Editor’s Note: This is the first of nine episodes of Scott McKay’s forthcoming novel Blockbusters, offered in serial form as an exclusive to The American Spectator readers in advance of its publication in October. Blockbusters is the third novel in the Mike Holman series; the first two, King of the Jungle and From Hellmarsh With Love, were also serialized at The American Spectator prior to book publication. 

Mike Holman, the protagonist in the series, is an independent journalist who’s been called The World’s Greatest Newsman. But in Blockbusters, he’s literally going Hollywood — choosing to head up a campaign chiefly funded by Pierce Polk, Mike’s long-time friend and one of the richest men in the world, to reform and save American and Western culture.

Starting with attempting to fix the film and TV business. That project is about to get underway as we begin our story.

—–

Austin, Texas – November 19, 2024

“I’m really only here until I graduate next month,” she slurred into his ear, only barely above the din of the techno music playing in the club. “Then I’m off to L.A.”

“Yeah?” asked Hank, practically shouting. “For what?”

“Acting classes! I’m gonna see if I can make it in the movies! If not, I mean, I’ll be in L.A.! Who knows what can happen!”

“Interesting,” he said. “Well, you’ve got the looks for it!”

That earned him a smile. But then her friend, the chubby one who had given him a very unfriendly look that he couldn’t decide was evidence of protectiveness toward Dylan — was her name Dylan? Did he hear that correctly? — or racism toward Hank, grabbed her and dragged her away.

Oh, well, he thought.

She was hot, but he wasn’t convinced there was much else to her.

And who wanted to be an actress anymore? Most of the college girls were trying to be social media influencers instead.

Hank shrugged. He was tired of this club anyway, just like he was tired of all the places he’d wasted time and money in back in San Francisco.

The problem, he thought to himself, is you. You’re too old to be hanging out in places like this. Be a grownup and take your ass home. Nothing good happens after midnight.

Congratulating himself for his own good advice, Hank started toward the door, only to be accosted.

“Hank Chang? Dude! How crazy is this?”

“You’re, ummm…”

“Vinesh! Vinesh Patel! You remember me? I’m Ravi’s brother!”

“Right! That is crazy. What are you doing in Austin? I thought you were in Palo Alto.”

“Silicon Valley is played, dude. I’m here with my peeps. We’re working on some things.”

“Yeah? Like what?”

“Hey, come see us at our table. VIP area, bay-bee! We’re livin’ the life. I’ll tell you all about it.”

Hank hesitated, and then shrugged after a beat. “Sure,” he said. “I was thinking about heading home, but whatever.”

“Ahhhhh! You can’t go home. It’s early!”

Hank smiled, hiding his dread, and then he followed Vinesh up the stairs of the club into the VIP area. A table half-filled with tech geeks in skinny jeans and V-neck sweaters awaited.

“Hank, meet my guys,” said Vinesh. “This is Billy Slaton, Sri Balakrishnan, and Aidan Gromsky. They’re all from back home. Guys, meet Hank Chang.”

“The one and only!” said Billy. “Dude, we heard what you’re doing with RKTech. That app is gonna be huge!”

The rest of them bubbled in agreement like little girls. Hank thanked them as graciously as he could.

“Just married the right principals and the right idea to the right contacts,” he said.

“Yeah, Pierce Polk,” said Vinesh. “That is so awesome you could put a construction app together with the most innovative construction company in the world.”

“He works fast,” Hank said with a nod. “One meeting and the wheels were moving. But he’d already seen what it could do. Your brother built an amazing piece of tech.”

“And got paid f**kin’ large, right?” That was Aidan. Hank suppressed a grimace; he saw Vinesh was less successful in doing so.

A somewhat uncomfortable pause ensued, and then Billy suddenly stood up — as did the others, except for Vinesh.

“We’re gonna look around the floor and see what kind of action is down there,” he said. “Wish us luck, huh?”

“Yeah, definitely,” said Hank, relieved.

That left him alone with Vinesh. Which wasn’t exactly the company he’d come here for. But it was obvious this wasn’t pure happenstance.

“OK, buddy,” he said. “Why am I here?”

“What do you mean?”

“Dude, enough. Did you stalk me up here, or what?”

“OK, OK. You’re right. Ravi told me you hang out here sometimes.”

“He could have told you my number.”

“Well, he said pitching you something so soon after you got the green light on RKTech is, like, rude or whatever.”

“Is that what we’re doing? You’re pitching me now?”

“Look, OK? I have an idea. More than an idea. A prototype.”

“It’s an app, obviously. What does it do?”

“We’re calling it CASTR.”

“OK. And?”

“It’s AI, and you can pick a movie, and then change all the actors in it. You want to see Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie in Casablanca? Just pick them from the pull-down. Color? Black and white? Your choice. You plug in your options, pay your money, and it’ll stream for you in an hour.”

“What, like the whole movie?”

“Yep. Dialogue in the actors’ voices. Images perfect, just as if they’d been shot on film, or, y’know, digitally like they’re doing now. Everything.”

“How many movies can you do this with?”

“Dude! All of them.”

“Assuming you have the rights.”

“Right. Well, like I said, it’s a prototype. But the tech is there. We did some really interesting things with the algorithms. We’re enhancing the resolution of the old films and washing them through this AI mapping software we’ve got that…”

“OK, it’s a little late, and I’m a little overserved to get too heavily into the code. Do you have something I can read in the daylight?”

“Yeah, yeah. I’ve got a whole PDF I can send you. It’s got specs, an investor pitch, everything.”

“You guys do any legal work yet?”

“Nah. It’s a prototype.”

“I mean, the idea sounds impressive. My guess is getting the rights to the likenesses and the IP will be nothing short of impossible. Who are you trying to sell it to?”

“I don’t know. Amazon? I would think their catalog would be…”

“It’s a thought. OK, what would you want from me?”

“We need a backer. Like somebody who can put some money into this beta stage so we can keep coding. The app can do what I say it can do, and the AI can actually code itself, but what we need is eyes and fingers for the testing and QC. And the stake money isn’t going to last a whole lot longer.”

“Well, yeah. Not if you spend it on VIP tables at the clubs.”

“I know, I know. But hey — you’re here.”

“I mean, I’m not going to say I’m not interested. But this isn’t a startup company you’re talking about. This is an app somebody big would offer to the public.”

“Like Amazon.”

“Right, yeah.”

“Isn’t your dad hooked up with them? You’re doing shipping, and…”

“Not really the same part of Amazon you’d need to have contacts with. And besides, I’m not with Chang Pan-Pacific anymore. I’m doing my own thing now.”

“Meaning you and your dad aren’t…”

“He’s not a movie guy anyway, Vinesh. I doubt he’d be much help to you.”

“Oh.”

“Look, like I said, send me what you’ve got and let me noodle on it. I might be able to open a door or two. For a fee, of course. Or even a little piece.”

“Oh, yeah. We can talk about that.”

Jupiter, Florida – December 4, 2024

This was just about the last situation I wanted to be in. And, at least arguably, I didn’t need to be here. But with the new venture, I would have looked like a jackass if I’d said no.

So I at least forced her to come to me to do the interview, which we did in the back patio of the house with the pool behind me.

PJ said it would make me come off as cool. I think she was probably right, but it still didn’t make me comfortable.

Glib was the best I could do, so I did that.

“He’s become known as the world’s greatest newsman,” she said, as she began. “His work has toppled governments, changed the course of elections, and even turned the tide in wars. His Holman Media website has just topped four million subscribers, and his biography of the legendary, controversial industrialist Pierce Polk has now sold more than two million copies worldwide. And yet Mike Holman is stepping away from journalism. Mike, can you tell us why?”

“Well, first, Sharyn,” I said, “let me say it’s a privilege to have this time with you. It’s a little weird, though. This obviously isn’t the first time I’ve been interviewed, but it might take me some time to get used to sitting on this side of one of these. For 30 years it’s mostly been me asking the questions, so you might have to bear with me.”

She smiled.

“You aren’t stalling, are you?”

“Who, me? Stall on the great Sharyn Kelly? Never!”

I could hear PJ giving a little snort just off-camera. I had to grin at her. She knew I was nervous as hell doing this interview. After all, it was only a month after the whole world, or practically the whole world, thought I was dead, and here I was coming back to life as something else.

More or less.

“It feels like you’re stalling. Why leave journalism when you’re unquestionably at the pinnacle of it?”

“Well, I’m still involved. I mean, I’m still the majority shareholder in Holman Media. And honestly, my team over there did such a great job when I was, y’know, indisposed over in the UK that it just seemed like they were ready to carry the torch without me doing the day-to-day stuff.

“And then of course, this new opportunity came along and it’s a chance to do some things that I’ve thought needed to be done for a long time.”

“The Polk Global Freedom Initiative, you mean.”

“Yeah. In my conversations with Pierce, both while writing the book and since, we both feel like there’s a crisis of sorts in America and also the West in general. And while lots of people here seem excited about the big win Donny Trumbull had last month in the presidential election, that’s just politics, really. Like Andrew Breitbart said all those years ago, politics is downstream from culture. I expect that Trumbull is going to make a lot of changes after he’s inaugurated, but our culture needs help that you really can’t ask the government to provide. Nor should you.”

“Such as?”

“Well, the cultural institutions we rely on don’t enforce our core values. They don’t push us to be better people. They don’t boost our morale as a society or as individuals. And they don’t incentivize positive, successful behaviors and habits. It’s no secret we suffer from a lot of social malaise as a result.”

I could tell she didn’t like that answer very much. “How do you mean?” she asked with a scowl.

“Pick just about any metric and you’ll know what I’m talking about. Unwed childbirth, educational performance, job performance, job satisfaction, crime, depression, drug abuse, government dependency, divorce. All the bad things are up, all the good things are down. It’s harder and harder to find good employees, people aren’t getting married and having kids, we have more loneliness, more isolation, we’re less religious than we used to be, our life expectancy is down.

“And when you analyze it, none of these things ought to be happening. We are richer, more technologically advanced, better access to food, information, entertainment… hell, practically everything we need, we have more of. And we’re still underperforming as a society. Do you disagree with that?”

I could tell she wanted to, but she didn’t offer anything.

“So you want to address this underperformance,” she said.

“A number of us, though Pierce and I were the first to agree in putting this plan together, have the theory that what’s failing us is culture. So this is going to be the first effort, maybe in modern history, at preservation and renewal of our base culture on a broad scale. Think of it as digging down to the foundations of our society and shoring those up.”

She gave me a perplexed look.

“OK,” I said. “Can we agree that over the past, say 50 or 60 years, there has been an effort by certain people, I’ll call them the Left, but you can term it any way you want, to change our attitudes about various things? You get that, right?”

“I’m not sure,” she said.

“Fine. Without judging it, let’s just say homosexuality. Fifty years ago our society as a whole viewed it as shameful, and you would almost never see it promoted as an acceptable lifestyle choice in a movie or on a TV show. Right? Now there’s a gay character in practically every movie and every TV series. That doesn’t happen without a conscious choice by the people in charge of gatekeeping what the public sees.”

“So this initiative is a homophobic thing?”

“Of course not. I’m simply using that issue as an example of how our cultural institutions have made a major sea change in what behaviors and attitudes they choose to promote, and those choices have an impact on how society functions.

“And in many cases, that impact is concerning because it leads people to unhealthy habits, attitudes, and behaviors. And our definition is that when you sum up the habits, attitudes, and behaviors of a given group of people, what you’re looking at is a culture.”

“Interesting,” she said. “So this is about, what? Making America religious again?”

“I expect that’ll be part of it, and we’ve already had some meetings with religious leaders about helping them to regain some footing in capturing the curiosity and passion of the folks that they’ve lost in the last half-century. But it’s more than that. We want to promote masculinity in men and femininity in women. We want to get people interested in physical fitness and health, because there is such a relationship between health and happiness and peak physical, mental, and moral performance. And we want to encourage folks to live more vibrant and meaningful lives. Do you remember that great final speech that Jim Valvano gave at the ESPYs when he was dying of cancer? It was a long time ago, late 1980s, I guess, but it’s still a great moment.”

“Vaguely,” she said. “What are you getting at?”

“He said you need three things every day. He said you need to laugh, to think, and to have your emotions moved to tears. He said if you can get those things in a day, that’s a good day. I just see us divorced from that now, especially in our pop culture. We have people so fragile they can’t face being moved to tears. They call that triggering now. And laughter? Everything funny offends somebody now. And of course, forget about thinking. Society doesn’t want you doing any of that. We’re ordered to swallow things that are utter nonsense, and you get canceled if you question any of them.”

“I can see how you’d think that,” said Sharyn. “You spent two months in a British prison for doing a podcast interview the Stormer government didn’t like.”

“For sure. But it’s not just my experience. We’ve had years and years of people being persecuted for seeking the truth on a whole host of things, whether it’s UFOs, COVID, terrorism, racism, climate change, whatever. And while we could chop each one of them up and talk about them, my point in bringing them up is that the institutions that influence opinions or even what topics we’re allowed to discuss have done everything they could to discourage people from coming to their own conclusions.”

I was making her uncomfortable and she turned a little more contentious. Which I expected.

“So you’re saying that because people can’t question climate change, they’re fat and depressed?”

“Come on, Sharyn. You can do better than that.”

She laughed.

“I’m just trying to do justice to the famous Mike Holman provocative question.”

“Look,” I said, “it’s a little absurd to make that connection, but we’re starting from the premise that Valvano was onto something.

“There’s a reason that speech resonated with and inspired so many people. There’s truth in it. We think happy, healthy, wise, and virtuous people will make for a society that reflects those traits and prospers as a result, and we think there are institutions that influence how well folks perform in those areas, and we think that’s where the disconnect is.

“So Pierce, and others, have decided they want to fund a grand experiment of sorts to see if those institutions can be recaptured and repurposed toward giving people a little more mental, spiritual, moral, and motivational nutrition rather than the junk food we’re getting from them now.”

“And you’re going to be in charge of this?” she asked.

“Yep.”

“Why?”

“I’ll admit that a lot of this comes from the fact that I was Pierce’s college roommate. We’ve been very good friends for decades. But along the way this has been a topic both of us have fixated on to an extent. You know that I’ve written and said a lot about culture, we do a ton of coverage on the subject at Holman Media, and that’s, I guess, where my qualifications sit.”

“But how do you do that?” she asked. “How do you fix a culture?”

“Well, in 2025, it’s probably a lot to do with those institutions. We have to get into them and make some changes. Or maybe it’s about creating new institutions and blowing out the current ones that are failing.”

“Can you give me an example?”

“I can keep you here all afternoon, giving you examples. But I’ll just throw out the easiest one. So, take film and TV. Entertainment media, if you want to call it that. Something like 90 percent of all the cable channels are controlled by five companies: XYZ Sidney, Summit, Castcom, Stine-Warmer, and BRONY. That’s really unhealthy, don’t you think?”

“I’m not going to offer an opinion on that.”

“Spoken like a true corporate media host!”

“OK, fine. Touché.”

“I’m not saying all of these guys are bad. But what I am saying is there are way too few people controlling way too much of what people see and hear in mass media, and right now this is still a mass media culture. Now, that’s definitely changing. No offense, but almost nobody’s watching broadcast news anymore. My guys at Holman Media are catching way, way more eyes than anybody is drawing for an audience at ANN, for example — even for your show, which obviously gets good ratings. And we can talk all day about the news business, as it’s obviously something both of us know really well. But here’s the thing: most people don’t really care about the news. They form their worldview not from the local or national news but from their experiences and the stories we tell each other.”

“And those stories aren’t good,” she said, almost accusingly.

“Exactly. They’re not. You go back 50 years, 100 years, and the stories were totally different. They resonated with people because they were an application of universal values and ancient wisdom. People were further along in their lives because they absorbed the positive lessons those classic stories taught them. Are we getting that now?”

“Well, but values change.”

“Yes, they do. Not always for the better, you know. Not all values have equal value.”

“Oh, there’s a line.”

“OK, this is an example out of left field, but do you know who Charles Napier was?”

“The actor? Wasn’t he in The Blues Brothers?”

“Good reference! No. Charles Napier was the British general in charge of India back in the mid-19th century. And there’s a famous story about him, which is that he’s marching his army through this area and they come upon a village and they’ve set up a big funeral pyre there, and Napier finds out the locals are about to throw this poor dead guy’s wife on the fire along with him. Do you know this story?”

“I don’t.”

“OK, so there was this practice called sati, and it was this custom where, when a husband died, they’d burn the widow on his pyre. In ancient times in India, they didn’t have the resources to take care of widows, so off to reincarnation-land they’d go, right? And the locals told Napier, Hey, this is our custom.”

“Well, it’s…”

“It’s really inconvenient if you’re a multiculturalist, right? So here’s what Napier says: he tells these guys, well, the custom in my country is that we hang murderers. So you can build your pyre and I’ll have my soldiers build a gibbet, and after you burn that poor widow to death, we’re going to hang the lot of you, and that way we’ll both exercise our customs. I’ll bet you can guess what happened.”

“They didn’t burn the widow.”

“Right. But not only that, the word got around, and that’s why you’d never heard of sati. Napier and the British imposed a superior culture on an inferior one, and they changed the world for the better when they did.”

“And you see yourself as a Charles Napier.”

“I see myself having the opportunity to give a superior culture a chance to reclaim the high ground from an inferior culture that has wormed its way in, yes. And I don’t accept the argument that what comes out of our cultural institutions was produced organically.”

“Is this a conspiracy theory of some sort?”

“In my experience, the conspiracy theorists just tend to be six months early, but let me just ask you this: Do you think that all of the action movies that have skinny girls beating the crap out of guys twice their size got made because that’s what the public was yearning for?”

“I don’t…”

“Bear in mind that these things generally do horribly at the box office, at least compared to the old John Wayne, Sly Stallone, Chuck Norris flicks. You don’t have a female who can measure up to any of those guys, box office-wise, and you never will. So if the audiences don’t show up, why is Hollywood still making those movies?”

“You think it’s on purpose?”

“Obviously it’s on purpose. You have a small number of people making decisions at the institutions that control which intellectual properties are fed to the public, and they’ve made a decision to push a message down the throats of the audience. In this case, it’s a feminist message that women can do everything that men can do.

“And I’m as big a fan of women as it’s possible to be, especially since I’m recently married to one of the all-time greats. I mean, PJ took a bullet for the guy who’s just been elected president of the country, OK? She’s more of a badass than any of the chicks in Hollywood making those movies. But even she’ll tell you that these things are ridiculous, and most women roll their eyes when they get subjected to these dumb action movies with the superhuman chicks who beat up the stunt men for two hours. So why else would they keep feeding us this stuff if it’s not aimed at affecting attitudes, habits, and behaviors?”

“And you think it does have that effect?”

“Well, put it this way: How often do you remember seeing or hearing about women brawling in a bar or at an airport? That’s on viral video every day now, you know.”

“Oh, come on.”

“No, you come on. Your network wouldn’t exist without 30-second commercial spots. People pay big, big money for those. And why? Because in those 30 seconds, they’re planting a message in hundreds of thousands, or even millions, of people’s heads: Buy our stuff, it’ll make you happy and cool. Am I lying?”

“Well, no.”

“OK. You think a cultural message embedded in a movie or a TV show, reinforced over and over again, doesn’t affect people’s thinking?”

“So you think women are more violent now because they see violent women on TV?”

“Don’t you?”

Sharyn just sat there for a minute. I suppressed the urge to bring up Emmanuel Macron’s wife.

“OK,” I said. “Do you remember the old Jane Fonda movie The China Syndrome?”

“That was about an accident at a nuclear power plant.”

“Exactly. It came out around, I don’t know, 1979 or 1980. And it had every alarmist, crazy accusation about nuclear power you can imagine. Right after that, there was this tiny malfunction at Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania, where there was a nuclear plant, and basically nothing happened as a result. But the whole country took that in within the prism of The China Syndrome, and all of a sudden nuclear energy became, if you’ll pardon the pun, radioactive with the American people.”

“So entertainment culture makes us who we are.”

“We are absolutely the products of the stories we tell each other. And there has been a concerted effort by a radical element in our society to co-opt that process and tell stories fitting a certain worldview and agenda that warps our understanding of ourselves and the world around us, with the effect that our stories aren’t very true anymore, and we’re suffering from it.”

“But doesn’t this effort make you the radical?”

“I’d rather say that I’m the guy sent to set it right. For the last 20 years or so what I prided myself on is that I’m a truth-seeker and a truth-teller. That’s been my brand and, I guess, my creed. So now, I’m sort of beyond journalism and into the storytelling business more broadly. And I’m hoping it’s a role I can fit by telling stories that are true, even when they’re fiction.”

“I thought that went well,” PJ said. “But it seems like you don’t.”

“I dunno, honey. It seems like she took the attitude like I’m nuts for doing this.”

She leaned in and kissed me and then gave me that smile of hers. The one that told me that I worry too much. I wasn’t finished learning all of PJ’s smiles; it had been a short pre-engagement, after all, and an even shorter engagement. But this one I knew, and it was one of my favorites.

“Nobody thinks you’re nuts,” she said.

“I sure hope you’re right.”

“I am right. You’re getting more money than most of us could ever dream of to do this thing. Whether it works or not, you have a billion dollars a year to spend on it. And you showed me all the polls that make it clear people believe you and Pierce are right about the culture. Come on! Who cares what Sharyn thinks?”

“We should have done the first interview with Colby. He asked for it, and I was stupid. I gave it to ANN.”

“So you’ll do the second interview with Colby, and it’ll get more traffic, and it’ll be better.”

I just grumbled to myself, but I didn’t argue with her.

PJ can tell you I’m a grumbler. Especially when I’m unsure whether I’m mucking things up. And this thing, the Polk Global Freedom Initiative, the first phase of which is to attack the deficient culture in the West and reclaim it by reforming film and TV and the storytelling that happens there, is something that categorically cannot be mucked up.

It has to work, for all the reasons I outlined in that interview with the legacy corporate media hack.

I mean, Sharyn is pretty good at her job. As an interviewer, she really is one of the better people out there. And her questions weren’t stupid ones, though it felt like she was playing dumb as a means of arguing with me.

That isn’t how PJ took it, though. She said Sharyn was playing the straight man so I could deliver the punch lines. And I will have to admit that PJ is rarely wrong.

I said we’d see. And besides, there was always the Joe Rogan interview I was set to do the next Monday.

In all of these interviews discussing PGFI, which is what we were calling it for lack of a better name, I was doing a whole lot of justifications and vision statements.

What I wasn’t doing was talking details.

That was strategic, or more to the point, it was a demand from Pierce. He’s the business guru behind all this, obviously — when your friend who’s giving you a ten-figure annual budget, with more funding available for the asking, and that friend also happens to own outright no less than six different Fortune 500 companies that he started, says, “Hey, don’t tell them exactly what we’re going to do,” then that’s how you play it.

Especially when at that point we weren’t actually sure what the play was.

We had the broad strokes already laid down, of course. We were going to get involved in entertainment media. We were going to throw some money around in an effort to create content that would move people and give them the Valvano treatment — thinking, laughing, and crying.

Exactly how? Well, Pierce left that to me. And he said I needed to get on it and start making moves.

But while I was doing interviews like the one with Sharyn Kelly, I was still putting a team together.

Allegedly.

And honestly, I had no idea what I was even looking for.

The thing about coming up as a journalist is that if you’re good at that job, you get to be just knowledgeable enough about the things you’re covering to be dangerous, but it’s seldom you actually become an expert on anything. So you put a journalist in charge of something important, and you watch them quickly recognize how utterly out of their depth they are.

And that was me.

I had all the resources in the world, I had a great mission and lots of support for it, and I had something of a vision.

But that’s pretty much where it stopped. How to implement it, I had no idea. And Pierce’s response was “Hey, you’ll figure it out.”

This was going to be my show. Sink or swim.

I spent the next few days getting very little done and being more than a little stressed out about that fact. But then it was time to head down to Palm Beach for Trumbull’s Christmas party, which was … well, it was exactly what you’d expect when one of the richest, most famous guys in America throws a big soiree five weeks before he’s getting inaugurated president.

As in, extravagant beyond measure.

And Trumbull was all smiles when I greeted him in the receiving line.

“That wife of yours looks awfully good, Mike,” he said. “Just remember that she was with me before she was with you.”

PJ chuckled at that. “Only professionally, Mr. President!” she said. “You’re not my type!”

“Hey, there’s no accounting for taste, right?” he said, and then he looked at me. “Anyway, while you’re here, I want to talk to you about this thing you’re doing with Pierce.”

“Definitely,” I said. “We need your input for this.”

He nodded, and we moved along. I got to introduce PJ to Miguel Sandoval, the new president of Argentina, and of course, we saw my old friend Neville Savage, who was likely to win the snap election in the U.K. that people were crediting or accusing me of bringing on. And all kinds of other luminaries.

Later, she showed me a selfie she took with Kid Rock. And another one she took with Elon.

It was pretty cool. They were treating me like I was basically the biggest deal at the party, which was, of course, ridiculous given the attendees. On the other hand, other than Trumbull, who’d been shot at and nearly killed, and had survived one of the nastiest, crookedest, and most turbulent elections in American history, I’d probably had the biggest year of anybody there.

Maybe. I don’t know.

Anyway, after things got going at the party and people were really mingling, one of Trumbull’s underlings came and got me. I left PJ with Neville, who looked like he was sober enough to behave himself with her, and got in a golf cart for a quick ride from the ballroom of the club to the main residence where Trumbull had his office.

“OK,” he said as I sat down. “This thing you and Pierce are doing. I like it.”

“Good, Mr. President. I hope…”

“Stop with that. Just call me Donny. I’m not president again yet. And it’s just us here, OK?”

“Got it. What I was saying is that this is actually much more up your alley than mine. I know the news media game as well as anybody, but this thing is so much broader than that. You’re the one who had the primetime reality show and turned that into a platform you ran for president on.”

He made a face and waved all of that away. “You’re talking about The Lackey? I mean, it was fun, but it was just a thing I did. Once you’re on TV, you’re a celebrity and people think it gives you special powers. It doesn’t. Most of the people they put on TV are nuts and idiots. Keith Olbermann, for cryin’ out loud. Joy Reid!”

“Well, that’s part of what we want to fix. What if we could raise the standard and get some really talented folks in front of the public?”

“I get it,” he said. “And I want to help, even though I don’t know exactly what you need. Doesn’t sound like money is it.”

“Nope. That I’ve got a lot of.”

“You need to talk to Numakin. You should put him on your board or whatever.”

Bernard Numakin was an interesting guy. He’d been the Treasury Secretary in Trumbull’s first term. He was an old Wall Street player who rose to the top of one of the blue-blood investment firms, with billions of dollars in tow, and after he made his money, he started dabbling in film. He’d been a movie producer for a decade or so, and some of the biggest blockbusters of the past 20 years or so had been projects he’d helped to finance.

“I definitely want to talk to him,” I said. “He’d be a hell of a resource.”

Trumbull said he’d set it up.

“What you need to do is chase all the woke stuff out of showbiz,” he was saying. “Everything woke turns to…”

“I get it,” I said. “And you’re right. People hate all that crap.”

“The day I go in, I’m scrubbing as much of it from the federal government as I can. If you can scrub it out of Hollywood, it’ll make a difference. For real.”

“I agree. There’s something else you can do to help, though.”

“Oh? What’s that, Mike?”

“Get DOJ, or whatever other agencies you want, to start going after the Big Five media conglomerates with antitrust actions.”

“Oh, shit,” he laughed. “Well, it’s not like I’d get treated any worse by the Fake News if I did.”

“Look, one of the things Pierce and I agreed on from the beginning when we started conceptualizing this project was that you have too few people making too many decisions on pop culture. Frankly, I think that’s a problem all over the economy, but of course Pierce won’t go that far.”

“Yeah, I guess not. Not with the way he’s cornered the market in all these things. What’s with his construction company and this app?”

“Totally revolutionary. The app is my brother-in-law’s thing, by the way. You’d love it. People can plug a piece of property into it, using GPS coordinates or a street address, and it pulls down all the official information from land surveys and so forth, and then you can build a virtual house or commercial building, whatever, using all kinds of things the app has preloaded — designs, features, the whole bit — and the app will give you detailed architectural plans, it’ll file building permits, it’ll give you a construction budget, the works.”

“And Sentinel Construction bought it? So they’re gonna bring it to market?”

“They think it’s going to cut down on time and cost to build a house by like 25 or 30 percent.”

“Oooh, I really like that. Wait — your brother-in-law? So Peter Chang’s kid?”

“Hank. Yeah. He’s a lot more like PJ than Peter.”

“Are you getting along with the old man now?”

“I think we’re tolerating each other. I should get a medal for that, seeing as though he was in on that bulls**t in England.”

“Kinda backfired on him.”

“That’s why I figured it would be better not to hold a grudge. Of course, PJ still won’t talk to him.”

“No?”

“Not really.”

“That’s too bad. I understand it, but it’s too bad.”

The conversation kind of devolved from there into golf and the war in Ukraine and a couple of other things, and then Trumbull very politely let me know that was all the time I was getting with him.

Which was fine, because at some point, Neville’s friendly attention to PJ would have the potential to turn. Scotch, which is a particular passion of Neville’s, has properties in that regard.

But when the golf cart brought me back to the ballroom, all was well. She was a little tipsier than Neville was.

“You’re just in time,” he said. “Now it’s me. I’ve been summoned to visit with the great man.”

“He’s in a good mood,” I said. “Enjoy.”

“World leaders … and my husband,” PJ whispered in my ear. “That’s who Trumbull wants to meet with.”

“I know, right? Didn’t you luck out?”

“A few weeks ago, it was a lot different. I keep thinking about you in jail. It’s kinda hot, actually.”

“You’re a little wasted, aren’t you?”

She held up a couple of fingers close together to signal that I was a little bit right.

“Might be a good idea to eat something,” I said.

She pouted at me. PJ’s pout is one of the cutest things on God’s green earth, but it didn’t stop me from dragging her to the buffet.

And her mood brightened in no time flat.

Why? You’ll never believe it.

PJ filled up her plate with and utterly devoured the meatloaf.

I know. The most low-brow thing available, and that’s what she went for.

Turns out she knew more than I did. It was literally Trumbull’s mom’s recipe. And yeah, it’s awfully good.

And before we left, PJ met Melanie — and hit her up for that recipe. We’ve had meatloaf once a week ever since when I’ve been home. So that was a big win coming out of the Christmas party.

New York, New York – December 14, 2024

I’d been to Tavern on the Green before. I hadn’t been in Bernard Numakin’s private dining room.

He did all of his big meetings in here. It was a space that could fit a couple dozen people and usually did, but Numakin was the restaurant’s “Number One Customer,” as he laughingly called himself, so when I’d called him to ask for a sit-down to talk about my project, he’d booked it in his usual way.

Which was that they’d set out an ostentatious buffet along one wall and a full bar on another, and put an oversized table for two in the middle.

“What do you do with all this food we don’t eat?” I asked him as we filled up our plates before sitting down to lunch.

He laughed.

“Everything we don’t eat is for the staff to feast on,” he said. “That’s why I’m the Number One Customer.”

That’s Numakin. He had a reputation as an absolute slasher of throats on Wall Street, but those rapacious gains of his always went somewhere else once he’d made them. He’d been one of the early funders of a network of care pregnancy centers when those were stood up. He’d thrown a ton of money behind groups taking care of wounded veterans. He had the pediatric oncology wing at Memorial Hospital in New Haven, and six others around the country, named after him, and nobody even needed to pitch him — he’d just shown up with a checkbook and asked what they needed.

He’d grown up as a Wall Street brat. Numakin’s dad had founded Starks Numakin right after the war, and when that firm got swallowed up by Salomon Brothers, he’d ended up the managing partner. That’s where Bernard got his start after he’d graduated top of his class at Yale, then he moved up quickly and ultimately became CEO at 38.

And a couple of years after that, Numakin was riding on the subway and some meth-head stabbed him with a screwdriver in the middle of a psychotic episode. He was in the hospital for weeks, because the wound went septic on him and it damn near killed him.

That experience changed his life. But it didn’t change Bernie’s profession.

He left Salomon Brothers to start his own thing, and by the time he was 50, his hedge fund was worth $75 billion. That’s when he started White Sands Entertainment as a side project. And White Sands financed something like 80 film projects in five years before he sold his interest in advance of becoming Trumbull’s Treasury Secretary in the first term.

Having lunch with Bernie Numakin was a treat. Especially given how he got things started.

“It’s a shame we’ve never met before,” he said. “I can’t tell you how excited I am to be sitting down with Mike Holman. In the flesh!”

“You’ve got to be kidding,” was my response.

“Why?”

“You’re Bernard freaking Numakin, that’s why. Who am I next to that?”

“I’m just a money guy. The stuff you’ve done? Carry a nightly TV show that was a hit. Start a media company and keep it going for years, no capital. Most influential podcast in America. What you did in Guyana. What you just did in the U.K. How many books have you written?”

“Four,” I said. “But only the last one really did anything sales-wise.”

“And that one sold two million copies already! You know how many people have written a book that sold two million copies?”

“Not very many,” I conceded. “But that’s more Pierce than me, you know.”

“Doesn’t matter. You deserve your success and all the admiration you’re getting. It’s an honor. Really.”

I had the impression he was shining me on, but he sure was nice about it, so as we sat down to an epicurean spectacular masquerading as lunch, I told him that Trumbull suggested I talk to him before I do anything else on the culture project.

“I have a general idea what we want to do,” I said, “and we’ve put together a few entities to get started with it. I had my attorney set up…”

“Anybody I’d know?” he asked me.

“Actually, it’s possible. He’s out of Atlanta now, but Morris Moskowitz is an old friend from my time in New York…”

“I know Morris! Hell of a guy! In fact, his cousin Eliezar worked for me at White Sands. What did Morris do for you?”

“We’ve got a 501c3, and he just put an LLC together to get started, and I’m assuming we’ll use the LLC to start investing in… honestly, I’m not all that sure what we’re going to do first.”

“And Trumbull said you’re trying to turn around the culture, right?”

I nodded.

“The theory is that there’s too much poison being broadcast to the folks from mass media, and we’re getting bad habits, behaviors, and attitudes as a result,” I said. “So if you displace bad messaging with good messaging by telling heroic stories and positive affirmations…”

“Yeah, but you need real storytelling, too,” he said. “You can’t just turn every channel on TV into the Hallmark Channel.”

“Hell, I’d just like to find a new Chuck Norris,” I said.

He laughed.

“Fair enough,” he said. “So I take it you want to buy some channels, do film production…”

“Maybe a record label.”

“OK, sure.”

He stopped to take a bite of his lamb chop. Then he cocked his head a little and looked at me.

“All right,” he said, after he’d swallowed it down. “Look, I’ll help you, but so you’ll know, and don’t go spreading this around, I’m not sitting on a lot of bandwidth.”

“Are you going back into the administration?”

He shook his head. “Not as such,” he said. “But Trumbull wants to set up a sovereign wealth fund, and I’m gonna be involved in that.”

“Interesting idea.”

“Yeah, well, it’s a way to pay off the national debt. We have all this land out west and it’s worth maybe $200 trillion, and that’s a lot more than the $36 trillion in debt the government’s stuck with. But there’s no entity that can monetize or securitize the assets, and so you set up a sovereign wealth fund to do that.”

“That’s way, way over my head,” I said.

“It’s wonky. Anyway, we’re months away, minimum, from being able to do anything public with that project, but it’s an awful lot of work in advance. So what I can do is be a Yoda for you, plus maybe give you some people to see who can help staff up some of the entities you’ll want to create or buy.”

“I’ll take all the help you can give, for sure,” I said. “And hey, I assume a good bit of what we’re going to do will turn a profit, so maybe there’s a back end.”

“Oh, believe me,” he said, “if you’re with Pierce, you’re investable. Keep me in the loop. Me and my guys will play. But before we get into any of that, I have a couple of thoughts.”

I pulled my phone out and turned on the recording app as I set it on the table. “I hope this is OK,” I said. “I just don’t want to miss anything.”

“Yeah, yeah, It’s fine. But I’ll have my people email you something on all of what I’m going to tell you, so if you want to just listen … anyway, have Morris call my office and I’ll get him set up to put together a private equity fund; you’ll want one of those as a vehicle to straight-up buy some media companies. Do you have a strategy in place for that?”

“Most of our conceptualizing so far has dealt with identifying the problems and isolating approaches we think can impact them,” I said. “As to structure, well, let’s just say we’re open to ideas.”

“Good! A blank slate! I like that. So think of it this way. There’s three elements you need to think of where entertainment media is concerned, and this applies more or less to all of it. Film and TV, music, art, books, they all work pretty similarly, and it’s like this.

“First, there’s the production. I’ll talk about this with film and TV because it’s what I know. You want to get some entities together that make content. Buy a production house, start getting some projects into principal photography.”

“Right,” I said. “And we don’t even have to buy production companies per se. We just need to capitalize some good projects, right?”

“Yeah,” he said, “but you’re gonna find it’s simpler to just buy and own for the most part. Anyway, next, there’s the distribution. So there you have a studio, which is going to have distribution agreements with theaters, rights deals with the streaming services and movie channels like HBO and Showtime and so forth, foreign distribution, the works.”

“Are you thinking the studios are the big problem?” I asked.

“In terms of what?”

“Shitty content being produced.”

He stopped and wolfed down another bite of that lamb chop as he thought about my question.

“The thing to understand is that it’s the studios that decide what gets distributed. So you have a really small number of people making decisions on what gets greenlighted and what dies, and they all know each other. A lot of them are legacy people who are where they are because a dad or an uncle or whoever hired them and they’ve moved up from there. They know basically nothing about real life, and whatever the attitudes are in Westwood or Beverly Hills are what they think are the case in Des Moines and Shreveport.”

“That sounds right.”

“So yeah. If you buy a studio, you’ll do some major damage to that little club. One reason I dumped out of the film business was that as a producer, I had to pitch these people, and it was a lot like having to talk to chimpanzees. You’d have a great project to pitch to them and they’d hit you with how many lesbians or blacks or Asians were in the cast, they’d want to change the story for all kinds of dumb reasons you knew audiences wouldn’t like, and… anyway, the point is it’s bad gatekeepers that make that industry suffer.”

“All right. We need to buy a studio and then have the production companies come to us.”

“Some of these will have their own production companies attached. But you need to understand something — the Big Five movie studios are each owned by one of the Big Five media conglomerates. You aren’t likely to separate a studio from the parent, because that’s the engine generating the IP that fuels sets of eyes to their platforms.”

“Well, what if we bought one of the Big Five media companies?”

“Oh,” he said.

“What?”

“I didn’t realize you were thinking THAT big. You’ve got, what? A billion a year?”

“I’m pretty sure I can get more if I need it.”

He chuckled.

“Yeah,” he said. “If Pierce is backing you, I imagine you’re right. But I’ll say this: as a pure investment matter, I’m on the fence about that.”

“Because most of these media companies are built on cable TV, right? And cable is dying.”

“Exactly. These are $30 billion, $50 billion, $100 billion companies, and most of it is dead weight. You have a broadcast network, a pile of cable channels, most of which nobody watches and they only make money because they rake in a little piece of the cable subscription revenue based on arrangements with cable systems made a thousand years ago.”

“But these are all profitable companies, though, right?”

“Sort of. You know why they’re profitable?”

“Give it to me,” I said.

“Pills.”

“Pills?”

“Drug ads. Pharma buys a third of the ad space on TV, and if that went away, all of these companies start dying. And let me tell you, before it’s done, Trumbull is going to make that illegal. The U.S. and New Zealand are the only places on earth you can advertise prescription drugs on TV, and in case you haven’t noticed we’re not the healthiest country around.”

“I’d love to see it. We’ve dealt with the pharmaceutical companies off and on with Holman Media, and all they care about is coverage.”

“Bribing you not to give them bad publicity for side effects or pricing practices and so on, huh?”

“That’s it. When we weren’t willing to play ball on that, the answer was ‘go to hell.’ They didn’t care how many viewers the podcast or the website were getting.”

“Yeah. Anyway, if the pill ads go away, none of these media companies are profitable anymore. You might look at getting a Big Five media company cheap so that you can get control of a studio and some of their distribution that isn’t obsolete, but just know that you’re going to overpay.”

“Unless there’s a way not to.”

Numakin smiled. “Yeah, but that takes us beyond this little 1000-level course we’re doing here.”

“OK, but there are studios out there that aren’t part of the Big Five, right?”

“You mean the mini-majors? Yeah, and those can be had pretty cheap. Generally, they’re a lot smaller, though, and they survive on making great IP, they have to work through the Big Five to distribute. They’ll have deals with theaters, and that’s OK, but streaming, TV…”

He stopped, and I could almost hear the gears grinding in his head as he finished his lamb chop.

“This would be something different, though, wouldn’t it?” he said. “The mini-majors are all basically undercapitalized shops. They depend on outside capital to finance production, and a lot of that is foreign — and not all that savory.”

“China, you mean,” I said.

“Sure. Plus the Arabs. And Mexico.”

“Mexico?”

Numakin pressed his finger to his nose and I knew he was talking about the cartels.

“Great.”

“I mean, Legendary Studios is literally a Chinese company, so it’s not a surprise their IP is pretty much Chicom propaganda. That kind of thing is part of the problem. A lot of these guys are so desperate to find sets of eyes to show their shows to that they’ll tailor toward the Chinese market more than the American. But — and people will say I’m racist for saying this, but this is experience talking — Chinese audiences are the absolute dumbest moviegoers there are. They know absolutely zero about plot, character arc, storytelling, or any of that. All they care about is big monsters and loud explosions. They’re too scared to actually think at a movie. I guess I would be, too, if I had to live in a country like that.”

“Yeah, I don’t care about breaking into the Chinese market,” I said. “At least not in the foreseeable future.”

“But that’s the point. You don’t have to. You want to make a profit, but you’re starting with more money than any of these guys have, and you can take some losses to gain market share. That makes you a very different cat.”

“So, yes, on a mini-major?”

“Perhaps. I think maybe if you marry it with a theater chain, and maybe put a streamer together…”

I just let him percolate. I noticed that Numakin seemed to think best while he was munching on something — in this case, the grilled trout, which he’d moved on to.

“Let me make a call or two,” he said. “I’ve got a buddy who has a family shop with a big position in Movie King. That’s 4,500 screens across the country, and they’re in all the markets except the Pacific Northwest. They’re not in Chapter 11 yet, but they’re struggling. Big time. I wonder if they’d be willing to unload it.”

“Seems like the theaters are direct victims of the studios,” I said. “How do you sell movie tickets when the movies suck?”

“No question about it.”

“But the big thing is,” I said, “if the movies aren’t good enough to draw crowds, what do you really have? You’re not a movie theater; you’re a meeting place.”

“Now you’re thinking correctly.”

“Well, like for example, why aren’t some of those theater spaces repurposed for live music, or meeting rooms, or gaming, or a fitness club, or bar space, or restaurants…”

Numakin was nodding.

“I don’t want to run any of that,” I said, “but if there’s somebody out there who’s doing this right, maybe we partner with them. We’ll go and buy the theater chain, maybe Movie King if that works out, and then we merge with the multi-action entertainment guys and then we keep enough screens to draw all the audience that still exists, but the rest of that space is used for other attractions.”

“And the cultural part that you’re looking for,” he said, “that Trumbull told me you’re interested in, is that you want to get people out of the house and interacting with each other again, and this is a way to do it.”

“It’s an idea,” I said. “Again, we’d have to find somebody who’s good at implementing a deal like this.”

He nodded, and down went the rest of his trout.

“You really ought to try this,” he said. “Terrific.”

“How do you eat all that and not get fat as a hog?” I asked him.

“I’m 45 minutes a day on the treadmill. That’s what you get when you marry your personal trainer.”

I laughed.

“I like you, Mike,” he said. “You got a good head on you.”

“Yeah, well, it’s spinning a little right now.”

“That’s all right. You’ll figure it out. Just be thinking — production, distribution, talent.”

“What do you mean by talent?”

“Talent is the part the public sees. Who are they fans of? Not some producer. Actors, directors, recording artists, maybe authors. You’re talent, for example. Your podcast.”

“Chuck Norris,” I said.

“Exactly! You’re gonna have to develop a lot of talent, because what you’re trying to do, Hollywood has done everything they could to suppress. But if you set up production and distribution big enough and well enough, you might find there’s some marketable all-American folks out there among actors and directors who can feel safe coming out of the woodwork to support what you’re doing and make it cool.”

“Might even be able to resurrect some people who’ve been canceled,” I said.

“That, for sure. The point is, if you’re going to work on fixing the culture and you want to focus on entertainment media, you need to open up enough space under your control in production and distribution that you can protect talent that attracts to your point of view.”

“You’re giving me a lot to think about,” I said.

“Likewise. In fact, the more I’m noodling on this, the more ideas this is giving me. Let’s give it a few days and talk on the phone. Meanwhile, I’ll have my assistant shoot you and Morris some ideas and resources on a structure.”

On my way back from New York, I made a stop in Atlanta to visit the folks at Holman Media, which was still mine even though I’d more or less retired from the news business. The company, I’d noticed much to my satisfaction and, to an extent, chagrin, was doing better than it had ever done when I was actually running it.

Essentially, Holman Media was a website and a YouTube and Rumble podcast channel, though now it was also beginning to find a space for itself as a documentary film production company. The site was hitting the international top 10 in traffic among news websites, and subscriptions had gone through the roof; since May of 2024, when I’d agreed to let Pierce pay me to write his biography and we’d taken him on as a client for the public relations part of the business, something our advertising sales manager Megan Rivers handled on the side, we’d gone from a little under a hundred thousand subscribers to more than four million.

Running a website, for the vast majority of folks who do it, is hardly a big profit-making occupation. When I got booted out of the prime-time cable news show on ANN that I’d hosted — it was called Mike Holman Tells The Truth, and I’m still kinda proud of the fact nobody jokes about the title — two decades ago, I went that route.

Well, I spent about a year doing local TV in Atlanta after ANN fired me. That was the worst experience of my life, or it was until recently, when I had to spend a couple of months in Belmarsh Prison because the British government didn’t like me interviewing Robby Thomason for the podcast while PJ and I were on our honeymoon.

Anyway, I had something of a celebrity status when I started the site, and I had some really good contacts for breaking news. And I’d known Megan from back in New York; she’d done PR for the New Jersey state lottery, and we’d had some mutual friends, but she and her husband were moving to Atlanta for his job, and she needed something to do, so I hired her to run ad sales. Then I hired Tom LeClair, who was the younger brother of one of my college friends from Vanderbilt and who’d just gotten an MBA at the University of Georgia, to be the business manager.

That was it. It was the three of us, and we started the site. And it … broke even.

It broke even, basically no matter what we did. We grew traffic; it broke even. We sold ads; it broke even. There was always some new expense, some crisis only money would fix, some employee we had to hire.

And I made sure that the folks at Holman Media were paid really well, which might have had something to do with why we always just broke even.

They were worth it.

Tom never lost his cool with me when Pierce would periodically butt in with offers to buy the site and properly capitalize it, and I’d say no, but that was always his recommendation.

But I didn’t want to do it.

Pierce was my roommate in college, and he was the superstar. I was the fun guy who drank his way through school when I wasn’t getting in trouble as the star reporter for the campus newspaper, and then later, as a stringer for the Nashville paper. I felt like I was in his shadow, and when I had an Icarus-style rise and fall in corporate journalism, getting that ANN show before I even turned 30 only to be cast off the air over a stupid fight with the son of the guy who owned the network, I don’t think my ego could stand having to run to Pierce for a bailout.

So we broke even.

I’d been living and funding the company, off the proceeds of the portfolio I’d put together while making the big money for those five years at ANN, for almost 20 years. I hadn’t taken a regular salary from Holman Media, really, ever, and in fact I’d been eating into my savings to cover shortfalls here and there over the time we were in business, before I finally let Pierce help. I paid Tom and Megan, and then Colby Igboizwe, who came on as the editor and who has turned into a world-class replacement for me on the podcast, and all the rest of the company’s crew, instead.

And that investment paid off, in a way, because nobody ever leaves that company. Everybody always talks about how the people they work with are a “family,” and the vast majority of the time it’s bullshit the HR department pushes in between DEI seminars and exit interviews. But with us it really was true.

Which you’d know if you saw the scene when I walked in the door unannounced at the office.

“Oh my GOD!” shrieked Kaylee Russo, the executive director of the Holman podcasts. “You’re HERE!”

And she ran up and almost knocked me down with a huge hug, two steps from the door.

“Hey, Kaylee,” I said. “I was in the neighborhood, and…”

“And everybody here misses you, like so much. You built this place, and we all love you, and now you’re just gone, and…”

“And you’re doing better than you ever did while I was in your hair,” I said. “I watched Colby’s interview with Justin Trudeau yesterday. That was amazing. But why was Trudeau crying?”

“I really don’t know,” she said. “But when Colby brought up Trudeau’s mom’s friendship with Fidel Castro, he got all weepy and he couldn’t stop.”

“Well, it was a crazy-good podcast. You’re killing it, Kaylee. I’m so proud of you, I can’t stand it.”

That earned me a kiss, which mercifully was short because the office was emptying out into the lobby now that the word had leaked that I was there.

And before I knew it, I was shaking hands and giving hugs to the whole staff. It wasn’t exactly a tearful reunion, Kaylee notwithstanding, but there was some emotion.

Before too long, I’d managed to corral the bunch of them into the conference room and gave them a little speech on the Polk Global Freedom Initiative and the culture project. I said that we hadn’t fully formulated a plan, but that it was possible, perhaps, that if we bought one of the media companies that Holman Media might actually end up being a network news operation.

And a funny thing happened when I said that.

“Don’t do that to us,” Colby snorted.

That took me aback.

“Are you kidding, Colb? You don’t want to be Anderson Cooper?”

“I know you’re joking,” he said with a chuckle, “but no. I damn sure don’t. And if you start with the Lester Holt jokes, I’m gonna chase you outta here.”

“There’s definitely a lot to be said for having network resources,” said Megan, “but I think the sentiment is that we don’t need all of that. We’re great in our own little niche where we are.”

“All we really needed was some capital and some turbocharged public attention,” Tom agreed. “When you gave us that, we were off to the races.”

“Here I thought I was going to bring some excitement to you people,” I said. “Like maybe we’d be the Visigoths getting to sack Rome. And it turns out you don’t want to be Romans.”

“Rome has already fallen,” said Sammy Wu, who’s the IT guy for Holman Media. “We don’t need to sack it. And we definitely don’t want to be Romans.”

“I could have gotten a job at that place across town whenever I wanted,” said Kaylee. “Forget that. I don’t want to be them. They suck.”

“Hear, hear,” said Melissa Swindell, whose current job was… I didn’t know. Melissa was my assistant, but after the honeymoon and the time in jail in the UK, and the whirlwind of the aftermath, we really didn’t even have a real position for her anymore, now that I wasn’t working at the company.

Which was something I’d come to Atlanta to talk to her about.

And I did after we finished our sort of surprising staff rebuff of their old boss’ offers of world domination. They hadn’t cleaned out my office, so I dragged Melissa in there.

“What happened to my chair?” I asked as we sat down.

“Colby got it. You’re in his old chair.”

“Mine was better.”

“Oh, I don’t think so. I’m more comfortable in this one.”

“So this is your office now?”

“Well, obviously,” she said. “I mean, I’m your assistant, so I have to do all the Mike Holman things. There’s still a lot of that around here, you know, and Tom and Megan can’t do all of it.”

“That can’t be enough to fill up a whole day, though.”

“Well, no, but I also help Colby with things, because his interns are… not ready. And, you know, Kaylee always needs help, so there’s that. I’m just, ummm, like the Girl Friday around here except I’m also Girl Monday and Girl Tuesday, and…”

“OK, OK, I get it. Look, I’m rapidly getting in over my head with this new project, and I don’t want to have to tackle it with a totally new team, so…”

“Yes.”

“…I was thinking that if you…”

“Yes.”

“…want to come and work for me with the new…”

“Mike! Yes! OK? I’ll do it. I can do all of your Holman Media stuff, plus what you’re gonna be working on is a lot more interesting. I want to come with you.”

“Oh, good.”

“Except you need to give me a raise.”

“Yeah, sure. How much do you want?”

She tucked her chin to her chest like she always did when she got nervous.

“A… hundred grand?”

“One fifty,” I said.

“Oh my God.”

“And you’ll have to move down to Florida, because you aren’t working this job remotely. You’re gonna have to follow me around and pester me about all the details I’m screwing up on, and you can’t do that just in Zoom calls.”

“Done. There are places to live in Jupiter that I can afford?”

“It’s not the Vatican, Melissa.”

She gave a big smile, which turned into a laugh.

“What?” I said.

“I’m gonna be hanging out with you and PJ, and Kaylee is gonna be soooo jealous,” she giggled.

“And now I regret this,” I said.

Kaylee had a massive fangirl crush on PJ. It started when we interviewed her for the podcast right after Trumbull got shot in Indiana, and PJ blew up the internet by turning whistleblower on the Secret Service and how a plot within the agency led to a crazed assassin being let in to nearly kill the candidate. They promised PJ, who was in charge of Trumbull’s security detail, that if she shut up and took the hit for “incompetence,” she’d be taken care of.

They didn’t know PJ very well, and I guess I was the beneficiary of that because after we did that podcast she and I ended up in love, and happily newlywed, and all the things.

I’m not saying Kaylee’s infatuation with PJ played a role in that. Kaylee would probably say it, though.

“OK,” Melissa said. “I need like, I dunno, three days or whatever, to pack up my stuff and then I’ll go down there and help you get going. Where’s the new office?”

“We don’t have it yet.”

“Are you serious right now?”

“I’ve been running it out of my house so far. Haven’t even looked at office space.”

She sighed.

“Hey, I’ve been kinda busy, you know.”

“It’s fine,” she said, putting up a hand to shush me. “I’ll handle it.”

I’d missed Melissa’s 23rd birthday party while I was in Belmarsh, for which she’d made a very dramatic show of forgiving me. But it struck me how old a 23-year-old she was.

Sometimes.