04-22-25 - *FULL SHOW* Brian Wesbury; Plastics; Earth Day; Taxing Sports Gambling

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
I was. I was out yesterday for what I thought
what I thought was going to be jury duty. It
ended up not being jury duty for me. But anyway,
and I do want to give a big thank you
is Shannon who was in for me yesterday. Ryan, I do.
I do want to give a big shout out to
Ryan and a big thank you to the person who

(00:21):
sent me a text saying, Ross, you finally had a
good show yesterday. Actually it was a tweet, not a text,
So there you go, Ry, I finally I finally had
a good show yesterday.

Speaker 2 (00:37):
I had a very weird dream last night.

Speaker 1 (00:42):
Can I just share this with you and then we'll
kind of jump into this story that I want to
share with you. Gosh, I hope this is not going
to make me log in. No, it's good, all right.
So you may recall late last week I did a
story about beer and the declining although still very large
number of craft brewery and stuff like that. And I
think maybe I had beer and Kraft beer on my brain.

(01:04):
And if you ever go to a craft brewery these days,
especially the really crafty ones, they have beer that is
made with all kinds of things, right, they had you know,
the the common stuff. You know, you might have a
stout made with coffee or chocolate, and you maybe you'll

(01:25):
have a wheat beer or even a lagger made with orange, right,
and then you get a little bit more elaborate, like
Graham Cracker and stuff like that. So anyway, I think
I must have had that in my brain, and I
do generally like you know, beers like that. But I
had a dream last night, Shannon, where I guess I was.
I don't even remember the scene. I just remember someone

(01:46):
said to me, I think you're really gonna like this beer.
It's made you ready. It's made with cardboard cassine, which
is like the primary protein, and cheese and lisol, like what.
And that's all I remember of the dream. And it

(02:07):
woke me up. It was so astonishing that it woke
me up. And I thought, because normally, what will happen
when I get up? And so I will. My dreams
frequently wake me up. I'm I'm a very light sleeper.
I will wake up and I will think, well, that
was a wacky dream. I need to tell my listeners
about that dream because it was so wacky. And then
I go back to sleep and I wake up later

(02:28):
in the morning, and what I have in my head
was Ross, you had a dream last night and you
wanted to tell your listeners about it.

Speaker 2 (02:34):
What was it? I don't remember. That's normally what happens.

Speaker 1 (02:38):
So this time I remember I was offered a beer
made out of cardboard, cassine, and lysol, not just a
mix of them, but infused with them, right the way
you might infuse a stout beer with chocolate or coffee
or something.

Speaker 2 (02:53):
In my dream, I do not believe I tasted the.

Speaker 1 (02:56):
Beer because I woke up before, and probably it's probably
fortunate for me that I woke up before actually tasting
the beer, because I bet it wouldn't have tasted very
good and might not have been that healthy for me.
After all, who wants a beer with made from cardboard?
So let me share this story with you. The Ballerina,

(03:19):
which many people still remember as Pepsi Center, But it's
Ballerina now. Maybe it's been Ballerina for long enough now
that everybody calls it ball Arena at this point. And
as you well know, the Cronky family owns the Arena
and the Nuggets and the Avalanche and of the Mammoth,
I think, and they own a lot of stuff, and
they also own the land around Ballerina and have been

(03:43):
talking for many years about redeveloping it. And we've talked
a little bit about this on the show. And as
Denver stories go, Denver area stories go, you don't have
to be in Denver to care about Ballerina, right, you know,
you go there for concerts and games and whatever.

Speaker 2 (04:00):
And so I'm.

Speaker 1 (04:02):
Super interested in what's going to be developed there. And
I saw a story over at the Denver Business Journal
that I just wanted to share a little bit with you.
Actually the story came out yesterday, but it's about it's
about the very first plans that have been submitted to
the city to begin the redevelopment of that area. Now,

(04:23):
I did post this article on my blog at Rosskominsky
dot com. It is possible that you won't be able
to read it because it's behind a paywall, But what
I also tried to do was put a link in
there that should not be paywalled, that you can click
on and it will open a picture like a like
a map ish of what the new development will look like.

(04:46):
So let me just share a little bit of this
with you. Again, is from the Denver Business Journal. Plans
to redevelop one of several parking lots surrounding Ball Arena
have been made public. Kronkey Sports and Entertainment submitted concept
plan to Denver to build a performance venue. So that
would be like a place for smaller concerts and maybe

(05:06):
plays or whatever. Not a massive thing like Ball Arena,
but a performance venue. A thirteen story hotel and two
residential buildings totaling three hundred units on a parking lot
that is just east of Ball Arena at one thousand
Chopper Circle. I think it's the you know how, I
guess Toyota sponsors that stuff. So the parking lots have

(05:30):
names of different Toyota cars, right, like the Camray Lot
and YadA, YadA, YadA.

Speaker 2 (05:34):
So this one is the is the Tundra Lot.

Speaker 1 (05:39):
And their current submission to the city is four buildings
that on the three point seven acre site that is
currently the Tundra parking lot, and they're gonna put underground
parking under it, and then they're gonna build a pedestrian
bridge over Spear Boulevard connecting all well this stuff to

(06:03):
Lo doo. Now they're talking about two different hotels, right,
one of them will have two hundred and forty four rooms,
almost fifteen thousand square feet of retail, almost fifteen thousand
square feet of food and drink space right, and two
twelve story residential buildings. They're gonna have studios one bedroom,

(06:23):
two bedroom, and then penthouse units that are three bedroom,
and then the residential tower is gonna have retail space
as well. The tower closest to Ball Arena, according to
this space this article has six thousand square feet of
office and other space and two thousand square feet for
and eating and drinking establishment, which could be a restaurant
or a bar or a coffee shop. The bridge, by

(06:45):
the way, is gonna be called the Winecope Crossing Pedestrian Bridge,
and it's going to align with Winecoope Street where it
ends at Cherry Creek. And well, there's more to it,
but I just wanted to share that with you. It's
kind of exciting actually to see this important step in

(07:06):
one of the most important areas I would say, in
Denver's for people who live in and not in Denver,
so they're taking their first steps. This is just phase
one A, and lots of stuff could change. The city
could object to some of it, right Kronkey could change
some of it, but this is at least the first step.
Imagine the scale of this project, right, I mean, this

(07:29):
is just one of their parking lots, and they're talking about,
you know, four buildings with two residential towers in a
hotel and a performance venue. The scale of this project
is going to be beyond belief, and hopefully it will
make Denver an even better city. On Earth Day, I
used to go around my house. I'm not making this up.
I used to go around my house, especially when I

(07:50):
lived in Chicago, and just turn on all the lights
because everybody else was turning off their lights and some
kind of virtue signaling thing. But now like all the
lights in my house LEDs and they hardly use any
electricity at all, and it's not nearly as much fun
as it as Earth Day used to be. For the record,
I'm quite fond of planet Earth and I want it

(08:12):
to be clean and shall we use an overused word sustainable,
not necessarily in all the ways the left wing uses
that word, but I would like Earth to be sustained.
After all, I have children, I want them to have
a nice place to live. So Earth Day has never
meant that much to me. I do note over at

(08:33):
earthday dot org. Right on their website, it says they're
calling for everyone to unite around renewable energy so we
can triple clean electricity by twenty thirty, which, let me
just say, if all else were equal, that would be
a fine goal. But all else is not equal, and
so called renewable energy is intermittent, unreliable, and very expensive.

(08:57):
And this whole thing about you know, uniting around renewable
energy is a sure way to keep poor people cold
and miserable. So Earth Day.

Speaker 2 (09:10):
Is mostly a negative.

Speaker 1 (09:11):
Even though it's a fine concept, in actual implementation, it's
no good at all. Now, I swear to you this
next thing is a thing that you would think that
somebody would write if they were trying to make fun
of themselves, right, or fun of Earth Day. But I
swear to you this is real. This is from National

(09:31):
Geographic Kids, and they're talking about turning off the electricity
on Earth Day, which used to be a big thing.
You'll remember this, Shannon, right, It was this whole big
thing and people would all turn off their lights at
some time and feel like they're saving the world. Anyway,
So this is what it says on the National Geographic Website.
On the kids part of the National Geographic Website, does

(09:54):
that lamp really need to be on while the sun
is out? Electricity doesn't just happen. It has to be
produced from things around us. A lot of times it
comes from fossil fuels such as coal, oil, or natural
gas that contribute to climate change. But that's not where
this is really off the rails. Check this out. This
is this is one of the greatest things I've read
in a long time. But electricity can also be made

(10:17):
from renewable sources like water, wind, the sun, and even
elephant dung. Okay, so since you know that these clowns
are championing renewable energy and they say elephant dung is
a renewable source, it means they are championing elephant dung

(10:41):
over for example, natural gas. Now let me just say that.
So I already had my own thing to say about this,
I'll just sit quickly because I want to get to
the next thing about Earth Day just for a minute.

Speaker 2 (10:56):
The thing I was gonna.

Speaker 1 (10:57):
Say is there are a few things that are responsible
for more shortened lives in the developing world, in poor,
non industrialized countries than people who who you know, live
in huts and use dung and even would, but especially

(11:21):
dung to cook their food and eat their homes because
it emits so many pollutants, both chemical and particulate.

Speaker 2 (11:29):
It kills lots of people.

Speaker 1 (11:32):
Every single person on the planet who burns dung as
an energy source would give their left arm or at
least some fraction thereof in order to have a propane
stove or you know, a natural gas line to their

(11:52):
house or anything like that. Absolutely nuts that they're cheering
for burning dung. On the National Geographic website for kids
brainwashing Kids, Now, I post I just saw this eight
minutes before my show started, and I posted it on
the blog so you can check it out. And it's
from Bjorn Lawmborg, who's one of my very very favorites,

(12:13):
And it's at the New York Post and it's entitled
environment improves as more nations prosper. The greatest polluter is poverty.
And I'll just share with you a few seconds from
here and then you can go read it yourself. As
we approach Earth Day this Tuesday, it's tempting to believe
that the world is on the brink of environmental collapse.
We're constantly inundated by dire predictions of climate catastrophe and

(12:33):
warnings about the planets and an in destruction, but this
is misleading. Rather than spiraling into panic, we should take
a moment to appreciate the remarkable progress we've made in
improving the environment and acknowledge that a key factor is prosperity.
When Earth Day was first mark fifty five years ago,
rivers were catching fire, cities were choked with smog, air

(12:53):
and water pollution were rampant. Today, outdoor air pollution has
declined dramatically in rich countries over the past three year decades.
Death risk from air pollution is spectacularly declined by over
seventy percent, while waterways have become cleaner and nations reforested.
And then I'm gonna just skip ahead in the interested
time much further down in Biorn's Peace. When focusing on

(13:16):
pictures of smoggy, wooden megacities, we miss the much deadlier
air pollution that takes place indoors for the world's poorest people.

Speaker 2 (13:24):
This overlook problem stems from.

Speaker 1 (13:26):
Energy poverty, where people are forced to rely on traditional biomass, wood, cardboard,
and dung to cook and keep warm. The World Health
Organization estimates the two point one billion people live in
homes that are many times more polluted than even the
worst outside days in Delhi or Beijing, equivalent to each
person smoking two packets of cigarettes a day.

Speaker 2 (13:47):
Even today, indoor.

Speaker 1 (13:48):
Air pollution kills more than three million people each year.
And this burning elephant dung because it's renewable, is being
recommended to kids by National Geographic Are you kidding me?
I'm ross. Thank you for spending a little time with
me on KOA. I'm so happy to have back on
the show. My good friend, my old friend, I do

(14:10):
mean old Brian Westbury. Brian and I have been friends
for at least thirty years, and Brian is one of
the great economists in the United States. He's the chief
economist at First Trust that has some I don't know,
a few hundred billion dollars of assets under management. His
opinion is very important, and we're going to spend some

(14:32):
time today talking about the economy and talking about markets.
Don't confuse them as being the same thing. They're related,
but they're not the same, and we are not really
going to in fact, we're going to explicitly avoid making
this about politics.

Speaker 2 (14:51):
We're going to talk about markets and the economy.

Speaker 1 (14:54):
So hi, Brian and your studio, your home studio looks fabulous.

Speaker 3 (14:58):
Well, thank you, Ross. Great to be with you, and
yes we are old friends. Uh.

Speaker 1 (15:05):
So let's let's talk markets first and then and then
we'll talk the economy. Uh, yesterday the market was down
a lot. Today it's up almost as much. Before we
talk about up and down. In your view of stock valuations,
what do you make of the recent massively increased volatility

(15:28):
in markets, with much bigger moves day after day than
we used to seeing for recent years.

Speaker 3 (15:34):
Yeah, I mean, so we have to begin with the
fact that I thought and still believe that the markets
were overvalued when we came into this year. And then
you know, I don't want to you know, beat up
Trump or not beat up Trump or whatever, but we
have clearly a completely different direction and policy.

Speaker 2 (15:56):
He's going after the Fed, we have tariffs.

Speaker 3 (16:00):
There seems to be some worry around the world about
you know, the US bond market and reserve currency status
and all of these kinds of things. At the same time,
Deep Seek came out and it was a game changer
for AI and and so that's I really think that's
when the mag seven started having their problems. And then

(16:23):
you add in all of this policy uncertainty on top
of it, and you get volatility. I expected the market
to go down this year, and so I have a
hard time blaming one thing or another on the fact
that it's going down. You need a catalyst, usually something
that that kicks it off. And then finally I'll just

(16:46):
add we we were in ever since COVID. What I've
called it.

Speaker 2 (16:50):
Is we were in the era of easy everything.

Speaker 3 (16:55):
We're running two trillion dollars budget deficits. The Federal Reserve
is printing like crazy. H was holding interest rates down,
then had to lift them, then cut them again, and
so all of this going on.

Speaker 2 (17:09):
With an overvalued market.

Speaker 3 (17:11):
It doesn't it doesn't surprise me at all that we
have more volatility.

Speaker 1 (17:14):
Let's stick with the overvalued thing for a moment. You
said that you believed that the market was overvalued, and
the market seems to have agreed with you thus far,
and then you said, I still think it's overvalued. So
how are you how are you thinking about value? And
let me just add one more thing that kind of

(17:36):
ties into what you and I were talking about. On
the phone yesterday. So a lot of times when people
are talking about fair value for the market, they're really
just thinking in terms of, you know, discounted cash flows
and what's the interest rate and what's the earnings on
the S and P and put it in a formula,
and that's fair value. When when you think about fair value,
are you just are you doing that kind of analysis
or do you add in other stuff like, for example,

(17:59):
might foreign investors be repatriating money out of the US
and therefore fair value might be less than just using
that formula.

Speaker 3 (18:08):
Yeah, you know, yes a little bit. So let me
explain how I look at value in the market. We
have seventy plus years of data, really good data on
the S and P five hundred and that's what I
focus on. So it's the five hundred biggest companies in
America and we know what their earnings are every quarter.

(18:32):
And by the way, I get that data from the
Treasury from the IRS. I figure if companies are reporting
earnings to the IRS and they owe taxes, then they
really did make that money. Sometimes SMP reported earnings are
a little suspect.

Speaker 2 (18:49):
I'm not saying.

Speaker 3 (18:50):
Anybody's lying, but they add all kinds of stuff in it.
I just want to use the earnings that they pay
taxes on, and so we know that every quarter for
the last seven years. And then you have to discount
those profits with interest rates. So the lower interest rates are,
the more profits are worth. The higher interest rates are,

(19:10):
the less profits are worth. And then I just do
a simple three way calculation. If you give me the
S and P five hundred and interest rates, I'll tell
you what the market thing's earnings are. If you give
me earnings and interest rates, I'll tell you what the
S and P five hundred should be compared to its
average over the last seventy years. And so when we

(19:33):
look at that, at the beginning of this year, the
market's fair value was about forty eight hundred. Now that's
the S and P five hundred. It's trading fifty one
fifty two hundred right now. Our forecast was fifty two hundred.
And the reason that I made I didn't go all

(19:53):
the way to forty eight is we were going to
get tax cuts and extension of the Trump tax cuts,
maybe some more tax cuts on.

Speaker 2 (20:01):
Top of that.

Speaker 3 (20:02):
I thought we would have a recession, but it would
be relatively.

Speaker 2 (20:06):
Mild and I didn't.

Speaker 3 (20:10):
I didn't add in big uncertainty over tariffs and on again,
off again tariffs, that kind of thing.

Speaker 2 (20:16):
But I just said fifty two hundred.

Speaker 4 (20:18):
Now.

Speaker 3 (20:18):
One thing to remember about my model, actually you just
heard about it, but is that it's just a thirty
thousand foot view. I'm not a stock trader just because
the market is overvalued.

Speaker 2 (20:32):
I tell everybody don't go short like that.

Speaker 3 (20:36):
That doesn't mean, it doesn't mean you should just short
the market. But what I was saying is, hey, the
Mag seven is thirty five cents of every dollar you
invest in the S and P five hundred, So if
you do invest, stay away, like go to where there's value,
because the smallest one hundred companies in the S and

(20:59):
P five hundred are trading at something like a seventeen pe,
whereas the MAG seven was trading at a thirty five pe.
So you can buy stocks that are cheaper. Now, by
the way, European stocks are really cheap, and they have
been for a long long time. The US market has
gone up, the European market has gone sideways at best

(21:22):
until this year, and so that's been a place of
value as well. So I'm not shocked to see Europeans.
Let's say, say, you know what, we're a little worried
about those high valuations. Maybe we should invest more at
home where we have low valuation. And anyway, we're a
first druss, We're a I guess I would call us

(21:44):
a quant shop. We invest like a lot of other
people do, but we really analyze the data about companies.
What are their earnings, do they raise dividends every year,
what are they doing with buybacks? And we look for
places where they're value rather than just growth and momentum.

Speaker 2 (22:04):
In other words, we're always we.

Speaker 3 (22:06):
Want to buy a we want to buy a dollars
worth of stock for less than the market average. And
if we can find those stocks, and you can all
the time, they're not hard to find. That's what That's
what this model meant to me. Yes, we're overvalued, it
doesn't mean every stock is overvalued. So I was just
urging caution for people, especially when we're going to move

(22:30):
into a year where there's a lot of policy uncertainty.

Speaker 1 (22:33):
We're talking with Brian Westbury, chief economists at First Trust.
The website is FT portfolios dot com. I encourage you
to go to FT portfolios dot com and sign up
for Brian's various emails. They're free, they're in plain English,
which you don't always get from economists, and they will
really help you understand not just markets, but the economy

(22:55):
as well. Before we get to the economy, just one
or two more sort of market gets questions. What do
you think the significance is, if any, Maybe people are
making too much of it of the recent weakness in
the US dollar, which I also see mirrored in a
new high price in gold.

Speaker 2 (23:17):
Yeah, I mean people are worried.

Speaker 3 (23:19):
Okay, so we could talk about FED independence and Trump
going after Powell, and that's what's causing people to worry.
The last time a president really went after a Federal
Reserve Board chairman was the nineteen seventies, and that was Nixon, you.

Speaker 2 (23:35):
Know, literally bullying.

Speaker 3 (23:39):
Arthur Burns to keep interest rates low, to keep printing money,
and Arthur Burns complied, and we ended up with the
stagflation of the nineteen seventies. And I think people are
worried about that today. Right now, I wouldn't be worried.
The money supply, which is what I really focus on.

(24:02):
It peaked in twenty twenty two. It's actually lower today
than it was at its peak, which is very unusual
in the history of the US and interest rates. Right now,
the Federal funds rate, which is the rate the FED controls,
is four and a half percent and inflation is running
about two and a half percent. Remember just a few

(24:24):
years ago, it was zero when inflation was one and
a half to two. So what it's called a real
interest rate? How high is the interest rate relative to inflation.
Back when the FED was holding rates at zero, it
was below inflation, in other words, too low. Today it's
about a percent and a half two percentage points above inflation.

Speaker 2 (24:47):
So I look at the FED, and I'm not saying
gold is wrong.

Speaker 3 (24:51):
I'm just saying it's a place where people go when
they are worried about the future. And Trump leaning on
the Fed causes people to remember the nineteen seventies and
so anyway, I'd love to talk about that more, but
I'll leave that for now. What I believe is the

(25:11):
era of easy everything is over Doge is actually cutting spending.
It's hard to tell if you look at overall government spending,
but they are. Congress is going to put a budget
for that actually cuts some spending and reduces the deficit.
And at the same time, the Feds, you know, I mean,
Powell is pushing back against Trump. I don't want to

(25:34):
cut rates, I don't want to boost the money supply.
So what that means is all this easy money, all
these huge deficits are gone. The era of easy everything
is over. And so I think gold is it's a
place where people go for safe haven. But I think
it might be wrong that we're going to have massive

(25:55):
inflation in the future. I just don't think we will.

Speaker 1 (25:58):
I think I think part of what's going on with
the rally in gold is that some investors, particularly foreigners,
are not flocking to bonds the way they used to,
and so they're trying to hide somewhere. So they're hiding
in gold where they used to hide in bonds. That's
just my guess.

Speaker 2 (26:16):
Yeah, yeah, exactly.

Speaker 3 (26:18):
You know, just to quick aside, when we buy foreign goods,
which we've been doing, you know, our trade deficit is
a trillion dollars a year, really close to it. That
means we buy it with dollars. Now foreigners at that
point have dollars, and they can choose to invest in
the United States. Let's say, buy a manufacturing plant or farmland.

(26:40):
They can buy treasury bonds or they can buy gold,
And right now they're worried that we are that Trumps
serious about not having these massive trade deficits, so then
they want to protect their dollars that they've earned by
exporting to US. And yeah, right now they they seem

(27:00):
to be picking gold over US treasury bonds. By the way,
that the US is not going to default on its
bonds in my lifetime, I do not expect the US
to lose its reserve currency status. If anybody thinks that,
tell me what country could replace it. I don't see
one anywhere in the world. I mean, by the way,

(27:22):
Switzerland could probably do it, because they have really good
policies and they are you can trust them, but they're
too small. They can't be the world's reserve currency. You
have to be a big country. You have to respect
private property, enforced contracts, be honest in your accounting. And

(27:44):
if anybody can tell me a country that's like that
or anywhere around the world that can beat the US,
there isn't one. So I think people are freaking out
a little bit and using these market moves to justify
their position and trying to scare people, But it's I
think it's more politics than it's actual economic reality.

Speaker 1 (28:06):
So what do you what do you have right now?
Is your forecast for GDP for this year and how
much if any have you adjusted it because of uh
terriffs or disruptions to global trade.

Speaker 3 (28:23):
Yeah, we we were, we were negative coming into this year.
I basically have flat GDP. Maybe maybe even I thought
we would have a recession. It's not this, by the way,
this is not two thousand with with you know, the
the market was overvalued by sixty two percent in two thousand,
all right, that we were overvalued by about twenty percent

(28:44):
at the beginning of this year. So it's not two
thousand where we have this massive decline in the market.
It's also not two thousand and eight. In fact, this
correction in the market has been very orderly. It's uh,
there haven't been big strains in the in the system.
All that you know, gold soaring, bonds are moving every day,
stocks are moving every day, and everything's happening normally. It's

(29:08):
there's no big strain. So that's a really good sign.
But I had basically flat GDP, maybe down to half
a percent, So it would it be a minor recession,
kind of normal in history, and then the trade stuff happened,
and so one of the things that's gonna happen.

Speaker 2 (29:25):
We're gonna first quarter GDP.

Speaker 3 (29:27):
Comes out in eight days I think now, and it's
it's going to be close to zero. And the the
big reason for that is that imports in the GDP
calculation because we didn't produce them. Remember gross domestic product,
what what do we produce domestically? And so if we

(29:49):
front run those tariffs and we jammed in all these
ships and we boosted our trade deficit, it'll take down GDP.
And that's gonna happen in the But at the same time,
consumption has slowed as well. Uh, consumption growth is only
going it's gonna be less than a percent real adjusted

(30:11):
for inflation in the first quarter. So and business investment
has slowed. I mean, this is where I come back
to deep seek. You know you have you've probably debated
this on your show, and I'm sorry I didn't hear
all the debates. But but if you believe that that
they were able to do in China for a tenth

(30:33):
of the cost of what we're doing in the United
States with AI, then that changes the entire model. And
by the way, if we look at Microsoft and Meta
and there's a lot of cancellations of these aiuh you know,
factories that they were building and and I think deep
seek is the reason for that. So so I think

(30:55):
we're going to see a little bit slower business investment
than people thought. Consumption is weakening, and then this quarter
is really weird because the big trade deficit, and next
right now the number of ships coming from China has
like collapsed, and so next quarter we may actually have
a much smaller deficit, which would boost consumption. So anyway,

(31:18):
I'm looking for basically flat GDP and that one step further.
If you have slower GDP growth, you'll have slower earnings growth.
And so when we came in into this year, the
consensus of stock analysts they look at individual companies, was

(31:39):
that we would have about ten percent earnings growth, and
every almost every day, somebody is reducing that estimate, and
it's now down to about five percent this year instead
of ten. I wouldn't be surprised if it's not flat.
And that's another reason why I think the market's a
little bit over value today, not as much as it

(31:59):
was and certainly nowhere near like it was in the
dot com bubble, but it's it's still a little bit
over value.

Speaker 1 (32:08):
I bet a friend of mine who's in this business
as well. I bet a friend of mine a beer
saying I think Q one GDP is gonna be negative.
And this was not part of the bet, but I'm
just adding I also think Q two GDP is going
to be going to be negative. I think the first
I think Q one, you know, near the end it
got a little crazy with the terrorist stuff. I think

(32:29):
it was essentially a normal quarter economically, but the number
is going to be dragged down because of all the imports.
And then I think Q two is going to be
negative because because I think it's an actual recession caused
by all this uncertainty and stuff we've talked about.

Speaker 2 (32:41):
We'll see, we'll see. Uh.

Speaker 1 (32:43):
Last, very quick question, and I've got about one minute.
And this is sort of half joking and half serious,
but I've had a kind of a lot of fun, uh,
almost making fun of you, but not really over the
years for being so so bullish all the time, right,
and and some months ago when you turned publicly bearish
and you're like, this is overvalued. It is not the

(33:06):
first time, but it's one of the few times that
I've heard you say that, and and it really kind
of stuck with me.

Speaker 2 (33:13):
And how do you feel.

Speaker 1 (33:15):
Like it's unusual for you in a way?

Speaker 2 (33:18):
Yeah?

Speaker 3 (33:19):
You know, well, the model that I described, we take profits,
discount them with the ten year treasury yield. Said the
market was from two thousand and nine at the bottom
when we changed mark to market accounting, which is a
whole other story, we were undervalued for fifteen years.

Speaker 2 (33:39):
And so when we're.

Speaker 3 (33:40):
Undervalued, you know, people would say, what about Brexit? And
I'm like, bye, you know, what about the fiscal cliff?
And I'm like bye, what about murder hornets? And I'm
like triple by so and then people started saying, well,
of course he's he's a perma bull because he works
for a fund company. And I always laughed at that,

(34:01):
because you don't know anything about First Trust, because if
you think the world is going to end tomorrow, we
got a product for you. And so my job is
to call the market as I see it. I do
not have to be bullish, I do not have to
be bearish. I don't have to be anything. I just
have to read the model, and eighteen months twenty months ago,
the model turned negative, and as a result, I started

(34:25):
to tell people to be cautious.

Speaker 2 (34:28):
I mean, I don't predict crashes or I don't trade.

Speaker 3 (34:32):
I just give an indication from thirty thousand feet about
whether the market is overvalued or undervalued. And it was
undervalued for thirty years or fifteen years, and now it's
a little bit overvalued. So that requires caution. So I'm
not a perma bull and I'm not a perma bear.
I just I take the data and tell people what

(34:54):
I see.

Speaker 1 (34:55):
Brian Westbury one of the great economists in the United States,
chief economist at First Trust ft portfolios dot com. You
can just look up his name and you'll find him Westbury.
We sbu r y. Brian.

Speaker 2 (35:08):
Always so great to talk to you.

Speaker 1 (35:10):
You're so good at bringing this into plain English that everybody,
even me can understand, and I really appreciate it.

Speaker 2 (35:16):
I'll see you soon, and my friend, all right, Ross,
great to be with you, all right, Great to you too. Bye.

Speaker 1 (35:21):
All right, folks, I hope you found that interesting and important.
I thought it was both. We'll be right back, big
thank you, and shout out both to Ryan for filling
in for me, and to the person who tweeted at
me yesterday saying, Ross, you finally had a good show
about yesterday's show when I wasn't here, So thank you
very much to both of you. One quick just mention

(35:43):
in passing I talked about this an hour ago on
the show. I'm not gonna do it again, but I
just want to refer you to my blog at Rosscominski
dot com if you want to take a look at
the very first plans for the very first part of
redeveloping the area around Ball. It's really interesting what Kronky
has submitted already for the first plans for just one

(36:06):
section basically on top of the current tundra parking lot
to the east of Ball Arena. But that's up on
my blog at Roskiminsky dot com if you want to
go check it out. Let's talk a little bit about
the Pope passing away. I imagine Ryan must have spent
some time on that yesterday, but it was a big story. Obviously,
you know I'm Jewish. The Pope is not a big

(36:28):
part of my life, but I do recognize him as
a very important global figure, and I do have some
thoughts there that I want to want to share with you.
Let me mention that the funeral is going to be
on Saturday at ten am Eastern not Eastern time, Italy time.
At ten am Italy time. I'm not sure what time

(36:50):
that is here in Denver. That's probably two am or
around somewhere around two am, I think, I think could
be wrong anyway, And that's going to be in Saint
Peter's Square.

Speaker 2 (37:01):
There's going to be public viewing of.

Speaker 1 (37:06):
The pope in the open casket starting tomorrow. And the
other thing that we're gonna get, of course, is this
whole conclave in the process for picking a new pope.

Speaker 2 (37:19):
Oh, by the way, Pope Francis.

Speaker 1 (37:23):
Was the first ever pope from the Western hemisphere and
probably the first ever pope from the Southern hemisphere. There's
some thinking that maybe like a long time ago, like
a thousand plus years ago, maybe there was a pope
who came from Africa but was living in Europe. Unclear,

(37:44):
but we'd think that he was. That Francis was the
first pope from the southern and western hemispheres, which is
which is pretty neat is pretty neat. Now the way
this all works, choosing the choosing the name pope is
that the cardinals get to vote, but only the and

(38:05):
there's one hundred there's a I don't know how many
total cardinals there are, but to be able to vote,
you have to be under the age of eighty, and
there's one hundred and thirty five of them. Okay, there's
one hundred and thirty five cardinals who are under the
age of eighty, so they will be allowed to vote.

Speaker 2 (38:23):
Now.

Speaker 1 (38:24):
One of the things that's kind of interesting about this,
and I'm going to talk about it as a political
story essentially, so Francis pope. Francis was the I don't know,
the Bernie Sanders of popes, like by far, the furthest
left pope that ever has been. And of the one

(38:46):
hundred and thirty five cardinals who are going to vote
on his successor, Francis appointed one hundred and eight of them.
Now that's kind of interesting. But where you might think that,
you know, in an American political situation, if you know,
let's say one very conservative group, one very conservative leader

(39:08):
picks a whole bunch of people to fill a particular group,
and then that group has to pick the successor, you
might say, well, they're going to pick another very conservative person, right,
you can't necessarily assume that here, because many of the
cardinals who were appointed by Pope Francis come from Asia

(39:29):
and Africa. Africa, by the way, is you know, probably
the single biggest growth area for the Catholic Church, and
those areas tend not to be liberals in this sense
of how someone like a pope.

Speaker 2 (39:45):
Could be a liberal.

Speaker 1 (39:46):
Uncertain issues, they tend to be quite conservative. They tend
to not be as open to let's seeglgbt Q, you know, outreach.

Speaker 2 (39:56):
As they call it.

Speaker 1 (39:57):
And it's quite possible that the cardinals, even though they
were appointed by Francis, will not necessarily look to someone
as liberal as Francis was. Now, my frustration with Pope
Francis was that he got very political in ways that

(40:18):
I thought are beyond what I would like to see
a pope get involved with. Although obviously a pope can
talk about anything he wants to talk about, by the way,
within Catholic dogma, a pope can never be wrong. A
pope is infallible, but only on matters of the church.

(40:41):
A pope can be wrong about other things that he
gets involved with, political things and science and whatever. Now
my take on this Pope I thought was well reflected
in an editorial by the Wall Street Journal that came
out yesterday. It's not very long, and I want to
just share some of this with you. When Jorge Mario

(41:03):
Bergoglio was elected as the two hundred and sixty six Pope,
oh my gosh, in twenty thirteen, that's Pope Francis, right,
that's his real name. It marked a series at first.
He was the first Jesuit pope, and as in Argentine,
the first in centuries from outside Europe. Yet his legacy
as Pope Francis, who died Easter Monday at age eighty eight,
was disappointing even on the priorities He's priorities he set.

(41:26):
He was best known for urgent concern for the poor
in the best Christian tradition. He called for a clergy
of quote shepherds who have the smell of their sheep,
that his priests and nuns who shared the suffering of
their neighbors. He made support for the weakest among us
the rhetorical centerpiece of his papacy. He brought a public
informality and openness to the Vatican Alas Pope Francis believed

(41:49):
ideologies that keep the poor in poverty. One of those
earthly dogmas is radical environmentalism, which isn't about keeping the
earth clean for human beings, but keeping the earth for itself,
entreating man as the enemy. I'm gonna skip ahead. His
papacy was marked by anti Americanism, not just against Donald Trump.

(42:09):
He seemed to believe that Latin America is poor because
the US is rich. But that's a recipe for stagnation
and despair, because the real reasons so many in Latin
America languish and poverty are at home lack of rule
of law, business government, collusion, protectionism, and other barriers to
human flourishing. They go through and talk about a little
of his history and how he lived under a conservative

(42:31):
time and then left wing paronism in Argentina and what
that might have.

Speaker 2 (42:36):
Made for him, and then it concludes with this.

Speaker 1 (42:39):
Unlike his two immediate predecessors, John Paul the Second and
Benedict Pope, Francis was from the progressive wing of his church.
He punished traditionalist bishops who disagreed with his direction, and
has populated the cardinal ranks with fellow progressives. The irony
is that this progressivism is most popular in places like Europe,
where the Sunday pews are empt The church is thriving

(43:02):
in Africa and among younger Orthodox Catholics in the West
looking for meaning in life beyond material consumption. The cardinals
who will choose the choose the pope's success will help
determine which future they want for the church and the
world's one point three billion Catholics. So that's kind of
where I am as on Pope Francis as well. To me,

(43:23):
his dabbling in issues outside of the church, in particular
with climate stuff, radical environmentalism and economics, to me represented
one unnecessary failure after another. I'll be very interested to
see whose name we hear after we see the white smoke.
Just two quick favors to ask of you. First, I

(43:47):
would be very grateful if you would subscribe to my substack.

Speaker 2 (43:50):
There's a link on my blog.

Speaker 1 (43:52):
If you go to Rosscominsky dot com and you going
today's blog, there's a link, or just go to Rosskominski
dot substack dot com and subscribe. It's absolutely free, uh,
and it probably always will be uh. And I I
just you know, I scribble there and I write thoughts
about what's going on in the world, and then I

(44:12):
just schedule them to show up in your inbox. Normally,
I schedule them just as I do for my blog
notes at seven oh nine in the morning, because that's
a prime number. But I would sure be grateful and
you can, you know, get some of my thoughts about
things that are going on in the world a little
bit longer than the versions that might normally be on
the blog, sometimes the length of an article, right, but

(44:33):
hopefully you'll enjoy it. And it's you know what the heck,
it's free, so Rosskominsky dot substack dot com.

Speaker 2 (44:39):
But it's free. It's free free.

Speaker 1 (44:41):
Yeah, that means no cost reach you all.

Speaker 2 (44:43):
It's actually it's actually worth more than that.

Speaker 1 (44:46):
You know. They say you get what you pay for
in this. You're getting just slightly, just slightly more your
fingers that you pay for it, not quite touching their
Bai's right right about there, right right about there. So
the other thing that I wanted to mention, if you're
interested in learning, we're not we're not officially you know,

(45:07):
like marketing this yet on the radio, but it is
available if you go to Ross. I'm sorry if you
go to Ross Trip r O S S t r
i p dot com. You can check out what my
listener trip is going to be next year. R O
S S t r i P dot com. I don't
even know if I if they want me mentioning it yet,
but it's they They put up a web page. So

(45:28):
if you want to sign up for my trip next year,
which by the way, is stupidly cheap for what this
trip is, you can you can get a head start
before it sells out, before we really start marketing it
on the air.

Speaker 2 (45:39):
R O S S t r i p dot com.

Speaker 1 (45:41):
Are you gonna tell me where we're going or are
you just gonna I'm gonna have to go to Ross Trip. Yeah,
I'm not gonna tell you, Okay, Ross trip dot com.

Speaker 2 (45:50):
Trip.

Speaker 1 (45:50):
I'm very excited we're going.

Speaker 2 (45:51):
I will tell you.

Speaker 1 (45:52):
We're going to buy the We're going to three big
cities and some smaller cities in between. And I've only
been to one of the big city and I'm very
excited for the other two. This is very much of
a city culture kind of trip, and I'm super excited
about it. Like I said I was, I'm not just
saying this like as some kind of marketing point. I
was really surprised how when expensive this trip is when

(46:14):
they priced it rosstrip dot ross dot com. Okay, so cheeze.
So let's there's a cool piece of axios. Meet Colorado's
fourteen billionaires on the Forbes List. So I like to
know what's going on in my state and my city
and so on. This is a state story, and.

Speaker 2 (46:31):
I think most of you.

Speaker 1 (46:33):
If I were to ask you, off the top of
your head, who do you think the richest guy in
Colorado is? I would have answered that question correctly if
you had asked me. And if you would ask me
who's the second richest guy in Colorado, I would have
answered that question correctly too. If you asked me who's
the third richest person in Colorado? I actually never heard
of them. I actually never heard of them. Anyway, let

(46:55):
me go through just some of this with you, because
there's a reason that Dragon played that bumper music coming in.
The richest guy in Colorado is Phil Anschutz, all right.
So Phil Anshuts made a lot of money in energy,
but he did a lot of other things as well.
He does a lot of other things as well. He's
got Walden studios for movies, and he did you know,
he's involved with sports and all this stuff.

Speaker 2 (47:14):
And he's you know, worth somewhere.

Speaker 1 (47:16):
Between sixteen and seventeen billion dollars, somewhere in that range.
And he's the richest guy in Colorado, richest person in
Colorado by a long way. Okay. Then the next richest
is John Malone, who made his money in cable TV.
He's got a reputation as being a libertarian. I hope
it's true. I've never met him. I would love to

(47:38):
talk with him, but he's probably not a guy who
I'll ever be able to reach and talk to. But
if anybody knows John Malone can introduce me, I would
really appreciate it. The next is a name I don't know,
Mark Stevens. Apparently a venture capitalist, and I guess I
should use some some numbers here.

Speaker 2 (47:57):
Let's see Mark Stevens capitalist.

Speaker 1 (48:01):
He joined Intel, So he joined Intel in the early eighties.

Speaker 2 (48:08):
And then what else?

Speaker 1 (48:09):
Oh, he's Sequoia Capital, all right. So Sequoia Capital is
a massive inture capital company that did a lot of
tech semiconductors and software and stuff like that. So okay,
so that's who.

Speaker 2 (48:21):
That's who.

Speaker 1 (48:22):
That guy is again these are Colorado billionaires. So and
shoot's almost seventeen billion, Malone almost eleven this guy eight billion.
Next is Pat Striker, famous funder of left wing things.
That's medical equipment. And I think Pat Striker, I think
Pat Striker inherited that money. I don't think she earned
that money. Charlie Ergan from satellite TV. And then this

(48:47):
name really jumped out at me, and that song really
jumped out at me. James Loprino. So I am the
Mike A. Loprino free market Fellow for the Common Sense Institute.

Speaker 2 (48:58):
And James Preno is on this list as the one,
two three.

Speaker 1 (49:03):
The sixth richest person in Colorado with just over two
billion dollars and in the category right all these other people.
You know, where'd you make your money? Energy, cable TV,
venture capital? James Loprino, It's cheese, cheese. How about that?
Being so much better at making cheese than everybody else?

Speaker 2 (49:26):
Is that you become a billionaire?

Speaker 3 (49:30):
Right?

Speaker 2 (49:31):
That you become a billionaire. It's pretty fantastic, right.

Speaker 1 (49:34):
So he's chairman of Loaprino Foods, which is the world's
largest manufacturer of mozzarella cheese, I think that's a fabulous,
fabulous story. So anyway, there you go. That's some of
the Colorado billionaires. If you go to my website at
Roskiminski dot.

Speaker 2 (49:54):
Com you can see the rest. We'll be right back now.

Speaker 1 (49:58):
It is Earthday, and as I told you earlier in
the show, I used to enjoy celebrating Earth Day by
going around the house and turning all my lights on,
you know, because it used to be that people did
the opposite. Now with led bulbs, it doesn't really do
them much good to go turn all the lights off,

(50:18):
and it's not nearly as much fun for me to
turn all the lights on. And I didn't just do
it to be contrarian. I did it to try to
make a point that nobody noticed, but I felt good
about it myself in my own form of virtue signaling.
That isn't it amazing that I can go hit a
little piece of plastic on my wall and the lights
come on? In that incredible that's what we should be celebrating. Anyway.

(50:39):
There's a lot of nonsense out there, not just on
Earth Day but every other day about environmental stuff, and
there are large organizations that make a lot of money
by telling us that the world is going to hell
in a handbasket, whether it's climate change or pollution or whatever.
And one of the sub segments that they really like

(51:02):
to bash is plastics. And my friend Christy Armitt from
Phantom Plastics has been on the show many times, but
I want to have him in particular today because he's
got a new book out today called Shattering the Plastics Illusion,
exposing environmental miss So Christie Armitt his website phantomplastics dot com.

(51:27):
It's great to see you again. It's great to have
you back on the show. Thanks for being here, Thanks Ross,
thanks for covering.

Speaker 5 (51:34):
I really appreciate the opportunity to talk to your listeners.

Speaker 1 (51:37):
Yeah, very glad to do it now. By the way,
your your last book, which is also a great book,
was you you made available for free? Now? What are
you doing with this book as far as like how
can people get it? And how much does it cost?
It's free too, this is free?

Speaker 2 (51:51):
How do you do that?

Speaker 1 (51:52):
Are you a billionaire? Are you a secret billionaire?

Speaker 2 (51:55):
Yeah?

Speaker 5 (51:55):
I really wish I was.

Speaker 4 (51:56):
That'd be tremendous. If anybody wants to make me a
huge donation and go right ahead. My pets are empty.

Speaker 2 (52:02):
Yeah.

Speaker 4 (52:03):
The point is, I mean, the truth should be free,
and you should be suspicious of anyone telling you something
and then saying donate now. They tell you some giant
whopper and then say donate now. So what I rather
do is say the science should be for free. Here
it is, it's peer reviewed, and I'm not trying to
get any money out of you. So it's a lot
more genuine message when scientists are telling you something for
free compared to us you said, and Geo's telling you

(52:23):
whoppers for money.

Speaker 5 (52:24):
So that's the point of it.

Speaker 1 (52:26):
Okay, just one last question along these lines, just for
kind of establishing credibility. Some people might be wondering, well,
you know, Chris is going to write this book that
you know says nice things about plastic is he just
funded by the plastics industry? So what do you want
to tell us about that. I'm glad you asked that.

Speaker 5 (52:44):
Ross.

Speaker 4 (52:45):
Yeah, I get that question all the time, and mainly
it comes from people who'd rather not put in the
work of actually looking at the evidence, so they would
like to look for an excuse not to even look.
And the answer is no, I'm not funded by the
plastics industry. I haven't received a single penny for this.
I did this because my daughters were lied to at
school and that made me angry, and I started checking in,
what are the teachers, you know, teaching my kids? What

(53:05):
are the facts behind this? And so I read five
thousand studies completely unfunded, and I disclose all of my
income sources on the website. And not only that, everything
I say is like literally verbatim from the studies and
peer reviewed, so none of these studies are mine, right,
This is all thousands and thousands of studies from other scientists,
independent ones all around the world. And not only that,
then I have a team of professors check it and

(53:25):
endorse it, which is on the website too, so you
can see that it's been checked by professors all around
the world.

Speaker 5 (53:30):
So this is totally independent, all right.

Speaker 1 (53:32):
And just one last thing again, just sort of establishing
you for listeners who who don't know you. Every once
in a while, I will see someone write a piece
about some scientific issue, and then when I go read
about them, it turns out that they are like comparative
literature majors who decided to become activists. Tell us just
briefly about your academic background, that qualifies you to write

(53:52):
about plastics.

Speaker 5 (53:54):
Yeah, that's a great point.

Speaker 4 (53:55):
So I have a PhD in plastics, in chemistry and
polymer science as we call it, and I spent my
whole career in the area. And I don't sell or
make or market plastics. I'm just a pure scientist who
really understands materials. I'm a Fellow of the Royal Society
of Chemistry, which is not easy to get, and a
fellow of the Institute for.

Speaker 5 (54:11):
Materials Mining and what's the other one? Mining materials mining.

Speaker 2 (54:16):
And that's enough we get the idea.

Speaker 5 (54:18):
So yeah, so a well respected scientist.

Speaker 4 (54:21):
And that's a good point, ross, because imagine I wrote
a book and it was full of nonsense. Why would
I send it to leading professors all around the world.
I'd be ashamed, I'd be humiliated, and they would call
me out right. And so you have to be confident
in your work that it's accurate before you share it
with people and make sure it's peer reviewed.

Speaker 2 (54:35):
Well that's so, you know.

Speaker 1 (54:37):
That's easy for you to say, and I'm glad you
said it, But there are lots of people who feel
no shame and do right. Big books that claim to
show some expertise and NGOs do this all the time.
All right, So let's let's get into the book a
little bit, and again we're talking with Chris d Armitt.
Checkout phantomplastics dot com. And if you've got a question
about plastics. I know this is super nerdy, right, but

(54:59):
I'm a nerd. So if you've got a question for
Chris about plastics, text it to us at five six
six nine zero. As always, I do not promise to
ask every question that gets sent in, but I will
ask the good ones. I'm going to do this in
no particular order. I'm going to have a guest on
the show sometime soon. We're actually gonna be talking about
fluoride and water. But in one of his talks I

(55:19):
saw him claim. Then this actually makes me wonder whether
I should have him. But I saw him claim something
that you then bring up in your book, the claim
that there is or soon will be more plastics in
the ocean than fish.

Speaker 4 (55:33):
Yeah, that's a great one that really captured people's imaginations.

Speaker 5 (55:36):
It went all around the world.

Speaker 4 (55:38):
And funnily enough, the people who first made that claim,
the scientists that they quoted. He cited some studies. Those
scientists said no, you can't make that claim from our work.
It's completely bogus. And so the people who originally made
that claim have stopped claiming it. They never retracted it,
but they don't have it up anymore in their annual report,
for example. So even the people who made that claim
realize that it's not true. And I call that out

(55:58):
in the book. That more plastic than fi is just
complete fiction.

Speaker 5 (56:02):
That's the kind of thing.

Speaker 4 (56:03):
My kids were taught that very thing last week ross
at school. They came home and said, Dad, you'll never
believe it. Our teachers told us there'll be more plastic
than fish, and that is just outright fiction.

Speaker 1 (56:11):
So do what are you doing about that about your
kids being told that at school? Did you contact the teacher?

Speaker 4 (56:18):
Yeah, that's why I wrote the first book, and then
I went and gave a presentation at the school. I've
given presentations all around the world at University of Cincinnati
and so forth, making sure people have a chance to
see the science. If you look at ocean plastic, it's
thousands of times less than originally claimed. That's a number
of the ocean's choking and plastic that was made up
by somebody called Jenna Jambeck, and she literally just took
a guess based on no data. She just literally made

(56:41):
up a number and said ten million tons of going
into the ocean. And then other scientists spent ten years
looking for this alleged plastic and they couldn't find it.
They went up and down, they sailed millions of miles
around the world with nets looking for this plastic and
it's not there because it was a guest and it
never was there.

Speaker 2 (56:55):
Okay, So two things I want to follow up there.

Speaker 1 (56:58):
First, I want you to just very specifically, what are
you going to do about the fact that your kids
were lied to again at school just a week ago?

Speaker 2 (57:08):
What are you doing about it?

Speaker 5 (57:10):
The last thing I did was I offered to talk.
So I talked to the principle.

Speaker 4 (57:13):
I cornered him at one of the like school events
and said, hey, I want to present this to the class.
And he wasn't interested, he didn't really get it, maybe
had his mind on other things. But I'm going to
keep going because they're at a new school now, because
they're a bit older, and so I'm going to approach
the teachers and the principal at that school and say, hey,
give me a chance to get in front of the
kids and show them the science and to de brainwash them.

Speaker 2 (57:34):
Unbelievable.

Speaker 1 (57:34):
Okay, So you know, with the more plastic than fish,
you said, it's nonsense, that was just made up. I
have a feeling this next thing falls into that exact
same category. But many of us have heard about the
giant Texas sized island of trash in the ocean, right,
So what about that?

Speaker 5 (57:52):
Yeah, that's a myth.

Speaker 4 (57:53):
That's actually a whole PhD thesis by Kim de Wolf
about how that myth came to be. So originally a
German article said that was the carpet of material on
the ocean, and that was translated into Russian by Pravda,
the Russian magazine, and they translated carpet into mountain, and
they put a cartoon of a mountain of plastic in
the ocean. And everyone else picked up on that, you know,
the New York Times and the Washington Post and everyone

(58:14):
spread this complete mistranslation around the world. And the funny
thing is, you can see a cigarette package from a
satellite image, right, that's the resolution of a satellite image,
and there's not a single image of this floating island
the size of Texas because it isn't there, it doesn't exist.
And for even more funny, ross journalists go to that guy,
Captain Moore I think is his name, who discovered the
gyre the areas with a little bit more material in

(58:36):
it because of the way the water swirls, And they say,
take me in your ship, take me out there. I
want to take my photographer and take pictures of this thing.
There's never been a picture of this gyre in the
whole history of the world because all you see is ocean.

Speaker 5 (58:47):
There's nothing to see there.

Speaker 4 (58:48):
You can even swim through it and not know that
you're in it because there's so little material there.

Speaker 2 (58:53):
Wow.

Speaker 1 (58:53):
All right, So I will say, and the plural of
anecdote is not data. And I do not think the
world is coming to an end. But I will say
as a guy, I've been to India three times, I've
been to I've been to I've been to sixty something countries,
a lot of them in Asia, only a little bit
in Africa, but especially in Asia. The amount of plastic

(59:18):
trash that you see there is really shocking. And this
is not a complaint about plastics, right, but these folks
in these poor countries, I mean, and I actually think
you talk about this in the book. Maybe they just
don't have very many trash cans and that's not like sarcasm,
but also maybe poor people just don't care. They don't
own anything, they have no real sense of private property

(59:39):
and all this. But dude, when you get near you know,
I was by the mouth of the Ganges in Bangladesh
and you see the plastic trash around. Again, I don't
think it's an existential planetary threat, but it does make
me sad, Yes, it does.

Speaker 4 (59:56):
Yeah, those images are really visceral an when you see
those things and you see the pollution, and scientists have
studied that. So trashy is dropped by people intentionally, and
people are like, oh, how can you blame the people?
It's like, well, because science and the legal system both
agree that it's you know, litter is is dropped by people,
caused by people, And the solutions to that once you
realize that it's human behavior are education, deposits and fines.

Speaker 5 (01:00:17):
And we know that that works because there are places
in the world with no litter.

Speaker 4 (01:00:20):
There's like Japan is incredibly clean, Singapore is incredibly clean.

Speaker 5 (01:00:24):
The developed nations are pretty good.

Speaker 2 (01:00:25):
But You're right.

Speaker 5 (01:00:26):
Some countries haven't caught up yet.

Speaker 4 (01:00:27):
And it's not that they're bad people, they just haven't
got their waste management under control yet. And we can
kind of show them how we did it and help
them catch up. So the litter is a real thing.
Plastic is a part of it, but it's not due
to materials. And sometimes I ask people to do this.
Go to your garden, take a chip package or something
or candy wrapper and drop it on the floor in
your garden, and then blame that candy rapper for what

(01:00:48):
you just did, and see what a.

Speaker 5 (01:00:49):
Fool you feel.

Speaker 4 (01:00:50):
And that will hit home to you how ridiculous it
is to drop litter and then blame the litter for
what you just did. So people need to take responsibility
for their actions, and some people are further behind.

Speaker 1 (01:01:00):
We're talking with Christy Armott. He's a PhD. Polymer scientists
read plastic and his new book is called Shattering the
Plastics Illusion, Exposing Environmental Myths, and you can get it
for free at phantomplastics dot com. Now I have a
lot of other questions for you, but I'm actually getting

(01:01:24):
because I have a smart and nerdy audience, a lot
of listener questions, So I'm gonna and some of them,
I'm sure will overlap with my questions. So I'm going
to just switch for a few minutes here to some
listener questions, and a whole bunch of people are asking
the same thing. And this is something that I wanted
to ask. We hear all this talk these days about

(01:01:45):
so called microplastics. I saw a story in the Denver Post.
We found microplastics in the snow in the Rocky Mountains.
So what are microplastics? Where do they come from? And
how do they get wherever they go? And should we
be concerned about it?

Speaker 5 (01:02:03):
Yeah, I'm glad you asked that.

Speaker 4 (01:02:04):
So so far, I've read more than five hundred peer
reviewed studies on microplastics, and that's probably the biggest review ever.
And I've never seen a single credible study showing any
evidence of harm. And there's a couple things to think about.
One is perspective. Right, have you heard about micro wood
or microglass or micrometal. No, it's just called dust, right,

(01:02:25):
all of these other particles. We just call it dust,
and we're used to it and we don't give it
a second thought. Even though some of that dust is
actually toxic. Some of it even causes cancer, but we're
not interested in it because we just call it dust.
As soon as it comes to plastics, the environmental people
did a very clever thing. They took plastic dust. It's
just a very very small part of dust, and they
gave it a special name to make it sound unknown
and scary. So we have to realize plastic is about

(01:02:48):
one hundred thousandth of the toxic of the well, sorry,
one hundred thousandth of the particles we ingest, and it's
non toxic. And that's according to and this is the
public thing. This is some kind of new, like unstudied area.
We have fifty years of studies, hundreds and hundreds of
studies showing no toxicity. They even fed plastic microparticles to rats.

(01:03:09):
They've fed them five percent plastic microparticles for three months
and nothing happened. That's how non toxic it is. It
says non toxic as cellulose, which is what plants are
made of. So yeah, they've made a big fuss, and
they've made hundreds of millions of dollars by telling us
lies and scaring us. About one hundred thousandth of the
safe part of dust. And meanwhile, what else is in dust?
It includes quartz, which causes cancer. It includes wood dust,

(01:03:31):
which amazingly causes cancer too. So we're totally ignoring the
actual toxic stuff that's there in large amounts and focusing
on a tiny fraction of the non toxic part. And
that's just stupid because it doesn't help anybody. It just
makes people scared for no reason.

Speaker 1 (01:03:45):
See, I'm just kind of you know, scrolling through the
listener questions, eighty percent of them were microplastics, is very interesting.
Let's just do one or two more questions. Is there
any way to truly recycle plastic? I'm guessing the answer
has I'm guessing the answer can differ depending on the
kind of plastic, because there are many kinds.

Speaker 4 (01:04:06):
Yeah, so about ninety percent of plastics, you can just
put it in a coffee grinder.

Speaker 5 (01:04:10):
I'm simplifying here.

Speaker 4 (01:04:11):
You wash it, put it in through something a lot
like a coffee grinder, and then you just melt it
and make a new part. That's called mechanical recycling. That
works for most plastic. It works just fine. It's cheap,
it's safe, and it uses equipment we already have. So
the investment costs are really, really low, and that's the
thing that is mostly done and makes most sense, and
I cover that in the book. The thing to know
about recycling is the way that it's presented to the

(01:04:33):
public is that we need recycling to make plastic green.
If you look at the life cycle study, plastic has
the least impact of all the alternatives nine times out
of ten. So nine times out of ten, if you
replace plastic, you're increasing greenhouse gas, you're increasing waste, increasing
with litter, and that's not a good idea.

Speaker 5 (01:04:51):
And that's even with zero recycling.

Speaker 4 (01:04:53):
It's the lowest impact solution, even without recycling, and when
you recycle it, you make it seventy or eighty percent
greener than it already was because you're not having to
make the material this time, you're just grinding up material
you already had.

Speaker 5 (01:05:05):
So Yeah, recycling works, and it's done on large scale.
It's not that easy to make money doing it, though,
because plastics so cheap, So that's part of the problem.
That it does work. Technically you can make money doing it,
but it's not that easy to do.

Speaker 1 (01:05:17):
Okay, last thing for you, and I've only got about
a minute here, and this isn't the most important story
just in terms of earthshakingness, but I love it as
an example of the kind of nonsense that gets out
there in the world that so many people come to believe.
We talked earlier about more plastics than than fish in

(01:05:38):
the ocean, but I just I want to leave on
this story as a cautionary tale for listeners to be very,
very careful what you believe. Chris tell us the story
about benzene in water after forest fires.

Speaker 5 (01:05:54):
Yeah, that's the most amazing thing.

Speaker 4 (01:05:56):
So there are some groups who are literally paid to
criticize place, even if the stuff is nonsense. They keep
coming up and they have huge budgets and professional marketing people.
And one of the things that they like to say
is that after a forest fire that benzine's going to
come out of these plastic pipes and poison you.

Speaker 5 (01:06:11):
And it's complete nonsense. Right, scientists have studied this.

Speaker 4 (01:06:14):
First of all, if my house had just burned down
in a forest fire, I'm not going to run to
my house, grab a smoldering pipe and start sucking water
out of it.

Speaker 1 (01:06:20):
Right.

Speaker 5 (01:06:20):
The whole idea of it is preposterous.

Speaker 4 (01:06:23):
And then they say they have no evidence that this
benzine came from the pipes, right, they just make it up,
just completely out of fiction. And then this is the
funny thing. What do you get when you burn trees
in a forest fire? And the answer is benzine. So
it never occurred apparently to these genius scientists, that you've
got one hundred thousand trees burning around you generating benzine endure,
that may be where the benzine's coming from. You get

(01:06:44):
a gigantic amount of benzine when you burn the trees,
and that's where it's coming from.

Speaker 5 (01:06:48):
That's what the real scientists showed.

Speaker 4 (01:06:50):
And these charlatans are trying to blame it on plastic
pipes because they're funded by the metals industry. It's really
shocking to see how low some people will stoop to
get funding.

Speaker 2 (01:06:59):
Okay, just a few seconds.

Speaker 1 (01:07:03):
I hadn't heard you say that before, and I was
wondering who funds these people who hate plastics so much,
because I know there are just radical environmentalist groups who
hate everything. They hate energy, they hate absolutely everything that
makes life easy and good. So you're saying that at
least some of the anti plastic rhetoric comes from metals
companies that want to people that have to use metal.

Speaker 2 (01:07:25):
Instead of plastic.

Speaker 4 (01:07:27):
I've been told the metal, paper, and glass industries are
all attacking plastics because they're much bigger than plastics are,
and they've got the funds to do it.

Speaker 5 (01:07:33):
The plastics the new kid on the block.

Speaker 4 (01:07:35):
And so of course they all get together and try
and grab their market share back again.

Speaker 5 (01:07:39):
And there are other people.

Speaker 4 (01:07:40):
There are billionaires like Michael Boomberg has said that he's
funding the anti plastics campaign.

Speaker 5 (01:07:44):
And this is the funny thing.

Speaker 4 (01:07:45):
He sees plastic as part of the oil industry, and
actually plastic reduces oil consumption. So this billionaire is spending
millions of dollars to campaign against his own wishes. And
that's so ironic. And that's in the book too.

Speaker 2 (01:07:56):
Oh my gosh.

Speaker 1 (01:07:57):
Christy Armott's fabulous new book, which you can get for
free at Phantom plastics dot com, is called Shattering the
Plastics Illusion. Chris, fabulous book, fabulous conversation. As always, I'm grateful.
I think I'm your first interview since the book's officially
released today, so that's really cool for me. Thanks for
being here.

Speaker 5 (01:08:16):
That's right, I lost to here with you, Ross and
thanks for being curious.

Speaker 4 (01:08:20):
You do, your your your readers and your listeners are
a real service to not just go with a regular
narrative but dig a bit deeper and look and see
what the facts are.

Speaker 5 (01:08:28):
So I really respect that.

Speaker 1 (01:08:30):
Thanks, Chris, appreciated very much. Talk to you.

Speaker 3 (01:08:32):
Thank you.

Speaker 2 (01:08:32):
All right.

Speaker 1 (01:08:33):
That's Chris ded Armitt Phantom Plastics dot com. I wasn't
planning on talking with him.

Speaker 2 (01:08:38):
For that long, but that just got more and more
and more interesting.

Speaker 1 (01:08:42):
And I got to say, I got so many listener
texts like, I really appreciate your your playing along and
I and I appreciate your interest in these technical and
even somewhat nerdy subjects. And uh, well it's part of
why I love my job so much as you guys,
Because we talked in the previous segment about Colorado's billionaires,
and they were all like categories you'd expect, energy, venture capital,

(01:09:06):
cable TV, and then James Loprino two point one billion
dollars mozzarella, best mozzarella makers apparently in the country, maybe
the world. Imagine, now, this.

Speaker 2 (01:09:18):
Is not sarcasm, is not sarcasm. As a capitalist, I.

Speaker 1 (01:09:26):
Am always so amazed by people who find a way
to do something, especially something. I mean, there's two different categories. Really,
Somebody comes up with something entirely new that's awesome, right,
Think about Steve Jobs and the iPod, the iPhone, all

(01:09:46):
that stuff, right, I mean no, Steve Jobs not only
created the iPhone, but he created the demand for the iPhone.
People didn't think they wanted that or needed that until
he said you need this here, come try it, right.
And then the other the other category, I guess I'm
way off on a tangent already, is people who find

(01:10:07):
a better way to do something that has been done
already for a long time. Now. I assume I have
not gone to research the history of mozzarella cheese, but
I suspect mozzarella cheese has been around a while, and
these guys, the Loprino family, became so good at making

(01:10:27):
mozzarella cheese with the right combination. And this is what
it's always about, the right combination of quality and value,
that they became the biggest and the best.

Speaker 2 (01:10:39):
Is that not amazing and it's cheese.

Speaker 1 (01:10:42):
It's not you know, Intel Corporation inventing a new semiconductor,
which is also fabulous, but it's a it's a just
a imagine how much better you have to be in
order to be that dominant. I just think I just
think that's so I just think that's so cool.

Speaker 2 (01:10:59):
I really do.

Speaker 1 (01:11:00):
And so anyway, but as far as blue cheese billionaires,
let's hope not nobody should ever make you a dollar
making blue che I mean, well, I guess, I guess
people make money selling rat poison, So why shouldn't people
be able to make money selling blue cheese? Right? I mean,
obviously I'd rather eat the rat poison than the blue cheese.

(01:11:22):
But still still, listener text, Ross, I don't always agree
with you, but one of the things I appreciate about
your appreciate about your show is that not only do
you bring interesting guests on, but you give listeners a
chance to access the guests with questions. Lots of other
radio hosts don't do this, so thank you. Having access
to these guests and experts is important to me. And

(01:11:43):
congratulations on finally having a good show yesterday, although I
think today's is pretty great too, very good.

Speaker 2 (01:11:49):
Thank you for that.

Speaker 1 (01:11:51):
You know what, I'm going to take a moment to
respond to another listener text on a whole different thing.
You probably saw the story over the last couple of
days about out the Secretary of Defense Pete hagg Seth,
and this question came out. I think it was NPR
that had it originally, and then the New York Times
picked it up.

Speaker 2 (01:12:08):
So you remember the.

Speaker 1 (01:12:10):
Uproar about his or actually Mike Waltz created this signal chat,
and then Pete hegg Sath disclosed a whole bunch of
classified information that the administration laughingly claimed wasn't classified information,
but obviously attack plans before an attack is classified, so
they lied to us about that, and heg Seth, you know,

(01:12:33):
set all this stuff in this in this classified environment.
So then the new story is that heg Seth set
up another signal chat. It wasn't heg Seth. It set
up the first one, but he he set all that
stuff in the chat. Apparently he set up another one,
and in this chat he disclosed some of that same
information about attack plans before the attack, attack plans against

(01:12:55):
the Houthis and Yemen, what airplane, what type of airplane
when they were launching all that, and shared the information with,
among other people, his brother, who does, by the way,
work at the Department of Defense and probably has a
security clearance. But just because you have a security clearance
doesn't mean you get to know everything, right, It's about
need to know. Even if you have clearance, you don't

(01:13:16):
just get to know. I don't think there's any legit
reason for his brother to need to know. But he
also included his wife. Now interestingly, and I'm not going
to play the audio for you, but heg Seth was
asked about this yesterday at the White House Easter party,
the Easter egg role for the little kids and all that,
and heg Seth, who is obviously very media savvy, right,

(01:13:37):
he's been on Fox News for a long time, actually
looked right into the camera. He looks at the reporters,
He looks at the camera, he looks the reporters, he
looks around, he.

Speaker 2 (01:13:43):
Looks at the camera.

Speaker 1 (01:13:44):
And it's very dramatic, it's very it's it's it's effective,
it's effective. And he's talking about, well, you know, this
story is, you know, anonymous sources for people who were
recently fired and have access to grind And you know what,
that's probably true, right. The newspaper doesn't name the source.

(01:14:06):
The source could well be somebody who was recently fired.
They fired a bunch of people, including very top people
around hegseth. A couple of them they fired for apparently
leaking information. They say they didn't. I don't know, and
I'm sure they're mad and that that could well be

(01:14:27):
the source. But here's the thing. Hegseeth never said the
story wasn't true. He just said, oh, it's people with
an axe to grind. Who are the you know, sources
for the story. He never said it's true. So he
almost certainly, in my opinion, he almost certainly did what
the article claimed. He shared attack declassified attack details with

(01:14:52):
his wife and I don't know who else. Now, I
believe he did this right around the same top time.
It would have to be right around the same day,
maybe even probably plus or minus a day of that
first quote unquote signal Gate thing. And it was before
it blew up in the media, so it wasn't as

(01:15:13):
if there was that whole blow up about doing this
on signal and then he did it, and then he
did it again after he made the same mistake twice
in a very short period of time. Now, I think
that this is mostly a Washington story. I don't think
most of America cares about it. For me and people
who pay close attention to this stuff. I think it

(01:15:36):
just represents the latest bit of evidence that he was
a bad choice, that he has bad judgment, that he
doesn't have the skill set for the job. I actually,
as I've said before, I share many of Pete Hegseth's
goals for the Department of Defense. I just don't think
he should be running it. Maybe he should have been
Deputy Secretary of Defense for I don't know what exactly

(01:15:57):
the next word would would be, but the portfolio could
be something like getting DEI out of the military, something
like that, something like that. So then the next part
that I think is more interesting than Signalgate two point zero,
which is just really not the biggest deal, right, It's

(01:16:18):
not good, but it's not that big a deal. But
now you get these little rumors that.

Speaker 2 (01:16:26):
They're looking for a replacement for hag said.

Speaker 1 (01:16:29):
When Trump is asked about this stuff, he's like, wait,
you're mentioning signal again, what are you talking about? And
the reporters say to him, well, there's another story. He
did it, you know with his these did another thing
on signal with his wife. And Trump said, can't you
guys go find something new? So Trump doesn't seem to care.
Trump doesn't seem to care at all. And so here's

(01:16:50):
my take on the situation. Trump will stand behind his
people until he won't. I know that's sounds like sarcasm,
but what I mean by it is I don't think
you will see Trump slowly wear down if there's more
bad stuff about heg Sath and like start getting a

(01:17:11):
little critical in public or whatever. He's going to be
fully behind him, full throated, defensive heg Seth every day
in every way until he fires him, and that'll be it.
Now Again, I'm not saying that I think there's a
high probability even that he fires him. What I am
saying is, if he fires him, you're not gonna have

(01:17:33):
any indication from Trump about that until the moment that
it happens. That's the way I think it will play out.
If it does. I have no idea if it will.
And sometimes when you see these stories like oh, there's
already talk about about replacing heg Seth, what that can
be is some backstabbing internal politics in DC where they

(01:17:57):
throw that story out there even if it's not really true,
to try to kick started and make it true politics.

Speaker 2 (01:18:04):
My friends is a dirty game.

Speaker 1 (01:18:06):
There's a national story that affects us locally, and I
want to share a little bit of that with you,
the local version of this big national story. The big
national story being the efforts by the Trump administration to
deport people who they think need to be deported for
one reason or another. And in recent weeks, some of

(01:18:27):
that focus has seemed to be on international college students.
Of course, there's that famous case up there at Columbia University.
There's a couple other slightly less famous cases as well.
But this is from Denver seven dot com or ABC
affiliate here in Denver headline. More than thirty international students

(01:18:47):
in Colorado are now reportedly losing their visas. Actually so
if this is posted it at Denver seven dot com,
but it's an associated press story. I like to just
be real clear about all that. Twenty two of the
at least thirty, you know, thirty plus international students across

(01:19:07):
the state of Colorado, you know, in colleges and universities,
have now lost their visas. The University of Colorado has
confirmed that twenty two of them come from the CU system. Now,
the CU system is not just CU Boulder. I think
there's four campuses in the CU system, but twenty two

(01:19:29):
at least so far of the somewhere just over thirty
so far have been within the CU system. Let's see
what else. Colorado State says ten. So there's thirty two
just within the CU system in Colorado State.

Speaker 2 (01:19:45):
What else?

Speaker 1 (01:19:45):
These numbers are up from the beginning of the month,
when nine students across three campuses were impacted by visa revocations.
In total, more than one thousand international students have now
had their visas or legal status revoked the Trump administration,
according to the AP, is affecting one hundred and sixty
schools across forty states. Higher education leaders worry that the

(01:20:08):
revocations and subsequent arrests could discourage students overseas from pursuing
higher education than the United States. Now, I don't so.
I think it's an absolutely legitimate fear. I don't think
the Trump administration cares. I do think we as Americans
should care, but it has to be in coordination with

(01:20:30):
something else.

Speaker 2 (01:20:30):
So let me just elaborate. We should encourage foreign students
to come here and learn.

Speaker 1 (01:20:38):
I do think there is a legit question about Chinese
students because so many of them are likely to go
back to China and compete against the United States, not
just economically, but perhaps militarily and in other ways. I
do think we should perhaps be careful with Chinese students.

(01:20:59):
I feel somewhat hesitant to say that, but there's just
so much Chinese spying, and I mean, the Chinese buy
our professors too, so it's it's it's that's a scary thing.
But in general, again, China is a special case in
a lot of things. China is a special case in
the in the trade wars as well. But in general,

(01:21:21):
what we should do is encourage them to come here
and make it easier for them to stay here. I
don't want, you know, to have some brilliant kid from
I don't care what country right from Taiwan. China gets
really mad when I call Taiwan its own country. So
from the country of Taiwan, it's all right. I'm not

(01:21:42):
going back to China, so I'll say it from the
country of Taiwan or Mexico or Liechtenstein.

Speaker 2 (01:21:48):
I don't care.

Speaker 1 (01:21:51):
I'm happy to accept their brain train. If those folks
want to come here and go to Mi t or
go to cu or go to d you or go
to metro state wherever they want to go, and stay
here and become productive members of American society and help
us compete against the world instead of helping the world
compete against us. Gosh, we should do that at every opportunity.

(01:22:13):
So we don't want to discourage students from coming here.
We do want to discourage students who are you know, radicals, troublemakers,
anti American.

Speaker 2 (01:22:24):
They have no necessary right to be here.

Speaker 1 (01:22:26):
And I do not object to the Trump administration getting
rid of those people, as long as they use the
right process and are doing it for the right reasons.
And I don't have enough information right now to say
whether they did or didn't, but CSU, their International Studies Department,
posted something a little less than two weeks ago when
they said, and I quote, our understanding is that some

(01:22:49):
visa revocations are occurring due to people who had minor
traffic citations or charges in a criminal case that have
not yet been adjudicated. So somebody's charged with crime but
not convicted of it, they're being sent out of the country.
Or if this is right, you know, had a speeding
ticket and there Now I don't know if that's true,
but that's what CSU is saying. I do think the

(01:23:12):
government should be a little bit careful with that. We'll
be right back. Oh my gosh, my friend Jody just
sent me a text saying, you know, speaking of speaking
of Colorado College students being troublemakers and losing their visas
or whatever. Although I don't think this guy lost his visa.
Does the name anoir Ala Lackey mean anything to you?

(01:23:35):
Do you remember this guy? He was the head of
He was the head of al Qaeda in Yemen, right,
and he was droned to death in Yemen by Barack Obama.
And and there was some controversy about that because he's
a he's an American citizen, an a leading terrorist and

(01:23:56):
Obama killed him. And good job by Obama, and a
bunch to people, you know, had some questions about that.
But the reason Jody mentioned it to me is he
went to CSU, that guy that that guy went to CSU.
And so I'll mention one other thing, and this is
this absolutely goes with the territory of being a talk
show host. But every once in a while, there there
are listeners out there, and if I, if I actually paid.

Speaker 2 (01:24:17):
Attention to the to the the phone numbers.

Speaker 1 (01:24:20):
That was, you know, coming in, I could remember who
texts what, But I don't pay attention to the to
the phone numbers. But every once in a while you
can tell there's just somebody who wants to argue with you.
And so in the last segment, we were talking about
revoking student visas.

Speaker 2 (01:24:41):
And I said, I'm perfectly happy.

Speaker 1 (01:24:44):
I said, on the one hand, we do want to
get smart people here from other countries and make it
easy for them to stay here so that they can
become assets to the United States and not.

Speaker 2 (01:24:53):
Be competing against us.

Speaker 1 (01:24:54):
So we need to have more legal immigration and then
you know, take the smartest kids from wherever and have
them become assets to America. And then I said, but
I'm also very pleased with the effort by the federal
government to get rid of students who are agitators and enemies. Right,
we need to be a little careful about that. Even

(01:25:15):
if they're students, they do have something like First Amendment
rights not you know, it's a little different. I'm not
going to get into the whatever, but I said, I
am pleased that the administration is working to revoke the
visas of people who if I were to simplify it,
are enemies of the United States and are here as students.
And this listener says, ross, let's just bring in more

(01:25:39):
jew hating Muslims and let them ride here.

Speaker 2 (01:25:41):
All they want.

Speaker 1 (01:25:42):
Instead of you complaining about the government ousting instigating foreign students,
you should be complaining about these schools not doing it themselves.
And I just I texted back. First of all, you
must not have been listening very clearly, and second of all,
you must just be in a like you must have
recently watched the Monty Python Argument Rooms sketch and you

(01:26:02):
just decided to come into my room for an argument.
But I am not the argument room, and you should
probably listen a little bit more carefully. So, oh, this
is another interesting Colorado story I wanted to share with you.
So there's been a lot of talk, especially during the
Biden administration. You don't get it. You didn't get it
too much before or after about junk fees. And junk

(01:26:27):
fees I would loosely define as fees that are mandatory
that were not disclosed when you bought the product or service.
An example might be, okay, here's an example. Here's an example.

(01:26:47):
I'm going to New York sometime in the next couple
of months for my nieces butt mitzvah. And I'm going
by myself, I'm not I'm my wife's not going, my
kids aren't going. And when I'm try traveling by myself,
in particular, I care very little about the quality of
the hotel that I'm staying in. Right, I'm perfectly happy

(01:27:10):
with a Motel six or whatever. Right, not that there's
a lot of Motel six in Manhattan, but i'fect I
don't care. Right, I'm not going to do like a
youth hostel where I'm sharing a room with a bunch
of people and sharing a bathroom with a bunch of people.
But I'm also not going to stay at some fancy
hotel for six hundred dollars a night. So I was
looking online at hotels in the neighborhood of Manhattan where

(01:27:32):
I want to be in, and I found one that
was like one hundred and forty dollars a night. And
most of them are, you know, very few of them
even start with a one. They start with a two
or a three or a seven. Right, But it was
maybe one hundred and forty dollars a night. And then
I'm reading through and then they have a like two
thirds of the way down in the fine print, a
forty six dollars per day resort fee. But if you

(01:27:56):
were just booking it and you didn't scroll through and
read all that, you wouldn't know. That is the you know,
a concept of a junk fee, which is to say,
once you've committed to buy the thing, you can't get
out of that fee. So and I have a lot
of sympathy for this, because I do think that hidden
fees like that, I do think they're a form of fraud.

(01:28:20):
I remember the first time I ever encountered a resort
fee was at the Mirage Hotel in Las Vegas. And
this must have been before anybody really heard of resort fees.
Now they're everywhere, but this was probably twenty five years ago.
And if you're old enough, you may remember that before

(01:28:45):
Vegas got as kid friendly and family friendly and all
that as it is now, it was a place that
was really just for adults and very much had high
and low seasons based on when people were. Adults were
more able to travel, when vacation would be and that

(01:29:06):
sort of thing, And so if you could travel when
other people weren't traveling, it was common common to be
able to get a hotel room in Vegas for under
one hundred dollars per night, and I think I got
a room at the Mirage, which was quite new at
the time and still very nice and had that INCREDI
don't know if you've ever been to the Mirage, but

(01:29:27):
one of the greatest aquariums I've ever seen is is
right this huge thing behind, you know, probably seventy five
feet long behind their check in desk.

Speaker 2 (01:29:35):
Just amazing.

Speaker 1 (01:29:37):
And so I get there and then they're like, and
then you've got this I don't know what the number was,
you know, thirty five dollars a night resort fee, like
for what I'm not I'm not at a resort, I'm
not using any of your faces. I'm just using the room.
And I'm lee, what is this? And it was mandatory

(01:29:58):
and you might not think of thirty thirty five bucks
a nine who cares, but it's forty percent additional on
the room price. And it really pissed me off, and
I felt like I had been defrauded because I was
not made aware of it before I committed to the reservation.

Speaker 2 (01:30:15):
So now let's bring this back to local from the
Denver Post.

Speaker 1 (01:30:19):
New Colorado junk fees law, signed by police, will prohibit
common apartment charges and require transparency. The restrictions will take
effect January first and come amid broader scrutiny of hidden
fees in housing. Now, I've actually read a lot of
this bill, and I have to say it is very dense,

(01:30:42):
and it is somewhat difficult for me to understand exactly
what it applies to and exactly what it doesn't apply to,
and exactly what the standards are. So before I tell
you a little bit about what we're pretty sure that
it does do, let me just share with you some
of the texts so you get an understanding of, you know,

(01:31:04):
what I'm reading to try to be able to explain this.
So I'm going to jump in almost the middle, a
little before the middle. Section two. Sub Section A. A
person shall not offer, display, or advertise an amount of
person may pay for a good service or property unless
the person offering, displaying, or advertising the good service or
property clearly and conspicuously discloses the total price for the

(01:31:25):
good service or property as a single number, without separating
the total price into separate fees, charges or amounts. The
total price for the good service or property must be
disclosed more prominently than any other pricing information for the
good service or property sub Section B. Notwithstanding any provision
of this section to the contrary, A person is compliant
with sections two A and three B of this section

(01:31:46):
if the person does not use deceptive, unfair, and unconscionable
acts or practices related to the pricing of good services
or property, and if the person one is a food
and beverage service estateablishment that in every offer display or
advertisement for the purchase of a good service includes with
the price of the good service offer displayed or advertised,

(01:32:06):
a clear and conspicuous disclosure of the percentage or amount
of any mandatory service charge, and an accurate description of
how the mandatory service charge is disputed. Too, can demonstrate
that the person is offering services for which the total
price of the service cannot reasonably be known at the
time of the offer due to factors that determine the
total price that are beyond the control of the person
offering the service, including factors that determined by consumer selections

(01:32:28):
or preferences, or that relate to distance or time, and
clearly and conspicuously discloses a the factors that determine the
total price b any mandatory fees associated with the transaction,
and see that the total price of the services may vary.
Oh my gosh, that's just section two. That's just section two. Okay,

(01:32:52):
actually that's not just section two. That's just section two,
Section two, sub section two and then sub sections of
that h a anyway, so dense, it is very hard
for me to know what it what it covers, and
what it doesn't and and about Just think about this

(01:33:13):
part again. I know that was a lot, there was
a lot of gobbledygook, but just to give you a
sense of what I, you know, what I put myself through,
kind of like when I say I watched it so you.

Speaker 2 (01:33:21):
Don't have to. I read it so you don't have to.
But listen this part. Actually, I really wonder what it means.

Speaker 1 (01:33:28):
So it says that, you know, separate from all that
stuff that you're not allowed to do, we're gonna say
that you aren't violating the law if you do not
use and I'm quoting again deceptive, unfair and unconscionable acts
or practices.

Speaker 2 (01:33:46):
And then there's more from that, but.

Speaker 1 (01:33:50):
It doesn't say deceptive, unfair, or unconscionable acts, it says,
and which means that assuming you fall into the category
where you could be exempted if you don't do that stuff,
who exactly is and this is not a sarcastic question,
who is going to decide what an unconscionable act is?

Speaker 2 (01:34:15):
Right? That's even harder, I would say.

Speaker 1 (01:34:19):
Than deciding what's deceptive on who's going to decide what's unfair?
So anyway, let me back up. Now, I don't know
exactly what all this applies to. It certainly sounds in
that part like there's some kind of carve outs for
restaurants or whatever. But it seems like the maid and

(01:34:40):
I don't know if this will apply to hotels and
resort fees.

Speaker 2 (01:34:44):
I cannot tell. They do not mention it here. I
may go ask somebody.

Speaker 1 (01:34:49):
If I can find someone in the state legislature to ask,
I may go ask. And if I and if I
find an answer, I will let you know. But what
they what they are aiming at that I think Coloraden's,
especially renters, need to know. The big push here is
for is for what some people call junk fees for renters,

(01:35:15):
and in particular things that are not disclosed or not
clearly disclosed when you sign a lease, and things that
a renter may reasonably assume would be fees that are
covered by the landlord as just part of owning and
maintaining the property, and where some landlords apparently have been

(01:35:38):
then assessing fees to the tenants, such as pest control
around the property, common area maintenance. Right, maybe you will
live in an apartment building that has a lawn out
front and a garden, and you pay somebody to mow
the lawn and take care of the flowers. Now you
might normally assume, well, I'm paying rent and that you know,

(01:36:01):
the landlord gets that rent, and that's part of what
he does with the money, right, you know, he uses
some to pay the mortgage, and he uses some to
pay the property taxes, and he uses some to pay
the common area maintenance, and then he's got some as
his return on investment.

Speaker 2 (01:36:14):
Good.

Speaker 1 (01:36:15):
That's what it's supposed to all be about. But instead,
in some of these places, the landlords then assess a
separate bill for common area maintenance.

Speaker 2 (01:36:23):
And this bill is going to prevent that.

Speaker 1 (01:36:29):
There was a provision in the bill that would have
allowed renters or customers in a different situation to directly
sue the landlords or companies who they thought were violating
the law.

Speaker 2 (01:36:42):
But that's not in there now at this point.

Speaker 1 (01:36:45):
I guess you would have to get a prosecutor to
file charges.

Speaker 2 (01:36:51):
But in any case, I just wanted to kind of
share that with you.

Speaker 1 (01:36:56):
Oh there's another thing, and quoting from the Denver Post,
landlords can I no longer charge higher fees for utility
costs than the actual utility bill or I think they
have like one or two percent more they're allowed to charge,
but they can't do some kind of dramatic markup of
utility costs and pass that along. And another thing they
can't do if you are a renter and the landlord

(01:37:19):
tells you either you must pay your rent online or
maybe they say there's some other way that you can
pay rent offline, but it's it's difficult and or it
costs money.

Speaker 2 (01:37:34):
So under this bill, they.

Speaker 1 (01:37:35):
Cannot charge you a fee for paying your rent online,
if just to keep it simple, if that's the only
way to pay. So there you go.

Speaker 2 (01:37:50):
Uh, what else?

Speaker 1 (01:37:52):
Can't charge for pest control? Can't charge for a common
area maintenance, stuff like that anyway, So.

Speaker 2 (01:37:59):
You get the idea that's signed into law now.

Speaker 1 (01:38:02):
And actually I didn't pay very close attention to it,
but there was at least part of that bill that
the Apartment Association of Colorado did not object to, and
I don't remember all that, I'm sure they did not
like the part that was later stripped out in the
in the Senate State Senate that said that a tenant

(01:38:24):
could just sue.

Speaker 2 (01:38:24):
The landlord claiming the landlord was violating the law.

Speaker 1 (01:38:27):
That part is out now, so a tenant would have
to go to presumably law enforcement or a district attorney
and claim that, and then the district attorney would have
to decide whether to file charges. So I think the
I think the part landlords will feel a little better
about about that overall. Look. On the one hand, I
don't like micromanagement. On the other hand, I think these

(01:38:48):
tenants have a legit point that it's reasonable to assume
that common area maintenance is you know, pest control is
in your lease, mowing the lawn.

Speaker 2 (01:38:58):
Is in your lease, and.

Speaker 1 (01:38:59):
It's to assume you wouldn't get another bill for that.

Speaker 2 (01:39:02):
And I think they have a.

Speaker 1 (01:39:04):
Point, and I think the Apartment Association realized they have
a point, and the Apartment Association, you know, representing so
many landlords. They don't want their industry to get a
bad reputation. So there is and they don't talk about
it in this article. But at least some of this
stuff the apartment Association was actually okay with, So I

(01:39:25):
wanted to share that with you.

Speaker 2 (01:39:25):
All right, what else? What else do we want to
do here?

Speaker 1 (01:39:30):
If you've ever bought stuff from overseas that came to
you here in the United States, there's a decent chance
that it came by DHL. You probably know DHL, right,
so big yellow trucks and airplanes with red writing that
says DHL. Actually, one of the things I just learned
is that DHL is actually a division of Germany's National

(01:39:53):
postal system. I did not know that it would be
as if FedEx were owned by our post office, which
it isn't. But in any case, there's all this stuff
going on with the so called demnimous exception, and meaning
it was at least that stuff worth less than eight
hundred dollars could get into the country easily and without tariffs.

Speaker 2 (01:40:15):
That seems like it's changing.

Speaker 1 (01:40:17):
And all this stuff, all the shipping and the logistics
stuff is very complicated.

Speaker 2 (01:40:21):
But what I wanted to share with.

Speaker 1 (01:40:22):
You is that DHL has suspended, not necessarily forever, but
suspended shipments from businesses to consumers, not businesses to other businesses,
but businesses to consumers in the United States shipment's worth
over eight hundred dollars because they've said for and I

(01:40:45):
don't know why the over eight hundred thing is different now.

Speaker 2 (01:40:48):
Actually, here's my guess.

Speaker 1 (01:40:49):
They still think they can deal with the diminimus issue and.

Speaker 2 (01:40:53):
Get that stuff through pretty easy.

Speaker 1 (01:40:55):
For stuff that isn't deminimous and goes through a regular
kind of import process, tariff process, it's become too complicated
and it's taking too long, and when it takes too long,
it costs the shipping company money, and they're not willing
to bear those costs anymore. So they have said that,
and i'll quote from CNN, DHL blamed the halt on

(01:41:17):
new customs rules that require require formal entry processing on
all shipments worth over eight hundred dollars. Then minimum had
been twenty five hundred dollars. So with these small ish
you know, eight hundred, nine hundred thousand dollars fifteen hundred
dollars shipments and I don't normally buy stuff like that
from overseas. Normally I'm buying, you know, small parts for

(01:41:39):
ten bucks or twenty bucks. But they're not gonna They're
not gonna bring this stuff in anymore, at least temporarily.

Speaker 2 (01:41:45):
So I just wanted you to be aware of that.

Speaker 1 (01:41:48):
If you have a problem getting some stuff in, it
might it might well be because of that. All right.
Mandy just walked in wearing an Alaska shirt or a hoodie.

Speaker 6 (01:41:59):
I just sold that I bought this shirt in Alaska, obviously,
but I've seen this exact same pattern.

Speaker 7 (01:42:05):
In other cities that I've been to.

Speaker 1 (01:42:07):
Oh yeah, that's a mountain day.

Speaker 2 (01:42:08):
That could be a Colorado things got a mountains on.

Speaker 6 (01:42:10):
It'd be the Canadian Rocket Jasper, imagine Jasper right the area.

Speaker 1 (01:42:15):
Yeah, I think there was a huge fire up by
Jasper and they closed a lot of it down for
a while.

Speaker 6 (01:42:20):
It's that was last summer, okay, and two summers ago
was really bad.

Speaker 2 (01:42:24):
All right, So enough of that, let me ask you
a personal question. Me.

Speaker 1 (01:42:27):
So, after you and I did that very fun crossover
and we both did our shows from from Winter Park,
you told me that you and your husband the next day,
were going to go enjoy some hot springs.

Speaker 2 (01:42:42):
Correct, and I'm curious how it was.

Speaker 6 (01:42:43):
It was absolutely delightful hot sulfur springs. Now you got
to be able to stomach the sulfur part of that name,
because it is very stinky. But it's spree water that
has the highest concentration of minerals of any of the
hot springs in Colorado. And you just feel so great
and relaxed after you leave. It was wonderful, fantastic.

Speaker 1 (01:43:04):
That's great.

Speaker 7 (01:43:05):
Could have been better? Highly recommend.

Speaker 2 (01:43:07):
All right, there you go.

Speaker 1 (01:43:08):
Yeah, I like it. And it's not a massive It's
not like going to Glenwood where there's going to be
a million people around.

Speaker 6 (01:43:13):
There, and if you're looking for clean water it's been filtered,
you're not going to find it there.

Speaker 7 (01:43:17):
You're sitting in a pool of floating things.

Speaker 2 (01:43:19):
I don't mind that.

Speaker 7 (01:43:20):
I don't either. You're going to freak that way.

Speaker 2 (01:43:24):
What you got coming out.

Speaker 7 (01:43:26):
We're going to talk to Laura Thomas.

Speaker 6 (01:43:28):
There's a group that is calling the Board of County
Commissioners out in Douglas County about their secret meetings about
this home rule situation. We're also going to talk about
a couple of different things that I can't remember right now,
ross all right time I had look that you'd think
that I would just check the headlines before I walk
in here.

Speaker 1 (01:43:47):
But no, that's okay. Everybody stick around for Mandy's fabulous
stuff and things, and maybe, if you're lucky, some Shenanigans
keep it here on koa