Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
It's it's better than a healthy breakfast.
Speaker 2 (00:01):
Playing with electronics first thing in the morning makes me happy.
Shannon is just shaking his head.
Speaker 1 (00:07):
So there is a lot.
Speaker 2 (00:09):
So, okay, I get various emails every morning from you know,
you sign up for these things, right, newspapers send out
emails and magazines and whatever. So I got one from
National Review and they had this quote in there.
Speaker 1 (00:24):
That's a very famous.
Speaker 2 (00:25):
Quote, or well somewhat famous quote, and it's attributed to
Vladimir Lenin, the guy who did the Russian Revolution. But
it's it's a great line, and it's a line that
reminds me very much of the bumper music that Channon
played yesterday regarding the first week of Donald Trump's presidency,
(00:49):
and that was, Oh, it was the band Bear Naked Ladies. Yeah,
and you know, it's been a week and Lenin. So
I'll get to the Lenin thing. It's attributed often to Lenin.
There are decades when nothing happens, and weeks when decades happen.
Speaker 1 (01:08):
That feels like the last week to me.
Speaker 2 (01:11):
I will also note so that quote I was reminded
of because it was used in a National Review email
I received this morning.
Speaker 1 (01:20):
And I'm not reading the National.
Speaker 2 (01:22):
Review thing right now, But it said something as Vladimir
Lenin equipped, right, as Vladimir Lenin equipped. There are decades
when nothing happens, and there are weeks when decades happened.
But in fact, it's very unlikely that Vladimir Lenin said it.
And over at Snopes, which is actually fairly decent site
(01:43):
when you're avoiding political stuff.
Speaker 1 (01:45):
Right when they got.
Speaker 2 (01:46):
Into the political fact checking, they got almost as bad
as everybody else, with a lot of bias, but strictly
historical stuff, it's a fairly useful site. And so they
are unable to find any evidence that Vladimir Lenin said
that or anything like that.
Speaker 1 (02:05):
But it's still a great line. So I'll say it again.
Speaker 2 (02:07):
There are decades when nothing happens, in weeks when decades happened.
Speaker 1 (02:14):
The last week feels like that to me.
Speaker 2 (02:16):
Let me talk for just a moment about tech stocks yesterday.
The reason I'm only going to do a moment is
that we're going to talk about it more half an
hour from now with a.
Speaker 1 (02:24):
Guest from the University of Colorado.
Speaker 2 (02:25):
But yesterday, because of the release by this Chinese AI
company called deep Seek, the top seven or ten or
so technology stocks in America lost a combined trillion dollars
with a t of value in Nvidia itself was almost
(02:52):
six hundred billion, not six hundred million, which would be
an astounding number already. Right, If I lost six hundred
million dollars of my net worth in one day, I'd
be a little bit upset.
Speaker 1 (03:06):
Six hundred, five hundred and.
Speaker 2 (03:08):
Eighty nine billion, to be precise, is that a shocking number.
In fact, briefly in video just a couple of days ago,
because I heard it on the news. I don't pay
very close attention to the nuts and bolts of the
markets every day that I heard that in Video had
become the most valuable company. Now it's not. Now, it's not.
Speaker 1 (03:28):
A whole bunch of other textocks got crushed too.
Speaker 2 (03:31):
Market is up today, NASDAK is recovering a little bit.
Speaker 1 (03:35):
Apple is very strong today.
Speaker 2 (03:36):
And Apple was strong yesterday too, which is interesting and
maybe we'll talk about that later. But part of the
reason the market is doing so well is that Apple
is up almost four percent. We will talk about that
more later, but I wanted to share it with you
so in the context of weeks when decades happened, Yesterday,
(03:57):
President Trump signed a few executive orders, and I wanted
to mention one of them to you because it's surely
going to get a lot of attention, especially in more
liberal leaning places.
Speaker 1 (04:06):
But I wanted to mention it to you.
Speaker 2 (04:09):
It's an executive order that's entitled Prioritizing Military Excellence and Readiness,
And in short, it is about the presence of transgender
people in the military. I don't know that they're trying
to like work their way around it a little bit,
(04:31):
and the word transgender does not appear in the executive order.
But let me just share with you a couple bits
and pieces of this, and I'm just going to go
through not all of it, but a man's assertion that
he is a woman and his requirement that others honor
this falsehood is not consistent with the humility and selflessness
(04:54):
required of a service member. Wow. Beyond the hormonal and
surgical medical involved, adoption of a gender identity inconsistent with
an individual's sex conflicts with a soldier's commitment to an honorable, truthful,
and disciplined lifestyle, even in one's personal life. WOW. For
the sake of our nation and the patriotic Americans, who
volunteer to serve it. Military service must be reserved for
(05:17):
those mentally and physically fit for duty. The Armed Forces
must adhere to high mental and physical health standards to
ensure our military can deploy, fight, and win, including in
austere conditions and without the benefit of routine medical treatment
or special provisions. The section two is called policy. It
is the policy in the United States government to establish
(05:37):
high treason I'm sorry, I don't know why I said treason.
I had two words together, look like that, to establish
high standards for troop readiness, lethality, cohesion, honesty, humility, uniformity,
and integrity. This policy is inconsistent with the medical, surgical,
and mental health constraints on individuals with gender dysphoria. This
(05:57):
policy is also inconsistent with shifting pronoun usage, or a
use of pronouns that inaccurately reflect in individuals sex. So
this doesn't say we're kicking transgender people out of the military.
But what it says is that the Secretary of Defense
(06:19):
shall identify all steps and issue guidance necessary to implement
this order, submit to the President a report that summarizes
the steps, and in short, what this seems to be
is the roadmap for the Secretary of Defense to kick
(06:41):
all transgender members out of the military, And let me
just do forty seconds of commentary on this. It is
first term Trump barred new transgender members joining the military,
but did not kick out existing transgender members. This is
going a step further. Trump is doing quite a few
(07:03):
things that seem to be aggressively aimed at pleasing his
conservative base. This falls into the category of elections have consequences.
Here's my quick take, and I say this as somebody
who did not serve in the military. There are situations
where you would expect.
Speaker 1 (07:23):
Tight quarters, you know, combat locations with a.
Speaker 2 (07:26):
Lot of people sleeping in one room, deployment on a
submarine or even other kinds of ships, and other things
like that, where I would expect that having a transgender
person involved in those tight quarters is bad for UNI morale,
bad for cohesion, bad for readiness, and bad for the mission.
And I don't support having transgender people in those even
(07:47):
though I honor their desire to serve. There are other
potential jobs in the military I don't know, maybe a mechanic,
maybe an office worker, maybe a drone operator who's never
being deployed overseas, or or being deployed overseas in a
very different kind of environment, and in those situations. Again,
I am not expert, but I can imagine a situation
(08:08):
where having a trans gender member of the military would
not be a significant impact and negative impact on unit cohesion.
Speaker 1 (08:17):
Or readiness or morale or whatever.
Speaker 2 (08:19):
What if this person happens to be the best drone operator.
And so I don't support a blanket ban on transgender
people in the military.
Speaker 1 (08:32):
If people want to serve, and they're in.
Speaker 2 (08:36):
That particular situation, but they want to serve their country
and their patriots, and they want to beat the enemy.
If they can serve in a way that you know
a normal rational person would not say is or or
should be conducive to poor order or a reduction in
the ability to execute the mission, I think they should
(08:57):
be able to serve. I think this order goes too far.
But elections have consequences. If you want to hang out
with Dave Logan and Ryan Edwards and Nick Ferguson, you
can do that today from three pm to six pm
at Sam's Number three Diner and Bar that's in Glendale
on South Cherry Street. Okay, three to six today hang
out with Dave Logan, Ryan Edwards, Nick Ferguson at Sam's
(09:20):
number three South Cherry Street in Glendale.
Speaker 1 (09:24):
Shannon, are you gonna be there for that? Or is
it not yours today? I have basketball tonight, so Arod
will be there.
Speaker 2 (09:30):
All right, You'll have a Rod there instead of Shannon.
The other reason I asked Shannon that is he does
such an enormous percentage of remote events for all the
stations in this building.
Speaker 1 (09:38):
I'll go set it up for a Rod, will you.
Speaker 2 (09:42):
Okay? That's nice of you. Well, let's you have the
comparative advantage. Nobody sets up remotes faster.
Speaker 1 (09:49):
And better than you. So there you go. All right.
Speaker 2 (09:52):
I want to do a couple of quick things that
are actually follow ups on stories where we had guests
on the show to talk about them. So first one
I want to mention is maybe a week and a
half ago or so. You may recall that we had
(10:13):
a guest on named doctor Robert Montgomery from the Langone
Medical Center in New York City who runs their transplant department,
and we were talking about a patient of his name,
Tawana Looney, and he used her name because she's gone
public otherwise he wouldn't have just shared patient information. But
she's been very public about it. She's in the newspapers
(10:34):
and stuff. And she had a kidney transplant where she
received pig kidney because she was on the verge of
death there or no human kidney's available.
Speaker 1 (10:46):
She said, all right, let's do it.
Speaker 2 (10:48):
I got no choice, and I just wanted to share
this with you. So miss Looney is actually from Alabama,
and so this is at al dot com, which is
an Alabama news based al my BA based news website.
An Alabama woman passed a major milestone Saturday to become
the longest living recipient of a pig organ transplant, Healthy
(11:11):
and full of energy with her new kidney for sixty
one days and counting, she told the Associated Press. I'm superwoman,
she said, laughing about outpacing family members on long walks
around New York City as she continues her recovery.
Speaker 1 (11:25):
It's a new take on life.
Speaker 2 (11:27):
Looney's vibrant recovery is a morale boost in the quest
to make.
Speaker 1 (11:30):
Animal to human transplants a reality.
Speaker 2 (11:33):
Only four other Americans have received hugely experimental transplants of
gene edited pig organs, two hearts, and two kidneys, and
none of those four people lived more than two months,
So she's now just over two months sixty one days
as of this story, which was written a couple of
(11:54):
days ago, and good for her.
Speaker 1 (11:57):
I wish her.
Speaker 2 (11:58):
I wish her a long and healthy life, and I
hope that whatever they're figuring out with doctor Montgomery and
his team allows lots of other people to live longer
and healthier lives than they otherwise would live. Another story
I wanted to share with you. We had an attorney
on the show named Jarrett Adams. He represents two guys
(12:18):
named Terrence Richardson and Faron Claiborne.
Speaker 1 (12:23):
They were found not guilty.
Speaker 2 (12:27):
They were found not guilty of the murder of a
Virginia police officer, but a judge decided that other evidence
in the case regarding a crime they were not charged with,
showed that they had likely committed some kind of drug crime,
(12:52):
and the judge sentenced these guys to I think life
in prison, even though they were found not guilty. To me,
it was an insane travesty of justice and a quirk
in the law that I don't understand why it exists.
Speaker 1 (13:08):
In any case.
Speaker 2 (13:09):
One of the very very few things that Joe Biden
did right in his terrible four years as president was
commuting the sentences of these two men who have been
in prison for a couple of decades now for a
crime that they probably didn't commit and definitely weren't convicted
(13:32):
of committing, and yet they were put in They were
put in jail.
Speaker 3 (13:39):
For.
Speaker 1 (13:41):
It's a long complicated story.
Speaker 2 (13:43):
They pled to let me get this right, They pled
guilty to involuntary manslaughter one of them did, and the
other one to acting as an accessory to the crime,
even though they claimed all along they never had anything
to do with it. That's what happened, and the judge
sentenced them to life in prison, which normally would be
an impossible sentence for those crimes that they pled guilty to.
(14:04):
But the judge said, well, I think that they did
this other stuff and therefore I'm going to sentence them
to life in prison. Really bad, not the way America
is supposed to work. And I'm not saying these guys
are our heroes, and I'm not saying these guys were
saints in their prior lives.
Speaker 1 (14:20):
But sentenced to life in prison for.
Speaker 2 (14:25):
A murder that they were acquitted of is a pretty
remarkable thing. In any case, Joe Biden did one thing right.
I want to mention two other things too. You One
was kind of a fun piece by my occasional fill
in host, Jimmy Sangenberger. You hear him in for me
sometimes Manby sometimes over on K House sometimes. And Jimmy
writes for the Denver Gazette, and he had a fun
(14:49):
piece two days ago entitled wanna be gov Like Governor
Griswold stumbles into announcing and.
Speaker 1 (14:57):
This is a funny story. So Jenna gri Wald.
Speaker 2 (15:01):
There are two things we know for sure about Jenna Griswald.
She is hyper partisan to the point of damaging the
secretary of State's office, where previous Republicans in that office
were scrupulously nonpartisan in their activities. She's not. And she's incompetent.
Speaker 1 (15:20):
So she's both of those things, which.
Speaker 2 (15:22):
Apparently makes her think that somebody's gonna want her to
be governor. She's a She's a talentless, worthless political climber
who should never have been elected to anything, but got
elected to be Secretary of State because she was running
as a Democrat in a year when Colorado voters threw
out every Republican they could find in any swing district
(15:43):
and statewide, right not in deep red districts. Yeah, Republicans
still won those, and so she beat Wayne Williams. Kind
of a remarkable thing in any case. So here's what
here's what Jimmy has to say as the Denver is
that reported. The Public Trust Institute filed the complaint on
January fourteenth, alleging that Griswold quote expended funds on a
(16:04):
gubernatorial campaign and had a website dedicated to a gubernatorial run,
but has not registered a committee or filed a campaign
affidavit for governor. The domain Jenna, which is jna Jenna
four governor dot com, was purchased on August eighth. A
placeholder web page went live the next day, copyrighted by
quote Jenna four governor, declaring launching soon and asking visitors
(16:28):
to submit their email addresses to be the first to
get updates.
Speaker 1 (16:31):
That last part is the site in quotes.
Speaker 2 (16:34):
The site remained up until December twentieth, when nine News
first reported its existence and the likelihood that Griswold skirted
legal requirements by not reporting the expenditures or filing paperwork
for her gubernatorial run the Public Trust Institute. Complaint says
Jenna Griswold announced her candidacy for governor. When the website
(16:55):
and support of her gubernatorial candidacy became available to the public.
By collecting the email add addresses of supporters, she was
actively engaging in campaign activities.
Speaker 1 (17:04):
All of this, the complaint aeded, should.
Speaker 2 (17:06):
Have been reported as campaign expenditures, but it wasn't.
Speaker 1 (17:08):
But wait, there's more.
Speaker 2 (17:11):
Griswold's trustee campaign sidekick has long been her brother Chris.
When nine News asked him about the site, Chris initially
denied involvement quote, definitely not a domain I set up.
He claimed that was a lie. The same week, Chris
issued a statement on Jenn's behalf quote, I have not
decided how that service will look beyond. Twenty twenty six,
(17:32):
When nine News reporter Marshall Zellinger signed up for alerts,
he received an automated reply from Chris's email address. The
political mastermind listed himself as the forwarding contact. Chris only
came clean after being confronted with the evidence and promising
to research his own actions, insisting that he bought the
domain to keep others from snatching it up and that
(17:53):
Big Cis still hasn't decided on running. Pro tip for
the Griswold's siblings, if you're trying to be sneaky, don't
leave a trick of fingerprints at the scene. So there's
more in this, but I'm gonna I'm gonna leave it there.
I'll just note that Jenna Griswold is violating the rules
(18:16):
and laws that her specific job in government.
Speaker 1 (18:20):
Is to enforce.
Speaker 2 (18:22):
Right. She's not a member of the legislature, she's not
the state treasurer. She's the Secretary of State, which is
the office that oversees compliance with election.
Speaker 1 (18:33):
Rules, and she's violating them.
Speaker 2 (18:37):
This is the same person who, when she found out
that certain kinds of bios level passwords for election computers
had been inadvertently available on the Internet for some weeks
or months, wasn't gonna tell anybody until the Republican Party
of Colorado found out about it and outed her publicly
(18:59):
out the problem and public and then she can she's
the worst as bad as Colorado is politically, and it
is terrible.
Speaker 1 (19:10):
We are not so bad as to deserve.
Speaker 2 (19:12):
Jenna Griswoll Really, all right, I want to tell you
a quick story, and I'm gonna I'm gonna not use
any names, and shinnon, I'm getting the zoom going or
whenever the whenever the guest arrives. So I'm not gonna
use any names here because because its not really a
(19:34):
bad story about a business. But I'm gonna tell a
story that involves a business, and they're okay, but I
want to tell the story anyway.
Speaker 1 (19:42):
So a friend of mine gave me at some point.
Speaker 2 (19:47):
It was actually not as like a birthday gift or something,
but it was it was part of a.
Speaker 1 (19:53):
Kind of like a business thing.
Speaker 2 (19:54):
Gave me a couple hundred dollars two hundred and twenty
five dollars to be to be precise, twenty five dollars
in gift certificates gift cards for a nice steakhouse. And
I decided my younger kid really likes good steak and
it was just his birthday, so I said, all.
Speaker 1 (20:13):
Right, let's go to the restaurant.
Speaker 2 (20:14):
I've got two hundred and twenty five bucks that'll probably
cover three quarters of the meal or something.
Speaker 1 (20:18):
We don't order wine.
Speaker 2 (20:19):
I know steak restaurants are a little bit expensive, right,
but we don't order wine, and usually we don't even
get dessert, and so two hundred and twenty five bucks
should be fine. And so I'll tell you we we
had one soda, one non alcoholic beer. For my wife
(20:41):
food doesn't drink, she had a non alcoholic beer. We
had three appetizers, I admit, we each had a main
course and that was it. The bill, including tip, was
give or take a couple of dollars five hundred and
(21:02):
eighty dollars. So my two hundred and twenty five dollars
of gift cards, I still had to put like almost
five almost three hundred and sixty dollars on.
Speaker 1 (21:12):
My own credit card for what I thought.
Speaker 2 (21:13):
I was gonna have to put fifty or one hundred.
And the restaurant's full. The restaurant's full, and lots of
people are drinking wine. Those people are probably paying two
hundred dollars a person, and I don't understand. And it
didn't look to me mostly like suits on expense accounts.
There were like couples and families. Who's doing this? Who
(21:36):
was spending one hundred and fifty to two hundred dollars
a person for dinner? And the food was very good.
I won't say it was memorably good. I've had better food,
I've had better steak. It was very good. But who's
doing that? I'm not I'm by the way, I'm not
mad at the restaurant. I'm not saying the restaurant is overpriced.
(21:58):
I'm saying I'm not willing to ever pay that price again.
But if they can fill the restaurant those prices, good
for them. I'm not mad at them. I guess I
should have looked up how much the prices were at
this restaurant before I went, but it didn't occur to
me that it could be one hundred and fifty dollars
a person without wine.
Speaker 1 (22:16):
I just didn't even think that.
Speaker 2 (22:19):
Anyway, It's an interesting world, and good for them. I'm
glad there's a restaurant that can do that well at
that kind of price, at that kind of pricing.
Speaker 1 (22:28):
I do wonder, and I'm going to.
Speaker 2 (22:29):
Talk a little bit later about restaurants in Denver. I
do wonder how well that will last if we have
an economic turndown. But it might be that rich people
are always rich in a restaurant like that will always
be fine. It might well be anyway. Again, I'm not
complaining really about the restaurant it just wasn't really what
(22:52):
I expected.
Speaker 1 (22:54):
All right, let's do something completely different.
Speaker 2 (22:57):
Now. You all know that I am a tech nerd,
and you know that I spent a fair bit of
time yesterday talking about deep Seek and even my own
experience because I signed up for the app yesterday before
apparently the DDoS attack that kind of sort of took
it down. To get a little experience with it, but
I'm barely a beginner at this stuff, and I wanted
(23:18):
to talk to an expert because, after all, the news
about this one AI engine took a trillion dollars off
the value of just like seven tech stocks, so this
is clearly a big deal, joining us to talk about it.
Speaker 1 (23:31):
I'm At Reggae is.
Speaker 2 (23:32):
A PhD student in computer science at CU Boulder. He
specializes in theoretical machine learning that US non experts might
call AI, and his research focuses on the interpretability of
modern generative models, whatever that means, and maybe he'll explain it. Hi,
i'm Ett, Thanks.
Speaker 1 (23:52):
For being here.
Speaker 3 (23:56):
It's good to be here.
Speaker 2 (23:58):
What does interpretability of my generative models mean?
Speaker 3 (24:04):
So generative? So let's start with the generative parts. Is
generative models basically mean that you're producing some kind of
generative output. So an example would be chat GPT, which
produces text. Another example would be visual generative models, which
produce image data or videos. Interpretibility means that you're trying
to understand what led the model to make a decision
(24:26):
that you see on the outside. So these models seem
to be black boxes, so I'm trying to sort of
open the black box and understand what's going on.
Speaker 2 (24:33):
Okay, So there's lots of aspects of deepseek to talk about,
but I think I'll start with something that sounds like
it's kind of sort of in the direction that you're
just talking about. I'm not going to open the app
right now and look at it, but I asked it
a few questions yesterday, and every time before it answered
the question, it first explained how it was interpreting my question,
(24:54):
which was very interesting. And I have not seen that
on chat GPT. One of my listeners said that his
his office, his work AI does that, but I hadn't
seen it before.
Speaker 1 (25:07):
Is that important and if so? Why?
Speaker 2 (25:12):
Yeah?
Speaker 3 (25:13):
It is. It is called something called it is called
technically chain of thought. It basically, you know, explains how
the model is getting at a particular decision, and it's
a very super modern sort of notion that has come
up in these kind of models in the last year
or so. Actually, if you use a modern version of CHAGPT,
(25:36):
like if you pay for it, it allows you to
use like, you know, more advanced models, and they do
have you know, something called chain of thought as well,
where model thinks in quotes and you know, chat GPT
unfortunately doesn't show all of the chain of thoughts. Being
open source, it shows you everything that goes along. So, yeah,
it is useful understand what's going on inside.
Speaker 2 (25:57):
How much does that particular kind of functional impact whether
you think ordinary people in businesses and people will use
AI will trust it and feel comfortable with it, and
and related to that, how much do you think that
chain of thought functionality can can help people feel that
(26:19):
this isn't like the terminator out to destroy them.
Speaker 3 (26:26):
Yeah, I think you know that. You know, that's a
great question. A large part of my research actually focuses
on similar questions. I think the main problem with you know,
chain of thought right now is that we don't know
if you know, the model is actually thinking what it's
telling us it's thinking, right, We don't know how faithful
this chain of thought is to its actual reasoning process. Right.
(26:47):
So that's that's something which is an active research direction.
But in general it you know, we have to be
careful about trusting the model's thinking behavior because we might think,
I mean, we might look at it and know gain
some satisfaction. Oh, you know, this is how the model
is thinking, but it might be thinking in a completely
different way. Right. So in general, for the public, I
(27:09):
think this is a good step in the right direction
because you know, previously we had nothing. Now we at
least have something. But we have to be careful about,
you know, not overly, you know, ascribing human like behaviors
to lease technical models.
Speaker 2 (27:23):
Fascinating. We're talking with met Reggae from the University of Colorado,
and just one quick comment and then I'll move on
to another issue. So before you were born, when I
started with computers, I was programming in basic on like
a TRS eight. I don't know if you ever heard
of that, and Apple two plus was the first computer
(27:43):
I owned. And of course, when I wrote a program
in basic to do whatever it did, I would always
know exactly what it was thinking. And if the program
did something wrong, I could go find the line of
code that was giving me the wrong answer, where I
accidentally put a minus sign instead of a plus sign,
or and instead of an ore. It's incredible that at
(28:04):
this level of computer programming, even the programmer doesn't necessarily
know what the program is doing. Can you just give
me seventeen or no, thirty seven seconds on that? Because
I like prime numbers, by the way, that's why I'm
giving you that numbers.
Speaker 3 (28:21):
Yeah, Yeah, that's an awesome question. I think the main
sort of technical challenge towards something like this, inductively speaking
at least, is that these models are so large and
so complex that we don't know, you know, where this
functionality is arising from. And also, you know, a lot
of this functionality that we see on the outside actually arises.
We don't actually train the model to explicitly do something
(28:43):
like this. And because we didn't program the model to
do explicitly you know, reasoning quote unquote it, and because
it arises, we don't know where it arises from. So
it's almost like a reverse engineering job for us to
figure out where it arises from. So that's where it's
a complexity.
Speaker 2 (28:58):
Yeah, that's just incredible. Okay, So now let's talk about
I'll ask this question. You can answer it any any.
Speaker 1 (29:06):
Way you like.
Speaker 2 (29:07):
Why did the release of deep Seek's AI app and
the current functionality take a trillion dollars off of the
value of text docs yesterday?
Speaker 3 (29:22):
Yeah, I think, you know, this is a little out
of outside my expertise, but I'll try to answer it
as best as I can. So, I think the main
sort of innovation, apart from the technical achievements, is that
deep Seek actually open source their model. You know, in
ordinary language, that means, you know, they put out the
entire model out on the internet for anyone to use.
(29:43):
And basically, you know, for the top US companies, the
business model for now has been, you know, we create
a large model and we provide access to people on
the outside by them paying for it. But as here,
these these companies have put out their models for everyone
to use for free, and so now people are warded that.
(30:04):
You know, if these kind of you know, highly performance
models out there were used to free, who's going to
buy GPUs, who's going to buy you know, open ei
services and things like that. So I think that that
is the overouching fear out there in the market.
Speaker 2 (30:19):
Yeah, that's why I think you're right, and I think
I mean chat, GPT, open AI is not is not public.
So most of the stuff that was getting crushed yesterday
was on was was hardware, but there was some sell
off in Meta and Google and you know companies that
are also perceived to be getting into the into the
AI space. It was mostly the hardware that got that
(30:41):
got crushed. So let's talk about that for a second.
If you believe Deep Seeks story about how they created it.
Speaker 1 (30:50):
And I probably believe it. I'm not sure.
Speaker 2 (30:53):
I'm always skeptical with stuff coming out.
Speaker 1 (30:55):
Of China, but I probably, I probably believe it.
Speaker 2 (30:58):
They're saying that they did this with five or six
million dollars and I don't know, maybe give or take
five percent or something of the number of chips that
a lot of people are talking about normally needing to
develop a model like this.
Speaker 1 (31:14):
So, first, do you believe them?
Speaker 2 (31:17):
And if it's true that they did it for six
million dollars and a single digit percentage of the number
of chips you would normally think about needing to buy,
what does that mean for the whole industry, not the
financial side, what does it mean for the development of AI?
Speaker 3 (31:36):
Yeah, I think there are great questions. I think I
do believe them when they say something like this, because
I think most of the research focus, most of the
focus of the top companies has been on scaling these
models to become bigger and bigger, and no one's really,
you know, tried to constrain themselves within a fixed amount
of computing budget and try to figure out if there's
like clever optimizations to do. And what you know deep
(31:58):
Seek has figured out is to do precisely that, you know,
figure out chaver optimizations. And I think or the broader
sort of industry in general, I think this is a
great step because it goes towards, it goes a long
way towards, you know, providing everyone access to these highly
performed models, because there was a fear out there saying
that you know, as these models become larger, ordinary people
(32:21):
get left behind. But now you know, the smallest versions
of the models that deep Seek has put out can
be done in your MacBook, which is a tremendous achievement
compared to like a couple of years.
Speaker 1 (32:31):
Yeah, I mean, just a quick comment.
Speaker 2 (32:33):
Yet yesterday there's all this panic and all the sell
off on the hardware side, because maybe maybe people don't
need to buy as many chips, but there isn't near
There hasn't been yet.
Speaker 1 (32:43):
Maybe it'll start today.
Speaker 2 (32:44):
And that's probably part of the reason Apple is actually
did well yesterday, is doing very well today.
Speaker 1 (32:50):
I mean, AI is going to be incredibly useful.
Speaker 2 (32:52):
AI is a transformative technology at the level of how
transformative the Internet itself was. And if suddenly AI can
be had for cheap or for free and and not
be this you know, cloistered, elitist thing that only a
few billionaires can handle, and then and then they will
deign to sell you little bits of it, that's an
amazing thing. Do you want to offer any quick comment
(33:15):
on that?
Speaker 3 (33:18):
Yeah, I think you know, it's it's an incredible achievement,
you know, to democrat democratize AI in this way. And
I personally, you know, do not believe that hardware demand
is going to go down. I think, you know, with democratization,
I think more people will want hardware, and so I
think the set off is a little short sat in
my opinion.
Speaker 1 (33:36):
That's that's really interesting.
Speaker 2 (33:38):
So instead of one hundred people, instead of one hundred
companies spending a billion dollars each, there could be ten
thousand companies spending ten million dollars each.
Speaker 3 (33:54):
Exactly. I think more people, you know, if you want
to start a company, because it's such a force multipler. Yeah,
start want to start their companies. It's fewer people and
more machines.
Speaker 2 (34:03):
And therefore, last quick question, I think I saw one
of your web pages online and it mentioned a few
different cities. But are you originally from Goa or from
somewhere else?
Speaker 3 (34:15):
Now? My family's from Goa. I come from Omar.
Speaker 2 (34:18):
Gotcha all right? I've actually I was in both on
my honeymoon.
Speaker 1 (34:23):
I love Goa.
Speaker 2 (34:24):
Go is just such a wonderful city and everybody should
check it out.
Speaker 1 (34:28):
It's a very it's a very unusual.
Speaker 2 (34:30):
Indian city because it's one of the few places that
was a Portuguese colony. So you go to Goa and
there will be a lot of Indian folks who have
Portuguese names like Joao and the and the food's a
little different, and it's on the beach and it's just gorgeous. Anyway,
I hadn't thought about Goa in a while, so I
read about it in your bio and I thought that
(34:50):
was cool. I'm at reggae is a PhD candidate at
the University of Colorado in computer science. Has been great
talking to you. Thank you for doing this. I hope
you'll come back on the show in the future.
Speaker 1 (35:03):
Thank you.
Speaker 3 (35:03):
Sure.
Speaker 2 (35:04):
All right, that was a really fun conversation. I hope
you enjoyed it as much as I did. We'll take
a quick break on Kowa. We are taking donations for
families whose lives have been so terribly affected by the
southern California wildfires.
Speaker 1 (35:17):
I have made a donation. I'm not asking you to
do something that I haven't done.
Speaker 2 (35:21):
You can donate to your fellow Americans in need by
texting the word relief R E L I E F
to three three one zero zero. Text relief to three
three one zero zero. It'll come back at you with
a link. You click on that, you'll see the logos
for Dream Center and iHeart, and you'll know you're in
the right place and you can donate whatever whatever feels
(35:42):
comfortable to you. I got a new guy behind the
glass across.
Speaker 4 (35:47):
I'd like to introduce myself before you as Dragon Redbeard.
I am the producer of the Ross Kaminski Show for
the past almost three years.
Speaker 2 (35:56):
You seem vaguely familiar, but I haven't seen you in
a while way ever around there. Yeah, I was expecting
somebody named Dragon Redbeard yesterday producing the last two hours
of my show.
Speaker 1 (36:09):
Yeah, and then I heard.
Speaker 2 (36:11):
That that that that guy was off because he was
like expecting a delivery. So now that you're here and
I vaguely recognize you, were you like, is there an
Amazon package coming to your house and you didn't want
the porch pirates to get it? Or what happened?
Speaker 4 (36:24):
Around six fifteen? There was a five pound, fifteen and
a half ounce nineteen and a quarter inch long delivery
named Nicholas Wow, Nicholas Chase.
Speaker 2 (36:35):
So that's actually on the small side, correct, Yeah, So
am I allowed to ask what was the was the
baby induced? I figured that baby was induced because you
took some of the day off, meaning it felt like
it was on a schedule. Correct.
Speaker 3 (36:49):
That.
Speaker 4 (36:49):
My daughter in law has a medical condition that makes
labor very troublesome for her, so they wanted to make
sure they planned everything out and got the proper whipment
and doctors around.
Speaker 2 (37:01):
Too, and everything went fine, Everything went swimming.
Speaker 1 (37:04):
So how many grandchildren do you have now? Two?
Speaker 2 (37:06):
Two boys?
Speaker 1 (37:06):
Two boys?
Speaker 2 (37:07):
Ye? Little Lance and little Nicholas. Wow, congratulations, thank you.
Still should have been here. I could have been they.
Speaker 4 (37:18):
X time, and you know I gotta be there in
case X happens.
Speaker 2 (37:21):
Uh huh.
Speaker 4 (37:22):
But it turns out didn't happen until six o'clock in
the evening.
Speaker 1 (37:26):
Unbelievable. A listener is asking.
Speaker 2 (37:28):
Me to talk about what was just in the news
there about opting into Tabor. I don't know enough about it. So, Chad,
if you're listening right now, if you could get me
some information about that whole opting in thing, because I
don't really I don't really understand the story, and it
sounds like something our listeners would like to know about.
So if you can help me understand that better, I
would sure, I would sure appreciate that. A listener said
(37:51):
that last guest was really interesting, but he was a
little bit hard to understand.
Speaker 1 (37:54):
Can you summarize?
Speaker 2 (37:55):
So, I guess wasn't Ai? Was He He was not
a I he was not He was an actual person
and I was looking at him. You remember when we
had that guest who seemed like Ai? Uh huh, Because
the listener said, you know, the future of talk radio
is AI guests, I hope not.
Speaker 1 (38:10):
You know, we will get to a point.
Speaker 2 (38:11):
Oh so this deep seek AI that caused all the
turmoil yesterday, I was reading about it a little bit.
Speaker 1 (38:17):
It stopped training, right, it stopped.
Speaker 2 (38:20):
Training learning in January and sorry, in July of last year.
But we're going to get to a point where AIS
are constantly learning and it will be interesting. I actually
think that radio talk show host is not entirely but
relatively immune to being replaced by AI.
Speaker 1 (38:43):
Podcasts hosts less so, but as AIS.
Speaker 2 (38:46):
Get better and better at being trainable on a minute
by minute basis, Like so right now on the show,
since as far as you know, I'm not AI, I
can look at something that's on the TV right now
and tell you what it is and respond to it.
(39:06):
It's gonna be a while until AI can do that,
but it's not gonna be forever. Look how fast this
stuff is developing, so so we'll see. Let me summarize.
How how old is Dragon? A listener wants to know?
Forty something? Yeah, I stop counting, stop counting, Yeah, forty something,
Grandpa Dragon, Wow? Yeah is I Yeah? Indeed, he's got
(39:30):
a lot to teach these little tykes about how to
lift Thor's hammer and how to grow facial hair and
things like that.
Speaker 1 (39:37):
They have a lot to learn from Grandpa Dragon.
Speaker 2 (39:40):
Uh. And and they'll get some merch probably they'll get
a they'll get a dragon Redbeard knit beanie like I
think my kid has of yours and the hat and
the hat and whatever else, whatever else you got, all right,
so let me let me talk about Let me talk.
Speaker 1 (39:55):
About this for a second.
Speaker 2 (39:59):
The reason this deep Seak thing is so interesting falls
into a few different categories, and I'm going to just
summarize briefly a couple of things that the guest said.
Number One, these guys were able to build on top.
Speaker 1 (40:13):
Of chat gpt.
Speaker 2 (40:14):
They used chat GPT's platform, but then trained it for
like six million dollars. When other companies are talking about
training theirs for six hundred million dollars, They trained it
for six million dollars. And they used I don't know,
some single digit number one thousand chips to as the
(40:37):
basis for this, where other people are talking about using
one hundred thousand chips. So they did it really, really cheap.
Then they opened their model up to the public. They
made it open source so anybody can get it, and.
Speaker 1 (40:53):
Repurpose it for whatever they want.
Speaker 2 (40:56):
So it did immense damage to the business models of
both the hardware side and the software side of existing
AI companies, So that that's kind of the main reasons
it's important. It is, as the guest said, democratizing AI,
(41:19):
and it is going to make the development of new
AIS not like affordable for you and me. Right well,
you could be much much, much richer than I am.
It's still going to take some millions to develop AI,
to develop a decent, interesting new AI based what they
have shown is that it is. It can be done
(41:42):
for some millions, even ten million, twenty million. Again, sounds
like a lot to you and me, but not when
you're thinking about comparing it to what Meta, the parent
company of Facebook, said a week ago or so that
they intend to spend sixty years sixty five billion. So
(42:03):
AI was looking like a place that only the biggest
players could hang out and we would all get whatever
little crumbs they decided to let us have. And deep
and Deep Seek has thrown a massive, massive monkey wrench
into that. Ross Is his name really Dragon Redbeard? Why
(42:24):
yes it is. We'll be right back by the way.
I just got to answer one more one more listener question.
And you know, so Dragon decided not to show up
at work yesterday, correct, because he's waiting for a package delivery.
Speaker 1 (42:38):
And I'm like, eh, and so.
Speaker 2 (42:39):
I'm a little cranky, and so I'm going to out
some personal information about Dragon right now, just because I'm
a little bit cranky with him. So a listener asks.
So a listener asked, is his name really Dragon Redbeard?
And I said yes. Listener asks again, I have a
follow up? Was he born legally with that name? And
(43:01):
I would like to just say, I don't care if
you don't want me to disclose Dragon, I'm I'm a
little mad that you didn't work yesterday. Uh no, Uh no,
His his birth name was Mephistopheles red Beard. Uh.
Speaker 1 (43:15):
He decided it was a little too long. Kids made
fun of him.
Speaker 2 (43:19):
My little sister couldn't say in middle school. His little
sister couldn't even say Mephistopheles red Beard and so uh
and so he changed it to Dragon Redbeard. And I
don't I don't care if I've embarrassed you publicly.
Speaker 4 (43:33):
I've grown across. I am in my forties, so I
I you know, I've gotten over.
Speaker 2 (43:37):
It, all right, Uh, so all right, since you played
the music, I gotta do this thing you were supposed
to talk about it.
Speaker 1 (43:46):
Yes, you know, I read the blog.
Speaker 2 (43:50):
Dot com. All right, all right, So there's a case
report that was published over at the Journal of the
American Medicine Medical Association Cardiology MAGS seeing JAMA Cardiology is
the name is the name of the magazine. Let me
just read this like a summary of a medical case
report that a doctor posted. A man in his forties
(44:10):
presented with a three week history of asymptomatic yellow yellowish
nodules on his palms, souls, and elbows. Now, in another
I posted a picture of this on the blog that's
not in that particular article.
Speaker 1 (44:24):
But there's a picture of this.
Speaker 2 (44:26):
You can't see his face, but he's showing his hands
and like all the intersections of the knuckles, you know,
like the creases across your fingers if you're looking at
your palm, they're all yellow on his hand and parts
of his palm are yellow. And it's really quite odd.
It's quite odd. And so the patient I'm reading now again,
the patients adopted a carnivore diet approximately eight months before presentation. Now,
(44:51):
listen to this dragon because you and I have both
done some weight loss, You've done a lot more than
I have. His dietary habits included a high intake fats,
consisting of six to nine pounds of cheese, sticks of butter,
and additional fat incorporated into his daily hamburgers.
Speaker 4 (45:13):
I was gonna ask, this is not six to nine
pounds of cheese daily?
Speaker 2 (45:18):
I think, so wow, No, okay, no, it's it's sixty
nine pounds of a combination of cheese, butter, and additional fat.
Speaker 4 (45:29):
Even though sixty nine pounds of a combination of that
isn't that nuts?
Speaker 3 (45:32):
Sad?
Speaker 2 (45:33):
It's difficult to do, and he lost a lot of
weight doing that. He reported weight loss, increased energy, and
improvemental clarity. Physical examination revealed multiple painless yellowish nodules on
his palms and elbows. His cholesterol level exceeded one thousand
milligrams per desolat one thousand. His baseline was two hundred
(45:59):
and ten to three three hundred normal. I think for
a human like where you want to be is probably
in the high one hundreds, one fifty something like that.
He was at a smidge thousands, a smidge high by much.
The diagnosis was something called zanthelasma x A n tche
(46:20):
lasma and then they say this case highlights the impact
of dietary patterns on lipid levels and the importance of
managing hypercholesterolemia to prevent complications. The dude was turning yellow.
The dude was turning yellow. This just popped up on
(46:42):
my on my radar, even though I guess it was
filed a couple of days ago. But I just got
an email blast about it from Advanced Colorado. And this
is a ballot measure that Advanced Colorado is going to
aim to get on the ballot. I expect it is
for this November. And it's it's an interesting one, Okay.
So here's the idea. If you have a particular political perspective,
(47:08):
and it might not be the perspective of the majority,
let's say, or even if it is you, you sometimes
want to try to put your political opponents in a
little bit of a bind. How do you do that
with a ballot measure by doing something that you know
your opponents won't like, but doing it in a limited
(47:30):
enough way that it that it comes across as and
actually hopefully is common sense and the kind of thing
that normal people would tend to support rather than going
way too far and doing something that will allow the
other side to portray you as a crazy person. So
(47:53):
this thing that's proposed right now is a very very
short and I don't think there's any that the legislature
themselves would pass it, because the legislature is dominated by
Democrats who wouldn't go along with this. And I don't
know why. I don't know why these Democrats prefer criminals
over their own citizens, but they do.
Speaker 1 (48:14):
And I don't know why you keep voting for them.
By the way, those of you who put a.
Speaker 2 (48:18):
Democrat state senator or state rep into the state House,
I don't know why you've done that. But in any case,
the text of this proposed ballot measures pretty simple, and
I quote, State and local law enforcement must cooperate with
(48:38):
federal requests to notify the Department of Homeland Security prior
to release and prior to release and detain inmates if
a the inmate is charged with a crime of violence
as defined by Colorado Revised Statutes, or b the inmate
(49:01):
has been convicted of a prior felony. So only under
those two circumstances seems pretty reasonable. State and local law enforcement.
Speaker 5 (49:10):
Must notify ICE before they release somebody they have in detention,
or they must detain somebody if the person that they
are in contact with or already detaining is charged with
a crime of violence or has been convicted of a
(49:33):
prior felony.
Speaker 1 (49:34):
Seems pretty straightforward.
Speaker 2 (49:36):
Again, we live in a rather insane world right now,
where for some reason there are people who will oppose that.
Speaker 1 (49:43):
But I want you to know what's out there, and.
Speaker 2 (49:46):
I think there's a good chance we'll see it on
the November ballot. And I think it's common sense enough.
It doesn't go very far, it doesn't go too far
as some people might want to put it. So I
think there's a decent chance it'll pass. We will see meantime.
And I'm going to get onto something else in a
second here. But Jared Polus has been in the media
(50:06):
a little bit. I think it was a television or
radio interview where he said that Colorado is not a
sanctuary state.
Speaker 1 (50:12):
Of course it is.
Speaker 2 (50:14):
Colorado is a sanctuary state under state law.
Speaker 3 (50:18):
Right.
Speaker 2 (50:18):
I mean, you can redefine sanctuary state, which I guess
is what he's trying to do. But under state law
as it stands, no law enforcement in this state can
cooperate with federal law enforcement to aid in any way
in the deportation of a criminal illegal alien. We are
(50:42):
a sanctuary state, and this law this not law, but
will it would.
Speaker 1 (50:49):
Effectively be a law.
Speaker 2 (50:50):
If that passes through the initiative process or the referendum process,
it would have the force of law, but that would
overcome a little bit of our sanctuary state in this
I don't really know why Jared, who is actually pretty
good on this issue compared to many Democrats.
Speaker 1 (51:09):
In the state legislature.
Speaker 2 (51:11):
I don't know why Jared wants to run around saying
we're not a sanctuary state when everybody knows that we are.
Speaker 1 (51:17):
All Right, I'm going to do something different. This is
a little bit.
Speaker 2 (51:20):
Of a long note, but it's one of the most
interesting things I've read in quite a while. It's written
by a guy named Christopher Caldwell who is writing for
the Free Press at VFP dot com, and I just
think this pretty fabulous story, so.
Speaker 1 (51:38):
I'm going to share most of this.
Speaker 2 (51:40):
So tumultuous was the first week of Donald Trump's second
term that people barely noticed a week on that last Tuesday,
he repealed affirmative action by executive.
Speaker 1 (51:49):
Order that's astonishing.
Speaker 2 (51:51):
For half a century, affirmative action has been the federal
government's principal instrument for carrying out desegregation, the longest and
costliest moral crusade and American history. After the nineteen seventies,
it was adapted to liberation movements from feminism to gay rights.
Supreme Court justices anguished over the way its call for
(52:13):
special consideration of minorities might clash with the letter of
the Civil Rights Act of nineteen sixty four, which barred
racial discrimination. Over the past decade, affirmative action became the
hammer of the diversity, Equity and Inclusion DEI movement, which
grew so unpopular that it has now brought affirmative action
and much else down with it. Trump's decision to repeal
(52:38):
it is the most significant policy change of this century,
more significant than the Affordable Care Act of twenty ten
or anything done about COVID. How can people be talking
about anything else?
Speaker 1 (52:49):
Yet? Major news outlets treat.
Speaker 2 (52:51):
Trump's bold move as a detail of personnel management. Quote
to stress and fury as Trump upends federal jobs, headlined
the New York Times.
Speaker 1 (53:02):
Somewhere along the line.
Speaker 2 (53:03):
The Trump administration came to understand in a sophisticated way
how the enforcement of civil rights actually works. Not many
Americans do, and it's worth reviewing. The standard Black History
Month account of civil rights stresses its idealistic and ethical side,
but like all government programs, it's better understood through its
bureaucratic and ruthless side. Affirmative action is mentioned in the
(53:29):
Civil Rights Act of nineteen sixty four, but the program
as we now understand it was launched a year later
with Lyndon Johnson's Executive Order one one two four six.
The President ordered companies and institutions doing business with the
government to have activist quote unquote non discrimination policies and
empowered officials now consolidated in the Office of Federal Contract
(53:53):
Compliance Programs to enforce them. The responsibilities for companies, laid
out over one hundred and fifty ffty eight pages in
Title forty one, Chapter sixty of the Code of Federal Regulations,
include quote comparing incumbency to availability, to outreach and positive recruitment,
and the meeting of goals and timetables set by the
(54:15):
federal government. Now, these goals were not always clear. The
safest thing was to treat them as quotas and match
incumbents meaning employees, to those available meaning the percentage of
a given ethnic group in the population, as closely as possible.
Executive orders don't require a democratic vote. They just lay
(54:36):
down the rules for the executive branch, of which the
President is the boss. They have the force of law
within all the federal agencies, which buy and sell enormous
amounts of goods and services. According to the Labor Department,
Johnson's executive order covered twenty percent of the American workforce,
potentially giving the president personal leverage over the economy, and
(54:58):
Johnson used it. He basically enlisted the country's top executives
as the commissars of a radical interpretation of civil rights policy.
They liked diversity from the moment it was invented until
last Tuesday.
Speaker 1 (55:14):
They had better Whenever a global chief.
Speaker 2 (55:17):
Diversity officer like Ken Barrett of General Motors intoned, diversity
is our strength.
Speaker 1 (55:23):
He was doing more than philosophizing.
Speaker 2 (55:26):
He was keeping billions of dollars of shareholder value safe
from the sanctions and penalties laid out in Chapter sixty
of the Code of Federal Regulations. Had Johnson's Affirmative Action
scheme been devised for anything but desegregation, it might have
been considered sinister and totalitarian.
Speaker 1 (55:44):
Since Ronald Reagan's time.
Speaker 2 (55:46):
Conservatives have crowed that they could undo affirmative Action with
the stroke of a pen.
Speaker 1 (55:52):
Reagan mulled doing so himself.
Speaker 2 (55:54):
In nineteen eighty five, but he faced opposition from corporate
donors and for more liberal Republicans led by Kansas Senator
Bob Dole, and he opted not to. In nineteen ninety six,
Tennessee Republican Senator Lamar Alexander tried to kickstart his presidential
candidacy with a promise to zero out affirmative Action, but
(56:15):
Republicans chose Dole instead.
Speaker 1 (56:18):
Now Trump has done what Reagan wouldn't.
Speaker 2 (56:22):
His repeal came via three executive orders, two issued on
inauguration Day. The first overturned dozens of Biden decrees, including
the Advancing Racial Equity executive Orders signed in the first
hours of his presidency in twenty twenty one. The second
ended all initiatives, offices, contracts, and employees connected to DEI,
(56:44):
which Trump referred to as quote illegal and immoral discrimination programs.
The decisive blow came the following day, in an order
called ending illegal discrimination and restoring merit based opportunity.
Speaker 1 (56:59):
Trump repealed the variety.
Speaker 2 (57:00):
Of executive orders, including Johnson's one, one, two, four six,
and explicitly bar bard that office I mentioned before that
manages federal contracts from enforcing affirmative action, and his Office
of Personnel Management followed through on the previous day's business,
ordering that all DEI federal employees be sent home, all
(57:22):
DEI federal contracts be terminated, and all efforts to pursue
federal DEI programs under another name be rooted out rip
affirmative action. But that's only part of the story. By
the way, if you're just joining, If you're just joining,
I'm sharing with you a brilliant article in the Free
Press THEFP dot com, written by a guy named Christopher Caldwell,
(57:44):
and it's entitled the Biggest policy change of the Century.
All right, let me continue. A curious element of Trump's
third executive order is it's invocation of the president's solemn
duty to enforce longstanding federal civil rights law men the
Civil Rights Act of nineteen sixty four. This is not
a concession, it's a threat. While the Civil Rights Act
(58:08):
mentioned affirmative action, it attached no specific meaning to the term,
and the law was resolutely color blind. Affirmative action programs,
with their differing treatment of races, are in tension with it.
DEI programs, many of which scapegoat white people, are even
more so. It is Trump's assertion that DEI programs quote
(58:30):
violate the text and spirit of our long standing federal
civil rights.
Speaker 1 (58:35):
Laws and quote.
Speaker 2 (58:36):
Trump is doing more than reforming the public sector. He
is signaling to the private sector that certain kinds of
programs are liable to prosecution, even asking each federal agency
to name up to nine large private sector organizations that
(58:56):
might be engaged in discrimination. Wow, there can be littled
out of the general effectiveness of such methods. In twenty
twenty and twenty twenty one, as civil rights regulators and
the Biden administration rallied behind it, DEI went from being
the hobby of a handful of quirky CEOs to the unanimous.
Speaker 1 (59:15):
Policy of corporate America.
Speaker 2 (59:19):
Today, the rush in the opposite direction is just as precipitous.
Among the new foes of DEI are some of its
erstwhile champions, Mark Zuckerberg's Meta Walmart and even Target, home
of the Tuck friendly bathing suit moral will follow.
Speaker 1 (59:37):
This, in turn, will.
Speaker 2 (59:39):
Have an effect on the entire ecology of the Democratic Party.
DEI and affirmative action are among the last things that
everyone in that divided party believes it and the source
of a good deal of its organizing muscle. Now there's
no work for affirmative action lawyers, diversity can insultants, or
(01:00:01):
inclusion trainers to do whole job categories are being zeroed out. Now,
it would be tempting to call Trump's actions and overreach
an intrusion into americans private lives or their freedom of association,
had not ten different administrations intruded this way over the
past sixty years, none more energetically than those of Presidents.
Speaker 1 (01:00:22):
Biden and Obama.
Speaker 2 (01:00:24):
In the Washington Post, labor lawyer Jason Schwartz of the
Powerhouse Washington firm Gibson Dunn stead of Trump's orders quote,
they are handing out sheriff's badges to private citizens to
sue about government contractor DEI programs. But that deputization is
(01:00:46):
what civil rights.
Speaker 1 (01:00:46):
Policy has always been.
Speaker 2 (01:00:48):
In other words, Trump is not just eliminating the affirmative
action enforcement machinery, He's.
Speaker 1 (01:00:53):
Throwing it in reverse.
Speaker 2 (01:00:55):
Companies will be assumed to be violating civil rights laws.
We suddenly learn if they engage in racial balancing, What
the hell is racial balancing? How do you define DEI?
For that matter, A different set of Americans are about
to learn how vague mandates like these can lead to
a feeling of being tyrannized and toyed with a little
(01:01:21):
bit more here. Affirmative action has been unpopular since its founding.
Speaker 1 (01:01:27):
As the late Harvard political sociologist.
Speaker 2 (01:01:29):
Nathan Glazer used to put it, the opposition it faced
has been quote uniformly enormous. Voters rejected in referendums, even
in blue states like California. They hate it because they
think it's racist. It was possible to believe at the
time of the Civil Rights Act of nineteen sixty four
(01:01:50):
that a good faith, moral commitment would suffice to remedy
the devilish racial antagonism that.
Speaker 1 (01:01:56):
Had beset the country since its founding.
Speaker 2 (01:01:58):
That that wouldn't work became obvious very quickly.
Speaker 1 (01:02:02):
Barely a year later.
Speaker 2 (01:02:04):
At the start of the summer of nineteen sixty five,
President Johnson argued before at Howard University graduating class that
it's not fair to make a runner quote who four
years has been hubbled by chains and quote compete with others.
It sounded generous, but it was dark. Three months later,
Johnson issued that executive order we mentioned, realizing that it
(01:02:27):
was possible to remedy a racist system only by favoring
the victim race in doses of remedial racism or what
the British apparently are more straightforward people than we are,
called reverse racism.
Speaker 1 (01:02:42):
This was the course.
Speaker 2 (01:02:43):
This was a course the public could not tolerate, and
neither government nor business could avow. A climate of dishonesty
was the result. Affirmative action was a big factor, maybe
the biggest, in convincing about half of Americans never to
trust anything any person.
Speaker 1 (01:03:03):
Of authority ever said.
Speaker 2 (01:03:06):
Ten presidents managed to insulate affirmative action from public accountability.
Then it became obvious to the public that changing anything
would require dismantling everything. And that's the end of the note. Again,
it's called the biggest policy change of the century, written
by Christopher Caldwell writing at The Free PRESSVFP dot com.
(01:03:32):
Let me take a moment and comment on that, because
in a way it relates to a metaphor that I
like in politics. You often hear about people talking about
a pendulum in politics, right, you get you know, conservative government,
and then people don't like it, and then they vote
in a liberal government, and then they don't like it
(01:03:52):
and swings back and they vote in a conservative government
in ste pendulum that swings like dragon Redbeard swinging his
new baby grandson in his arms to put him to sleep.
What I often wonder, and have wondered aloud from time
to time is whether we occasionally think something is a pendulum,
(01:04:14):
but it's actually a ratchet. So you know what a
ratchet is, right, you know, you put the socket on
the head of the bolt and you crank it, and
the ratchet goes.
Speaker 1 (01:04:26):
One way. But when you want to turn the bolt.
Speaker 2 (01:04:29):
The other way, the ratchet just click click, click, and
it doesn't grab anything, and the bolt doesn't turn, and
then when you pull back in the original direction, they
don't keep going that way. Right. So a ratchet is
something where in a way, you actually can move the
thing in both directions, but it only actually turns the
thing it's connected to in one direction. And I've wondered
(01:04:52):
for a long time whether America's descent into wokeness, which
used to be called political correctness.
Speaker 1 (01:04:59):
Then it became the.
Speaker 2 (01:05:00):
Same way that global warming became climate change, with global
warming becoming climate change, and I'm talking about the mindset
about it. At least until right about now, it's been
a ratchet.
Speaker 1 (01:05:13):
It never really swung back.
Speaker 2 (01:05:15):
And political correctness never really swung back. Even the political
correctness predates let's say George W.
Speaker 1 (01:05:22):
Bush, but he didn't swing back. It was a ratchet.
Speaker 2 (01:05:27):
We got a certain level of political correctness, and there
were things people felt like they weren't allowed to say,
and jokes you weren't allowed to tell, and you know,
things you weren't supposed to find entertaining or whatever. And
then when Obama came in, the ratchet just kept going.
And then when Biden came in, I mean, this stuff
just exploded, but through Obama and Biden and during Trump too,
(01:05:49):
but not because of Trump, but in reaction to Trump.
We had all this cancel culture and people losing their
jobs over non funny jokes that everybody knew was joke,
and everybody walking on eggshells, including me a little bit,
even what I do for a living. And it's fantastic, heartening, hope,
(01:06:19):
inspiring that for the first time in at least a generation.
This tyrannical desire to control not just what you say,
but what you think, is swinging backwards towards normalcy, towards tolerance,
(01:06:43):
away from censorship. And what we see right now, of
which Trump is more or at least as much a
symptom as a cause, is that we're seeing a true pendulum.
(01:07:05):
Maybe it's been a ratchet before, it's a pendulum now
it's swinging back. And yes, there will be some overshoot,
just like there always is with any pendulum political pendulum
swinging back in some direction. It can overshoot as it
goes back to and a little bit past the original
thing on a case by case basis. But all in all,
(01:07:26):
this is just the pendulum that this country needs. Our new,
newly redesigned iHeart Radio app absolutely free app, by the way,
and it functions a lot like a car radio with
presets and a dial you can turn and and you
can scan and stuff like that. It's it's pretty cool.
So anyway, iHeartRadio app. It's it's absolutely free. Make sure
you have the latest version and then set set KOA
(01:07:48):
as a pre set.
Speaker 1 (01:07:49):
All right.
Speaker 2 (01:07:49):
A listener asked me to follow up on a story
the Chad Bauer talked about a little bit earlier on
and just you know, a little a little inside baseball here.
Speaker 1 (01:07:58):
Thing it is.
Speaker 2 (01:08:00):
It's not because I think the news is unimportant, and
I'm not being sarcastic. It's not because I think the
news is unimportant. But I usually only have like half
of one ear listening to the news during the news breaks,
because I'm looking at what I want to talk about
with you next, or connecting a guest, or you know,
(01:08:22):
thinking something about the show. So every once in a
while hears something out of the corner, come up with
a bad analogy. Yeah too. That can happen all the time.
I hear something out of the corner of my ear right,
and I'm not sure which part of the year counts
to the corner, but I hear.
Speaker 1 (01:08:35):
Something out of the corner of my ear and I'm like, wait,
what was that?
Speaker 2 (01:08:37):
And and sometimes I ask Chad to stick around. Sometimes
I don't. Sometimes my brain processes so slowly that Chad
says it, I hear it without knowing that I'm hearing it.
Chad finishes his newscast, gets out of the news booth,
and walks back to his desk and three seconds later,
(01:09:01):
what pops in through my tiny brain is wait, did
he just say that? But then it's too late to
ask him to stay. So that's what happened with this.
And it was a thing about Tabor and I want
to A listener asked if I could follow up on it,
and I said, I don't know about it, So I
went and looked it up. And this is on kdvr's website.
(01:09:23):
There are news partners at Fox thirty one. Today is
the first day that the IRS can start accepting and
processing your tax returns for last year. And I'm going
to quote from KDIVR dot com. Colorado filers need to
keep an eye out for a key step to make
sure they get all the money that they are eligible
for back in their wallets. Coloraden's are set to get
(01:09:43):
TABOR refunds after they file their taxes this year, but
the state is reminding residents that they have to opt in.
The Colorado Department of Revenue is hoping to help taxpayers
make sure they get back as much money as they
can when they file their taxes this year. Elizabeth Kosar,
communicationation's director for the Department of Revenue, says, unfortunately, if
(01:10:04):
you didn't check that box for your taxes that you
filed in twenty twenty four, for tax here twenty twenty three,
you did miss out on your TABOR refund. Tabor is
something you need to opt into. So please check that box,
or again, have whoever is preparing your taxes check that box.
(01:10:25):
Oh mean, now this is gonna sound super bougie, but
I'm gonna say it anyway, and you're all used to
me being like that anyway. In my entire lifetime as
a working adult, since I was either twenty one or
(01:10:46):
twenty two years old, I'm not sure what probably twenty one,
I have never done my own taxes.
Speaker 1 (01:10:56):
And it's not because I'm lazy.
Speaker 2 (01:10:58):
It's because my first career was as an options trader,
and at the end of a year, I would get
so much paper and it's so complicated, those taxes and
all the rules that go along with being a professional trader,
and there's no way I could do my taxes myself.
Speaker 4 (01:11:17):
Yeah, yours is a little bit more complicated than somebody
that just you know, works at a subway.
Speaker 1 (01:11:22):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (01:11:22):
And even when I was self employed, too complicated, too
much law around it. And then I did you know,
some kind of wacky investments, and I'm in some partnerships
and stuff like that. And so now, even though I'm
not a trader anymore, my my taxes are still too
complicated for me to do by myself. I just I
(01:11:44):
wouldn't mind it, because I pay my account like seventeen
hundred dollars a year, which annoys me. But anyway, my
point is, I have no idea how long it's been
the case that you have to check the box on
the Colorado tax thing to get a table refund if
(01:12:07):
one is available. I wonder if you can tell me.
I wonder if you can tell me by text at
five six six nine zero. There's not a trick question.
I really don't know the answer. I wonder if you
can tell me. Has it always been that way? Did
it change recently to be that way. I don't do
my own taxes, so.
Speaker 1 (01:12:27):
I don't know. My accountant does him. He sends me them.
I just look at the I don't even look at
the numbers.
Speaker 2 (01:12:33):
How am I supposed to judge what's right and what's wrong?
I had no idea, So I just sign it. Yeah,
I can you evensure that he checked the box? I
so my accountant knows that, but I don't know if
there's always been a box. I want someone to text
me at five six six nine zero who actually knows
the answer to this question. In fact, maybe I'll try
(01:12:53):
to get in touch with this Elizabeth Kosar woman and
ask her if she knows.
Speaker 3 (01:12:58):
I don't.
Speaker 1 (01:12:58):
I don't know her.
Speaker 2 (01:12:59):
I've never been in contact with her, but I might
be able to get to her, you know, into state
government somehow. But if you know, text me at five
six six nine zero and tell me. Now here's my thing.
As soon as I read about this story, you know,
I heard Chad kind of out of the corner of
my ear.
Speaker 1 (01:13:14):
I heard Chad.
Speaker 2 (01:13:15):
Mention, and then the listener asked me about it. I
went and looked it up, and I immediately got really mad.
Why the hell should you have to opt into getting
your tax refund?
Speaker 1 (01:13:29):
And and when.
Speaker 2 (01:13:30):
The state government says that, or when there it's characterized here,
hold on, give me, let me, let me let me
look for this. Yeah, okay, so the KDVR writer it
was it wasn't necessarily the government person, but the KDVR
writer said, the Colorado Department of Revenue is hoping to
help taxpayers make sure they get as much money back
(01:13:52):
as they can when they.
Speaker 1 (01:13:52):
File their taxes this year.
Speaker 2 (01:13:54):
Look if Colorado, and I don't know if this legislature,
if the legislature did this, or if the Department of
Revenue just can has the already to make this decision
as to whether there's a checkbox on the farm. But
nobody can honestly say that you're trying to help people
make sure they get as much money back as they
can by putting a checkbox on the tax return saying
(01:14:16):
op me into TABOR. If you want to make sure
people get the money back, right, there shouldn't be any
box at all.
Speaker 1 (01:14:23):
You just automatically get your tax.
Speaker 4 (01:14:24):
Refund or even worst case scenario opt out.
Speaker 2 (01:14:29):
An even worst case scenario would be opt out. Should
worst case scenario should be having an opt out box.
But what we have now is the worst case scenario.
Why would you make people have to opt in to
get their own money back. I want to know who
did it. I'm gonna try to find out. I'm gonna
try to get to the bottom of it. I don't
know how long it's been there. I emailed a friend
(01:14:51):
of mine in the state legislature, asking do you think
you could jam this into a piece of legislation to
say that there cannot be an opt in box.
Speaker 1 (01:15:00):
There must be nothing, and you get your refund or
an opt out box.
Speaker 2 (01:15:04):
If you're some kind of you know, weird person who
wants government to have more of your money, all right,
then check the box, or or maybe your table refund
would only be nine dollars, and you decide it's not
even worth your time to get a nine dollars check
and then go have to deal with depositing it, so
you might as well just let.
Speaker 1 (01:15:20):
The state keep it.
Speaker 2 (01:15:21):
Okay, all right, I wouldn't even do that if I
were in charge.
Speaker 1 (01:15:25):
I don't want the government to have it.
Speaker 2 (01:15:26):
But but the thing is, having a checkbox is clearly
must only be I do not think you will have
a hard time convincing me that there is any explanation
for having an opt in checkbox for your Tabor refund
other than somebody in the government hoping that some people
(01:15:51):
neglect to check the box and therefore the state gets
to keep their money. I cannot think of any other
reason why. So during that break I emailed the TABOR
spokeswoman and I asked, here, let me let me go
find the email. Hang on this semi professional radio say,
hang on a second, I'm gonna go over to here.
I'm gonna go over to my scent items. And so
(01:16:15):
I emailed. I emailed her and I asked, can you
please tell me one how many people didn't check the
table refund box last year too? What that represented in
total dollars not refunded to Coloradden's.
Speaker 1 (01:16:25):
I could do that math myself.
Speaker 2 (01:16:26):
Actually, I'm sure, because I think everybody got the same.
Speaker 1 (01:16:29):
Table refund last year.
Speaker 2 (01:16:30):
It amount I was a flat amount, and how long
you've had to opt in to get the table refund.
Let me also note, by the way, just in passing here,
that this year the table refunds it will be less
than before because the Democrats passed a bunch of things
that are basically designed to spend as much of the
table refund as they can so they don't have to
(01:16:52):
give much of it back, but they will still have
to give some back. And this year it's going to
go back to a more traditional kind of formula where
your Tabor refund will be kind of sort of proportional
to your income, which is how it should be in
because Tabor refund is supposed to be a rough proxy
for how much you overpaid in income and sales taxes,
(01:17:15):
and so it makes sense that people who make more
money obviously paid more in income tax and probably paid
more in sales tax, and therefore should get a bigger
tabor refund. So in any case, it's good that that's
going to be the case this year. Dragons, can you
actually no, Yeah, let's do this thing I asked you about,
and then I'll get to my own audio in a second.
(01:17:36):
I have no idea what Caroline Levitt is saying right now,
but I wanted to just share a moment with you
of Caroline Levitt, who is the White House Press Secretary,
and her very first White House press conference. I wanted
to take it just because her first I don't know
what she's talking about. Let's drop in for a minute.
Speaker 1 (01:17:56):
Perhaps that role itself.
Speaker 3 (01:17:59):
Yeah, I think the fact that they had a gap trun.
Speaker 2 (01:18:03):
Oh, oh, did we lose it? Come whether we're sorry,
we are sometime for certainty of folks. Then also is
that uncertainty? How does that uncertainty service the president's voters?
Speaker 6 (01:18:15):
Well, I think there's only uncertainty in this room amongst
the media. There's no uncertainty in this building. So let
me provide the certainty and the clarity that all of
you need. This is not a blanket pause on federal
assistance in grant programs from the Trump administration. Individual assistance
that includes I'm not naming everything that's included, but just
to give you a few examples, social Security benefits, Medicare benefits,
(01:18:39):
food Stamps, welfare benefits. Assistance that is going directly to
individuals will not be impacted by this pause. And I
want to make that very clear to any Americans who
are watching at home who may be a little bit
confused about some of the media reporting this administration, if
you are receiving individual assistance from the federal government.
Speaker 1 (01:18:57):
You will find I think that's enough.
Speaker 2 (01:19:00):
Not not out of disrespect to her, but that was good, right.
The reporter asked something about confusion, and her answer, she's
gonna be she's gonna be combative with the media for
as long as she's in this job. Right to her,
uh and and to many Republicans, the media is the enemy,
and so she's gonna be combative like that. And she said, no,
the only confusion is in this room with you reporters.
(01:19:22):
What they were asking about, By the way, is something
that I haven't talked about yet on the show. I
did have it as a thing I might talk about,
and so maybe I'll get to it for I'll get
to it now as long as she just as long
as she just mentioned it. And and that is that
the Trump administration just put out an order to pause
(01:19:45):
essentially all federal grants and loans that don't go to individuals, right, So,
as she said, doesn't impact so security veterans benefits, right,
because that because that's.
Speaker 1 (01:20:00):
Money from the government to you.
Speaker 2 (01:20:03):
So this is instead money from the federal government to
a nonprofit, to a foreign government, to I don't know,
a science organization, to anything like that. And they are
going to go through them and they are going to
make sure that these things comport with presidential priorities.
Speaker 1 (01:20:26):
Now, I'm just going to add one thing to that.
Speaker 2 (01:20:30):
Most of these things are authorized by law. Most of
these things are created by acts of Congress. And once
that's the case, the program is created by Congress, the
money is appropriated by Congress. There is almost no legal
authority for the president to say we're not funding that anymore.
(01:20:53):
The only way to say to say we're not funding
that anymore is to have Congress pass the bill repealing
the funding.
Speaker 1 (01:21:00):
And this may well be one of those.
Speaker 2 (01:21:02):
Areas like the birthright citizenship thing, where there will be
immediate lawsuits because there is immediate harm, and the Trump
administration will I don't know how you define win or
lose here, but it'll probably be more like losing for them,
because I think their way out on a limb, even
(01:21:23):
though I understand why they want to do this, I
think they're way out on a limb. Where they're on
more solid ground would be if Congress said we authorize a.
Speaker 1 (01:21:36):
Pool of money.
Speaker 2 (01:21:39):
To try to achieve such and such a goal, but
without saying the money is going to this group or
that group or that country. And then and then the
federal government decides actually which groups are getting the money.
Within the executive branch they make that decision. That can
be an area where they may be on more solid footing.
(01:22:00):
But you know, listening to listen to Caroline Levitt for
ninety seconds, she sounds pretty good.
Speaker 1 (01:22:06):
Well.
Speaker 2 (01:22:06):
This pause on federal payments to institutions impact student loans,
because with student loans, the government is paying college, they're
not paying the person. The answer is no, it will
not impact student loans. Even though the money is going
from the government to the college, that money is tied
(01:22:28):
to you when it is considered a specific benefit, a
benefit for a specific individual. So this pause does not
impact student loans. Now, it appears that this is an
ongoing topic of conversation at the White House Press conference.
This is Caroline Levitt is a new Press secretary, and
(01:22:51):
I think she might be talking about this right now,
So let's just drop in again and have a listen.
Speaker 7 (01:22:56):
Thank you some of the concision I think making here
with this cause on federal funding. You've made it clear
if you're not stopping funds that go directly to individuals,
But there certainly are lots of organizations that receive funding
and then may pass along a benefit meals on wheels,
for one, they provide meals for over two point two
million seniors. What is the president's message to Americans out there,
many of whom supported him and voted for him, who
(01:23:18):
are concerned that this is going to impact them directly,
even if, as you said, the funding isn't coming directly
to their way.
Speaker 6 (01:23:25):
I have now been asked and answered this question four
times to individuals at home who receive direct assistance from
the federal government. You will not be impacted by the
federal Freese. In fact, O and B just sent out
a memo to Capitol Hill with Q and A to
clarify some of the questions and the answers that all
of you are asking me right now. Again, direct assistants
(01:23:48):
will not be impacted. I've been asked and answered about
this O and B memo. There's many other topics of
the day, Jackie Hyder, Correct.
Speaker 2 (01:23:54):
Assistance, Carolina.
Speaker 7 (01:23:54):
It's going to another organization and then trickling down a
direct assistance that is in the hands of the American people.
Speaker 3 (01:24:00):
Will not be impacted.
Speaker 2 (01:24:01):
Again.
Speaker 7 (01:24:01):
As I said to Peter, we will continue to provide.
Speaker 6 (01:24:03):
That list as it comes to fruition. But O and
B right now is focused on analyzing the federal government's spending,
which is exactly what the American people elected President Trump
to do.
Speaker 1 (01:24:12):
I want to watch the earlier one immigration hearing.
Speaker 7 (01:24:15):
Five hundred arrests ICE has made so far since President
Trump came back into office. Can you just tell us
the numbers how many have a criminal record versus those
who are just in the country illegal, with.
Speaker 6 (01:24:25):
All of them because they illegally broke our nation's laws,
and therefore they are criminals as far as this administration goes.
I know the last administration didn't see it that way.
So it's a big culture shift in our nation to
view someone who breaks our immigration laws as a criminal.
But that's exactly what they are here.
Speaker 2 (01:24:39):
All right, let's pause it there, but I think I
want to come back to that dragon if you can.
If you can pause it, that last answer on the
immigration thing is interesting too. My understanding, if I if
I remember correctly, be okay, crossing the border illegally, I guess,
is a crime. Try and remember this correctly. It's weird
provisions of law. Being in the country illegally, which is
(01:25:01):
kind of a different thing from crossing illegally is I
think a civil violation, so you wouldn't call it a crime.
I think Caroline well understands that the question being asked
is what percentage of the people who have been deported
have committed crimes since coming into the country. She gave
the spin that she wanted to give, but she's clearly
(01:25:23):
very quick. I think she's gonna be I think she's
gonna be good at I think she's gonna be good at
that job. Anyway, I want to just share quickly a
listener text and this is this is important. I'm just
gonna stick with this for a minute. So the Trump
administration announced this thing, right, They're going to pause all
basically loans and grants that kind of spending money, money
(01:25:45):
that's going out to organizations, not to individuals. In order
to get a court case heard challenging a government action,
you in almost every case need to demonstrate that you
are harmed by the action. And if you're going to
(01:26:06):
try to get an immediate injunction, which is a judge
saying to the government, you must stop doing whatever that
thing is or restart doing something that you were stopping
immediately because what it does is creating immediate harm.
Speaker 1 (01:26:28):
To the plaintiffs.
Speaker 2 (01:26:31):
And this and part is important, and the plaintiffs haves
a pretty decent chance of winning the case. I think
that might happen here. And here's an example. This is
a listener text from just a few minutes ago. Ross
This decision by Trump is affecting my family personally. My
wife is at three pm today going to be furloughed
(01:26:55):
for god knows how long. This is a razor situation,
not an act situation. And then what the listener means
by that is what Trump is doing is just like
a giant meat axe, not subtle at all, just cutting
off everything where really, if they're allowed to do this
at all, what they should probably be doing. And my
listener says, you know, using a razor for more precise
(01:27:17):
cutting where it needs to go.
Speaker 1 (01:27:19):
Her program is the listener text.
Speaker 2 (01:27:21):
Now, her program has no dei nonsense in it, but
she still has to deal with this. Her grant is
with the physics department at the University of Colorado. So
again taking the sort of legalistic position here, here's here's
what I expect will happen. Somebody is a part of
(01:27:48):
a program that was authorized specifically.
Speaker 1 (01:27:52):
By Congress in a bill.
Speaker 2 (01:27:54):
Congress says two point seventy five million dollars to the
University of Colorado Physics Department to study such and such,
and that grant goes to fund that program and the
salaries of the people in that program, and the rent
and the health insurance and the computers and whatever else
(01:28:15):
they need to run that program. The grant is the funding,
and again very important in my example, the Congress specifically
authorized that grant to that department. It would be different
potentially in my legal analysis as a non lawyer, if
(01:28:35):
government said we allocate to the I don't know, Department
of Energy two point seven million dollars to study a
certain kind of energy physics, and the department can decide
who gets the money, that's a different question. If the
federal government is making the decision, then the president can
(01:28:58):
pause it, change it, do almost anything. But if Congress
made the decision, he really doesn't have the authority to
do anything at all. So what I expect to happen.
In fact, how about this, I expect it has already happened.
I expect there has already been a lawsuit filed, or
ten or one hundred lawsuits filed by people like my
(01:29:22):
listener's wife, who are in programs that were explicitly authorized
by Congress and who are now being furloughed or otherwise harmed.
Speaker 1 (01:29:33):
So the harm is immediate, and.
Speaker 2 (01:29:37):
The president does not have the authority to take the action.
And I expect that well before the end of the week,
a federal judge somewhere will rule that the Trump administration cannot.
Speaker 1 (01:29:54):
Do this and will.
Speaker 2 (01:29:56):
Say we understand or at least can block payments of
any sort on programs that were specifically authorized by Congress
to go to that recipient.
Speaker 1 (01:30:14):
I think that.
Speaker 2 (01:30:14):
I bet you that lawsuit. I bet you a bunch
of those lawsuits have already already been filed.
Speaker 1 (01:30:23):
Wow, here's another side. Ross.
Speaker 2 (01:30:26):
You can tell your other listener who texted in that
I lost my job because the Biden administration started making
mass payoffs of student loans and cut the contracted amount
they paid my employer. So I've been out of work
for five months. Way too many people, by the way,
way too many people dependent on the federal government for work.
Speaker 1 (01:30:47):
What is all this? Why?
Speaker 2 (01:30:49):
And look, I don't want anybody to lose a job,
but why is somebody in a student loan business losing
a job because of something government did actually know the answer?
Because Barack Obama nationalized the student loan program when trying
to make Obamacare look cheaper than it actually was, and
they used fake assumed profits from the student loan program
and offset their crazy expenses for healthcare. And they said, well,
(01:31:12):
we're going to lose a trillion and a half dollars
in healthcare, but we're going to make five hundred billion
dollars in student loan profits. So the bill is only
going to cost a trillion, and of course it was
all both sides were lies. It costs more, and there
were no student loan profits or almost no student loan profits,
not really a very profitable business. But in any case,
why is the government there? And why are people at
(01:31:32):
CU getting federal government money? And why are people anywhere
getting federal government What is federal government money? That's my
money and your money and our children's money. Why are
they getting in Where is it in the constitution that
the federal government has a role to fund such and
such research, to fund freaking gain of function research in Wuhan, China,
(01:31:56):
to take over the student loan industry, to fund and
I don't know, some small.
Speaker 1 (01:32:01):
Part of education. And even though they only fund a small.
Speaker 2 (01:32:04):
Part of education, it still puts their hooks in.
Speaker 1 (01:32:06):
It, and they get to tell people what to do.
Speaker 2 (01:32:10):
I mean, this is to me, I'm on a bit
of a rant here, I realized to me, even though
actually I think Trump probably can't do much.
Speaker 1 (01:32:23):
Of what he's doing with this.
Speaker 2 (01:32:26):
I love the fact that it's gonna start waking a
lot of people up to the fact that too many
people make money by sucking on the government teat, which
really is my children's future earnings.
Speaker 1 (01:32:43):
It's insane.
Speaker 2 (01:32:47):
State government is a little better in the sense that
states have to run balanced budgets so they can hire
more people than they need. But they're gonna have to
cut somewhere else or they're gonna have to raise tw
But either way they're gonna have to deal with the
voters on it right away. But since the federal government
just keeps running up bigger and bigger debt, they're piling
this stuff on the heads of our children. The state
(01:33:09):
really can't pile it too much on the heads of
our children. A little bit when some parts of the
state do bond offerings that are gonna be paid off
in twenty years and such. But you know, the federal
government's a whole different level, and it's immoral and it's disgusting,
and maybe two things. Maybe this will get a bunch
(01:33:33):
of people thinking, wow, now that you think about it,
that really does seem like too many people getting their
money from the federal government. So that could be one thing,
and then the other thing, and this would be great.
The other thing might be maybe some of these programs
would come to stay to themselves.
Speaker 1 (01:33:50):
You know what, our.
Speaker 2 (01:33:53):
Federal funding might not be as stable or reliable a
funding source as we have been thinking.
Speaker 1 (01:34:00):
So maybe we should look for different funding.
Speaker 2 (01:34:02):
Maybe we should try to get funding from nonprofits, from charities,
from rich people, from foundations, from corporations, from anything other
than government. I remember this too, Remember this too. An
(01:34:22):
organization that is getting funding from the federal government is
getting funding whose source is basically the moral equivalent of
a mugger. Now, if you're running some program and you
go to a rich person or a foundation, or or
(01:34:46):
ten thousand not rich people, like the millions and millions
of Americans around the country. We're donating money to the
Red Cross and actually to our partners at Dream Center
to help people in California. Right, that's all volun terry.
There's no mugging involved. Right, there's no mugging involved. I say,
I'll give you an example. I say to you. I
(01:35:08):
say to you, we and iHeart are partnering with Dream
Center to help the people in California. Please text the
word relief to Oh my gosh, what's the number dragon?
Speaker 1 (01:35:21):
Text the word relief too. I don't have it informally.
Speaker 2 (01:35:24):
Three three one two zero three anyway, Uh, maybe dragon
will find it, and I do want to get it
right actually, and I should have it in front of me,
but I got rid of the piece of paper that
I had it, that I had it.
Speaker 1 (01:35:38):
Written down on.
Speaker 2 (01:35:39):
So let me three one zero zero okay, one zero
zero Okay. So I say you text three three one
zero zero and donate some money to help your fellow
Americans in need. And I've done it too, Okay. So
that's a real thing. That's what I heard is doing
with with dream Center. Three three one zero zero, text
the word relief to them. So there's no threat there.
(01:36:01):
I'm not threatening you. Hey, if you don't do this,
then something. There's no threat. It's a it's a request.
It's a suggestion, it's a mention. It's just a it's
a it's a thing. It's totally voluntary. I did it voluntarily.
You can do it or not do it voluntarily. But
(01:36:27):
when some group or even a person. This is even
true with Social Security, even though people don't like.
Speaker 1 (01:36:36):
To hear it.
Speaker 2 (01:36:37):
There's no Social Security Trust Fund. When you get money
from the government, there's no government money. It's just people's money,
either now or later. So I don't want to give
money through the government.
Speaker 1 (01:36:56):
To support X Y and Z. By the way, I
don't want.
Speaker 2 (01:37:01):
To give money through the government to support X Y
and Z, even though I like X Y and Z,
because it's not the government's function. If I want to
support X Y and Z, if I think they should
be supported, I will donate to them directly. I'm talking
specifically about things that aren't the government's function. I'm not
talking about government funding of the Defense Department, which is
clearly a legitimate.
Speaker 1 (01:37:21):
Function of government.
Speaker 2 (01:37:23):
I'm talking about government funding of almost everything else it does,
education and this kind of research and transportation and whatever.
There's no constitutional authority there any but separate from the
constitutional authority. So they're going to give out billions, They're
gonna give out FEMA AID, They're gonna give out billions
of my children's future earnings. And look, if I want
(01:37:44):
to fund the people in California, I'll do it myself.
And in fact, I've done it myself, right, I made
that donation. So how do they get the money from
me and from you? And let's not use the California
fires as an example, because most of us want to
help there, But there's a myriad tens of thousands of government.
Remember shrimp on a treadmill. You remember that, the scientific
(01:38:08):
thing that was funded by the government, and one of
the things they like to put a little treadmill in
a little quarium and had a shrimp running on it
and they were measuring something. The only way the government
gets that money, the only way is because there is
a threat that if you don't pay your taxes, you
go to jail or they take your house. Government, and
(01:38:33):
I want to be pretty specific here, federal government spending
on things that the constitution does not authorize is no
better than a mugger, no better than a mugger who says,
holds a gun up to your face, give me your wallet.
(01:38:54):
You got one hundred dollars in your wallet, the mugger says,
don't feel bad, I'm giving fifty dollars of this to charity.
You should feel at least half good. No, you just
stole my money. That's what government is. That's what government is,
(01:39:14):
and it's it's going to bankrupt us eventually, but it's
already bankrupted us morally.
Speaker 1 (01:39:23):
We have come to think, after.
Speaker 2 (01:39:27):
I don't know a century and a half of being
a nation without thinking this way, we have come to
think that it is the federal government's job to pay
for so many things, and it's not.
Speaker 1 (01:39:43):
It.
Speaker 2 (01:39:43):
It just isn't.
Speaker 1 (01:39:47):
I hope it gets better.
Speaker 2 (01:39:48):
I hope that some of what Trump is doing here
is causing some of these institutions to say, hey, maybe
we should look somewhere else for the funding. I think
that's probably a little too optimistic, all right. I think
that's probably a little too optimistic. But we'll see. All right.
(01:40:15):
One other thing I want to mention that I'm actually
seeing in a news report here from Fox that came
up in Caroline Levitt's press conference.
Speaker 1 (01:40:24):
The drones.
Speaker 2 (01:40:24):
You remember the drones flying over New Jersey that several
years earlier, a few years earlier, were flying over Colorado
but didn't get national attention.
Speaker 1 (01:40:31):
Do you remember this dragon?
Speaker 2 (01:40:33):
I don't remember them thlawing over Colorado. Oh okay, So
this week, weeks and weeks, there are these big drones
lights at night, flying over Colorado, especially more rural parts,
but not entirely eastern Colorado.
Speaker 1 (01:40:44):
And the Sheriff's out there like, what the heck is
all this?
Speaker 2 (01:40:46):
And it went on for weeks and nobody identified them,
and some people thought it was coming out of I
think an Air Force base in Wyoming, but they said
it wasn't and we never figured it out, and then
it went away, and then suddenly the drones show up
over New Jersey.
Speaker 1 (01:40:58):
Are they the same drones? I don't know. Mike might
be part of the same program. I don't know.
Speaker 2 (01:41:04):
And the government acted not very concerned. And somebody made
a wonderful point, which is when you got all these
drones over places where there are a lot of kind
of fancy and rich people. There are a lot of
fancy rich people in certain parts of New Jersey because
there's very very rich areas there. People who live in
(01:41:24):
New York, right, they could be in Connecticut, they could
be in New Jersey, they could be in Westchester County.
When the government's acting unconcerned, it probably means they have
some idea what it is, even though they're saying they
have no idea what it is. Because if they really
had no idea what it was, they'd be concerned. They'd
be worried what's going on here? So Caroline Levitt was
(01:41:46):
asked a question about this in the press conference day.
We don't have the audio, but I just have the
text in quotes here from a Fox News report.
Speaker 1 (01:41:53):
Quote, after research and study.
Speaker 2 (01:41:55):
The drones that were flying over New Jersey and large
numbers were authorized by the FAA for research and various
other reasons.
Speaker 1 (01:42:07):
And then she.
Speaker 2 (01:42:09):
Was pushed on a little bit more and she said,
this was not the enemy.
Speaker 1 (01:42:13):
Unbelievable. We knew that they knew.
Speaker 2 (01:42:17):
And even though we knew that they knew, and they
knew that we knew that they knew, they still wouldn't
tell us. Ridiculous And what did we know? We knew
that the government had some idea what the drones of
New over New Jersey were, or they would have been
a lot more worried about it. Correct.
Speaker 8 (01:42:34):
I would think that they would have been shot down
or something or something.
Speaker 1 (01:42:38):
Yeah, I can't imagine.
Speaker 2 (01:42:39):
Well, then the net did.
Speaker 8 (01:42:41):
Little weather balloon float all the way across.
Speaker 2 (01:42:44):
The United States? Indeed? Well, in her first ever press
conference today that just finished, Caroline Levitt said, and I quote,
after research and study, the drones that were flying over
New Jersey and large numbers were authorized by the FAA
for research and various other reasons. Ah, various reason Yeah.
Speaker 8 (01:43:00):
Okay, Susan Wickin actually tested me and said, this young
woman just crushed it.
Speaker 2 (01:43:05):
She did.
Speaker 1 (01:43:05):
Yeah, we took a little bit of it on the show.
Speaker 2 (01:43:07):
I'll go back and watch the shoes afternoon. She was
very good and just like like one example, a reporter
said something to her like, well, there's some confusion about
and then whatever it was, and then she said, you know,
the only confusion is among you in this room. Yeah.
Speaker 8 (01:43:21):
Yeah, she's Oh, I feel a little airy flesher right now.
Speaker 2 (01:43:24):
She's tough, so excited. It's very tough. What you got
coming up? Oh god, I have no idea.
Speaker 8 (01:43:28):
No, I'm talking the Common Sense Institute about their Free
Enterprise report. Yeah, and Leland Conway is going to stop by.
He's on his way to the Gold Dome to testify
against this god awful gun bill.
Speaker 2 (01:43:37):
Everybody stick around for Mandy stuff and things.
Speaker 1 (01:43:40):
Another fabulous show. I'll talk to you tomorrow.
It's it's better than a healthy breakfast.
Speaker 2 (00:01):
Playing with electronics first thing in the morning makes me happy.
Shannon is just shaking his head.
Speaker 1 (00:07):
So there is a lot.
Speaker 2 (00:09):
So, okay, I get various emails every morning from you know,
you sign up for these things, right, newspapers send out
emails and magazines and whatever. So I got one from
National Review and they had this quote in there.
Speaker 1 (00:24):
That's a very famous.
Speaker 2 (00:25):
Quote, or well somewhat famous quote, and it's attributed to
Vladimir Lenin, the guy who did the Russian Revolution. But
it's it's a great line, and it's a line that
reminds me very much of the bumper music that Channon
played yesterday regarding the first week of Donald Trump's presidency,
(00:49):
and that was, Oh, it was the band Bear Naked Ladies. Yeah,
and you know, it's been a week and Lenin. So
I'll get to the Lenin thing. It's attributed often to Lenin.
There are decades when nothing happens, and weeks when decades happen.
Speaker 1 (01:08):
That feels like the last week to me.
Speaker 2 (01:11):
I will also note so that quote I was reminded
of because it was used in a National Review email
I received this morning.
Speaker 1 (01:20):
And I'm not reading the National.
Speaker 2 (01:22):
Review thing right now, But it said something as Vladimir
Lenin equipped, right, as Vladimir Lenin equipped. There are decades
when nothing happens, and there are weeks when decades happened.
But in fact, it's very unlikely that Vladimir Lenin said it.
And over at Snopes, which is actually fairly decent site
(01:43):
when you're avoiding political stuff.
Speaker 1 (01:45):
Right when they got.
Speaker 2 (01:46):
Into the political fact checking, they got almost as bad
as everybody else, with a lot of bias, but strictly
historical stuff, it's a fairly useful site. And so they
are unable to find any evidence that Vladimir Lenin said
that or anything like that.
Speaker 1 (02:05):
But it's still a great line. So I'll say it again.
Speaker 2 (02:07):
There are decades when nothing happens, in weeks when decades happened.
Speaker 1 (02:14):
The last week feels like that to me.
Speaker 2 (02:16):
Let me talk for just a moment about tech stocks yesterday.
The reason I'm only going to do a moment is
that we're going to talk about it more half an
hour from now with a.
Speaker 1 (02:24):
Guest from the University of Colorado.
Speaker 2 (02:25):
But yesterday, because of the release by this Chinese AI
company called deep Seek, the top seven or ten or
so technology stocks in America lost a combined trillion dollars
with a t of value in Nvidia itself was almost
(02:52):
six hundred billion, not six hundred million, which would be
an astounding number already. Right, If I lost six hundred
million dollars of my net worth in one day, I'd
be a little bit upset.
Speaker 1 (03:06):
Six hundred, five hundred and.
Speaker 2 (03:08):
Eighty nine billion, to be precise, is that a shocking number.
In fact, briefly in video just a couple of days ago,
because I heard it on the news. I don't pay
very close attention to the nuts and bolts of the
markets every day that I heard that in Video had
become the most valuable company. Now it's not. Now, it's not.
Speaker 1 (03:28):
A whole bunch of other textocks got crushed too.
Speaker 2 (03:31):
Market is up today, NASDAK is recovering a little bit.
Speaker 1 (03:35):
Apple is very strong today.
Speaker 2 (03:36):
And Apple was strong yesterday too, which is interesting and
maybe we'll talk about that later. But part of the
reason the market is doing so well is that Apple
is up almost four percent. We will talk about that
more later, but I wanted to share it with you
so in the context of weeks when decades happened, Yesterday,
(03:57):
President Trump signed a few executive orders, and I wanted
to mention one of them to you because it's surely
going to get a lot of attention, especially in more
liberal leaning places.
Speaker 1 (04:06):
But I wanted to mention it to you.
Speaker 2 (04:09):
It's an executive order that's entitled Prioritizing Military Excellence and Readiness,
And in short, it is about the presence of transgender
people in the military. I don't know that they're trying
to like work their way around it a little bit,
(04:31):
and the word transgender does not appear in the executive order.
But let me just share with you a couple bits
and pieces of this, and I'm just going to go
through not all of it, but a man's assertion that
he is a woman and his requirement that others honor
this falsehood is not consistent with the humility and selflessness
(04:54):
required of a service member. Wow. Beyond the hormonal and
surgical medical involved, adoption of a gender identity inconsistent with
an individual's sex conflicts with a soldier's commitment to an honorable, truthful,
and disciplined lifestyle, even in one's personal life. WOW. For
the sake of our nation and the patriotic Americans, who
volunteer to serve it. Military service must be reserved for
(05:17):
those mentally and physically fit for duty. The Armed Forces
must adhere to high mental and physical health standards to
ensure our military can deploy, fight, and win, including in
austere conditions and without the benefit of routine medical treatment
or special provisions. The section two is called policy. It
is the policy in the United States government to establish
(05:37):
high treason I'm sorry, I don't know why I said treason.
I had two words together, look like that, to establish
high standards for troop readiness, lethality, cohesion, honesty, humility, uniformity,
and integrity. This policy is inconsistent with the medical, surgical,
and mental health constraints on individuals with gender dysphoria. This
(05:57):
policy is also inconsistent with shifting pronoun usage, or a
use of pronouns that inaccurately reflect in individuals sex. So
this doesn't say we're kicking transgender people out of the military.
But what it says is that the Secretary of Defense
(06:19):
shall identify all steps and issue guidance necessary to implement
this order, submit to the President a report that summarizes
the steps, and in short, what this seems to be
is the roadmap for the Secretary of Defense to kick
(06:41):
all transgender members out of the military, And let me
just do forty seconds of commentary on this. It is
first term Trump barred new transgender members joining the military,
but did not kick out existing transgender members. This is
going a step further. Trump is doing quite a few
(07:03):
things that seem to be aggressively aimed at pleasing his
conservative base. This falls into the category of elections have consequences.
Here's my quick take, and I say this as somebody
who did not serve in the military. There are situations
where you would expect.
Speaker 1 (07:23):
Tight quarters, you know, combat locations with a.
Speaker 2 (07:26):
Lot of people sleeping in one room, deployment on a
submarine or even other kinds of ships, and other things
like that, where I would expect that having a transgender
person involved in those tight quarters is bad for UNI morale,
bad for cohesion, bad for readiness, and bad for the mission.
And I don't support having transgender people in those even
(07:47):
though I honor their desire to serve. There are other
potential jobs in the military I don't know, maybe a mechanic,
maybe an office worker, maybe a drone operator who's never
being deployed overseas, or or being deployed overseas in a
very different kind of environment, and in those situations. Again,
I am not expert, but I can imagine a situation
(08:08):
where having a trans gender member of the military would
not be a significant impact and negative impact on unit cohesion.
Speaker 1 (08:17):
Or readiness or morale or whatever.
Speaker 2 (08:19):
What if this person happens to be the best drone operator.
And so I don't support a blanket ban on transgender
people in the military.
Speaker 1 (08:32):
If people want to serve, and they're in.
Speaker 2 (08:36):
That particular situation, but they want to serve their country
and their patriots, and they want to beat the enemy.
If they can serve in a way that you know
a normal rational person would not say is or or
should be conducive to poor order or a reduction in
the ability to execute the mission, I think they should
(08:57):
be able to serve. I think this order goes too far.
But elections have consequences. If you want to hang out
with Dave Logan and Ryan Edwards and Nick Ferguson, you
can do that today from three pm to six pm
at Sam's Number three Diner and Bar that's in Glendale
on South Cherry Street. Okay, three to six today hang
out with Dave Logan, Ryan Edwards, Nick Ferguson at Sam's
(09:20):
number three South Cherry Street in Glendale.
Speaker 1 (09:24):
Shannon, are you gonna be there for that? Or is
it not yours today? I have basketball tonight, so Arod
will be there.
Speaker 2 (09:30):
All right, You'll have a Rod there instead of Shannon.
The other reason I asked Shannon that is he does
such an enormous percentage of remote events for all the
stations in this building.
Speaker 1 (09:38):
I'll go set it up for a Rod, will you.
Speaker 2 (09:42):
Okay? That's nice of you. Well, let's you have the
comparative advantage. Nobody sets up remotes faster.
Speaker 1 (09:49):
And better than you. So there you go. All right.
Speaker 2 (09:52):
I want to do a couple of quick things that
are actually follow ups on stories where we had guests
on the show to talk about them. So first one
I want to mention is maybe a week and a
half ago or so. You may recall that we had
(10:13):
a guest on named doctor Robert Montgomery from the Langone
Medical Center in New York City who runs their transplant department,
and we were talking about a patient of his name,
Tawana Looney, and he used her name because she's gone
public otherwise he wouldn't have just shared patient information. But
she's been very public about it. She's in the newspapers
(10:34):
and stuff. And she had a kidney transplant where she
received pig kidney because she was on the verge of
death there or no human kidney's available.
Speaker 1 (10:46):
She said, all right, let's do it.
Speaker 2 (10:48):
I got no choice, and I just wanted to share
this with you. So miss Looney is actually from Alabama,
and so this is at al dot com, which is
an Alabama news based al my BA based news website.
An Alabama woman passed a major milestone Saturday to become
the longest living recipient of a pig organ transplant, Healthy
(11:11):
and full of energy with her new kidney for sixty
one days and counting, she told the Associated Press. I'm superwoman,
she said, laughing about outpacing family members on long walks
around New York City as she continues her recovery.
Speaker 1 (11:25):
It's a new take on life.
Speaker 2 (11:27):
Looney's vibrant recovery is a morale boost in the quest
to make.
Speaker 1 (11:30):
Animal to human transplants a reality.
Speaker 2 (11:33):
Only four other Americans have received hugely experimental transplants of
gene edited pig organs, two hearts, and two kidneys, and
none of those four people lived more than two months,
So she's now just over two months sixty one days
as of this story, which was written a couple of
(11:54):
days ago, and good for her.
Speaker 1 (11:57):
I wish her.
Speaker 2 (11:58):
I wish her a long and healthy life, and I
hope that whatever they're figuring out with doctor Montgomery and
his team allows lots of other people to live longer
and healthier lives than they otherwise would live. Another story
I wanted to share with you. We had an attorney
on the show named Jarrett Adams. He represents two guys
(12:18):
named Terrence Richardson and Faron Claiborne.
Speaker 1 (12:23):
They were found not guilty.
Speaker 2 (12:27):
They were found not guilty of the murder of a
Virginia police officer, but a judge decided that other evidence
in the case regarding a crime they were not charged with,
showed that they had likely committed some kind of drug crime,
(12:52):
and the judge sentenced these guys to I think life
in prison, even though they were found not guilty. To me,
it was an insane travesty of justice and a quirk
in the law that I don't understand why it exists.
Speaker 1 (13:08):
In any case.
Speaker 2 (13:09):
One of the very very few things that Joe Biden
did right in his terrible four years as president was
commuting the sentences of these two men who have been
in prison for a couple of decades now for a
crime that they probably didn't commit and definitely weren't convicted
(13:32):
of committing, and yet they were put in They were
put in jail.
Speaker 3 (13:39):
For.
Speaker 1 (13:41):
It's a long complicated story.
Speaker 2 (13:43):
They pled to let me get this right, They pled
guilty to involuntary manslaughter one of them did, and the
other one to acting as an accessory to the crime,
even though they claimed all along they never had anything
to do with it. That's what happened, and the judge
sentenced them to life in prison, which normally would be
an impossible sentence for those crimes that they pled guilty to.
(14:04):
But the judge said, well, I think that they did
this other stuff and therefore I'm going to sentence them
to life in prison. Really bad, not the way America
is supposed to work. And I'm not saying these guys
are our heroes, and I'm not saying these guys were
saints in their prior lives.
Speaker 1 (14:20):
But sentenced to life in prison for.
Speaker 2 (14:25):
A murder that they were acquitted of is a pretty
remarkable thing. In any case, Joe Biden did one thing right.
I want to mention two other things too. You One
was kind of a fun piece by my occasional fill
in host, Jimmy Sangenberger. You hear him in for me
sometimes Manby sometimes over on K House sometimes. And Jimmy
writes for the Denver Gazette, and he had a fun
(14:49):
piece two days ago entitled wanna be gov Like Governor
Griswold stumbles into announcing and.
Speaker 1 (14:57):
This is a funny story. So Jenna gri Wald.
Speaker 2 (15:01):
There are two things we know for sure about Jenna Griswald.
She is hyper partisan to the point of damaging the
secretary of State's office, where previous Republicans in that office
were scrupulously nonpartisan in their activities. She's not. And she's incompetent.
Speaker 1 (15:20):
So she's both of those things, which.
Speaker 2 (15:22):
Apparently makes her think that somebody's gonna want her to
be governor. She's a She's a talentless, worthless political climber
who should never have been elected to anything, but got
elected to be Secretary of State because she was running
as a Democrat in a year when Colorado voters threw
out every Republican they could find in any swing district
(15:43):
and statewide, right not in deep red districts. Yeah, Republicans
still won those, and so she beat Wayne Williams. Kind
of a remarkable thing in any case. So here's what
here's what Jimmy has to say as the Denver is
that reported. The Public Trust Institute filed the complaint on
January fourteenth, alleging that Griswold quote expended funds on a
(16:04):
gubernatorial campaign and had a website dedicated to a gubernatorial run,
but has not registered a committee or filed a campaign
affidavit for governor. The domain Jenna, which is jna Jenna
four governor dot com, was purchased on August eighth. A
placeholder web page went live the next day, copyrighted by
quote Jenna four governor, declaring launching soon and asking visitors
(16:28):
to submit their email addresses to be the first to
get updates.
Speaker 1 (16:31):
That last part is the site in quotes.
Speaker 2 (16:34):
The site remained up until December twentieth, when nine News
first reported its existence and the likelihood that Griswold skirted
legal requirements by not reporting the expenditures or filing paperwork
for her gubernatorial run the Public Trust Institute. Complaint says
Jenna Griswold announced her candidacy for governor. When the website
(16:55):
and support of her gubernatorial candidacy became available to the public.
By collecting the email add addresses of supporters, she was
actively engaging in campaign activities.
Speaker 1 (17:04):
All of this, the complaint aeded, should.
Speaker 2 (17:06):
Have been reported as campaign expenditures, but it wasn't.
Speaker 1 (17:08):
But wait, there's more.
Speaker 2 (17:11):
Griswold's trustee campaign sidekick has long been her brother Chris.
When nine News asked him about the site, Chris initially
denied involvement quote, definitely not a domain I set up.
He claimed that was a lie. The same week, Chris
issued a statement on Jenn's behalf quote, I have not
decided how that service will look beyond. Twenty twenty six,
(17:32):
When nine News reporter Marshall Zellinger signed up for alerts,
he received an automated reply from Chris's email address. The
political mastermind listed himself as the forwarding contact. Chris only
came clean after being confronted with the evidence and promising
to research his own actions, insisting that he bought the
domain to keep others from snatching it up and that
(17:53):
Big Cis still hasn't decided on running. Pro tip for
the Griswold's siblings, if you're trying to be sneaky, don't
leave a trick of fingerprints at the scene. So there's
more in this, but I'm gonna I'm gonna leave it there.
I'll just note that Jenna Griswold is violating the rules
(18:16):
and laws that her specific job in government.
Speaker 1 (18:20):
Is to enforce.
Speaker 2 (18:22):
Right. She's not a member of the legislature, she's not
the state treasurer. She's the Secretary of State, which is
the office that oversees compliance with election.
Speaker 1 (18:33):
Rules, and she's violating them.
Speaker 2 (18:37):
This is the same person who, when she found out
that certain kinds of bios level passwords for election computers
had been inadvertently available on the Internet for some weeks
or months, wasn't gonna tell anybody until the Republican Party
of Colorado found out about it and outed her publicly
(18:59):
out the problem and public and then she can she's
the worst as bad as Colorado is politically, and it
is terrible.
Speaker 1 (19:10):
We are not so bad as to deserve.
Speaker 2 (19:12):
Jenna Griswoll Really, all right, I want to tell you
a quick story, and I'm gonna I'm gonna not use
any names, and shinnon, I'm getting the zoom going or
whenever the whenever the guest arrives. So I'm not gonna
use any names here because because its not really a
(19:34):
bad story about a business. But I'm gonna tell a
story that involves a business, and they're okay, but I
want to tell the story anyway.
Speaker 1 (19:42):
So a friend of mine gave me at some point.
Speaker 2 (19:47):
It was actually not as like a birthday gift or something,
but it was it was part of a.
Speaker 1 (19:53):
Kind of like a business thing.
Speaker 2 (19:54):
Gave me a couple hundred dollars two hundred and twenty
five dollars to be to be precise, twenty five dollars
in gift certificates gift cards for a nice steakhouse. And
I decided my younger kid really likes good steak and
it was just his birthday, so I said, all.
Speaker 1 (20:13):
Right, let's go to the restaurant.
Speaker 2 (20:14):
I've got two hundred and twenty five bucks that'll probably
cover three quarters of the meal or something.
Speaker 1 (20:18):
We don't order wine.
Speaker 2 (20:19):
I know steak restaurants are a little bit expensive, right,
but we don't order wine, and usually we don't even
get dessert, and so two hundred and twenty five bucks
should be fine. And so I'll tell you we we
had one soda, one non alcoholic beer. For my wife
(20:41):
food doesn't drink, she had a non alcoholic beer. We
had three appetizers, I admit, we each had a main
course and that was it. The bill, including tip, was
give or take a couple of dollars five hundred and
(21:02):
eighty dollars. So my two hundred and twenty five dollars
of gift cards, I still had to put like almost
five almost three hundred and sixty dollars on.
Speaker 1 (21:12):
My own credit card for what I thought.
Speaker 2 (21:13):
I was gonna have to put fifty or one hundred.
And the restaurant's full. The restaurant's full, and lots of
people are drinking wine. Those people are probably paying two
hundred dollars a person, and I don't understand. And it
didn't look to me mostly like suits on expense accounts.
There were like couples and families. Who's doing this? Who
(21:36):
was spending one hundred and fifty to two hundred dollars
a person for dinner? And the food was very good.
I won't say it was memorably good. I've had better food,
I've had better steak. It was very good. But who's
doing that? I'm not I'm by the way, I'm not
mad at the restaurant. I'm not saying the restaurant is overpriced.
(21:58):
I'm saying I'm not willing to ever pay that price again.
But if they can fill the restaurant those prices, good
for them. I'm not mad at them. I guess I
should have looked up how much the prices were at
this restaurant before I went, but it didn't occur to
me that it could be one hundred and fifty dollars
a person without wine.
Speaker 1 (22:16):
I just didn't even think that.
Speaker 2 (22:19):
Anyway, It's an interesting world, and good for them. I'm
glad there's a restaurant that can do that well at
that kind of price, at that kind of pricing.
Speaker 1 (22:28):
I do wonder, and I'm going to.
Speaker 2 (22:29):
Talk a little bit later about restaurants in Denver. I
do wonder how well that will last if we have
an economic turndown. But it might be that rich people
are always rich in a restaurant like that will always
be fine. It might well be anyway. Again, I'm not
complaining really about the restaurant it just wasn't really what
(22:52):
I expected.
Speaker 1 (22:54):
All right, let's do something completely different.
Speaker 2 (22:57):
Now. You all know that I am a tech nerd,
and you know that I spent a fair bit of
time yesterday talking about deep Seek and even my own
experience because I signed up for the app yesterday before
apparently the DDoS attack that kind of sort of took
it down. To get a little experience with it, but
I'm barely a beginner at this stuff, and I wanted
(23:18):
to talk to an expert because, after all, the news
about this one AI engine took a trillion dollars off
the value of just like seven tech stocks, so this
is clearly a big deal, joining us to talk about it.
Speaker 1 (23:31):
I'm At Reggae is.
Speaker 2 (23:32):
A PhD student in computer science at CU Boulder. He
specializes in theoretical machine learning that US non experts might
call AI, and his research focuses on the interpretability of
modern generative models, whatever that means, and maybe he'll explain it. Hi,
i'm Ett, Thanks.
Speaker 1 (23:52):
For being here.
Speaker 3 (23:56):
It's good to be here.
Speaker 2 (23:58):
What does interpretability of my generative models mean?
Speaker 3 (24:04):
So generative? So let's start with the generative parts. Is
generative models basically mean that you're producing some kind of
generative output. So an example would be chat GPT, which
produces text. Another example would be visual generative models, which
produce image data or videos. Interpretibility means that you're trying
to understand what led the model to make a decision
(24:26):
that you see on the outside. So these models seem
to be black boxes, so I'm trying to sort of
open the black box and understand what's going on.
Speaker 2 (24:33):
Okay, So there's lots of aspects of deepseek to talk about,
but I think I'll start with something that sounds like
it's kind of sort of in the direction that you're
just talking about. I'm not going to open the app
right now and look at it, but I asked it
a few questions yesterday, and every time before it answered
the question, it first explained how it was interpreting my question,
(24:54):
which was very interesting. And I have not seen that
on chat GPT. One of my listeners said that his
his office, his work AI does that, but I hadn't
seen it before.
Speaker 1 (25:07):
Is that important and if so? Why?
Speaker 2 (25:12):
Yeah?
Speaker 3 (25:13):
It is. It is called something called it is called
technically chain of thought. It basically, you know, explains how
the model is getting at a particular decision, and it's
a very super modern sort of notion that has come
up in these kind of models in the last year
or so. Actually, if you use a modern version of CHAGPT,
(25:36):
like if you pay for it, it allows you to
use like, you know, more advanced models, and they do
have you know, something called chain of thought as well,
where model thinks in quotes and you know, chat GPT
unfortunately doesn't show all of the chain of thoughts. Being
open source, it shows you everything that goes along. So, yeah,
it is useful understand what's going on inside.
Speaker 2 (25:57):
How much does that particular kind of functional impact whether
you think ordinary people in businesses and people will use
AI will trust it and feel comfortable with it, and
and related to that, how much do you think that
chain of thought functionality can can help people feel that
(26:19):
this isn't like the terminator out to destroy them.
Speaker 3 (26:26):
Yeah, I think you know that. You know, that's a
great question. A large part of my research actually focuses
on similar questions. I think the main problem with you know,
chain of thought right now is that we don't know
if you know, the model is actually thinking what it's
telling us it's thinking, right, We don't know how faithful
this chain of thought is to its actual reasoning process. Right.
(26:47):
So that's that's something which is an active research direction.
But in general it you know, we have to be
careful about trusting the model's thinking behavior because we might think,
I mean, we might look at it and know gain
some satisfaction. Oh, you know, this is how the model
is thinking, but it might be thinking in a completely
different way. Right. So in general, for the public, I
(27:09):
think this is a good step in the right direction
because you know, previously we had nothing. Now we at
least have something. But we have to be careful about,
you know, not overly, you know, ascribing human like behaviors
to lease technical models.
Speaker 2 (27:23):
Fascinating. We're talking with met Reggae from the University of Colorado,
and just one quick comment and then I'll move on
to another issue. So before you were born, when I
started with computers, I was programming in basic on like
a TRS eight. I don't know if you ever heard
of that, and Apple two plus was the first computer
(27:43):
I owned. And of course, when I wrote a program
in basic to do whatever it did, I would always
know exactly what it was thinking. And if the program
did something wrong, I could go find the line of
code that was giving me the wrong answer, where I
accidentally put a minus sign instead of a plus sign,
or and instead of an ore. It's incredible that at
(28:04):
this level of computer programming, even the programmer doesn't necessarily
know what the program is doing. Can you just give
me seventeen or no, thirty seven seconds on that? Because
I like prime numbers, by the way, that's why I'm
giving you that numbers.
Speaker 3 (28:21):
Yeah, Yeah, that's an awesome question. I think the main
sort of technical challenge towards something like this, inductively speaking
at least, is that these models are so large and
so complex that we don't know, you know, where this
functionality is arising from. And also, you know, a lot
of this functionality that we see on the outside actually arises.
We don't actually train the model to explicitly do something
(28:43):
like this. And because we didn't program the model to
do explicitly you know, reasoning quote unquote it, and because
it arises, we don't know where it arises from. So
it's almost like a reverse engineering job for us to
figure out where it arises from. So that's where it's
a complexity.
Speaker 2 (28:58):
Yeah, that's just incredible. Okay, So now let's talk about
I'll ask this question. You can answer it any any.
Speaker 1 (29:06):
Way you like.
Speaker 2 (29:07):
Why did the release of deep Seek's AI app and
the current functionality take a trillion dollars off of the
value of text docs yesterday?
Speaker 3 (29:22):
Yeah, I think, you know, this is a little out
of outside my expertise, but I'll try to answer it
as best as I can. So, I think the main
sort of innovation, apart from the technical achievements, is that
deep Seek actually open source their model. You know, in
ordinary language, that means, you know, they put out the
entire model out on the internet for anyone to use.
(29:43):
And basically, you know, for the top US companies, the
business model for now has been, you know, we create
a large model and we provide access to people on
the outside by them paying for it. But as here,
these these companies have put out their models for everyone
to use for free, and so now people are warded that.
(30:04):
You know, if these kind of you know, highly performance
models out there were used to free, who's going to
buy GPUs, who's going to buy you know, open ei
services and things like that. So I think that that
is the overouching fear out there in the market.
Speaker 2 (30:19):
Yeah, that's why I think you're right, and I think
I mean chat, GPT, open AI is not is not public.
So most of the stuff that was getting crushed yesterday
was on was was hardware, but there was some sell
off in Meta and Google and you know companies that
are also perceived to be getting into the into the
AI space. It was mostly the hardware that got that
(30:41):
got crushed. So let's talk about that for a second.
If you believe Deep Seeks story about how they created it.
Speaker 1 (30:50):
And I probably believe it. I'm not sure.
Speaker 2 (30:53):
I'm always skeptical with stuff coming out.
Speaker 1 (30:55):
Of China, but I probably, I probably believe it.
Speaker 2 (30:58):
They're saying that they did this with five or six
million dollars and I don't know, maybe give or take
five percent or something of the number of chips that
a lot of people are talking about normally needing to
develop a model like this.
Speaker 1 (31:14):
So, first, do you believe them?
Speaker 2 (31:17):
And if it's true that they did it for six
million dollars and a single digit percentage of the number
of chips you would normally think about needing to buy,
what does that mean for the whole industry, not the
financial side, what does it mean for the development of AI?
Speaker 3 (31:36):
Yeah, I think there are great questions. I think I
do believe them when they say something like this, because
I think most of the research focus, most of the
focus of the top companies has been on scaling these
models to become bigger and bigger, and no one's really,
you know, tried to constrain themselves within a fixed amount
of computing budget and try to figure out if there's
like clever optimizations to do. And what you know deep
(31:58):
Seek has figured out is to do precisely that, you know,
figure out chaver optimizations. And I think or the broader
sort of industry in general, I think this is a
great step because it goes towards, it goes a long
way towards, you know, providing everyone access to these highly
performed models, because there was a fear out there saying
that you know, as these models become larger, ordinary people
(32:21):
get left behind. But now you know, the smallest versions
of the models that deep Seek has put out can
be done in your MacBook, which is a tremendous achievement
compared to like a couple of years.
Speaker 1 (32:31):
Yeah, I mean, just a quick comment.
Speaker 2 (32:33):
Yet yesterday there's all this panic and all the sell
off on the hardware side, because maybe maybe people don't
need to buy as many chips, but there isn't near
There hasn't been yet.
Speaker 1 (32:43):
Maybe it'll start today.
Speaker 2 (32:44):
And that's probably part of the reason Apple is actually
did well yesterday, is doing very well today.
Speaker 1 (32:50):
I mean, AI is going to be incredibly useful.
Speaker 2 (32:52):
AI is a transformative technology at the level of how
transformative the Internet itself was. And if suddenly AI can
be had for cheap or for free and and not
be this you know, cloistered, elitist thing that only a
few billionaires can handle, and then and then they will
deign to sell you little bits of it, that's an
amazing thing. Do you want to offer any quick comment
(33:15):
on that?
Speaker 3 (33:18):
Yeah, I think you know, it's it's an incredible achievement,
you know, to democrat democratize AI in this way. And
I personally, you know, do not believe that hardware demand
is going to go down. I think, you know, with democratization,
I think more people will want hardware, and so I
think the set off is a little short sat in
my opinion.
Speaker 1 (33:36):
That's that's really interesting.
Speaker 2 (33:38):
So instead of one hundred people, instead of one hundred
companies spending a billion dollars each, there could be ten
thousand companies spending ten million dollars each.
Speaker 3 (33:54):
Exactly. I think more people, you know, if you want
to start a company, because it's such a force multipler. Yeah,
start want to start their companies. It's fewer people and
more machines.
Speaker 2 (34:03):
And therefore, last quick question, I think I saw one
of your web pages online and it mentioned a few
different cities. But are you originally from Goa or from
somewhere else?
Speaker 3 (34:15):
Now? My family's from Goa. I come from Omar.
Speaker 2 (34:18):
Gotcha all right? I've actually I was in both on
my honeymoon.
Speaker 1 (34:23):
I love Goa.
Speaker 2 (34:24):
Go is just such a wonderful city and everybody should
check it out.
Speaker 1 (34:28):
It's a very it's a very unusual.
Speaker 2 (34:30):
Indian city because it's one of the few places that
was a Portuguese colony. So you go to Goa and
there will be a lot of Indian folks who have
Portuguese names like Joao and the and the food's a
little different, and it's on the beach and it's just gorgeous. Anyway,
I hadn't thought about Goa in a while, so I
read about it in your bio and I thought that
(34:50):
was cool. I'm at reggae is a PhD candidate at
the University of Colorado in computer science. Has been great
talking to you. Thank you for doing this. I hope
you'll come back on the show in the future.
Speaker 1 (35:03):
Thank you.
Speaker 3 (35:03):
Sure.
Speaker 2 (35:04):
All right, that was a really fun conversation. I hope
you enjoyed it as much as I did. We'll take
a quick break on Kowa. We are taking donations for
families whose lives have been so terribly affected by the
southern California wildfires.
Speaker 1 (35:17):
I have made a donation. I'm not asking you to
do something that I haven't done.
Speaker 2 (35:21):
You can donate to your fellow Americans in need by
texting the word relief R E L I E F
to three three one zero zero. Text relief to three
three one zero zero. It'll come back at you with
a link. You click on that, you'll see the logos
for Dream Center and iHeart, and you'll know you're in
the right place and you can donate whatever whatever feels
(35:42):
comfortable to you. I got a new guy behind the
glass across.
Speaker 4 (35:47):
I'd like to introduce myself before you as Dragon Redbeard.
I am the producer of the Ross Kaminski Show for
the past almost three years.
Speaker 2 (35:56):
You seem vaguely familiar, but I haven't seen you in
a while way ever around there. Yeah, I was expecting
somebody named Dragon Redbeard yesterday producing the last two hours
of my show.
Speaker 1 (36:09):
Yeah, and then I heard.
Speaker 2 (36:11):
That that that that guy was off because he was
like expecting a delivery. So now that you're here and
I vaguely recognize you, were you like, is there an
Amazon package coming to your house and you didn't want
the porch pirates to get it? Or what happened?
Speaker 4 (36:24):
Around six fifteen? There was a five pound, fifteen and
a half ounce nineteen and a quarter inch long delivery
named Nicholas Wow, Nicholas Chase.
Speaker 2 (36:35):
So that's actually on the small side, correct, Yeah, So
am I allowed to ask what was the was the
baby induced? I figured that baby was induced because you
took some of the day off, meaning it felt like
it was on a schedule. Correct.
Speaker 3 (36:49):
That.
Speaker 4 (36:49):
My daughter in law has a medical condition that makes
labor very troublesome for her, so they wanted to make
sure they planned everything out and got the proper whipment
and doctors around.
Speaker 2 (37:01):
Too, and everything went fine, Everything went swimming.
Speaker 1 (37:04):
So how many grandchildren do you have now? Two?
Speaker 2 (37:06):
Two boys?
Speaker 1 (37:06):
Two boys?
Speaker 2 (37:07):
Ye? Little Lance and little Nicholas. Wow, congratulations, thank you.
Still should have been here. I could have been they.
Speaker 4 (37:18):
X time, and you know I gotta be there in
case X happens.
Speaker 2 (37:21):
Uh huh.
Speaker 4 (37:22):
But it turns out didn't happen until six o'clock in
the evening.
Speaker 1 (37:26):
Unbelievable. A listener is asking.
Speaker 2 (37:28):
Me to talk about what was just in the news
there about opting into Tabor. I don't know enough about it. So, Chad,
if you're listening right now, if you could get me
some information about that whole opting in thing, because I
don't really I don't really understand the story, and it
sounds like something our listeners would like to know about.
So if you can help me understand that better, I
would sure, I would sure appreciate that. A listener said
(37:51):
that last guest was really interesting, but he was a
little bit hard to understand.
Speaker 1 (37:54):
Can you summarize?
Speaker 2 (37:55):
So, I guess wasn't Ai? Was He He was not
a I he was not He was an actual person
and I was looking at him. You remember when we
had that guest who seemed like Ai? Uh huh, Because
the listener said, you know, the future of talk radio
is AI guests, I hope not.
Speaker 1 (38:10):
You know, we will get to a point.
Speaker 2 (38:11):
Oh so this deep seek AI that caused all the
turmoil yesterday, I was reading about it a little bit.
Speaker 1 (38:17):
It stopped training, right, it stopped.
Speaker 2 (38:20):
Training learning in January and sorry, in July of last year.
But we're going to get to a point where AIS
are constantly learning and it will be interesting. I actually
think that radio talk show host is not entirely but
relatively immune to being replaced by AI.
Speaker 1 (38:43):
Podcasts hosts less so, but as AIS.
Speaker 2 (38:46):
Get better and better at being trainable on a minute
by minute basis, Like so right now on the show,
since as far as you know, I'm not AI, I
can look at something that's on the TV right now
and tell you what it is and respond to it.
(39:06):
It's gonna be a while until AI can do that,
but it's not gonna be forever. Look how fast this
stuff is developing, so so we'll see. Let me summarize.
How how old is Dragon? A listener wants to know?
Forty something? Yeah, I stop counting, stop counting, Yeah, forty something,
Grandpa Dragon, Wow? Yeah is I Yeah? Indeed, he's got
(39:30):
a lot to teach these little tykes about how to
lift Thor's hammer and how to grow facial hair and
things like that.
Speaker 1 (39:37):
They have a lot to learn from Grandpa Dragon.
Speaker 2 (39:40):
Uh. And and they'll get some merch probably they'll get
a they'll get a dragon Redbeard knit beanie like I
think my kid has of yours and the hat and
the hat and whatever else, whatever else you got, all right,
so let me let me talk about Let me talk.
Speaker 1 (39:55):
About this for a second.
Speaker 2 (39:59):
The reason this deep Seak thing is so interesting falls
into a few different categories, and I'm going to just
summarize briefly a couple of things that the guest said.
Number One, these guys were able to build on top.
Speaker 1 (40:13):
Of chat gpt.
Speaker 2 (40:14):
They used chat GPT's platform, but then trained it for
like six million dollars. When other companies are talking about
training theirs for six hundred million dollars, They trained it
for six million dollars. And they used I don't know,
some single digit number one thousand chips to as the
(40:37):
basis for this, where other people are talking about using
one hundred thousand chips. So they did it really, really cheap.
Then they opened their model up to the public. They
made it open source so anybody can get it, and.
Speaker 1 (40:53):
Repurpose it for whatever they want.
Speaker 2 (40:56):
So it did immense damage to the business models of
both the hardware side and the software side of existing
AI companies, So that that's kind of the main reasons
it's important. It is, as the guest said, democratizing AI,
(41:19):
and it is going to make the development of new
AIS not like affordable for you and me. Right well,
you could be much much, much richer than I am.
It's still going to take some millions to develop AI,
to develop a decent, interesting new AI based what they
have shown is that it is. It can be done
(41:42):
for some millions, even ten million, twenty million. Again, sounds
like a lot to you and me, but not when
you're thinking about comparing it to what Meta, the parent
company of Facebook, said a week ago or so that
they intend to spend sixty years sixty five billion. So
(42:03):
AI was looking like a place that only the biggest
players could hang out and we would all get whatever
little crumbs they decided to let us have. And deep
and Deep Seek has thrown a massive, massive monkey wrench
into that. Ross Is his name really Dragon Redbeard? Why
(42:24):
yes it is. We'll be right back by the way.
I just got to answer one more one more listener question.
And you know, so Dragon decided not to show up
at work yesterday, correct, because he's waiting for a package delivery.
Speaker 1 (42:38):
And I'm like, eh, and so.
Speaker 2 (42:39):
I'm a little cranky, and so I'm going to out
some personal information about Dragon right now, just because I'm
a little bit cranky with him. So a listener asks.
So a listener asked, is his name really Dragon Redbeard?
And I said yes. Listener asks again, I have a
follow up? Was he born legally with that name? And
(43:01):
I would like to just say, I don't care if
you don't want me to disclose Dragon, I'm I'm a
little mad that you didn't work yesterday. Uh no, Uh no,
His his birth name was Mephistopheles red Beard. Uh.
Speaker 1 (43:15):
He decided it was a little too long. Kids made
fun of him.
Speaker 2 (43:19):
My little sister couldn't say in middle school. His little
sister couldn't even say Mephistopheles red Beard and so uh
and so he changed it to Dragon Redbeard. And I
don't I don't care if I've embarrassed you publicly.
Speaker 4 (43:33):
I've grown across. I am in my forties, so I
I you know, I've gotten over.
Speaker 2 (43:37):
It, all right, Uh, so all right, since you played
the music, I gotta do this thing you were supposed
to talk about it.
Speaker 1 (43:46):
Yes, you know, I read the blog.
Speaker 2 (43:50):
Dot com. All right, all right, So there's a case
report that was published over at the Journal of the
American Medicine Medical Association Cardiology MAGS seeing JAMA Cardiology is
the name is the name of the magazine. Let me
just read this like a summary of a medical case
report that a doctor posted. A man in his forties
(44:10):
presented with a three week history of asymptomatic yellow yellowish
nodules on his palms, souls, and elbows. Now, in another
I posted a picture of this on the blog that's
not in that particular article.
Speaker 1 (44:24):
But there's a picture of this.
Speaker 2 (44:26):
You can't see his face, but he's showing his hands
and like all the intersections of the knuckles, you know,
like the creases across your fingers if you're looking at
your palm, they're all yellow on his hand and parts
of his palm are yellow. And it's really quite odd.
It's quite odd. And so the patient I'm reading now again,
the patients adopted a carnivore diet approximately eight months before presentation. Now,
(44:51):
listen to this dragon because you and I have both
done some weight loss, You've done a lot more than
I have. His dietary habits included a high intake fats,
consisting of six to nine pounds of cheese, sticks of butter,
and additional fat incorporated into his daily hamburgers.
Speaker 4 (45:13):
I was gonna ask, this is not six to nine
pounds of cheese daily?
Speaker 2 (45:18):
I think, so wow, No, okay, no, it's it's sixty
nine pounds of a combination of cheese, butter, and additional fat.
Speaker 4 (45:29):
Even though sixty nine pounds of a combination of that
isn't that nuts?
Speaker 3 (45:32):
Sad?
Speaker 2 (45:33):
It's difficult to do, and he lost a lot of
weight doing that. He reported weight loss, increased energy, and
improvemental clarity. Physical examination revealed multiple painless yellowish nodules on
his palms and elbows. His cholesterol level exceeded one thousand
milligrams per desolat one thousand. His baseline was two hundred
(45:59):
and ten to three three hundred normal. I think for
a human like where you want to be is probably
in the high one hundreds, one fifty something like that.
He was at a smidge thousands, a smidge high by much.
The diagnosis was something called zanthelasma x A n tche
(46:20):
lasma and then they say this case highlights the impact
of dietary patterns on lipid levels and the importance of
managing hypercholesterolemia to prevent complications. The dude was turning yellow.
The dude was turning yellow. This just popped up on
(46:42):
my on my radar, even though I guess it was
filed a couple of days ago. But I just got
an email blast about it from Advanced Colorado. And this
is a ballot measure that Advanced Colorado is going to
aim to get on the ballot. I expect it is
for this November. And it's it's an interesting one, Okay.
So here's the idea. If you have a particular political perspective,
(47:08):
and it might not be the perspective of the majority,
let's say, or even if it is you, you sometimes
want to try to put your political opponents in a
little bit of a bind. How do you do that
with a ballot measure by doing something that you know
your opponents won't like, but doing it in a limited
(47:30):
enough way that it that it comes across as and
actually hopefully is common sense and the kind of thing
that normal people would tend to support rather than going
way too far and doing something that will allow the
other side to portray you as a crazy person. So
(47:53):
this thing that's proposed right now is a very very
short and I don't think there's any that the legislature
themselves would pass it, because the legislature is dominated by
Democrats who wouldn't go along with this. And I don't
know why. I don't know why these Democrats prefer criminals
over their own citizens, but they do.
Speaker 1 (48:14):
And I don't know why you keep voting for them.
By the way, those of you who put a.
Speaker 2 (48:18):
Democrat state senator or state rep into the state House,
I don't know why you've done that. But in any case,
the text of this proposed ballot measures pretty simple, and
I quote, State and local law enforcement must cooperate with
(48:38):
federal requests to notify the Department of Homeland Security prior
to release and prior to release and detain inmates if
a the inmate is charged with a crime of violence
as defined by Colorado Revised Statutes, or b the inmate
(49:01):
has been convicted of a prior felony. So only under
those two circumstances seems pretty reasonable. State and local law enforcement.
Speaker 5 (49:10):
Must notify ICE before they release somebody they have in detention,
or they must detain somebody if the person that they
are in contact with or already detaining is charged with
a crime of violence or has been convicted of a
(49:33):
prior felony.
Speaker 1 (49:34):
Seems pretty straightforward.
Speaker 2 (49:36):
Again, we live in a rather insane world right now,
where for some reason there are people who will oppose that.
Speaker 1 (49:43):
But I want you to know what's out there, and.
Speaker 2 (49:46):
I think there's a good chance we'll see it on
the November ballot. And I think it's common sense enough.
It doesn't go very far, it doesn't go too far
as some people might want to put it. So I
think there's a decent chance it'll pass. We will see meantime.
And I'm going to get onto something else in a
second here. But Jared Polus has been in the media
(50:06):
a little bit. I think it was a television or
radio interview where he said that Colorado is not a
sanctuary state.
Speaker 1 (50:12):
Of course it is.
Speaker 2 (50:14):
Colorado is a sanctuary state under state law.
Speaker 3 (50:18):
Right.
Speaker 2 (50:18):
I mean, you can redefine sanctuary state, which I guess
is what he's trying to do. But under state law
as it stands, no law enforcement in this state can
cooperate with federal law enforcement to aid in any way
in the deportation of a criminal illegal alien. We are
(50:42):
a sanctuary state, and this law this not law, but
will it would.
Speaker 1 (50:49):
Effectively be a law.
Speaker 2 (50:50):
If that passes through the initiative process or the referendum process,
it would have the force of law, but that would
overcome a little bit of our sanctuary state in this
I don't really know why Jared, who is actually pretty
good on this issue compared to many Democrats.
Speaker 1 (51:09):
In the state legislature.
Speaker 2 (51:11):
I don't know why Jared wants to run around saying
we're not a sanctuary state when everybody knows that we are.
Speaker 1 (51:17):
All Right, I'm going to do something different. This is
a little bit.
Speaker 2 (51:20):
Of a long note, but it's one of the most
interesting things I've read in quite a while. It's written
by a guy named Christopher Caldwell who is writing for
the Free Press at VFP dot com, and I just
think this pretty fabulous story, so.
Speaker 1 (51:38):
I'm going to share most of this.
Speaker 2 (51:40):
So tumultuous was the first week of Donald Trump's second
term that people barely noticed a week on that last Tuesday,
he repealed affirmative action by executive.
Speaker 1 (51:49):
Order that's astonishing.
Speaker 2 (51:51):
For half a century, affirmative action has been the federal
government's principal instrument for carrying out desegregation, the longest and
costliest moral crusade and American history. After the nineteen seventies,
it was adapted to liberation movements from feminism to gay rights.
Supreme Court justices anguished over the way its call for
(52:13):
special consideration of minorities might clash with the letter of
the Civil Rights Act of nineteen sixty four, which barred
racial discrimination. Over the past decade, affirmative action became the
hammer of the diversity, Equity and Inclusion DEI movement, which
grew so unpopular that it has now brought affirmative action
and much else down with it. Trump's decision to repeal
(52:38):
it is the most significant policy change of this century,
more significant than the Affordable Care Act of twenty ten
or anything done about COVID. How can people be talking
about anything else?
Speaker 1 (52:49):
Yet? Major news outlets treat.
Speaker 2 (52:51):
Trump's bold move as a detail of personnel management. Quote
to stress and fury as Trump upends federal jobs, headlined
the New York Times.
Speaker 1 (53:02):
Somewhere along the line.
Speaker 2 (53:03):
The Trump administration came to understand in a sophisticated way
how the enforcement of civil rights actually works. Not many
Americans do, and it's worth reviewing. The standard Black History
Month account of civil rights stresses its idealistic and ethical side,
but like all government programs, it's better understood through its
bureaucratic and ruthless side. Affirmative action is mentioned in the
(53:29):
Civil Rights Act of nineteen sixty four, but the program
as we now understand it was launched a year later
with Lyndon Johnson's Executive Order one one two four six.
The President ordered companies and institutions doing business with the
government to have activist quote unquote non discrimination policies and
empowered officials now consolidated in the Office of Federal Contract
(53:53):
Compliance Programs to enforce them. The responsibilities for companies, laid
out over one hundred and fifty ffty eight pages in
Title forty one, Chapter sixty of the Code of Federal Regulations,
include quote comparing incumbency to availability, to outreach and positive recruitment,
and the meeting of goals and timetables set by the
(54:15):
federal government. Now, these goals were not always clear. The
safest thing was to treat them as quotas and match
incumbents meaning employees, to those available meaning the percentage of
a given ethnic group in the population, as closely as possible.
Executive orders don't require a democratic vote. They just lay
(54:36):
down the rules for the executive branch, of which the
President is the boss. They have the force of law
within all the federal agencies, which buy and sell enormous
amounts of goods and services. According to the Labor Department,
Johnson's executive order covered twenty percent of the American workforce,
potentially giving the president personal leverage over the economy, and
(54:58):
Johnson used it. He basically enlisted the country's top executives
as the commissars of a radical interpretation of civil rights policy.
They liked diversity from the moment it was invented until
last Tuesday.
Speaker 1 (55:14):
They had better Whenever a global chief.
Speaker 2 (55:17):
Diversity officer like Ken Barrett of General Motors intoned, diversity
is our strength.
Speaker 1 (55:23):
He was doing more than philosophizing.
Speaker 2 (55:26):
He was keeping billions of dollars of shareholder value safe
from the sanctions and penalties laid out in Chapter sixty
of the Code of Federal Regulations. Had Johnson's Affirmative Action
scheme been devised for anything but desegregation, it might have
been considered sinister and totalitarian.
Speaker 1 (55:44):
Since Ronald Reagan's time.
Speaker 2 (55:46):
Conservatives have crowed that they could undo affirmative Action with
the stroke of a pen.
Speaker 1 (55:52):
Reagan mulled doing so himself.
Speaker 2 (55:54):
In nineteen eighty five, but he faced opposition from corporate
donors and for more liberal Republicans led by Kansas Senator
Bob Dole, and he opted not to. In nineteen ninety six,
Tennessee Republican Senator Lamar Alexander tried to kickstart his presidential
candidacy with a promise to zero out affirmative Action, but
(56:15):
Republicans chose Dole instead.
Speaker 1 (56:18):
Now Trump has done what Reagan wouldn't.
Speaker 2 (56:22):
His repeal came via three executive orders, two issued on
inauguration Day. The first overturned dozens of Biden decrees, including
the Advancing Racial Equity executive Orders signed in the first
hours of his presidency in twenty twenty one. The second
ended all initiatives, offices, contracts, and employees connected to DEI,
(56:44):
which Trump referred to as quote illegal and immoral discrimination programs.
The decisive blow came the following day, in an order
called ending illegal discrimination and restoring merit based opportunity.
Speaker 1 (56:59):
Trump repealed the variety.
Speaker 2 (57:00):
Of executive orders, including Johnson's one, one, two, four six,
and explicitly bar bard that office I mentioned before that
manages federal contracts from enforcing affirmative action, and his Office
of Personnel Management followed through on the previous day's business,
ordering that all DEI federal employees be sent home, all
(57:22):
DEI federal contracts be terminated, and all efforts to pursue
federal DEI programs under another name be rooted out rip
affirmative action. But that's only part of the story. By
the way, if you're just joining, If you're just joining,
I'm sharing with you a brilliant article in the Free
Press THEFP dot com, written by a guy named Christopher Caldwell,
(57:44):
and it's entitled the Biggest policy change of the Century.
All right, let me continue. A curious element of Trump's
third executive order is it's invocation of the president's solemn
duty to enforce longstanding federal civil rights law men the
Civil Rights Act of nineteen sixty four. This is not
a concession, it's a threat. While the Civil Rights Act
(58:08):
mentioned affirmative action, it attached no specific meaning to the term,
and the law was resolutely color blind. Affirmative action programs,
with their differing treatment of races, are in tension with it.
DEI programs, many of which scapegoat white people, are even
more so. It is Trump's assertion that DEI programs quote
(58:30):
violate the text and spirit of our long standing federal
civil rights.
Speaker 1 (58:35):
Laws and quote.
Speaker 2 (58:36):
Trump is doing more than reforming the public sector. He
is signaling to the private sector that certain kinds of
programs are liable to prosecution, even asking each federal agency
to name up to nine large private sector organizations that
(58:56):
might be engaged in discrimination. Wow, there can be littled
out of the general effectiveness of such methods. In twenty
twenty and twenty twenty one, as civil rights regulators and
the Biden administration rallied behind it, DEI went from being
the hobby of a handful of quirky CEOs to the unanimous.
Speaker 1 (59:15):
Policy of corporate America.
Speaker 2 (59:19):
Today, the rush in the opposite direction is just as precipitous.
Among the new foes of DEI are some of its
erstwhile champions, Mark Zuckerberg's Meta Walmart and even Target, home
of the Tuck friendly bathing suit moral will follow.
Speaker 1 (59:37):
This, in turn, will.
Speaker 2 (59:39):
Have an effect on the entire ecology of the Democratic Party.
DEI and affirmative action are among the last things that
everyone in that divided party believes it and the source
of a good deal of its organizing muscle. Now there's
no work for affirmative action lawyers, diversity can insultants, or
(01:00:01):
inclusion trainers to do whole job categories are being zeroed out. Now,
it would be tempting to call Trump's actions and overreach
an intrusion into americans private lives or their freedom of association,
had not ten different administrations intruded this way over the
past sixty years, none more energetically than those of Presidents.
Speaker 1 (01:00:22):
Biden and Obama.
Speaker 2 (01:00:24):
In the Washington Post, labor lawyer Jason Schwartz of the
Powerhouse Washington firm Gibson Dunn stead of Trump's orders quote,
they are handing out sheriff's badges to private citizens to
sue about government contractor DEI programs. But that deputization is
(01:00:46):
what civil rights.
Speaker 1 (01:00:46):
Policy has always been.
Speaker 2 (01:00:48):
In other words, Trump is not just eliminating the affirmative
action enforcement machinery, He's.
Speaker 1 (01:00:53):
Throwing it in reverse.
Speaker 2 (01:00:55):
Companies will be assumed to be violating civil rights laws.
We suddenly learn if they engage in racial balancing, What
the hell is racial balancing? How do you define DEI?
For that matter, A different set of Americans are about
to learn how vague mandates like these can lead to
a feeling of being tyrannized and toyed with a little
(01:01:21):
bit more here. Affirmative action has been unpopular since its founding.
Speaker 1 (01:01:27):
As the late Harvard political sociologist.
Speaker 2 (01:01:29):
Nathan Glazer used to put it, the opposition it faced
has been quote uniformly enormous. Voters rejected in referendums, even
in blue states like California. They hate it because they
think it's racist. It was possible to believe at the
time of the Civil Rights Act of nineteen sixty four
(01:01:50):
that a good faith, moral commitment would suffice to remedy
the devilish racial antagonism that.
Speaker 1 (01:01:56):
Had beset the country since its founding.
Speaker 2 (01:01:58):
That that wouldn't work became obvious very quickly.
Speaker 1 (01:02:02):
Barely a year later.
Speaker 2 (01:02:04):
At the start of the summer of nineteen sixty five,
President Johnson argued before at Howard University graduating class that
it's not fair to make a runner quote who four
years has been hubbled by chains and quote compete with others.
It sounded generous, but it was dark. Three months later,
Johnson issued that executive order we mentioned, realizing that it
(01:02:27):
was possible to remedy a racist system only by favoring
the victim race in doses of remedial racism or what
the British apparently are more straightforward people than we are,
called reverse racism.
Speaker 1 (01:02:42):
This was the course.
Speaker 2 (01:02:43):
This was a course the public could not tolerate, and
neither government nor business could avow. A climate of dishonesty
was the result. Affirmative action was a big factor, maybe
the biggest, in convincing about half of Americans never to
trust anything any person.
Speaker 1 (01:03:03):
Of authority ever said.
Speaker 2 (01:03:06):
Ten presidents managed to insulate affirmative action from public accountability.
Then it became obvious to the public that changing anything
would require dismantling everything. And that's the end of the note. Again,
it's called the biggest policy change of the century, written
by Christopher Caldwell writing at The Free PRESSVFP dot com.
(01:03:32):
Let me take a moment and comment on that, because
in a way it relates to a metaphor that I
like in politics. You often hear about people talking about
a pendulum in politics, right, you get you know, conservative government,
and then people don't like it, and then they vote
in a liberal government, and then they don't like it
(01:03:52):
and swings back and they vote in a conservative government
in ste pendulum that swings like dragon Redbeard swinging his
new baby grandson in his arms to put him to sleep.
What I often wonder, and have wondered aloud from time
to time is whether we occasionally think something is a pendulum,
(01:04:14):
but it's actually a ratchet. So you know what a
ratchet is, right, you know, you put the socket on
the head of the bolt and you crank it, and
the ratchet goes.
Speaker 1 (01:04:26):
One way. But when you want to turn the bolt.
Speaker 2 (01:04:29):
The other way, the ratchet just click click, click, and
it doesn't grab anything, and the bolt doesn't turn, and
then when you pull back in the original direction, they
don't keep going that way. Right. So a ratchet is
something where in a way, you actually can move the
thing in both directions, but it only actually turns the
thing it's connected to in one direction. And I've wondered
(01:04:52):
for a long time whether America's descent into wokeness, which
used to be called political correctness.
Speaker 1 (01:04:59):
Then it became the.
Speaker 2 (01:05:00):
Same way that global warming became climate change, with global
warming becoming climate change, and I'm talking about the mindset
about it. At least until right about now, it's been
a ratchet.
Speaker 1 (01:05:13):
It never really swung back.
Speaker 2 (01:05:15):
And political correctness never really swung back. Even the political
correctness predates let's say George W.
Speaker 1 (01:05:22):
Bush, but he didn't swing back. It was a ratchet.
Speaker 2 (01:05:27):
We got a certain level of political correctness, and there
were things people felt like they weren't allowed to say,
and jokes you weren't allowed to tell, and you know,
things you weren't supposed to find entertaining or whatever. And
then when Obama came in, the ratchet just kept going.
And then when Biden came in, I mean, this stuff
just exploded, but through Obama and Biden and during Trump too,
(01:05:49):
but not because of Trump, but in reaction to Trump.
We had all this cancel culture and people losing their
jobs over non funny jokes that everybody knew was joke,
and everybody walking on eggshells, including me a little bit,
even what I do for a living. And it's fantastic, heartening, hope,
(01:06:19):
inspiring that for the first time in at least a generation.
This tyrannical desire to control not just what you say,
but what you think, is swinging backwards towards normalcy, towards tolerance,
(01:06:43):
away from censorship. And what we see right now, of
which Trump is more or at least as much a
symptom as a cause, is that we're seeing a true pendulum.
(01:07:05):
Maybe it's been a ratchet before, it's a pendulum now
it's swinging back. And yes, there will be some overshoot,
just like there always is with any pendulum political pendulum
swinging back in some direction. It can overshoot as it
goes back to and a little bit past the original
thing on a case by case basis. But all in all,
(01:07:26):
this is just the pendulum that this country needs. Our new,
newly redesigned iHeart Radio app absolutely free app, by the way,
and it functions a lot like a car radio with
presets and a dial you can turn and and you
can scan and stuff like that. It's it's pretty cool.
So anyway, iHeartRadio app. It's it's absolutely free. Make sure
you have the latest version and then set set KOA
(01:07:48):
as a pre set.
Speaker 1 (01:07:49):
All right.
Speaker 2 (01:07:49):
A listener asked me to follow up on a story
the Chad Bauer talked about a little bit earlier on
and just you know, a little a little inside baseball here.
Speaker 1 (01:07:58):
Thing it is.
Speaker 2 (01:08:00):
It's not because I think the news is unimportant, and
I'm not being sarcastic. It's not because I think the
news is unimportant. But I usually only have like half
of one ear listening to the news during the news breaks,
because I'm looking at what I want to talk about
with you next, or connecting a guest, or you know,
(01:08:22):
thinking something about the show. So every once in a
while hears something out of the corner, come up with
a bad analogy. Yeah too. That can happen all the time.
I hear something out of the corner of my ear right,
and I'm not sure which part of the year counts
to the corner, but I hear.
Speaker 1 (01:08:35):
Something out of the corner of my ear and I'm like, wait,
what was that?
Speaker 2 (01:08:37):
And and sometimes I ask Chad to stick around. Sometimes
I don't. Sometimes my brain processes so slowly that Chad
says it, I hear it without knowing that I'm hearing it.
Chad finishes his newscast, gets out of the news booth,
and walks back to his desk and three seconds later,
(01:09:01):
what pops in through my tiny brain is wait, did
he just say that? But then it's too late to
ask him to stay. So that's what happened with this.
And it was a thing about Tabor and I want
to A listener asked if I could follow up on it,
and I said, I don't know about it, So I
went and looked it up. And this is on kdvr's website.
(01:09:23):
There are news partners at Fox thirty one. Today is
the first day that the IRS can start accepting and
processing your tax returns for last year. And I'm going
to quote from KDIVR dot com. Colorado filers need to
keep an eye out for a key step to make
sure they get all the money that they are eligible
for back in their wallets. Coloraden's are set to get
(01:09:43):
TABOR refunds after they file their taxes this year, but
the state is reminding residents that they have to opt in.
The Colorado Department of Revenue is hoping to help taxpayers
make sure they get back as much money as they
can when they file their taxes this year. Elizabeth Kosar,
communicationation's director for the Department of Revenue, says, unfortunately, if
(01:10:04):
you didn't check that box for your taxes that you
filed in twenty twenty four, for tax here twenty twenty three,
you did miss out on your TABOR refund. Tabor is
something you need to opt into. So please check that box,
or again, have whoever is preparing your taxes check that box.
(01:10:25):
Oh mean, now this is gonna sound super bougie, but
I'm gonna say it anyway, and you're all used to
me being like that anyway. In my entire lifetime as
a working adult, since I was either twenty one or
(01:10:46):
twenty two years old, I'm not sure what probably twenty one,
I have never done my own taxes.
Speaker 1 (01:10:56):
And it's not because I'm lazy.
Speaker 2 (01:10:58):
It's because my first career was as an options trader,
and at the end of a year, I would get
so much paper and it's so complicated, those taxes and
all the rules that go along with being a professional trader,
and there's no way I could do my taxes myself.
Speaker 4 (01:11:17):
Yeah, yours is a little bit more complicated than somebody
that just you know, works at a subway.
Speaker 1 (01:11:22):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (01:11:22):
And even when I was self employed, too complicated, too
much law around it. And then I did you know,
some kind of wacky investments, and I'm in some partnerships
and stuff like that. And so now, even though I'm
not a trader anymore, my my taxes are still too
complicated for me to do by myself. I just I
(01:11:44):
wouldn't mind it, because I pay my account like seventeen
hundred dollars a year, which annoys me. But anyway, my
point is, I have no idea how long it's been
the case that you have to check the box on
the Colorado tax thing to get a table refund if
(01:12:07):
one is available. I wonder if you can tell me.
I wonder if you can tell me by text at
five six six nine zero. There's not a trick question.
I really don't know the answer. I wonder if you
can tell me. Has it always been that way? Did
it change recently to be that way. I don't do
my own taxes, so.
Speaker 1 (01:12:27):
I don't know. My accountant does him. He sends me them.
I just look at the I don't even look at
the numbers.
Speaker 2 (01:12:33):
How am I supposed to judge what's right and what's wrong?
I had no idea, So I just sign it. Yeah,
I can you evensure that he checked the box? I
so my accountant knows that, but I don't know if
there's always been a box. I want someone to text
me at five six six nine zero who actually knows
the answer to this question. In fact, maybe I'll try
(01:12:53):
to get in touch with this Elizabeth Kosar woman and
ask her if she knows.
Speaker 3 (01:12:58):
I don't.
Speaker 1 (01:12:58):
I don't know her.
Speaker 2 (01:12:59):
I've never been in contact with her, but I might
be able to get to her, you know, into state
government somehow. But if you know, text me at five
six six nine zero and tell me. Now here's my thing.
As soon as I read about this story, you know,
I heard Chad kind of out of the corner of
my ear.
Speaker 1 (01:13:14):
I heard Chad.
Speaker 2 (01:13:15):
Mention, and then the listener asked me about it. I
went and looked it up, and I immediately got really mad.
Why the hell should you have to opt into getting
your tax refund?
Speaker 1 (01:13:29):
And and when.
Speaker 2 (01:13:30):
The state government says that, or when there it's characterized here,
hold on, give me, let me, let me let me
look for this. Yeah, okay, so the KDVR writer it
was it wasn't necessarily the government person, but the KDVR
writer said, the Colorado Department of Revenue is hoping to
help taxpayers make sure they get as much money back
(01:13:52):
as they can when they.
Speaker 1 (01:13:52):
File their taxes this year.
Speaker 2 (01:13:54):
Look if Colorado, and I don't know if this legislature,
if the legislature did this, or if the Department of
Revenue just can has the already to make this decision
as to whether there's a checkbox on the farm. But
nobody can honestly say that you're trying to help people
make sure they get as much money back as they
can by putting a checkbox on the tax return saying
(01:14:16):
op me into TABOR. If you want to make sure
people get the money back, right, there shouldn't be any
box at all.
Speaker 1 (01:14:23):
You just automatically get your tax.
Speaker 4 (01:14:24):
Refund or even worst case scenario opt out.
Speaker 2 (01:14:29):
An even worst case scenario would be opt out. Should
worst case scenario should be having an opt out box.
But what we have now is the worst case scenario.
Why would you make people have to opt in to
get their own money back. I want to know who
did it. I'm gonna try to find out. I'm gonna
try to get to the bottom of it. I don't
know how long it's been there. I emailed a friend
(01:14:51):
of mine in the state legislature, asking do you think
you could jam this into a piece of legislation to
say that there cannot be an opt in box.
Speaker 1 (01:15:00):
There must be nothing, and you get your refund or
an opt out box.
Speaker 2 (01:15:04):
If you're some kind of you know, weird person who
wants government to have more of your money, all right,
then check the box, or or maybe your table refund
would only be nine dollars, and you decide it's not
even worth your time to get a nine dollars check
and then go have to deal with depositing it, so
you might as well just let.
Speaker 1 (01:15:20):
The state keep it.
Speaker 2 (01:15:21):
Okay, all right, I wouldn't even do that if I
were in charge.
Speaker 1 (01:15:25):
I don't want the government to have it.
Speaker 2 (01:15:26):
But but the thing is, having a checkbox is clearly
must only be I do not think you will have
a hard time convincing me that there is any explanation
for having an opt in checkbox for your Tabor refund
other than somebody in the government hoping that some people
(01:15:51):
neglect to check the box and therefore the state gets
to keep their money. I cannot think of any other
reason why. So during that break I emailed the TABOR
spokeswoman and I asked, here, let me let me go
find the email. Hang on this semi professional radio say,
hang on a second, I'm gonna go over to here.
I'm gonna go over to my scent items. And so
(01:16:15):
I emailed. I emailed her and I asked, can you
please tell me one how many people didn't check the
table refund box last year too? What that represented in
total dollars not refunded to Coloradden's.
Speaker 1 (01:16:25):
I could do that math myself.
Speaker 2 (01:16:26):
Actually, I'm sure, because I think everybody got the same.
Speaker 1 (01:16:29):
Table refund last year.
Speaker 2 (01:16:30):
It amount I was a flat amount, and how long
you've had to opt in to get the table refund.
Let me also note, by the way, just in passing here,
that this year the table refunds it will be less
than before because the Democrats passed a bunch of things
that are basically designed to spend as much of the
table refund as they can so they don't have to
(01:16:52):
give much of it back, but they will still have
to give some back. And this year it's going to
go back to a more traditional kind of formula where
your Tabor refund will be kind of sort of proportional
to your income, which is how it should be in
because Tabor refund is supposed to be a rough proxy
for how much you overpaid in income and sales taxes,
(01:17:15):
and so it makes sense that people who make more
money obviously paid more in income tax and probably paid
more in sales tax, and therefore should get a bigger
tabor refund. So in any case, it's good that that's
going to be the case this year. Dragons, can you
actually no, Yeah, let's do this thing I asked you about,
and then I'll get to my own audio in a second.
(01:17:36):
I have no idea what Caroline Levitt is saying right now,
but I wanted to just share a moment with you
of Caroline Levitt, who is the White House Press Secretary,
and her very first White House press conference. I wanted
to take it just because her first I don't know
what she's talking about. Let's drop in for a minute.
Speaker 1 (01:17:56):
Perhaps that role itself.
Speaker 3 (01:17:59):
Yeah, I think the fact that they had a gap trun.
Speaker 2 (01:18:03):
Oh, oh, did we lose it? Come whether we're sorry,
we are sometime for certainty of folks. Then also is
that uncertainty? How does that uncertainty service the president's voters?
Speaker 6 (01:18:15):
Well, I think there's only uncertainty in this room amongst
the media. There's no uncertainty in this building. So let
me provide the certainty and the clarity that all of
you need. This is not a blanket pause on federal
assistance in grant programs from the Trump administration. Individual assistance
that includes I'm not naming everything that's included, but just
to give you a few examples, social Security benefits, Medicare benefits,
(01:18:39):
food Stamps, welfare benefits. Assistance that is going directly to
individuals will not be impacted by this pause. And I
want to make that very clear to any Americans who
are watching at home who may be a little bit
confused about some of the media reporting this administration, if
you are receiving individual assistance from the federal government.
Speaker 1 (01:18:57):
You will find I think that's enough.
Speaker 2 (01:19:00):
Not not out of disrespect to her, but that was good, right.
The reporter asked something about confusion, and her answer, she's
gonna be she's gonna be combative with the media for
as long as she's in this job. Right to her,
uh and and to many Republicans, the media is the enemy,
and so she's gonna be combative like that. And she said, no,
the only confusion is in this room with you reporters.
(01:19:22):
What they were asking about, By the way, is something
that I haven't talked about yet on the show. I
did have it as a thing I might talk about,
and so maybe I'll get to it for I'll get
to it now as long as she just as long
as she just mentioned it. And and that is that
the Trump administration just put out an order to pause
(01:19:45):
essentially all federal grants and loans that don't go to individuals, right, So,
as she said, doesn't impact so security veterans benefits, right,
because that because that's.
Speaker 1 (01:20:00):
Money from the government to you.
Speaker 2 (01:20:03):
So this is instead money from the federal government to
a nonprofit, to a foreign government, to I don't know,
a science organization, to anything like that. And they are
going to go through them and they are going to
make sure that these things comport with presidential priorities.
Speaker 1 (01:20:26):
Now, I'm just going to add one thing to that.
Speaker 2 (01:20:30):
Most of these things are authorized by law. Most of
these things are created by acts of Congress. And once
that's the case, the program is created by Congress, the
money is appropriated by Congress. There is almost no legal
authority for the president to say we're not funding that anymore.
(01:20:53):
The only way to say to say we're not funding
that anymore is to have Congress pass the bill repealing
the funding.
Speaker 1 (01:21:00):
And this may well be one of those.
Speaker 2 (01:21:02):
Areas like the birthright citizenship thing, where there will be
immediate lawsuits because there is immediate harm, and the Trump
administration will I don't know how you define win or
lose here, but it'll probably be more like losing for them,
because I think their way out on a limb, even
(01:21:23):
though I understand why they want to do this, I
think they're way out on a limb. Where they're on
more solid ground would be if Congress said we authorize a.
Speaker 1 (01:21:36):
Pool of money.
Speaker 2 (01:21:39):
To try to achieve such and such a goal, but
without saying the money is going to this group or
that group or that country. And then and then the
federal government decides actually which groups are getting the money.
Within the executive branch they make that decision. That can
be an area where they may be on more solid footing.
(01:22:00):
But you know, listening to listen to Caroline Levitt for
ninety seconds, she sounds pretty good.
Speaker 1 (01:22:06):
Well.
Speaker 2 (01:22:06):
This pause on federal payments to institutions impact student loans,
because with student loans, the government is paying college, they're
not paying the person. The answer is no, it will
not impact student loans. Even though the money is going
from the government to the college, that money is tied
(01:22:28):
to you when it is considered a specific benefit, a
benefit for a specific individual. So this pause does not
impact student loans. Now, it appears that this is an
ongoing topic of conversation at the White House Press conference.
This is Caroline Levitt is a new Press secretary, and
(01:22:51):
I think she might be talking about this right now,
So let's just drop in again and have a listen.
Speaker 7 (01:22:56):
Thank you some of the concision I think making here
with this cause on federal funding. You've made it clear
if you're not stopping funds that go directly to individuals,
But there certainly are lots of organizations that receive funding
and then may pass along a benefit meals on wheels,
for one, they provide meals for over two point two
million seniors. What is the president's message to Americans out there,
many of whom supported him and voted for him, who
(01:23:18):
are concerned that this is going to impact them directly,
even if, as you said, the funding isn't coming directly
to their way.
Speaker 6 (01:23:25):
I have now been asked and answered this question four
times to individuals at home who receive direct assistance from
the federal government. You will not be impacted by the
federal Freese. In fact, O and B just sent out
a memo to Capitol Hill with Q and A to
clarify some of the questions and the answers that all
of you are asking me right now. Again, direct assistants
(01:23:48):
will not be impacted. I've been asked and answered about
this O and B memo. There's many other topics of
the day, Jackie Hyder, Correct.
Speaker 2 (01:23:54):
Assistance, Carolina.
Speaker 7 (01:23:54):
It's going to another organization and then trickling down a
direct assistance that is in the hands of the American people.
Speaker 3 (01:24:00):
Will not be impacted.
Speaker 2 (01:24:01):
Again.
Speaker 7 (01:24:01):
As I said to Peter, we will continue to provide.
Speaker 6 (01:24:03):
That list as it comes to fruition. But O and
B right now is focused on analyzing the federal government's spending,
which is exactly what the American people elected President Trump
to do.
Speaker 1 (01:24:12):
I want to watch the earlier one immigration hearing.
Speaker 7 (01:24:15):
Five hundred arrests ICE has made so far since President
Trump came back into office. Can you just tell us
the numbers how many have a criminal record versus those
who are just in the country illegal, with.
Speaker 6 (01:24:25):
All of them because they illegally broke our nation's laws,
and therefore they are criminals as far as this administration goes.
I know the last administration didn't see it that way.
So it's a big culture shift in our nation to
view someone who breaks our immigration laws as a criminal.
But that's exactly what they are here.
Speaker 2 (01:24:39):
All right, let's pause it there, but I think I
want to come back to that dragon if you can.
If you can pause it, that last answer on the
immigration thing is interesting too. My understanding, if I if
I remember correctly, be okay, crossing the border illegally, I guess,
is a crime. Try and remember this correctly. It's weird
provisions of law. Being in the country illegally, which is
(01:25:01):
kind of a different thing from crossing illegally is I
think a civil violation, so you wouldn't call it a crime.
I think Caroline well understands that the question being asked
is what percentage of the people who have been deported
have committed crimes since coming into the country. She gave
the spin that she wanted to give, but she's clearly
(01:25:23):
very quick. I think she's gonna be I think she's
gonna be good at I think she's gonna be good at
that job. Anyway, I want to just share quickly a
listener text and this is this is important. I'm just
gonna stick with this for a minute. So the Trump
administration announced this thing, right, They're going to pause all
basically loans and grants that kind of spending money, money
(01:25:45):
that's going out to organizations, not to individuals. In order
to get a court case heard challenging a government action,
you in almost every case need to demonstrate that you
are harmed by the action. And if you're going to
(01:26:06):
try to get an immediate injunction, which is a judge
saying to the government, you must stop doing whatever that
thing is or restart doing something that you were stopping
immediately because what it does is creating immediate harm.
Speaker 1 (01:26:28):
To the plaintiffs.
Speaker 2 (01:26:31):
And this and part is important, and the plaintiffs haves
a pretty decent chance of winning the case. I think
that might happen here. And here's an example. This is
a listener text from just a few minutes ago. Ross
This decision by Trump is affecting my family personally. My
wife is at three pm today going to be furloughed
(01:26:55):
for god knows how long. This is a razor situation,
not an act situation. And then what the listener means
by that is what Trump is doing is just like
a giant meat axe, not subtle at all, just cutting
off everything where really, if they're allowed to do this
at all, what they should probably be doing. And my
listener says, you know, using a razor for more precise
(01:27:17):
cutting where it needs to go.
Speaker 1 (01:27:19):
Her program is the listener text.
Speaker 2 (01:27:21):
Now, her program has no dei nonsense in it, but
she still has to deal with this. Her grant is
with the physics department at the University of Colorado. So
again taking the sort of legalistic position here, here's here's
what I expect will happen. Somebody is a part of
(01:27:48):
a program that was authorized specifically.
Speaker 1 (01:27:52):
By Congress in a bill.
Speaker 2 (01:27:54):
Congress says two point seventy five million dollars to the
University of Colorado Physics Department to study such and such,
and that grant goes to fund that program and the
salaries of the people in that program, and the rent
and the health insurance and the computers and whatever else
(01:28:15):
they need to run that program. The grant is the funding,
and again very important in my example, the Congress specifically
authorized that grant to that department. It would be different
potentially in my legal analysis as a non lawyer, if
(01:28:35):
government said we allocate to the I don't know, Department
of Energy two point seven million dollars to study a
certain kind of energy physics, and the department can decide
who gets the money, that's a different question. If the
federal government is making the decision, then the president can
(01:28:58):
pause it, change it, do almost anything. But if Congress
made the decision, he really doesn't have the authority to
do anything at all. So what I expect to happen.
In fact, how about this, I expect it has already happened.
I expect there has already been a lawsuit filed, or
ten or one hundred lawsuits filed by people like my
(01:29:22):
listener's wife, who are in programs that were explicitly authorized
by Congress and who are now being furloughed or otherwise harmed.
Speaker 1 (01:29:33):
So the harm is immediate, and.
Speaker 2 (01:29:37):
The president does not have the authority to take the action.
And I expect that well before the end of the week,
a federal judge somewhere will rule that the Trump administration cannot.
Speaker 1 (01:29:54):
Do this and will.
Speaker 2 (01:29:56):
Say we understand or at least can block payments of
any sort on programs that were specifically authorized by Congress
to go to that recipient.
Speaker 1 (01:30:14):
I think that.
Speaker 2 (01:30:14):
I bet you that lawsuit. I bet you a bunch
of those lawsuits have already already been filed.
Speaker 1 (01:30:23):
Wow, here's another side. Ross.
Speaker 2 (01:30:26):
You can tell your other listener who texted in that
I lost my job because the Biden administration started making
mass payoffs of student loans and cut the contracted amount
they paid my employer. So I've been out of work
for five months. Way too many people, by the way,
way too many people dependent on the federal government for work.
Speaker 1 (01:30:47):
What is all this? Why?
Speaker 2 (01:30:49):
And look, I don't want anybody to lose a job,
but why is somebody in a student loan business losing
a job because of something government did actually know the answer?
Because Barack Obama nationalized the student loan program when trying
to make Obamacare look cheaper than it actually was, and
they used fake assumed profits from the student loan program
and offset their crazy expenses for healthcare. And they said, well,
(01:31:12):
we're going to lose a trillion and a half dollars
in healthcare, but we're going to make five hundred billion
dollars in student loan profits. So the bill is only
going to cost a trillion, and of course it was
all both sides were lies. It costs more, and there
were no student loan profits or almost no student loan profits,
not really a very profitable business. But in any case,
why is the government there? And why are people at
(01:31:32):
CU getting federal government money? And why are people anywhere
getting federal government What is federal government money? That's my
money and your money and our children's money. Why are
they getting in Where is it in the constitution that
the federal government has a role to fund such and
such research, to fund freaking gain of function research in Wuhan, China,
(01:31:56):
to take over the student loan industry, to fund and
I don't know, some small.
Speaker 1 (01:32:01):
Part of education. And even though they only fund a small.
Speaker 2 (01:32:04):
Part of education, it still puts their hooks in.
Speaker 1 (01:32:06):
It, and they get to tell people what to do.
Speaker 2 (01:32:10):
I mean, this is to me, I'm on a bit
of a rant here, I realized to me, even though
actually I think Trump probably can't do much.
Speaker 1 (01:32:23):
Of what he's doing with this.
Speaker 2 (01:32:26):
I love the fact that it's gonna start waking a
lot of people up to the fact that too many
people make money by sucking on the government teat, which
really is my children's future earnings.
Speaker 1 (01:32:43):
It's insane.
Speaker 2 (01:32:47):
State government is a little better in the sense that
states have to run balanced budgets so they can hire
more people than they need. But they're gonna have to
cut somewhere else or they're gonna have to raise tw
But either way they're gonna have to deal with the
voters on it right away. But since the federal government
just keeps running up bigger and bigger debt, they're piling
this stuff on the heads of our children. The state
(01:33:09):
really can't pile it too much on the heads of
our children. A little bit when some parts of the
state do bond offerings that are gonna be paid off
in twenty years and such. But you know, the federal
government's a whole different level, and it's immoral and it's disgusting,
and maybe two things. Maybe this will get a bunch
(01:33:33):
of people thinking, wow, now that you think about it,
that really does seem like too many people getting their
money from the federal government. So that could be one thing,
and then the other thing, and this would be great.
The other thing might be maybe some of these programs
would come to stay to themselves.
Speaker 1 (01:33:50):
You know what, our.
Speaker 2 (01:33:53):
Federal funding might not be as stable or reliable a
funding source as we have been thinking.
Speaker 1 (01:34:00):
So maybe we should look for different funding.
Speaker 2 (01:34:02):
Maybe we should try to get funding from nonprofits, from charities,
from rich people, from foundations, from corporations, from anything other
than government. I remember this too, Remember this too. An
(01:34:22):
organization that is getting funding from the federal government is
getting funding whose source is basically the moral equivalent of
a mugger. Now, if you're running some program and you
go to a rich person or a foundation, or or
(01:34:46):
ten thousand not rich people, like the millions and millions
of Americans around the country. We're donating money to the
Red Cross and actually to our partners at Dream Center
to help people in California. Right, that's all volun terry.
There's no mugging involved. Right, there's no mugging involved. I say,
I'll give you an example. I say to you. I
(01:35:08):
say to you, we and iHeart are partnering with Dream
Center to help the people in California. Please text the
word relief to Oh my gosh, what's the number dragon?
Speaker 1 (01:35:21):
Text the word relief too. I don't have it informally.
Speaker 2 (01:35:24):
Three three one two zero three anyway, Uh, maybe dragon
will find it, and I do want to get it
right actually, and I should have it in front of me,
but I got rid of the piece of paper that
I had it, that I had it.
Speaker 1 (01:35:38):
Written down on.
Speaker 2 (01:35:39):
So let me three one zero zero okay, one zero
zero Okay. So I say you text three three one
zero zero and donate some money to help your fellow
Americans in need. And I've done it too, Okay. So
that's a real thing. That's what I heard is doing
with with dream Center. Three three one zero zero, text
the word relief to them. So there's no threat there.
(01:36:01):
I'm not threatening you. Hey, if you don't do this,
then something. There's no threat. It's a it's a request.
It's a suggestion, it's a mention. It's just a it's
a it's a thing. It's totally voluntary. I did it voluntarily.
You can do it or not do it voluntarily. But
(01:36:27):
when some group or even a person. This is even
true with Social Security, even though people don't like.
Speaker 1 (01:36:36):
To hear it.
Speaker 2 (01:36:37):
There's no Social Security Trust Fund. When you get money
from the government, there's no government money. It's just people's money,
either now or later. So I don't want to give
money through the government.
Speaker 1 (01:36:56):
To support X Y and Z. By the way, I
don't want.
Speaker 2 (01:37:01):
To give money through the government to support X Y
and Z, even though I like X Y and Z,
because it's not the government's function. If I want to
support X Y and Z, if I think they should
be supported, I will donate to them directly. I'm talking
specifically about things that aren't the government's function. I'm not
talking about government funding of the Defense Department, which is
clearly a legitimate.
Speaker 1 (01:37:21):
Function of government.
Speaker 2 (01:37:23):
I'm talking about government funding of almost everything else it does,
education and this kind of research and transportation and whatever.
There's no constitutional authority there any but separate from the
constitutional authority. So they're going to give out billions, They're
gonna give out FEMA AID, They're gonna give out billions
of my children's future earnings. And look, if I want
(01:37:44):
to fund the people in California, I'll do it myself.
And in fact, I've done it myself, right, I made
that donation. So how do they get the money from
me and from you? And let's not use the California
fires as an example, because most of us want to
help there, But there's a myriad tens of thousands of government.
Remember shrimp on a treadmill. You remember that, the scientific
(01:38:08):
thing that was funded by the government, and one of
the things they like to put a little treadmill in
a little quarium and had a shrimp running on it
and they were measuring something. The only way the government
gets that money, the only way is because there is
a threat that if you don't pay your taxes, you
go to jail or they take your house. Government, and
(01:38:33):
I want to be pretty specific here, federal government spending
on things that the constitution does not authorize is no
better than a mugger, no better than a mugger who says,
holds a gun up to your face, give me your wallet.
(01:38:54):
You got one hundred dollars in your wallet, the mugger says,
don't feel bad, I'm giving fifty dollars of this to charity.
You should feel at least half good. No, you just
stole my money. That's what government is. That's what government is,
(01:39:14):
and it's it's going to bankrupt us eventually, but it's
already bankrupted us morally.
Speaker 1 (01:39:23):
We have come to think, after.
Speaker 2 (01:39:27):
I don't know a century and a half of being
a nation without thinking this way, we have come to
think that it is the federal government's job to pay
for so many things, and it's not.
Speaker 1 (01:39:43):
It.
Speaker 2 (01:39:43):
It just isn't.
Speaker 1 (01:39:47):
I hope it gets better.
Speaker 2 (01:39:48):
I hope that some of what Trump is doing here
is causing some of these institutions to say, hey, maybe
we should look somewhere else for the funding. I think
that's probably a little too optimistic, all right. I think
that's probably a little too optimistic. But we'll see. All right.
(01:40:15):
One other thing I want to mention that I'm actually
seeing in a news report here from Fox that came
up in Caroline Levitt's press conference.
Speaker 1 (01:40:24):
The drones.
Speaker 2 (01:40:24):
You remember the drones flying over New Jersey that several
years earlier, a few years earlier, were flying over Colorado
but didn't get national attention.
Speaker 1 (01:40:31):
Do you remember this dragon?
Speaker 2 (01:40:33):
I don't remember them thlawing over Colorado. Oh okay, So
this week, weeks and weeks, there are these big drones
lights at night, flying over Colorado, especially more rural parts,
but not entirely eastern Colorado.
Speaker 1 (01:40:44):
And the Sheriff's out there like, what the heck is
all this?
Speaker 2 (01:40:46):
And it went on for weeks and nobody identified them,
and some people thought it was coming out of I
think an Air Force base in Wyoming, but they said
it wasn't and we never figured it out, and then
it went away, and then suddenly the drones show up
over New Jersey.
Speaker 1 (01:40:58):
Are they the same drones? I don't know. Mike might
be part of the same program. I don't know.
Speaker 2 (01:41:04):
And the government acted not very concerned. And somebody made
a wonderful point, which is when you got all these
drones over places where there are a lot of kind
of fancy and rich people. There are a lot of
fancy rich people in certain parts of New Jersey because
there's very very rich areas there. People who live in
(01:41:24):
New York, right, they could be in Connecticut, they could
be in New Jersey, they could be in Westchester County.
When the government's acting unconcerned, it probably means they have
some idea what it is, even though they're saying they
have no idea what it is. Because if they really
had no idea what it was, they'd be concerned. They'd
be worried what's going on here? So Caroline Levitt was
(01:41:46):
asked a question about this in the press conference day.
We don't have the audio, but I just have the
text in quotes here from a Fox News report.
Speaker 1 (01:41:53):
Quote, after research and study.
Speaker 2 (01:41:55):
The drones that were flying over New Jersey and large
numbers were authorized by the FAA for research and various
other reasons.
Speaker 1 (01:42:07):
And then she.
Speaker 2 (01:42:09):
Was pushed on a little bit more and she said,
this was not the enemy.
Speaker 1 (01:42:13):
Unbelievable. We knew that they knew.
Speaker 2 (01:42:17):
And even though we knew that they knew, and they
knew that we knew that they knew, they still wouldn't
tell us. Ridiculous And what did we know? We knew
that the government had some idea what the drones of
New over New Jersey were, or they would have been
a lot more worried about it. Correct.
Speaker 8 (01:42:34):
I would think that they would have been shot down
or something or something.
Speaker 1 (01:42:38):
Yeah, I can't imagine.
Speaker 2 (01:42:39):
Well, then the net did.
Speaker 8 (01:42:41):
Little weather balloon float all the way across.
Speaker 2 (01:42:44):
The United States? Indeed? Well, in her first ever press
conference today that just finished, Caroline Levitt said, and I quote,
after research and study, the drones that were flying over
New Jersey and large numbers were authorized by the FAA
for research and various other reasons. Ah, various reason Yeah.
Speaker 8 (01:43:00):
Okay, Susan Wickin actually tested me and said, this young
woman just crushed it.
Speaker 2 (01:43:05):
She did.
Speaker 1 (01:43:05):
Yeah, we took a little bit of it on the show.
Speaker 2 (01:43:07):
I'll go back and watch the shoes afternoon. She was
very good and just like like one example, a reporter
said something to her like, well, there's some confusion about
and then whatever it was, and then she said, you know,
the only confusion is among you in this room. Yeah.
Speaker 8 (01:43:21):
Yeah, she's Oh, I feel a little airy flesher right now.
Speaker 2 (01:43:24):
She's tough, so excited. It's very tough. What you got
coming up? Oh god, I have no idea.
Speaker 8 (01:43:28):
No, I'm talking the Common Sense Institute about their Free
Enterprise report. Yeah, and Leland Conway is going to stop by.
He's on his way to the Gold Dome to testify
against this god awful gun bill.
Speaker 2 (01:43:37):
Everybody stick around for Mandy stuff and things.
Speaker 1 (01:43:40):
Another fabulous show. I'll talk to you tomorrow.
The Ross Kaminsky Show News
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