03-07-25 - *FULL SHOW* Right-To-Work; MAGA and Ukraine; Reining in Elon; Science

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
I am Ross's Koa. We are one hundred and we
always appreciate your company. I'm very grateful to have you
here with me. There's these are the kinds of times
that remind you, remind me at least, why the Chinese
phrase may you live in interesting times is actually thought
of as a curse. We surely live in very interesting

(00:21):
times right now. It's never boring for a talk show host.
Lots and lots of stuff to talk about. We are
expecting the President of the United.

Speaker 2 (00:28):
States to speak at.

Speaker 1 (00:30):
The White House very soon. He wants apparently he wants
to talk about the economy. There's been a lot of
turmoil in the stock market since he started these trade wars.
There was a jobs report that came out today that
had one kind of bright spot that I think Trump
will talk about a lot, which was the first increase

(00:50):
in auto manufacturing jobs in a while. You know, it's
like it's nothing to write home about, but you know.

Speaker 2 (00:57):
It's it's better than jobs going down.

Speaker 1 (01:00):
I suppose it's actually more complicated situation than it seems.

Speaker 2 (01:04):
But in any case, so there's.

Speaker 1 (01:07):
That We've had two slightly disappointing job reports in a row.
The one that came out today was a little bit
weaker than expected, not massively weaker than expected, and certainly
within any kind of.

Speaker 2 (01:19):
Normal error range.

Speaker 1 (01:22):
And last month was also weaker than expected and then
was revised down. So I do think some folks are
starting to worry about whether we are drifting toward, you know,
lower growth or negative growth, meaning recession. The bond market
has been very interesting in the last several days. The

(01:43):
yields have been pretty volatile, and it seems to me
that the bond market is trying to decide between stagflation
and recession.

Speaker 2 (01:51):
I think I think a lot.

Speaker 1 (01:52):
Of market participants are starting to believe that some of
the policies coming out of Washington in DC, the trade stuff,
the massive firing of large numbers of federal employees at
one time. And by the way, I'm not saying we
shouldn't be doing that. I'm just talking about how the
markets are reacting. I think the markets are looking at

(02:15):
an economic slowdown, and I think Trump and his people
are going to be pretty concerned about that. I'll switch
to politics here so just so we're all on the
same page. A small economic slowdown is not a big deal,
but politically it can be very painful, and Democrats will
certainly milk it to the greatest possible extent. And if

(02:37):
we have let's say, a couple quarters of negative growth
and that's technically a recession, and you will see Democrats say, oh,
here's the Trump procession. And there are lots of voters
out there who don't have much information, and they'll hear
the Trump procession and they'll believe it. But also, if
there is an actual recession, even if it's not deep,

(03:00):
you don't have to be a so called low information
voter to notice that things will.

Speaker 2 (03:04):
Be different out out there.

Speaker 1 (03:06):
Some people will be losing jobs, Unemployment rates will go up,
and if it's because of Trump's tariffs, unemployment rates will
go up at the same time that the cost of
things you need to buy in the store or a
car or a house or whatever, all going up. And
that could turn into a route of Republicans in the
twenty twenty six mid term elections that in turn would

(03:30):
make Donald Trump's life absolutely miserable. They will look for
any excuse to impeach him. I think somebody already filed.
I think some I think some Democrat or was it.

Speaker 2 (03:42):
Al Green, Yeah, Okay, Al Green, the.

Speaker 1 (03:43):
Guy who got thrown out of the House chambers on
Tuesday night for standing up and waving his cane at
the president and yelling that guy.

Speaker 2 (03:53):
So anyway, if I.

Speaker 1 (03:55):
Were, if I were the Republicans, I would be a
little concerned. On the other hand, I do think there's
very much they can do about it other than getting
Donald Trump to completely stop the trade war stuff. And
that just doesn't seem like the kind of thing that
Donald Trump is likely to do. So so well, we'll see.
Trump is scheduled to be speaking around now. These things

(04:18):
rarely start on time. Whenever he speaks, we will. We
will get to it. In the meantime, I'll share a
couple of other things with you. Oh, speaking of Tuesday
night speech. At one part of the speech, Donald Trump
laid out this long list of programs that the federal
government funded that were just ridiculously wasteful. And I bet

(04:43):
you two percent of the country would hear those programs
and think that we should spend money on that. And
those are like the two craziest percent, you know, the
people who liked Elizabeth Epps when she was in the
state House, the people who liked her nand as you know,
maybe the Bernie Sanders types, although I think even Bernie
would say no, a lot of that stuff is nonsense.

(05:05):
I did want to mention one though, So at some point,
and I don't have the audio, but at some point
you if you watch the speech, you will remember President
Trump said, however.

Speaker 2 (05:15):
Many million dollars uh to.

Speaker 1 (05:18):
Make mice transgender, all right, to make mice transgender? And
I just I don't really want to pick on Trump,
but somebody whoever's writing his speech, because Trump Trump doesn't
know that. Trump doesn't know that list of projects, somebody
put that in his speech. And the what that project

(05:41):
was was making mice transgenic, not transgender. Transgenic is when
you genetically modify something, and in this case, they are
genetically modifying mice so that they can be used to
study diseases in humans, you know, in a way that's

(06:03):
highly applicable to humans without having to, you know, give
a human a disease. And it's very advanced, it's very
very advanced biological scientific research, very beneficial, and basically, transgenic
means you take genes DNA, not blue gens DNA from

(06:23):
somewhere and put that into the mouse DNA into the
nucleus of a fertilized mouse egg, and then that DNA
then becomes the DNA of that mouse, and then that
mouse is then used to in the laboratory to study diseases.

(06:43):
USA Today says this, for example, studying conditions like Alzheimer's
and and and and Transgendic kind of research is used
on plants as well, trees, insects, other other kinds of stuff.
So anyway, they're there's no project to make mice transgender.

Speaker 2 (07:03):
It was a project involving transgenic mice.

Speaker 1 (07:06):
Here's a good news story of the day. So I
think I mentioned on the show. I'm not one hundred
percent sure, because I know I was talking about it
at home a lot, how much I wanted to severely
beat about the head and neck the three people involved
with the crime of stealing two English bulldog puppies from
a pet store in Centennial.

Speaker 2 (07:27):
And not just because I have an English bulldog, but.

Speaker 1 (07:32):
Three people did this. One of them pretended to have
a seizure. Then a guy grabbed a couple of puppies, and.

Speaker 2 (07:40):
A gal drove the getaway car. And the store is.

Speaker 1 (07:46):
Called Perfect Pets and Centennial, and these puppies retail for
about forty three hundred dollars.

Speaker 2 (07:52):
And actually one lady bought.

Speaker 1 (07:55):
One of these puppies from someone on the street for
I think fifteen hundred bucks or something, and then saw
the news story and realized, oh, this is probably one
of those stolen puppies, and she brought it back to
the store as she was told she would get a thousand.

Speaker 2 (08:09):
Dollars reward for the return of the puppy.

Speaker 1 (08:13):
As of Thursday afternoon, she told the Denver Is that
she hadn't received the reward yet.

Speaker 2 (08:17):
But anyway, what I wanted you to know is.

Speaker 1 (08:21):
That law enforcements has caught these people. Jonathan moonees a
thirty two year old. He's facing a whole bunch of charges.
I won't bother reading them all. Poor Furia tech Courante,
thirty four years old. She she turned herself in. She
knew that they were going to get her. She posted
bond and she's out. That other guy though the first

(08:43):
guy did not get bail and he's still in jail.
And then the guy who did the fake seizure. His
name is Timothy Davis. He's thirty seven years old. He
has also been arrested. So in any case, they've got
them all.

Speaker 2 (08:59):
They've got them all.

Speaker 1 (09:00):
I don't know exactly what the right punishment.

Speaker 2 (09:03):
Should be there. I do think a severe.

Speaker 1 (09:06):
Beating about the head and neck would be a good start.
But the good news is they've got these people and
hopefully they'll never do it again. We're keeping an eye
out for President Trump to speak. We'll take that as
soon as he starts. We are awaiting President Trump, who
was about nineteen minutes late right now.

Speaker 2 (09:24):
But that's normal, they okay? Is that is that what
the media is saying? Really there? The media is going
to give us a tape replay.

Speaker 1 (09:35):
Wow, all right, Well whatever, whenever we get, whatever it
is we get, we're gonna share it with you.

Speaker 2 (09:41):
And that'll be we assume.

Speaker 1 (09:42):
Donald Trump talking about the economy I mentioned before.

Speaker 2 (09:45):
I'm not going to dwell on it now.

Speaker 1 (09:46):
I think he and his team are probably a little
bit worried about the economy because the stock market has
been so bad. This is the this is gonna be
the worst week for the stock market in six months.
And yeah, look, I told you two weeks ago that
a week earlier, or a week and a half earlier,

(10:07):
I had significantly reduced my exposure to the stock market,
and I was very clear about and I it's going
to sound like I'm patting myself on the back, but
that's not my point. Yeah, Shannon says, I could pat
myself on my stomach instead and then.

Speaker 2 (10:22):
Everything will be better.

Speaker 1 (10:24):
I rarely have strong opinions on the direction of the
stock market. I'm talking about probably once every three or
four or five years.

Speaker 2 (10:32):
I very, verily, very rarely have an opinion. And I
don't think.

Speaker 1 (10:37):
I don't think I've ever been wrong because it's so rare.
I only have an opinion when everything is lining up
in a way that I am absolutely positively convinced.

Speaker 2 (10:50):
So I'm literally.

Speaker 1 (10:51):
Talking about four or five times in twenty years, right,
So I'm not doing this every day, trying to pick
directions in the market. But I just had a feeling
three four weeks ago like something has changed. I felt
like the mood has changed a little bit in the market,
a little less, a little less excited. But also I
felt strongly and it's not because of any talking point

(11:15):
or politics, because I'm not gonna let my view of
politics and politicians cost me money.

Speaker 2 (11:21):
I have this conversation with people all the time.

Speaker 1 (11:23):
Think about how many conservatives missed one of the greatest
stock market rallies of all time during the Obama administration
because they couldn't imagine how anything good could happen when
that guy was president. And look, I understand the mindset,

(11:43):
but it misses the point. In fact, I wasn't going
to talk about this, but I am going to talk
about it. You have to remember that presidents in Congress
most of the time, even when they're doing bad things,
they're not doing things that are bad enough to overcome

(12:06):
just how remarkable American entrepreneurs are. So when you're betting,
you know, in the stock market, let's say, not only
a little bit, are you betting on government? Mostly you're
betting on American entrepreneurship. Shannon, are you hearing something that

(12:27):
we need to know? Not yet, not yet, never, never, Okay.
And so I actually had a moment about this. I
have to say I was underinvested for a similar reason
early in the Obama presidency. And I was at a gathering,
I forget where, of a whole bunch of conservatives, and
I was talking with a friend of mine or the

(12:48):
wife of a friend of mine, and they have quite
a bit of money, and she did at least as
much of the money management as he did. And she
was very involved with the family's investments. And I said,
they have had and I assume still have quite a
bit more money than I have.

Speaker 2 (13:07):
And she said a couple things to me.

Speaker 1 (13:11):
She said, look, Obama's president, so I'm not really worried
that the market's going up.

Speaker 2 (13:15):
And also she's and this is.

Speaker 1 (13:17):
Kind of coming out of the huge like two thousand
and seven, two thousand and eight sell off. She said,
the market's already gone up a fair bit, so I'm
going to wait for it to go down a little
and then I'll buy.

Speaker 2 (13:31):
So I heard those two things right.

Speaker 1 (13:33):
She said she didn't believe anything good could happen, and
she's waiting to buy the dip.

Speaker 2 (13:37):
So you know what I did the next day.

Speaker 1 (13:40):
The next day, I put the most money into the
stock market in one day that I ever put into
the stock market in one day. And the Dow was
like fourteen thousand at the time. It's tripled since then,
it's tripled. And actually, the stock market did pretty well

(14:00):
under Biden, even though he was the worst president in
my lifetime, and the stock market is not doing that
well under Trump, even though he has some good policies.
Part of the reason it's not doing well is he
also has some bad policies. My point is, I've been
doing this investing stuff for too long to let politics

(14:25):
interfere with making money. And I don't let the fact
that there's a president I like make me think bad
things can't happen. I don't let the fact that there's
a president I don't like make me think that good
things can't happen, because mostly it's not about the president.
Mostly it's about you and me, animal spirits, men and

(14:48):
women opening businesses. And about four weeks ago, I just
it just became very clear to me that all of
these folks who are saying that Donald Trump only is
using tariff's as negotiating leverage and he doesn't actually mean them,
and he's just going to negotiate with him and then

(15:10):
tariff rates will come down around the world, and then
our tariffs will go away and everything will be fine.
I came to deeply believe that that's wrong, and that
Donald Trump really likes tariffs. Now I'm not saying he
doesn't also like the leverage he does, but even without
the leverage, he likes them. He believes in them. They're
a way for him to impose a massive tax increase

(15:31):
on you and me without admitting that that's what he's doing.
And Donald Trump actually has never been a champion of
free trade. He has always thought that trade is a
form of the United States getting ripped off. And I'm
not going to go into all the economics of why
that's wrong, but it is wrong, and it's dangerously wrong.
And it became clear to me a little less than

(15:51):
a month ago that this was going to go badly
because Trump was going to go ahead with tariffs and
We're all going to pay the price. And so I
took a lot of money out of the stock market,
and I told I told my people, like, hey, I
hope I'm wrong. I hope I'm wrong. At this point,
I have no idea. The stock market's down quite a
lot since then. I have no idea whether it's done,

(16:13):
and much depends on what Trump does next. A friend
of mine who runs a hedge fund, and I'm not
going to.

Speaker 2 (16:21):
Name this person, but.

Speaker 1 (16:24):
Going into all this, what my friend did was take
a lot of money out of the US stock market
and put it into European military defense companies with the
idea of being Donald Trump is likely to stop supporting Ukraine,
stop sending weapons to Ukraine, but the Europeans are going

(16:46):
to want to keep supporting Ukraine. So they're going to
have to start spending a lot of money on weapons,
and they're not going to buy it from American companies.

Speaker 2 (16:52):
They're going to buy it from European companies.

Speaker 1 (16:55):
So in any case, while the US stock market is
down whatever it's down for the year, down a heck
of a lot over the past week, or to my
friend's hedge fund is up fifteen percent or something. I mean,
what a brilliant this. This is what great investors do.
And by the way, I am not a great investor.
I'm barely an investor. I'm much more of a trader.

(17:17):
My finance, my finance background is trading options, where for me,
holding a position for a long time was a couple
of weeks, right, Usually it could be anywhere from a
couple hours to a couple days, but a couple of
weeks was a long time, and a month was almost
unheard of. So I'm really not an investor, and I'm

(17:37):
just always.

Speaker 2 (17:38):
So impressed when people think of that.

Speaker 1 (17:40):
You know, you're you're starting at all right, Trump thinks this, Well,
what does that mean he's gonna do?

Speaker 2 (17:44):
Then what does that mean the other country's gonna do?
And then that what does.

Speaker 1 (17:48):
That mean for which companies in those other countries? And
it's in a sense when I say it to you
like that, it sounds simple, right, but almost nobody does
it because you know, people who are great at something
make it seem simple. Right. So anyway, I just thought
I thought i'd share that, share that story with you.

(18:11):
All right, let's do some other things again. We're still
waiting for Donald Trump. Uh. Producer Shannon seems to believe,
based on what he's hearing from one of the major
news networks, that everybody is gonna get this at the
same time on on tape effectively. So when it when
we hear it, I guess it will have what did

(18:31):
I say it wrong?

Speaker 2 (18:32):
Just you make it sound like I saw a sasquatch.
Uh huh.

Speaker 1 (18:41):
Next time, see just for a change of pace, because
you've done Pete Gustin three or four times in a
row now, so for a change of pace to the
other one, the other one next time you talk. Anyway,
we'll see, all right, So let me let me keep
doing some other things, and then we'll we'll come back whenever,
whenever Trump does whatever.

Speaker 2 (18:57):
He's gonna whatever he's gonna. I'm gonna switch gears and
time here.

Speaker 1 (19:00):
I'm gonna move away from economics, move away from.

Speaker 2 (19:02):
Politics for a minute.

Speaker 1 (19:03):
Oh my gosh, I hit it when this thing makes
me want to wants to make me sign in come on,
Oh man, that's not gonna work, all right, this is
this is a beauty of live radio. Now I gotta now,
I gotta turn away from the screen that's in front
of me. Uh and and go to my go to
my laptop and open this web page on my laptop,

(19:25):
which should work fine, I hope. So there's a okay,
here we go. This is from the Wall Street Journal,
Please work, Please work, And it's a it's a story
that comes from uh New Zealand, and I just love
this story. It's about it's about orange traffic cones and

(19:45):
the headline is code orange the Fight over road Cones
in New Zealand. And I admit, I fully admit, this
is a silly story. But I need a silly story
right now. So let me just share a little of
this with you. Some countries, are you over religion? Others
debate military spending or healthcare. New Zealand is really torn
up over traffic cones. The center right government. It's a

(20:09):
relatively new government in New Zealand. They've been left to
center left for a long time. The center right government
is cracking down on what officials say as an excessive
use of traffic cones. They argue all those cones are
putting a brake on New Zealand's struggling economy, driving up costs.

Speaker 2 (20:24):
And annoying drivers.

Speaker 1 (20:25):
One lawmaker named Katherine wed Weed d said the cones
have multiplied. Maybe you think cones are, you know, making
little baby cones. No cones did that, but she said
truckers and motorists have sent her pictures and videos of
them lined up for miles along the road with nothing

(20:47):
happening around them. She said in New Zealand Parliament, the
madness is about to end. There's a picture here that
shows a truck loaded up with traffic cones that maybe
they're going to deploy somewhere, and it says underneath the
picture the pro cone contingent argues they keep workers safe.
But to some the cones symbolize a nanny state in overdrive.

Speaker 2 (21:09):
Anyway.

Speaker 1 (21:09):
Continuing with the article, the country's Civil Contractors Association isn't pleased,
saying traffic controls like cones help workers do their jobs
without getting hurt. The left leaning opposition is on their side,
saying all this talk about cones is just a distraction
from the real problems the government's failing to fix. We
heard from this they quote opposition lawmaker here their version

(21:32):
of a democrat. Basically, we heard from the Prime Minister
that they're going to have a laser sharp focus on
the cost of living. But all we seem to hear
about is a laser sharp focus on roads, road cones
and potholes. Queenstown, a tourist mecca famed for its challenging
ski trails and natural beauty, has become inundated with so
many cones that locals have renamed it Cones Town. People

(21:57):
often deposit cones on top of a sculpture that's facetiously
called the Fountain of Cones.

Speaker 2 (22:03):
Locals and visitors say it's.

Speaker 1 (22:06):
Cone mania down here, said Mel Gold, the operations manager
at Searchlight Brewery, which has sold a beer called Conestown Lager.

Speaker 2 (22:15):
Is that great?

Speaker 1 (22:16):
By the way, I've been to Queenstown. Queenstown is on
the South Island and it's one of the most beautiful
places you will ever be in your entire life. There
are some ski resorts near there. I've been snowboarding in
a place down there called the Remarkables. It's pretty cool
to go snowboarding in August because that's you know, their winter.

Speaker 2 (22:33):
And it's just a spectacular town.

Speaker 1 (22:35):
It's that's the area where they filmed The Lord of
the Rings movies and a lot of other things. Like
sometimes you'll see an advertisement for dairy, you like, a
butter or something there and they talk about it as
if it's Switzerland and these but it's actually New Zealand
because it's just as beautiful and it's much cheaper to
work there. So anyway, a guy named Kevin, who gives

(22:57):
Segway tours in Queenstown, says people of stashed cones and
other odd places. He remembered a cone on the mast
of a yacht for months. We had one on the
top of a crane at one point. In some ways,
New Zealand is reliant on its roads and its cones.
Agriculture products require a high quality road network to reach
export markets. The country advertises road trips with stunning vistas

(23:20):
to millions of tourists, and many cones were needed after
the devastating twenty eleven earthquake that his hit christ Church.

Speaker 2 (23:26):
Just further as trying to think.

Speaker 1 (23:28):
Is christ christ Church is either the north.

Speaker 2 (23:30):
Part of the South Island or the south part of
the North Island. I forget which anyway.

Speaker 1 (23:34):
To sum the cones symbolize a nanny state on overdrive.
Sharon Keo was recently irritated by cones that ran for
about a mile and a quarter along the highway near
a small work site outside the active work area. He
thinks signs would have been enough. Cones and speed restrictions
were also left in place for a while after the

(23:54):
work seemed to be over. One government estimate says the
equivalent of around four hundred and forty five million dollars
has been spent on temporary traffic management, which includes cones,
for national highways over the past three years, and that's
about nine percent of total federal government spending or central
government spending on the highways. And some people say that

(24:18):
that that's actually about right anyway. I'll leave it there,
I guess, But the point is that the new center
right government is going to look to pass some laws
to I suppose require that these traffic what would you
call it, traffic construction companies, road engineers remove cones and

(24:39):
not put them too far before and too far after
the work sites.

Speaker 2 (24:42):
We'll see. Anyway, I like that story and I wanted
to share it with you.

Speaker 1 (24:46):
Okay, This next story comes from the is he really
surprised about this files?

Speaker 2 (24:53):
This is from.

Speaker 1 (24:54):
Politico, and it's from something they call their playbook, which
is kind of an aggregation of a whole bunch of
short story, a whole bunch of stories. They just kind
of put it in a a in a summary there.
So again, this is from the are you actually surprised
about this files? Headline Hunter Brden Hunter Biden is broke

(25:17):
a little more detail. A pardon from his dad spared
Hunter Biden from prison, but the former president's son remained
saddled with debt and was forced out.

Speaker 2 (25:26):
Of a home he was renting by.

Speaker 1 (25:28):
The recent Pacific Palisades fire. Biden detailed his grim financial
situation in a court filing yesterday, saying that he has
struggled to sell his paintings in recent months, moving only
one in the past fourteen months compared with twenty seven
in the prior to or three years. I guarantee you

(25:51):
there are some people out there who don't understand why.

Speaker 2 (25:56):
I promise you there are some.

Speaker 1 (25:58):
Hunter Biden reported significant debts and lackluster sales of his memoir.

Speaker 2 (26:03):
Did you know he had a memoir?

Speaker 1 (26:05):
Jannon, just more than forty two hundred copies during a
one year period. I bet, I bet a whole bunch
of the forty two hundred were bought by some leftist
tool and wanted to you know, like, I bet, I
bet somebody bought a thousand of them. That led up
to the trial in Delaware last spring, in which he
was found guilty of lying about his drug addiction on
a federal gun purchase form.

Speaker 2 (26:28):
And then Hunter Biden writes this.

Speaker 1 (26:32):
Again, Just imagine how utterly clueless you have to be
to write this as Hunter Biden. Okay, given the positive
feedback in reviews of my artwork and memoir, I was
expecting to obtain paid speaking engagements and paid appearances.

Speaker 2 (26:50):
But that has not happened, Biden wrote, citing.

Speaker 1 (26:53):
The financial burden of his ongoing legal fees, He's asking
a federal judge in LA to allow him to drop
a lawsuit that he fired held in twenty twenty three
accusing a former Trump White House aid of hacking the
contents of Biden's laptop.

Speaker 2 (27:08):
Of course, nobody hacked it anyway.

Speaker 1 (27:13):
Imagine how clueless you have to be, as Hunter Biden,
to believe that the sales of your paintings would continue
at the same pace when your dad wasn't president anymore.

Speaker 2 (27:30):
That would have to mean that.

Speaker 1 (27:32):
You believe that people were buying your paintings for a
quarter million dollars or a half million dollars because they
thought they were worth that much, which is laugh out
loud funny.

Speaker 2 (27:47):
And on the one hand, I don't feel a great
need to be verbally abusive to Hunter Biden, And on
the other hand, I feel a great need to be
verbally abusive to hunt this guy. All Right, I'll just
I'll just stop.

Speaker 3 (28:07):
I'll just stop.

Speaker 2 (28:08):
You know what I'm gonna say. I don't even need
to say it. I don't even need to say it.
All right, let's let's.

Speaker 1 (28:15):
Get back to kind of politics and economics. So one
of Donald Trump's target audiences during the campaign was the
crypto community. Kamala Harris figured that out at some point
and tried to pander to them too. But Donald Trump
really surprised a lot of people with being you know,

(28:35):
early and very aggressive and talking about his support of cryptocurrencies,
not just bitcoin, but including bitcoin and all this other stuff.
And then, of course, remember Donald Trump himself, just before
his inauguration, released this kind of Donald Trump, Me and
mccoin that he maintained the ownership of most of them
and sold some of them to the public, almost like

(28:57):
an IPO would be in stocks and on paper, on paper,
donald Trump's holdings in that in that coin, We're suddenly
worth some number of billions of dollars, like it was.
It was now his most valuable asset, if you can
imagine that. Now I'm looking at a chart here. So

(29:19):
this thing went from I mean, it was not really
at the moment it was introduced as like eight bucks,
but after his inauguration, or right around his inauguration, when
it was really released to the public, it traded up
as high as like seventy dollars or something. And now

(29:41):
it's back down to about thirteen the mark. But and
I don't know for sure what percentage of this Trump owns,
but I think he owns more than half, maybe three quarters,
And the current total market cap is about two point
six billion dollars. So Trump's ownership in this thing, if
you you know, it's hard to guess how much it
would go down in value if he actually went to

(30:04):
sell any but you know, he probably owns a billion and.

Speaker 2 (30:08):
A half of this stuff.

Speaker 1 (30:11):
In any case, Trump has been interested in crypto, and
it's hard to know how much of it is because
he likes it, how much of it is because he
wanted to make sure to get the votes of these
crypto people, how much of it is because he's in
on the grift and wanted to get a billion and
a half dollars from people who were dumb enough.

Speaker 2 (30:25):
To buy his coin.

Speaker 1 (30:28):
So as part of that, he talked about setting up
some kind of government crypto fund or bitcoin fund or whatever,
and yesterday he actually did it by executive order. They
sent out a fact sheet the government did saying Donald J. Trump,
President Donald J. Trump establishes the Strategic Bitcoin Reserve and

(30:50):
the US Digital Asset Stockpile. And you might think that
this would be a massive win for you know, bitcoin people,
but it's actually kind of a yawn. And immediately after
it came out. Immediately after the news came out, bitcoin

(31:11):
prices dropped a fair bit. They recovered some, but they're
still down around four percent, you know, around three thousand
dollars a bitcoin or something from let's call it roughly
ninety thousand to roughly eighty seven thousand. So since the
President announced this bitcoin the Strategic Bitcoin Reserve, why, you

(31:33):
might ask, is the price of bitcoin going down? And
the answer is that the devil is in the details.
So here are the key details. The US Treasury has
a bunch of bitcoin. It didn't buy the bitcoin. It
got the bitcoin as part of legal proceedings through what's
called criminal asset forfeiture and civil asset forfeiture.

Speaker 2 (31:56):
In criminal asset forfeiture.

Speaker 1 (31:58):
Somebody is charged with a crime, found guilty of a crime,
and they have to forfeit the assets that a court
rules were acquired through proceeds.

Speaker 2 (32:11):
Of committing crime.

Speaker 1 (32:13):
Right, the most obvious thing would be you robbed a.

Speaker 2 (32:15):
Bank, you don't get to keep the money.

Speaker 1 (32:18):
But maybe you did some other things that were criminal,
and you sold some things you said and I shouldn't
have sold, and you did some things wrong, and then
you did this and that with some of the money
and then you took some of that and converted it
into bitcoin, and they can say the bitcoin is you know,
maybe not directly, but indirectly an ill got and gain
and you have.

Speaker 2 (32:34):
To give it up.

Speaker 1 (32:35):
That's criminal asset forfeiture. Then there's another thing called civil
asset forfeiture. And I just want to be very clear
about this. Civil asset forfeiture is really a crime committed
by government against a citizen and it should be illegal everywhere,
and it's disgusting that it's not.

Speaker 2 (32:55):
And what civil asset forfeiture is. Let's give this. That's
a very common example.

Speaker 1 (33:03):
A cop pulls somebody over and finds that this person
is carrying seven thousand dollars in cash, and the person says, well,
I'm going to trade in this car i'm driving and
the seven thousand dollars in cash and go get a
new car. And the cop says, I think you're a
drug dealer and I'm keeping your money. And what happens

(33:24):
often in these cases, especially with smaller amounts of money
like a thousand, two thousand, and three thousand dollars, where
it might not be worth the time for the person
who was robbed by the law enforcement officer to get
an attorney and get the money back. So what ends
up happening is the police take the money, take the property,

(33:46):
and not only is that person never convicted of a crime,
that person is never charged with a crime.

Speaker 2 (33:54):
It's just theft by government, and the.

Speaker 1 (33:57):
People who are doing it should be in prison, but
they won't be because their law enforcement officers state, local
and federal.

Speaker 2 (34:05):
In any case, this is also a.

Speaker 1 (34:07):
Source of some bitcoin that the federal government has now
and so the Strategic Bitcoin Reserve it's gonna hold all
of this stuff, some of which was properly forfeited by
criminals and some of which was stolen by government in
its own acting like a criminal.

Speaker 2 (34:23):
And government has all this bitcoin.

Speaker 1 (34:26):
But since the government has it already, there's no benefit
there for bitcoin prices. It doesn't mean they're buying more,
and it could mean that someday.

Speaker 2 (34:34):
They'll sell some of this.

Speaker 1 (34:37):
The rest of the detail in the Bitcoin Reserve says
that they're generally not going to sell it, but the
Department of the Treasury can decide to sell it if
they believe that's in the best interest of the United States.
And this is the other thing that's very important in
why bitcoin is down today. The Secretaries of Treasure in

(35:00):
Commerce I'm quoting now are authorized to develop budget neutral
strategies for acquiring additional bitcoin, provided that those strategies impose
no incremental cost on American taxpayers. And I think the market,
the bitcoin market, is looking at this and saying there
are probably no such strategies, or almost no such strategies,

(35:23):
and if such a strategy does exist, it's not going
to be big in others. So the government is not
going to be just buying bitcoin, and if they find
some way to do it nibbling around the edges, it's
going to be very small. And so I think, you know,
I heard a last thing on this. I heard someone

(35:43):
on CNN this morning talking about how this was like
Christmas morning for the bitcoin community after this announcement yesterday.
I'm like, wow, that's one of the that person should
never be a guest analyst on television.

Speaker 2 (35:55):
Again, if it was like.

Speaker 1 (35:57):
Christmas morning, it would mean bitcoin would be up five
percent or ten percent or something. But instead, what I
think is Donald Trump did the least he could do
to make it sound like he was honoring a promise
to the crypto community. But as of now, the crypto
community is at best yawning. Our expert on all transgender rodents,

(36:21):
John Caldera, President of the Independence Institute, Hi, John.

Speaker 2 (36:26):
Why are you such a hater?

Speaker 1 (36:30):
All right, we're not going to talk about transgender my soul.
I will tell listeners. I do have more to add
to the transgender my story.

Speaker 2 (36:35):
It's really stupid. We live in a really stupid world
right now.

Speaker 1 (36:38):
But when I have John on before, and we got
about six minutes or so to talk about this stuff.

Speaker 2 (36:42):
John's involved with.

Speaker 1 (36:43):
There may be more than two, but two that I'm
thinking about right now potential ballot measures for Colorado. One
is about transparency. We'll talk about that, and one is
what's the other one? The other one is oh right,
right to work? Yeah, and so we're gonna talk about
We're gonna talk about all that. Let's let's start with
the transparency one. I saw a piece over at the

(37:04):
Colorado Sun. Why don't you just jump in and tell
us what this potential ballot measure's about.

Speaker 4 (37:10):
First of all, it's transparency, not trans mice. The So
both of these initiatives have one hundred percent to do
with the overreach of our current legislature. Last year if
you recall, the legislature exempted themselves from the open meetings law,
which I've in my thirty five years of political work,

(37:33):
I've never seen something so arrogant. There are five thousand
governments in Colorado, and the legislature said, yeah, but this
rule doesn't count to us. In the very next few
weeks later, they had their special session on property taxes,
and they use this newfound power of secrecy to do
backroom deals, and we didn't see what was going.

Speaker 2 (37:56):
On until they voted on it. So last year we
looked at it.

Speaker 4 (38:00):
We've looked at a bill to or an initiative simply
to remove that. We did some polling on it and said, yeah,
this would pass pretty comfortably. But I thought, why in
the world are we spending all this energy just to
get back to normal. When the legislature does these private meetings,
they charge so much for getting our records. Every government

(38:25):
in Colorado seems to have a different set of rules
on how you can ask for open records, what it costs,
what the timeline is. And so we started bringing around
a bunch of groups that usually hate us, and they
all have the same response, which is this is getting crazy.
So we bring together this coalition that includes the Press Association,

(38:46):
the broadcasters, the League of Women Voters, the Colorado Times Recorder,
which is a progressive news organization, and more and more
of these groups on left, right and middle and working
on bringing forward a constitutional amendment next year to address
the privacy and lack of transparency we're getting throughout the

(39:09):
entire state. That is, to have basic rules that every
government has to operate by, all right, And what.

Speaker 1 (39:16):
Are the chances that that'll be on the ballot at
this point or is it too hard to predict?

Speaker 4 (39:19):
At this point too hard to predict, But I think, really,
really good. I've never seen a coalition like this. Listen,
when the League of Women Voters and John Caldera are
sitting together working on something, you ought to pay attention.

Speaker 2 (39:30):
This is a bizarre coalition.

Speaker 4 (39:33):
And the issue here is that the legislature is getting
more and more arrogant.

Speaker 3 (39:39):
More and more.

Speaker 4 (39:40):
Local governments are looking to excuse themselves from open meetings.
And government doesn't work unless we get to see it.
And if they didn't close up government, if they weren't
so secretive, And by the way, Senator Pelton has a
bill up next Monday afternoon and it's basically what we

(40:01):
would like to see on an initiative.

Speaker 2 (40:04):
Of course, they sent it to the Kill Committee.

Speaker 4 (40:06):
And I'm sure it'll die, but these are changes the
legislature could make themselves if they wanted to be more open.

Speaker 2 (40:15):
All right, let's switch gears.

Speaker 1 (40:16):
We got about two minutes, and I care really a
lot about this next one. And this is about making
Colorado a right to work state. Colorado is in a
very strange position right now. We're not exactly a fully
you know, you can easily unionize and make everybody pay
dues to have a job, but we're not a right
to work state either. We have this thing called the
Labor Peace Act and Democrats are trying to go after

(40:38):
it right now.

Speaker 2 (40:40):
So tell us whatever we need to know.

Speaker 4 (40:42):
Forty years we've had this dayton between labor and business owners,
and it's a Labor Peace Act.

Speaker 2 (40:47):
It's not as good as right to work.

Speaker 4 (40:49):
I'll call it protecting workers' rights, but it's lasted, and
now the legislature wants to get rid of this and
force workers to support organizations they may or mat not
agree with, namely the union. And so we've always said, no,
we're not going to run a right to Work initiative.
Because we have this Labor Piece Act. I'm not going
to be the first one to draw blood. But since

(41:12):
the unions are doing this, out of state unions are
doing this, and it's likely to pass. I hope the
governor vetos it. I hope it doesn't pass. But we
stand ready to put forward a bill to protect workers'
rights to associate with those organizations they wish, and more importantly,
not to associate with organizations they don't want. Nobody should

(41:35):
be forced to give political money to an organization they
don't agree with, and the Colorado Legislature is about to
make that happen.

Speaker 2 (41:44):
I find it really really ugly. Okay, So if they do,
you'll see it on the ballot. Okay. So I want
to just follow up on that.

Speaker 1 (41:52):
I bet that Jared Poulus will veto this thing, so too,
but I have no confidence that the next Democrat would
veto the same thing. And there's there's an i'll say
a ninety percent chance that our next governor will be
a Democrat.

Speaker 2 (42:07):
That might be a little low, and I'm not that's low, right,
ninety eight percent?

Speaker 1 (42:12):
Yeah, okay, So, and I don't know, there's there's a
bunch of candidates in I don't know who else is
going to get in. I don't know if the next
Democrat would veto this thing. So if Jared Polus vetos it,
or might you try to run it anyway?

Speaker 4 (42:28):
I haven't decided yet, And it depends on a lot
of issues. Getting a constitutional amendment across the finish line
is an expensive lift. But I tell you what, if
they're going to try to trample on workers' rights to
decide who they associate with, you know, we are definitely
going going to go forward with this. If the governor

(42:48):
vetos this, we'll have to take a closer look on
whether we want to do this now or do we
want to wait and see if if the next legislature
gets a little wiser. It's another thing when when a
company looks on relocating, one of the first things they
look at is is it a right to work state?

Speaker 5 (43:06):
Is the tax policy good? Is housing costs low? Do
they have do they have good infrastructure, good roads? And
on all these measures, Colorado just stinks, or at.

Speaker 1 (43:21):
Least if it doesn't stink, at least it's going the
wrong way on every single one of those things.

Speaker 2 (43:27):
It's going the wrong way.

Speaker 4 (43:28):
And forcing people to join the union would be the
death nail of Colorado's economy. The only think okay, I
think that would be worse would be a progressive income tax.

Speaker 1 (43:37):
Right, and they want to do that too, although I
don't think they're pushing for it this year. I could
have missed it. If they are, but I haven't seen.
I think next year they're gonna be. Yeah, maybe next year,
all right, what very give me a very quick answer
on this. If Jared Poula says to you, John, I
guarantee you I will veto the bill, if you guarantee
me that you won't run the ballot measure, what would
you say.

Speaker 4 (43:59):
I would say, two seconds after you veto it' I'll
yank it, all.

Speaker 1 (44:04):
Right, John Kelder, a president of the Independence Institute. We're
gonna keep in touch on all this stuff, and please
let me know if you're running any other ballot measures
as well.

Speaker 4 (44:12):
We'll do and check out thinkfreedom dot org if you
want to keep an eye on what we're doing. That's
thinkfreedom dot org. And uh, let me get back to
my trans mice. Thinkfreedom dot org people. Thanks John.

Speaker 1 (44:23):
Normally, when we have ceophysics professor Paul Beal on the show.

Speaker 2 (44:27):
To nerd out with all kinds of science. Normally we
do it.

Speaker 1 (44:29):
At eleven thirty, but he's got a meeting, so we're
doing in ten thirty today, So Paul will be up
with a little after ten thirty. Paul will be with
us in twelve or thirteen minutes, and we're gonna we're
gonna science out a little bit. We're gonna nerd out
a little bit. So I need to correct the correction
a little bit.

Speaker 3 (44:43):
So near the.

Speaker 1 (44:43):
Beginning of the show, I spent a couple of minutes
talking about transgender mice versus transgenic mice, and just the
fact that I'm mentioning this at all tells.

Speaker 2 (44:51):
You how stupid our country is right now.

Speaker 1 (44:53):
But President Trump, in his big speech talked about some
number of millions of dollars to make mice transgen and
I said, it appears that what he's talking about is
something to make mice transgenic, which is a genetic modification
so that you can study human diseases in mice essentially.

Speaker 2 (45:11):
But then CNN, which was one of.

Speaker 1 (45:14):
The places that was doing the fact check on the speech,
they did their own.

Speaker 2 (45:17):
Fact check on their fact check and.

Speaker 1 (45:19):
Said, well, there are actually a couple of studies where
they are using mice and studying the same the same
hormones that people would take to go through a you know,
transgender process as humans, in order to study whether that
process could potentially make humans more susceptible to disease, more

(45:44):
susceptible to HIV, more susceptible to whatever. So there is
in fact some stuff going on with, if not exactly
transgender mice, mice that are being given similar treatments that
as a human would use to make that transition in
order to study some other stuff that might relate to

(46:04):
transgender humans. So there was at least some truth in
Trump's claim, although I think the number was exaggerated because
it included this other stuff. But anyway, I actually think
the bigger point is the fact that like CNN's talking
about it, Fox is talking about it, I'm talking about
it for a minute, but I'm gonna move on, and

(46:25):
it just in a way goes to.

Speaker 2 (46:26):
Show how off the rails this country is right now.

Speaker 1 (46:30):
That this is a thing that a lot of people
think they need to care about. Now, Government waste is
a thing I care about a lot, and so in
that context, in that context.

Speaker 3 (46:38):
I care.

Speaker 2 (46:39):
Okay, let's move on to some other stuff. I'm just
gonna do this quickly because we do coming up coming
up in the next segment the show, we're gonna.

Speaker 1 (46:46):
Have SeeU physics professor Paul Beil. So just a couple
of quick stories I want to do. As long as
we're renaming things, right like, we're renaming the Gulf of
Mexico to Gulf of America and the Associated Press wouldn't
go along with it, so they got booted from the
press pool.

Speaker 2 (47:00):
So anyway, as long as.

Speaker 1 (47:02):
We're renaming things, I thought I would share this story
with you from the New York Post. Texas may officially
rename the New York Strip Steak in a slap to
the liberal empire state that promotes local beef. I guess
go well, according to the New York Post, but it
may fire up an interstate beef instead. Texas Lieutenant Governor

(47:23):
Dan Patrick said that Texas Strip Steak would be a
better name to reflect the lone star state status as
the cow capital of America. He took inspiration, as I mentioned,
from Trump's rebranding of the Gulf of Mexico to Gulf
of America. And he said that his idea came after
he visited the Texas cattle feeders and cattle raisers in
an effort to promote the state's twelve point two million cattle,

(47:47):
the most in the country. And he asked, why didn't
we just call it a Texas strip because New York
mostly has dairy cows, right, New York doesn't have a
lot of beef cows that they're you know, making tech
making quote unquote New York Strip out of. And yeah,
just because the New York restaurant named the New York

(48:08):
named this the New York Strip in the nineteenth century,
doesn't mean we need to keep doing that.

Speaker 2 (48:13):
By the way, we're.

Speaker 1 (48:14):
Talking about Delmonico's restaurant, which in a few years will
have been around two hundred years to very old restaurant,
and they listed the New York Strip stake on their
menu when whenever that was and it took off from
there as the New York Strip. So as long as
we're renaming things, maybe one day the New York Strip

(48:36):
will be the Texas Strip. I Again, to me, this
kind of falls into the category of don't we have
better things to do? One other story, I'm gonna do
very very quickly because I don't have anything to add
to it. Three US Army soldiers, two of them active duty,
one of them retired, were arrested yesterday for selling secret
or top secret information about US military readiness to China.

(49:01):
And just please do keep in mind these countries, China,
Russia as well.

Speaker 2 (49:06):
They're really our enemies, and.

Speaker 1 (49:10):
We should take very seriously their willingness to do anything
they can to hurt us or to prepare to hurt
us in the future.

Speaker 2 (49:21):
Often when we.

Speaker 1 (49:22):
Have ceophysics professor Paul Beil on the show, it's almost
always on a Friday, and it's almost always right near
the end of the show. But Paul has something to
do with that time today, so we got him an
hour earlier at the ten thirty ish time instead of
the eleven thirty ish time. So welcome Paul to a
new time. And perhaps we got some folks who normally
listen in the ten o'clock hour and not the eleven

(49:43):
o'clock hour who get to hear you for one of
the few times.

Speaker 2 (49:46):
So it's good to have you back. Thanks for being here,
new listeners, that would be great, That would be great.

Speaker 1 (49:52):
So before we talk about science, just for fun, tell
my listeners what you just told me that you're studying
right now.

Speaker 6 (50:00):
I'm working on trying to become on a certified light instructor,
So I've been taking lessons to try to fly my
airplane from the right seat and act like an instructor
to the really senior professional instructor in my left.

Speaker 3 (50:15):
Seat right now.

Speaker 2 (50:17):
That's pretty fantastic. I love that. Look at you studying
and teaching, Pete. Well, you'd be a good teacher.

Speaker 1 (50:23):
So you know who would be better to teach it
than a fly than a guy who teaches for a living.

Speaker 2 (50:29):
I'm hoping.

Speaker 1 (50:30):
All right, let's talk some science, two different science ye things,
and then we'll talk about the gam Off lecture coming up,
which is actually interesting in that it's not really a
physics lecture. But we'll get to that in a minute.
So I sent you this link from space dot com.
The headline dark matter is more valuable than gold. Wobbly

(50:52):
galaxies help shine a light on the universe's strangest stuff,
and dark matter has come up from time to time
in our conversation on the air. But tell us what
this specifically is about, and then we'll just we'll dig
into it a little more.

Speaker 6 (51:08):
Well, that headline is a bit of a hype, but
it's about measuring the properties of dark matter using a
new technique using object called pulsars. So pulsars are objects
that are the collapsed remnants of supernova. But the start
that went supernova wasn't quite big enough to make a

(51:28):
black hole, but it can make what's called a neutron star.
So it's a star composed completely of neutrons. It has
an enormous density because the atoms are one hundred thousand
times bigger than the nucleus that has most of the mass.
So when those get crushed, the electrons get crushed into
the protons dent. This material is really dense, and these

(51:52):
neutron stars they rotate really rapidly and they send out
radio beams out of their magnetic poles, and so there's
a whole bunch of them have been discovered, and they
have a very very stable pattern of the pulses comings
as good as atomic clocks actually, so they will pulse

(52:13):
about one thousand times per second, but the time between
the pulses is steady to seventeen significant figures, so they
provide a really good clock.

Speaker 1 (52:25):
Do they all do all the pulsars spin or pulse
at the same rate.

Speaker 6 (52:32):
No, they're all at different rates, but in the range
around they're called millisecond pulsars because the time between pulses
those in the order of a few milliseconds.

Speaker 1 (52:41):
Okay, so they're all at different rates, but within any
one the rate is steady to seventeen significant.

Speaker 6 (52:48):
Figures, very very very steady. So it's like having a
galaxy of GPS satellites out in our Milky Way galaxy,
and you can use those for all sorts of things.
And what this team of people were doing is using
the pulsars to measure directly the acceleration of these objects

(53:10):
as they orbit around the center of the Milky Way,
and that allows you to measure the total mass of
the thing it's orbiting, and most of that is dark matter.
So most of the mass of the Milky Way is
not visible stars in gas, but rather.

Speaker 3 (53:25):
This very mysterious material.

Speaker 6 (53:28):
We don't know what it is, but it's five to
ten times more mass in that than it is in
the visible star.

Speaker 2 (53:35):
Okay.

Speaker 1 (53:36):
So I'm going to just put this in plain English,
and you tell me I'm if I'm dumbing it down correctly.
So the scientists are are examining the motion of these
of these pulsars, and if the pulsars were only being
impacted by if the only gravitational forces that were impacted

(54:00):
the pulsars were the things that we could see, then
the pulsars would move in a certain way. But they're
not moving that way, and therefore they must be being
affected by gravitational forces from things from something we can't see.

Speaker 2 (54:14):
And we're calling that dark matter. Is that right?

Speaker 3 (54:17):
Right, that's right? And we've known about that for many decades.

Speaker 6 (54:20):
This was discovered, excuse me, discovered in the nineteen seventies
by teams of people. Two of them are Kent and
Vera Rubin, who was a graduate student of George Gamov's,
and they were measuring the velocity of stars going around
nearby galaxies and from that inferring that there had to

(54:43):
be way more mass in the galaxy than was visible
in the galaxy.

Speaker 2 (54:47):
There's an amazing line in this article that I sent you.

Speaker 1 (54:51):
The research team that's doing this work found that there
is less than one kilogram, so maybe somewhere around two
pounds of dark matter, of dark matter in a volume
equivalent to that of the entire Earth.

Speaker 6 (55:10):
I was trying to check that number, but you know
that sounds like a believable number. So the dark matter
spread very smoothly across the whole volume of where the
galaxy is, so there's not very much at any one location.

Speaker 1 (55:25):
Okay, just one more question on this and then we'll
move to the next one. And this may be a
question that requires at least bourbon, if not something else.

Speaker 2 (55:34):
But what is dark matter? What's it made of? What?

Speaker 6 (55:40):
Well, we don't know. And so that's one of the
mysteries of the universe. The matter in the universe composes
about five percent of the energy density of the current universe,
and dark matter is about five times more than that
spread across the universe. And then there's even more mysterious
is the so called dark energy that's about seventy five

(56:03):
percent of the total mass of the mass energy of
the of the universe. And the latter two we have
no idea what either of them are. In terms of
our models of the things that we know about atoms
and electrons and sub atomic particles, it doesn't.

Speaker 3 (56:20):
Seem to be any of those yet.

Speaker 6 (56:22):
We haven't seen a sub atomic particle that has the
properties that dark matter would need to have.

Speaker 2 (56:28):
Okay, I'm gonna ask this.

Speaker 1 (56:31):
It's kind of a dumb question, but it's a it's
a normal sort of science y question. Since since we've
never since we have no idea what this is, dark matter,
dark energy, it's dark, we've never detected it in any
direct kind of way. How do we know for sure
that it even exists at all, rather than that the
models are wrong and that we're making up this dark

(56:53):
matter to as like an error term to fix.

Speaker 2 (56:58):
Models that were wrong.

Speaker 1 (56:59):
And there's like, you know, I think Einstein had a
famous term like that in one of his things.

Speaker 6 (57:04):
Right, Yeah, so the dark energy term is the cosmological
constant that Einstein put into his equation.

Speaker 3 (57:12):
The dark matter was not discovered and.

Speaker 6 (57:16):
Like I said, until the nineteen seventies, and we can
see it's effect very accurately because of the effects it
has gravitationally on the things that we can see, so
we can see it indirectly by the effects it has
on other things. And a lot of science is that
you measure the effects something else has on something you

(57:39):
can measure very accurately.

Speaker 1 (57:41):
I'm not sure if this where this listener question came
from a listener wants to know, and I'm not going
to ask any follow ups.

Speaker 2 (57:49):
I'm just going to ask this one. Is the professor
at all religious?

Speaker 6 (57:57):
I would say I have a spiritual nature to me?

Speaker 2 (58:00):
How about that? Okay, moving on.

Speaker 1 (58:03):
So this was the thing we were going to talk
about last time and we ran out of time. There's
a bunch of articles about it. Here's when it Forbes
massive Microsoft quantum computer breakthrough uses new state of matter.

Speaker 2 (58:16):
And I read a.

Speaker 1 (58:17):
Fair bit about this and I understood some of it.
I think it's pretty fascinating, but maybe maybe you should
tell me if it's not as interesting as I think
it is.

Speaker 6 (58:28):
Well, well, again, the headline might be more hype than
than what's going on. But Microsoft has developed a new
way of storing what are called qbits, a quantum bit.
And if we can make computers using quantum bits, where
you simultaneously the bit contains both zero and one in
every bit, then it's possible to do calculations that are many,

(58:52):
many many times faster than an ordinary computer, which bits
are either a zero or a one, and not so
thing that's a linear combination.

Speaker 3 (59:02):
So this combination is what you might think of.

Speaker 6 (59:04):
As the famous Schrodinger's cat, so it's in a state
of you don't know what it is until you measure it,
and then it's either a zero or a one, or
the cat is dead or alive in the original Schrodinger
cat analogy. So they've created a computer with eight cubits
using a new type of storage called a Mayorana zero mode.

(59:30):
So Mayorana was a physicist in the nineteen thirties that
noticed that there was the Drax equation allowed for particles
that could be their own anti particle, and they became
known as Marianna fermion, and so people can make something
that has that property in condensed matter, superconducting materials, and

(59:53):
so they have created a system where the storage of
the cubit is in these maarana uh quasi particles. They're
called okay, they're they're they're very stable in this they're
like topological meaning uh, if you had a long string
and there's a knot in the middle of it, you
can't get the knot out by doing anything with either

(01:00:16):
end of the string. So this knot is present, and
then you can imagine a knot and an anti knot
and then you pull on it and then they go away.
So one's the anti particle of the other. That's sort
of what Maruna Fermi on is.

Speaker 1 (01:00:30):
Okay, that that that's one of the most mind bending
conversations you and I have ever had on the air,
So that that definitely requires probably a whole a whole
bottle of bourbon. The one thing that's sort of as
a layman, really kind of struck me from that article
is their claim that other forms of quantum computers that

(01:00:52):
have been built so far are very susceptible to error
being caused by environmental noise, and that this one isn't.
And if that's true, I think that that's interesting.

Speaker 2 (01:01:03):
If it's true, that's the goal.

Speaker 6 (01:01:07):
This topological property of these Marana quasi particles would be
very useful because they're very long lived. Now, long live
to them means milliseconds. Whereas you can measure things in
the microsecond range, in this computer has to be held
at fifty millikelvin. That's one twentieth of one degree above

(01:01:29):
absolute zero.

Speaker 2 (01:01:30):
Unbelievable. All right, let's switch gears.

Speaker 1 (01:01:33):
Let's talk about the upcoming Gamov lecture, the fifty fourth
George Gamov Memorial Lecture, And for those of you.

Speaker 2 (01:01:40):
Who are going to look it up.

Speaker 1 (01:01:42):
Well, it's on my blog already at Rosskominski dot com.
But Gamov is Gamow, just so you know. And this
one is particularly interesting in the sense that it's it's
not really physics and tell us what we got going on.

Speaker 6 (01:01:57):
So George Gamov was very interested in lots of shields
of science, not just physics and astrophysics, And in fact,
he made a very important contribution in the genetic code
in the nineteen fifties. He was one of the first
people who tried to figure out that how DNA stored
information in order to build all the amino acids that

(01:02:19):
make up proteins, and he was the first person to
come up with something that was beginning to be a
viable code in the DNA structure. And so for that reason,
the Gambob Lecture can be in almost any area of science,
because he was interested in physics and astrophysics and geology
and mathematics.

Speaker 2 (01:02:41):
The speaker on.

Speaker 6 (01:02:43):
March eighteenth and in the evening at seven point thirty
is Jennifer DOWDNA. She won the twenty twenty Nobel Prize.
She shared it with Emmanuel shrump NTA for their discovery
of crisper, which is a gene editing technique that's widely
used around the around the world. Chrisper stands for clustered

(01:03:04):
regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats.

Speaker 2 (01:03:08):
And when I saw it, When.

Speaker 6 (01:03:10):
I saw that, it's like, Wow, businesses are much better
naming things black hole, you.

Speaker 3 (01:03:16):
Know, big bang.

Speaker 4 (01:03:19):
A.

Speaker 6 (01:03:19):
Biologists need to create a long acronym in order to
come up with their name.

Speaker 1 (01:03:24):
All right, So folks, let me let me just give
you this, and then I gotta get to Donald Trump,
who's gonna speaking here in a moment. The Gamov lecture
is Tuesday March eighteenth, so eleven days from now, at
the Macki Auditorium at CU Boulder. Doors open at seven.
The lecture starts at seven point thirty. It's free to attend,

(01:03:46):
and you absolutely should. I'm going to be out of
the country with listeners or I would be going. But
all the information is up on my blog at Rosscominski
dot com. Up there today or just type in gam
Off Gamow Lecture and you'll find it. That's again, Tuesday
March eighteenth, at seven thirty at SeeU Boulder.

Speaker 2 (01:04:05):
Paul I got to leave it there. Thanks so much
for your time. As always, Hey, enjoy the Galapagos. All right,
we'll do all right.

Speaker 1 (01:04:13):
That's the fantastic see you, physics professor Paul Beal, Donald Trump.
Now they actually just released tape. It's not actually live,
but everyone's getting it now. So let's have a listener.

Speaker 2 (01:04:24):
Well, they've packed the labor market.

Speaker 3 (01:04:26):
The labor market.

Speaker 7 (01:04:28):
No, I think the labor market's going to be fantastic,
but it's going to have high paying manufacturing jobs as
opposed to government jobs. We had too many people in government.
You can't just do that. We had many, many.

Speaker 3 (01:04:39):
Too many. This is for forty years. You know. This
isn't just now.

Speaker 7 (01:04:44):
This built up and got worse and worse, and they
just hire more and more people. You look at the
Department of Education, it seems like.

Speaker 3 (01:04:51):
So many buildings.

Speaker 7 (01:04:52):
I ride bias, says Department of Education.

Speaker 3 (01:04:54):
They're all over the place. And we don't even want it.

Speaker 7 (01:04:57):
We want the education to be given the States.

Speaker 3 (01:05:00):
It'll be much better. It'll be it'll.

Speaker 7 (01:05:02):
Move us to the top of the list from the
bottom of the list and actually save us money. But
it's too important even talk about them. It'll save us
a lot of money. But we don't want that. We
want education to be given. So you go to Iowa
and Indiana and Idaho and all these places.

Speaker 3 (01:05:20):
They're so well run, they're going to.

Speaker 7 (01:05:23):
Be producing education that will be the equivalent of like
Denmark is one in Norway, Sweden. Actually, China is one
of the better in terms of education, and so we
can't blame size anymore. You know, China is one point
four billion people, but they're very high on their list.

Speaker 3 (01:05:41):
The one thing we're doing well on were number one
on the list is costs per pupil.

Speaker 7 (01:05:45):
We spend more money than any other country in the
world by far. So I jokingly say, the one thing
we do well on is the cost We spend more money,
and yet we're toward the bottom of the list.

Speaker 8 (01:05:57):
Yeah, person, I want to ask you to joint of
russ millions Americans. Watch your joint address earlier this week
where you warned that there could be a little disturbance
that Americans could feel as a function of these taxes,
these tariffs. How much disturbance are you willing to accept
in the near term as a puncture of that into
set expectations? How long do the Americans expect things to cost.

Speaker 7 (01:06:17):
A bit more well so far, Peter, that hasn't been
very much because these numbers are coming out. We're here
for just a little over four weeks, and these are
fantastic numbers.

Speaker 3 (01:06:27):
I was watching some of the reports this morning.

Speaker 7 (01:06:29):
They were surprised there could be some disturbance, a little
bit of disturbance. I solved a little bit of that
because I have respect for our auto companies, and I
gave them a little bit of a one month's reprieve
because it was it was unfair. Although I'm sure they'll
take advantage of it. I see they're driving a lot
of cars into the US to try and avoid the
tariffs and you know, taking advantage of it a little bit.

(01:06:52):
But they called me, they asked me, They said, could
they have a little bit of help? And I decided,
you know, their American companies USMCA, and I let them
have that. But this really kicks in the reciprocals, you know,
kicks in on Let's see, I guess the second, and

(01:07:14):
I wanted to be the first so badly. It just
didn't want to be on April Fool's Day. So I
made it the second. That's going to cost a lot
of money that one day is going to cost a
lot of money. But that's okay. But I don't see it.
I don't see anything. I see good reports. I think
we're going to have good numbers from the beginning. Now,
glocalists won't love this because this brings jobs back to America.
So if they're coming back to America, maybe you'll lose

(01:07:37):
some in other parts of the world. But the other
parts of the world have done very well, and they'll
continue to do very well. But I think the United
States is going to be doing record business. Will bring
a lot of those ninety thousand factories that.

Speaker 3 (01:07:49):
Have been lost over the last number of years.

Speaker 7 (01:07:52):
It's been it's hard to believe ninety I think of
what ninety thousand is. Ninety thousand plants and factories are gone.
We're going to bring back many of those plants in factories.

Speaker 8 (01:08:01):
One day the tariffs are on, the next day they're off.
Right now, the markets, as you know, well, for first stability,
are you done going forward? With the pauses and the
car houses at it?

Speaker 3 (01:08:11):
For those there'll always be changes and adjustments, and.

Speaker 7 (01:08:14):
You know you can't just I could have, for instance,
tolled the American car companies.

Speaker 3 (01:08:19):
No, I'm not going to give you anything, and then
you wouldn't.

Speaker 7 (01:08:21):
Have had to say, well, they're getting a little extra.

Speaker 3 (01:08:23):
It's just a.

Speaker 7 (01:08:24):
Little bit of a one month reprieve. They're very happy
about what's happening. They won't have to go across borders.

Speaker 3 (01:08:30):
And you see the zigzag and you.

Speaker 7 (01:08:32):
Have a fender made in Canada, you have something else
made in Mexico.

Speaker 3 (01:08:36):
We don't want that.

Speaker 7 (01:08:36):
We want it made here. But there'll always be some modifications.
I mean, if you have a wall in front of you,
sometimes you have to go around the wall instead of
through it. But I think very little. I think very
little on occasion if we can do something. We want
to help companies. We want to help companies create jobs.
So I could have left that and you wouldn't have

(01:08:57):
had a minor change. Instead, I was asked by the
major here, the real majors, the big majors, if they
could do this, and I said, yeah, I want you to.

Speaker 3 (01:09:07):
Produce a lot of jobs.

Speaker 7 (01:09:09):
And numerous of the people, actually all of the people
I spoke to, have already been very much on the
way to already. That's why you have auto jobs increase.
And the man I don't know, I'm Sean Fain, I
don't know him, and I did great, as you know,
with the auto workers, with the team Seris, with unions,
I did fantastically well, best numbers ever by a Republican.

Speaker 3 (01:09:31):
And I have a lot of respect for those people.

Speaker 7 (01:09:33):
But Sean Fain, who I don't know, but wasn't a supporter,
although the auto workers were big supporters. I watched him
last night and he said Donald Trump is absolutely right
on tariffs. He said what he's doing on tariffs is
an incredible thing.

Speaker 2 (01:09:52):
And I'll tell you what, We're going to take a
quick pause here.

Speaker 1 (01:09:56):
We're going to come back and continue with some more
of Donald Trump's comments, and I have some comments on
his comments as well. We'll do all of that right
after this on Kowa's been a little bit of a
turnaround in the stock market. The Dow is up a
little bit now after having been down a bit or
more than a bit earlier today.

Speaker 2 (01:10:13):
I'm guessing some of it maybe.

Speaker 1 (01:10:16):
Some market reaction to what Trump said, although I don't
think he said much important in terms of economics.

Speaker 2 (01:10:21):
I also think that.

Speaker 1 (01:10:23):
FED Chairman Jerome Powell was talking and he and he
said things like inflation seems to be under control, and
so on. I'm gonna make one comment about something Trump said,
and then we're gonna go back and grab a little
more audio from from Donald Trump speaking, and we're gonna,
you know, go listen to some about Ukraine and Russia
rather than more of the economic stuff. I just want

(01:10:45):
to make one or two very quick comments. So first,
Donald Trump says he's gonna bring lots and lots of
manufacturing jobs back to the United States. You know, with
the right policies, you could bring a fair number of
manufacturing jobs back to the United States. But remember that
an immense amount of the loss of manufacturing jobs, not

(01:11:06):
just in the US, but across the entire world, has
come due to the advent of what I would loosely
call robots, where you have machines who can do things
that people used to do. So even if you do
set up more factories here, yes you will create some jobs,
but you will never get back to the number of

(01:11:28):
jobs that you used to have per factory, you know,
twenty years ago or thirty years ago, or that sort
of thing. So the other thing I want to mention
is our unemployment rate isn't high, so I'm not sure
just where he thinks he's going to get the workers
from without causing bidding war for labor in certain areas,
raising the price of labor and thereby making it more.

Speaker 2 (01:11:53):
Expensive to buy the thing. And I'll give you an example.

Speaker 1 (01:11:56):
This is in the news constantly, especially here in Denver.

Speaker 3 (01:11:59):
Right.

Speaker 1 (01:12:00):
Denver's lost something like four hundred restaurants in the last
couple of years, and much of the cause is an
increase in minimum wage, because it has raised the cost
of the restaurant to the restaurants, the cost of running
the restaurants so much that you can't sell the product anymore.
People are not willing to go pay twenty five dollars
for a main course that they used to be able

(01:12:21):
to get for fifteen dollars, and so restaurants are going
out of business. And tariffs and forcing these businesses back
into the United States of America is kind of like that.
It's it's creating a much higher cost environment. And Trump
and his friends only want to talk about the jobs
that are going to be created, but they're forgetting the
fact that what that will end up doing is it'll

(01:12:44):
make every car in the United States, or every car
that's made or partly made in the United States to
be more expensive than it was before, and it's actually
it'll make a few people richer and millions and millions
of Americans poorer, and it's really.

Speaker 2 (01:12:56):
Bad economic policy.

Speaker 1 (01:12:58):
I absolutely understand the idea wanting to fight with with
wanting to challenge the people who have tariff's on our
stuff and get them to lower them. But I continue
to believe that Donald Trump actually likes tariffs. One other
thing and then we'll have a Listen. Donald Trump said
he's going to impose more tariffs on April second instead
of April first, because he didn't want to do it

(01:13:19):
on April Fool's Day, and he said that's going to
cost a lot of money. Think about that statement for
a minute. That's going to cost a lot of money.
Who is it going to cost? Where does the money
come from that he collects in tariffs that the government
collects in tariffs, and the answers it comes from you.

Speaker 2 (01:13:33):
Tariffs are a sales tax.

Speaker 1 (01:13:34):
You pay the tariff when you import the thing, or
the company, the American company that's selling you the thing
pays the tariff when they import it. Now they might
absorb some of it, but you're paying it. Okay, you're
paying it. So don't forget. When President Trump says it's
going to cost a lot of money, you should say
thank God, because all of this money that he's talking

(01:13:55):
about bringing in comes from you.

Speaker 2 (01:13:57):
All Right, let's hear what else he had to say.

Speaker 8 (01:14:00):
You have hardened Derrick Chauvin. Are you considering harding Derrick Shovin.

Speaker 3 (01:14:04):
No, I haven't even heard about it.

Speaker 5 (01:14:05):
No.

Speaker 2 (01:14:05):
As your president on peace.

Speaker 3 (01:14:07):
I haven't heard that in the first term.

Speaker 9 (01:14:09):
You may recall I wrote the news that you were
nominated for the Nobel Peace Bots and the reason for
that was the work that you led on the Abraham quotes.
I spoke yesterday with the member of the Parliament, the
Norwegian Parliament that nominated and he said.

Speaker 2 (01:14:26):
What the Nobel Committee is looking for from.

Speaker 9 (01:14:28):
You, mister President, is security guarantees for Ukraine.

Speaker 8 (01:14:34):
Is that aboussibility, mister President.

Speaker 7 (01:14:37):
So before I even think about that, I want to
settle the war, get it finished, because if I'm not here,
nobody's going to settle it. And President Macrona said that,
and every president, everybody said that, the Prime ministers of.

Speaker 3 (01:14:51):
Presidents, we're pushing very hard.

Speaker 7 (01:14:54):
That's all I'm thinking about now, as far as the
question about security later, that's the easy part. The hard
part is getting it settled. We got to get them.

Speaker 3 (01:15:04):
We're losing two thousand human beings.

Speaker 7 (01:15:08):
Every week, more than that, actually two thousand nice young
although they're getting older because they're drafting much older now
in the case of one country, much older, because a
lot of the young people have been killed. It's very
sad and I'd like to see if I could stop that.

Speaker 3 (01:15:26):
And I'd like to.

Speaker 7 (01:15:27):
Also see if we could stop making these massive payments
from the United States. I mean, Biden gave away money
like it was like it was water with no anything, got.

Speaker 3 (01:15:37):
Nothing for it.

Speaker 7 (01:15:37):
Europe did it in the form of a loan. They
get their money back.

Speaker 3 (01:15:41):
We don't.

Speaker 7 (01:15:43):
So that's how we came up with the rare earth steal.
But we started, you know, behind the eight ball. He
could have gone to Europe because that, come on, you
got to put up money with us, You got to
put up.

Speaker 3 (01:15:54):
Money with us. But he never did that.

Speaker 7 (01:15:56):
They just kept handing money out because he was grossly
in comp Thank you very much, everybody.

Speaker 2 (01:16:04):
Interesting, All right, we'll see.

Speaker 1 (01:16:07):
There have been some rumors this morning that Vladimir Putin
said he's open to a ceasefire. A listener texted me
about that, and I said, look, I don't care what
Vladimir Putin says. I made a bet with Mark Major
on the show, and our bet is our bet as
five dollars, and our bet Mark believes there will be

(01:16:29):
a ceasefire, and I believe there won't be within sixty
days of the day.

Speaker 2 (01:16:33):
We made the bet a couple of days ago.

Speaker 1 (01:16:35):
And the stipulation is it's not just somebody saying we'll
have a ceasefire, it has to be a signed ceasefire
deal signed by both countries.

Speaker 2 (01:16:43):
I continue to believe there won't be one.

Speaker 1 (01:16:45):
But I if there's ever been a bet I want
to lose, it's this one. I want to be wrong,
but so far I don't think. I think Vladimir Putin
sees the United States only putting Rusher on oddly enough,
the victim of Russia's aggression. It's a very strange thing,

(01:17:06):
and I'll have more to say about it right after
this on KOA.

Speaker 2 (01:17:09):
I want to I want to do this other thing here.

Speaker 1 (01:17:11):
Ah God, this is what happens when you work for
a Viking.

Speaker 2 (01:17:18):
Only one driver what he complaining about?

Speaker 1 (01:17:20):
Indeed, all right, So a few weeks ago I had
Douglas Murray on the show and he was giving a
speech at the Paramount Theater, and I went and Mandy went,
and it was, you know, a full house at the
Paramount Theater. Douglas Murray is just one of the most
interesting writers and thinkers around. His background is most Israeli journalism,
war reporter and all that. And he wrote a piece

(01:17:42):
for the Free Press that I want to share with you.
It's not long, and I'm gonna share the whole thing.
Hopefully I can get in get through it in the
little time I have in this segment, and then Dragon's
gonna make me talk about something else.

Speaker 2 (01:17:53):
So this is Douglas Murray from the Free Press. How
can the right be by the way this guy's conservative?

Speaker 1 (01:17:59):
How can the right be so wrong or at least
portions of the right, especially the American right, when it
comes to Ukraine. To begin to grapple with this, you
have to go way way back to Donald Trump's first
term in office. In that time, Ukraine came to the
public's consciousness just twice. The first when Trump and other
Republicans began to make Hay over the business dealings of
Hunter Biden Since twenty fourteen, the then Vice President's son

(01:18:21):
had been sitting on the board of Ukrainian energy company Barisma,
earning around a million dollars a year to advise a
company in a sector where he had zero experience. Why
might a foreign company want the son of the vice
president on their board. Obviously, as all the investigations have
shown since so, that the Biden name would bring contracts, grants,
and other support to Barisma. The only other time Ukraine

(01:18:41):
came to the attention of the American right was in
twenty nineteen, when President Trump had a phone call with
Ukrainian President Volodimir Zelenski. Trump's political opponents claimed that he
used the call to tell Zelenski that American aid to
the country would be contingent on Ukraine, helping to expose
the Biden family's financial dealings. Trump was impeached over the call,
but acquitted by the Senate. But these two events started

(01:19:03):
to embed the idea on the right that Ukraine was
simply a corrupt country which had enriched and cooperated with
its own political opponents. This was all that Ukraine meant
to most mega republicans until Russia's full scale invasion in.

Speaker 2 (01:19:16):
February of twenty twenty two.

Speaker 1 (01:19:19):
For a while, the old guard of the Republican Party
asserted itself in the Senate, in the House. With Trump
in exile and fighting a thousand legal battles, Republican lawmakers
like Lindsey Graham fought to be more pro Ukraine and
anti Vladimir Putin than the next man. Some people might
think that was cynical, but it was largely an assertion
of a Republican principle, which is that tanks, and especially

(01:19:39):
Russian tanks, should not be allowed to roll with impunity
into an allied country. But all the while, an upcoming
generation of mainly online MAGA Republicans could be seen veering
in different directions. For these people, the question of whether
Putin was a bad guy was not settled during the
peak of Biden's presidency, and woke during the peak of

(01:20:00):
Biden's presidency, and woke right during the peak of Woke.
Putin became for some of them a focus of admiration.
While the West had turned away from traditional values, not
least the Christian faith, here was a leader who spoke
in defense of such values. Shortly before Russia's invasion, Trump's
former advisor Steve Bannon was podcasting with Eric Prince, the
founder of Blackwater Quote putin eight woke, said Bannon at

(01:20:22):
one point, He's anti woke. Prince added, the Russian people
still know which bathroom to use. You might say that
all this was part of the inevitable over correction to
the period of woke, but these memes gathered force online.
At the start of the invasion, the normal conservative view prevailed.
Ukraine had been brutally attacked, had stood its ground, and.

Speaker 2 (01:20:41):
Was admirably fighting back.

Speaker 1 (01:20:43):
Then several things that are typical of our age began
to occur. The first was that the online right became
bored with the story and wanted it to move along,
Being an essentially reactionary movement. They also began to get
bored of the near universal admiration for Ukraine, specifically for Zelenski.
These people understandably hate the idea of narratives being pushed

(01:21:08):
on them, and they noticed that many of the Lost
Souls who had been putting BLM flags in their Twitter
bios were now posting Ukraine flags. That's an interesting observation,
isn't it. You know what, There's a bit more to this,
and I want to not a lot more, a bit more.
I want to give it the time it deserves. So
I'm gonna take a quick break here. I'm gonna finish
this when we come back. Then I'm going to do

(01:21:28):
the thing that dragon wanted me to talk about.

Speaker 2 (01:21:31):
We'll be right back, all right. So, now now that
dragon has thrown.

Speaker 1 (01:21:34):
To be completely off track, I'm gonna go back to
this piece by by Douglas Murray. I shared about the
first half of it with you before the break, and
if you're just joining, I'll just I'll share the headline.

Speaker 2 (01:21:43):
The headline is how MAGA lost its.

Speaker 1 (01:21:46):
Way on Ukraine, and I'll do a very quick recap
again for those just joining.

Speaker 2 (01:21:52):
He talks about.

Speaker 1 (01:21:52):
How Conservative Republicans, how MAGA first probably hurt you know,
heard of Ukraine in any way that got into your consciousness,
with the with the Hunter Biden Brisma stuff, and then
with the Trump phone call to the Ukrainian president, the
call that got that got Trump impeached. And then Douglas

(01:22:15):
Murray says, this is all that Ukraine meant to most
MAGA Republicans until Russia's full scale invasion.

Speaker 2 (01:22:19):
In February of twenty twenty two.

Speaker 1 (01:22:21):
Then he goes on to talk about how Trump wasn't
president then, so you had a lot of Republicans, of
a good number of Republicans fighting to be as as
pro Ukraine and anti Putin as they could. Lindsay Graham,
who is just a ridiculous caricature.

Speaker 2 (01:22:35):
Of a politician, especially.

Speaker 1 (01:22:37):
When it comes to foreign policy, Lindsay, I mean, I
don't like the guy. So so that's kind of what
you heard. But then over time, MAGA and the more
cultural right kind of started leaning towards Russia and towards
Putin because because Putin is so so incredibly he woke

(01:23:01):
and Putin talked a good game on religion, and a
lot of you know, some folks on the not everybody,
but some folks on the Christian right.

Speaker 2 (01:23:08):
Kind of thought that that Putin was their guy.

Speaker 1 (01:23:12):
And uh, and now I'm gonna I'm gonna jump.

Speaker 2 (01:23:16):
Back into the article.

Speaker 1 (01:23:19):
So Douglas Murray says again talking about MAGA, these people
understandably hate the idea of narratives being pushed on them,
and they noticed that many of the Lost Souls who
had been putting BLM flags in their Twitter bios were
now posting Ukraine flags. Also, I'll just mention for those
who didn't hear me mention it before. And if you
don't know who Douglas Murray is, he's quite conservative. This

(01:23:41):
guy is not a liberal, just so you understand right now.
MAGA became additionally irritated that the unheroic and distinctly unmasculine
figures like Justin Trudeau of Canada were suddenly able to
present themselves as wartime leaders. When the Zelenskis did things
like the Vogue magazine shoot, they were doubtless simply trying

(01:24:06):
to keep the plight of their country in the Western
public eye. But the online right started to find this
stuff risible and smelly. If Biden, Trudeau, French President mccron,
and every other hated left wing quote unquote globalist was shimmying.

Speaker 2 (01:24:21):
Up to Zelenski, there.

Speaker 1 (01:24:22):
Must be something wrong with him, wittingly or otherwise. The
MAGA online right started to absorb Russia's narrative on Ukraine,
that it isn't a real country, that the Ukrainians aren't
to real people, that if they are real people, then
they are uniquely corrupt, on and on and when that
Ukrainian soldiers are literal Nazis, and that Zelensky is constantly

(01:24:46):
buying villas and yachts in the south of France, That
the whole war is one big money laundering operation, that
Ukraine's war to push the Russians back is unwinnable because
of the great might of the Russian army, and that
the whole thing is a giant waste of US taxpayer money.
Of course, almost all the allegations the Magaite makes against
Ukraine are infinitely truer of Putin's Russia. Interested in international corruption,

(01:25:11):
try looking at Putin and his friends. Interested in an
anti Christian government. How about looking at the cynical faith
of Putin, who trumpets Christian values while firing rockets at
great cathedrals like that in Odessa and recruiting jihadists to
fight for him.

Speaker 2 (01:25:28):
Think Ukraine is cruel.

Speaker 1 (01:25:29):
And forcing draft dodgers into the army, Look at Putin's
recruitment process. You don't like Zelenski for not holding an
election during a total war, have you noticed Putin's electoral habits?
By this stage, Ukraine is not just a country that
the Magaite has never visited. It's a fantasy country that

(01:25:51):
they imagine they know everything about and.

Speaker 2 (01:25:54):
All of it is bad.

Speaker 1 (01:25:56):
Perhaps they will manage to weide their way out of
the memes, or perhaps they will find out the hard
way that most of the American public may dislike Woke,
but they dislike dictators too, and that it's possible to
keep both these dislikes in one head and movement at
the same time.

Speaker 2 (01:26:17):
That's from Douglas Murray.

Speaker 1 (01:26:18):
It's published at the Free PRESSDFP dot com, although was
originally published over at the UK Spectator website Spectator dot
co dot uk. And I don't think I've a lot
to add to it. I will just say if unless
you are somebody who actually likes Russia and Putin and

(01:26:40):
dictators and corruption and all that, unless you actually like that,
and I don't think there are very many people like
that who listen to my show. There are quite a
lot of people like that on Twitter. But if you're
not one of those.

Speaker 2 (01:26:53):
Then if somehow you have been talked into hating Ukraine,
you should probably re examine some of that.

Speaker 1 (01:27:03):
And I'm not I want to be really clear about something.
I'm not saying Ukraine was great or is great. I
am not saying that Zelenski is great. Yes, he had
some great moments earlier in the war and probably saved
his country.

Speaker 2 (01:27:18):
But that doesn't mean he's a perfect human being.

Speaker 1 (01:27:20):
He's surely quite flawed, and he definitely showed it in
that Oval Office meeting.

Speaker 2 (01:27:28):
Everything.

Speaker 1 (01:27:29):
There are very few absolutes in foreign policy. Foreign policy
is so complex, all kinds of shades of gray, and
I and let's just say, I would stipulate to you
that Ukraine has had serious corruption problems and that Zelensky
has definitely done some things wrong in some things that
I wish he hadn't done. Does that mean then that

(01:27:53):
we should be rooting for one of the most evil
dictators in the world, be to overrun a country that
did something that that just that wasn't great. I mean,
it's just it's it's nonsense. It's nonsense, and unfortunately Trump
is feeding into it. And I'm not sure why. I'm

(01:28:15):
not sure how much of it he believes regarding Ukraine.
I'm not sure how much he thinks it's just helped
he thinks it helps him rile up his megabase and
raise money or whatever. But I firmly agree with Douglas
Murray that MAGA has lost its way on Ukraine and
we need to all understand that just because Ukraine isn't
perfect doesn't mean Russia is good. And that was just

(01:28:37):
the main lesson I wanted to to share with you.
From that all, I'm gonna move on to some stuff
that isn't economics and isn't politics, and just a couple
other things on our on our Friday, And at some
point here we're gonna get to get to name that
tune and Dragon is gonna have to guess my song.

Speaker 2 (01:28:50):
Uh So, the.

Speaker 1 (01:28:53):
Best TikTok trends are stupid and the bad ones are
stupid and harmful. This one seems to be closer to
stupid than stupid and harmful. But still, I just thought
I would share it with you. I don't remember. I
think maybe maybe dragons sent me this one. Did you
send me a thing about kids? And butter sure did?

Speaker 2 (01:29:16):
This is so look, I'm I'm not on TikTok. I
don't have the app on my phone. I don't I've never.

Speaker 1 (01:29:21):
Created a TikTok account because I'm I do believe that
it is Chinese malware basically, even though it has lots
of fabulous stuff. But keep in mind, like I put
TikTok videos in my blog from time to time because
you don't need an account to watch them.

Speaker 2 (01:29:39):
So if there's an interesting video or a funny video.

Speaker 1 (01:29:42):
Or whatever, you can watch it without having an account,
and that's okay.

Speaker 2 (01:29:48):
So here's the story from the New York Post.

Speaker 1 (01:29:52):
Parents are desperate for their children to get butter sleep
at night, not better but butter I. A new trend
on TikTok revealed a new and unusual method that parents
are resorting to to get their kids to sleep better
feeding them butter.

Speaker 2 (01:30:06):
Exhausted parents are giving their.

Speaker 1 (01:30:08):
Little ones a spoonful of butter before putting them down
for the night, and some claim it helps the kids
sleep through the night. Now, I wonder what's going through
your head right now. Kids get hungry and you feed
them pure fat, and it'll keep them satiated a little
while longer, and maybe they won't wake up.

Speaker 2 (01:30:24):
That's one possibility anyway.

Speaker 1 (01:30:27):
The trend started with moms in the US giving their
tots quote unquote real.

Speaker 2 (01:30:31):
Butter and has spread.

Speaker 1 (01:30:32):
Of course, It's started in the US and has spread
to the UK and New Zealand, allowing them to allegedly get.

Speaker 2 (01:30:37):
A full eight hours of sleep. Some parents swear.

Speaker 1 (01:30:40):
By this, so called hack, but experts have said it
might not make a difference and it might even do
more harm than good.

Speaker 2 (01:30:46):
One mom on.

Speaker 1 (01:30:47):
TikTok has been documenting her venture into the butter trend
and sharing.

Speaker 2 (01:30:51):
Results with followers.

Speaker 1 (01:30:52):
Quote.

Speaker 2 (01:30:53):
So we're gonna try the butter.

Speaker 1 (01:30:54):
Trend where you give your baby a spoonful of butter
and apparently it works magic and they sleep all night long,
said this one user.

Speaker 2 (01:31:01):
She claimed that her baby.

Speaker 1 (01:31:02):
Slept all night, with the exception of one feed and
one time where she.

Speaker 2 (01:31:06):
Was woken up by noisy neighbors.

Speaker 1 (01:31:08):
On night two, she said that her baby Ivy slept
longer in between the periods when she woke up, but
she wasn't sure if it was due to the butter
or because the baby was overtired.

Speaker 2 (01:31:16):
From the day oh. A New Zealand mom also shared
the trend, saying that.

Speaker 1 (01:31:21):
Her fifteen month old baby had never slept through the
night and she was willing to try anything.

Speaker 2 (01:31:26):
What do I have to lose? She asked.

Speaker 1 (01:31:28):
In a follow up video, the mom said that this
trend didn't work. She put the toddler to sleep around
seven and slightly after eight, the toddler had woken up
three times.

Speaker 2 (01:31:39):
Already.

Speaker 1 (01:31:40):
Experts claim that feeding your baby butter is absolutely not
the best way to get them to sleep. They quote
a baby nutritionist who told a newspaper that social media
like these TikTok trends are rife with information and that butter,
which is high in salt and saturated fat, is.

Speaker 2 (01:31:58):
Not recommended for babies.

Speaker 1 (01:31:59):
Also, the texture and slipperiness of butter can pose a
choking risk for babies who are still developing their eating skills.

Speaker 2 (01:32:06):
This is talking about pair.

Speaker 1 (01:32:07):
You know, moms who are giving a spoonful with a
big chunk of butter on it. Incorporating butter into cooking
or spreading on a thin layer on toast is perfectly fine.
Large chunks of butter directly from a spoon is not advisable.

Speaker 2 (01:32:20):
What about a spoonful of sugar? Hear it helps the
medicine go down? I just.

Speaker 1 (01:32:28):
It never ceases to amaze me how many people will
just follow a TikTok trend, and even some that are
insanely dangerous, like eating tide pods where people are dying. Like,
what is that about? Okay, let me ask listeners something.
This is kind of a wacky question. I wasn't thinking
of this. I want you to text me your answer
at five six six nine zero. Have you ever stumbled

(01:32:50):
across an online trend, not just one person with an idea,
but something that's really kind of gone viral and gone
and has become trendy. Have you ever stumbled across an
online trend that you took up, that you tried and
you decided it's actually quite good And I'm gonna and I'm.

Speaker 2 (01:33:11):
Gonna keep doing that. Is Mandy here earlier than usual?

Speaker 6 (01:33:15):
Hi?

Speaker 10 (01:33:15):
Mandy, I'm just eating a piece of peanut butter toast ross.
Uh huh, yeah, so that's down here. It's not butter,
but peanut butter.

Speaker 2 (01:33:24):
Yeah. But you're not a baby. I mean sometimes you are.

Speaker 11 (01:33:27):
I mean emotionally, yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:33:28):
Yeah, you're not about to go to sleep.

Speaker 11 (01:33:32):
Peanut butter toast is delicious anytime.

Speaker 1 (01:33:34):
Okay, wait, let's just let's just back away from the
baby stuff for a second.

Speaker 2 (01:33:38):
So I, I, uh, do you toast? Is it actual toaster?
Is it just bread? And?

Speaker 11 (01:33:43):
Oh god?

Speaker 7 (01:33:43):
No?

Speaker 10 (01:33:44):
When I say toast, I mean toast. Okay, I'm a
dark toast person, not black, but dark.

Speaker 2 (01:33:47):
That's what I was gonna ask you.

Speaker 1 (01:33:49):
How dark Chrispy I'm normally I'm normally not toast, but
if I do toast, not dark light toast, if toast
at all.

Speaker 2 (01:33:58):
So that's interesting.

Speaker 11 (01:33:59):
You're anti. I had no idea your anti toast.

Speaker 2 (01:34:02):
I'm not really anti toast. I'm just not a toaster.

Speaker 11 (01:34:05):
I just don't think that kind of toast is good enough.
Huh right, so not as good as your test.

Speaker 2 (01:34:09):
So here's the other thing.

Speaker 1 (01:34:10):
And this is where you get into stuff that can
be more like fighting words.

Speaker 2 (01:34:15):
Uh, creamy or crunchy.

Speaker 11 (01:34:19):
Uh, depends on my mood and what I'm doing with it.

Speaker 2 (01:34:21):
Wow.

Speaker 10 (01:34:22):
Yeah, because I use peanut butter when I cook a lot. No,
but I mean on bread, Like right now, this is crunchy,
and I had both options. So today it was crunchy.
I wanted something a little more hearty. Yes, you know, yeah,
I feel like it's gonna stick to my ribs.

Speaker 1 (01:34:36):
I lean crunchy as well. It doesn't mean I would
turn down a good creamy peanut butter, but I definitely
lean crunchy as well. Now, the other thing that I
need to know from you, okay, is anything else on there?
Like for example, for me, sometimes I'll eat it straight,
but more often I put some kind of jelly or marmalade.
I had some passion fruit jam yesterday that I put on.

(01:34:57):
I had some orange marmalade that I like as well. Yeah,
and then it gets even more like just an absolute child.
I will sometimes put grape jelly on as if I'm
seven years old.

Speaker 11 (01:35:10):
Well, I don't like the texture of fruit.

Speaker 10 (01:35:13):
You know this about me, right, So I don't like
anything other than jelly, and that's basically hardened sugar water, right,
So I try to lean away at this point in
my life from hardened sugar water on anything. So I'm
a purist. It's just peanut butter. It's just toast, and
that's it.

Speaker 2 (01:35:29):
An open face or do you fold that over making
it open face?

Speaker 10 (01:35:32):
I like to enjoy the texture, you know, change between
that you sink your teeth through the peanut butter and
the little crunch from and then you get the bread.

Speaker 3 (01:35:39):
I do.

Speaker 2 (01:35:39):
I do the open face as well.

Speaker 1 (01:35:41):
At some point, though, See, I find that with a
little bit of jam or marmalade or something, it's a
little easier to eat, because I think just straight up
peanut butter glues your mouth closed.

Speaker 11 (01:35:50):
No, oh, you have little faith.

Speaker 10 (01:35:53):
Well, this is what's funny is I keep reaching over
to take a bite, and I'm like, man, you can't
eat eat peanut butter toast on the radio, Like you should.

Speaker 2 (01:36:00):
Have the limits at some point. Now.

Speaker 10 (01:36:02):
No, oh wait, that's right, I'm in the minors. Right now,
I could probably No, I'm just kidding. I won't do
that now. I won't do that because I always think
of our former boss, Dan Mandis, who was the longtime
producer for Doctor Laura, who had fifteen minutes of nothing
but Laura eating yogurt sounds recorded. He has a recording
of that because he used to drive him so insane.

Speaker 1 (01:36:23):
So I can't do that, all right, all right, I
mean as you are, You're more than welcome to eat
peanut butter while we're playing Name that tune.

Speaker 11 (01:36:33):
Okay, great?

Speaker 10 (01:36:33):
And to the person who said peanut butter and honey
is fantastic, you are correct. But again, trying to steer
away from just pouring random sugar onto other things that
isn't already there.

Speaker 1 (01:36:42):
Have you ever had toast with peanut butter and honey
from Ross's Bees?

Speaker 10 (01:36:47):
I am not, and your honey is outstanding. Now, have
you ever had honey with cane syrup on it. Do
you know what cane syrup is?

Speaker 2 (01:36:55):
I know what, I think I know what cane It is.

Speaker 10 (01:36:57):
The byproduct of sugar cane. They crush it, They basically
crush the sugar cane. Then they boil down the sugar
water that comes out, and that is cane syrup, indeed,
and it's hard to find here, but I happen to
be in possession of two bottles right a little shot.

Speaker 1 (01:37:12):
I actually brought back some stuff whose name escapes me,
starts with a P from Columbia and it's it's a
hard pardon me, a hard block of cane sugar and
I kind of like file it down and then boil
it and make cane syrup. Yeah, but I have not
I've not had it with honey. I wouldn't have thought

(01:37:33):
to add.

Speaker 10 (01:37:34):
Oh yeah, it's a completely different kind of sweetness.

Speaker 11 (01:37:36):
And it's just it's really really good.

Speaker 10 (01:37:38):
And I have an amazing recipe for cane syrup then,
agret that is just lights out, so delicious, so delicious.

Speaker 1 (01:37:45):
All right, we'll have to get that recipe because Kristen
loves vinagrette.

Speaker 2 (01:37:48):
A rod is walking in. I haven't seen you in
a week.

Speaker 3 (01:37:51):
Is he?

Speaker 10 (01:37:51):
Tann and rested because I'm broadcasting from southern.

Speaker 1 (01:37:53):
Are you are you tanned and rested? A Rod Mandy
is asking if you're tanned and rested? He's always pretty, Tann,
I'm always pretty Can Tanner rested? Absolutely?

Speaker 2 (01:38:03):
Where were you good?

Speaker 12 (01:38:05):
On a cruise at a long beach Catalian Island and
en Sonata for the last.

Speaker 2 (01:38:08):
Wow four days?

Speaker 12 (01:38:10):
Wow, California is so stupid expensive. I know it's not
breaking news, but I spent hundreds of dollars on ubers alone.
Oh yeah, hundred hundreds ye two days, hundreds of dollars
on ubers alone.

Speaker 2 (01:38:24):
Dude, dude, not proud to be born from that. Just
kidding a little bit. Hey, folks, If you're listening on
the podcast right now, that's the end of today's show.
Thank you so much for listening. Don't forget.

Speaker 1 (01:38:34):
You can catch us every day on the podcast as
you are right now, on your smart speaker, on your
iHeartRadio app, even on the computer at Koa, Colorado, and
the good old fashioned way on your radio.

Speaker 2 (01:38:46):
Thanks so much for listening to the show.