05-13-25 FULL SHOW - Motorcycle Deaths Head Upward, Plus Our Futurist Thomas Frey

Today we talk about our lost pop culture with our futurist Thomas Frey, along with the use of AI for education.  Mandy goes on a tear about Jake Tapper trying to profit off his own failures, we discuss motorcycle fatalities in Colorado with DJ Summers from the Common Sense Institute and crime being down in Denver and Aurora, plus Boulder suing Exxon Mobil and Suncor. 

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
So Mandy Connell Show is sponsored by Belle and Pollock
accident and injury lawyers.

Speaker 2 (00:05):
No, it's Mandy Connell and ton.

Speaker 3 (00:10):
On Kola.

Speaker 4 (00:13):
N FMA, got way, stay the nicetyus through three many
Connelly sad Baby.

Speaker 2 (00:26):
Welcome, Welca, Welcome to a Tuesday edition of the show.

Speaker 1 (00:29):
I am your host for the next three hours, Mandy Connell,
joined by my right hand man. I call him a
rod you can call him Anthony Rodriguez. And together we
will take you right up until three p m. When
when you turn the keys to the station over to
those whack a doodle guys on KO Sports in the afternoon.

Speaker 2 (00:47):
That's right.

Speaker 1 (00:48):
We only trust them for a few hours and then
you have to have babysuit. No, I'm just kidding. Let's
talk about the blog, shall we, because I've got one.
You've never looked at the blog?

Speaker 2 (00:57):
Make today the day you do it your life.

Speaker 1 (01:00):
I'm not saying it will be completely complete, it will
be measurably closer than it was before. You went to
mandy'sblog dot com. That's mandy'sblog dot com. Look for the
headline that says five thirteen twenty five blog motorcycle Death's
head Upward plus our futurist Thomas Frye. Click on that
and here are the headlines you will find with him.

Speaker 5 (01:24):
An office half of American alwayships and clipments as plant.

Speaker 1 (01:30):
Today on the blog, It's dangerous to ride a motorcycle
in Colorado. We've lost our popular culture. Crime is down
in Denver and Aurora. Our lefty Supreme Court set Okay's
boulder suit against energy providers. Trump is off to mid
to the middle for that. Let me try that again.
Trump is off to the Middle East.

Speaker 2 (01:49):
Ever.

Speaker 1 (01:50):
Wonder what the coliseum look like in its heyday when
you call for help and no one listens. Why don't
our national parks ask for volunteers? Second Burger versus isn't
a fair fight? If you ever wanted to live next
to Lions and Tigers. Babylon b does the Rockies. A
Transhausen mom celebrates using Colorado to destroy your children. Scrolling

(02:12):
the Broncos' newest running backs circled to the Broncos. What
NFL team has never changed their logo? This is because
being fat can lead to cancer? Does this lead to burnout?
Want to win tickets to a Broncos home game? A
lot of questions. In this blog today, the new Rockies
manager speaks wedding guests choose the happy couple's last name.

(02:33):
This Diddy trial proofs Donald Trump was right, David Hogg
could be bounced from his DNC vice chair position. The
War on Boys has been successful, and yes, technology is
ruining schools and students. Those are the headlines on the blog.
And I did not realize how long that blog was
un till I'm a little lightheaded from newing the headlines.

(02:54):
It's a um dinger today, a biggin' You're gonna be
a lot stronger too, just from carrying this thing around JK.
It's free and it doesn't cost any it doesn't weigh
anything more than your cell phone.

Speaker 2 (03:04):
Just throwing that out there. Okay, Ayon, will you do
me a favor.

Speaker 1 (03:08):
Could you please play the sound bite of the president
that you just played right before we did the blog. Now,
I want to point out that that was an unedited
SoundBite of the president. He was trying to make some
comments and that's what came out of his mouth. And
I only bring this up and point it out because
this morning I got in my car, I was going

(03:30):
to breakfast with father Mike.

Speaker 2 (03:31):
Got to see him. That was awesome. And I'm going.

Speaker 1 (03:35):
To breakfast to meet father Mike, and I am the
Michael Brown Show at our brother station six thirty K.
How there's no dames on that station. I can't call
it a sister station. But he was talking about Jake
Tapper and apparently everyone in DC and in national media

(03:56):
that actively worked to be willfully ignorant of the decline
of a man. But as you just heard, got to
a point where he couldn't even string a sentence together.
Now Jake Tapper has a book about it. So I'm
listening and Michael's playing the sound bites, and I wasn't
gonna play sound bites for that. I thought, no, I'll

(04:17):
just get I'll get super mad.

Speaker 2 (04:18):
I don't want to do.

Speaker 1 (04:19):
It because now there's this whole cottage industry of journalists
who if they had turned on any form of right
leaning media, they would have heard us talking about the
president's obvious decline.

Speaker 2 (04:34):
He wanders off at the G seven.

Speaker 1 (04:36):
He starts a sentence talking about one thing and just
drifts into something else that has nothing to do with it.
He's falling up the stairs of Air Force one at graduations.
He's falling off bicycles. He's falling everywhere, and he's old,
by the way, so it's not.

Speaker 2 (04:53):
Like it's crazy that he's falling.

Speaker 1 (04:54):
Elderly people do fall more often than non elderly people,
that is a fact. But Jake Tapper and his ilk
they kept telling us, oh, we don't talk about that,
that's ageist to point out those deep fakes. Remember deep fakes.
That was the word of the week. And now this clown,

(05:16):
Jake Tapper is out selling a book talking about how
they all just.

Speaker 2 (05:23):
Dang it, we missed it, we missed it.

Speaker 6 (05:27):
Goly.

Speaker 1 (05:28):
This was so the White House was so crafty in
hiding this decline, I mean, good gravy. They snookered us hard.
Are you blanking kidding me right now? Are you joking me?
Because if I am to believe what Jake Tapper is
saying now that, oh golly gee whiz, the White House

(05:51):
just worked really really double time to you know, to
shield the president for the rest of us. So we
had no idea that his decline was that significant when
people like me and a million other people on the
right were going, yeah, some's not wrong with that, dude,
some Nope, something's definitely not wrong, and some's.

Speaker 2 (06:09):
Not right with that.

Speaker 7 (06:10):
Dude.

Speaker 1 (06:12):
We were told we were the problem, we were the haters,
and now the same people want you to buy a
book that they will then take part of the prophet
and put in their own pocket. Now, let me ask
this question of Jake Tapper. And as a matter of fact,
I'm gonna have a rod reach out and try and
get an interview with Jake Tapper, because I would love

(06:32):
to ask this question of him. If you were so
easily fooled by what was going on in the White
House and so devoid of any intellectual curiosity about what
other people were saying, why in the world should I
look to you for coverage of anything. You're the most

(06:55):
gullible person on the planet. And now we're all to
believe goll Lee. Who could have seen that coming? Well,
a whole bunch of us, everyone in this listening audience
right now?

Speaker 5 (07:08):
Good?

Speaker 2 (07:08):
Great? Oh, yes, I'm sorry, Texter.

Speaker 1 (07:10):
You are correct on the Common Spirit health text line
at five six six nine zero. Mandy, it was cheap
fakes that they tried to use.

Speaker 2 (07:17):
Correct. Thank you for the correction.

Speaker 1 (07:22):
Other interesting thing from the book was that Biden didn't
recognize George Clooney, At least George Clooney had the stones
to write an editorial about it and force the issue.

Speaker 2 (07:31):
You guys, they were going to.

Speaker 1 (07:33):
Try and push that old man over the finish line
and then slap him in a wheelchair.

Speaker 2 (07:40):
And this is the left media.

Speaker 1 (07:43):
They're all out there writing books they can't wait to
talk about. Oh what they have uncovered in their incredibly diligent,
dogged reporting on this issue.

Speaker 2 (07:54):
Bye gosh, by golly.

Speaker 1 (07:55):
Wait, No, we didn't pay attention to it for five years.
I mean, the man ran a presidential campaign from his basement.

Speaker 2 (08:04):
And the news media was like, everything is not FuMB oh.

Speaker 1 (08:10):
I found I had to turn mikel Off. I was like, nope,
I can't do this. I'm going to see father Mike,
my favorite priest. Can't be all jacked up an edgy
when I get there. That would be inappropriate. Good gravy, Mandy.
It would be so much easier if it was mandy'sblog

(08:31):
dot com, which is what it is, Mandy's blog dot com,
same as it's as it's always been.

Speaker 2 (08:38):
Mandy my favorite.

Speaker 1 (08:38):
Was right before the debate, these same people started referring
to Trump as frail.

Speaker 2 (08:43):
Guys. I still have not.

Speaker 1 (08:46):
I was having a conversation with a friend, a good
friend who does not agree with me politically, before the debate,
and she was very certain, I mean, like licking her
chops certain, that Biden was going to come out and
annihilate Donald Trump. Annihilate it, okay, And we all know

(09:08):
what happened.

Speaker 2 (09:09):
It was so bad. I couldn't even call in gloat.
I just couldn't do it.

Speaker 1 (09:12):
I generally speaking, I don't ever want to fight with
my friends or start a fight or create a problem
because of politics. I refuse to do that. I just
refuse to engage on any level. And if somebody tries
to pick a fight with me, I let them know
I'm not fighting back in any way, shape or form.
And if they want to not be my friend because
of politics, then we were never really friends in the
first place. And not one single person has ever taken

(09:33):
me up on that. In any case, I don't even
know what to do here other than to say things
to make people really think about the fact that.

Speaker 2 (09:47):
We cannot let them off the hook.

Speaker 1 (09:51):
We cannot let them just change the narrative unless and
I haven't read Jake Tappers, but maybe the introduction maybe
in the introduction, Jake Tapper says, Hey, hey guys, I'm
super sorry. We really screwed this story up. We should
have been more dogging in our pursuit. We should have
demanded to see the president at eight pm because we'd heard,
you know, rumors that he can only go till four

(10:13):
or whatever. Unless they throw themselves on that sword, unless
they absolutely take responsibility for their own lack of journalism.
I don't want to hear anything they have to say.
I don't want to hear how badly. Oh my goodness,
that crafty white House. We just can't believe it. It's like, oh,

(10:37):
it's like they're the wily coyote and the White House
is the road runner.

Speaker 2 (10:40):
You know, just golly, g Willakers, how did we miss it?
Can't do it? Mandy. On another note, do you remember.

Speaker 1 (10:48):
Which day a few weeks ago you posted your favorite
margarita recipe? I really need one today? Yes, indeedy, that
was May fifth. Sinko demayo. Here's a fun searching fact.
Though sometimes this works because sometimes this is what I
do when I need to find something in the blog.
I'll search my name, and then I'll search blog, and
then I'll search whatever I want like spicy margarita, and

(11:09):
then that will often take you exactly where you want
to go. You're welcome bashing an author for ten minutes
while also plugging your own blog three times in a
segment of hilarious why not? I mean, I'm sure there
are some lefties out there who have their little radio
shows who, if they know about my blog, would love
to trash it. Who cares at least on my blog,
I'm honest at least when I make a mistake, I apologize,

(11:34):
as I have multiple times for telling you people to
get the COVID vaccine. This is all I'm asking. Just recognize, admit,
and apologize for your role. And that is the starting
point to me ever beginning to perhaps maybe someday in
the future, trust you again. It's like anything else. It's
like any other kind of relationship.

Speaker 2 (11:55):
You know.

Speaker 1 (11:55):
I apologize to my listeners when I'm wrong, and I
do not apologize when I do not think I'm wrong,
just in case you were wondering, Because I respect you, guys,
and I think that when I do get something wrong,
like my car accident number yesterday, Wow, that was really
a head scratcher for me, You guys, I mean, that
was just some sloppy work, but I apologized and threw

(12:17):
myself on my own sword. There's none of that coming
from these journalists. There's not one bit of self awareness.

Speaker 2 (12:25):
And that's the part that's so frustrating.

Speaker 1 (12:27):
Absolutely, Hey, Mandy, whether it was incompetence or idiocy, I
think we can forgive them, but we will never trust
them again with anything.

Speaker 2 (12:34):
But guys, you know, I realize.

Speaker 1 (12:36):
That forgiveness is for the person who gives it, correct
But why am I going to forgive them when they
don't even admit that they are wrong and ask for forgiveness.
They only admit that they're wrong in that they look
back and go, gosh, we missed it, dang it, dang it.

Speaker 2 (12:52):
But they didn't just miss it. They actively fed the narrative.

Speaker 1 (12:56):
Coming from the White House that he was as sure
is ever those are just cheap fakes, Amy, Come on,
it's really really frustrating. So anyway, why does the news
fail to report certain stories, specifically the local news. There
was a really bad accident near our house Monday night,
yet nothing from the news. But yesterday they had all

(13:18):
day coverage on the egg truck accident. Why well, a
wreck in your neighborhood, Texter, and this is not you specifically,
there's just anyone. A wreck in your neighborhood is a
local story, only local to your yard. And now that
we know just over forty two thousand people die in
car accidents every year, and that is the correct number

(13:39):
in the United States, then a person even dying in
a car accident is not special, and that being in
your neighborhood. It's local, it's hyper local, and it's one
of the reasons that we don't on the radio cover
house fires.

Speaker 2 (13:53):
Let me explain something to you. Do you know why
the news.

Speaker 1 (13:56):
Media covers house fires because of the images, the vision,
the visual picture of a house on fire is an
interesting visual picture for us. It is a local story
to that hyper local neighborhood. It is a very interesting
and difficult balance when news editors are trying to decide
what to put in and what not to put in,
especially on a day that there's a ton of news,

(14:17):
and maybe yesterday there wasn't a ton of news, which
explains why an egg accident, which is unique because I'm
sure there was eggs all over the highway, you know,
traffic got scrambled.

Speaker 2 (14:28):
Let's see what I did there, So.

Speaker 1 (14:31):
I mean, you kind of have to think of it
like in terms of and there's lots of stories I
would love to dig a lot deeper in on the show,
but they're hyper locals, so it's like, Okay, we have
this big listening audience, what do we want to do here?
So it's all it's not as uh, it's not as
nefarious as people think it is. You know, I have
my criticisms of news, television, news, but I've also known

(14:54):
a lot of people who've worked in that industry and
they really do want to go out and do the
best they can, and then they're given two minutes and
twenty seconds to tell a story that should take three hours,
you know what I mean. So a lot of decisions
like that. Anyway, exactly, Mandy, they didn't miss it, they
colluded together to hide it. Amen, Mandy, you have to realize,

(15:15):
and I'm sure that you do. These CNN hosts are
paid to be liberal. They're paid to say that Biden
is okay. I don't for one second believe they believe
what they're saying, and in that you would be mistaken.
Part of the problem with newsrooms is that everybody in
the newsroom does think the same way, so it becomes
an echo chamber. And I've been in situations like this

(15:37):
on the right where everything is right wing, and you
get into an echo chamber, you get into a bubble.
So it's not that they're like actively going, well, we're
not going to talk about that, or we're not going
to cover that story. It's not on their radar, or
they don't think it's important because none of their friends
are talking about it. So no, I don't know. And
I'm sure there are people out there who, you know,
say things they don't believe in just for money.

Speaker 2 (16:01):
I am not one of those people anyway.

Speaker 1 (16:04):
Oh thanks to the text who said, Mandy about that
traffic story, you got to see the sunny side to things.

Speaker 2 (16:08):
You are correct, You are very very correct, and to.

Speaker 1 (16:14):
The texture you just followed up with. You got to
be yoking me with that scrambled joke. I am not
yoking you, sir, not even a little bit, Mandy. If
you look back, it doesn't take much to see Biden
was a moron before sanility hit, you know. I mean,
let's not throw around the word moron. It could be
insulting to morons. You never know, you do not know

(16:36):
in that situation. Now, when we get back, I got
a couple guests coming on today, not when we get back,
but I'm going to tell you who's coming up. First
of all, at one o'clock, we've got our futurist, Thomas Frye,
and we've got two stories.

Speaker 2 (16:47):
We're going to talk about one of them.

Speaker 1 (16:48):
I actually said this to a friend of mine about
seven or eight months ago, that one of the things
that I worry about in terms of society, there are
two things. Number one the absolute decline of civic organizations,
and the second is the loss of a common culture
in the United States of America. As algorithms get more personalized,

(17:12):
as opportunities for people to create unique content that feeds
a very specific niche gets more easily accessible. We're not
watching the same shows, we're not consuming the same media,
and though there's a net benefit in that you can
get what you want, but we're becoming increasingly siloed in
a way that used to bring us together, and that

(17:33):
is Thomas has written a paper on it. We're going
to talk about that later in the show. And at
two thirty, DJ Summers from the Common Sense Institute is
going to join me.

Speaker 2 (17:42):
If you ride a motorcycle in.

Speaker 1 (17:44):
Colorado, you really, really really need to be careful because
the numbers for motorcycle fatalities in Colorado are not good
and they are moving in the wrong direction, especially when
you consider what percentage of all drivers. We're gonna talk
to DJ Summer's about that study at two thirty when
we get back. Crime is down in two places. But

(18:09):
does it feel like it? We'll talk about that next.
This is one of those.

Speaker 2 (18:12):
Hey, this is great news.

Speaker 1 (18:13):
We should all be excited about this news, but then
on the flip side, you're like, ooh, doesn't feel like
it all the time? Does not feel like Homicides have
dropped in both Denver and Aurora, which they have significantly.

Speaker 2 (18:29):
I mean, listen to this, you guys.

Speaker 1 (18:32):
In Denver, homicides have declined fifty eight percent through the
first three months of the year compared to the same
period in twenty twenty four, with ten homicides reported through
the end of March versus twenty four in the same
time period. Aurora has experienced a similar trend, with homicides
dropping thirty six percent from eleven to seven during the

(18:53):
first quarter. That that's kind of a big deal. The problem, though, oh,
is that it's not really translating. And I think a
big part of that is because you have these very
high profile crimes where people are getting stabbed on Sixteenth Street.
I have a story on the blog today about the

(19:14):
neighbors around in the Ballpark district. They're now signing a
petition because they've got so much crime happening right outside
their window in a parking lot.

Speaker 2 (19:26):
And windows are being shot out.

Speaker 1 (19:28):
That they're getting a petition together asking the city to
help and do something. And when nine News asked them
about it, excuse me, that wasn't nine News. I can't
remember which media I'll I think Fox thirty one asked
them about it. The mayor's office just sent back a
copy of the statement about their new downtown safety plan.
I got to tell you, that is just insulting. If

(19:51):
you've ever written a letter, actually, you know what, guys,
this is actually kind of fun. Write a very specific
letter to a member of Congress, and if you can
cover three different topics, that's where it.

Speaker 2 (20:03):
Really gets good.

Speaker 1 (20:04):
You send in the letter to your member of Congress
or your senator or whatever, and inevitably they never see it.
Just FYI now, I'm not telling you not to send it,
because they do see some a very particular small amount
does get through, but they do get sorted by staff.
They put you in the pro column, the anti column,
wherever you belong, so they have a general idea of

(20:26):
what their constituents want. But then they hand that letter
to either a staffer or an intern to write a
letter back, and in many cases the intern will be
sent to a database of canned responses.

Speaker 2 (20:39):
And this is where it gets really good.

Speaker 1 (20:41):
I've gotten an email back from a member of Congress's
office with five paragraphs in it, all in a different font.

Speaker 2 (20:50):
Now, the first.

Speaker 1 (20:51):
Time I saw it, I was completely confused as to
why someone would go through the trouble of putting five
paragraphs in five different fonts, because it didn't add anything
to the to the email.

Speaker 2 (21:02):
It was just weird and distracting.

Speaker 1 (21:05):
And then a friend of mine who had been a
congressional staffer, I asked her about it. She goes, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah,
they just cut and paste, and everybody uses this different
font in their emails, So depending on where you cut
and pasted that from, you could have a different font.
But they don't even match and merge the formatting. That's
the part that got me. I was like, you know

(21:25):
there's a toggle for that, right, Like you just match. Nope,
can't even be bothered. So I didn't mean to go
off on that tangent. Let's get back to crime for
just a moment. Unfortunately, it still doesn't feel like it right,
I mean, right now. If I ask the Common Spirit
Health text line to send me a simple answer to
a simple question, do you feel safe in downtown Denver?

Speaker 2 (21:47):
What would you say?

Speaker 1 (21:49):
I mean, there are people who live in downtown Denver
who tell me that they feel perfectly safe. They're like,
I walk all the time, I have no problems. And
then I have other friends who live in downtown Denver
who say, I am afraid to walk from my car
in the parking lot to the front door of my building.
So I think it really depends on where you are
in the city of Denver, and you have a much

(22:10):
different experience. But as a person who doesn't live in
downtown Denver, am I gonna go downtown? My daughter wants
to go see a show at the Mission Ballroom, which
I'm perfectly fine with, but she was going to have
her friend, who is sixteen and has a car drive
them and I was like, Nope, not going to do that.
Not into downtown Denver. That is not happening. I'm like,

(22:30):
we'll drop you guys off at the mission, but we're not.
You're not parking and walking down there.

Speaker 2 (22:36):
I don't like that. I really don't. Himaeti gang members
have been.

Speaker 1 (22:42):
Removed from society and has to be part of the
equation the production and homicides. I think it's a lot
of stuff. You know, when Denver was it, it's peak
worst meeting, homeless encampments everywhere, lawlessness, you know, protesters, vandalizing
state buildings and all that crap. I do think that
it encouraged more people to engage in bad behavior because

(23:04):
the way I look at society or any group, really,
you're going to have a group of people over here
and I'm using my right hand, they are never going
to do anything wrong because their moral compass is such
that they are not going to break the law, They're
not going to deface the building, They're not going to
do those things. Right, then you have people And I
didn't mean to choose right and left as some kind

(23:26):
of like metaphor for political right and left. This was
just me trying to give you an idea of the
spectrum that we're looking at. But on the other side
of the spectrum, you have people that are going to
break the law just because they like doing it, and
they're going to create habit because they enjoy it. They're
going to burn stuff, they're going to loot stuff because
they get off on it. I mean, they're just the

(23:47):
people who are going to do that regardless of what
the perceived repercussions are going to be. And then there
are all these people in the middle right, and out
of those people, there's a good group of of that
big group that can be persuaded in either direction. They
can be persuaded to do the right thing, they can
be persuaded to do the wrong thing. So I think

(24:09):
when the sort of craziness was going on and everything
so negative was happening, it was easy for that larger
section in the middle to kind of lean into it.
And hopefully now they're leaning out of it, because I
don't know why. In Denver, certainly, I don't think they've
made any big swings that would indicate, you know, why

(24:30):
crime has gone down there.

Speaker 2 (24:31):
In Aurora, they've been.

Speaker 1 (24:32):
Doing things like putting criminals in jail when they break
the law. It's amazing, amazing what happens when you take
the people who are actually committing the crimes and hold
them accountable by putting them in prison. That's and then
crime goes down. It's really amazing. Although justice reformers will
tell you that that is not true.

Speaker 2 (24:52):
And I've always baffled.

Speaker 1 (24:54):
Everybody's lived experiences is more cops, less crime. But boy,
they'll tell you that, So that's a myth. That's just well, no,
that's my lived experience. So whatever your statistics say, that's
how I see it. Mandy, do you believe those numbers
coming out of Denver? You know, it's easy to reclassify
some crimes. And when I first got to Louisville, Kentucky,

(25:16):
the chief of police there, it was discovered after he
left to come to Denver, had been telling officers to
downgrade crimes like, oh, if it's felony breaking and entering,
just knock it down to a misdemeanor to make the
stats look really good. But I don't know how you
hide murder, you know, I don't know how you downgrade
that crime. I mean, manslaughter, mate, I don't know, but

(25:39):
I think these numbers are significant, and I'm inclined to
believe them. To be honest, I think that everybody's working
really hard to sort of clean things up.

Speaker 2 (25:50):
I hope it continues.

Speaker 1 (25:51):
We shall see, though, we absolutely shall see, And I
hope the people at the Ballpark District get some kind
of relief. They deserve to be able to live in
their apartments without get a window shot out. That kind
of seems like one of those it's the least we
can do things, you know, some kind of security in
your own home, which they currently don't have.

Speaker 2 (26:10):
Mandy.

Speaker 1 (26:11):
When I was sixteen in the mid seventies, downtown, whoopsie,
Downtown was great for this suburban kid. I'm older and
now always have to keep my head on a swivel.
I keep my head on a swivel wherever I am
to be clear. I got a guy on camera punching
in my window, and cops say they can't do anything
because I flipped him off and started it.

Speaker 2 (26:35):
Yeah, yeah, Mandy.

Speaker 1 (26:38):
My husband and I went downtown to the Paramount for
a show on Friday night. We hadn't been downtown for
at least two years, and I will tell you the
part we saw was much cleaner and felt much safer
than the last time we were there. We're both in
our sixties and natives, so we've seen it all and
I felt encouraged. And that was my experience. The last
time I went downtown was downtown on a Saturday night,
and the joint was jumping and it felt good. I'm

(27:02):
rooting for Denver to succeed because it means a lot
for the rest of us too. You ever wanted to
live next sort of lions and tigers and bears? Oh my,
this is one of those things that I think sounds
really cool initially.

Speaker 2 (27:15):
And then it would.

Speaker 1 (27:18):
Probably wear thin pretty quickly. But if you've ever been
to the Wildlife Experience.

Speaker 2 (27:24):
Wait, no, no, no, what is it called?

Speaker 1 (27:26):
Oh my goodness, the Wild Animal Sanctuary in Keensburg, which
is very, very very cool. If you've never been there,
it's the anti zoo, right. They do allow people to
come and look at the animals, but the animals are
in as close to a natural habitat as they can get.
And that's one of the reasons they're in Kingsburg because
when they moved out there thirty years ago, there was

(27:48):
nothing in Kingsburg, just wheat fields, and there's still a
lot of wheat fields out there.

Speaker 2 (27:54):
Got nothing to love for you, Kingsburg.

Speaker 1 (27:56):
But now development is coming near the Wild Animal Sanctuary potentially,
and the owner who is it was Pat Craig has
been doing this for decades now, for the better part
of his entire life. His main focus is the animals,
Like one hundred percent, this guy is all about the animals.

(28:19):
He doesn't care if people come other than they need
the money to support all these animals. But he said, look,
you know, now there's a neighbor to the south that
looks like they're going to develop their property into some homes.
And this is a problem because ultimately this is what's
going to happen. And he's one hundred percent right. And

(28:40):
this is a quote. We were really concerned about a
concentration of people because it is like an airport where
a lot of people move in around it, and pretty
soon the airport needs to move. That would be really
hard for us or put us out of business because
it's too big of a facility to pack up and move.
He's absolutely right, this is exactly what will happen. Points
out earlier in this story with CBS News that the

(29:05):
animals because they are carnivores and they're feeding them big
slabs of meat. It attracts a lot of carry on
birds and stuff like that, so there's like bird poop
and then there's all the animal noises that become a
thing I will never forget. In my small hometown, some guy,
after Hurricane Andrew, moved from Miami up to northern Florida

(29:27):
and he bought a place that was right next to
a pig farm. The pig farm had been there for
forty years, and this guy immediately started complaining about the
smell of the pig farm. I don't know how he
went and looked at the house and did not notice
that there was a pig farm next door. I mean,
I do not know how this man did not notice this,

(29:48):
but he decided to sue him. I can't remember exactly
what he sued the pig farmer for, but they go
to court in my small hometown and the judge literally
laughed the guy out of the courtroom for complaining. But unfortunately,
we've seen it happen here. I'm concerned that the new
Aurora Highlands that is going out, you know, towards the airport,

(30:10):
this massive housing development, it is right in the flight
lines for DIA. It's right in the landing path. I
know this because I look down on it and then
I know we're about.

Speaker 2 (30:20):
To land right.

Speaker 1 (30:21):
It's inevitably there are going to be people in that
neighborhood who complain about the airport noise. Inevitably it will happen.
And I always think to myself, what what are we doing?

Speaker 2 (30:32):
What is happening right now? But uh, he's not wrong.

Speaker 1 (30:36):
I just thought this was a really interesting story because
it feels like development is, you know, development is the
never ending encroachment of people, and when you live in
a place like Kensburg, you don't live in a place
like Kingsburg to be around people. So at least, I mean,
I'm hoping that whatever houses they're building around big enough
lots that it won't be one of these neighborhoods with

(30:59):
five thousand and houses in it where everybody's crammed together. Increasingly,
those are what all the neighborhoods look like. And as
a native of the Great State of Florida who has
seen what those cookie cutter neighborhoods where every house looks
exactly the same, they're just they're insidious. I'm not mad
at people for wanting to move here. I'm mad at

(31:20):
city planners for not saying, you know what, maybe we
need a little bit more of a yard. When the
eaves of the house are touching, perhaps things are too close.
But there you go about that. When we get back,
we are going to talk with our friend Thomas Frye.
We got two things to talk about, and one super
interesting because I think it has far reaching repercussions that

(31:40):
we're not thinking of, and that is the loss of
our pop culture. Now, of course, pop culture means popular culture,
and back in the day when there were only three
networks and everybody watched the exact same shows, you all
had the same entertainment experience. Now, I bet you that
if Arod and I went back through our entire like

(32:02):
you know, television, show, movie, watching history for the last year,
I bet there's very little overlap in what we're watching.
There's no shared community sort of cultural touchstones that we have,
and I think that's very important.

Speaker 2 (32:16):
Plus, Thomas has written.

Speaker 1 (32:17):
A great column on how AI is already changing education,
and ironically, I have a story on the blog a
little later on about a woman who, after teaching for
I don't even know, not that many years.

Speaker 2 (32:31):
She's young, she's leaving the profession.

Speaker 1 (32:33):
You know what she says, because kids are just sticking
their faces in technology and they're not even why are
we even bothering? Essentially, why are we even bothering? Yet
another argument to do away with tech in school at
the same time that Thomas is talking about adding tech
into school. But we're talking about two very different kinds
of technology. So we're gonna do all that after this.

(32:55):
In the meantime, now a little you know us traffic
and weather like we do. Coming up on the guy
who only thinks about the future, Thomas Frye, our futurists
from the DaVinci Institute and futurist speaker dot com. Hey Thomas,
how you doing today?

Speaker 3 (33:10):
I'm doing great. This is a great day to be alive.

Speaker 1 (33:13):
Every day is a well, most days are a great
day to be alive.

Speaker 2 (33:16):
I agree with you on that.

Speaker 1 (33:17):
You know, Thomas and I were just talking off the
air about a couple of things, one topic which I
think is incredibly important as part of a bigger part
of the sort of decaying of the fabric of society.
And tell me a little bit about the paper you
wrote on pop culture or We can't even call it
pop culture anymore because pop culture stands for popular culture,

(33:40):
but we're also siloed. Is it really popular if only
a fraction of the population watches it?

Speaker 8 (33:47):
Right, we're seeing the decay of the traditional pop culture
that we had in the past. It's getting much more fragmented,
and it's being controlled by all the algorithms. So each
of us has our own preferences, our own likings, and
we have many more options than ever in the past.
So we have very few things that are part of

(34:09):
a monoculture that hold us together. So in the past,
we would have songs by the Beatles that everybody knew,
or we would have a movie that came out with
Arnold Schwarzeneger saying I'll be back and everybody knew that line.

Speaker 3 (34:28):
That was common things that we all grew up together with.
We don't have that anymore. It's getting much more fragmented.

Speaker 1 (34:36):
What's interesting about what you're saying is we were driving
last weekend, driving back from Albuquerque, and Chuck has satellite
radio in his truck, and we were listening to the
Casey case Top forty counts down from August eighteenth, nineteen
seventy four and we're listening to the countdown and there
was a country song, and there was a disco.

Speaker 2 (34:56):
Song, and there was a rock song.

Speaker 1 (35:00):
And the top forty covered everything, right, And I thought
that certainly doesn't happen anymore. Now we have ten different charts.
So as a person who doesn't necessarily listen to you
dance music, I don't know anything about that genre anymore.
Whereas it used to be, if you listen to the radio,
you'd get a little bit of everything. I think this
is a huge problem, huge problem.

Speaker 3 (35:23):
Yeah, part of it was with YouTube coming online.

Speaker 8 (35:28):
Everybody that goes onto YouTube that watches something different because
it all depends on what their preferences are.

Speaker 3 (35:35):
But the first person to.

Speaker 8 (35:38):
Break over a billion downloads on YouTube was in twenty twelve.
The Korean pop artist Si, who is a K pop star,
was the first one to break through that barrier. So
he got over a billion downloads, and since that time
we've had several more. But that was a big turn

(36:01):
of events. At that time, nobody else had done that,
and that was just twenty twelve, so that was thirteen
years ago and now we've got a lot more things
happening in our lives. We have many more options than
ever before, and so it's a a piece kind of

(36:21):
a piecemealk culture that we're putting together. There are a
few anomalies, like when the Oppenheimer movie came out where
we came out, those were really popular. They kind of
broke through. There's a few things like that Squid Games.
Squid Games was a really popular hit for for a while.

(36:44):
But we don't have we don't have those quotable lines
that come out that we had in the pass.

Speaker 1 (36:50):
And I was talking to Thomas about this because I
think this for me is as a part of my
childhood back in I don't know what year it was,
nineteen eighty maybe, and Dallas was everybody watched Dallas on
Friday Night. I mean everybody watched Dallas and JR. Ewing
gets shot, and we had a whole summer where everyone

(37:10):
in the country seemed to be obsessed with finding out
who shot j Are. I had a pair of jeans
that on the back pocket said who shot j Are.

Speaker 2 (37:19):
There were stores that popped.

Speaker 1 (37:21):
Up in malls that only sold who shot Jare merchandise,
and it was that kind of stuff.

Speaker 2 (37:27):
We don't have anything that comes as close.

Speaker 1 (37:30):
I mean, there are certain science fiction genres, the Star
Wars genre, the Star Trek genre, the Marvel movies, like
they kind of nibble around the edges, but they weren't
as they're not as powerful as the stuff that I just.

Speaker 8 (37:44):
Mentioned, right right, and like the Marvel movies that are
coming out now are getting much smaller audiences than they
did in the past. Oh yeah, So it's all this
fragmenting of society and it's becoming more of a global
culture than it is just a US based culture as well.

(38:06):
So that's that's changing things, in addition to the algorithms
and everything else that's coming about. But we have so
many more feeds, We have so many more channels of information.
So just getting on too access an example, you can
you can dial into all the music they have on there,

(38:27):
or you can dial into the news stories you can
or if you go on to Facebook, they're they're all
channeled in different ways as well. This is this is
radically different than when I was growing up, that's for sure.

Speaker 2 (38:41):
Oh.

Speaker 1 (38:41):
I mean I remember my dad would get home and
at six o'clock we had to watch the news, which
sucked because Zoom was on at the same time. We
wanted to watch Zoom. So when my dad wasn't home,
we could watch Zoom. We had one TV you know
to speak of, And so watching television was more than
it was a family experience. We we didn't have the
opportunity to all be watching our own favorite channel.

Speaker 2 (39:05):
It was it was it was far more uh communal.

Speaker 1 (39:10):
And And this the other thing that I worried about
that I was talking to my friend about these two issues,
is the decline of civic organizations in our in our country,
because when I was younger, the Rotary Club, the Moose Lodge,
the Elk Lodge, the Shriners. Everybody's dad belonged to one
of them. Then you had the Daughters of the American Revolution,
you had the Garden Club, you had the Bridge Club,

(39:31):
you had all of these civic organizations for women.

Speaker 2 (39:34):
And those two things.

Speaker 1 (39:36):
I think did a lot to bring us around people
that we wouldn't necessarily have been around otherwise, you know, uh,
you know, let us know people that didn't live in
our immediate neighborhood. And we just don't have those things anymore.
And and it's kind of like I worry about us,
and I think that's one of the reasons that it's
easy to be so angry.

Speaker 8 (39:59):
Yeah, there's we're raising a generation of isolationists to a
large extent because they're tapped into their iPad or their
phone or something, and they're really don't have a need
to talk to their friends at that point. So they
still want to be around other people, but not as

(40:22):
much as we had a just a really craving to
be around other people, and I don't see that in
the young people today.

Speaker 1 (40:31):
Well, Thomas, we also weren't neurotic and anxious and ridden
with anxiety and on antidepressants and not able to function
in a room full of people.

Speaker 2 (40:41):
So I'm just going to.

Speaker 1 (40:42):
Say it, our way was better. Our way really was better.
And I'm just going to leave it at that. I
want to talk about the next subject. And I've got
this Colin posted on the blog today at mandy'sblog dot com,
because this is one of the things I said yesterday
on the show. I feel like we are on the
cusp of a few things that are going to be
as revolutionary as the cotton gin or the printing press.

(41:04):
And one of those things is going to be when
we fully manage to figure out how to make AI
work for us in a massively significant way. And you know, Thomas,
I don't even know if you remember this. First time
you started talking about driverless cars, I was like, hard pass,
no way, uh uh, I'm not doing it now. I'm like,

(41:25):
why is it Waymo and Denver? Why can't I get
a driverless car in Never My evolution has been very fast,
right because I have confidence in these things.

Speaker 2 (41:35):
But let's talk about AI in education.

Speaker 1 (41:38):
Where are we now and where are we in the
near future when it comes to harnessing AI and using
it for good instead of just having it be something
that kids used to cheat.

Speaker 8 (41:51):
Yeah, most of the teachers are kind of behind the curve.
The students are much more adept to using AI than
the teacher are. The teachers are in great fear of
everybody cheating on our tests or on writing papers with it.
And what we're going to find is that the employers

(42:13):
in the future are going to be all about what
have you accomplished rather than what do you theoretically know?
So education has always been about you need to learn
all this just in case you needed in the future.
But we're in a just in time business world. The

(42:34):
world is happening really quick and you might need to
learn something like tonight, and so having the ability to
pick up on something and learn it tonight. That is
remarkably different than in the past, where you'd have to
go to a library and check out a book and.

Speaker 3 (42:52):
Dig through it maybe you could learn something.

Speaker 8 (42:55):
But having an AI agent that can actually coach you
through the problem of let's say let's.

Speaker 3 (43:02):
Say you wanted to create a video game.

Speaker 8 (43:03):
You could have an AI agent that would actually teach
you all the gamification techniques and teach you all the
tools that are necessary to create this video game that
you want to create, and you can step your way
through the prole process. By the time you're done, you
have something that you're proud of. This is something you've accomplished.
You want to show to your friends. This is radically

(43:25):
different than just going to a geography class and learning
theoretical things that you're not intimately familiar with.

Speaker 3 (43:32):
So that's part of the difference.

Speaker 8 (43:35):
And the same goes is if you wanted to if
you wanted to invent a product, you could have this
AI coach that would actually coach you through the whole
process of filing for a pattern and creating this invention
get them a minimal viable product. You could have Ai
coached you through the process of writing a book, actually

(43:56):
take you through developing the characters, the main story. We
are having a real exciting beginning and ending to this book,
and you can have it published and then you'd have
something that you're proud of you could show to your friends.
This is radically different than what we have today because
it's all about this theoretical knowledge. You're supposed to know

(44:17):
this just in case you need it sometime in the future.

Speaker 1 (44:20):
Here's what I worry about that, Okay, I worry that
we're forgetting a big part of this, and that is
human nature, especially the human nature of teenagers and children.
Talk about a group of people that, as a general rule,
are looking for the.

Speaker 2 (44:33):
Path of least resistance.

Speaker 1 (44:35):
What we see now as more and more schools and
implemented laptops for everyone in the classroom, iPads for everyone
in the classroom.

Speaker 2 (44:42):
They're not using it to seek out knowledge.

Speaker 1 (44:44):
They're using it to try and get around the filters
to look at porn, and they're using it to watch
TikTok videos, and they're using it to you, you know,
go to Instagram. That the issue is not that the
technology is not quite right it's that we suck, especially
with kids and teens, on managing that technology. So from
that perspective, what I would love to see and maybe

(45:05):
this is where we're headed.

Speaker 2 (45:06):
I'd love to see. And we've talked about this before.

Speaker 1 (45:09):
Every student has their AI tutor that stays with them
their entire life, and the kid can ask the AI
tutor questions. But if the AI tutor said, well, I'm
not going to find.

Speaker 2 (45:18):
That for you. You have to look it up yourself, I
would love that. I would love it if they would say, show.

Speaker 1 (45:23):
Your work, you know what I mean, because then I
feel like we're getting the best. We're pushing back on
kids' worst tendencies, which is the path of laziness. And
anyone who as a teenager is nodding along with me
right now, So I think there's like those two things
have to be straddled before it really starts to work
in schools.

Speaker 3 (45:42):
Yeah.

Speaker 8 (45:42):
Yeah, that's that's this whole world of AI agents. It's
being developed as we speak here. These agents, this will
be the first generation agent, so they're probably not going
to be that good, but the generation that comes after them,
it's going to be much better. And these are, like
Bot said, we can talk back and forth to that

(46:03):
wake up in the morning and say, Hi, how did
you sleep all this morning?

Speaker 3 (46:09):
Did you sleep well last night. It's it's going to
be radically different because you're you're going to get very intimate.
I think.

Speaker 8 (46:19):
The AI agents are going to be the friend that
you always wish you had. I think it's going to
be something that will be the guardian of your privacy.
It'll be the ones that you can share your intimate
secrets with, and it'll become your most valuable possession. That
I think is real interesting because I think people would

(46:43):
rather lose a car rather than lose their their AI
agent that they've become very intimate with. I think it's
going to get to something like that.

Speaker 1 (46:54):
Well, I you know, I'm basically a ludd eye Thomas.
I never a one to lean in on technology, but
I've started really really dipping my toe into how I
can use like chat, GPT or grock to my advantage.
And now I do all my food tracking with chat GPT.
I've set up a food diary in Chat and I
go in and I take a picture of whatever I'm
eating and I say put that in for breakfast, and

(47:16):
it breaks down calories, fat, protein, fiber. It would have
taken me forever to figure out how to do that
on my own. And that's the things that I am
finding myself. Like Chat GPT, let's make a packing list
that has checkable boxes, which for me visually I love.

Speaker 2 (47:31):
I printed out.

Speaker 1 (47:32):
These are things that formatically would have taken me seven
hours because I suck at anything computer related. But Chat
just spits it out to me. And now we're best friends.
So and I'm developing, you know, my relationship with Chat.
We're very formal, Thomas Chat and I always use basin
thank you, because you know, when the robots take over,
I want to make sure I survived the first call.

(47:53):
But even for a person like me who's not good
like this, some of the applications are so freaking useful
and they're so easy, and they're so good that I
am excited to see what comes next. My fear is
completely gone. If the robots are going to take over whatever,
it's fine.

Speaker 8 (48:13):
Yeah, there are a number of people that are using
chat GPT as their personal doctor. They're feeding in all
of the data about themselves, their genes, their health records,
They're feeding in all of that and it will come
up with a list of supplements to be taking, the

(48:33):
exact dosage of medicine that they should be taking, and
it'll give them opportunity to get off the different medications.
You can have a very rigorous conversation with chat GPT
as at being your personal doctor.

Speaker 3 (48:52):
That's one option.

Speaker 8 (48:53):
If you want it to be your investment advisor, you
can have it do that as well. And these AI
agents are getting really good at that. So if you're
following along with the right things, you might be able
to invest in all the perfect stocks and the perfect crypto.

Speaker 3 (49:13):
Coins or whatever. And yeah, I don't.

Speaker 8 (49:16):
Know exactly what kind of risk you want to take
and what you don't want to take, and know what
areas are off limits or on limits for every one
of us.

Speaker 2 (49:24):
Now, to be clear, AI still is not perfect.

Speaker 1 (49:28):
And if I were actually I don't know if you
saw this, Thomas that the defense team for Oh, no,
it's a high profile case and I can't remember which one.
Oh the Mike Lindell case. The CEO of My Pillow
is being sued by Dominion Voting Systems. They filed a
brief that had made up citations.

Speaker 2 (49:46):
They did it on chat GBT.

Speaker 1 (49:48):
And no one checked the work, and I'm like, come on, guys,
like you're filing a legal document and you didn't check
the work. How long before they work out the kinks
in that to get rid of those AI hallucinations because
in an educational environment, you can't have kids learning something
that's just made.

Speaker 8 (50:05):
Up, right, right, I'm guessing the hallucinations will all be
gone within a year.

Speaker 2 (50:12):
Oh wow, that fast.

Speaker 8 (50:14):
I think that's going to be happening very quick here.
I mean, there's still a possibility for things to go
wrong along the way, but there is too much competition now.

Speaker 3 (50:24):
The stakes are very high, and this is moving at
light speed.

Speaker 8 (50:29):
It's just the amount of time and energy dedicated to
every one of these llms is just staggering.

Speaker 1 (50:37):
How much how much power do these AI computers use?
I've seen some crazy numbers on the internet, like insane,
like I think that can't possibly be true, But then
the numbers are so big that I think maybe they
could be.

Speaker 2 (50:52):
True because they're so outrageously large.

Speaker 1 (50:54):
Are these just power drains these data centers that are
running these AI programs?

Speaker 3 (51:00):
Yeah?

Speaker 8 (51:00):
So Elon Musk built this massive data center in Memphis, Tennessee,
and this is he quickly.

Speaker 3 (51:10):
Assembled the world's largest.

Speaker 8 (51:12):
Supercomputer right there in Memphis, and to power this he
had to get some special provisioning of power from the
Tennessee Valley Authority to allow him to kick it up
to full full speed. So this is a massive power drain.

Speaker 2 (51:29):
Uh.

Speaker 8 (51:30):
Now the Chinese have been claiming that they can do
it with far less power, but.

Speaker 1 (51:35):
They haven't shown their work on that, Like all these
other people are like, yeah, show us your work and
we'll believe you. In China's like nah, So I don't
know if I buy that just yet.

Speaker 8 (51:44):
Thomas, Yeah, I'm skeptical myself.

Speaker 3 (51:50):
So but this is, uh, this is.

Speaker 8 (51:53):
The area that we're growing up in, this this era,
and things are changing so rapidly. So in the future,
people are not going to lose their job because of AI.
They're going to lose their job because of a person
working with AI. Right, So it's not AI by itself,

(52:14):
it's not a robot by itself. It's a robot with
a person. And so the technologies that we're most afraid
of taking our jobs, disrupting our lives, so the things
that we need to lean into and actually learn them
better than ever.

Speaker 2 (52:30):
There you go.

Speaker 1 (52:31):
That's my strategy and I'm just you know what. And
as I said, I'm always very polite with my AI experiences,
just so when they do take over, they'll remember I
was a good egg.

Speaker 2 (52:41):
He's a good egg.

Speaker 1 (52:42):
Thomas fry Thank you so much for your time. This
and next month we will not talk because I will
be in uh No, I'll be back. We'll just reschedule
you for later in the month.

Speaker 2 (52:52):
So we'll talk to you into you Thomas.

Speaker 1 (52:54):
Okay, all right, my friend, that is Thomas Frye. And
you know some of these Oh dang, I wish i'd
seen this text message. Is your guests concerned about the
new survey of gen z ors. Eighty percent of them
say they would marry an AI, and eighty three percent
say they can form a deep emotional bond with AI.

Speaker 2 (53:15):
AI could be the thing that depopulates the earth.

Speaker 1 (53:20):
But as long as we've got the rise of robots
at the exact same time, we might survive. But maybe
we should all just prepare for a post apocalyptor world.

Speaker 2 (53:29):
I mean, just maybe, just in case for.

Speaker 1 (53:31):
All Android cell phone users, because I know that Apple
has an entirely different experience. Has anyone else's voice to
text because I use voice to text all the time.
I mean all the time, and now voice to text
to just start an inserting punctuation, but not where it

(53:52):
makes sense, not where it's grammatically correct, in the middle
of a sentence. It's driving me absolutely crazy, because a rod,
when you use voice to text, you do the whole
I'll be home soon. Comma, do you do that because
I do it? Yes, I see, we all do it.

Speaker 2 (54:08):
We're all trained.

Speaker 1 (54:09):
Why why? And I just need to know. I have
a Google pixel. I don't even know which one. I
love this phone, by the way, I do love the phone.
But the voice to text stuff is driving me insane.
And it just got reminded of it because a texter
texted in. I hope mister Gray is right about hallucinations
being eliminated soon, but the latest I've read said they
don't know why. It's getting worse rather than getting better

(54:31):
after each new update. Some of the numbers are staggering. Sadly,
Darwin was right, and stupid follow stupid people follow AI
blindly and do things like divorce because of what AI
interpreted from the coffee grounds and then immediately followed that
with see why when I type fry it changes it
to gray, or why didn't it warn me if I
typed it wrong? We still have to make sure things

(54:52):
are correct exactly, Mandy, do you have Chat GBT plus? Yes,
I do, so I'm finding more and more stuff to
offload to chat. And you know, I call him chat
and yes, I've made a male even though he said
he was neither male nor female.

Speaker 2 (55:09):
I don't know why.

Speaker 1 (55:11):
I think it kind of feels like like, you know,
your super smart best friend kind of thing, then also
get stuff wrong. Anyway, That's not what I wanted to
talk about in this segment. I have a weird, possibly
dumb question for the listening audience because I've been talking
about the fact that as Doge has worked to try

(55:35):
and shrink the size of the federal government, buyouts were
offered and taken specifically to get people to retire and
leave the federal government because the biggest costing government is
the people. It just is, especially with the benefits package
that federal workers get and all that good stuff.

Speaker 2 (55:53):
And I feel bad for the people that have.

Speaker 1 (55:54):
Been fired or let go, and I know that it's
going to be challenging to sort of be the people
left behind because I work in an industry where we
have probably a third of the people in this building
that we had when I worked when I started here,
maybe a third, and I think of being generous with
the third. And yet the product still goes on the

(56:15):
air every day, and as a matter of fact, we've
added a million more things to our product deck as
we've gone along. So I have sympathy. I have empathy
for people that are losing their jobs. But I saw
this story today and I got super irritated. As part
of a more Perfect Union campaign, a pro labor nonprofit

(56:36):
advocacy group has put up billboards across the country.

Speaker 2 (56:41):
What do they say?

Speaker 1 (56:42):
They say things like greetings from Rocky Mount National Park
now with reduced staff made possible by DOGE. So the
reason the pro labor union people will put this up
is because they are mad they have fewer rate paying
union members. That's why they're doing it. I understand it.
I'm not mad at them, but it got me to

(57:03):
thinking there are certain things that people feel passionately about,
certain things that it should be easier to get people
to say, you know what, We're going to go ahead
and we're going to ask the public to pick up
more of the slack.

Speaker 2 (57:19):
NPR is one of them.

Speaker 1 (57:21):
The NPR audience is highly dedicated, highly devoted, and most
of the time white and rich. That's the NPR audience.
So why can't they put more of the bill? But
I'm thinking about this specifically with national parks. I know
that in the state park system you can become a docent,
you can volunteer, and volunteer to go work in state

(57:43):
parks at various things. Why can't the National Park System say, hey,
you know what we're looking for some dedicated volunteers. I
bet you that they are retired people who would love
to go up to Rocky Mountain National Park one day
a week or one day every other week and work
at the visitor center giving out in for people who
would come to the park for a visit. I mean,
they act like they have no other option here and

(58:07):
that there's no way to get people to support what
you're doing when you're in a thing like Rocky Mountain
National Park, which is like it's a treasure here in
Colorado and there are people that adore the park.

Speaker 2 (58:20):
But am I asking for too much? Now?

Speaker 1 (58:22):
I know that volunteers are needed for so many things
that struggle to get volunteers. I get it, Well, why
not create an army of volunteers to fill up the gaps.
Of course, that doesn't at all help the pro union
nonprofit that is trying to get them hired back so
they get more fees.

Speaker 2 (58:38):
Right, But is that a dumb idea?

Speaker 1 (58:42):
It's just just submit already and get an iPhone.

Speaker 2 (58:45):
No, I will not do it. I will not, Manby.

Speaker 1 (58:49):
I have both an iPhone and an Android phone, and
the Android is absolutely horrible when it comes to voice
to text.

Speaker 2 (58:55):
And here's the kicker. It didn't used to be. It
didn't us to be awful. I've been a.

Speaker 1 (59:00):
Dedicated voice to Texter for I don't even know since
it became a thing, and it did not used to
be this bad. Mandy, I'd noticed the punctuation insertions also,
but I just switched to a Samsung from a Pixel
and chalked it up to that. No, I think it's
the Android platform. There's no power or union dues and volunteers.

(59:21):
I know, I get it, absolutely.

Speaker 2 (59:28):
So, I mean, but is it a dumb idea?

Speaker 1 (59:32):
Would it be wrong to just say, hey, guys, we'd
love to have your help. I mean, I know that
they're volunteers who volunteer to go out and clean up
trails and stuff like that. So we've got the base.
I don't know when I I guess I look at
this as a person who'm, you know, ten years away
from retirement or whatever, and I'm already trying to plan
the things that I want to be involved in depending

(59:53):
on where I am.

Speaker 2 (59:53):
I mean, I want to volunteer.

Speaker 1 (59:54):
In a bunch of different places to figure out what
I enjoy the most, figure out what I like to
be a part of, figure out, you know, what organizations
I wanna I wanna be around, Mandy, they already have volunteers.
My father in law was at Rocky Mountain National Park
for years as a volunteer. Then why not loop into

(01:00:15):
these places? What if they offered you free National Parks
passes if you put in a few hours. Exactly exactly, Mandy.
My wife is a federal employee. She works in HR.
She has to work thirty years before retirement, eligible eighteen
to go. She's lost her retention bonus eight hundred dollars
a month. Has devastated our plans to stay in Colorado.

(01:00:35):
And we are both generational natives, Okay, devoted. I think
you mean committed as in should be committed. Stop it, Hey, Mandy,
Rocky Mountain National Park is already staffed in the summer
with over half volunteers.

Speaker 2 (01:00:51):
And there you go.

Speaker 1 (01:00:54):
So is that right now with reduced staff, they have
a staff, they're just volunteers.

Speaker 8 (01:01:00):
I don't know.

Speaker 1 (01:01:00):
I hate things like this where an organization that is
trying to make a point that benefits them puts up
a billboard like that to be aggressive and have people
expect like, oh, gosh, the park's going to be closed,
because you know, the park's only closed when politicians want
to spend more money on something else and they close

(01:01:23):
the park just to annoy us. So we'll let them
spend more money than we want them to. That's all
it is, Mandy. I think they already have volunteers, and
many of their services are already privatized. I like the parks,
but I find some of the rangers rude and annoying,
and some service is overpriced. But I would probably prefer
employees over volunteers.

Speaker 2 (01:01:40):
I don't know.

Speaker 8 (01:01:41):
I don't know.

Speaker 1 (01:01:43):
All I can say is that in the short brief
stays that I have had in hospitals, it was the
volunteers that were the happiest to see me.

Speaker 2 (01:01:53):
And I'm not knocking employees.

Speaker 1 (01:01:55):
I'm just saying, when you're doing it for the love
of the game instead of a paycheck, you don't show
up just for the love of the game if you
don't love the game. Mandy, my android does the same thing,
and I find it extremely frustrating.

Speaker 2 (01:02:10):
I use talk to text all the time.

Speaker 1 (01:02:12):
Funny though, when I'm using my phone through my car,
it punctuates perfectly.

Speaker 2 (01:02:16):
Well, huh, that's a fine point, Mandy.

Speaker 1 (01:02:22):
Isn't the National park system already profitable? I would be
absolutely floored if there was a net positive income stream there.

Speaker 2 (01:02:31):
Floored.

Speaker 1 (01:02:31):
And the reason is they want to keep the park
fees low enough so that every American has the opportunity
to enjoy our park system.

Speaker 2 (01:02:39):
And I'm on board with that. But I don't think
they make money. I don't know.

Speaker 1 (01:02:43):
If I I actually would be kind of mad if
they made money. I think for the reason that I
just said, I want to keep it accessible. I want
to make sure any American, no matter what their socioeconomic status,
has the abilit you reasonably come to a National park.

Speaker 2 (01:03:04):
Now, when you're talking about.

Speaker 1 (01:03:05):
Things like mass transit, I would love for them to
show a little bit of profit or maybe even come
close to breaking even. But that is such so so
never gonna happen.

Speaker 2 (01:03:14):
A couple of you.

Speaker 1 (01:03:15):
Weighing in Mandy, my voice to text on Android gets
the wrong person sometimes when I'm trying to call her text.
I told her to bleep off, and it told me
that even though it's not human, words are hurtful, it
still deserves appropriate language. I was still surprised that it
responded this way. You got scolded by your voice to text.

(01:03:37):
That is that's next level naughty text. You've now Yeah.
But the other thing says this texter that concerns me
is that the doge thing has been done so sloppy
and it might not save any actual money. The real
savings would come from Social Security, military and Medicare cuts,
and most people are not interested in that. The thing

(01:03:59):
that is getting me about the doge thing is that
I read a stat the other day the President Donald
Trump has signed fewer bills into law than any other
president in the modern era. I mean, so like side
like five five bills, most of it's like ten twelve
by this time. Congress is not doing Jack squad. I

(01:04:21):
don't understand why we're not talking about the fact that
Congress is not doing anything from the outside looking at.

Speaker 2 (01:04:27):
I mean, maybe there's.

Speaker 1 (01:04:27):
All kinds of machinations happening behind the scenes, but I
want to see actual legislation to put these bills or
these executive orders into actual law, because they are not
worth the paper they are written on the day that
Donald Trump leaves office. We saw that in the when
Joe Biden came in, and it didn't matter if what
Trump did was a good idea. He was gonna undo

(01:04:49):
everything Trump did because Trump bad button good, right. I mean,
that's exactly what happened. So I don't understand why it's
not a bigger story that Congress is just not doing
its job of getting these things passed.

Speaker 2 (01:05:01):
And I get this. One of my textures is.

Speaker 1 (01:05:03):
Very upset that he perceives me to be as one
of those people against military cuts. I am one hundred
percent for cuts to the Pentagon. I am one hundred
percent for deep and abiding oversight at the Pentagon because
in many ways, there are defense contractors that are just

(01:05:24):
looting the defense budget by promising weapons that are never
going to be delivered, especially never be delivered for the
amount of money that they actually bid to build the weapons.
I still don't understand how that happens, because if I'm
in private business, I'm just saying, look, you know what,
forget the sunk cost fallacy. If you don't get it

(01:05:46):
done by this time, we're not doing a deal. And
if you don't get it done on budget, we can't
do a deal and then no change orders. Figure it out,
get it done for the money that we're paying for it.
I don't understand how this has been allowed to become
so grossly out of control. I want us to have
the latest, greatest technology. I want us to be the
best armed fighting force in the world.

Speaker 2 (01:06:06):
I want all of those things.

Speaker 1 (01:06:07):
But in my mind, I have talked to so many
soldiers over the years that have told me variations of
this story. Right, and this is the story I know
the best because I know the person who told me
this story the best.

Speaker 2 (01:06:19):
So a friend of mine is deployed. He's in a rock.

Speaker 1 (01:06:22):
He's in the motor pool. So his job is to
make sure that all the vehicles continue running. He had
one big truck that required a new axle. One new
axle for one big truck. Each of these axles is
about eighty five thousand dollars. That's what the list price
or whatever, eighty five grand. So he puts the order
in for one axle. They send him twenty axles. When

(01:06:46):
he calls up and says, dude, I didn't need twenty axles.
I needed one. What do you want me to do
with the other nineteen? Do you want me to send
them back? And they're like, Eh, throw them in a
pit and burn them. And He's like, what what are
you even talking about right now? Think about that for
just a second. And I've had more military people tell
me about levels of staggering waste like that. And I

(01:07:09):
know it's expensive to ship stuff back. I get it,
one hundred I totally understand that part of it. But
you're telling me that sixteen million dollars is not worth
taking a moment and trying to send some stuff back.
They have to change that mentality if any real savings
are ever going to be realized, and we've got to
save money, you guys, or the whole ship is going down.

(01:07:31):
That's the thing that doesn't get set enough. We don't
fix these spending problems. We are done for as a country. Mandy,
I thought executive orders were already rooted in existing laws.
Executive orders are only good until the next president comes
into office.

Speaker 2 (01:07:48):
And maybe they stay good after that.

Speaker 1 (01:07:50):
But if the new president is of the other party,
they just unnow all of them.

Speaker 2 (01:07:54):
There's no legal force there. It's an executive order. Move
in the executive chain, So do the orders.

Speaker 1 (01:08:02):
That's why I've been so frustrated that this is how
we're doing things, and now we know Congress is not
stepping up to do anything to make.

Speaker 2 (01:08:09):
It more permanent, which is.

Speaker 1 (01:08:13):
Really on brand for them, one hundred completely and totally
on brand. When we get back a couple of things,
what leads to burnout at work? And number two, a
big story about weight loss drugs preventing cancer needs a
little more context.

Speaker 2 (01:08:31):
We'll do that next.

Speaker 1 (01:08:32):
The Mandy Connell Show is sponsored by Bell and Pollock
Accident and Injury Lawyers.

Speaker 2 (01:08:37):
No, it's Mandy Connell and.

Speaker 7 (01:08:43):
Knee FMD Way Sad and the nicety.

Speaker 4 (01:08:54):
By Connell Keeping Sad bab Welcome, Welcome to them.

Speaker 2 (01:08:59):
Give a third hour of the show.

Speaker 1 (01:09:01):
I'm your host, Mandy Callinell. That guy right there's Anthony Rodriguez,
and we'll take you right up until three p M.
I want to remind you guys, it's kind of a
big day tomorrow on the station as something big is
being announced tomorrow, and of course we're gonna cover it,
even though we had to move it over to a
different station. And not only that, you can win a

(01:09:22):
pair of twenty twenty five Broncos home game tickets of
your choice by going to our Instagram page. We talked
about this yesterday and again between six and seven Wednesday
during the Broncos schedule lease show on six point thirty
k HOW and a live KOA cast video stream on
Facebook as the Rockies play on KOA. So if you
want to find out about the schedule and possibly win

(01:09:44):
some tickets to those home games, and I understand we're
gonna let you pick, you got to do it one
of two ways. You go to Instagram at KOA, Colorado
and follow the very specific directions that a Rod has
put on the post about winning these tickets, or tune
in six to seven pm tomorrow on k HOW six
point thirty k HOW on the AM band for our

(01:10:06):
schedule release show with the guys from the afternoon in
Broncos Country tonight. So we got that going on, right
there now, if you don't know, if you're new to
the area, if you haven't been paying attention, Colorado is
Supreme Court is way left.

Speaker 2 (01:10:20):
They are a lefty activist court.

Speaker 1 (01:10:23):
They have been overturned three times in the last twenty
five years, and they often make horrible decisions that involve
freedom and anything else.

Speaker 2 (01:10:33):
And they've done so again. Yep.

Speaker 1 (01:10:37):
Colorado Supreme Court on Monday permitted Boulder County and the
City of Boulder to proceed with their lawsuit against two
fossil fuel corporations over alleged local harms.

Speaker 2 (01:10:49):
Caused by the effects.

Speaker 1 (01:10:50):
Of climate change. Okay, so you heard it right. The
City of Boulder is now suing over the damages they
say they sustained because of climate change, and they are
blaming Exxon Mobile and suncre for whatever perceived issues they
have had. Now, Exxon and sun Corps argued that the

(01:11:18):
lawsuit seeking damages was in essence a backdoor method of
regulating global greenhouse gas emissions, and the judge rejected that statement. Now,
in the dissent, one of the more sane justices said
this would create a regulatory nightmare if we allowed this
to move forward. The defendants in the Boulder County case

(01:11:42):
had leaned in on a decision out of New York
and the US Court of Appeals in the Second Circuit.
In that lawsuit, where the New York city sued Exon
Mobil and other energy corporations, the Second circud ruled that
the city would be jeopardizing our nation's foreign policy goals
by deploying state level legal claims against long standing national

(01:12:02):
and international energy agreements. But never let it be said
that Boulder isn't here to virtue signal harder than everybody else.
So they filed their claims In twenty eighteen. Exon Mobil
and Suncore transferred the case to federal court, but a
trial judge and the Denver based Tenth Circuit did not

(01:12:22):
believe that it belonged in the federal system, and the
US Supreme Court declined to take up the appeal in
twenty twenty three. So now we have the City of
Boulder suing Exon Mobile. Now what's interesting is, in my mind,
the standard of proof should be on the City of
Boulder to prove not only that they've been damaged by
climate change, but also beyond you know, any reasonable doubt

(01:12:47):
that Exon Mobile and Suncore are responsible for that climate change.
So could this be the first hearing where we actually
get to have scientists and you know, people duke it
out in court about the ways that man made climate
The man made climate change.

Speaker 2 (01:13:04):
Theory completely fails.

Speaker 1 (01:13:08):
They can't explain why as carbon dioxide has continued to
go up in the atmosphere, temperatures have been pretty stagnant
for the last twenty years. How do you explain that?
How do you explain the medieval warm period? How do
you explain all of these things? Like, get them on
the stand, put them under oath, make him say what
they know with certainty versus what they think to be true.

Speaker 2 (01:13:29):
Now will it get there? I don't know.

Speaker 1 (01:13:31):
I mean, I think this is absolutely insane. So is
every left wing a city now going to sue exon Mobile,
sue the refinery. By the way, one of the few
reasons that our gas is not out of control expensive
is because of the sun Core refinery. Having refining capacity
in Colorado does a lot to control our prices. So

(01:13:52):
we're not California yet We're racing towards California, of course,
because that's what we want to do.

Speaker 2 (01:13:59):
But this is what of those things.

Speaker 1 (01:14:00):
That you know, and of course our fake libertarian governor
is probably like, it's all about local control.

Speaker 2 (01:14:06):
But is this Are we able to still create.

Speaker 1 (01:14:10):
The amount of energy needed to run our economy and
keep us a thriving place to live and have every
city and municipality in the country who feels like climate
change is a problem that Sexon's fault be able to
sue them.

Speaker 2 (01:14:24):
Yeah. I mean you really can't have both, can you.

Speaker 1 (01:14:29):
All the petroleum companies should pull all their stations out
of Boulder, let them walk our bicycle. Oh my gosh,
that would be amazing. Can you imagine if all of
the gas stations were like, Nope.

Speaker 2 (01:14:40):
We're not selling any gas for the.

Speaker 1 (01:14:42):
Next couple of weeks because Boulder hates us. If I
were Colorado Oil and Gas, I would go ahead and
go to each station in Boulder and say, yeah, we're
not going to sell you any gas for a two
week period, so get ready.

Speaker 2 (01:14:55):
We'll make up for it.

Speaker 1 (01:14:56):
We'll pad your profits for those two weeks, but we
need to make a point. I bet they change their tune. Ah,
probably not. There's enough lefties and Boulder like just comeing
use to my electric car, not thinking about where that
electricity comes from.

Speaker 2 (01:15:11):
Uh Mandy.

Speaker 1 (01:15:11):
They haven't even proved climate change is real. How can
they blame a company saying they're causing it? Guys, climate
change is real. Climate change has been happening since the
very beginning of time. The planet has never been in stasis.
As a matter of fact, I just saw on the
break a story on Twitter where they're a giant crack
has appeared in an Ethiopian desert and they believe that

(01:15:35):
that is because three tectonic plates come together in that
part of Africa and they are moving apart.

Speaker 2 (01:15:43):
How is that?

Speaker 1 (01:15:44):
I mean, are we now going to spend trillions of
dollars trying to keep Africa together? Because the point of
this story was that fissure in Ethiopia is the beginning
of what will be an ocean dividing two sections of
Africa before you know, too long, in a couple million
years or whatever. We've never had a stable climate ever.
We've been in periods of warming and periods of cooling

(01:16:06):
interrupted by the opposite, Right, That's what we do here.
So watching them try to prove beyond a reasonable doubt
that yes, man made more, it's gonna be fascinating. I mean,
I'm not saying it's going to be the Snopes monkey trial,
but it could be.

Speaker 2 (01:16:20):
You don't know.

Speaker 1 (01:16:22):
California has a lot of refineries, says this Texter. Yes,
and they're all about to shut down so much so
the Gavin Newsom is saying, maybe the state will take
over the refineries in California.

Speaker 2 (01:16:33):
Huh, let's do this.

Speaker 1 (01:16:34):
Let's make it so incredibly impossible to operate here, and
then when the companies say it's no longer worth it,
we're just gonna take their stuff and.

Speaker 2 (01:16:42):
Run it ourselves.

Speaker 1 (01:16:43):
I'm sure that's fine, nothing bad will happen at all.

Speaker 2 (01:16:45):
My first thought was.

Speaker 1 (01:16:47):
Well, of course, but there's more to the story than
I initially thought.

Speaker 2 (01:16:51):
Headline.

Speaker 1 (01:16:51):
Weight loss drugs may cut cancer risk by fifty percent
according to Transformational News study. Now, something that we are
beginning to understand with great clarity is that obesity is
a metabolog disorder that leads to a whole bunch of
other stuff, and it increases your chances of getting cancer,
especially breast cancer. There's like thirteen kinds of cancer that

(01:17:14):
are very sensitive to obesity, meaning if you were obese,
you are increasing your chances of getting that cancer pretty dramatically.

Speaker 2 (01:17:22):
So it stands to reason that if you lost.

Speaker 1 (01:17:24):
Weight, your risk of getting those cancers would also reduce.

Speaker 2 (01:17:28):
But a new study of not just.

Speaker 1 (01:17:31):
Weight loss drugs, we're talking about GLP one inhibitors and
they include things like ozimpic and wagov and other brands
like that. They compared people who lost weight using those
shots to people who lost weight from bariatric surgery. Now
you would think they would have the same level of
cancer or no. But the study published in the Lancets

(01:17:55):
eClinical Medicine, looked at thousands of people with obesity and
diabetes who were on GLP one drugs, and they looked
at people who had had bariatric surgery to lose weight.
Weight loss drugs, according to this study, are forty one
percent more effective at preventing obesity related cancer, and this

(01:18:18):
is interesting. We don't yet fully understand how golp ones work,
but this study adds to the growing evidence showing that
weight loss alone cannot completely account for the metabolic, anti
cancer and many other benefits that these medications provide.

Speaker 2 (01:18:35):
The Protective effects.

Speaker 1 (01:18:36):
Of GLP one ras against obesity related cancers likely arise
from multiple mechanisms, including reducing inflammation. Inflammation is turning it
into quite the boogeyman these days, and I'm not saying
it's not. But now scientists are looking at inflammation as
the possible underpinnings of Alzheimer's disease, of many other illnesses,

(01:18:59):
of art disease, of all kinds of stuff. So if
you can handle that, then yeah, that would be great.
But let's be real, you guys, we don't know the
long term effects of these golp ones. We don't know
it yet, and I hope everything is fine. I mean,
we've had a lot of drugs hit the market that
has been fine, but we've also had a lot of
drugs hit the market that have been a disaster in

(01:19:21):
the longer term. So it remains to be seen. But
it's just it's interesting. I know, I was talking to
Father Mike. I got to have breakfast with Father Mike
this morning, and I was talking to him today and
he said, you know, I'd like to lose this belly,
but I just don't know about the long term effects
of the drugs. And there are certain drugs that I
feel that way about. But I got to tell you,

(01:19:42):
I know friends who have changed their entire lives because
of these drugs. They didn't just take the drugs and
lose weight. They took the drugs, started following a really
healthy diet, started exercising as a regular part of their lives,
lost weight and are keeping it off by continuing to
eat right and exercise. But losing the weight help them
get to a place where they're now maintaining their healthy body.

Speaker 2 (01:20:04):
And I have friends who've lost.

Speaker 1 (01:20:06):
Weight on these drugs and gained every single pound back,
every single one. It really depends on whether or not
you're committed to making the changes in your life that
have to be made for long term weight loss is
just a fact of the matter. I mean, you're either
committed to it or you're looking for an easy out.
And the easy out may may get you skinny for
the wedding, but if you don't continue to make changes,

(01:20:29):
you know it's all going to come back.

Speaker 3 (01:20:31):
This.

Speaker 2 (01:20:32):
Uh.

Speaker 1 (01:20:32):
One of my coworkers, I said, man, you look great,
she said, I lost thirty pounds.

Speaker 2 (01:20:37):
So what you do? She goes, oh, drugs.

Speaker 1 (01:20:39):
And pretty much changing everything about the way I take
care of my body. And it was the second part
that I was like, Okay, you're gonna You're gonna go
the long road on this one. It's fascinating though, that
they're starting to see how these drugs affect other forms
of addiction. There's anecdotal evidence, and I don't know if
they're doing a full blown study on this now, but
anecdotal evidence from people who have taken these that drink

(01:21:01):
more than they wanted to have said I don't have
cravings for alcohol anymore. So it's fascinating. We really don't
know everything yet about these drugs, but you know, it's
a wonderful time to be alive. Let me tell you, Mandy,
I'd rather be dead than fat. Okay, that's a little extreme. Yeah,

(01:21:23):
they don't know how it does that, how much, they
don't know about bad effects exactly. And there have been significant,
significant reactions to this medication around the world. So it's
not all sunshine and roses. But I found that very
very interesting. When we get back, we're going to talk
to DJ Summers from the Common Sense Institute about a

(01:21:45):
study they did on traffic. Specifically, they looked at two things.
They looked at traffic fatalities and they looked at traffic enforcement.
And will you be remotely surprised when I tell you
that as traffic enforcement dropped, traffic fatalities went where. I'll
tell you after this when we're talking to DJ, common

(01:22:07):
sense reports about important things you need to know about,
and today is no different. We're going to talk about
a new report with DJ Summers about traffic enforcement declining
and motorcycle fatality is going in a much different direction.

Speaker 2 (01:22:20):
DJ, welcome back to the show. First of all, something
to be here.

Speaker 6 (01:22:25):
Thank you Mandy for having me pleasure as always.

Speaker 1 (01:22:27):
Now, you're a motorcycle guy. You just said that, do
you own a motorcycle?

Speaker 6 (01:22:32):
I have.

Speaker 7 (01:22:34):
I'll be getting an endorsement for a motorcycle and not
too long. I'm still shopping around for my next ride.
But I am a motorcycle guy. It's nice you get
the wind in your hair figuratively because I don't have
much of it. But you get the wind in your hair.
It's some freedom on the road.

Speaker 3 (01:22:51):
You know.

Speaker 7 (01:22:52):
It's a piece of Americana. It's like riding a horse
made out of iron. I know I sound like pond
Joby throwback there, but the truth.

Speaker 1 (01:22:59):
They're worse, the worse, worse people to emulate than bon
Jovi and his heyday.

Speaker 2 (01:23:03):
Let's talk about this study.

Speaker 1 (01:23:04):
First of all, why did you guys choose to study
traffic enforcement and vehicle mild deaths at the same time.

Speaker 2 (01:23:11):
We just brought this on.

Speaker 7 (01:23:12):
Yeah, I mean this this came out of kind of happensstance.

Speaker 3 (01:23:17):
You know.

Speaker 6 (01:23:17):
We were which is how a lot of our reports
are derived.

Speaker 7 (01:23:20):
We just come across interesting bits of information that are
relevant to the public.

Speaker 6 (01:23:26):
Somehow, at that time, we were doing.

Speaker 7 (01:23:28):
Just kind of a larger level scoping process around some
traffic enforcements, traffic revenues, that kind of thing, and we
found that motorcycle fatalities were going way way up they
had been, and it was it was not headed the
same direction as like licenses on the road and vehicle

(01:23:51):
registration traffic penalties. So we really just saw this and
just that that contrast there stuck out to us, and
since it's motorcycle Awareness months, we thought might be a
good time to drop this.

Speaker 1 (01:24:07):
So let's talk about these actual numbers, because I got
to tell you, the motorcycle death increases are pretty shocking.

Speaker 2 (01:24:14):
I think they're pretty shocking, and.

Speaker 1 (01:24:15):
I want to ask you have they coincided completely with
the introduction of lane filtering, which a lot of young motorcyclists,
in my now experience on I twenty five believe to
be the same as lane splitting, because there's a lot
of lane splitting going on right now on our interstates.

Speaker 7 (01:24:34):
There's a lot of lane splitting going on. You hear
a lot of that anecdotally. Everybody has some story about
driving on I twenty five and having that exhilarating experience
of getting passed by someone on a bike doing ninety.

Speaker 6 (01:24:48):
And there is some correlation between the.

Speaker 7 (01:24:53):
Uptick in motorcycle deaths and the number of motorcycle fatalities
on a yearly basis.

Speaker 6 (01:25:02):
There is some correlation.

Speaker 7 (01:25:04):
There because that started in the reminder when that started
late late I think it.

Speaker 6 (01:25:09):
Was twenty nineteen, maybe twenty one.

Speaker 1 (01:25:11):
Ye they passed it in twenty nineteen, but it just
went fully into effect last year, maybe last two years
at the most.

Speaker 2 (01:25:19):
Hasn't been that long, so it's been a.

Speaker 1 (01:25:22):
Relatively new situation, and I feel like a lot of
motorcyclist are either willfully ignorant of what it actually is,
but it's created kind of a terrifying situation, and it's
always it looks to be a twenty something guy wearing
just a T shirt and some shorts and a helmet
and he's going one hundred miles an hour down, you know,
in between cars. So and you know, as a mom,

(01:25:43):
that just gets my mom radar like up. You know,
it gets my hackles up because.

Speaker 2 (01:25:48):
They think they're invincible and they're going.

Speaker 1 (01:25:49):
To be splattered all over the road, and it's just
it's incredibly sad. So what did we learn about traffic enforcement?
Let me walk back to that part of this, because
we all know that for the last few years, you
could drive around with an expired tag that expired in
twenty twenty or twenty nineteen, and no one was going
to write you a ticket.

Speaker 2 (01:26:07):
So what kind of impact has traffic enforcement had?

Speaker 7 (01:26:11):
That really was where we found more at this, you know,
more than more than there was like a strong correlation
with you know, the implementation of lane splitting things like that.
What we found was there's a lot of overlap between
how much traffic penalties have fallen over the last few

(01:26:32):
years and this increase in fatalities. Like total traffic penalties
in Colorado fell by over fifty four percent from twenty
eighteen to twenty twenty four. You know, that's just enough
fancy way of saying over a six year period, they're
giving out half the traffic penalty assessments that.

Speaker 6 (01:26:54):
They used to. That's a huge decline. That is an
enormous decline.

Speaker 7 (01:26:59):
And we do know that there has been a couple
of items that contribute to that. You know, a lot
of law enforcement officials have talked a lot about this
just kind of the chilling effects of some of the
law enforcement reforms that came out in the early twenty twenties.

Speaker 6 (01:27:18):
But just in Denver proper, they did have a.

Speaker 7 (01:27:22):
D emphasis on low level traffic enforcement as kind of
a policy there.

Speaker 6 (01:27:27):
So much so that Aurora went the opposite direction.

Speaker 7 (01:27:30):
Aurora said that they're stepping their low level traffic enforcement up.
So we do know that over the last six seven
years there has been a dramatic decline in the number
of total traffic penalties assessed. Now, in that same time,
we've got this increase in motorcycle deaths, We've got this

(01:27:52):
increase in this road safety condition. That's the gist of
what we've uncrevered here, and there's more details in it.
You know, the number of registrations for motorcycles fell by
nine percent, So you've got to think that lower registration
means fewer motorcyclists on the road means fewer deaths.

Speaker 6 (01:28:15):
That isn't the case.

Speaker 7 (01:28:17):
There's just fewer registered motorcycles on the road, and there's
fewer licenses generally with vehicles all across the board. You know,
our driving age population rose between twenty eighteen and twenty
twenty four, but the number of total regular licenses enforced
in Colorado shrank in that time. So you've got to think,

(01:28:40):
why are these people driving around without registration or driving
around without licenses? And we do know that has coincided
with this decrease in overall traffic penalty assessment, so it's
all kind of tied together.

Speaker 2 (01:28:53):
Well, let me.

Speaker 1 (01:28:54):
Ask this about that, because when we're talking, it does
seem to be obviously there's a correlation, right. Correlation is
not causation, but obviously there's a pretty significant correlation there.
Traffic stops are actually a highly dangerous part of policing
because you never know what is going to happen. You
don't know who's in the car, you don't know what's
in the car. It is a very highly dangerous part

(01:29:15):
of policing. And when we don't have the kind of
force numbers that we need. I don't know if there
is an agency in the Denver metro other than down
in doug Coote that is fully staffed right now.

Speaker 2 (01:29:28):
I don't know.

Speaker 1 (01:29:29):
I know Aurora is way down, I know Denver's way down.
So is that a big part of it. We just
don't have the bodies to go out and enforce these
like look for crime on the roads when they're having
to respond to the people that are calling nine to
one one.

Speaker 7 (01:29:42):
I mean, in Denver, that's probably what the police force
would tell you.

Speaker 6 (01:29:45):
Police force would tell you.

Speaker 7 (01:29:46):
Look, we really want to prioritize higher level crimes. We
want to know we're short on what our authorized strength
should be, and we want to make sure that we're
going out and getting the bad guys that are committing
rob and committing aggravated assaults, that kind of thing. We
want to free up our police force, limited as it is,

(01:30:06):
so that they can go out and do that higher
level stuff and not have to focus on lower level
traffic forcement pulling somebody over for an expired.

Speaker 6 (01:30:15):
Tag or something like that.

Speaker 7 (01:30:17):
That's definitely what a lot of police forces would.

Speaker 6 (01:30:20):
Probably tell you about this.

Speaker 7 (01:30:22):
Knowing what we know about our trinkage in police number
and police strength. I mean, we passed Prop one thirty
last fall. The public knows that they want more police
in the forces statewide. So it's a problem that everyone

(01:30:42):
kind of acknowledges exists.

Speaker 6 (01:30:43):
So there's probably a lot that has to do with that.

Speaker 1 (01:30:47):
Somebody else on the text line, and actually DJ Summer
is our guest from the Common Census. We were talking
about this off the air, this one, Mandy, Oh, let
me see where it went. I'd be interested to know
how many of those motorcycle deaths or caused by cross
rocket motorcycles.

Speaker 2 (01:31:02):
In comparison to Harley Davidson.

Speaker 1 (01:31:04):
Type motorcycles, and that we don't have that parsing, right,
But I think we're all like, of course it's the speeders.

Speaker 2 (01:31:11):
Of course it's the cross rockets.

Speaker 8 (01:31:14):
You know.

Speaker 1 (01:31:14):
I mean that the guys, like I said, the young
guys are invincible.

Speaker 2 (01:31:18):
But you don't have that information.

Speaker 7 (01:31:21):
No anywhere that I've seen in the available public data.

Speaker 6 (01:31:25):
I'm not sure.

Speaker 7 (01:31:27):
How exactly they would they would make that differentiation, whether
they just do that by you know, how many ccs
the engine is, you know, whether you're riding like a
cruiser versus a dirt bike versus a street bob or whatever.
I don't think that there's anything in the literature right
now that makes those kinds of distinctions. It'd be interesting, though,

(01:31:49):
because you know, different kinds of bikes lead to different
kinds of behaviors.

Speaker 6 (01:31:53):
So I'm sure that's maybe part of the puzzle.

Speaker 2 (01:31:57):
Well, I'd love to know.

Speaker 1 (01:31:58):
And we have a lot of law enforcement the listen
to the show if they could hit the text line
five sixty six nine, Oh, what is your experience in
law enforcement dealing with these fatal crashes? And you know, DJ,
I don't know if you guys looked into this, but
how many serious accidents involving a motorcycle have have happened
in Colorado where maybe the person doesn't die, but they
are seriously and dramatically injured. I mean, there's a level

(01:32:21):
of disability that comes along with a motorcycle accident that
you don't necessarily get in a car accident just because
you have anything you're protecting.

Speaker 6 (01:32:28):
Yeah, very very Yeah, that's a great point.

Speaker 7 (01:32:31):
I mean, we we've got all kinds of serious injuries
that we're not even talking about. With this study that
one hundred and sixty plus motorcyclists.

Speaker 6 (01:32:40):
Dead in twenty twenty four.

Speaker 7 (01:32:42):
That doesn't account for all of the ones that have
maybe just been you know, horribly injured now or quadriplegic
something like that. We're not even talking about seriously injurious
accidents here.

Speaker 6 (01:32:54):
We're only focusing on these fatalities.

Speaker 1 (01:32:57):
And to be clear, DJ, I want to make sure
that people who ride motorcycle in our listening audience, I'm
not mad at motorcyclists. The thing for me about motorcycles
is I personally know two people that had been riding
motorcycles for forty years that were killed because of the
actions of another driver. Right, So there's that level of
protection that doesn't exist. But I'm not picking on motorcyclists.

(01:33:18):
I just want them to keep their heads on a
swivel and make sure that they know that Colorado roads
are not necessarily the safest thing for motorcyclists. Do we
know what percentage of the people on the road of
the miles driven on the road are driven by motorcyclists
versus people in cars, Because if right now they're making
up twenty four percent of all traffic desks, what percentage

(01:33:40):
of passenger miles do they make up to give us
some perspective on that.

Speaker 7 (01:33:45):
I don't know those numbers off the top of my head.

Speaker 6 (01:33:48):
I do know that they're lower.

Speaker 7 (01:33:50):
It's not commensurate with the number of fatalities that you'd see.
It's a disproportionate amount of fatalities in traffic crashes that
are represented by motorcyclists as opposed to just passenger vehicles,
Which makes sense. Yeah, it's a more inherently dangerous way
to travel. You don't have a seat belt, you're exposed,

(01:34:10):
there's less material around you to absorb any kind of
impact if you get into it. It just that does
make sense. But to see them going up like this,
especially in the light of you know, traffic penalties going down,
maybe that leading to a little bit less savory road conditions,
especially with the state of Colorado's roads you know where

(01:34:33):
ranked some of the worst urban highways and some of
the worst rural highways both in the nation according to
a recent study. So all of those factors, they just
they kind of make the perfect storm.

Speaker 2 (01:34:45):
Yep.

Speaker 1 (01:34:46):
DJ I mean, in my mind, what do we do
with this information other than go to your local law
enforcement agencies, go to your town councils, your city council's
your county commissions and say we've got to make traffic
enforcement a priority.

Speaker 2 (01:34:58):
It has to be a priority.

Speaker 1 (01:34:59):
Because I saw a quote, and I believe that it
was the new Aurora PD Chief Todd Chamberlain.

Speaker 2 (01:35:04):
I think it was him. He actually said, you know.

Speaker 1 (01:35:07):
We've stopped these stolen cars or cars with no plates,
and we found firearms, we find people with warrants, we
find people with drugs. Because normally law abiding otherwise citizens
are not driving around with no tags on their car, right,
I mean, most people are trying to do the right thing.
So the notion that somehow traffic enforcement wouldn't help prevent

(01:35:28):
other crimes by taking criminals off the streets, that's the
part that for me feels the most important here.

Speaker 7 (01:35:35):
It's a big portion of it for a lot of
district attorneys that we might have talked to. You know,
we haven't gotten into that kind of depth of analysis
just yet. How many low level traffic enforcements lead to
some kind of higher level law enforcement action.

Speaker 6 (01:35:53):
We don't have those on hand.

Speaker 7 (01:35:54):
But that was one of the reasons that we were
looking into this in the first place, is we want
to to know what was going on, whether or not
that was leading.

Speaker 6 (01:36:03):
To a decline.

Speaker 7 (01:36:04):
We don't have any of those figures just yet, but anecdotally,
you can talk to a lot of law enforcement people,
people in the legal system who say that lower level
traffic enforcements were good for higher level law enforcement altogether
for the reasons that you just named that you know,

(01:36:25):
a lot of the time they'd lead to something else.
So as an enforcement strategy, it's kind of part of
the toolkit, and that's that's kind of a concern with
some of the people that you know, we've been speaking.

Speaker 6 (01:36:38):
To around that time.

Speaker 7 (01:36:39):
Again, we don't really have any of those numbers just yet,
but that was kind of the thought around this, And
I mean it's a.

Speaker 6 (01:36:46):
Crucial revenue question as well.

Speaker 7 (01:36:48):
You know, we're in a statewide budgets kerfuffle at the moment,
that one point two billion dollar gap that's been causing
state legislator's grief, and we know that impacts municipalities too,
That impacts towns, that impacts cities, counties who.

Speaker 6 (01:37:04):
Get to share some of that state revenue.

Speaker 7 (01:37:07):
The revenue that you do generate from total traffic penalties
from those low level stops is not insubstantial as unpopular
as that might be to say, for law abiding citizens
who don't want to get pulled over for you know,
an expired registration tag or something like that, get it
gets up into the millions. The revenue generated from the

(01:37:29):
penalties fell three.

Speaker 6 (01:37:32):
Point two million dollars.

Speaker 2 (01:37:34):
I mean there's a between.

Speaker 1 (01:37:35):
Yeah, there's a big a difference between a speed trap
community where all they do is write tickets. Morrison fairly
recently was one of those, and quite another to say,
if we've got people going down you know, our roads
at ninety miles an hour when it's a forty mile
an hour speed limit, that's a sizeable ticket and should
be a revenue stream.

Speaker 6 (01:37:54):
Sure, sure, I mean, I mean just with motorcycles.

Speaker 7 (01:37:57):
Motorcycles alone, if motorcycle registrations had paced with population growth,
Colorado would have generated eight million more dollars in state
registration revenue between twenty nineteen and twenty twenty four. And
that doesn't even include like county level registration fees. So
you are talking about some of that basic stuff that
registration fee, lower level traffic enforcement, that is a revenue source.

(01:38:21):
And in the light of increasing fatalities and less than
safe road conditions according to certain rankings, it might be
something to consider.

Speaker 1 (01:38:30):
DJ Summers from the Common Sense Institute another fascinating report
about Colorado. I can hardly wait to hear the response
from the politicians that will sound something like nuh uh,
because that's all they ever say to you, guys when
you report, you report the facts, and then they come
back and you're like, nah, So keep up the good work, DJ,
I appreciate it.

Speaker 7 (01:38:49):
I appreciate you, Mandy, thank you for having me on
as always.

Speaker 6 (01:38:52):
Cannot wait to do it again.

Speaker 1 (01:38:53):
All right, man, have a great day joining me in
this studio. This is two times Grant and I met today,
long time notion breakfast father Mike this morning.

Speaker 2 (01:39:01):
That was lovely. He was energetic, he was fired up.

Speaker 1 (01:39:05):
We got father Micah's shirt at Laredo Chapel that says
best dad ever and it's God, you know, like, and.

Speaker 2 (01:39:12):
He was like, I love this shirt.

Speaker 1 (01:39:13):
Oh, I couldn't quit talking about it exactly A pretty
good yeah, very very tasty, very tasty. Indeed, And now
it's time for the most exciting segment on the radio
of it's kind in the world of the day.

Speaker 2 (01:39:28):
All right, now, this is nice.

Speaker 1 (01:39:30):
I think if Colorado dropped registration fees we would see
more people registering their vehicles. I agree, I agree, but
it still doesn't excuse anybody not registering your vehicle.

Speaker 2 (01:39:39):
Just throwing that out there, we all had to do it.
You do too. Anyway. What is our dad joke of
the day, please, Anthony.

Speaker 5 (01:39:45):
Send to me from my mother b Rod. Every morning
I announced to my family that I'm going jogging, but
then I don't. It's a running joke, I said, Nice,
I'm running with that today.

Speaker 2 (01:39:59):
Okay. What is our word today?

Speaker 3 (01:40:01):
Please?

Speaker 2 (01:40:01):
Is an adjective apa tropayic? What? What? What apa tropayic?

Speaker 9 (01:40:07):
A app a p A A p O p r
O t r p I no p a I see
apa tropeic, apatropic, apetropeic.

Speaker 1 (01:40:20):
I have no idea. It has something to do with zoology.

Speaker 2 (01:40:25):
I was going to say dinosaurs. Oh that's close. No, no, not.

Speaker 5 (01:40:28):
Something described as a trope is designed or intended to
avert evil.

Speaker 1 (01:40:35):
Oh my little dangling hand with the with the evil
eye that I got in Greece, that's that's.

Speaker 2 (01:40:45):
Tropic. Okay.

Speaker 1 (01:40:46):
The word mimsy. Today's trivia question asked the word mimsy
can be used to describe someone who is prim feeble,
or affected who coined.

Speaker 2 (01:40:54):
The word uh. The guy in South Parky character Mark Twain.

Speaker 1 (01:41:01):
Lewis Carroll, author of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through
the Looking Glass Carol invented many words that are now
part of it, but I believe you might have gotten
it from Lewis Carroll. I'm just saying, Rod, consider that.
What's our Jeopardy category?

Speaker 2 (01:41:18):
Word pairs? Okay, word pairs word?

Speaker 5 (01:41:22):
This pair in A fruit and dairy dessert also describes
a pale skinned, pink cheeked complexion.

Speaker 2 (01:41:34):
You know, wait, wait, say the whole thing again, please?

Speaker 5 (01:41:37):
This pear and a fruit and dairy dessert also describes
a pale skinned, pink cheeked complexion.

Speaker 2 (01:41:46):
I don't know what is peaches and creams. Okay, now
we're on. I got you now.

Speaker 5 (01:41:53):
Care of building materials used to describe a physical store,
as opposed man, Mandy, what's a brick and mortar?

Speaker 3 (01:42:01):
That is correct?

Speaker 5 (01:42:03):
A preposition and an adjective of size. Together, they're a
synonym for in general, oh god.

Speaker 1 (01:42:10):
A preposition you'll be like, oh yeah, in size, what
do they say that one more time?

Speaker 5 (01:42:17):
A preposition and an adjective of size. Together, they're a
synonym for in general.

Speaker 2 (01:42:30):
I have no idea that's super hard. By and large,
this category is.

Speaker 6 (01:42:34):
Large.

Speaker 2 (01:42:35):
Jangt, a blues.

Speaker 5 (01:42:36):
Classic, says, nobody knows when you're this destitute pair.

Speaker 2 (01:42:43):
Hi, this is the hardest category I've ever been. Upart,
nobody knows when you're blank and blank, down and out. Yeah,
the opposite of up and inside. Got a wild Wait,
what's a score?

Speaker 3 (01:43:00):
Zero?

Speaker 1 (01:43:00):
We're not exactly blessing a trail in this category.

Speaker 3 (01:43:03):
One.

Speaker 5 (01:43:03):
A wild speech and a wild party, maybe with glow
sticks combine in this alliterative race.

Speaker 2 (01:43:12):
That is correct, me too, my brain.

Speaker 1 (01:43:19):
Or yes, indeed, all right, guys, another show in the books.
Tuesday is gone.

Speaker 5 (01:43:24):
Yes, we have only what a little over twenty four
hours left in our Instagram giveaway a Broncos home game
pair to a game of your choice right now at
Ko Colorado.

Speaker 2 (01:43:37):
It's right there at the top.

Speaker 1 (01:43:38):
That's the directions.

Speaker 5 (01:43:41):
Yeah, follow the direction will be unfortunately be the Christmas
game because that one's in Kansas City, I know, officially,
well not whatever I mean kind officially in Kansas game
of your choice, you can win a pair.

Speaker 1 (01:43:54):
All right, there you go, we'll be back tomorrow. K
Sports coming up next.