Ron DeSantis appears in The Bob Zadek Show not as a guest but as a political figure whose actions two separate guests assess. In a 2019 episode on drug pricing, Sally Pipes cites him as the governor of Florida who signed a bill permitting the importation of prescription drugs from Canada. In two 2022 episodes, the historian Richard Foglesong treats DeSantis’s conflict with Walt Disney World as the central case study in the governance of the Reedy Creek Improvement District. The excerpts contain no interview with DeSantis and no extended account of his career beyond these two matters.
Drug importation from Canada
In the closing segment of the 2019 episode, Bob Zadek asks Sally Pipes about a proposal by President Trump to allow Americans to buy and import drugs from Canada, where the same drugs are allegedly cheaper because the Canadian government negotiates low prices. Pipes says she totally opposes the idea and that she did a lot of work on it in 2004, when importing drugs from Canada became a big issue and counterfeit drugs were found coming from online pharmacies in Canada Sally Pipes on the High Cost of Free Stuff (2019).
Within that answer, Pipes names two states that have moved on importation. She says Florida, under a Republican governor, Ron DeSantis, has signed a bill allowing for importing drugs from Canada, and that Governor Polis in Colorado has signed an importation drug measure. She adds that about eleven other states want to do the same thing, plus the federal level. Her objection is one of supply: Canada is a country with 39 million people, and Canada does not have the supply of drugs. She says Canadian officials have recently said they cannot be the drugstore for the United States, and that the Health Minister of Canada has said he is very concerned. She attributes Canada’s lower prices to price controls, noting that American pharmaceutical companies sell to Canada, the UK and other countries with price controls at those lower prices, while research and development costs $2.6 billion from an idea to bring a drug to market and most drugs do not make it Sally Pipes on the High Cost of Free Stuff (2019).
Zadek then frames the tradeoff: the savings Americans enjoy would come at the expense of drug companies that would have to cut research budgets, harming the supply of new drugs. Pipes does not respond to that framing in the excerpt; her answer breaks off mid-sentence while she is listing new therapies. The excerpt therefore records DeSantis’s signature on the Florida importation bill as a fact stated by Pipes, without describing the bill’s terms, its number, or its enactment date.
The Disney conflict: Reedy Creek
The two 2022 episodes are built around Foglesong’s book Married to the Mouse: Walt Disney World and Orlando. In both, Zadek introduces the dispute by saying that Disney’s senior management took positions on public policy issues regarding the rights of parents in control of the education of their children and involving gay rights type issues, that Disney was outspoken in opposition to DeSantis’s policies, and that the governor decided to punish Disney World. Zadek describes the tool as taking away some of the autonomy Disney World has over its environment, and notes that Walt Disney himself envisioned building a political subdivision, the Reedy Creek Improvement District, over which the company would have almost exclusive control—running the police, the fire department, and designing the building code, in effect a pure company town Disney versus DeSantis (2022).
Foglesong’s own account of DeSantis’s motive is blunt. He says he does not think Ron DeSantis is particularly concerned about the privileges Disney has, but that he is revengeful towards them because they are contrary to his political messaging. In the second episode he puts it in similar terms: he does not think DeSantis is really so much bothered by the powers Disney has, but is mad at the Disney Company because it disagreed with him about issues of LGBTQ rights and did not like Disney challenging him on those woke principles Disney World’s Model for Cities of the Future (2022).
Foglesong also describes how Disney’s powers were locked in. Disney got the powers to provide public services themselves, tailored to their precise needs, as well as self-regulation, institutionalized in the form of the Reedy Creek Improvement District, so that when local government might later have taken control and taken back those powers, they were institutionalized in the form of the covenant of the district. He adds that he does not think anyone would have thought a Republican governor, Ron DeSantis, would want to take those powers away Disney World’s Model for Cities of the Future (2022).
The bond mechanism and who pays
The most concrete part of the Disney discussion is the municipal bond question, which Zadek asks about mechanically: what power does DeSantis have, and how much can he undo? Foglesong answers that Disney taxes itself to pay bond cost, and that is how it borrows money. People buy Reedy Creek Improvement District municipal bonds, and Disney taxes itself to retire those bonds. If Reedy Creek goes away, it would no longer have the ability to tax itself to retire the bonds, so someone else would have to compensate bondholders. The law says that would need to be a local government, a general-purpose local government—Osceola County and Orange County. Foglesong notes that he pays property taxes in that county and does not think Governor DeSantis can get re-elected if he allows that tax burden to fall upon residents there Disney versus DeSantis (2022).
He estimates the burden as an extra couple thousand—that is the right range—for municipal bonding, and says he does not particularly want to pay it, nor do other Orange County and Osceola County homeowners, just in order to satisfy Governor DeSantis. His conclusion is that in the end Disney will still have its power, and that DeSantis is in a problem place because someone has to retire those bonds Disney versus DeSantis (2022).
Across episodes
The Disney topic is argued twice in the same 2022 conversation, released under two episode titles, and the excerpts show no development between them: Zadek’s framing, Foglesong’s assessment of DeSantis’s motive, and the bond analysis recur in nearly identical form, with the second version adding the detail that Disney pays the largest tax bill in Orange County and is exempt from impact fees that competitors such as Universal Studios must pay Disney World’s Model for Cities of the Future (2022). The 2019 drug-importation segment touches DeSantis only in passing and shares no question with the Disney episodes; the excerpts show no arc connecting the two treatments.
What the sources do not cover
The excerpts do not state DeSantis’s title beyond Pipes’s reference to him as Florida’s Republican governor, nor any date of birth, election, or prior office. They do not name the Florida importation bill, describe its provisions, or say when it was signed, and they do not identify the education measure or the LGBTQ-related dispute beyond Zadek’s general description. The legal fate of Reedy Creek, any court ruling, and the outcome of the bond question are all left unresolved in the excerpts, which end with Foglesong’s prediction rather than a result.