YouSaid · the spoken record

Neil King Jr.

lines on the record: 67
first: 2023-04-13
most recent: 2023-04-13
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“It just has an accumulative effect over time. And, you know, by the time I got to New York, I was in many ways a changed being, in large part just because of the additive effect of what happens to you and how you see the world if after many weeks, in my case, you're just paying attention to a single spring, to the people you meet, to the lay of the land and the story that our country tells as you go. And it's just can be a miraculous thing just to go out for a long walk. That's all.”
2023-04-13 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 529 — Neil King Jr. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Know it's when I get to the Susquehanna and the Delaware and these things and I'm like, these are amazing rivers and I'm going to just talk to you a bit about how amazing these bodies of water are. And some of it is just the attitude that you bring to these things otherwise seem kind of commonplace, right? Oh, yeah, I know about that and kind of, you know, going about it with a fresher eye or fresher outlook. I call the book a walk of memory and renewal and it's a national memory. It's also a bit of a personal memory and it's a personal renewal. And I, you know, the thing that comes about if you set out attentively in an undistracted way to go on a long walk like this, not listening to podcasts or music in your ear. Wait, wait, wait.”
2023-04-13 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 529 — Neil King Jr. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Know one of the things I'm doing out in the hustings, so to speak, is really wanting to kind of drive home the fact that, yeah, okay, I did this thing and I'll talk to you about this thing I did, but I really urge other people to do their version of it. And it doesn't have to be a three week plus walk to New York, but some version where you really go out and look closely at some aspect of the country and really sort of honor it and see it for the complexity that it has. And, you know, one of the things that I like to talk about is just kind of granting yourself the freedom to be wondrous about things and sort of shirk or shed cynicism or whatever it is that kind of prevents a lot of us from just seeing things the way they are, at least in my mind, which is.”
2023-04-13 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 529 — Neil King Jr. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's a little bit of, I like to say I'm distinctly living on what I look at as bonus time. And there's no time as good as bonus time.”
2023-04-13 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 529 — Neil King Jr. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, it just sort of incorporates all of it, right? Creation, sustenance, and just thank God for being here. And in a lot of ways, I think the, I don't even want to say travails, but the experiences that I've had over the last few years has just kind of compounded that sense of thankfulness for being here. And it's a great state of mind to be in.”
2023-04-13 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 529 — Neil King Jr. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it's just made me filled with a lot more true kind of ongoing gratitude about a lot of things than, you know, there's a great moment, I'd say, in the book where it's at the very end and I meet a friend of mine and we walk up Fifth Avenue and we go into Central Park and we arrive at the Angel of the Waters, which is that fantastic statue at the Bethesda Fountain. This friend of mine says that a Hebrew prayer that is very ancient prayer. I kind of look at it as like the foundational prayer of all prayers. And it basically goes something like, Lord, thank you for creating me, for sustaining me. And for allowing me to be here at this present moment, you know, thank you for making this moment possible.”
2023-04-13 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 529 — Neil King Jr. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, it happened beforehand. I got bit by a tick that gave me Lyme disease and botched up one of my vocal cords. So it was another one of those lessons where, you know, for a while I was actually not very able to talk at all. I'm certainly it's gotten a lot better since you said.”
2023-04-13 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 529 — Neil King Jr. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, my brother Kevin was a fantastic soul in so many ways and told amazing stories, experienced things so vividly, and did a lot of his own adventurous walking. And, you know, he got the worst kind of cancer there is, glioplastoma, which goes, you know, into the brain, and almost nobody survives it. And it basically slowly rid him of his ability to talk well or to walk really at all. And the fact that I was walking and talking throughout the year that he ended up dying in certainly gave a different backdrop to the walk. And I shared various moments with him along the way. And I talk about some of this in the book itself. It certainly made a lot of it. A lot more vibrant just thinking about him.”
2023-04-13 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 529 — Neil King Jr. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Absolutely. That makes a huge difference. You know, as you have also, I've done a lot of this just kind of talking to people along the way as a trap.”
2023-04-13 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 529 — Neil King Jr. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Know, I think a lot of it is the more comfortable any of us are with ourselves and the more sort of transferable we feel we are from environment to environment, the more easily we feel like we belong in different places. And I, you know, if there's anything you can do to make a person feel welcome is to make them feel that they belong in the place that they are. And I stepped into a lot of foreign settings along the way. Barn a Mennonite Farrier who was shoeing a horse to various bars and things along the way and along that way people by and large made me feel welcome and feel like I belong there and that was a good thing.”
2023-04-13 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 529 — Neil King Jr. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But, you know, in this case, I had to figure out how I was going to get across this body of water. And so I made my way under the Rarton Yacht Club dock. And I told the folks there what I was trying to do. And they sort of brightened the whole idea because I, you know, was off on this lark of an adventure. And so they said, oh, we think we know a guy. And so they put forward this guy's Duke Conway. And he drove an hour in the next morning from his house to take me across on a launch to the other side. And that was just a great thing. And, you know, when it comes to the whole kind of belonging, did I belong on that pier at that yacht club? No. The only reason that I kind of did is I was off on an adventure in those are the sort of things that those people, sailors and the like understand, and they kind of took to that.”
2023-04-13 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 529 — Neil King Jr. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, actually, that was to get from Perth Amboy across to Staten Island. I had to get across the Arthur Kill. You know, that was a great moment where, you know, one of the things I talk about a fair bit in the book is kind of the whole, you know, idea of privilege. And, you know, I have a lot of privilege that came my way. I had relatively little to fear being a white guy of my age walking down the road.”
2023-04-13 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 529 — Neil King Jr. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, and you would understand well because you knew these people from your time with President Obama that his story was one of those great Odyssey stories where he hadn't been keen on Bush when Obama came along, what he actually said to me in the driver was, the white guys hadn't done a great job of it, so I figured it's time to give the black guy a chance. You know, he had supported Obama when Trump came along. He himself was a person who nursed a lot of different kind of grievances and gripes about things, which he aired many of them to me when I was in his driveway. And Trump kind of appealed to that sort of kicking at your critics thing. And that was why one of the reasons that he had supported Trump, it was just a fascinating sort of Odyssey that he had taken.”
2023-04-13 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 529 — Neil King Jr. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That was on the day of parables. I call that the parable of the empty water bottle where he didn't see fit to fill my water bottle out of his hose.”
2023-04-13 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 529 — Neil King Jr. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And the minute I said what I was doing, he immediately said, Can I get you a water, a beer, a clementine? Yeah, which is really interesting.”
2023-04-13 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 529 — Neil King Jr. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Know there was another guy this is jumping way ahead, but I was in New Jersey in a very Trump area of New Jersey on the other side of I-95. And I'm walking along and I look over and there's a driveway with this truck out front and these flags flying and magga stuff all over. And for a second, I'm kind of like, God, it'd be sort of interesting to have a full-blown discussion with this guy. And that exact minute he walks out of his house on his way to have his own walk. And he says to me, what are you doing here? Where are you going? And I said, well, I live near the capital. I'm walking to New York. And, you know, there had been a little bit of an issue the whole way about kind of hospitality and who offers what to whom.”
2023-04-13 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 529 — Neil King Jr. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That was the snowstorm. That was the snowstorm. And at the end of our conversation, I said to him, Ken, do you know why we met and had this conversation? And he said, no, I don't. And I said, it's because my phone died and I needed to find a person to give me directions. And there you were working in this barn. And I appreciate that. And, you know, that again, there again was one of those kind of parable-like aspects to the whole story that I really loved.”
2023-04-13 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 529 — Neil King Jr. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I know. And you know, it's funny, there were so many times that I came upon people that mentioned lines or phrases or whatever where I had to say, wait, what did you just say? And that was one of them because that whole concept of don't let the world, you know, form you. Don't conform to it, but transform yourself through a renewal of your mind and something we should all constantly attempt to do. And it's something that I very avidly attempted to do through the whole of the walk.”
2023-04-13 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 529 — Neil King Jr. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Profoundly so, you know, and I had a discussion actually in the basement of the church after they sang to me with Neil Weaver, this teacher, and I said, tell me a little bit about the Mennonite faith. And in doing that, he quoted this line from St. Paul to the Romans, and I'm not exactly like a big Bible reading guy, but the line kind of just like lit up in my head as really kind of the motto of the whole walk. And it is do not conform to the world, but transform yourself through a renewal of your mind. And when he said that as a wow. Wait, say that again”
2023-04-13 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 529 — Neil King Jr. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, that is such a fantastic story. I won't tell it at length, but I just came up the road the next day and saw this amazing game of softball being played by these young women and young men at this school, the young women all dressed in these long floral dresses and playing the most incredibly aggressive, bona fide game of softball I think I've ever played, seen played. And then we started talking and this teacher came over and they all invited me inside and they wanted to sing some hymns to me. So I went downstairs and They sang these two fantastic hymns to me. And you know, I was with them for maybe half an hour altogether. I've remained in touch with that teacher, Neil Weaver. I'm going to see them in the couple of days are going to do, well, a kind of book event, but they're also going to sing in that same place. Again, I went up to a Christmas concert at the end of last year that they invited me to. And it's kind of extraordinary when you can walk out your door.”
2023-04-13 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 529 — Neil King Jr. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Or even over loud or obnoxious, those people are often on to something. And Thaddeus Stevens was very much of one of those people. So that was a fantastic day, just sort of seeing that in this case, the balance is starting to write and Stevens is beginning to get the due he deserves.”
2023-04-13 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 529 — Neil King Jr. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And a really extraordinary person who deserves much, much more fame than he has now. And one of the points I make in passing, but I think is an important one. You know, when we all look back on history, we like to put ourselves in it from this point of view of the good people. So all of us assume that if we had been around, we would have been staunch abolitionists. Well, the reality is they were a tiny portion of the population. And I really think we should not only own our James Buchanans, but we should realize that inside of a lot of us is probably more James Buchanan than Daddy of Stevens. It's not easy to be Thaddeus Stevens out on Vanguard morally in the way that he was. It's often a lonely place to be. And I think we all need to be a little more humble in realizing that not only that, but a lot of times the person that seems the most sort of”
2023-04-13 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 529 — Neil King Jr. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That was another magical moment where I literally walked into the town of Lancaster at a time as I described in the book that these sort of tectonic plates are shifting and they were just taking the name of James Buchanan in elementary school off that school. There was the meticulously preserved house that James Buchanan had lived in. And his reputation was plummeting while the house that Thaddeus Stevens, who was truly one of the founders of our second founding after the Civil War, he was the one really one of the prime forces that pushed Lincoln to do the emancipation proclamation to let blacks into the military during the Civil War. And he was a cantankerous character.”
2023-04-13 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 529 — Neil King Jr. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is abandoned and right underneath the front porch of it ran the line itself. And it was just, the whole thing was so fascinating just to ponder the person who had built that farmhouse, how the line between, you know, at least the theoretical line between slavery and freedom had run right underneath his front porch. And then just to look at the sort of the pride and beauty of the structures of the barn and all these other things that these people had built, you know, the different kinds of hinges that were all clearly handmade. And it was just a great example of lived history right there under your fingertips, you know, and it was a fantastic hour or so I spent there.”
2023-04-13 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 529 — Neil King Jr. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of Chris had no choice but to cross it because that's what you cross when you go north. And if I could just make a call out to whoever's listening to just the sort of vital importance of going to the places themselves and not just sort of driving and jumping out of your car, but kind of arriving to them at them by foot, contextualizing them. It just to me anyway, it just was resonant with so much meaning because this is a border between North and South that for, you know, decades and decades had such incredible significance, particularly to the enslaved populations of the South. And, you know, I thought about that for hours as I walked toward it and along these roads that would have been the same roads that somebody would have skirted along on their way to try to get out of there. And then when I got to the line itself, I found this incredible 1830s German-built farmhouse that at that time anyway.”
2023-04-13 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 529 — Neil King Jr. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, Michael Halfrick, who I just sexually saw just recently, I'm going to see you in a couple days. I described as if there are 14,000 mayors and all the land Michael, Helfred Custody among the most unusual. He, you know, was once in the rainbow family and talked to me openly about all the times he had dropped acid in the woods in Oregon and various places. He now lives in a house built in 1767, if I have it right, and is an ardent follower of Thomas Paine. When I went into his house, almost everything in it was from the 18th century, including all of the collected works of Thomas Paine, which were almost all printed when Payne was still alive, essentially. And, you know, I said to him, Michael, when was America last great? And he said 1791 when the Battle of Yorktown was over. And we had ended our war with the British and we became a divided and fact-fractuous country.”
2023-04-13 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 529 — Neil King Jr. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I know. I mean, you know, instead where we should humanize, of course, we now demonize and in some ways this walk was kind of my effort to humanize.”
2023-04-13 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 529 — Neil King Jr. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, exactly. And, you know, he was an auctioneer in his bar, that barn was filled with all these amazing older tractors that he really loved. And he was showing me what made them marvelous. And, you know, to me, it was just a great lesson that if you're in one place, kind of a common ground setting with another American, another fellow human being, yeah, okay, you may disagree on some things, but you're going to find some things that you like, that you have in common that that person, you know, something about him or her that is funny. We got on really well and it just, and when I walked away from there, I was like, you know, we all need these kind of encounters more often.”
2023-04-13 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 529 — Neil King Jr. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Know very trumpy and had very distinct, very old fashioned views of how the world should be organized. And, you know, it was snowing out. And I had to get some directions because I was lost from him and he invited me into this barn. And we talked for a while. And, you know, despite his views, it certainly didn't align with my views. I found Ken Keeney is his name to be the”
2023-04-13 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 529 — Neil King Jr. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, and in that case, actually he was about to start, and I said, Hey, Ted, do you mind if I hit my phone record? Because I got, I think I got a feeling I got to get this. And he said, now go ahead. And it was, it was a fantastic sermon that just there at curbside. And, you know, I met a Mennonite auctioneer who was.”
2023-04-13 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 529 — Neil King Jr. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, exactly. Yes, yes. And I called it the parable of the tuning fork. He said, I know what you're doing. You're trying to put yourself in tune. The whole nation is out of tune and out of joint and you're feeling it. And if you can get yourself in tune, you will get the nation in tune. And I was like, Ted, are you really putting that sort of heaping that burden on me that, you know, I will have to put the whole country in harmony? And he said, yes, that's exactly this is a holy walk. He said it was right before Easter. It was then.”
2023-04-13 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 529 — Neil King Jr. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I said, Well, look, I'm going there. I will bring good tidings of your well-being to them and pass along your regards. And they were sort of astonished that I would do that. And I did it. I got there eight days later. And it became, I said immediately when I left them to myself, I said, wow, I just experienced a parable, like something out of the New Testament, you know? And that day itself I encountered several of what I came to see as parables, one off encounters with people that were pregnant with meaning that others of us can detect and feel. And, you know, I think it was the next day I ran into this guy, this black guy who was out at the end of his drive getting his garbage can in. And he said, hey, where are you going? And I said, I'm going to New York. And I live at the capital. And he immediately, his name is Ted, embarked on this incredibly great Thurman.”
2023-04-13 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 529 — Neil King Jr. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“On the second day, I'm just on the true outskirts of Washington. And by a series of events, I won't describe right now, I run into this older couple, Mennonite couple walking down a small lane. And it comes to pass that I mention that I'm heading to this town called Ephroden, Pennsylvania. And they immediately brighten and they say, we used to live near there in a little house on Crooked Lane next to these people.”
2023-04-13 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 529 — Neil King Jr. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The original idea to walk to New York was not a book idea, it was just a dang, I wonder what it would be like if I were to do it. It became by the time I walked out the door a book idea. I realized in the time in between that there was just so much richness along the way and I was going to mine it, I think in a way like no one ever has between those two cities. And I guess I was competing a bit with all those folks I was reading about in the 1830s and 40s and stuff. I was like, okay, I'm going to try to do the best account of a slow walk between these two places of any that I've read. So yes, by the time I walked out, I fully intended to do that.”
2023-04-13 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 529 — Neil King Jr. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, I very intentionally went super light. I decided I was not going to camp. I had no tent. I had no sleeping bag. I stayed mainly in Airbnbs and Inns and things like that. And my backpack was about 17 pounds. And the heaviest thing I had in it was...”
2023-04-13 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 529 — Neil King Jr. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I really decided I was going to go due north of Washington. I wasn't going to go up I-95. I wasn't going to walk up the Jersey shore. I was going to go up along the cross the Mason-Dixon line up into Pennsylvania across into Lancaster County, one of the great regions of experimentation in American life and cutting all the way across to Valley Forge into Philadelphia, et cetera. It was kind of a arcing somewhat roundabout way to get to New York City where I really wanted to emphasize certain places that were important to me that told stories, but also important to us collectively. Civil War battle sites, places in the Revolutionary War, underground railroad sites, rail beds that were important, canals, the whole bit. And so there was a lot of advanced planning, including the people I wanted to meet. I met a lot of people serendipitously.”
2023-04-13 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 529 — Neil King Jr. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, there were really, I guess I would say three forms of preparation. The first one was through that year when I had to postpone it, I immersed myself in dozens and dozens of the travel logs that so many people had written in the early years of our republic, 1820s and 30s. Alexis de Tocqueville, Charles Dickens being among the best known. But people who had come to America to look it over wonder if it was going to survive, wonder what it was going to become. sort of absorb myself into those narratives and I took a very similar point of view in a way when I walked out my door the other form of preparation was of course physical I did a lot of walking with a heavy pack on my back and that kind of thing for months beforehand and then the third was the determining the route I was going to take and where I was going to sleep every night and who I wanted to meet with and in that one”
2023-04-13 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 529 — Neil King Jr. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“At those events on January 6th, which I walked from my house and watched play out live. I didn't, of course, go inside the Capitol, but I watched it as a witness. And so by the time I walked out my door, I was walking past the capital that was still ringed by razor wire with National Guard troops around it. And it really drove home to me how I was truly stepping into a historical context with all of those questions that I wanted to think about, which is, what are we collectively? What is our story? Who are the founders? Which are the founders that we should honor? What do we make of this time? And are our best days as a country still ahead of us or are they distinctly behind us? And the January 6th events were just one of a tableau of different things that really set the stage for me personally as I wandered. Past the cap”
2023-04-13 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 529 — Neil King Jr. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, let me just step back a tiny bit before I get to that. I was going to go out my door on the 29th of March of 2020. Everything that came along that month made that impossible. I waited exactly a year to do it. And you know what happened between that year? We were slammed by COVID. George Floyd was killed in Minneapolis. All of those social justice protests and riots took place across the country. We had the spade of statues being torn down and a real, real debate in our country about the nature of our beginnings, of our past, of our national story, a deep discussion which I think should be ongoing about who do we honor and who do we want to dishonor or forget about from our past. We had a disputed election. We had the whole kind of nature of truth being called into question. And then...”
2023-04-13 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 529 — Neil King Jr. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It leaves an imprint in part because I had sort of stepped out my door into sort of like going into Narnia through the back of the wardrobe in the C.S. Lewis book, you know, into this kingdom that's just outside all of our doors. But it was because I went about it in a certain way.”
2023-04-13 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 529 — Neil King Jr. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, it's fascinating not to get too esoteric here, but the Greeks have two words for time. There's Kronos, which is what we think of as chronological time, kind of mechanical time. And they have an expression called KROST, which is a kind of time that's like revelatory time that some transformational time. It's the sort of time that leaves a stronger imprint on your memory. I think it's kind of the time that we tend to a lot to vacations or to those magical moments that stick in your mind decades later. And the fascinating thing about the whole concept is this walk, the 26 days of it. It all took place in that kind of K-Rose sort of time. It was basically every minute of it, still to this day, two years later, has this clarity about it in my mind that no 26-day stretch in my life has where I could bore you endlessly with stories about every day.”
2023-04-13 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 529 — Neil King Jr. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I think it was a big motivating factor. And not only that, it just helped kind of condition my psyche and my attitude towards stepping out my door the day that I set out on this walk as a different person and with a very distinct frame of mind and a very distinct sensibility towards what I was going to encounter. I mean, we can talk about it some more going ahead here, but it became a kind of time out of time.”
2023-04-13 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 529 — Neil King Jr. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Very, yeah, I mean, yeah, it was one of the worst esophageal cancer. And, you know, when I looked up the numbers, I was something like, you know, 12% survival, five-year survival rate. And that was quite a, it was a four-year experience, essentially, where I had a relapse a year and a half later after going through all this stuff through that fall. And I hate to be one of those people that too loudly trumpets the benefits of a cancer diagnosis if you survive it. In my case, it kind of did wonders for my sense of how to allot my own time. And now I saw the world. And by the time I came out the other end, which was in a lot of ways really just before I set off on the walk, I was kind of a changed person in many ways that I was appreciative of.”
2023-04-13 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 529 — Neil King Jr. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm only very open to talk about it. I welcome talking about it because it played into my own psyche and my own life plan. So strongly and in a weird way so well. So in 2017, I got one of those diagnoses. Nobody likes to go see a doctor and have him utter the word cancer. And it was a fairly advanced cancer that had come out of nowhere like these things do.”
2023-04-13 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 529 — Neil King Jr. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, some of the most purian things, as you say, one of the things that sticks the most in people's minds. I mean, it is the fact, I will say one thing about Cristile. He was the one who raised the flag on what was going on with Russia and its efforts to get involved in the election. I think even before the FBI was really onto that in early June of that year, just before the huge email dumps and all this stuff that occurred that we saw play out through that summer. So there was also an element of pressure there. These things get muddled as we look back on things. It was a fascinating stretch. I then left there at the end of 2019 with my ambitions being I was going to take a time off. I was going to take this walk to New York and kind of do almost like an adult gap year. And then, of course, COVID kind of botched that up a little bit and delayed my plans for a year.”
2023-04-13 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 529 — Neil King Jr. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, tapping sources and talking to people and Fusion's work model has always been to do very rigorous, open source, very verifiable document-based research. And that's what it continues to do. And as all of the work that Fusion did looking at Trump outside of the dossier, was very much that way. And as we've come to understand, not only was Trump and his people very much interacting with the Russians all that year, of course, and Putin trying to do what he did during that election year. But, you know, Trump's own business pass going back to the very early foundations of his company have been sketchy at best and worthy of a lot of close attention, which Fusion helped give, along with many reputable, irreputable news organizations. It's quite a story that we continue to see ongoing.”
2023-04-13 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 529 — Neil King Jr. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah. You know, it was a fascinating turn for me. I walked in the door, I think, three days before BuzzFeed actually published the so-called dossier. I was not there when they commissioned it or did any of that work. I had actually signed on with them on election day, which of course in the middle of that day everyone had the expectations that the election would turn out a different way. You know, the work that Fusion did, quite to the contrary, to the dossier itself or whatever reputation it has gotten was markedly different than the dossiers on method, which was Chris Steele going out and basically.”
2023-04-13 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 529 — Neil King Jr. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Kind of yes and no. I mean, I do have to say, and I'm no Murdoch fan by a long shot, but, you know, he helped save the journal in a lot of ways because the owners at that time weren't exactly the most creative force. And nor were they necessarily in a position to do much creative with it. But by the time I left, I wasn't terribly pleased by how they had covered the 2016 election. It was not exactly even-handed. There were a lot of things that were just sort of frustrating about the place at that point. So I left at the end of 2016.”
2023-04-13 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 529 — Neil King Jr. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Know it's funny in a way when I look back at my journalism career, I kind of feel like I've run out of a lot of burning buildings. I mean, we did the foreign correspondent thing when it was really in a lot of ways that it's heyday, which was also pre-internet. We had a lot of liberty to roam, to do stories that might take a week or more. You know, my time in Washington was also fantastic. I got to cover so many different things. I kind of just wanted to move beyond in a lot of ways and sort of look to what else was possible. And I think that I could fairly say that particularly in the last two years and in doing this walk that became the book I have truly found in some ways, what I was sort of destined to do all along. I'm really glad that I jumped from traditional journalism and went about things differently.”
2023-04-13 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 529 — Neil King Jr. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, absolutely, definitely. I mean, it was clear the minute the second plane hit, as it was, of course, clear to most of us that something big was afoot here. And I think it became immediately apparent that this was an al-Qaeda operation. And, you know, that transformed my career and, of course, all of our lives”
2023-04-13 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 529 — Neil King Jr. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source