Our Trump Tapes, Revealed

EPISODE 1: Finally.

I had to start my show this way.

After months of private deliberating — and traveling, and reporting other stories that I cannot wait to show you guys — we had to start here. With a story that is, fundamentally, about sports radio. And all of us.

Because the very first time I ever co-hosted ESPN’s The Dan Le Batard Show with Stugotz, it was back in 2015, in Miami. My formal introduction to what would later become the Meadowlark Media family.

And that day, we had a call-in guest.

A call-in guest that I’ve been thinking about literally ever since. Even though everyone’s basically spent years pretending like it never happened.

But our actual interview with Donald Trump, the man who’d become the only U.S. president in history with a mugshot, was not the most unforgettable aspect of that day in 2015, somehow.

The most unforgettable part was what my future boss/friend/business partner, Dan Le Batard, revealed to me after we did the show.

Because today, in 2023, Dan is a famously vocal Trump critic whose company has in many ways been defined by that criticism. But that day, in 2015, he matter-of-factly informed me that Donald Trump had been a recurring guest on his show.

For, like, years.

But by 2016, of course, everybody associated with my future employer had effectively memory-holed those interviews. They’d wiped the tapes off the Internet. Avoided discussing them.

In fact, I only recently discovered that the tapes were banished to a physical hard drive, in Miami, accessible only to select Meadowlark Media employees.

Never to be heard from — or confronted — again.

Until now…

P.S. Please listen on Apple Podcasts or Spotify or anywhere else! This episode is still an audio-first experience!

P.P.S. But also, our YouTube video is special, man. And I do apologize for the YouTube teaser image at the top of this post. If you click into the video, you’ll find our show’s actual artistic sensibility, which I love so damn much. But The Algorithm wants big, emotive faces like we’re Mr. Beast, apparently, as well as big, capital letters. And thus The Algorithm must so be fed! Thank you, The Algorithm! Please send my daughter to college!

P.P.P.S.