Editor’s Note: This is the fourth 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. In Episode 3, Mike went to Los Angeles in search of allies and partners to begin reforming Hollywood. In Episode 4, however, the scene changes to the corporate boardrooms and the Wall Street trading desks…

—

Jupiter, Florida – February 2, 2025

My flight out of LAX didn’t take off until 10:30 that night thanks to all the delays from the fire and the ICE riot downtown. That meant it was a little after 6:30 the next morning when I finally was able to fetch my stuff at the baggage claim at West Palm Beach International.

And the Uber dropped me off just in time for breakfast.

“Why didn’t you tell me when you were landing?” PJ said when I shuffled my stuff through the front door. “I’d have picked you up!”

“Aww, that’s sweet,” I said, giving her a kiss. “I really missed you.”

“Not as much as I missed you,” she said. “Your breath kinda stinks. And your clothes smell like smoke. Is that from the Palisades fire?”

“More from the burning Waymo and the ICE riot, I think,” I said.

That earned me an unhappy look. And I noticed she had a disheveled air about her that was deeper than just what I’d expect from the old bathrobe, flannel pajama pants, and scuffy slippers she was wearing.

“You seem tired,” I said. “You OK?”

“The dog,” she said, “does not sleep. And it also does not shut up. All night.”

I busted out laughing.

“Unsympathetic?”

“Well,” I said with a chuckle, “I make more than my share of messes. I’m just happy to know I’m not the only guilty one around here.”

Her response was to grab my hand and drag me to the empty spare bedroom on the far side of the house, where she had laid down a giant sheet of visqueen to cover the tile floor and had a dog kennel in the middle of the room.

A little tan-colored gremlin flashed me a toothy grin and wiggled his butt at me.

“Hey, Little Robby,” I said, opening the kennel door and watching the dog scamper out.

PJ just managed to shut the bedroom door before Robby bounded to freedom. That instigated a bout of the zoomies, after which the dog had managed to knock over a water bowl and roll up an edge of the visqueen in one corner. I managed to grab him and pick him up, and immediately regretted it.

“Whoa. He stinks like Tijuana,” I said.

“The vet says kennel-training him is the best way to keep him from peeing all over the house,” said PJ. “But he just pees in the kennel! I don’t think I’m very good at this.”

“You’ll learn,” I said. “Come with me, Robby.”

And I carried the smelly puppy outside, setting him down on the grass. No sooner were all four paws on the ground, he was taking a leak. And he was still taking a leak, spraying everywhere, as he started running all over the back yard.

My phone buzzed. It was a text from Stan.

“Hey,” it said. “I know you probably need a recovery day, but Numakin and Gardocki and I have been working and we need a Zoom ASAP. Got some big-time acquisition stuff going.”

“Let me call you in a bit,” I texted back. “I just got home a few minutes ago and I need to give PJ some attention.”

“No. NO! Dammit!” I could hear her say as a minor splash pulled my eyes off the phone.

Robby was in the pool gleefully teaching himself how to swim, and his little legs were spraying jets of water to and fro.

I looked at PJ and she looked at me, and both of us started laughing. She came over and gave me a hug.

“It’s so good to have you home,” she said, and as I kissed her I watched Robby find the steps in the shallow end of the pool and climb out.

Then he jumped right back in.

“That’s a very spirited dog,” I said. “Usually you want to pick the calmest one in the litter.”

“I don’t think I did,” she said.

“No,” I agreed, as Robby climbed back out of the pool and sank his teeth into one of the deck chairs, attempting to drag it into the water and, thankfully, failing miserably. “I don’t think you did, either.”

“I guess I need to give him a bath,” PJ said sorrowfully, as she broke our embrace. “Did you sleep on the plane?”

“Nope,” I said. “I was reading a movie script called Redemption Run.”

“Are you kidding?”

“You’d actually like this one, I think. I’ll let you read it. It’s about this obnoxious Greta Thunberg-type climate activist who comes to this little town in South Dakota trying to stop an oil pipeline from Canada from coming through. She’s going house to house trying to get the locals to sign a petition that would stop it. But she’s up against this rep from the oil company who wants to build the pipeline. And a bunch of stuff happens, but ultimately she finds out that the NGO she works for is like, fully funded by the billionaire who owns the railroad the oil company is transporting their oil with.”

Her eyes lit up.

“So she isn’t saving the climate at all,” said PJ. “She’s just making the railroad tycoon more money by making sure he gets to move the oil to the refinery.”

“Exactly.”

PJ giggled.

“Oh, that’s a movie worth making.”

“I thought so, too.”

“What’s up with the name? Redemption Run?”

“It’s the name of the town.”

“Ohhhhhkay,” she shrugged.

“Guy gave me the script while I was in the airport lounge waiting for the flight to finally start boarding.”

“What guy?”

“His name is Bradley Crain. He works the gate for Delta. He’s a screenwriter — or he was. XYZ Sidney fired most of the white-dude screenwriters last year, so he’s out of a job in showbiz. But when I checked in at the gate, he asked me if I was the Mike Holman who’s getting into film production and I said yes, and he went on his break, I guess he ran to his locker and came back with a copy of the script and dropped it in my lap.”

“That’s so typical,” she said, and then used her foot to shoo Robby away from the deck chair. His teeth then transferred their allegiance to her scuff slipper, which he ripped from its mooring and escaped away with to another part of the yard.

“Oh my God!” she yelped, giving chase to the little bandit.

“Hey,” I hollered after her. “I hate to abandon you, but I desperately need a hot shower and a change of clothes. And then I need to eat something. And then I need to get on a Zoom call!”

“OK!” I could hear her say from behind the corner of the pool house where Robby had led her. “Give me that, you little monster!”

“OK, I asked Pierce if he could join us on the call,” I said. “I expect we’d want to get his input since we’ll probably want to tap him for cash to make this play.”

“Oh, good,” said Stan. “In the meantime, how was Hollywood?”

“Four weeks of burning a lot more bridges than I built, sorry to say,” I said. “I don’t think the folks out there are very bought in to the idea that they’re destroying our culture.”

“That’s not what you told them, is it?” Gardocki asked.

“Well, not exactly. But I’m pretty sure that’s what they heard. All I did was to say that lots of regular Americans would like to see their values validated rather than questioned, and we think there’s a great deal of commercial success to be had from doing that.”

Numakin chuckled.

“I know, Bernie,” I said. “Almost every one of these people treated me like I was a rube.”

“I apologize that Cousin Eliezar didn’t do better for you,” said Morris. “I told him what you were doing; I guess he didn’t listen.”

“Morris, there’s no need. Elie worked his butt off getting those meetings. I think he emptied out his Rolodex for us. And it was a hell of an education.”

“This worked out perfectly well,” said Numakin. “You smoked out a whole host of people we now know aren’t on board with this project and that’ll save time later.”

“Better to know your enemies up front, for sure,” said Stan.

“Wait, what enemies?” That was Pierce, who had just joined the Zoom.

I introduced him to Gardocki, Morris, and Numakin. He already knew Stan a little and he was very friendly with Melissa. And then I gave a quick recitation of the four weeks in L.A., including the sting of Barry Blondheim that we’d pulled off.

“Flip said he has some more investigating to do before any of this goes up at the Holman Media site, but when it hits it’ll be like a nuke.”

“Holy shit,” said Stan, chuckling. “I thought you were getting out of the reporting business.”

“Shock and awe,” said Pierce. “This is the way.”

“Anyhow,” said Numakin, appointing himself to the role of party-pooper, “we should get this started because we need to agree on a course of action and then begin.”

“Agreed,” said Stan. “So I’ll go first: with the agreement of all here, we’re going to run a hostile takeover of Summit Entertainment.”

“Are we sure it’s the Big Five company we want?” I asked.

Summit, after all, was a fairly unhealthy conglomerate. Its broadcast network was generally last among the big four in the ratings, it had a collection of terrible cable channels nobody watched, Summit Studios was very prestigious but hadn’t turned out any big winner movies in a good while and Summit Plus, its streaming network, was a colossal loser.

And the new CEO, Shri Bundarahman, was not off to a good start, having made a number of less-than-complimentary statements about the majority of American voters who’d elected Trumbull. It didn’t help that Trumbull had filed a lawsuit against Summit’s network news division for a strikingly deceptive edit of an interview they’d done with Pamela Farris.

The raw version of that interview made her out to be an imbecile; she didn’t just misspeak when she said she said Ulaanbaatar was the capital of India, she doubled down and insisted she’d been there.

And she wasn’t lying about that. She had. Apparently she didn’t know she was in Mongolia.

Even worse, she’d also been to New Delhi.

None of that made the air, of course, and when somebody leaked the raw copy after the election all hell broke loose and then came the lawsuit, and Bundarahman’s snippy comments.

I threw all of that out for discussion and noted that part of me just wanted to roast the marshmallows and watch Summit burn.

All true, Numakin was explaining, screen-sharing a blizzard of charts and graphs but showing a series of surveys indicating that Summit’s intellectual property, or IP, which is the industry jargon for creative content, was generally beloved by the public.

“There’s a lot here,” he said, “and while we would want to shed some of it once we can control Summit, returning the company to profitability is quite doable.”

“What about if Trumbull gets rid of the drug ads?” I asked Bernie. “You mentioned that’ll kill all of these companies.”

“The key is to dump salaries and get lean, and work on a subscription-based business model. And merchandising, which we’re building a proposal for.”

“I don’t think we care so much about profit on this,” said Pierce. “We need to think of this as a power move more than a money-making deal.”

“Well,” said Stan, “some of us are putting our own scratch in, so we’re gonna want to make a little money.”

Numakin nodded.

“OK, fair enough,” said Pierce with a chuckle.

“What’s it going to take to pull this off?” asked Stan.

Gardocki then took over, rattling off a list of current Summit investors his intel indicated would vote with our proxy, running through some projections and bringing the train into the station with an estimate.

“We need $2.2 billion,” he said.

“What do you think, Pierce?” I asked.

“We’ll use $200 million from PGFI’s stash, I’ll write a check for another billion. Can we get help for the rest?”

“I said I’d play,” said Stan. “I’ll put $100 million in, and I can maybe raise the rest.”

“I can do $100 million,” Numakin said.

“So we need $800 million,” I said.

“Very doable,” said Gardocki.

“It’s up to you, Mike,” said Pierce. “You’re running this thing. It’s your call. If you think we’re buying this thing only to get saddled with it, then say no now.”

“Well, what’s the recommendation?” I asked the group.

“I think you do it,” said Numakin.

“Yes,” said Stan.

Pierce and Gardocki nodded.

“Somebody is gonna do this,” said Morris. “Might as well be you.”

“But understand,” said Stan, “that if we do this it will get very ugly, very fast. That current board they’ve got at Summit are some dirty SOB’s. We need maximum leverage in minimum time, so if you want in, we move like lightning.”

“OK,” I said. “I guess we need to find $800 million, what, today?”

“We’ll make the calls,” said Numakin.

Melissa ended the Zoom and I rolled my desk chair back from the computer, my heart pounding and my head spinning. PJ came into my office with Robby trailing behind, a stuffed duck in his mouth.

“So did you have fun on your Zoom call, honey?” she said with a smile as she handed me a bottle of Zephyrhills water.

“We’re going to buy Summit Entertainment,” I said. “Or at least, we’re going to try.”

“Oh,” she said, feigning indifference. “That’s nice.”

At least, I thought she was feigning indifference.

“Ow!” I protested as Robby reared up and chomped on my finger. “He bites, huh?”

“He absolutely does.”

So I grabbed Robby by his little snout and held his mouth shut. He began to struggle but I held firm.

“You’re gonna learn some rules,” I said to him calmly. “And Rule Number One is no biting the people.”

I let him go and he tried to nip at me again. So I tackled him.

“Yeah,” PJ said, smiling as I rolled around on the floor with the puppy. “You’re definitely a corporate CEO.”

The next morning, after I’d finally had a chance to recover some semblance of normal sleep, Numakin called.

“I think we’re going to be able to make a move on Movie King,” he said. “My contact at that family firm tells me they’d be willing to unload it, and the chain itself is just about ready for Chapter 11. Management is very much open to working with a new buyer.”

“Great!” I told him. “It turns out that I’ve got an old friend we can bring in to run it.”

Then I told him about Jim Harnett.

Harnett was a guy from back home in Cincinnati. I’d gone to high school with his younger cousin, and Jim was the guy we’d beg to get us beer. Nobody knew it at the time, but that turned out to be a calling of his.

Not contributing to the delinquency of minors. I mean getting people beer.

Jim went to college at Miami of Ohio, and he bought the sports bar right off campus with some money his grandfather left him. He turned the place into an absolute gold mine, and then he opened up locations in Cincinnati, Columbus, and Cleveland.

Then Louisville, Lexington, Indianapolis, Fort Wayne, and Pittsburgh. Then Arlington, Richmond, and Roanoke.

Before long, Ballyard Sports places were all over the country, and at 60, Jim managed to parachute out of the thing with a cool $100 million in cash. I found out that he’d moved down to Palm Beach and I’d reconnected with him late last year.

Harnett told me he really regretted not staying on with Ballyard Sports.

“I’m bored to death playing golf all day,” he said. “It’s like I’ve lost my purpose in life and I’m too damned old to be waiting around to die.”

“Well, obviously you’re going to have to start a new project,” I told him.

“Right. But what?”

When the Movie King thing surfaced, I’d sent Harnett an email floating that idea and asking him if repurposing a chain of movie theaters into, essentially, multi-purpose entertainment venues was something he’d like to do if we could stake him in the venture.

He said it was interesting and he’d think about it.

And on my email when I got back to Jupiter was a PDF from Harnett. It was a prospectus based on five Movie King locations in South Florida and southwestern Ohio that he’d been able to scout in detail based on their layouts.

This was all about turning the theatres into these mind-blowing places for people to meet and hang out; bar and restaurant space, dance clubs, fitness gyms, bowling alleys, game arcades, meeting rooms… and yes, movie theaters.

He was keeping a third to a half of the screens for movies, and in one Movie King place in Miami he was maintaining a space for multipurpose use — it could be a movie theater room but it could also serve as a concert venue. That kind of thing.

Harnett’s idea was that no Movie King would be exactly the same, so there would be a reason for people to frequent multiple locations within a city rather than just the one nearest your house. He also had the idea that the attractions might rotate a little, so you never quite knew what the Movie King place would have to offer and there would always be something new going on there.

So I forwarded that to Numakin after he told me Movie King was in play. And I CC’ed Stan and Gardocki and Pierce.

They went wild over Harnett’s ideas.

Numakin said he’d work his magic, and to stay tuned.

And then I had a Zoom with Nachman and Bradley Crain.

“I got a kick out of Redemption Run,” I told Crain on the call. “It’s a brutally satirical story, which is up my alley, but it’s more like a true-to-life drama than a real comedy. It reads like you put your heart into writing it.”

Nachman, to whom I’d FedExed my copy after making Melissa Xerox the thing, wholeheartedly agreed.

“I’d say that’s what I do with all my screenplays,” said Crain, “but I’d be lying if I did. This one has a special edge to it because it’s somewhat autobiographical.”

“In what sense?” asked Nachman.

“Well, we have a family farm back in South Dakota, a place we call Redemption. It’s wheat and hogs, mostly. Anyway, Keystone XL was supposed to come through on the property and we were going to get a million-dollar royalty out of it. That went away when Omobba and then Deadhorse blocked the project.”

“Don’t tell me you lost the farm over this,” said Nachman.

“Nah, nothing like that, but my brother — he’s got the farm — was going to get out of debt with it, and of course he couldn’t. Those interest payments we’d have saved would be like another salary coming in.”

“Well, we want to buy it,” I said.

“Would you take 250K for it?” Nachman asked Crain.

“Yeah,” he said. “Plus 5 percent of the gross.”

“How about the net?” Nachman countered.

“OK.”

“We’ll want you on the project as a consultant,” Nachman said. “We’ll get you on location and we’ll want you around for pre- and post-production. Two thousand a week, plus expenses.”

“I’m in,” said Crain. “Hell, if you want to put me on staff at Belmarsh Entertainment, I’m open to that as well.”

“We’ll chew on that,” I said. “Thanks, Bradley.”

Nachman and I stayed on the call after Crain got off.

“I need a couple million bucks,” Nachman told me.

“Who doesn’t?” I said.

“There’s an industrial park on the outskirts of Corpus. It’s got some big, tall warehouses that are perfect to turn into sound stages. It’s sort of beat-up, but it’s an awfully good site to build a campus in. The local government is offering some terrific incentives for a buildout and it’s for sale right now, ready to go.”

So I gave the OK for that, and a little while later Santiago sent me two selfies — one of him standing on some desolate beach, I’m assuming in South Texas somewhere, and the second was the same picture with a beat-up old Arabic-looking fortress Photoshopped into the background.

And it looked real as hell.

“I get it,” I texted him back. “Looks good.”

“We’re gonna be moving very, very fast,” he messaged next.

So I sent him the contact information for Ted Kournis, who was the lead project manager for Sentinel Construction and who had run the construction project to build Liberty Point in the middle of the jungle in Guyana. I texted Ted and told him Santiago was going to hit him up and that he needed a contact with the company who could work miracles over in Texas.

“Making movies?” Kournis texted back. “That’s so cool. I’ll hook him up.”

And after that, I had to hustle down to the Club at Admiral’s Cove, because we’d booked the VIP room for me to do a podcast interview with Theo Von, whose producer said he was going to bill this as “Makin’ Movies Safe For Rednecks Again.”

I’d love to report that things took off from there. They almost did.

We did get Movie King. Numakin closed a great deal — a controlling interest in the chain for only $46 million plus assumption of debt, which was a lot, but Gardocki was very bullish on the fundamentals.

So was Stan. Especially when I bugged Kournis again and hooked him up with Harnett. Within a couple of days Sentinel Construction had a team tearing apart the Movie King cineplex in Fort Lauderdale to build it out into a movie house/fitness club/game arcade/restaurant.

The last part was exceptionally cool. The plans were to turn one of the theater spaces into a fake-outdoor German beer garden, and the cuisine would be, like Harnett said, “the Tex-Mex of German food.” The concept stuff reminded me a little of the Le Central Bar at Paris Las Vegas, which if you’ve ever been gives off the momentary illusion of being at an outside café along the Seine.

And they went so fast reworking that big place it practically made my head spin. Harnett was pulling all-nighters over there getting his prototype project off the ground in Fort Lauderdale, and they would have had it back open by the beginning of March but for his need to go slow in staffing up the place.

Buzz was building, and quickly. So much so that there were actually crowds of gawkers at times who showed up looking for clues as to what was going into the Movie King. Local news tried to get it out of Harnett in an interview; he was cagey as hell and said he wouldn’t divulge his secrets even under torture.

So that was great stuff.

And then came the bad news.

“We’re losing out on Summit,” Stan called to tell me at the end of February.

It wasn’t a total surprise. Bundarahman had gone on Fox Business with Maria Bartiromo the previous morning, and, amid a brutal interview about the Trumbull lawsuit and yet another box-office disaster — they’d cast Jennifer Lopez as a Roman gladiator who beats up all the dudes and then escapes from the Colosseum riding on the back of a lion, and you can imagine how well that did — he said he had “utmost confidence” that the takeover fight would go his way.

And the word on the street was that institutional capital was moving to bolster management’s hold.

Gardocki confirmed that. “If I lose this to RedGuard after they took my job,” he said, “it’s gonna get real spicy around here.”

Still, only a couple of days earlier Stan and Numakin were both confident Summit would be ours. And John Nolte put out a column at Breitbart trashing Bundarahman and touting his soon-to-come ouster.

Now Stan was saying it was all a bust.

“What happened?” I whined. “I thought we were locked in for the $2.2 bil.”

“We were, but now we’re locked out.”

“Well, that’s disappointing. How’d we get locked out?”

“RedGuard. Who do you think? The SOB’s have been quietly buying every share they could, but this morning they opened the floodgates. They’re now holding 15 percent of the stock and that’s enough to block our play. Just barely.”

“Well, where are we?”

“Our group is holding about 47 percent of the shares. And now that everybody knows Summit is in play, the stock price has shot up from $10.40 to just over $14.”

“Well, should we get a Zoom together and try to play over the top?”

“I wouldn’t. For one thing I don’t think it’ll work. RedGuard is Bundarahman, and Bundarahman is RedGuard. They’ve got a majority of the shares locked in. We’re not gonna be able to get control.”

“Well, that sucks.”

“Plus, honestly, I don’t think this is the best use of our money at $14. And Bernie and Trent agree.”

“So what do we do?”

“Unload that stock tomorrow morning until it drops to $12. We’ll walk out with a tidy little profit, and we’ll still hold enough equity that if something changes we can mount another attack.”

“All right, I guess. At least we’ll make money.”

“This is how the game works. And it isn’t over. Sometimes these mergers can take years. It’s not like Summit is going to magically reinvent itself the way, for example, Harnett’s doing with Movie King. You hit a home run with that, by the way. I’ve heard what he’s working over there is nothing short of magical.”

“That’s good to hear. Still, this is disappointing. We’re gonna look like little kids who just got our lunch money stolen.”

“Never fear, Mike. I’ve got something else.”

“You do?”

“Yep. Stay tuned. In fact, let’s meet at the PGFI office at 9 tomorrow. We’ll get Bernie and Pierce to come in remotely.”

I flipped the TV in my study onto CNBC, and there was my face on the screen. The panel was talking about me and basically cheering RedGuard’s victory, and the chyron below said “Holman Falls From Summit.”

“Very freakin’ funny,” I groused.

“So this isn’t going to happen?” PJ, who had just come in wearing a very well-fitting tennis dress, asked me.

“Nope,” I said. “And now I’m a laughingstock on the business channels.”

“Awww,” she said, planting a kiss on my cheek. “If it makes you feel any better, I don’t think you’re a laughingstock.”

“Thank you, PJ.”

She said she was off to the club for tennis lessons, and then she was hitting Whole Foods to pick up stuff for dinner.

“You’re grilling steaks tonight. You can manage that without somebody stealing them from you, right?”

I gave her an amused, fake pissed-off look.

“My wife is so mean,” I said. “I’m gonna completely burn your steak.”

She laughed, and kissed me again, and then she told me she loved me. Then she was off.

And I spent the rest of the day doomscrolling on the internet and watching the legacy corporate media have a ball roasting PGFI, and me personally, for having taken it in the shorts on the Summit merger. We’d agreed in an email chain that none of us was going to comment to the media, so I had to rebuff the dozen or so interview requests that came in, mostly from unfriendly sources.

And that was hard, because Jim Cramer called our Summit fiasco an “avalanche” and said I was a “blogger” who “ought to go back to the internet, where he isn’t completely out of his depth.”

And it got harder late in the afternoon.

Bundarahman gave an interview to Bloomberg where he cast the whole thing in terms of the defenders of the city holding off the barbarians at the gates and breaking the siege.

“You pompous little shit,” I yelled at the TV, and that woke Robby up from his doggie bed. All of a sudden he was pawing at me, like he thought I was mad at him again.

Hey, the dog’s bowel control was, in a word, shitty. Being mad at him was not an infrequent, or unjustifiable, state of play, as evidenced by the placement of paper towels and all-purpose cleaner in every room of the house.

I decided to let him outside, which as it turned out was very, very good timing, as that might have been the only time he let loose outside of the house that day.

And the next morning, Trent and Stan and I were in the newly decorated conference room in the PGFI offices munching on apple turnovers and drinking coffee when Numakin and Pierce showed up virtually simultaneously on the big screen along the left wall.

“Stine-Warmer,” said Stan. “They’re our next target.”

“Hell, yeah,” I said. “How do we avoid another RedGuard ambush?”

“We’ll dig deeper this time,” said Numakin. “Stine-Warmer’s a different beast. They’re more stable management-wise, they’ve got a rich vault of IP. It’s a better company. But it’s still ripe. We play this smart, apply some lessons we’ve just learned, and we’ll get this one.”

Pierce nodded. “Don’t get down about Summit. We only have to hit on one of these. They have to block us on all five. And I don’t think they can.”

Another day, another siege, I thought, taking a bite off my pastry. Maybe this time, we’ll finally storm some gates.

Liberty Point, Guyana – March 10, 2025

We couldn’t seize control over Stine-Warmer, either. Everybody in our group was really downcast about that.

But how we lost it, at least for me, was the worst of all.

To explain this, I need to go back about 20 years. You probably know that I was only 28 years old when I got hired to host Mike Holman Tells The Truth on ANN — and that I was 32 when I got booted off the air, which led to this journey in independent media that ultimately led to where we were.

Logan Rudolph was the reason for the latter event.

Logan is a sniveling, entitled piece of shit. That’s not just my opinion; most people think that of him. I’m just especially vehement in saying it.

Logan’s father was Irving Rudolph, who founded Rudolph Media Group. It’s perhaps best known as a book publisher, but that’s only a little piece of its action. Rudolph Media owns newspapers and magazines, a radio network, and the American News Network. ANN is a strange bird in the cable news world, in that it’s generally pretty good about taking a position in the ideological middle. It’s not fabulously profitable; what ANN does tremendously well is promote the living shit out of the books its personalities write.

They’ve basically owned that TV-to-book space for 25 years and it’s made them a killing.

Irving was an asshole, but he was absolutely brilliant. Logan is a lot bigger asshole but is not brilliant at all.

And Logan, who was around my age, hated me from the very beginning. He hated ANN hiring me as a correspondent when I was 25 and had begun making a name for myself as a freelance journalist getting stuff published in reputable outlets both on the right and left, he hated it when ANN started plugging me in as a guest host when their regular talent would go on vacation, and he really hated it for me to take over at 8 p.m. Eastern Time with my own show.

And he hated that the show was massively successful.

Logan had no official role at ANN. He was an executive vice president of Rudolph Media Group, so it’s not like he didn’t belong in the building, and everybody knew he was the heir apparent atop the company. So when he’d just roam the hallways harassing people and giving them a piece of his mind, they were all like, “Yes, Mr. Rudolph.” I’d run into him, or he’d poke his nose in my office, or worse, he’d summon me to his, and he’d come up with some nitpicky critique or other of the show.

I did my best to keep the peace with him. I got the impression there was some itch Logan couldn’t ever scratch. I think he wanted to be on TV, but in Irving’s view that was something you hired the help to do.

The fact that Logan had a squeaky, girlish voice and beady eyes like a caricature of a used car salesman also made his worth as on-air talent somewhat less than his ego and ambition would otherwise favor.

So he fell back on the fact that his daddy’s money and his impeccable educational credentials — Phillips Exeter, Oxford, Harvard Business School, Yale Law — made him the crustiest of upper-crusters. And my perfectly respectable middle-to-upper-middle class background — Catholic school in Cincinnati, Vanderbilt and a mountain of student debt for college — didn’t make me, in Logan’s eyes, the kind of person who would have a higher profile in that building than he had.

Which was stupid. Everybody with a show at ANN had a higher profile than Logan did. That’s how TV works. But the rest of the on-air gang at that network was older and they were all happy to be right where they were. I, on the other hand, was on a rocket.

And Logan simply could not stand that.

My agent and I were negotiating with Rudolph Media to begin cranking out books and documentary films. The trade media kept talking about how I was going to be the richest property in all of journalism when my contract came up and that ANN wouldn’t have enough money to keep me.

Logan couldn’t stand it.

And, to be fair, I was something of an asshole myself. I had a chip on my shoulder, mostly because as quickly as I was rising I was still very much in Pierce’s shadow. He was my college roommate, after all, and while I might have been the youngest prime time host on cable news that wasn’t exactly a resume that matched up with the eight or ten billion dollars Pierce had already made with Sentinel Security, Sentinel Web Services and Sentinel Port Management by then. So I was hyperaggressive about making myself as big a swinging dick as I could.

And I leaned into my man-of-the-people thing, because (a) it was authentic, (b) it sold, and (c) it utterly infuriated Logan, who wouldn’t stop saying so all over the building.

Then I met Lisa, who was a Manhattan socialite with the Ivy League pedigree and all the right connections, and I figured that was a perfect box to check off. We weren’t dating for three months before I popped the question and she said yes. Her mom (Lisa’s dad was never part of the picture but he didn’t need to be; not with the kind of money that family had) spent $80,000 on the wedding.

And my mom said we wouldn’t last six months.

She was wrong. We lasted seven months.

That’s when I found out Lisa was cheating on me with a performance artist from Greenwich Village. I told my mom I couldn’t believe it, but actually I completely could. Lisa said I was too boring for her, and that our values weren’t “sympatico.”

I agreed and I threw her out.

And then Logan brought her to the Rudolph Media Group New Year’s Eve party, and he made a big show, amid the clinking of champagne glasses and the sequin dresses, and Michael Buble getting ready to start his second set on the stage, of groping Lisa in front of everybody.

She wasn’t unhappy about that. Lisa’s signature mistake was believing that her ability to shock people made her interesting. I’ll hold off on commenting further about that, other than to say it was a significant factor in making our relationship toxic. There’s only so much avant-garde bullshit you can stand before it gets very, very old.

But I had to play white-knight anyway.

I was drunk, and I was still very messed up about Lisa, and the fact that Logan was doing that to her in front of the whole party was, I knew, a direct challenge to me. So I went up to him and instructed him that nobody wanted to see his hands where he was putting them.

His response was to tell me to do something anatomically implausible.

“Let me put this another way,” I said. “Take it somewhere else or I’ll break you in half.”

Back then I was doing a little taekwondo, and it wasn’t an idle threat. I’d have ruined Logan’s day, and he knew it. So he melted away, and I got a lot of attaboys from the ANN staffers at the party.

They all hated Logan. I’m not saying they loved me; as I said I wasn’t all that lovable back then. But I was definitely in the right at that party. Even Irving said so, in an email the next day actually thanking me for standing up to Logan’s embarrassing behavior.

Nevertheless, five days later I still got shitcanned. I showed up to do show-prep and Terry, who had the front desk on the 9th floor of Rudolph Tower where ANN’s studios were, gave me a hangdog face as I came off the elevator.

“I’m sorry, Mike,” she said, “but you can’t go in.”

“Why not?” I said.

She handed me an envelope, which contained a very curt one-page letter from Irving thanking me for my service at ANN but saying that they were going in another direction and that they’d be in touch with my lawyer to negotiate a settlement of my contract.

And then a couple of security guys in navy blazers brought out a dolly with three boxes of my stuff, which they put into a cab along with me and sent me back to my apartment on Central Park West.

That night I got a phone call from Logan, who was drunk as Cooter Freaking Brown, laughing and talking shit about how I’d been put in my place and I could go back to the small-time where I belonged. I should have recorded the call, but that was my rookie mistake.

Anyway, I considered that the smart move was to disengage and then rebuild away from Rudolph Media. I sold the apartment as fast as I could, got out of New York and moved back to Cincinnati for a while. At that point Dad’s cancer had flared up and it was clear he wasn’t going to beat it this time, so I spent three months reconnecting with him and healing the wounds of our somewhat turbulent relationship.

He couldn’t stop telling me how proud he was of me. I had to swallow hard, because I was at a low point in my career. I’d expected my phone would be ringing off the hook with offers that would kick in as soon as my national-media non-compete ran out, and instead I was radioactive. Logan had put on the full-court press.

But he was proud of me anyway. And my Dad, who’d been divorced and remarried to Mom on account of his infidelities, knew that I wasn’t all that proud of him.

That, and all the stuff which went with it, tore me up. All this time later I think I’m still processing it.

Anyway, he passed the day before the Reds’ season opener in 2005. After the funeral, Mom told me that my “life reset” was over, and there were no excuses left, and what I did next would determine whether my Dad’s pride in me would mean something.

So I moved down to Atlanta and got a job with WSB-TV there through a couple of friends. That was the only real opportunity I had.

I figured I’d do local news better than the shlubs in that market and vault right back into the national media as soon as my non-compete expired. I was still that arrogant, but I found out pretty quickly that nobody in the news business gave a damn about Mike Holman anymore.

Instead, I started Holman Media. And you know the rest.

Meanwhile, Irving Rudolph dropped dead in 2016 and Logan took over the company.

Twenty years later he’s still an asshole, and he’s still not brilliant, but he managed not to crash Rudolph Media after Irving kicked the bucket. Logan Rudolph is the single largest reason I hate corporate media, and he was even more entrenched now than he was that night in Rudolph Tower.

And Rudolph Media now owns Stine-Warmer. That’s who we lost the takeover bid to.

Stine-Warmer’s stock had been in the toilet for years when Stan turned our guns on it. The day he announced we were going to make our move, STWM was sitting at $10.12 a share, which was an all-time low. They’d had a whole series of box-office bombs, their streaming revenue was practically nil, cable ratings for the host of networks they operated were horrific.

You’d wonder why anybody would want them.

But the IP library was just about the best there was. When Stan brought up the possibility of getting that company, it really got me thinking about Hank’s crazy CASTR app and what we could do with all those old movies if we picked up the rights through an acquisition of a company like Stine-Warmer.

We all agreed we should be able to get that company cheaper than Summit would have been. Numakin ran the numbers, and Stan and Gardocki both agreed, that a $2 billion tender should have been enough to pull it. That was a 20 percent premium over the existing stock price.

We were convinced that part of what killed us with Summit was we had investors we’d drummed up who got blabby, and that was how RedGuard sniffed out our play and was able to get the drop on us. Gardocki said it was crucial that we avoid that problem this time around.

So Pierce said he’d front the whole $2 billion. “We’ll have better operational security and fewer leaks if we do it this way,” he said.

But Numakin and Stan both said they’d take a $100 million piece each; they wanted to play.

I had visions of updated, AI-enhanced and colorized, rereleased old classic movies from Stine-Warmer’s catalog, starring current actors, popping out at Movie King places. Harnett had an even more fun idea — some law firm or dentist’s office or insurance brokerage would pick an old movie and cast everybody in the office in the roles and then rent out a theater for an office party-slash-movie premiere.

“Jesus,” I said. “How much fun would that be for the folks?”

“Well, are you gonna buy that app?” Harnett asked.

“Not until I have access to a film catalog, but we did front Hank some cash to keep it developing. He did up a convertible debenture agreement for us and we’re gonna do it that way.”

We had a good plan, and we executed it about as well as it could be executed.

But a couple of days after news of our tender hit, the stock jumped past $13.50 a share, and Stan said we were in trouble.

“Somebody else is in this,” he said, “and it’s a problem.”

Not long after, I got a call from Paul Rinker, who was a vice president at ANN. Rinker and I had stayed friendly, and he kept me in the know about Logan’s prick antics.

“Are you trying to buy Stine-Warmer?” he said.

“No comment,” I told him. “Why?”

“Because Logan thinks you are, and he’s hell-bent on taking it away from you.”

“Is that so?”

“Oh, yeah. It’s amazing how all these years later he still has a hard-on for you.”

“I would guess it’s only gotten worse over the last year or so.”

“Oh, 100 percent.”

I thanked him for the news and immediately told the crew.

And on the Zoom which came a little while later, Gardocki’s face was ashen.

“RedGuard was bad, but Logan’s syndicate’s worse,” he said. “They’ve got 20 percent locked.”

“How?” I said.

“It looks like they’re all in,” said Stan. “Logan’s leveraging the shit out of Rudolph Media to raise cash for this. Half the banks on the Street have gotten tapped in the last couple of days, my sources tell me.”

Not an hour later, it was all over the business channels and the internet: Rudolph Media Group bid $2.3 billion, outpacing our $2 billion.

On CNN, the chyron screamed “PGFI’s Stine-Warmer Stumble.” I stared, stunned. Bloomberg had some media law professor from Cornell whom I’d never heard of calling me a “neophyte” and saying I had the “gang who couldn’t shoot straight” flailing around in an industry we knew nothing about.

And then, that night, Logan gloated about the Stine-Warmer bid on ANN.

“Some never learn their place,” he said. “Mike Holman has always been glib and brash, but there has never been much substance to him. And he’s been bested once again.”

I used the remote to throw my best fastball, cracking the TV.

“Are you kidding me?” PJ said, her mouth agape at me.

“Sorry,” I said. “That won’t happen again. Hey, let’s go to Best Buy!”

I felt so low about the whole thing that I splurged on the 98-inch Samsung Neo QLED model. Hey, it was only $9,200.

PJ let me do it.

“At least I’ll know you won’t throw the remote at this thing,” she said.

She could tell I was crushed, losing that takeover bid to Logan F**king Rudolph. I’d never gone into the detail of all that history, but of course I poured it out to her that night as we sat on the deck drinking a bottle of Duckhorn merlot and watching Robby shred his stuffed duck.

“Wow,” she said. “Can I help?”

“Don’t let me get discouraged,” I said. “That might take some work.”

So she kept me away from TV and the internet all the next day, because PGFI was getting flattened by the talking heads. It was bad. Somebody asked Trumbull about the Summit and Stine-Warmer takeovers, and he didn’t pile on.

At least, not really.

“The corporate takeover stuff,” he said, sucking air between his teeth, “is rough. Those are some tough people to play in the sandbox with. I’m rooting for Mike and Pierce and my guy Bernie Numakin, though. They’re great people and I know they’ll be successful.

“Just, uhhhh, not today.”

The whole White House press corps broke out laughing.

I’m glad I didn’t see it. But after that happened, the phone rang. It was Pierce. I didn’t answer. I couldn’t.

So he called PJ instead, and she gave her phone to me.

“I can’t today, Pierce,” I said.

“Listen, I get it. I could tell you that Stine-Warmer isn’t worth $19 a share, but I know…”

“$14 a share.”

“Oh, no. It’s $19 today. The Street is buying Stine-Warmer like mad ever since Logan made his tender. And we’ve made a killing on the sellback.”

“Huh.”

That did take the sting off, I guess. But I was still seething.

“Anyway, that’s not why I called. I want to see if you and PJ want to come down to Liberty Point for the weekend. I thought we’d see if Bernie and Stan and your guy Trent want to come as well.”

“Down to the jungle to lick our wounds?”

“Just, y’know, get away for a couple of days and do some brainstorming. Maybe let’s get Jim Harnett and Rod Nachman down as well. I understand your guy Santiago has already got the William Eaton thing in pre-production, which is fantastic.”

PJ was nodding at me. “Let’s go to Liberty Point,” she whispered.

“I dunno, Pierce. Sure.”

“Look, you’re down about this, and it’s totally understandable why. I’ve never even met Logan Rudolph and I hate the sonofabitch anyway. But what I really want you to do, particularly now, is stop for a minute.”

“Part of me wants to stop for longer than that,” I said.

“Yeah, fine. But think about what we’ve already done. You’ve got a film production company going with a movie already in production, we have a theater chain that’s going to crush it and everybody knows that, and even though we’re 0-for-2 in trying to get a media company, we’ve scared the shit out of these people and forced them to commit way more capital than they should to keep us out. Both RedGuard and Rudolph considerably overpaid in these deals.”

I gave a disgruntled “hmmmmph,” like I frequently do in such situations.

“Mike, we’ve made a couple hundred million selling back some of the stock in these two companies after our bids didn’t get us there. You’re bummed out because a bunch of TV brokedicks are shit-talking you, but you made more money the last six weeks than the lot of them will ever make in their lifetimes. Don’t forget that.”

“Pierce, I appreciate it. But we have a mission to accomplish here, and I’m not sure we’ve accomplished anything with these two bids.”

“We own a double-figure share of both those two companies,” Pierce said. “Don’t think that won’t make a difference eventually.”

I told him I’d round up the crew and we’d set up a time to fly down there. Trent and Stan and their wives were ecstatic. Bernie had to move things around, but he did it. Morris bitched about how he hated to fly, but he came anyway. And Melissa enthusiastically organized the whole thing.

So after the pieces came together, Pierce sent his new G700 and we all flew from the West Palm Beach airport to Liberty Point on a Saturday morning.

I hadn’t been there since October. I barely recognized the place.

Liberty Point is barely two years old. Pierce and his guys from Sentinel Construction carved it out of a thick jungle at the confluence of the Potaro and Essequibo Rivers in the middle of Guyana. They turned just about the thickest rain forest imaginable into what I can best describe as a Mediterranean paradise that looks like it would fit pretty well along the Amalfi coast or the French Riviera. It’s got wide boulevards lined with palm trees, the classic red tile roofs, fountains and statues, including a gigantic 200-foot high Liberty Torch, which is a bronze figure of a hand holding a torch that’s lit every night, with a natural gas line feeding the thing.

Utterly beautiful.

You fly into Connor Polk International Airport, which Pierce named for his dad, and because it’s pretty rainy there, the pilot pulls the plane into one of three gigantic hangars they’ve got set up. And you get off the plane and walk down the stairs they roll up to the door, and they escort you to the bar along the far wall where you have a seat in a comfy chair. They’ll make you a mojito or a capirinha or a Bloody Mary, and you then wait for them to load your bags into one of the SUV’s lined up just on the other side of the big automatic sliding glass doors set up just past the bar.

Then you get in, and your driver gives you a ride down this little highway which opens into a wide main drag into town a few miles away from the airport.

And where you usually end up, or at least where I usually end up, is the Liberty Lodge, which is the first of the big hotels Pierce built.

The Liberty Lodge is more like a really high-end condo place than a hotel. It’s a four-story building along the Essequibo which actually hangs out over the river so that people can moor their boats in this little covered marina that leads into the building. And it’s got a huge bar and restaurant on the first floor with a couple of hundred very, very nice condos Pierce will book his guests into. And then there’s a rooftop VIP club.

I’m told they’re selling condos in the Liberty Lodge for 800 grand now. I don’t doubt it.

This was the fourth or fifth time PJ and I had stayed there. We’d also stayed at the Grand Waica Hotel, which was where Pierce had his place in the penthouse before he finished his villa on a hill overlooking the Essequibo a little south of the city.

The reason I say I almost didn’t recognize Liberty Point isn’t so much that they’d built the place up — they had, and it was probably twice the size it had been four months earlier – but instead that it was absolutely crawling with people.

Melissa, Trent and his wife Caroline, PJ, and I were riding in the same SUV, and I asked Curtis, a very cool ex-Airborne Ranger from East St. Louis who was our driver, what was with the population as we made our way through the town.

“Well, on Monday the Exchange of the Americas opens,” he said, so this is all the brokers and traders from all over the U.S. and Latin America coming in. They decided they’d have a festival this weekend to celebrate the market’s opening. Tyler Childers and Darius Rucker are playing at the ampitheater on the river tonight, along with some Cuban band from Miami.”

“Sounds pretty cool, Mike,” said PJ in her cheer-your-ass-up voice. I nodded dutifully.

We all got checked in to our condos, and along with the wine-and-charcuterie basket laid out on the kitchen counter for us was an envelope inviting us to a “siesta” at the rooftop club.

And that’s where we saw Pierce. Of course that led to an embarrassing bear hug, and an even more embarrassing applause from the hundred or so Liberty Point swells already there.

It was a nice little moment, and definitely a needed respite from the continuing, if by now imaginary, assault Logan Rudolph was making on my ego. Having a host of people I knew or had met kissing my ass and calling me a hero was certainly different from how I’d spent most of the year to date.

And I got to see my buddy Roman Jefferson, who was Pierce’s chief badass security operative guy. Roman had a long list of exploits, some he could acknowledge and most he couldn’t. Including, it’s rumored, that he took out Venezuela’s dictator Nicolae Madiera with an almost impossible sniper shot and in doing so ended the war between that country and Guyana. And, not a rumor, Roman engineered my escape from Belmarsh Prison in London last year when the Stormer government decided that my doing a podcast interview with the nationalist activist Robby Thomason constituted a terrorist plot.

Pierce had managed to put enough pressure on the British government after that jailbreak to make that legal situation – and Stormer, for that matter – go away. There wasn’t a lot he couldn’t do.

With the exception of the thing he’d enlisted me to do for him, unfortunately.

“Man,” Roman was saying, “I knew you’d go Hollywood sooner or later. You should be acting in those movies you’re going to make.”

“Psh,” I said. “I don’t think so. What I need to do is get the rights to your story. We’ll get Denzel to play you and we’ll make a billion dollars.”

“Yeah, dude, no. I could tell you, but then I’d have to kill you.”

“Which would be a perfect title.”

“Sadly, no,” he said. Though I do think he was serious about the sadly part.

PJ insisted on hanging out with Roman and his wife while I went into my business meeting with Pierce. That was fine with me — the people Roman couldn’t make completely safe were usually people Roman would intentionally make very much the opposite.

In any event, Pierce got us together in the glassed-in conference suite in the rooftop club, and he had his assistant, a very cute dark-skinned girl named Courtney who had a delightful Guyanese accent, hit a dimmer that changed the tint of the glass so nobody in the party outside could see in. Courtney smiled at us, said she’d be outside if we needed anything, and left.

And it was Pierce, me, Trent, Stan, Numakin, Morris, Nachman, Harnett, and a couple of others — Walter Green, who was Sentinel Telecommunications’ CEO, and Pierce’s older brother Harrison, who was chief legal counsel for Mainsail Capital, a well-heeled hedge fund out of Connecticut.

“Guys,” said Pierce, “I just wanted to get everybody together for a vision-storm. I hope you’re all comfortable and settled in for the weekend, and whatever we do here right now I want you most of all to enjoy the trip.”

“It’s all first-class, Pierce,” said Stan. “As always.”

Everybody nodded.

“What’s… you called this a vision-storm?” Gardocki asked.

“Yeah,” said Pierce. “It’s one of my little things I do. We’re not just brainstorming. We’re jumping back to 30,000 feet and re-examining our project to see if we can’t re-center ourselves.”

“Guess we could use that,” I said.

“Mike’s a little busted up about the Stine-Warmer mess,” Pierce said, “because he’s got a long personal thing with Logan Rudolph. You’ll have to forgive him if he hasn’t processed this thing fully.”

“I haven’t, either,” said Numakin. “The statements he’s made in the trade press are utterly unacceptable.”

“They’re on brand for him, trust me,” I said.

“All right,” Pierce said. “Forget that prick. We’re moving forward. So let’s take it from the top. Why are we here?”

“Fixing American culture, and Western culture along with it,” said Harrison. “And what you’re working on now is only a little piece of that.”

“Exactly,” said Pierce. “And Bernie, your formulation of doing that in media is exactly right.”

Numakin nodded. Then Pierce gave him a look which said “now is when you restate that formulation for the group,” so he did.

“Seize the means of production and distribution,” he said, “and develop, nurture, capture and leverage cultural talent along the way.”

“So where are we so far?” said Pierce.

“Well,” I said, “On production we’ve got Rod Nachman here. He’s the new CEO of Belmarsh Entertainment. Rod, do you want to talk real quick about what we’ve got rolling?”

Nachman smiled and said “sure,” and then he ran down what he was doing with Belmarsh, including the latest on Desert Odyssey.

“We’ve got our William Eaton, by the way,” he said.

“Big star?” said Pierce.

“No,” Nachman said with a smile. “First-timer.”

“Really? A no-name?”

“Not exactly. Parker Stone. That name ring a bell?”

“The, uhhh… quarterback?”

Stone had been a prolific passer at Texas Tech, and then he’d been the perfect embodiment of an NFL journeyman. He’d been in and out of the league for 12 years, playing with nine different teams and completing a grand total of 15 passes in 23 attempts with one career touchdown in all that time.

Then he’d gotten into coaching, and within three years his high school team from the exurbs of Denver had won the Colorado Class 3A state championship — and that led to his firing when somebody posted a video of him leading the kids in a prayer of thanks in the locker room. The school district spouted some bullshit about the Establishment Clause, and that was that.

So Stone and his wife decided to get in an RV and ride all over the western United States, stopping at all kinds of tourist attractions, natural wonders, and so on and doing little podcast episodes about them. They were hilarious. He had a very Mike Rowe style to him, which fit perfectly with the fact that he was 6’4″ and 230 pounds and looked like a marble statue.

PJ loved Stone’s podcasts and she had turned me on to them. I in turn had shared a couple with Santiago — not necessarily with an eye toward casting or anything, just as a “hey, check this out” thing.

I didn’t even know that he was going to make Stone into William Eaton. Hearing Nachman say that brought a smile to my face.

“He’ll be perfect,” Nachman said.

Then he talked about Redemption Run, Crain’s screenplay, and the conversation he’d had with Armando Iannucci about directing it. Iannucci told Nachman he loved the script. So did Ryan Gosling’s agent.

“But we’re going to have a problem,” said Nachman. “This is the kind of project Barry Blondheim can crush.”

“When is Blondheim’s wokefest movie coming out?” I asked him.

“They’ve had some post-production issues. End of March.”

“Yeah,” I said. “He’s going to be well taken care of by then.”

Everybody around the table knew about Flip’s expose of Blondheim and the Boys’ Club that was set to splash on Holman Media the next week.

Next up was distribution. That was Harnett’s turn, and he was a ball of energy as he talked about the opening of the new Movie King entertainment center in Fort Lauderdale, with the plans to convert the whole chain to the new format within 18 months. Harnett said the first location was selling club memberships, which had all kinds of premium benefits, for $200 a year — and they were going fast.

But then Pierce jumped in and turned the floor over to Walter Green, and there was some news.

“We’re ready to purpose our satellite network for consumer use,” he said.

“Wait. Pierce, this was something you bluffed at last year when you were fighting with the Deadhorse administration,” I said. “This is real now?”

“We can turn it on with the flip of a switch,” he said.

Green jumped in, explaining that Sentinel used a LEO, region-optimized constellation with dynamic orbit-sync tech which gave their network near-stationary coverage over North America. None of us understood what the hell that meant.

“We have 2,400 satellites flying in low orbit,” said Pierce, “and they hand-off signals to each other using advanced AI technology to combine to give coverage everywhere in the U.S., Canada, and Mexico. All you need to access the network is a $99 terminal which looks like an Etch-a-Sketch on a movable stand.”

“We’ll be able to offer 300 Mbps download speed in optimal conditions to everyone in North America as soon as this network is turned on,” said Green. “Our defense-grade satellites use encrypted laser links and military bandwidth. And our quantum relay system triples data density, like a space highway for data, so 300 Mbps is just the start.”

Nobody had a clue what that meant. But it sounded bad-ass.

“I’ll boil this down,” said Pierce. “By later this year we’re going to be able to offer the American public nationwide coverage for Wi-Fi internet faster than you can get from the cable company at half the cost.”

“Well, that creates some possibilities,” said Numakin.

“I wasn’t going to move forward with this while Deadhorse was in office,” said Pierce, “but the current administration is a little different.”

“Really, really would have been nice to have Summit or Stine-Warmer to pair with that,” I groused.

“We own the skies, Mike,” said Pierce. “We’ve been launching defense birds for a decade, and as those older models are getting replaced with the newer models instead of letting them drop out of orbit we’ve been repurposing them for the commercial network. Couple those with the lower-cost smaller satellites with the new technology, it’s a space army we can deploy to kill the competition in telecom.”

“OK, what about the talent piece?” asked Stan. “Do we have anything on that?”

“I’m guessing when we crack open production and distribution, talent will flow naturally,” I said. “For instance, if Rod here and our guy Santiago make Parker Stone into the next John Wayne, that’ll be an example.”

“I’d say that’s right,” said Numakin. “Talent will do as it’s told.”

“Maybe instead of buying a Big Five player,” Numakin said, “we ought to just build one.”

Pierce scowled.

“We can look at picking up a mini-major studio, and then let’s grab a few production companies,” said Gardocki. “Distribution through Movie King, and then maybe we’ll set up a streaming service, buy some cable channels cheap and then cobble this together.”

“Probably what we need to do,” I said, “if for no other reason than that we won’t get the kind of institutional resistance we’re currently getting.”

“Look,” Pierce said, “I appreciate what you’re saying, but you’re talking about a freaking grind. What we need is a quantum leap, not a slog through the mud. Think bigger.”

And that was more or less the end of Pierce’s vision-storm, because, as he said, it was time to hit the big suite at the ampitheater.

By the time we got there, PJ showed me a picture of her with Darius Rucker. He’d been in the suite earlier but had gone down to the backstage area.

“He said he likes it better when they don’t call him Hootie,” she said. “’Call me Darius. It’s what my momma calls me.’”

PJ was a little drunk. But she was Fun PJ, and I needed that.

I don’t know how far we got business-wise down in Liberty Point. But it was a hell of a recharge. And on the flight back, Nachman and I had an interesting conversation about how we could build up a library of IP in a hurry. He said he’d get me something in writing on that the next week.