AM Show Hr 3 | If Lina Wasn't Such A Loon, Garcia's Question Would Be The Lead Story

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:03):
It's that time, time, time, time, luck and load. The
Michael Varie Show is on the air.

Speaker 2 (00:14):
There are cultural impediments to doing this work. Let's say
you work in the FBI. You know that one of
the two political parties is, let me put it nicely,
white supremacist adjacent at a minimum.

Speaker 3 (00:26):
So there's a lot of people that are like, you
know what, like, let's go find the safest white boy
we can find.

Speaker 1 (00:31):
Poor kids are just as bright and just as talent
as white kids.

Speaker 3 (00:34):
Is that this election has proven, that this administration has
proven painfully in some ways, is that black people cannot
save this country from white folks.

Speaker 1 (00:45):
All right, I want you to listen carefully to what
I'm about to play. Thirty second clip. It's is Adrian
Garcia who knows better. Adrian Garcia ran for city council
while I was on the city council, and Gabe Vozkaz

(01:09):
at the last minute ran for controller or maybe mayor,
I don't remember what it was. But he runs for
mayor and at the last minute, and I think he
had wired it where this is one of these games
people play. They their hand pick candidate's going to replace them.
The following deadline is five o'clock. At four fifty five,

(01:33):
Adrian Garcia walks in. He'd been an HPD officer and
at the time he was like an HPD liaison with
City Council, so I had worked with him in a
purely professional capacity. He was very responsive if I had
questions after hours, if I had a question before council,

(01:55):
mean he've had a question when middle of council because
the numbers didn't up, or I needed to know the history.
He was He was responsive, he was polite, respectful. I
had good things to say about Hadrian. I didn't think
he was the sharpest pencil in the pack. He wasn't
going to figure out how we get to mars Elon,

(02:16):
wasn't going to hire him to fix the Texas the
Tesla battery deficiency. But he seemed honest, straightforward, solid, consistent.
There was well, you know, I'll leave that alone. Then
he he runs and he wins, and we were happy.

(02:38):
Thought he's a reasonable guy. I didn't have any illusions
that he might be delusions that he might be Republican.
But it didn't matter much on City council if you
didn't let people outside council infect your mind and tell
you you needed to be down there. You know, Ada
Edwards would would think she was you know some you

(02:59):
know Angela Davis, Black Power, the rent is too damn
high guy, or Kami Mamdani or Jasmine Crockett. She'd get
a little carried away on that, which wasn't necessary. But Adrian,
we expected good things, and by and large he was okay. Well,

(03:22):
I noticed as I was leaving he was being recruited
by the Democrat party that picked him, that he was
they were going to run in for president, for mayor
or congress because he was a Hispanic mail with a
law enforcement background and this this is that that was
easily controlled. So he serves out his term. I think

(03:48):
he ran for mayor and got beaten. And it was
the woman who ran his campaign who was the one
who Lena Hidalgo was trying to give the twenty million
dollars to that got her three top eight. He's indicted.
So Adrian then runs for sheriff and it was a
year the Democrats swept, So he gets swept into office. Well,

(04:13):
a lot of people are looking around, going, this is
a nice guy, but can he handle the department like this? Well,
I guess we're about to find out. So he goes
in and he decides he wants to be county commissioner,
and he runs a pretty good race, and Adrian is

(04:36):
very good at east Side politics. Politics on the east
Side of Houston are very different than elsewhere. It's very
much working class Chicano Tehano Mexican American, different people to

(04:57):
find themselves differently, but it's very much kind of a
working class Hispanic base that are not real deep into
ideological issues. It comes from a Latin American political You
cheer for your politician the way you cheer for your

(05:17):
soccer team. I got it on Si delos Minos. Well
why why though? Why because they are team oh okay,
and so you cheer for your team and your colors
and and you're loyal and you'll be there forever. But
why because it's our team? Okay? But but why? Uh
mean familia? And so there's this there's this family god

(05:42):
community and our colors. And the NFL interesting has tapped
into this demographic because these are very very loyal fans.
NFL loves them because they're not buying the front row
seat or the suites, but they will show up when
you're oh, and sixteen to the last game of the
Sea and it feels so weird to say that ramon
seventeen game seasons, so weird. But they will show up

(06:04):
when you're on sixteen.

Speaker 2 (06:05):
They will.

Speaker 1 (06:06):
They will buy a jersey with their favorite player's name
on the back, or just just to be kind of cool,
they may show up with Andre Johnson, you know, on
the back, or JJ Watt. They'll drink a lot of beers, Budwezer.
They'll go afterwards, they'll stagger out of there. They'll be
They're always a man on the street. If you if

(06:27):
you see a video of a man on the street
after an Astros or a Texans game and we've just
lost a heartbreaker, you know, the white people are like,
I'm down with this team. Screw them, man, I've been
been a fan for a long I'm sick of my
heart being broken. I'm done with this. And he strolls off.

(06:47):
He'll be back, but right now, boy, he's had enough.
And then here will come some little Chikano dude. He's
got his jersey on, and they're like, what do you
think And he'll interrupt them in the middle. You think you, oh, man,
we're going to support a man. These are astros, and
we are going to be here for them and I

(07:08):
will never forget them. Put on either these are my team.
Uh see him, I mean familiar and it's great man
on the street video because it's like, you know this
is this is the hometown fan. They believe. Well, that's
kind of what Adrian was campaigning to and he's good

(07:29):
at that. It's not to say he's not. Ben Reyes
was good at that. He gets elected commissioner and he
starts having visions of running for a bigger office, including
Sylvia Garcia's congressional seat. The audio I'm about to play
you has set off every law enforcement agency in the
regions in the region. Now, I'm sad to say this
because they're friends of mine, but they'll all come back

(07:50):
together and support him and raise money for him when
he runs for re election. But today they're pretty pissed.
I'd like to see them so mad at him that
he regrets his comment for the rest of his career.
But I have found it to be the case that
a lot of law enforcement agency representatives are purely transactional,
and if you're gonna win, they're gonna support you, and

(08:11):
so you never really teach a guy like this to
stop the nonsense. But we shall see. I'll play that
audio just man I got caught up in the Picano
Astros fan. You know that guy. You gotta love that guy.
We are going to win next year. We have next
year already next year beginning.

Speaker 3 (08:26):
Now you've got.

Speaker 1 (08:29):
Manos.

Speaker 4 (08:30):
The Michael Berry Show.

Speaker 1 (09:29):
Is as talking about talking about nineteen eighty nine Oscar Arius,
president of Costa Rica, wins the Nobel Prize for Peace.

(09:52):
Or read an article that they call him. It's two
o'clock in the morning in San Jose, the capitol. He
rolls over, picks up the phone and they said, senor audience,
you have won the Nobel Prize for Peace. And he
says the prize is for Costa Rica. Well, that story
hit me. I liked it. You know, this was like

(10:14):
John F. Kennedy making Winston Churchill an honorary citizen and
proclaiming at the ceremony that Prime Minister Churchill had mobilized
the English language and sent it into battle. I was
moved by such words and concepts, and so I decided
then in there I was going to go to Costa
Rica that summer. I had raised the money go to

(10:37):
d C summer before, and had learned a lot about politics.
Now I wanted to learn Spanish and travel abroad, which
I'd never been. So I raised ten thousand dollars from Orange.
My poor sweet mother told me before I left, when
she should have said, how proud she was of me
that I'd done this without asking for a penny. She said,
You've made us look like the poorest people at Orange

(11:00):
around town with your begging board asking for one hundred
dollars apiece. Should I have asked for two? But I
think about this. One hundred businesses supported me at one
hundred dollars apiece. I mean a lot of businesses wouldn't
write you one hundred dollars in twenty twenty five, and
that's thirty six years later. One hundred dollars was more
than it is today. That was nice. They didn't know me.

(11:22):
Wasn't some prominent families to go to church with them.
They just did it because I told them what I
was going to do. Bawban Enterprise gave me a commission
to write a series called the Youth's Young Writers, Young Writers,
and so I would write, you know, kind of dispatch
his back. That was my own Hunter S. Thompson in

(11:43):
my own mind. So I go down there, and I
get there, and I have a host family that I'm
living with, and I would go to this place called
the Central Cultreal every day. And it's where all the
old Americans would gather to read American newspapers and drink

(12:03):
coffee and gossip. Because at the time, if you would
spend two thousand dollars a month US dollars in the
country in any way, shape or form, you could live
tax free. You could live like a king, like the
government protected you. They were trying to bring us. They
were trying to bring Americans down there, and so you
had people who were pensioners. What two thousand dollars a month,

(12:24):
even in nineteen eighty nine wasn't a lot of money
in the US. But you got some guy that's a
truck driver, plant worker, police officer, and he's got twenty
five hundred dollars a month in a pension for the
rest of his life. And they moved down there and live,
I mean absolutely like kings. Some of them take up

(12:46):
young Costa Rican wives start a whole different family, but
that's a different issue. And I would go there every
day and I would sit and I realized, I can't
hang around these Americans are all speak English all day.
So I would just wander through the streets and I
would ask people for directions. And I'll never forget the
first time a parade like almost like a festival. It

(13:07):
was almost impromptu, like in New Orleans. Was the second
line what do they call it? It just burst up
and it was Costa Rica trying to qualify for their
very first World Cup. They were the Coca Caf I
think it was called, was the Caribbean the I forget

(13:28):
the categories. I'm not a soccer nut, but I try
to learn a little bit about everything, and that was
their song and soccer for Costa Rica. They didn't they
didn't qualify in the Olympics. They didn't have a bobsledding
team and the dream team of basketball and the skate shooting,
and they didn't have Jesse Owens and Carl Lewis and

(13:51):
Mark Spitz and Michael Phelps. This was it, man, if
they could get into the World Cup, their little their
little country, their little soccer team. And so you know,
San Jose is the central hub of the so there
was so much excitement. I never see anything like this.
And in Latin American cities everything people come to the

(14:12):
Central Park. And it's funny when Houstonians tell me, you know,
we should be like New York, we should have a
central park. Why don't you go there for a week
after dark by yourself, no cops, and see how long
it takes till you get butt raped. But I'm a
man a point exactly, if you're lucky, you'll just be mugged.
You don't go to the park because you don't have

(14:34):
to go to the park. You have a park in
your backyard. They don't you ever notice those people aren't
leaving their home in Yonkers to drive into the park.
That's not how that works. The people of Long Island
don't drive back into town to go to the Central Park.
Nor do they ride the subway if they can help it.

(14:58):
But that song would break out, and I would remember
the words, even though I didn't remember what they know
what they meant. I didn't have any way to download it,
so I would write them down phonetically. Good news is
Spanish is almost one hundred percent purely phonetic, And I'd
write them down, and later I would ask people to
explain them well, unfortunately, most people don't know how to

(15:19):
create a synonym for a word that has H has
the same meaning. I got it on say kay significa, oh,
leiban tha, leibon, Oh lift up yes lois mano your
hands lift ah raise your hand raised, that's raiser ah.

(15:41):
I got it. But it's the best way to learn language.
And I have such fond memories of that. Not sure
why I told you that story, but it was top
of mind. Oh because I mentioned that song and it
was playing in my head. So here was what County
Commissioner Adrian Garcia said at Commissioner's Court yesterday, which lucky
for him, is being overshadowed because of Lena Hidalgo pitching

(16:04):
a fit.

Speaker 5 (16:05):
Jonathan, it would I be able to or would the
court be able to make some request short of a
demand that our county law enforcement not cooperate with Ice,

(16:28):
that I would like to take the discussion into executive session.

Speaker 3 (16:31):
Given there's tremendous legal risk around that, I do think
there's some things we could do around that.

Speaker 1 (16:38):
Hold on, we'll make sure you understand what just happened,
Adrian Garcia said, can you figure out a way legally
that our jail would not cooperate with the federal officials
in Ice trying to remove murderers and deport them as
the president has or think about that for a moment.

(17:00):
The Michael Barry shows. You know, this drives me crazy
when you do this kind of thing I would do
to other people. You know that one Donometta is not
Costa Rican, you know it's Mexican. Seven one three nine

(17:22):
one thousand, seven one three nine nine one thousand. Reminds
me of that great Mexican freedom fighter Jose Marti seven
one three nine nine one thousand in that fantastic, fantastic

(17:42):
group that had such a resurgence. Are really I guess
you can't. I can't. You can't make a comeback if
you never were Buena Vista Social Club from just south
to California on the Baja Peninsula. Boy, they had a minute,
didn't they. And the Gypsy Kings O man, I tell

(18:05):
you my second favorite Mexican woman singer Gloria Stefan. She
was something and El Puma ol Puma with bay La Baylah.
That was a good Mexican right there. Mm hmm. So
a little story, Let's see if I can find it.

(18:30):
I was talking to Paul Lambert. Paul Lambert stepped into
Eddie Martini's shoes when Eddie became the division president, and
that means he's head of many, many markets, not just
Houston now.

Speaker 5 (18:43):
And.

Speaker 1 (18:46):
So I was we were talking about something. Uh oh,
he had sent an email to everybody saying about He
called it email etiquette, and he said, hey, guys, and
he said it in a very polite way. I wouldn't have
been so polite. Hey, you know, somebody sends you an email,
acknowledge it. So if somebody says, hey, I'm interested in

(19:07):
being on the Michael Berry Show, which is why I
always tell people send it to me first, then I
can make sure you're taken care of. Oh well, I
didn't want to bother you. So you called the national number,
got sent to New York, who sent you to Florida,
who sent you to Arizona, and now you have a
rep I've never met in place. Well you bothered me,
all right. You bothered me by not being able to
help you when I tell you contact me directly. This

(19:31):
is my business. I live my business. I don't have hobbies.
I talk on the air. I take care of businesses.
That's what I do, and I take care of businesses
by connecting them with listeners and making sure they take
care of our listeners. And then it all works. When
you do me the favor you think of not bothering me,
you cause yourself a bunch of problems, and in the

(19:52):
end me problems because now I got to deal with
some rep in Arizona. Hey, have you ever heard of
so and so? They're really nice people. They like to
sponsor the show. How do you know they're nice people.
I just spoke to them. So they want to spend
a bunch of money. Their nice pens seem real nice,
real nice. Yeah, well they're in green energy and I

(20:13):
don't do green energy, so no, we're not going to
do that. That's my way of saying. Email me directly
through the website Michael Berryshow dot com. His email was
about email etiquette, and he'd send it to all the
all the employees at our company, and I I had
to reach out to him and say, gosh, I'm so
glad that that's such a well written email. I wasn't

(20:35):
asked kissing, Ramon, I don't need to ask, Okay, I
was ask kissing. I mean, wasn't that Okay, the act
itself is a kissing, but the worst kind of ass
kissing is when you're as kissing saying something you don't believe.
I was saying something I believed, but yes, it did
fit into the category of ask kissing. I would admit
to that. So anyway, the point was I hate when

(20:58):
someone emails our team are giving example, Emily has been
yelled at before she's learned, Hey, as long as you
learn from it. Someone email, Hey, I'm interested in going
on the Palm Beach trip. Can you send me the
price and some details? And by the way, can I
do this thing? Or will this happen? And so she'll think, well,

(21:21):
I don't want to bother Michael, so let me figure
out an answer to that question, so that when I
respond to them, I can give them price dates and
an answer to that question. And so two days into it,
she's still reviewing it. Well, what does the listener do? Hey,
and Emily and I both get our emails. Everything I

(21:43):
receive she receives in a carbon copy and she can
respond to it or I will respond to it. And
if I respond to it, she sees that that way
she always knows what my interactions are so she can
step in and take care of anything before I even
need to if I'm on air. And so two days
go by, email comes again. Hey, just want to make

(22:04):
sure you got my email because I haven't heard back.
And so my rule is, you don't have to do
what the person is asking. You don't have to give
them answers to the question they're asking. You don't have
to perform the task they're asked. Acknowledge the email. If
you go up to somebody's house and they're inside going, uh,

(22:29):
probably take me about twenty minutes to get dressed, let
me go ahead and get started. I'll go upstairs. They're
gonna leave right and come back. But if you were
to say give me just a second, they now know
you've acknowledged, and they wait. These are basic, basic task tasks. Son,
easy word. So I send him an email telling him

(22:51):
that story and how Emily's tired of hearing about it.
And he said, my parents opened a small supermarket when
I was nine years old. When my dad's think one
of my dad's things that he harped on religiously to
the employees and me was immediately acknowledged. Every single person
who walks through the door His specific quote was, and

(23:14):
I heard it more times than I can possibly remember.
I don't care if you tell them to go to hell.
At least they'll feel acknowledged. That was the concept behind
the Walmart. Greader, you have foregone your local hardware store,
your local bike store, your local supplies and Sundrys, and

(23:39):
you have given up everything that gave your life meaning
human connection. You have sold your soul and you will
regret it. I remember when everybody was so excited they
had a Walmart that come to town. Everybody regretted it,
but at that moment they are so excited. So now
you're basically just going in like zombies and here are

(23:59):
your cheap Chinese chachkes, just boxes of commodities. Nobody to
help you, Nobody that you know ever touched this product.
It was all. It was all forklifted after it came
on a big ship on a slow train, on a

(24:21):
slow ship from China, and the only thing that human
being ever did for a while till they got them
out of that was to scan it for you. And
so all the people that had lost their jobs at
the other stores ended up being scanners there, even though
they had the paint department or hardware at the local
store you'd been going to for years. But in order

(24:42):
to try to humanize the process. Brilliant, brilliant concept, they
put old men and old women at the front to
greet you. It was absolutely genius. And I see this
all the time when businesses will tell me they want
me to come tour their business. And I can't tour
every but sometimes if I'm in the area, I'll stop

(25:03):
in and they want to show me all their technology.
Hey a, I can do this and replace these three people. Okay,
well that's good, you got them off your payroll. I
get that. But let me ask you this. What I
don't like a chatbot? Oh no, no, the chatbot can answer.
I don't like a chatbot. I won't use a chatbot.
I think in the process a lot of business. It's

(25:25):
one thing for big businesses, they don't care, they have
no soul. But if you're a small business, don't lose
what differentiated you. You're never going to out technology to
big boys, out customer service, the human connection. Growing up
in Spanish hustle, I guess young people will never appreciate it.

(25:47):
But for my generation, and I guess you're an old soul,
So you're more in my generation than your own. But
the idea that these great bands would gather around the
bandleader guitarist who himself was not a vocalist, Carlos Santana,
Ted NuGen, I mean, there's so many of those, it's

(26:10):
just fascinating to me. Little Debbie's name and image were
first used in nineteen sixty when the McKees packaging supplier
Bob Mosher suggested using a family member's name to market
the new Family pack of The first item that was

(26:34):
used the name that was used for the oat Mill
cream Pies to market that oat Mill oat Mill cream Pies. Correct,
So what was the name of the person and that

(26:56):
person's image that were used to sell the cream pie?
They wanted to personalize it. They didn't want it to
just be a commodity, an item of food stuff. It
wanted to be something you connect with.

Speaker 2 (27:13):
It was.

Speaker 1 (27:16):
Named for no guess. You don't have a guess, Little Debbies.
You're right, Little Debbie Herse, you got that right. Little
Debbie herself and her parents were unaware until they saw
her face on the boxes, illustrated by the famous pin

(27:36):
up artist Pearl fresh Man. Mosher's marketing tactic paid off.
In the nineteen sixties, the McKee family got their big
break selling family packs of individually wrapped, wrapped snake snack cakes.
The McKee's concept of multiple single serving pastries in a
single box was groundbreaking, and over the years the Little

(27:58):
Debbie line unvailable loved products including Swiss rolls, Christmas tree cakes,
and of course Twinkies. Twinkies are my favorite example of
a phenomenon that I see happening a lot today, and
that is where you go. Hey, did you see Twinkies
went away? Oh? Man, God, noll I miss Twinkies me too, Man,

(28:24):
I used to rip some Twinkies. Me too, Man, I
hadn't had a Twinkies in forty years. Me neither.

Speaker 5 (28:36):
Boa.

Speaker 1 (28:38):
Well, how how much you gonna miss them going away?

Speaker 2 (28:45):
Man?

Speaker 1 (28:46):
I'm gonna miss the old Terry's Coffee shop going away
on I ten between viter and Beaumont. It's a real
loss to the community. Really gonna miss it being there?
Oh really, how long has it been since you've been there? Shoot?
Probably eighty five, maybe eighty eight, late eighties. Well what

(29:08):
exactly are you gonna miss? Just so I know, because
the only Terry's restaurant that exists for you is in
your mind and nobody can take it from it. In
the memory Palace, Twinkies didn't go anywhere. Twinkies played a
little game on everybody, big announcement. Hey, sh don't tell

(29:29):
nobody Twinkies quietly going out of business. Whit what You
can't quietly go out of business, your Twinkies. You're a
public repository of respect, an institute of awesome. You can't
just go away, Twinkies. Yeah, yeah, going away. Putting the

(29:52):
old white cream Philly away for good.

Speaker 2 (29:56):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (29:57):
Yellow gelatinous substance with a disturbing shelf life of three
hundred and fifty years, the oddly moist cake like substance
that remains moist for as far as we can tell
about ninety years, will be put away and used as

(30:24):
ky jelly supplement or something because it's oddly oddly moist
for a disturbingly long period of time For something that's
going into my belly. I never needed it to be nutritious.
I just really didn't want to mainline arsenic if I

(30:47):
could help it. You know, you've made vasiline taste good.
But people will do that with things. They're so sad
that something went away, so sad. Well, it was last
week they announced they were going away, don't you. I
meant to I meant to get over there. God dog it,
I wish I'd gotten over there. I really hate it.

(31:10):
So and so not touring anymore. That was my favorite band. Well,
they just came through on their finalite tour two months ago.
I know, I know, I wish I'd had gone. I
bet there's a lot of I wish I had gone
in your life. I bet you the idea of sense

(31:31):
of urgency, make a decision, act on it completely. I
bet that that's not strong. That's not a strong suit
for you. So my advice to small business, and we're
to the point, especially in the retail space where you're
really small or really big and there's very very little
in between, is don't lose touch of who you are.

(31:55):
I had a late lunch yesterday. No I didn't eat ramon.
I sat there while they eat. Yes, that's obnoxious. I
agreed to the meeting. I wanted to meet these folks.
So it was the owners of some of the Ace hardwares.
And the cool thing about Ace Hardware is it's basically
just Bill's hardware and Mickey's hardware and Dorothy's hardware. I'm

(32:17):
going around the room. Here's hardware and Jack's hardware. It's
basically just your hardware. But you can't compete as a
one off because it's basically a buying co op because
you can't. You already can't compete on price with Home
Deep or Lows. You don't even try to. I mean,
you can say, hey, come shop here. There won't be

(32:39):
a bunch of illegal aliens out front, but now you
know Trump cleared that up, so you have to say
you can say, hey, come shop here, because I work here.
My wife runs the girls gifts department. My son's over
here in the barbecue pits, my daughter's over here in
the gardening section. We have a post office inside here.

(33:00):
You don't have to go to the old fashion post
office and get bad customer service. And I am roving
at all times. You need an air conditioning, you need
an ac capacitor apparently the number one fastest growing item
for all A stores. So anyway, ACE is basically just
a buying co op for each person's individual hardware, gifts,
everything store. But it's kind of everything that I believed in.

(33:24):
So anyway, I said, yeah, I want to meet these guys.
I want to talk about how they run their stores.
It's fascinating. So I've been out touring the Ace hardwarees
and they have twenty nine different items, different categories in
a store. So it's kind of like how Walgreens and
cvs took over away from the big stores because nobody
wanted to go in that big story. You want to

(33:44):
go in and get it. Well, this is like a
Walgreens CVS of everything thisess, except it's locally owned and
instead of a Walmart reader, you got Bill Murrah or
Mickey or Rick tap or Dorothy You've got the people
that own them right there at the front and their
whole family. So that was kind of a very very subtle,

(34:08):
but fully disclosed. I'm not gonna lie to you. Product
placement for Ace Hardware Texas dot com.

Speaker 2 (34:15):
And when you go in.

Speaker 1 (34:16):
Today, say oh, I heard Michael Berry talk about you.
I want to meet the owner because the owner will
be on site. You never get that at the big
block stores.