Rick Leventhal joins Megyn Kelly on The Megynkel show to discuss his new book, Chasing Catastrophe. He also co-hosts The Rick and Kelly Show and The Daily Smash with his wife, Kelly Dodd of Real Housewives fame.
00:05:02.180I mean, it's as hard as it is to believe that that might actually be the case.
00:05:06.860And it's also kind of it would be presumptuous to assume that we're the only intelligent life forms in this universe.
00:05:14.900And it's only a matter of time before we do have spaceships buzzing overhead.
00:05:18.820But if they were alien spaceships, why would they shoot them down?
00:05:22.900You know, why wouldn't they just sort of corral them somehow or try to bring them to the ground so they could talk to the alien pilots on board?
00:05:49.740I'm checking my notes just to get the latest, because some some pilots said that they seem to have some sort of control or that they were they were messing with our control, our controls.
00:05:58.960And other pilots said, no, they didn't see that.
00:07:15.580Yeah, because this guy, again, who who this in his name correctly, General Van Herc again, domain awareness gap prior to right now.
00:07:26.380He came out and told the New York Times after the transit of the Chinese spy balloon last week, NORAD adjusted its radar system to make it more sensitive.
00:08:10.740Well, it certainly seems as if now they're seeing them because they're trying to see them, whereas before they were most likely there.
00:08:17.340And we just weren't either looking for them or we weren't properly applying the technology we have to find them.
00:08:23.400So I think what this tells you is that we've been spied on for a very long time by who knows who.
00:08:29.060And now we're starting to see those those the spy technology and we're shooting them down, which is great if you don't want to be spied on.
00:08:40.340But it's also a reminder that there's a lot of stuff that we probably have already given them and we've been exposed for a long time.
00:08:48.960And you pointed out that, you know, what do we have over there that made us reluctant to shoot down spy balloon number one?
00:08:57.200Right. Is that was that playing into our reluctance to shoot this thing down and let it cross over the entire United States before we did anything about it?
00:09:04.820Now, this is GOP representative Mike Turner of Ohio.
00:09:21.780So get them out of here waiting for him to cross the entire country seems to be like shooting yourself in the foot because you're letting them get everything they can possibly get.
00:09:29.460And by the way, I'm sure they're real time streaming that to whatever base they have somewhere.
00:09:40.120So why would we let it go all the way across the United States?
00:09:42.600Even the Democratic senator, John Tester of Montana, which has been the site of at least one of these, comes out and says, this is craziness.
00:09:51.540He says, what's gone on the last two weeks or so last 10 days has been nothing short of craziness.
00:09:56.000The military needs a plan to determine what's out there and then determine the dangers that go with it.
00:10:01.620So this is, you know, a bipartisan concern.
00:10:04.400And is it weird, do you think, Rick, that like now we've got four, OK, we got four in eight days that the president hasn't addressed this at all?
00:10:15.180I mean, because Americans already were a little freaked out about UFOs or UAPs.
00:10:20.400Remember, we had the whole big report last year about what's really out there and are they being transparent with us?
00:10:38.180If President Trump were still in office, you know, he'd be talking about it and he'd be like, we're going to shoot down everything in the sky that's not ours.
00:10:47.320You know, he would not be hiding in the White House, not doing a Super Bowl interview and not talking about aircraft being shot down or unmanned aircraft being shot down over the United States.
00:30:31.180Like, who that then proves everybody wrong doesn't just go out there and say, like, yeah, you know, they didn't believe we could do it, but we did it.
00:30:40.240Like, he's mad about the pre-game predictions.
00:30:41.860I thought it was a low moment for him.
00:30:44.960He should stay classy like his mama, who had a boy on the Eagles and a boy on the Chiefs and wore a great jersey that was split right down the middle.
00:32:34.360There's no point in dividing us by race, going into something that is already unifying as a country.
00:32:39.340And then we had a parade of left-wing celebrities all over the ads, from Amy Schumer to Ben Affleck, who won't even act with a Republican.
00:32:51.620He refuses to act across anybody who's openly Republican.
00:32:54.140To Serena Williams, like, you could go down the list.
00:32:58.200And all I could think was, like, they don't get it, right?
00:33:01.700The people who put together the entertainment, who put together the ads, they're not even trying to, like, think about the other half of the country.
00:33:33.560I do know that there are a lot of actors in Hollywood who are afraid to be honest about their political leanings because they're concerned about being canceled.
00:33:42.420And that's happening in every industry.
00:33:46.980So I'm not surprised, but I am disappointed.
00:33:59.480But my understanding is there was some blowback against her for pushing back on some of, like, the mask mandates and some of the overreaches by the Fauci administration.
00:34:10.860Like, even as a real housewife, she was getting blowback for just taking positions which are very accepted now.
00:34:16.980And she has a lot of fans who are convinced that the only reason she's no longer a housewife is because she didn't agree politically with the leanings, the left leanings of Bravo and Andy Cohen, who runs that franchise.
00:34:28.700She believes, and many of her, most of her supporters believe that the only reason she's off the show is because she dared to voice her opposition to mask mandates, to schools closing, to businesses closing, and questioned the efficacy of masks and the other things that people were doing to allegedly try and protect us.
00:34:49.120And, Megan, I'm sure you saw that study that came out recently that said that masks, it turns out, were only about 5% effective in keeping people from getting COVID, 5%, which is negligible.
00:35:19.060You can't be real on the real housewives or elsewhere if you're a Republican or if you're at all conservative or even just heterodox in your views when it comes to their sacred cows, whether it's COVID and the vaccines and the masks or BLM or the trans, you know, radical trans ideology.
00:35:36.340These are certain things you're not allowed to know.
00:35:38.260There will be no divergence of opinion on these sacred cows.
00:35:50.800In the last two years, this whole world, the whole environment has changed so dramatically where any alternative voices are being silenced or ridiculed.
00:36:00.600I mean, the world has just turned on its side, and I really don't understand why, and I don't get where we're going.
00:36:10.860Well, it's ironic to me because Fox ran promos for Greg Gutfeld and his late night show, which is doing great, and I love to see it.
00:36:20.380I mean, this guy who worked so hard started Red Eye.
00:36:23.260It was like this middle of the night thing, and Greg toiled away on it when nobody was watching, and then it became a cult hit, and now he really is the king of late night.
00:36:32.240He's crushing Colbert and Fallon and Kimmel, and you love to see it.
00:37:01.520The American people are not into this.
00:37:03.100Well, a lot of people needed someone like Gutfeld to do a late night show because the others were cookie cutter, and they were all appealing to the same audience.
00:37:12.680And there are a lot of conservatives out there who felt like they were being made fun of every night on the late shows, and why would they watch that?
00:37:19.860But, you know, Gutfeld's actually telling jokes that they can laugh at.
00:38:14.700Well, I was wondering how much of the music she was actually singing.
00:38:20.360It appeared to me that she was lip syncing for most of it.
00:38:24.600She might have sang some pieces of one of the first couple of songs, and maybe at the end, a little bit.
00:38:31.060But honestly, Megan, all I kept focusing on was how you kept hearing her voice, even when she wasn't opening her mouth or holding the microphone near her mouth.
00:38:59.520But, I mean, to be surfing above the field like that on some plastic shield when you're pregnant, as it turns out, you know, that was pretty ballsy.
00:39:11.520Somebody online, somebody online was, like, put in the Donkey Kong guy, you know, like, because you know how Donkey Kong, you go up and down the platform.
00:41:08.660You know, she she she boy she said she was boycotting the Super Bowl a few years ago over the whole Colin Kaepernick thing.
00:41:17.180She was asked to do the Super Bowl, I think, in 2019 and turned it down.
00:41:21.260And there are a lot of people who are questioning her commitment to whatever cause it was that she was trying to promote by saying, oh, you sold out.
00:41:29.000Why did you do the Super Bowl now when you wouldn't do it four years ago?
00:41:33.020That's a good question, because she said, what kind of a person would I be if I didn't stand with Colin Kaepernick?
00:41:37.820And that if I sold out and did this the Super Bowl show and now I was like, well, you tell us, what kind of a person are you?
00:44:24.440So to think that, you know, this is going to last a really long time would, I think, be, I mean, you're kidding yourself if you think it's going to last.
00:44:37.760Maybe they were meant to be all along.
00:44:40.300But typically, when you have a relationship and it doesn't work out, it's because of issues between the two people that are not going to resolve themselves by being apart for a few months, typically.
00:45:33.460If it's the same play I saw to me, it looked like a hold, but you know, they, they, sometimes they call it, sometimes they don't.
00:45:41.400But at that key moment in the game, if you're holding the guy and he can't get to the ball, well, then I'm, I support them calling that penalty.
00:45:48.140I mean, it's one of those things where it's sour grapes, right?
00:45:50.540Because it's like the Eagles had many chance to win that thing last night, many chances.
00:46:22.020I don't know the background of every player, but experience is, is one of the best things you can have going on to the, you know, into the Superbowl.
00:46:32.220Any, any sporting contest, if you've been there before, you're better off than the guy who hasn't.
00:46:38.080Now, last but not least, uh, one thing we did not see on that Superbowl was Joe Biden.
00:46:43.240He, after all this back and forth, he was going to sit.
00:46:46.640Well, he never said he was going to sit, but typically he would sit with the FNC anchors, Fox News Channel.
00:46:51.840They said they extended the invitation.
00:47:29.720And apparently the White House pulled the plug on it.
00:47:32.060For some reason, Vivica Fox and Mike Smith were traveling to D.C.
00:47:35.380They said they were, they were there waiting for him.
00:47:37.260In any event, to me, this is, this is a disaster for Fox.
00:47:41.520They never should have agreed to an interview with Fox Soul, much less with somebody who was actually a surrogate for Biden over the FNC anchors.
00:47:49.720They didn't treat Bret Baier correctly, I think, Fox.
00:47:53.040And Joe Biden was, I don't, you know, he was, shall we say, chicken.
00:47:59.240He was too chicken to sit with the real news anchors.
00:48:18.280That's what presidents do every Super Bowl.
00:48:20.440It's a terrific opportunity to talk about your agenda, to talk about what's happening in the world.
00:48:24.400That would have been an opportunity for him to talk about the things that are flying over our heads, that our military keeps shooting out of the sky.
00:48:32.140And to not, to, to, to say, I can't do that, ask, answer real questions.
00:48:37.120And we all know why he can't sit down and answer questions.
00:48:40.680And then to say, okay, I'll do it with Fox Soul.
00:48:42.700And then to cancel again is just emblematic of the administration, hiding and deflecting and ignoring the, the, the, what America wants to know.
00:49:03.140And when there was that period of time where they were saying that he would sit with Fox Soul, but not with Fox News Channel and Fox corporate was going to air it, which they were reportedly prepared to do.
00:49:12.980All I could think was Roger Ailes is turning over in his grave right now.
00:49:58.120And then much, much more with Rick Leventhal.
00:49:59.860When we come back, we will talk about his new book, Chasing Catastrophe, which he really has done to some huge measure of success in his life.
00:50:55.900Like, I think more people might watch Fox Soul.
00:50:58.100And listen, listen to that crew, including Don Lemon, reacting to that news, plus the fact that there was a shot at the Super Bowl of Rupert Murdoch sitting next to Elon Musk in one of the boxes in one of the boxes of the Super Bowl.
00:51:17.200When you talk about reshaping truth in the media ecosystem and you see Elon Musk and Rupert Murdoch sitting there together, that gets people to wonder.
00:51:26.520And for some, it is confirmation that, see, that's why he shouldn't have done the interview with Fox.
00:51:30.300It's all they're all in collusion out to get Joe Biden and liberals and the administration.
00:51:36.560Were you that surprised, though, to see them sitting next to each other?
00:51:39.540I really I don't think I was that surprised.
00:51:41.300It stood out, but it wasn't like, oh, wow.
00:51:43.840No, it seems like the most predictable thing in the world.
00:51:45.640I was kind of surprised that they actually like, wow, they actually did it because it's a little frightening, I must say.
00:51:59.820To see the head of Fox News Channel and The Wall Street Journal and New York Post and other media conglomerates sitting next to Elon Musk, the head of Twitter.
00:52:45.360I think that was just a couple of guys who are very, very wealthy hanging out and watching the Super Bowl.
00:52:50.100It's so crazy, like how the left gets scared.
00:52:53.180They get scared of the fact that Elon runs Twitter.
00:52:56.080I can see why they might be scared because, you know, Twitter was doing the bidding of the Biden administration and was going after Trump every day of his tenure.
00:53:05.520And now, oh, my God, Elon Musk took over Twitter.
00:53:11.960And now, like, so his reasoning is Biden was right not to sit with the Fox News Channel anchors because the man who owns FNC knows Elon Musk.
00:54:05.900Very accessible and very entertaining.
00:54:07.820And now we have a guy who, as far as I can tell, can't really finish a sentence, loses his train of thought, gets names wrong and forgets where he is.
00:54:18.120It's it's a sad situation, in my opinion.
00:54:21.120It's probably why he didn't want to sit down and do an interview with a Fox anchor, because he would have been exposed as someone who can't carry on a meaningful conversation and can't answer questions for 15 minutes straight without help.
00:54:34.160He's one step above his moronic press secretary, secretary, secretary, canadia.
00:54:41.640Right. He's like one step above her to to be charitable, like his communication skills are about where hers are.
00:54:48.460Miss noble prize, noble prize, his word search, his stumbling around his loss of train of thought.
00:54:58.420Remember when he confused, I think it was title 42 with the covid lockdowns, like he was all over the Supreme Court case.
00:55:05.320He does like he loses his train of thought in a way that's really disturbing for the leader of the free world.
00:55:09.800So I'm sure that's the reason it would be funny if it weren't so sad.
00:55:16.440I mean, it's sad for us, right, because we're heading now into an election where they're saying he's going to announce and he's going to announce soon.
00:55:23.580And he's the Democrats last best hope, like there's not a real second comer there.
00:55:29.660And if the Republicans run Trump, we could be right back to where we started.
00:55:33.760This is why I don't like covering politics, because it's just ridiculous what's going on.
00:55:39.300I don't I don't know how people do it.
00:55:43.620My whole thing when I was working as a correspondent, senior correspondent at Fox News Channel, I wanted to cover real news.
00:55:50.140I wanted to go where the action was. I wanted to go to the front lines of war.
00:55:53.860I wanted to go where the hurricane was supposed to hit.
00:55:55.940If there was a terror attack or a plane crash, I want to get as close to the scene as I can and then tell viewers about it.
00:56:01.420I don't want to go down to Washington and sit there and press conferences and congressional hearings and listen to people listen to themselves talk.
00:56:09.260I wanted to cover stuff that actually mattered to people.
00:56:11.960And, you know, even though you'd like to think the government matters, maybe eventually it does.
00:56:17.180There's so much nonsense between the inception to the to the conclusion of whatever it is they're trying to get done that I just I couldn't see myself being in that situation.
00:56:27.420So what about that? So this is interesting to me because you really are like a war correspondent.
00:56:31.080You're you're a rugged guy. One of the very great things about you.
00:56:34.920But when we were all at FNC together and you're watching Carl Cameron, right, campaign Carl Cameron, who was great at what he did, neck deep in politics all the time.
00:56:45.000Are you thinking, yeah, thank God that's not my job.
00:56:47.500Yeah. But, you know, he was perfect for it because he was a big nerd and he was a wonk and he knew all the ins and outs of of everything congressional.
00:56:57.400So he was the right guy for it. Plus, you know, he almost had that I don't give a damn attitude to go along with it.
00:57:04.000So he took it with a grain of salt, a big one, and put a great spin, not a spin, but, you know, the way he reported it wasn't a typical congressional reporter.
00:57:14.560He made it he made it fun and interesting and was real.
00:57:18.940And that's the thing that I think any reporter should should be first and foremost is as real as possible, because always and you know if you're talking, you know, if you're not being honest with them.
00:57:29.000And my whole thing was always to just tell it like it is.
00:57:32.780You could never tell with Carl Cameron what side of the aisle he favored.
00:57:36.520You really couldn't. He broke news that was I mean, he broke that President Bush like drunk.
00:57:42.960Remember when President Bush was running the first time, George W. Bush and oh.
00:57:47.400God, my God, I'm testing my own memory now in 2000, he broke the story about his drinking.
00:57:52.820Anyway, my point is, he's done lots of breaking news on Republicans and Democrats,
00:57:57.280and I could never tell where he stood politically until Trump.
00:58:00.940And then he left Fox and he got very, very hardcore anti-Trump.
00:58:04.220And it was surprising to me to see him come out so strongly against the channel, against Trump.
00:58:08.700I never I never knew. I never knew. Well, I worked with him.
00:58:12.220The only other thing I knew about Carl was that he liked to drive fast like I do.
00:58:15.940Like he was he was really a madman behind the wheel.
00:58:18.480Yeah, madman. Everyone talked about him.
00:58:20.420But they would talk about me and him in the same sentence because we both like to drive fast.
00:58:23.620OK, so here's the thing about that. We knew about you, Rick, was that, yes, wherever it was dangerous, you'd go.
00:58:30.480You were the first, you know, number number one with your hand up.
00:58:33.800But also you had a history with the ladies.
00:58:37.080You're like you were known as a bit of a ladies man.
00:58:39.760The ladies love Rick Leventhal. I'm sorry to break it to you here.
00:58:43.660I know you're happily married, man, but you always had lovely ladies who are after you or on your arm.
00:59:52.960It seems like very fireworky in a good way.
00:59:55.860Not in the JLo Ben Affleck scolding each other openly way.
00:59:59.400And I have to say, I'm very happy to see it because I know there have been like ups and downs in the love life and so on, as there are for most people.
01:00:07.040But you've always been such a solid, nice guy.
01:00:10.200So as your friend, I wanted to see you well settled.
01:01:05.720I got a great rush out of being there and racing to scenes and being first on the air and being in the middle of a Cat 4 or Cat 5 or a war zone.
01:01:18.520You know, I really did feed off of it.
01:01:23.000And to me, it was such an honor and a privilege to be in Iraq, where I am right there, with Marines.
01:01:30.120The 20-year anniversary, that's Christian Galdivini, my cameraman in Iraq, when we were embedded with the third LAR and the 223 Marines.
01:01:38.100I'm going to a couple of reunions in the next couple of months because these guys, you know, they invited me, and I'm definitely going to go.
01:01:45.320But it was something that I definitely needed to do.
01:01:57.440After 35 years as a journalist, there came a time when I kind of didn't want to have to leave home on a moment's notice again for a day, a week, or a month.
01:02:08.180I didn't want to have to do that for another three years.
01:02:12.520I guess I felt like I'd been rained on enough, that I'd been out the door enough, that I'd paid my dues.
01:02:18.360And it was – I felt like it was time for me to just take a little step back or maybe a big step back and just, I don't know, write a book.
01:02:28.320I wrote Chasing Catastrophe, and, you know, it's some of the greatest stories I covered behind the scenes, stuff that people didn't know happened, stories that I never told before that occurred during some of these big events.
01:03:16.160Well, you know, it's funny you say that because my first chapter is about 9-11, and I was, I believe, the first reporter to go live nationally at the scene.
01:03:26.140And that experience the whole day was – in the weeks and months that followed was so devastating and so just difficult to handle.
01:03:36.300I poured my heart into the chapter on 9-11, and at the end of the chapter when I was reading it in the audio booth, I broke down.
01:03:44.760I couldn't finish the end of the chapter.
01:03:47.700I started sobbing in the audio booth, and the guys that were in there were like, whoa, what do we do about this?
01:03:54.720And I just – I was like – I just needed a minute to compose myself.
01:03:57.820And I did, and then it took me a couple tries to get through it.
01:04:02.500But, I mean, it was – I still get chills when I see video from that day or talk about it or read about it.
01:04:11.620I definitely suffered PTSD from being in the dust cloud, from watching the towers fall, and from, you know, trying to make sense out of what was happening around us that day.
01:06:31.480And on that tape are the four and a half minutes that Pat Butler, the engineer, and I spent inside the truck when we ran from the first cloud, from the first tower when it fell.
01:06:40.900Our conversation, you know, what the F is going on?
01:08:15.460You know, I had to put up that emotional wall and not let myself get caught up in in what a normal reaction would be.
01:08:23.560And just started to focus on what my job was, which was to try and separate rumor and fiction from fact and relate to viewers what exactly was going on around us, which I did for, I don't know, 14 or 16 hours that day.
01:08:35.580And then, you know, every pretty much every day after that until I packed up and went off to Afghanistan.
01:08:40.200But, you know, I do give a lot of credit to to the crews who were down there seeing the most awful things that they could have imagined seeing.
01:08:47.960And obviously the most credit goes to the firefighters and police officers who were brave enough to rush toward the fire, trying to save lives.
01:09:22.580I mean, you know, that's a bustling area with, you know, typically you'd have thousands of people on the street.
01:09:29.000And, you know, where we were, our satellite truck was parked at Church and Warren and Church is basically 6th Avenue when it gets all the way downtown.
01:09:35.580And so we were about five blocks from the World Trade Center site, just up the street and a jet engine and a big gear had fallen into the street from when the plane hit the tower.
01:09:49.240It was sitting right in that intersection just across the street from us.
01:09:52.040And the I think it was the FBI had put up some crime scene tape and we're taking photos of it when the first tower fell.
01:09:59.260And after we came back outside and there was that moon dust all over, all over everything, the tape was still there and the engine and gear were still there.
01:11:44.780You know, I talk about this with J.D. all the time.
01:11:47.060Janice Dean, one of my closest friends, because her husband, Sean, was a firefighter who lost all of his fellow firefighters on 9-11.
01:11:54.460And and they worry about it every day, you know, if he's going to come down with one of the cancers that the guys got working at ground zero.
01:12:29.080But that was the only symptom that I recognized.
01:12:33.200And fortunately, I haven't had any health issues that I'm aware of that I could blame on on what I breathed that day.
01:12:40.580But you're right that so many people suffered deeply.
01:12:44.200So many people lost their lives after the fact because of, you know, awful cancers and other things that they contracted from from being in that toxic environment.
01:12:53.320Can I just ask you, because we just heard this from President Biden, the State of the Union talking about how January 6th was the worst threat to democracy since the Civil War.
01:13:03.580And it makes me so angry, Rick, to hear him and others talk about January 6th that way without I mean, in that instance, he's ignoring World War One, World War Two, but ignoring 9-11.
01:13:18.080These these these morons, these pundits who actually talk about January 6th explicitly in terms of 9-11 saying this was worse.
01:13:38.700But the thing that struck me when January 6th happened and I don't support what happened on January 6th, but I also didn't support the burning and looting of buildings across America during the protests that went on for months and months and months leading up to January 6th.
01:13:54.160And all the rest of the mainstream media was saying, oh, this is just isolated fires.
01:13:59.260Oh, these are peaceful, mostly peaceful protests.
01:14:02.920Where was the outrage when people were burning buildings and destroying businesses and rioting and looting across America?
01:14:12.760Where was the outrage when that was going on?
01:14:15.400All of a sudden that was OK because people were expressing their First Amendment rights or that was OK.
01:14:21.640But then when when a group stormed the Capitol building, all of a sudden it's a threat to democracy.
01:14:27.700What about storming the mom and pop grocery store that that was forced to close forever?
01:14:32.100What about taking over downtown of so many major metropolitan areas?
01:14:37.220What about, you know, the crime that was rampant?
01:14:39.480That, to me, was a much bigger threat to democracy, a much bigger threat to the quality of life that we all enjoy here in the United States.
01:14:47.600That's what bothered me, that that all of a sudden the media is like, oh, see, they're bad people.
01:14:52.660But what about the other bad people who were doing all that stuff for the last six, eight, 10 months?
01:14:57.400I just I couldn't wrap my head around why one thing mattered and the other thing did.
01:15:02.100You've waived your moral authority because you didn't speak up when these horrific behaviors were happening.
01:15:09.140You didn't care because, you know, BLM, you just wanted a virtue signal.
01:15:13.900And now you want us to take you seriously as our moral arbiters.
01:15:17.220Arbiters. Well, we don't. That's what happened.
01:15:19.280We don't. And spare us your indignation over January 6th when you didn't care at all.
01:15:24.880When cops are being shot and attacked and killed in some instances in some of these protests.
01:15:31.780And you're going to lecture us about the Constitution, the constitutional rights.
01:15:34.920What about when the BLM protesters got in people's faces and said, say it, put your fist up right now.
01:15:49.880My wife was fined $16,000 by Bravo for unnamed, unspecified reasons, which primarily we think was because she wore a hat that said drunk wives matter as a joke that someone gave her at her wedding shower.
01:16:06.480She had put it on for a photo for, you know, 20 seconds and Bravo forced her to make a public apology.
01:16:14.320She was like, of course, Black Lives Matter.
01:16:17.540I don't have to support the organization.
01:18:39.500So I was like, oh, yeah, I'll be Alec Baldwin because, you know, he's on the hot seat right now.
01:18:43.620And I'm so jaded from covering news for 35 years that I didn't really think twice about what other people might think about what I was doing.
01:18:52.060And it was only after the fact that it made every – I mean, it was a news week, okay, that I was Alec Baldwin on Halloween.
01:19:08.360I mean, there was a college not long ago that was recommending that its students, to avoid risk of offending anybody, just dress up as letters of the alphabet.
01:19:26.540Halloween itself is going to be canceled soon, right?
01:19:29.060Like you're not – just costumes are going to be banned.
01:22:22.740So Rick, in addition to your war reporting, which the book goes into in just vivid and very telling detail, including the sort of the embed training that you had and how Geraldo didn't take it and went over there and blew it.
01:22:37.700Remember when he revealed the location of our troops, that whole thing?
01:22:40.360There's a great behind the scenes stories on all of this.
01:22:42.440But let me take you to some of your hurricane reporting.
01:22:46.360I learned some new facts about you and your hurricane reporting.
01:22:49.220You used to go, no matter how dangerous the hurricanes were.
01:22:52.420And here's just a little taste of this for the audience.
01:22:55.320The kind of things you'd have to do so that you could manage the reporting.