Hi, and welcome back to the Carol Marcowitz Show on iHeartRadio. Have you heard of this concept of girl dinner? The basic premise that if a woman is eating alone, she's having something random, like a bowl of cereal or tortilla chips for dinner. I just spent ten days in Michigan living alone without my family, and I can tell you that the image of the single life drinking martinis in ball gowns at nice restaurants, I mean that's not even close.
I ate really badly alone on a couch. What's interesting about this is it's the man who is the stabilizing force here.
Right.
We always think of women as being the good societal influence on a man, But here's the case of men doing it for women. Something about being in a relationship causes you to have the real meals for dinner instead of like half an apple and a bag of ches. Apparently the original poster about girl dinners was eating grapes, cornishans, bread and cheese, which actually all sounds amazing to me. As fast as girl dinner became a trend, of course,
there was the inevitable backlash. It was racist. Who knows why it promoted stereotypes and gender roles. Blah blah. It's somehow opposed body positivity because I guess the girls are eating enough.
I don't know.
The thing is obviously, men left to their own devices probably don't do that great food wise either. I know my husband loves to get taco bell with the kids when I'm away, because I just wouldn't do that right. I've talked a lot about all the positives of being in a relationship and the way it benefits you in so many different ways. The way we eat is a part of that. We all understand that girl dinners or boy taco bell nights are not.
Good in the long term.
And yes, of course, there are plenty of single people eating very healthy. I'm not taking anything away from them on that. And I'm sure there are some coupled people eating popcorn and a cucumber for dinner. But being in a couple elevates you. It makes you strive to be better. You're not eating your grilled chicken on a fork over the sink, and yes, I've done that. None of us are perfect, but we're all trying.
To be better.
Coming up next and interview with John Cardillo. Join us after the break.
Welcome back to the Carol Markowitz Show on iHeartRadio. My guest today is my good friend John Cardillo, conservative commentator and former NYPD.
Hi John, Hey, Carol, good to finally be with you.
So nice to have you on.
So a running joke in our group of friends is nobody that knows what you do.
So it was great when I was like, Cas, should I introduce you? You're like, you know, conservative commentator, whatever.
I'm a boring private equity guy these days. That's that's it. I'm you know, and I cause trouble on Twitter. But yeah, I love that. I love how you guys bust my chops on that. It makes my day every time with you.
We were at an event one time and we were going around the table and everybody was introducing themselves and I was sitting next to Dave Rubin and so as we're like going around the table and everyone's you know, I'm whatever, and I this is my job. I wrote to Ruben like, I can't wait to find out what John cardemod remember that, And then when it got to you, we still didn't really know.
Oh do I kept it as cryptic as possible.
Yeah, right, you were like you know, Yeah, it was definitely.
I would say CIA, but it's not Cia. It's something way beyond that. It's masade, like, let's be real.
So you're also known in our group of friends as like the og Floridian. A lot of us, our crew, we moved here in the last you know, two years, well Rubin and I last two years. Lisa Booth a little bit before that, Josh Hammer, Dave Ree Boy a little bit before that. But you have been here, and Jordan Shaffille also around that same time. But you've been here the longest, and you know your genius.
How did you know? How did you know to come to Florida? What was the draw?
Yeah, it was it was really a combination of things. Right. So February twenty third, a few weeks ago, right, was my twentieth year in Florida, and I had been in Miami in Brickll area for about eleven years and up in Fort Lauderdale for about the last nine. I love it up here. By the way, I'm on the east side as well, which is a lot more red. Everybody thinks Broward County so blue, and it is right mathematically, But on the east side, when you're east of federal
it's it's pretty red. I mean, you've got Trump and the Santa's flags on pretty much every boat on the intra coastal over here. For me, it was a combination of things, you know, after leaving the NYPD for the private sector, just wanting to leave New York after nine to eleven. Candidly right, I left three years after nine to eleven, And Florida was a place that I didn't only come on vacation when I was a kid. My dad was essentially a national sales manager for an industrial
company and Florida was one of his lucrative territories. And I was down here all the time. Is A and then some cousins that I was very close to, and at and uncle. My aunt uncle at the time had worked for Motorola, which had a big presence in South Florida. They moved down and so we would come down and visit them quite a bit. And I always loved it, you know. I always had really good memories, really good
times in Florida as a kid. So it was a place I would vacation and college and then as an adult. And for me, it was just a pretty logical choice. I was comfortable with it. I knew it. The Brickell area of Miami was vertical, right, so a lot of high rises. So when we got in New York City, it was a really comfortable transition. Yeah, couple of friends had made the move and so that was that was my reasoning and the catalyst from you move in download interesting.
So it's funny because we looked at Brickle but I found it's just like not that walkable. And I guess we have kids, so it wasn't, you know, quite as the picture I had in my head.
But yeah, the vertical thing, it's true. It really does.
Remind me of New York and so much of it feels very New york Ish. But so it's funny because again you pre date the whole mad rush to Florida that happens in the last four years. We're really at the anniversary basically right now of pandemic lockdowns and it's changed a lot.
How do you feel about that?
I mean, are there pluses and minuses or is it one way or another?
Ye know, I wish some people carol at a time machine to see what Brickle look like. If you go to brickl now, it's a world class city. Right. I mean, it's new, and it's hot, and it's upscale, and you've got every shop you have in Manhattan and Midtown there. Right when I got to Brickle in two thousand and four, there were maybe three real high rises. The Four Seasons Tower that we've all been new right together or separately,
was up in that. I believe at the time that was the tallest building on the East coast of the United States outside of New York. It's like eight hundred and something feet. So there was that, and there was the condo building I lived in and the one I was moving into that was being built. Everything else Downtown had a couple of tall buildings, but the skyline of Miami Downtown Miami was maybe maybe six or seven notable buildings. Now there are just dozens, and so they literally built
a city around me. I mean, one of the reasons I left Brickle.
Was John is here, Let's do it.
Let's do it. You know. One of the reasons I left was because the traffic got so insane from all the construction, and when they started to put up that mall in Brickall, it would take me some days, thirty forty five minutes just to get the publics at the grocery store, its way with traffic. So I was ready. You know, I had grown up in a city my whole life. I grew up in New York City, grew
up in Queens, than lived in Manhattan. Was now in another city, and I was getting more into the old Florida kind of sleepy Florida, right, and where I live in Fort Lauderdale, now there's a lot, a lot of boating and fishing.
And I think if you as like a cowboy, you're like living the text lifestyle in Florida.
Yeah. Hey, people don't realize. You go to like the Baby right fifteen minutes west of here, and there's rodeos. It's it's horse country.
Right, So what about the people like, has the like culture of Florida.
Changed or the Well, yeah, I think it's that neutral, right, It depends what you like. When I moved down, if you didn't speak Spanish in brickl in Miami really anywhere, I still.
Feel like that.
Well, let me tell you it was a lot worse. I mean there were days I'd walk into Walgreens where there wasn't one English speaking employee.
I feel like my high school Spanish has not served me well in Florida at all, Like, I have no idea what's going on. It's not like nobody's asking me the directions to the library.
Yeah, it was really different. So culturally that was it. Now I found Miami to be a lot like New York. It's not. It's a little bit transient in many respects, and people keep to themselves. So I always tell a story. I've told our group and our text chain of story. You know, when I lived in Miami, I didn't even know my neighbors. When I lived in Brickle, I had a nice group of people I do happy hour with,
but we were like acquaintances more than friends. But I didn't really know my neighbors when I moved to Fort very hard to believe.
You are like the world's most social guy.
I'm a social guy, but you'd be surprised, right. So I knew the bartenders, and I knew that the Happy Aircraft. But when I got to Fort Lauderdale. I moved to Fort Lauderdale in July of twenty fifteen, I did Thanksgiving dinner with we at a restaurant with a bunch of my neighbors that November, like a few months later. So it's really it depends where you go. But some of the nicest, friendliest people I've ever met in my life I've met down here in Florida.
We're going to take a quick break and be right back on the Carol Marcowitch Show.
Do you miss New York ever?
You know? No? No, In fact, the last time I was thinking about the the other day. The last time I was in New York was Buck's engagement party, and that was.
Sex and I we got to mention him in our cha. So we moved down in the last two years.
Yeah, yeah, So Buck Sexton's engagement party was the last time I was in New York. With that, I was in New York with you guys, or I was in New York at all.
Wow, that's what's a while?
Yeah, no, no, I'm sorry. And then I popped, I'm sorry, my mistake and wait, no, that was that was twenty two. Yeah, and then May of last year I came in for a day. My mistake. May of last year, I came in for a day for my nephew's high school graduation.
But you don't miss anything about it.
No, No, that's why I've been there twice in two years and I forgot one of them right exactly.
So we're recording this a few days after the funeral for a fallen police officer in New York. What do you think when you see stuff like that or the way that everything happened. He was killed by somebody who had been released from prison. Many times, this is not a political show, but I feel like that is such a cultural touch point, especially right now, where people don't feel safe, and that's you know, that could be political, but it's very much societal. So what do you say,
what do you think about that? Can New York come back?
You know, not not at the rate they're going, right, So, you know, having been to too many police funerals, having responded one of my first month maybe on the job to the murder of a copper graduated the academy at we Academy with me Sean McDonald. He was shot in the head responding to an alarm burglary alarm that turned out to be an actual alarm robbery. Another police officer shot in our command on the Grand Concourse, shot and killed.
You know, I went to too many funerals and addressed uniform, but this one of appeal. Jonathan Dillar now detective first grade. Jonathan Dillar. I don't know if your viewers know this, but when New York City police officers are killed in the line of duty, the custom is at the funeral they're then promoted to detective first grade, the highest rank of detective, so that their families can receive a better benefit, much much higher pension payout for the wife and in this case, the young child.
Right.
But you know, Carol, even in those situations and every depth is tragic. You didn't see the perps. The murderers were not arrested twenty one times in release, right. I don't think you can analyze that issue without being somewhat political. And the problem in New York City is this, and I'll try to condense it. It's when the District Attorney's office
won't prosecute, and they've been very clear. The das in each borough have been very clear they're going to take this radical, far left approach and not prosecute certain crimes. Bad guys are emboldened, but worse worse for public safety, the NYPD stops making arrests because they can't incur the overtime the cops will get in trouble. The commanders will get in trouble for incurring the overtime when they know
the DA's office is going to keay the case. This is such a public safety crisis at which more people were talking about this, but they're not not enough. People are talking about the whys. They're talking about the what happened, but not why it's happening.
What would you say is our largest cultural problem or like, do you think that this plays into that?
Well, I think it's I think it's you know, there're several right. I think we saw this with the antifen in Black Lives Matter riots. There's this insanely permissive attitude towards crime. It's just permissive when you see videos every day people walking into Macy's and Walgreens and Publics and every other store out there, no matter where you were in the country, just loading up backpacks and garbage bags
full of merchandise and nobody's stopping them. And then you hear the story of the employee that tried to stop them, being the wire or the police officer being reprimanded for using too much force to put on handcuffs. When you start to tell bad guys that what they're doing is not going to be punished. They're going to do more of it. I mean, this doesn't take the greatest sociologists in the history of mankind of figure out right. And
when you combine that with prosecutors, wo won't prosecute? What do they think is going to happen?
Do you think it's solvable? Is there anything that we can do?
Yeah, I mean I think the blueprint is there that I think. You know, that's a great question, because not only is it solvable, you think a guy like me that came out of the police Academy was in the police Academy under David Dinkins, come out under really Julian Rudy Giuliani, Carol, When when we implemented broken windows, when we implemented Rudy's policing strategies and Bill Bratton's at the time policing strategies, we saw we noticed the difference on
the street in about two weeks. Really, it wasn't six months. You lived in New York, you were up there, yell on top of it.
Yeah, I was teens though, Yeah, but.
We noticed it in weeks. As cops, the bad guys weren't as brave anymore. When we drove by, they weren't just sitting at the cars. They weren't throwing washing machines. True story. I had a washing machine and a refriguer and to throw off broof tops at me. They weren't doing that because now they knew that were we held accountable. It wasn't realized it was that best used to call it. We used to call it airmail.
It meant that.
I didn't realize you could see the change then. I thought it was like a year's long process.
Well, statistically right, trickle down statistically took about a year. But I can tell you having been on patrol at four to twelve every night in the South Bronx, the busiest times you started to see I'm not saying it was a sweeping change right within a couple of weeks, those bad guys on the corner, Yeah, they were a lot less bold. You started to see it very quickly.
Wow, that's very interesting. I wonder you know.
The thing about having a strategy that worked is the insanity that you need to be living under to not go back to it. It's like, hey, I know you've got called in the National Guard into the New York City subway.
But what if what if you did.
This other thing that totally worked, you know, not that long ago, and tried that instead, But no, they go for National Guarden.
That's somehow the better option.
You can't do anything. Who aren't empowered or allowed to do anything. And to your point, that other thing that works is the incredibly radically a novel idea of forcing the law and prosecuting them. There's no you know, that's
why all jokes aside. That's why it's so frustrating me and Bernie Carrick, the former commissioner, a friend of mine, and I talked to countless guys and girls who are either still on the job or retired, and you bang your head against the wall because you're like, they know exactly what they need to do. It doesn't cost a penny more than anything they're doing, and they refuse to do it right.
But you know, for us, we get to live in Florida and we see action.
Taken all the time. I didn't even know this was possible.
I didn't know things like this were possible, like the recent thing that our you know, Governor DeSantis did where there was a lot of conversation around squatters and he was like, Okay, well here we go. I'm not going to have squatters in the States. It's illegal.
Now, Like, oh, it's that simple. People could just fix problems.
I was unaware until this, until now, until I came to Florida, I didn't know that people can just fix problems and make bad things go away. I didn't realize politicians and government officials can actually do that.
Was it always like that in Florida?
Or really?
Is he different?
No? I think it was because in Florida you don't have to the degree that you have it in the Blue states. Is even your Democrat voters down here are law and order voters? You know? I would always say when the Democrats would do defund the police, and they would try to act like that would also creep into Florida. I it wouldn't, because you take areas in West Broward County and these are nice areas and you know, up scale, upper middle class, staffluent areas. Yeah, maybe they vote blue,
but you know what else they vote for. They also vote for their hoa dollars to pay for that off duty police officer in the marked car to patrol their hoa at night. So there's a much different mindset down here with regards to law and order. I think it also has a bit to do with I don't know how much shout a bit to do with the fact that this has always been a haven for a tired
cops from around the country. There's no state income tax and all that fun stuff, and so uh, I think culturally, what we see in places like New York and Chicago and Detroit and Baltimore, you just wouldn't see here, even in your blue cities.
Right, So what do you do on weekends? What's what's a John Cardillo weekend?
Like? Oh, oh, you guys, not right, A clay I do know, a lot of clay shooting, a lot of regular shooting. I'm so proud that I got you guys into guns. I'm one of my greatest accomplishments.
You really, you were such an inspiration getting us armed.
You you played a giant role in that.
You introduced us to your guy who's you know now our guy? Yeah, Manny at Palm Beach Tacticals. We haven't we haven't come to the polo with you yet. That's that's something that's what.
I do on Sunday. You know what's so crazy? Everybody whenever I say that, I get beat up. Oh it's so pretentious. Take your horself somewhat. If I put up a picture of a polo match on Twitter, right now, take your horse golf somewhere else, horse scof you weren't a regular guy. I'm like, I just I have horses. I like to go to watch the horses. You know, yeah, horse golf, So I do a lot of that. Or I go to the beach club and you know, I
have a couple of kasotas. But that's the cool thing about Florida, right There's so much to do and the scene. You know, you you could be in my neighborhood, go out and fish, and within fifteen minutes you're in horse country. Within an hour you've got some of the best out there shooting ranges in America. It's just it's such a cool place to live. If you're into anything like that and doing stuff outdoors on the weekend, do.
You feel like you've made it?
Yeah? I mean, you know, I felt like I was a Floridian after five years, after fifteen, I knew I was never leaving. I was like hard for life to get a little better than this.
You know, right, But as a like have you made it?
Like? Is that?
Is that all that it takes to have a happy flow already in life?
I think you find none of us know what you do.
I mean that that's got to be a goal.
I think I think you find the stuff. Look, you know, I did media for a long time. I still love it. I do heads like this a few times a week and and stay abreast of the industry. But I was fortunate in that I had an expertise in the firearms space, tactical gear space. An opportunity presented itself to start pushing those products out in large scale, and I grabbed it and it turned out to be a very good decision. But yeah, I mean, I can't really think of anything
I would change about my life right now. So I guess I equate have you made it with more being happy about where you are than how many how many zeros? I mean? Yeah, I mean, I look, you always want more business, right, everybody wants to do always do better. But I don't if I wake up in the morning and say uh and and regret anything, I'm pretty energy.
I love it.
And here with your best tip for my listeners on how they can live a John Cardillo life and improve their.
Lives start by moving to Florida. And all kidding aside. Somebody once said to me, and it was the greatest piece of advice I've ever gotten. You can't steal second with your foot on first. And there really is no conventional path when something I'm a big believer in the sixth sense, and I've gut feeling, Carol, and when something too, when something starts to feel wrong and something else starts to feel right, explore it and if it starts to feel really right, pursuit love it.
Thank you so much for coming on, John, love talking to you. I have to come to Horset Golf sometime.
Absolutely, talk to you soon.
Thank you so much for joining us on the Carol Marcowitz Show. Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.