tuesday night.
This is the version posted by end Wokeness Minnesota District
five eight pm. Polls closed eight fifteen PM, zero percent
counter eight thirty PM, zero percent counted, eight forty five PM,
zero percent counted, nine PM, zero percent counted, nine to
(22:11):
twenty two PM five point zero percent counted, nine thirty
seven PM ninety nine point five percent counted. Totally one
hundred percent legitimate, nothing at all suspicious. Congrats to ilan Omar.
You know what, I went to a baseball game once
and nobody scored in the baseball game for eight innings,
and so I left when it was nothing to nothing.
(22:33):
When I got home, they said the Mets had lost
four to three, and that's impossible because nobody scored for
eight innings. Morons plus is another wag noted first, the
vote counting was too slow for the fascists. Now the
vote counting is too fast for the fascists. The runner
(22:56):
up worser good old Laura Ingram or whatever that is
that replaced her on Fox that can barely move its mouth.
It's either Laura uh after way too much work, or
it's an animatronic Laura like in the Hall of Presidence
at the Apcot Center. Good Evening and our Ingraham when
(23:18):
the Ingram angle graphic on the show Curson. Kamala loves
her swear words. Okay, I got two on this. Number
one Even Politico noted that Trump has repeatedly used the
B word to describe Kamala Harris. So if we're going
to talk about who's calling whom what, let's start with
(23:41):
Trump calling her the B word, shall we the other point?
You will have to take my word on this, but
I think I may have mentioned this once or twice
before Laura and I went out on one date and
one cross between a date and a hostage situation, wherein
I was the hostage. This occurred in the previous century.
(24:03):
And if you think Kerson Kamala loves her swear words,
you should hear imprecating ingram like a longshoreman. But our
winner the former UK Prime Minister Liz Rent don't buy Truss,
who lasted fifty days on the job, famously failing to
(24:24):
outlast the live stream of a decaying head of Lettuce.
The British political prankster activists led by donkeys, likes to
install remote controlled banners behind unsuspecting speakers at public events
and then press the down button and guess who they
didn't They did do it to him who didn't know
(24:44):
what was being done to them, Liz trust I don't
know how they get away with this. Seems to me.
In the United States they'd call it a terrorist act.
It's hard to hear what's happening on audio. But as
Liz Truss is just droning on a sign descends reading
I crashed the economy and above that is ahead of
(25:08):
Lettuce with Liz's eyes on it, the last thing you
will hear is Liz getting up and and not very
very decors fashion. She's kind of sitting there with her
legs played, so when she stands up, she gives uh,
the people in the front row of view of the
(25:31):
the queen anyway, So as she gets up with this
delightful lady like gesture, she's walking off and she's saying,
that's the fuddy, he.
Speaker 2 (25:44):
Will, he will, questions life.
Speaker 1 (26:13):
Well, it's kind of funny, Liz. Plus, you have to
admit that whole bit lasted longer than your tenure as
Prime Minister. Liz, let us entertain you trust Two days
Worse Parson and the World. Over the weekend, a colleague
(26:47):
of mine explained that his career is over. It's done.
He's had all the chances, there are no more jobs
to get. It's all over. The business is dying, his
career is dying. It's finished. He's going to look into
something else, maybe selling used cars. And I said, boy,
oh boy, if I had ten million dollars for every
(27:07):
time I have been told my career was over, I'd
have a lot less money than I actually do. To
our number one story on the countdown, and good evening,
and welcome to the end of our careers, or more
particularly the end of my career. No, I'm not retiring.
I'm just quoting myself from nineteen ninety three in the
(27:28):
launch of ESPN two and the subject of career ending
announcements career ending announcements. Recently a colleague of mine told
me he was done, and I had to go through
all of the times I have been told I was done.
The first one was in nineteen eighty four. This would
(27:49):
be in a previous century that I know. To a
lot of younger listeners, seems like it might as well
be eighteen eighty four. I have told before the story
of my limited career in Boston, for which I waited
about a year to start and lasted about half as
long because I went to work at the wrong place,
in the wrong city, outside in the wrong suburb of Boston,
(28:10):
with the wrong boss, where they said, don't make any jokes,
and I said, what did you hire me for? And
I left very very quickly, and then they tried to
fire me while I was filling out the terms of
my contract and staying there until they could get a replacement,
and the whole thing went up in flames. And the
result of this was that the news director of the
station Channel five in Boston, a man who actually answered
(28:33):
to the name Philip Scribner Balboni went to the Boston
Globe TV sports writer when they had such things as
TV Sports Writers and said, Oh, it was such a
shame about Keith. He was potentially such a major talent.
I will not deny that the use of that phrase
did inspire me to some degree to get cracking on
(28:54):
my career. On the other hand, I didn't work for
nearly a year later, as I was taking care of
some family business back home and sort of put everything
about my own interest on the shelf off the record.
The general manager of the station I had worked for,
a man named James Coppersmith, said to my agent something
that made Balboni's statement look like a compliment. Coppersmith said,
(29:14):
he will never again work in our business. That got
me motivated. I believe I read recently that Coppersmith died.
In any event, I worked again in his business. The
punchline to this one, and they all have punchlines, is
that at some point around two thousand and seven, I
got an email at MSNBC and the return address was
(29:39):
Philip Scribner Balboni, and there was a great email from
my old brief news director Boston Channel five in Boston,
who explained that I had been potentially such a major talent,
and was quoted on the record as saying that, And
now he was saying how he watched Countdown every night
and was so proud to have been in there at
the start of my career. Not a word about the
(30:01):
other part about the oh, potentially such a major ten.
I guess he meant it in the past future, perfect
sense of the I don't know, my grammar education is
not what it should be. But he managed to wriggle
out of it. Never made any reference to it. And
the one thing about surviving repeated announcements that your career
(30:21):
is over is to never really go back and criticize
the people who were wrong about it, because they know
they were wrong, and your success is the best answer. Nevertheless,
this all came up, and I thought i'd retell it
to you because I had to retell it to a
friend who recently told me his career was over. But
as I said, that was just the first time that
(30:43):
had ever happened in a fully professional setting in two
thousand and one, and I was just reading this, I
guess about a year ago. It came across it somewhere online.
I was reading it for a punchline in and of itself.
It was a piece in Sports Illustrated by a man
named Chris Ballard, I believe, and Chris Ballard wrote an
(31:03):
article about my being fired by Fox Sports, which he
wrote as I had resigned from Fox Sports, and went
on to explain that I did not respond as Sports
Illustrated's request by emails and phones for comment, I never
received any of them, because it never occurred to him
that when they fired me and told everybody I had resigned,
(31:24):
they cut off my access to my email and my phone,
and they said to him when he wanted to talk
to me, oh, just send him an email, he'll get
back to you. And I didn't, and thus he made
me look like a jerk. In any event, the article
explained in two thousand and one that having gone through
ESPN and now ESPN's sort of mini me rival, Fox
(31:45):
Sports News, that there was nothing left for me to
do in the business. I had tried news briefly in
nineteen ninety seven and nineteen ninety eight. Clearly my career
in both fields was over. I could not possibly work
again in television in news or in sports. We're now
coming up next year. If I get to it now,
it's been twenty three, twenty four year. Okay, I recently
(32:10):
saw this article and was inspired to look for it
online because Chris Ballard was retiring from Sports Illustrated and
I'm still here. One question that came up as I
was retelling the story of my various career ending moments
that did not in fact end my career from my
friend who's very worried about this, was how I managed
(32:33):
not to have my career. And when Ballard's premise was
not completely wrong, he was certainly looking at what he
thought happened in television. He was not the TV sports
writer for Sports Illustrated for very long. It was not
a natural subject for him. Most people who did this
job thought that it involved simply watching sports on TV
(32:54):
and then writing what they thought as opposed to understanding
an industry or its complexities, or its parameters or its
sort of weird voodoo customs. In any event, I said, well, look,
it's not very difficult to survive these things. You just
have to acknowledge that perhaps your next job after some
sort of cataclysmic departure from an ESPN or a Fox
(33:17):
Sports or an MSNBC or wherever else, perhaps it's not
going to pay you quite as much as the last
one did. And so when my agent and I began
to look around for more work in two thousand and one,
and I might add that after Fox fired me, they
had to pay me for another eight months at one
hundred thousand dollars a year. And if you can't survive
(33:37):
on a job that requires you to do nothing for
eight months and pays you eight hundred thousand dollars that
you can salt away. If you can't survive on that
and enjoy your life while you're doing it, you're doing
things wrong. In any event, what I said was just
the next job. Just take a job that allows you
to do what you can do and do it well,
(33:59):
and you will succeed in it. You have talent a
lot of other people don't. You will be low costs,
so they're much more likely to overlook anything that happened
in the past, and most importantly, if it is successful,
you can then hold them up on the second contract negotiation.
So I went first to CNN after the Fox Sports
experience started to work for them for not a lot
(34:21):
of money, and although they did not ultimately exercise this,
they signed me to a contract to do the eight
pm show on CNN for a certain large amount of money,
and there were two finalists they wanted us lined up
in advance, and they made the clever decision to choose
Connie Chung instead of me. But they had sort of
reauthorized me. They had re established me. By it was
(34:43):
well known within the industry that I was the runner
up for the job at eight o'clock And within six
months of them saying, nah, we think Connie's the right
person to lead us into the future here, within six
months of that, I was doing the eight o'clock show
on MSNBC for in fact, twice what the agreement had
been at CNN, And within three years they'd signed me
to a new deal that was worth three times that,
(35:05):
more than I had ever made in my life. So
the key thing to it is to be flexible financially.
You sock them for the money while you're successful. And
then by the way, once again, if you can't succeed
in the business, if you can't succeed in life, when
you have received in one year anything north of three
(35:25):
million dollars in one year, four million dollars. Maybe I
forget what the actual financial floor is. But if you've
made that much money in one year and can't live
basically off that and simply interest from the bank that
that will provide you, If you can't do that, you
must have some sort of addiction to drugs, because guess what,
(35:48):
you can go a long way still. I mean, yeah,
it's true, four million dollars is what it used to be,
but guess what it is now. It's still really good.
I never failed to see one of these articles in
which somebody who's lost a job paying in you know,
the tens of millions of dollars, and so I always finished.
Now it's like, yes, he's finished. Now he can sit
(36:10):
on a beach, he can hire somebody to do his
exercise for him. He can sit on a beach and
eat the money, and it won't make a difference. He
doesn't have to do it again in any event. So
the pattern here that I have described already has continued
in subsequent years, even after I came back from the
dead after my experience in Boston, where I was dubbed
(36:32):
the dark Prints of TV Sports and was winning awards.
In Los Angeles, the next year. Although, to be fair,
after that quote in nineteen eighty four about how I
was potentially a great talent, I did get down to
about my last one hundred dollars in the bank. And
actually I actually had to borrow money from my dear
sister to get on the bus to take me to
(36:56):
the airport in New York so I could take the
flight to Los Angeles to start my job there. That's
how close I cut it. Another week and I would
have been borrowing money for food. That's where I was.
But you have to be willing to walk that tight
rope to pull this off in any event. So that
was Boston, became the Los Angeles job. In the Los
Angeles job, when they eliminated that, it's like, well, his
(37:18):
career is over now. The next job was ESPN. ESPN
led to NBC. When that didn't work out and I
pushed to get out of there, they sold me to
Fox for a million dollars and they paid me a
lot of money and continued to pay me a lot
of money even after they stopped putting me on TV.
And that led to a doldrum period where I got
to read about the guy who's now retired from Sports Illustrated,
(37:39):
explaining what network will sign him now? What team will
sign him now? Whither Keith? This is two thousand and one.
I was forty two years old. It's like I get
nostalgic reading that, going, Yeah, you were forty two years old.
They fired you at that point and people thought your
career was over. Yeah, but I was forty two. My
hair was dark most places in any event, So that
(38:03):
led into the MSNBC the c job, and the MSNBC job,
as sort of messy as that ended, the second one
anyway led to the Current TV job, and as disastrous
as that was, since it was kind of a confidence trick,
there was a day where between the money I got
for leaving NBC and the money I got for joining
Current TV, I made sixty eight million dollars in one day.
(38:26):
I had to see a lot of people afterwards to
get all of it, but I got just about all
of it. In any event, I'm now boasting back to
the point of this whole story. An old friend of
mine came in when I was doing the videos for
GQ The Closer and The Resistance in twenty sixteen. In
twenty seventeen, came in to watch me do this, and
(38:46):
started to ask very very graciously and very gently about, well,
isn't this something of a come down for you from
the MSNBC experience where you had a staff? And I said, well,
first off, the MSNBC experience consisted of two cameramen and
a floor director and me and sometimes a guest in
(39:06):
a studio. The staff, whereas they were all certainly dedicated
to the project, consisted of basically a core of six
or seven people. It never really felt like a big deal.
I know it had more influence than I was ever
led to understand, but it wasn't like, oh, well, you
know those movies that you did with Richard Burton and
(39:27):
Elizabeth Taylor and Tom Cruise, and now you're just sitting
at home with a camera. It didn't have that feel
in the slightest. And I said to him, did you
see the thing from CBS News the other day? And
he went, what thing from CBS News? I said, don't
you have the Google at the New York Times? And
he said yes. I said, Google, Social Flow, Facebook, and
(39:48):
he did on his phone and he read this political
pundit Keith Alderman found a way to channel concerns about
mister Trump. This is July twenty seventeen, started hosting a
series of political commentary and special interviews titled The Resistance
with Keith Olberman, with the first episode featured on GQ
on November sixteenth, twenty sixteen, reaching fifty four million people,
(40:09):
equivalent to one in six Americans. And I said, look,
I understand that if you measure things solely by the
idea that I'm on your TV every night, well, yeah,
that the doing a video and coming into a studio
that isn't really designed for TV and there's an echo
in it might seem like the end of my career.
Fifty four million people saw that video and interacted with
(40:32):
it in some kind. They either forwarded it, or watched it,
or put a comment on it, or sometimes all three.
That was, in fact the number one political video or
story on Facebook in the period of time after Donald
Trump's election. I think that's something of a success. And
I said, by this point, I don't need the damn money.
(40:53):
The money I'm making from doing this is going to
dog charities. Okay, So we could go on at length
about other small versions of that. I once went back
and forth with this guy who now I was one
of the people at Puck News who insisted that I
had not been negotiating with the then chairman of NBC,
Jeff she Shell, about returning to MSNBC in twenty nineteen,
(41:16):
twenty and twenty one, because NBC News had insisted it
wasn't true. And I said, who told you that? And
they said, a spokesman. And I said to this guy,
his name was Dylan Byers, I said, well, who was
the spokesman. Well, it's just supposed to be a spokesman,
I said, so. They wouldn't even put their own name
on it, not even a made up name Jim Jones,
NBC News spokesman, which would have been, by the way,
(41:38):
an appropriate name for a series of NBC News spokespeople.
They didn't even do that. And he said no. They
were insistent, there's never been any contact between you and
Jeff Shell. And I went hang on, and I called
up from my phone twenty three emails and texts from
Jeff Shell. I photo shot at them, I screen shotted
them and gave him to the guy. And I don't
(41:59):
think this guy Buyers has recovered since his worldview was
totally destroyed. He was writing a story about how I
had deteriorated to the point where I was hallucinating about
being in contact with Jeff Shell from NBC News or
from NBC about returning to NBC News and MSNBC when
we were deep into negotiations about it, and we're delayed
(42:21):
only by the pandemic. And as I pointed out here before,
the vetos of certain people working on the air at MSNBC,
most of whose careers I started. But that's another story
which I've already discussed. His whole worldview was shattered by
this because should do be he could not comprehend that
an NBC News spokesperson would lie to him, And he
(42:43):
really said this. He said, I don't understand why would
they lie to me? And I said, you don't have
to understand that the idea that they would not put
their own name on this statement might have suggested to
you that they were lying to you. Oh, I'll keep
that in mind. Well, he didn't keep that in mind.
But that's again another story about Dylan Byers, and we'll
get to him someday some day too, somewhere soon. Somebody
(43:05):
asked towards the end of July twenty twenty four about
my recent comeback and how I had just gotten back
into political commentary now with the new podcast, and I said,
it's two years old. On August first, it was approaching
five hundred episodes. We're doing like a million listens a week,
(43:26):
a million audience participants a week. I mean, it's challenging
certain hours on CNN for total audience. Good God, what
do you mean recent comeback? But this is, as I said,
if I had ten million dollars for every time somebody
told me my career was over, A career is sort
(43:49):
of over because I'm now of advanced years and now
I've done something that I really didn't understand until the
year twenty eleven, until I left MSNBC to go to
Current TV. And there was built into this answer for
a three month period of time where I could not
work anywhere in television. I had not had such a
(44:11):
period of time except for the aforementioned period when I
was taking care of family members who were in trouble
in nineteen eighty five after the Boston experience, I hadn't
had such a length of time without being on the
air somewhere, And in fact, during that period in nineteen
eighty five, I did a lot of freelance work just
to get the cash that I didn't have to borrow
from my sister, who was, by the way, seventeen years
(44:33):
old at the time. Yeah, Jen, have you got a
twenty Yeah? Thanks, I need to go buy a cigar.
In any event, I believe we had that conversation. In
any event, the point of this was, until twenty eleven,
I'd really not had a day or at least a
week without deadlines. Media deadlines. You have to have this
(44:54):
written by eight o'clock because the show is starting with
or without you. I hadn't had a day or a
week without those since I was sixteen years old. I
was to my shock, I found I I really enjoyed
not having those deadlines. And when we went back on
the air in Current TV in June of twenty eleven,
I was kind of disappointed, not because the studio was
(45:15):
actually not a studio but more like a you know,
a portal to Hell and not that part of it,
which was disappointing, but not as much as I really enjoyed,
you know, not shaving every weekday and not having to write,
you know, ten thousand words a day, and not having
to read the twelve seconds of script inside the twelve
(45:36):
second window before the sound hit, and just the number
of deadlines I suddenly didn't have. So since twenty eleven,
I decided to cut back to four days work a week,
generally speaking, that's my concession to my mid sixties. And
as I was preparing this to tell you this story
in light of the experience I had with my friend
(45:58):
who thought his career was over, and I was reciting this,
I realized that I had left out in telling him
the story, and I have deliberately left it out of
the chronological order of these tales of the actual first
time I was told my career was over, I had
forgotten completely about the day that the sports director what
was then a prominent radio station told me that not
(46:20):
only would he and the news director there not hire me,
even though I had been told I was a candidate
for a sports job there, but he told me that
I would never get a job in radio or television
of any prominence because of my attitude. No one will
ever hire you. His name was Ernie Jackson, and I
(46:41):
believe he left the town we were in to get
a job selling airtime on a radio station in Cincinnati.
And after that I don't know what the hell happened
to him. The news director was a guy named Bob Lynch,
and he shortly thereafter moved to a job that I
think he spent his entire professional career at traffic reporter
in a plane above the beautiful city of Rochester, New York.
(47:04):
The date that mister Jackson, on mister Lynch's behalf told
me that my career was over, the first time I
was told you will never again work in this business,
the first good evening and welcome to the end of
my career was October nineteen seventy seven. I've done all
(47:37):
the damage I can do here. Thank you for listening.
Please share this podcast with somebody who does not listen.
We are on a roll here. Perhaps it's all the
good news. The total audience last Friday was one hundred
and fifty thousand. If we do that every episode, that's
thirty one million a year. Brian Ray and John Phillip Shanelle,
the musical directors, have Countdown, arranged, produced and performed most
(48:00):
of our music. Mister Chanale handled orchestration and keyboards. Ray
was on the guitars, bass and drums. Produced by Tko
Brothers Our satirical and pithy musical comments are by the
best baseball stadium organist ever, Nancy Faust. Sports music is
the Olberman theme from ESPN two, written by Mitch Warren
Davis courtesy of ESPN. Other music arranged and performed by
(48:23):
the group No Horns Allowed. My announcer today was my friend.
Here's a coincidence, Nancy Faust. Everything else was pretty much
my fault as usual. So that's countdown for this, the
eighty third day until the twenty twenty four presidential election,
the one three hundred and sixteenth day since convicted felon
dementia Jay Trump's first attempted coup against the democratically elected
(48:46):
government of the United States. Use the September eighteenth sentencing hearing.
Use the mental health system. You've got it. President Biden
used presidential immunity to stop him from doing it again
while we still can. And anti Semitic, anti immigration, Republican
gun nuts, please stop shooting at Trump. Thank you. The
(49:09):
next scheduled countdown is tomorrow. Bulletins as the news requires
till the next one. I'm Keith Olberman. Good morning, good afternoon,
good night, and good luck. Countdown with Keith Olderman is
(49:34):
a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit
the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Host
Keith Olbermann
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