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In the Energy News Beat Podcast– Conversation in Energy, the host Stuart Turley, Stuart Turley speaks with Martha Zoller, host of the Martha Zoller Show, about political trends, the energy landscape, and the importance of local media. They discuss the success of conservative voices in radio and podcasts, the rising influence of “America First” candidates, and the impact of energy policies on global geopolitics. Martha also shares insights on Georgia’s energy growth, the importance of education reform, and the cyclical nature of political and societal change. The conversation highlights the need for accountability and innovation in both politics and media.
Thank you, Martha. I had an absolute blast talking with you, and it was an honor to have you on the podcast. Please follow Martha on her LinkedIn here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/marthazoller/
Check out Martha’s Substack HERE:
Highlights of the Podcast
00:00 – Intro
01:31 – Primary Elections and America First Movement
02:55 – Opposition and the Role of Primaries in Georgia
03:07 – The Lack of Primaries in the Democratic Party
03:50 – Conservative Media vs. Liberal Media
05:20 – Trump’s Business Conservatism
05:56 – Energy News and Alternative Media Growth
06:47 – The Importance of Local Radio
07:12 – Radio Stations and Media Growth
08:11 – President Trump’s Impact on News Cycles
08:53 – The Zelensky Visit and Trump’s Strategy
09:44 – Energy and Geopolitics in the Ukraine Conflict
10:36 – The Role of Dogecoin and the Deep State
12:02 – Fixing Government Systems and Saving Money
12:55 – The Election Process and National Integrity
14:02 – The Shifting Peace Agenda
14:54 – The Great Awakening and Political Change
15:27 – Education and College Campuses
17:15 – Education Reform and Parental Involvement
18:10 – The Collapse of Blue States and Education System
18:34 – Georgia’s Nuclear Growth and Energy Future
19:36 – Texas, Georgia, and Energy Grid Differences
20:28 – Cycles in American History and Political Change
20:39 – Where to Find Martha Zoller
21:49 – Tribute to Rush Limbaugh
22:00 – Conclusion
Stuart Turley [00:00:07] Hello everybody, welcome to the Energy Newsbeat Podcast. My name’s Stu Turley, president of the Sandstone Group. We are actually in one of the biggest news cycles we have ever been in. And if you’re a podcast listener here, you know that we talk about energy and politics, geopolitics, and I’ve got a fantastic guest today. I’ve Got Martha Zoller. She is the host of the Martha Zoller Show and she is in Georgia with some updates. How are you today? Have a great day.
Martha Zoller [00:00:36] I’m doing great and we’re taping this on Fat Tuesday so I got my Mardi Gras scarf on so I’m ready to go.
Stuart Turley [00:00:41] Oh, I like that. We’re already off to a start and you just finished a podcast with Zach Nunn. He is an outstanding representative out there. How’d that go?
Martha Zoller [00:00:53] Yeah, I mean, I love talking to these new folks that are out there because we have in the House, we’ve been pretty successful at getting the average age down. You know, I mean, the Senate, we still have some work to do, although we’re doing better. I mean I was looking yesterday at one of the Senate votes that it was 96, because at any given time there’s four senators out because they’re too old. So I love talking to people like Zach Nunn because they bring that new, vibrant vitality, because that’s what we need. You know, I’m a term limit person, but at the same time, voters are doing a really good job in the House of Representatives of term living people. And that’s, what we need.
Stuart Turley [00:01:31] Isn’t that great? I’m interviewing. I’ve started a new series now, Martha. And that is if you are a America first person trying to primary out a Democrat or a rhino, I want you on my podcast so that we can talk about energy policies and everything else. And the, it’s just amazing. I’ve got an all star cast starting to line up of folks that are going to go after the Democrats and the rhinos. It’s pretty cool.
Martha Zoller [00:01:59] Yeah, and I think that primaries are good. Okay, so I live in the ninth district of Georgia, and it is a plus 26 Republican district. Okay. So basically, once you get in, you can stay in as long as you want. And, and our Congressman Andrew Clyde, which is a good guy, he’s a great guy, he’s got he’s right on the issues, but he has drawn an opponent this time. And I think that’s a good thing, because in a plus twenty six district. The Democrat is never going to come back from nowhere and beat us. OK, so what could happen is if you don’t have a Republican, even if they’re an America first Republican, a mega Republican, a rhino, whoever they are, they should have to defend their positions. And if you do primary them, then they never have to do that in a district like ours. So I’m excited. We’re going to have some opposition. Sam Kuvion is the mayor of Gainesville, which is the largest city in the ninth district. and he’s running and so we’re going to have a nice primary season.
Stuart Turley [00:02:56] Isn’t that great? You know, it’s kind of like, I think the Democrats found out that because they didn’t have a primary, they got stuck with something they didn t really turn out very good for them, did it?
Martha Zoller [00:03:07] No, and you know what, they could have had a primary. You know what’s so funny is whether you write like Robert Kennedy or not, he had been a lifelong Democrat and they wouldn’t let him in. Dean Phillips, whether you like him or not. You know, he had a different point of view about things and they wouldn’t Let him in and look what ended up happening. It was good for us, but it wasn’t very good for America.
Stuart Turley [00:03:28] I mean, when you take Donald Trump, Tulsi Gabbard, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and you run them off, you take Joe Rogan, they’re now sitting there going, what are we doing? And we had all these. One of their biggest things they’re trying to say now, Martha, is how do we find the next Joe Rogin? You had Joe Rogen.
Martha Zoller [00:03:50] Well, and I tell you what, I’ve been in the radio business a long time, and this has been an issue since I got in the business in the mid 90s, where there was roughly about 4,500 at that time, conservative shows across the country, but there were about 400 liberal shows. And then Air America came along and then which they tried to, and they failed. A lot of other people came along. They tried to and they failed. And my good friend, the dear departed Alan Combs, who was one of the few Liberals who actually was successful at doing radio. He had about 50 stations, which back in the day It wasn’t 600 like like like Rush Limbaugh But it was 50 stations and he was on a lot of stations and I asked him Alan Why is it that liberals can’t make radio work and he said Martha it’s two reasons one We don’t have a sense of humor and two when you’re bashing capitalism You can’t get advertisers and he wasn’t right It is a business in addition to being something that that you have to do and Republicans have figured that out. Conservatives have figured that out and I really classify myself more as a conservative now than a Republican because I think Republicans have changed. I mean, even Donald Trump is not, he’s not a lifelong Republican. He is more of a, of, I think he’s more of a business conservative, okay? He’s not as conservative as I am on everything, but he’s right on the business issues that are going to make the economy strong and And that’s I can deal with that. You know, we can we can have a big tent and I can deal with
Stuart Turley [00:05:21] Well, this is so we’re in a cycle with my, my new site and podcast and everything else. We’ve got about 30 podcasts that we’ve filmed that are in production right now. We had eight and a half million transcripts read last year of our podcast. We had 2 million downloads just of the podcast, but now we are on target to hit 15 million transcript read of the podcasts and people are starved. For news outside of the mainstream media and do you think that that’s also radio is the same way that it’s their star for your kind of show.
Martha Zoller [00:05:57] Oh, absolutely. And, and people have been talking about the demise of radio since television came in, right? But what radio gives you, I mean, I do a podcast also, and I use Substack and I get, I put a lot of audio out and different kinds of content, because I think people don’t want to just read politics every day. So I talk about culture. I talk about other things too, but what’s what radio gives you in the old school, you know, you in radio, that’s my radio station, what it gives you is that local flair. So you can turn it on. You know whether the kids are going to school, you know what the weather’s like. You can’t replace that with a podcast. You can replace that with new media as they like to call it. New media is great. And I listened to a whole group of podcasts, but when you are getting your kids up to go to school you want something that’s local. And that’s what we give them.
Stuart Turley [00:06:47] You know, it’s kind of funny we’re having this conversation because I was looking at putting my podcast, we have a daily show and I’m looking at putting my podcast in about four or five cities and looking at the cost versus benefit. And radio’s tough to sit back and try to say, if you don’t know your market, you don’ know if it’s going to be financially or fiscally okay to go ahead and jump in.
Martha Zoller [00:07:13] No, I think you’re right about that. And I’ve been lucky enough, I’ve worked for a family-owned station for most of my career. And Mr. Jacobs believed in internet. And he did a, a online newspaper long before they made money. Okay, it’s called a DUN. He started in 1999. But because he was family-own, and he only had to answer to himself, he, he was able to put the time and effort into it until it started making money. And now we get millions of views every day. People come to us, we sell advertising. It’s great. But he couldn’t have done that if he was a Cox Media Group. I’ve also worked for Cox Media group, which from a benefits standpoint is fantastic, from a training standpoint is fantastic, from the ability to be able to cross-reference. I’ve done shows in Tulsa, Oklahoma. I’ve gone shows in Atlanta. I’ve got shows all over the country. It’s a great time for me to do that. But when I got the opportunity to come back to my family-owned station that was 15 minutes from my house, I took it.
Stuart Turley [00:08:11] Isn’t that cool? But boy with the, with the way president Trump has got things going on. I, we’re filming this on the 4th of March and with the presidential speech to the joint session of the house and Senate, I’ll tell you what we are in a news cycle that is the most bizarre thing I’ve ever seen when we had president Zelinsky in the white house last week and he absolutely insulted president Trump. and president trump and i love president i mean vice president vance those two did not take anything and zelensky you’re out i enjoyed that i’m sorry goodbye i you do not need to be in Well, I think…
Martha Zoller [00:08:53] Well, I think look, look at what Trump was able to do with that. And I have a little different view. I love Vice President Vance. I have little different view that I think he should have left it. I think Trump was fine. He didn’t need someone to step in and help him. I think I was dealing with Zelensky fine. And and so I have a little bit different view as I love JD Vance, but I have a little difference view about that. But what I think what you look at, what’s happened? You’ve got Europe stepping up to the table there. They’re putting more money in their defense. They’re saying they’re gonna handle more of this. And then just before we came on to tape, Zelensky did this full throated apology saying it was wrong what he did, that he needs America, all of this, just in time for this speech. I mean, it is three-dimensional chess that Trump is playing and he’s getting people to do the things he wants them to do. And that’s what I think is so great about what we’re watching.
Stuart Turley [00:09:44] Isn’t that wild? I mean, the whole thing, President Trump, I would never want to play chess with that man because I am not qualified to even think outside of where he’s going on this. And what I think is, is we are going to see an end to the war. and the amount of policies and corruption that are being shown. I love Doge and Elon and what they’re finding out. And Martha, I think it’s absolutely hysterical that people are saying that President Trump and Elon have Doge when Doge was actually an Obama creation. With everything tied to the back end between all of the agencies and they’re using their own Obama agency against the deep state I think it’s absolutely hilarious and phenomenal.
Martha Zoller [00:10:38] Well, and let’s go back one step further. You know, Bill Clinton released 377,000 federal workers, you know, under Bill Clinton, you they actually balanced the budget for four years and paid down some of the debt now I’m not saying that makes him a great guy, but it started kind of, you remember the era of big government is over it started then and that’s when Democrats used to be small government people and then. Right. Obama stepped in and Obama was the deporter in chief. Nobody talks about that. He didn’t talk about immigration much, but he was very hardline on immigration. Then you had the kind of the technology department that he had that now has become Doge and what I love about what Elon Musk is doing and speaking of our friend Joe Rogan, you should listen to the podcast. It’s three and a half hours long with he and Elon Musk that dropped last Friday, but you get explanations. You don’t get anywhere else. about why he’s doing what he’s doing and how he’s doing what he’s doing. But what you found here with these, these processes that you have $4.7 trillion of checks that go out with no coding. Okay. That you don’t know what the checks are for or where they went. You have these other things that are happening related to processes that have been around since the eighties. You know, if he just, if in addition to the cuts, which are fantastic, but if all he does is fixes all these systems. so that they are up to date and really efficient. He’s gonna save us money from here on out.
Stuart Turley [00:12:02] Exactly. But Martha, there’s, there there’s about 16th thing I could, I could say. I keep going off on all these tangents, but if we don’t get the election process fixed nationally, we’re going to be back where we were now, you know, where we are in the midterms. Cause right now, if president Trump stumbles during the Ukraine end of the war and the war will be ended in president Putin and president Trump. May already have a negotiated settlement of what I think is already going on I think they already know what’s gonna go on but president Zelensky is Rumored to have already signed Mineral deals with the UK and the EU So those mineral deals that he was looking at signing may have been actually compromised and president Trump knows that
Martha Zoller [00:12:55] No, I think I think you’re right about that, that they we don’t know exactly what that’s going to look like. But I do think that what’s going happen is that he’s got, you know, a great insight as far as energy is concerned. And yes, and really, it’s been pointed out that the EU and the Great Britain have spent more money buying energy from Putin than they have funding the war. So basically, they’re funding both sides of the war, and nobody’s calling them on that until now. And it wouldn’t have happened. if this thing hadn’t happened in the White House on Friday. So if that hadn’t happened on Friday, then we wouldn’t have had the light shined on what the EU was doing related to Russia and energy. So and then in 2018, President Trump told us this was going to happen. So it’s an exciting time, not only for energy, which is at the base of the cost of everything, right? What it costs to get it from one place to another, but we’ve also got Peace. I mean, we flipped the script, haven’t we? It used to be the Dems that were for peace, and we were kind of the neocon warmongers. Now they flip the script and we’re the guys wanting to have peace, and I think more people are gonna align with that.
Stuart Turley [00:14:03] I think the world is tired, but I think that as I need to have you back for a follow-up podcast next month and say, wait a minute, here’s what we said and here’s where we’re going. I would love that. I think this is a big enough topic. We have got the seven P plan. I just finished a podcast with George McMillan on my, and he is an absolute jewel, but The left has been planning this since the 50s. They have implemented this by stripping out our colleges. And you’ve got the Georgia Bulldogs behind you. I absolutely love Georgia. And when you sit back and take a look at this, this has been in play. We are in the middle of a chain. There is a great awakening going on with Americans going, I think we’re kind of done. There’s about 70% of us that are done with the old world. in a little
Martha Zoller [00:14:54] and a little side story about UGA, okay, and all the SCC schools. And I’m a little biased, okay, because I went to UGA. But we didn’t put up with any of the stuff related to October 7. We did not allow it to happen. We did, not we carried people back to where they were. We allowed people to protest, but they had to protest peacefully. And our applications are through the roof and are having a hard time getting people to apply. So we’re seeing this happen because parents saw people saw that we weren’t going to put up with that kind of stuff on our college campuses.
Stuart Turley [00:15:28] You know, this brings up, I can sit and talk to you for hours. I, this is kind of cool because this brings up our new secretary of education. And she is here to dismantle the, the department of education and give it back to the States, which is where it belongs. Because when you and I grew up, we didn’t have a department of education and we actually learned things.
Martha Zoller [00:15:49] Yeah, and in full disclosure, I’m on the State Board of Education for the state of Georgia. And we, you know, we are dealing with this right now and budgeting. We’re in everything that we approved in our last meeting. I said, are these funds that we already have in house or these funds we’re expecting to get from the Department of Education? Because that may not be happening anymore. So we’ve been asking that question about everything. And you’re right that we did a better job. You know, two things have happened since the Department. of education. And they’re kind of contrary to each other. One is education has gotten worse because it takes 25 percent of administrative time to get seven percent of money from the federal government on average on average. Now, there are some schools that more some get less not efficient. The second thing is we’ve gone from only having about 70 percent of kids in school to about 97 percent of kids in school, which on the surface sounds like a good thing. but they are the hardest to educate. The ones that weren’t going to school before and are now are the hard to educate, and we’ve got to acknowledge that and figure out how to get a kid a best education. And we’re gonna do it three ways. By teaching the basics, by getting back to teaching technical careers in school, okay, because we feminized education to where girls are doing great, boys are not doing very well, and that’s an oversimplification, but it’s in general true. And then the final thing we gotta do is make it easy for parents to be involved.
Stuart Turley [00:17:16] this is this is back to the parents and if you don’t get involved this brings up a more gigantic piece of this entire puzzle and that is if you’re in a democrat run blue state and now the department of education is now becoming very important for your local school district if you are in a really crappy school district, you’re going to end up moving. and those that are successful are going to move to very successful states. So all of a sudden it’s kind of like Germany and its energy policies. They went woke, they went green energy, and now they are broke. And it’s going to be the same thing for the blue states. It is Delaware, It is New Jersey California and New York and I mean they are going broke. I wonder if it’s going to be the same in the education system.
Martha Zoller [00:18:11] Well, and Georgia was only closed until April 26th in 2020. And so we didn’t miss but a very small amount of school. And we were back in school by that next fall. And so starting to see differences there. And in Georgia, we have opened up two new nuclear reactors and we have two more to be building. So we’re ready for the energy growth.
Stuart Turley [00:18:34] You know, AI is so great, but in Texas, Georgia was one of the exceptions. I’ve been doing a study of the entire grid. There’s three component, three main sections to the grid. Texas, ERCOT, and then the East and the West. And when you sit back, Georgia is looking pretty good. When you take a look at their great utilities, you take a look everything, they’ve got their nuclear power plants there for baseline. It’s about 12% of that particular area in that grid. As far as a baseline, you have to have that. Texas is doing great because they’re bringing on natural gas power plant and they’ve got the budget. They’ve got that money. The other sections whoops, they’re they’re not looking so good for all of the rest of this. So our great secretary of energy, Chris Wright, who’s been on the show about four times, he’s got his work cut out for him. But with Lee Zeldin, he is they’re going to do great things together. They’re great things to do. One of the not problem children in the world. It’s a good problem to be a good not problem to
Martha Zoller [00:19:36] I think you’re absolutely right. No, I think you’re right about that. I’m excited. I love Georgia. We have everything we have from mountains to beaches. You know, we’ve got everything, and I love it. But, but look, we got this is a great country. This is the greatest country that God ever created. And we are, you know, we get in our own way sometimes, but you know what? Historically, It’s like 50 year cycles. In the seventies, we had high inflation, violence in the cities, you know, and people were moving to the suburbs. In the twenties, you had prohibition and there was lawlessness all around. Now in the twenties we’ve got violence in the cities and people are moving. it runs in cycles. My theory is it gets just far enough away that people forget it because look, I was in high school and college in the 70s. I loved it. Okay. But for our parents, it was difficult. So we’ve got to, we’ve gotta learn from our mistakes, learn from our lessons and we got to move forward.
Stuart Turley [00:20:28] This is so cool. I would love to have another podcast within the future, but how do people find you right now? If you are out there, how do you find Martha Zoller?
Martha Zoller [00:20:39] Well, I’m on X at Martha’s Aller. I’m at Martha Zoller on Facebook and LinkedIn and I also have a sub stack at Martha zoller. So that’s where you can find me.
Stuart Turley [00:20:48] Nice. I, well, thank you so much. This is exciting. And I’ll tell you, it’s so much fun being out there. It’s funny that you’re a podcast host and a radio personality. And I’m over here exploring, going to radio and I’ve taken it from digital where Google has shut me down. And I’ve now bypassed Google and have now big enough. That’s kind of fun when you can just say, I don’t really care if you try to shut me.
Martha Zoller [00:21:16] That’s right
Stuart Turley [00:21:17] That’s where radio and Rush Limbaugh really made the difference. And that’s why I was exploring going into radio.
Martha Zoller [00:21:24] Well, Rush, I tell you, was one of the most gracious people I ever met. And I always did the time slot leading into him. And he was the three or four times that I got to see him in person in my life. He was always so gracious. He knew who I was. And he would always say that I was show prep for him. And I knew I wasn’t show prep for him, but he was that kind of old school manners. And he just was a great guy and he’s greatly missed.
Stuart Turley [00:21:49] Well, Martha, you just absolutely made my day today, and we will put all your contact information in the show notes and look forward to seeing you again. Thank you for stopping by the Energy Newsbeat podcast today.
Martha Zoller [00:22:00] Thanks so much, Stu, it was great to be here.
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