A. J. Rice is a special guest on The Paul Leslie Hour!
Are you here? Wherever you are, know this—we’re glad you’re here, tuned in to The Paul Leslie Hour.
Your host Paul has been interviewing people for 20 years now, but there’s never been a guest like this. A. J. Rice is the author of The Woking Dead: How Society’s Vogue Virus Destroys Our Culture. The book is full of wit and information.
Pundit and journalist Monica Crowley had this to say:
“In The Woking Dead, A.J. Rice nails the cultural madness and dark manipulations of the radical left as few others do or can: with smarts, humor, and refreshing common sense. A must-read for those who care about the precarious state of our beloved America today.”
A.J. Rice is also the President of Publius PR, having represented some of the biggest names inmedia, and publicizing some of the top books of the last couple of decades. Just check out publiuspr.com and you’ll see what we mean.
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A. J. Rice Interview Official Transcript
A.J. Rice: What’s going on, brother?
Paul Leslie: Excited to talk to you.
Likewise.
Have you ever seen the movie FM?
[2:07] FM?
Old movie.
Yeah, a long time ago.
Well, the movie starts with this guy and he’s trying to get to the radio studio and he’s driving and he seamlessly, like, arrives right on time. Well, I was getting blood work and it was kind of – it kind of felt like that.
Oh my gosh. Oh my gosh.
I was pulling up.
You just arrived.
I just arrived, exactly, but I’m thrilled.
I’m glad you’re here.
I’m glad you’re here. I’m thrilled to talk to you. So, you’re joining us from the greater Washington, D.C. area, correct?
That’s right. I’m in Swamp Central.
Swamp Central! Well, all the people out there that are watching the video, you can see something that says, it doesn’t say “the walking dead,” it says “the woking dead.” It’s this book right here. A.J. Rice is the author of the bestseller, The Woking Dead: How Society’s Vogue Virus Destroys Our Culture. He’s also the president of Publius PR. [3:08] So tell me, when did you come up with this idea that there was something that needed to be explored? “The Woking Dead.” Where did that come from?
Well, I’m a proponent of gallows humor. So, if we are gonna march to our death, whether it’s culturally or politically, or even just sort of end comedy altogether, which has been attempted over the last couple of years, I like to come up with, I’m a thematic guy, so I like to come up with layers, kind of like the layer cake of themes. So, I’m a fan of the old Romero, cheesy, kitsch [3:53] zombie movies, I like zombie movies. I liked The Walking Dead when it was on.
Now there’s like 50,000 spinoffs. I can’t keep track, you know, with Daryl, Daryl’s going this way and Rick’s going that way. And, you know, Negan’s going over here. You know, I can’t keep up with it with how many shows and spinoffs there are.
But look, I like a good metaphor. I like to hang a joke on people.
[4:18] And, you know, “The Woking Dead” is, I always had the title in my head. In fact, it first appeared as a column and then the column became the book, which, you know, with a lot of people, public thinkers and comedians and people that do, you know, comedy albums, a lot of times that is the case or they’ll name it after a song. And I set the book up as you go through it, you don’t have to read it cover to cover.
It’s kind of set up like a music album. I love music. The book is an anthology. It’s got 98 entries. You could call them track listings if you want. So it’s kind of like a CD where you could kind of skip around.
You don’t have to go cover to cover. 10 sections, 98 entries. And at the beginning of it, because I am a millennial child of the 80s, I put the opening monologue by Vincent Price in Michael Jackson’s Thriller. [5:24] Which again, harnessing the zombie joke, the zombie metaphor.
[5:31] That brings us to the serious part of this. And in reality, if you know anything about comedy, you know that comedy has a couple of different definitions. One of them is tragedy plus time equals comedy. And one of them is, you know, if you’re gonna study comedy or humor, it’s the ability to transform horror into humor. The horror part is the fact that wokeism is real. It doesn’t have a set definition, although I sort of kind of come up with one. It constantly is evolving, actually. It’s a real thing.
It has lots, it’s almost like the Crayola 64 box in that there’s lots of, it used to just be, you know, five or six, you know, colors, but it’s like it was the Friendly’s crayons and now it’s the Crayola 64 box. So, you know, it makes up a lot of things. I try to do my best to tackle different parts in our society where it shows up.
[6:40] But I think, and I think this is why people like Bill Maher and Tucker Carlson and Dave Chappelle and Sean Hannity and Ben Shapiro, people on the right and the left are concerned about this from both sides is that the horror part of it is the lack of imagination that’s happening, the conformity that is happening. [7:09] You know, the left used to stand for non-conformity, you know, shave your head, burn your bra, you can be a goth, you can be steampunk, you can be a rapper, you can be a white rapper, you can be anything you want. And there wasn’t really this instruction manual on the rules to being an American.
[7:31] But that’s kind of what wokeism tries to do. And it does it really with language.
Right.
It does it with language. It tries to control the language. It tries to shun certain language that is not popular to the, you know, poll bureau or whoever’s in charge, whoever’s deciding. So while we were locked down with a different virus, I wrote the book. So the China virus has us locked down and while we’re all locked down, I’m looking around, and I’m noticing that there’s different attacks on the culture happening. There’s different silencing of a voice is happening. And it was coming in many flavors it was the meat to movement and the post-George Floyd chaos. I mean i called it a totalitarian dress rehearsal but it was a way to kind of get us to conform to what’s going to be our new behavior, that the masters of the universe are gonna make us follow.
So look, there’s funny stuff in the book. [8:47] Some of it goes back, some of it I wrote as far back as 2018, but a lot of it is the Trump-era and the beginning of the Biden-era. And I’m not really one to, It doesn’t thrill me to get into the day-to-day, Biden’s wonderful, Biden’s terrible, Trump’s wonderful. There’s a million other books out there that get into that. I find some of that tedious. I certainly can field any questions that people throw at me. I have met both men. [9:29] In fact, they’re probably the two presidents interacted with the most, not as President, but as people, but before they were President, in the case of Biden, when he was a senator. You know, because I’ve been in this game for a while. And look, wokeism is not new. The 20th century is filled with different movements trying to silence one group or another.
[9:54] Sometimes they were religious people trying to silence libertine talking, libertine jokes or or blue comedy or you know Lenny Bruce or George Carlin or Joan or Kinison or whoever. So it’s not new. The new part if you talk to Rogan or you talk to Maher, if you ask Chappelle, the new part is is where it’s coming from. It’s coming from the people that led the rebellion of the language, the rebellion, the counterculture kids. And now they’re conforming. They’re the conformity kids. So I find that fascinating.
I remember William F. Buckley Jr. threatening to, I mean, I’ve seen tape of it, I wasn’t alive then, using derogatory terms against Gore Vidal on television, threatening to take him out on television, that was about as wild as the right got.
[11:00] Because back then, you’re talking the 60s, late 50s, and into the 70s, the rock and roll was on the left. The fighting against the man, whether it was on a college campus or against the Democrat Presidents that started Vietnam, you know, that’s where the wildness was.
Today, it seems to have turned a little bit, and you can kind of see that, because the only people really getting shut down on campus are the people that, you know, mostly are on the right, although there are some people that are willing to challenge to challenge the establishment on campus. And, you know, even, and then there’s people that aren’t, They just don’t want no part of it, which is why you have even clean comedians, like Jerry Seinfeld, basically saying, “I’m not doing college campuses anymore. They’re a bunch of snowflakes.”
Extraordinary.
Yeah, I’ll go make my money somewhere else.
[11:58] A moment ago you said you have your definition of wokeness and I’ve seen a few people like Vivek Ramaswamy has famously defined it, but I would love to know the A.J. Rice definition. What is it to be woke? What is wokeness?
Well and you know we love Vivek here. Full disclosure we, are one of Vivek’s PR firms. He’s one of the few people that got a book on the shelf about Wokeism before I did. And it’s a great book. It’s called Woke Inc.
Right.
Vivek is coming at this, I think because of his background, I think in the corporate world, he is looking at it from a perspective of, in the old days, you had big business. A lot of times, the bottom line is all that mattered. And they weren’t really going to to buy into some of this left-wing bullying.
[12:58] But they have bought in. And that’s a whole nother discussion, things that when you’re talking about DEI and some of the sort of corporate, sort of trickle-down woke-ism that used to kind of, I mean, and in all honesty, big business used to be a Republican boogeyman, right? Wall Street was the Republican boogeyman. And now in some cases, these corporations, sometimes multinational corporations, certainly the tech community because of where they’re from, they’re pushing this stuff.
For me, however [13:38] Wokeism is the inevitable evolution of what was really the political correctness movement that came out of the 1990s, the sort of pantsuit Gen-X Murphy Brown mafia, as I call it,the people that were gonna push the culture then.
And remember Bill Maher’s first show on Comedy Central was called “Politically Incorrect with Bill Maher.” I mean, he’s always been a libertarian guy. So he’s gotten back to his roots recently. I mean, he’s no fan of George W. Bush. He’s no fan of… [14:13] Romney and McCain, I mean he might have had McCain on for you know when he was a senator, but obviously no fan of Trump either. But he gets it and he understands that when the left is concerned with sucking joy from our life, because that’s what wokeism does, it’s kind of like a joy vacuum. It’s like you know a whole country of hall monitors, right?They’re all blowing the whistle on what you can say and what you can wear, what you can listen to, what you can watch and things like that. For me, though, got to go further back than the 1990s Murphy Brown crowd. You pretty much have to go back to the pre-World War I society.
[14:56] And and sort of the formation of the different flavors of Marxism that were trying to get a foothold in Western civilization. So the definition of wokeism for me is cultural Marxism. At its core, that’s what it is. I don’t care whether it’s the 1619 project, I don’t care whether it’s the trans mafia that are, you know, trying to operate on children without their parents’ permission, I don’t care whether it’s cancel culture. All of those things are the symptoms of this and not the cause. The cause is cultural Marxism and what is that? What is cultural Marxism? I mean, what’s Marxism? You know?
And look, the pejoratives of Marxism get thrown around and people say communism, people say totalitarian this and communist that and socialist this and Marxist that.
But beyond something being just an economic system that, you know, Karl Marx and Engels and then sort of the political aspect of it, which would be, you know, what Lenin and Stalinand Khrushchev tried to implement. And then obviously the Asian varieties and the Latin American varieties are actually closer. [16:15] to what’s going on in the United States than the Russian variety or the Eastern European variety.
And that is the cultural revolution of Mao, the purging of all things Western. The purging of, the destruction of the old gods, the destruction of the old idols, twilight of the idols, breaking down things, the violin has to go, the crucifix has to go.
I mean, China really did a number on itself in the 50s and 60s under Mao. And obviously Castro implemented some of that, the Kim family in North Korea, Ho Chi Mihn in Vietnam and on and on there there are different varieties of this, but here stateside, you know if you’re talking who’s the godfather of it in the western world was an Italian philosopher named Antonio Gramsci right. So what happened was this, Marxism gets a foothold here and it’s the devotee of it’s you know the elite love it and remember Lenin was the elite. You know he was he was in Paris and he got he got to travel with protection from the Germans to get to St. Petersburg and to get into the Soviet Union because World War I is going on.
[17:39] So basically these are elite people, you know, like college professors really, a lot of them.
And then they have their thug variety with Stalin and others. And remember, if you look at where Marxism, any variety of it has ever thrived, it thrives in a place with no middle class and it thrives in a place that really was ripe for a peasant revolt, right?
So the serfs are gonna rise up and they’re gonna overthrow a royal family or they’re gonna overthrow the Romanovs or the Batista regime in Cuba or some colonial power that’s hanging on.
And that’s really where it worked. Well, if you’re gonna try to do it here. [18:24] If you’re gonna try to turn Uncle Sam into Uncle Joe.. You’ve got to do it a different, you know, you got to do it a different way. And, well, how do you do it? What do you, how do you, how do you, if you survey the landscape here, before and after World War I, I mean, we have a thriving middle class. We have a ton of immigrants.
They’ve come here because they’ve escaped some of this political persecution and some of this stuff. They’ve, most of the countries and some of it’s religious persecution also.
So they’re here and you got Catholics, Italians, and Irish, Polish coming off boats, Jews coming in, you know, coming into New York City, and you say to yourself, well, how do we convert these people? We’re not going to get a workers’ revolution.
[19:12] You know, we’re not going to get, you know, bricklayers and plumbers and lumberjacks to overthrow the country. So we need someone else. We need different foot soldiers. And they looked around and they found them. And they found them, you know, and remember, this is the time of Margaret Sanger, the time of Woodrow Wilson, you know, the progressive movement is thriving and it’s got a touch of populism to it. You know, eugenics is very popular.
[19:42] You know, Planned Parenthood gets invented. It gets purposefully put into the black community, and they say to themselves, okay, here’s who we’re going to flip. We’re going to flip the public sector, unions, public school unions, we’re going to flip, we’re going to go after early radio, we’re going to go after Broadway, we’re going to go after early Hollywood, the silent picture industry. Get into the newspapers, get into academia, get into the Democrat Party. And[20:07] if you think about who’s pushing wokeism today, 100 years later, it’s the same people.
The only difference, of course, is that they now have big tech, whereas 100 years ago, they didn’t have big tech sort of acting as their force field, acting as their bodyguard, which is what they are now.
And for what it’s worth, not all of big tech has bought into this. Obviously, you know, Musk does not.
People like Peter Thiel do not.
You know what’s interesting is that I think Musk and guys like Rogan, and guys like Maher. And even the pushing back by people like RFK, Jr. and others, I think people that are not traditionally, you know Chappelle, Chris Rock. These aren’t exactly, you know, people that go to, you know, CPAC, right? So when you have sanity coming from the middle or the libertarian side or the left, Russell Brand, there are others, I think that, you know, it makes guys like Zuckerberg think twice about totally wholeheartedly turning their entire creation over to these sort of little digital brown shirts that they’re employing.
[21:33] Have they messed with elections? Yes. Do they censor? Do they platform? Do they do shadow ban? Yes. Were they in league with the FBI and other intelligence agencies? Yes. They’ve all admitted it. We have tape of them admitting it. But I think they see that the boat is turning on wokeism. That like all revolutions, they eventually, you know, it’s like one scalp too many, you start eating yourself, right? You start eating yourself.
I mean, Robespierre, who led the, you know, assault, one of the people that led the assault to get rid of the French royalty in the French Revolution, eventually he got his head chopped in the guillotine as well.
Right.
[22:21] And Zuckerberg doesn’t want to be in the guillotine.
No, no, not at all. Well, you know, I listened to your interview with Rose Unplugged. Great, great interviewer that she is. And you were talking about this very thing about how the revolutionaries, they always eat themselves. What do you see is the biggest sign right now that we’re maybe seeing some kind of a turn against wokeism?
Yeah, I think so. I mean, I think that’s where we’re at. And look, wokeism is a form of totalitarian behavior. And some of these tech companies, though, they’re not going to stop because they see money in it. [23:05] I mean, some of them will make mistakes. Some of these corporations, I mean, my God, Budweiser learned a big lesson. You want to talk about not knowing who your audience is. But there are people out there, whether it’s Coca-Cola or the NBA, I think they think that they’re okay with, and maybe Disney too, that they’re okay with losing traditional Americans as customers. I mean, look, Jimmy Kimmel, who once upon a time when he was on the Man Show, was pretty funny when he was on there with Carolla.
Once upon a time. Yes.
Yeah. [23:50] He works for ABC and ABC’s owned by Disney and he is basically told the brass over there. Look, I’m not gonna stop making fun of conservatives I’m not gonna stop making fun of Trump if you tell me to stop I’m going to quit. I don’t care if I lose my entire audience. I’m not gonna stop and, I think you know for certain, movie releases by Disney or Warner Brothers. The ability to play NBA games in China.
I think there are certain corporations that have made a calculation and the calculation is simple. If we lose 50% of our US audience, it’s okay because we’re going to gain the 1.3 billion Chinese as customers.
[24:39] And the Chinese love this. Oh my God, they love it. They love wokeism. They love it because it lowers America’s immune system. It gets us all fighting with each other. It weakens us. It’s like a retrovirus, right? It’s like HIV. Brings you down. Lowers your immune system and then something else comes along. Pneumonia, ISIS, Putin, an invasion of Taiwan, whatever the hell it is and that’s what finishes you off right. So you know there are certain people out there that are sort of white blood cells in the body politic that are trying to cure this it’s not always fun and clean and and and you know tidy. Donald Trump i believe was elected because he pushed back on political correctness and then obviously once he got elected they upped the ante and got even crazier. So whether it’s the Me Too movement or BLM or whoever it is, cancel culture. You know, and look, some celebrities have bought into this.
[25:48] Some ome corporations have, as we discussed. You talked about Vivek earlier, I mean, you’re talking about DEI, right? Or ESG: Environmental Social Governance. Diversity, Equity, Inclusion. These things are being used now like a sushi menu by corporations almost like a user agreement to be an American or to work somewhere. Here’s our user agreement, you know. You will promise to do this, do that, you know, here’s the pronouns, here’s the, you know, let Bill in the women’s locker room. Whatever the hell it is. And it’s like a user agreement to be an American citizen, or to be an employee. And that’s scary. That’s scary. Because the goal is, of course, to remove our individuality. And have us all just be, you know, sheeple. Have us all just be part of the herd, right? And they’ll tell us what’s best for us. “Oh, please, master, tell us what beer should we drink? Oh, Bud Light because there’s a tranny in the bathtub?” You know, I mean, really, that’s where we’re at with these guys. So you know, it’s crazy. There’s different forms of it. [27:16] You know, it’s a shame that some of the old-school comedians aren’t around to take it on, whether it’s Carlin or Joan, but there are enough, I think, enough alternative platforms, be it Parler or Rumble or whatever it is, Truth Social.
[27:36] There are comedians that have learned to scale their comedy without permission from the left, which is good. You know, you have places like Netflix and Spotify that were assaulted by their own middle management. And that’s really where the little fascists are. Right? Not the boomers, not the boomers at the top. It’s the it’s the it’s the Gen Xers and some of the old millennials in there.
You know, the remnants of the pantsuit mafia, they’re in there. They’re the ones in the parking lot protesting Netflix because of Chappelle’s jokes, or trying of blackmail Spotify because they won’t pull Rogan, right? But so far, to their credit, they’ve resisted. So with them, so far, they can try to wrap themselves in the flag all they want. You know, we’re for free speech no matter what. Probably not true. At least they’re still operating with financial interests in mind of their shareholders, right?
Right.
So Neil Young, I mean, what did we prove? We proved that Neil Young is not as powerful as Joe Rogan. Okay. Thank God. Thank God. Thank God. So that’s good.
[28:59] But they’re going to keep coming. They’re going to keep trying to cancel. They do.
You know, why was Tucker Carlson dismissed? And look, here’s the other thing. With a lot of these people, you know, there are other ways to get to you. And they are trying, there are government agencies mixed with corporations that are trying to figure out ways to remove you in other ways.
So, you know, you could be fired, you could be deplatformed.
[29:38] In some cases, if they can’t get you digitally or financially, they may show up in person and try to cancel you physically. You know we got a guy running over we got we got an attack on a on a Republican baseball game where Steve Scalise was shot. We had Rand Paul’s neighbor attack him, break his ribs. We had a guy jump on stage and try to stab Dave Chappelle. We had a guy I jump on stage and try to stab Lee Zeldin when he was running for governor of New York. We had an attack on on Salman Rushdie, where they succeeded with a knife attack. And look, that might’ve been radical Islam, but they’re trying to cancel him. So there’s an example where, it wasn’t a cultural Marxist, it was someone that was mad that he had offended Islam in the late 80s, early 90s, with his book, The Satanic Verses.
[30:39] They’ve gone after the South Park guys over the years. Look, we had a guy running around Brett Kavanaugh’s neighborhood, you know, with a gun, and maybe he’s going to attack a Supreme Court justice. So look, you know, this is real. People dox people, they give their address out online. That’s a real thing.
So you know, there’s incoming, there’s incoming, there’s, you know, there’s people that get dismissed for various reasons whether they’re real or not. Maybe we’ll find out, you know I don’t care whether it’s Tucker or someone else. You know Russell Brand it’s interesting it’s interesting to me with guys like him and guys like Andrew Tate. Find something. Find something on these people you know we can’t we can’t separate them from their audience we got to find something it’s We can’t separate Trump from his voters, let’s find something.
Right.
You know, because we’ve had, I mean look, it’s the age of tyranny. The Woking Dead is just the cultural tyranny. But there’s three other tyrannies. I call it, we’re in the age of the four tyrannies.
And wokeism is just, you know, the cultural one.
Bidenomics is the economic one. [32:07] You know, COVID and the continual, you know, we’re gonna have masks, we’re not gonna have, we’re gonna have this, we’re gonna have that, we’re gonna be triple-vax, quadruple-boosted, you know, we’re gonna look like pinhead from Hellraiser soon. You know, we’re gonna be stuck up like pinhead, Hellraiser. That’s the medical tyranny. And then the last one is the political judicial one where, you know, you’ve got, I’ve never seen in my life, other than the presidents that were shot, I’ve never seen a politician hunted like this. You have two phony impeachments, four phony indictments. I mean, they are throwing everything they can at this man.
Yeah.
And most of us would buckle with one little taste of this. But they keep coming and they keep coming because in the end of the day with him, it’s really not about him.
And even some ways with somebody like Tucker, wasn’t really about Tucker. It was his audience.
It was, you know, it’s Russell Brand’s audience. It’s Trump’s audience. You know, so so you have to go you got to go and we’re gonna figure out a way to get you, you know.
[33:25] And look Trump so far has been able to withstand, Everything they’ve thrown at him. And you know There’s really only one or two things that they haven’t tried so far and hopefully,You know and I’ll leave it up to other analysts that have been discussing that we don’t need to get into that here, but Bongino and Megyn Kelly and Tucker and Adam Carolla, they’ve all talked about it.
You know, I mean, the only thing they haven’t done is, you know, attack him physically. So hopefully we don’t come to that. But, you know, society doesn’t trust the people in charge anymore, even the left. I mean look, Bernie Sanders had a convention rigged against him.
We know this because Donna Brazile told us, okay? You didn’t tell us, I didn’t tell, it’s not, it’s not this show, it’s not, you know, Bill Maher, Tucker Carlson or, you know, Fox and Friends or Glenn Beck.
[34:28] Debbie Wasserman Schultz, with the help of these superdelegates, made sure that Hillary was the nominee. That looks rigged to me. They will not pay attention to RFK Jr. They will not debate him.
The DNC basically ignoring all of his requests. He’s asked for Secret Service protection, even though he had a gunman after him a couple weeks ago. So he says,” all right, bye, I’ll run, as an Independent.” So look, it’s not just the right that is hanging out in Alex Jones’s glove compartment, is being midwifed into existence by Steve Bannon. It’s not just us or sane people or the 77 million that voted for Trump, I think the Bernie Sanders people know that their votes are kind of getting lit on fire too.
So that brings us to, well, who’s really calling the shots?
And it’s like, you know, Elon Musk says to us, look, most of the conspiracy theories, about Twitter turned out to be true.
[35:49] And look, there are people whose shows we love, people that we work with, people that I’m the publicist for. I don’t have to agree with everything everyone says. The viewers of this show don’t have to agree with everything you and I say. And we’re not responsible for everything. But when people like Bannon and Jones, people like Mike Lindell, people like Tucker Carlson or Andrew Tate or Russell Brand or Bill Maher or Chappelle, when they get close enough to the truth enough, when they hit the bullseye enough, even if 30% of what they say might be just nuts, you know, Biden’s going to unzip his skin suit and a lizard’s going to jump out, you know, or whatever. They don’t need to be right 100% of the time. They just need to be right enough. And it’s in that enough where the DNA of democracy. [36:52] The fabric of society is breaking down. And it’s not just breaking down because of wokeism and because the kids are like this hand coming out of the ground behind me here. They’re zombies. It’s more than that. It’s, you know, what do you believe anymore? What do you believe?
Like, part of what keeps us from being Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome, or just being, you know, the law of the jungle, right? Is what the Founding Fathers called the consent of the governed, right? So what happens when the consent of the governed is gone? You know, I’m not paying my taxes and I’m not paying for 14 karat gold toilet seat for AOC.
You know, I’m not, you know, what stops us from jumping over the counter at the pharmacy and just filling our trash bag with it?
That’s where we are in some places.
Well, that’s what I’m saying is like, once you don’t think anything’s real. [38:00] Whether it’s because of the lockdowns, because of the Me Too movement, because of China eating our lunch because of this. And we don’t have time for this. This monetary printing press for Ukraine, which is like a laundromat. It’s the Z laundromat. Come to the Z laundromat where we wash all the dollars of Western civilization. We can get you 6% on your return or your investment. Are you freaking kidding me with this with this Ukraine stuff? So look you can think Putin’s not an angel and still be like [38:41] you know, maybe I don’t want to give the the man in the green pajamas any more money. I mean look we’ve had plenty of men in the green pajamas, throughout history. That we thought was an ally and then all of a sudden boom they become Fidel Castro or you know they boom, they become Stalin and look we have look sometimes we have to cut deals with people, kind of deal with Saddam, because the Iranians were worse right? Or are we worse? I mean, that’s what we’re coming to. Oh, I’m going to side with Saddam, instead of the mullahs of Iran. And now we’re going to side with MBS instead of the mullahs of Iran. We’re going to side with the Saudis instead of the mullahs of Iran. We’re going to, side with the Mujahideen against the Soviets, right, when they invaded Afghanistan. Fine. I get it. I don’t live in a fantasy world.
So, AJ, people can get your book anywhere they, pick up their books. There’s also an audio book, right?
There is. There’s an e-reader. There’s an audio book with a voiceover actor. [39:58] Yeah. There’s no paperback yet. We’ve had a couple of runs of hardbacks. People keep buying the hardbacks and we keep printing them. So, but look, it’s Post Hill Press is the publisher. Simon & Schuster is the distributor. So, you know, there are, it is in some bookstores and you can order through the bookstore. In fact, if you really want to make your, you know, liberal friends at the bookstore squirm, go in and order the book from them, see what they say. For the most part though, Amazon, Books-A-Million, Barnes & Noble, SimonandSchuster.com. There’s a lot of other places you can get it. So, pretty good price right now on Amazon. You want to check it out.
Okay. And it is highly recommended. Now, a lot of our listeners, this is their favorite part of the show. We have, where there’s rapid fire questions at the end. You are a publicist, but you also speak publicly. Do you prefer or behind the scenes or on stage?
[41:00] Well, I’m what you call a player coach. No one wants a coach who hasn’t played the game, right? So, and quite frankly, one of the reasons I went out and did this was to put myself through the pain that I’ve put hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of other people through. So, did I put myself through some pain? Yes. At the same time, my tolerance for people missing interviews has gone way down because I’ve done this. I’ve done a couple hundred interviews since the launch of this book. So radio and TV and podcasts and online stuff. So it gives you a different perspective. It certainly does. And I’m always looking for an angle to be better than my competition. What can I do that they’re not doing? Because I got to tell you, ladies and gentlemen, The PR world is filled with a lot of hacks, some grifters, some people that are in it just to, I guess, fortify their social life. But not me, you know, I’m on a mission and, you know, putting out a book is part of that mission.
Now, you can plead the fifth on this. I was driving over here from the hospital and I was wondering, is he going to answer this? All-time favorite client?
[42:22] All-time favorite client. Well, I would say that I have been having the most fun. [42:35] Gird your loins, ladies and gentlemen, because I just did my fourth book with her, and she is a pistol and she’s not for the faint of heart, but Judge Jeanine Pirro is a blast. She’s 100 pounds, wet and wearing boots, but she will give you a colonoscopy if you mess up. [43:02] I like people that keep me honest. I like people that you have to step your game up for. So, you know, and she knows it. She knows it, but most people, she would eat their face. So it’s the same thing with Ingraham. You know, I’m Laura Ingraham’s former executive producer. She’s like my sister. You know, she’s a fire-breathing dragon, man. She came, you know, she came from virtually nothing. She got herself into Dartmouth, got herself in the UVA Law School, she clerked for Clarence Thomas on the Supreme Court, so she doesn’t want to hear, you know, about fancy this and fancy that, she doesn’t want to hear about excuses, and I’m a Philly guy, as you can tell, okay? I’m a Philly sports guy, I’m a Philly guy, Irish Catholic. I like tough people. I like people that make you raise your game a little bit, right? Don’t playing defense on your heels. We’re not here playing two hand touch. So, you know, my favorite clients are the killers. They’re the killers. I mean, I’ve worked with a lot of, the conservative universe.
[44:22] And we’re talking from George P. Bush, who’s a fairly moderate guy, right? The nephew of the former president, the grandson of another former president, all the way through to Donald Trump, Jr. And I’ve worked with RFK, Jr. So all the juniors. But, you know, so you learn, you get something different from everyone, you really do. You know, I’ve had some weird ones, You could spend all day with some of those people. That’s the real book. That’s the real book. I had a couple die on me mid-book tour. I couldn’t find them. They’d vanished. Yeah, I’ve got some wild stories, some crazy ones, some crazy clients, but my favorites are the people that elevate your game. And I mean, look, you think Kobe Bryant, Michael Jordan got to be who they are by playing against a bunch of scrubs or with a bunch of scrubs? Absolutely not. So adversity is good.
So you’re a Philly guy, Pat’s or Geno’s?
Oh, Geno’s all the way. All the way, ticket to the bank. I knew Joey Vento, who was the long time patriarch of Geno’s.
[45:50] Geno’s is kind of the conservative cheesesteak place. I mean, you know, if you want to be honest, Barack Obama, John Kerry, Hillary, they ain’t going to Geno’s.
Now, Joey got himself a lot of press when it was a decade ago now, two decades. He put a sign in the window at Geno’s that said, “when you order, speak English.” Oh my God, he must have broke the universe with that, you know. But he went out, he defended himself, he was an American original and a patriot. God bless him.
What is the best thing about being A.J. Rice?
Fatherhood. And you know, I’ve got a wife that I mean, if you’ve, if you’ve hung around long enough here, guys, for this interview, you know, you can imagine waking up next to this, right, you got to deal with this every day. I’m not exactly a PEZ dispenser of light-hearted things. No, no, my wife, my family, I mean, the best part of being me is definitely my family. You know.
[47:11] You know, when you’re on your deathbed, you’re never going to say to yourself, “well, man, if I only had worked with that client,” or “if I if I only had sold one more book,” or “if I only took one more meeting and, you know, miss my my kids baseball game” or whatever the hell it is. So yeah, I mean, you know, I’m on a mission. You know, I’m a bit of a character. That’s why some of the people we have some of the people we have, you know. We just did Kari Lake book. She’s a piece of work. We’re doing Marjorie Taylor Greene’s book in about a month. You know, I’ve worked with a lot of different people. I worked with Alan Dershowitz. I’ve worked with almost the whole Dream Team on the OJ Dream Team, the ones that are still alive. I’ve worked with almost all of them, I think, except Robert Shapiro.
But yeah, I would say family, definitely.
Well, I always like to leave my guests, with giving them the last words. For our audience out there, do you have anything in conclusion to say?
[48:17] Yeah, I mean, we do this for a living. We host shows, we write books. You know, we write columns, we promote other people. But and we’re in the political world, the cultural world, but just understand something. You know, you can host all the shows and write all the books you want.
But the only way you’re really going to change the country is by doing it yourself and doing it really locally. Don’t look for Washington D.C. to save you. Kevin McCarthy’s not going to save you. Matt Gaetz isn’t going to save you. Schumer, McConnell. You know, politicians aren’t coming to save you. You have to save yourself. [49:09] You know, there is an insurrection out there and I think it’s an insurrection of parents, and people trying to take back their schools, trying to get rid of some of this woke garbage from the culture, and trying to get out from under the soaking of Bidenonics that has made things very, very expensive. So, you know, if you want to laugh and you want to be informed, you get a copy of The Woking Dead. Hopefully I’ll be back next year when the sequel comes out.
But just understand that this is your country. It’s not a politician’s country. I don’t care if it’s the elected dog catcher or the President of the United States. You can take back your country yourself. Be inspired. Have some fun doing it. You know, wear a GoPro camera if you’re going to take on somebody. But just understand that, you know, we created the federal government, not the other way around.
[50:15] That’s great. I love that. Ladies and gentlemen, A.J. Rice, thank you so much for being with us.
Thank you, sir. You’re a patriot. We love you here. Keep fighting. Keep growing that audience.
We’ll do. All right, sir. Until next time.
Thank you.
Thank you.
