04-30-25 - *FULL SHOW* Bashing Amazon; Wolfman Jack; Making Babies

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
First of all, the stock market is down modestly, not
a big crash or anything, but around one point two
percent on the S and P, a little more than
that on the Nasdaq, a little less than that on
the Dow. Not a big deal. But first, you know,
down day in a while, and the day's not done.
We're only an hour and a half into it, and
I just want to tell you what's going on.

Speaker 2 (00:21):
I actually got something right.

Speaker 1 (00:23):
When Brian Westbury was on the show several days ago,
he said he thought that the first quarter gd P
print was going to be a small positive number, and
I said, I think it's going to be a small
negative number.

Speaker 2 (00:35):
And the reason I thought it would be a small.

Speaker 1 (00:36):
Negative number is that I expected that there was a
much bigger rush by Americans to go buy things in
advance of the tariffs, and a much bigger rush than
was expected. And a lot of people said that there
would be a rush. I just thought it would be
an even bigger rush by companies that sell things that
they have to import to just go buy a ton

(00:59):
of stuff, even if it means they have to put
it in their inventory, even if they can't sell it
right away, but to just go buy as much as
they can, as much as they could of stuff that
they sell in order to buy it before the tariffs hit, right,
So you could you know, if you sell a thing
for twenty bucks and you know you buy it for twelve,
you know you go buy as many as you can
for twelve, especially if you're buying it from China, because

(01:22):
you just don't know what tariffs on China are going
to be, and that thing that you buy for twelve
could easily be twenty, and you just don't want to
risk it because you know you can't raise your prices
to thirty and still keep your customers. Right.

Speaker 2 (01:33):
So, anyway, I thought there would be.

Speaker 1 (01:35):
This massive rush, bigger than what people were expecting, and
that seems to be what happened. It doesn't actually, the
negative GDP number does not actually mean the economy was
weak in a way, you know. It means the economy
is sort of strong. These are some of the tricky
bits in these numbers. But imports are subtracted in the
formula for calculating GDP, so an import is a negative

(01:57):
number in GDP. So that's why I thought the print
would be negative. Then the real question, the more important question,
is what will the.

Speaker 2 (02:04):
Second quarter GDP be right?

Speaker 1 (02:06):
The first quarter GDP number was negative, but not because
the economy was actually weak. The question going forward is
how will the next quarter look, because if it does,
it's not going to be because there was a big
rush of imports. It will be because people have slowed
down buying things. And I'm guessing people and businesses are

(02:27):
slowing down buying things, but I don't know if it'll
be enough for a negative print on GDP.

Speaker 2 (02:31):
We will see part.

Speaker 1 (02:33):
Of the other reason the market is down, by the way,
it was down a lot more before. Right The Dow,
for example, is down about three point fifty right now,
was down more than twice that much earlier in the morning.
So it's it's it's well off its lows already, and
I do not have a prediction for the rest of
the day. The S and P has been up and
the Dow has been up not a lot, but up

(02:55):
six sessions in a row, and that hasn't happened in
a while, So we'll see what happens today. The other
thing that I wanted to mention, there's a private company
called ADP that does payroll for lots of companies and
they put out a survey every month, usually the day
before the federal government puts out their own data about jobs,
and it's a private sector job report. And ADP reported
private sector payrolls up by sixty two thousand for the

(03:20):
month of April, and that was about half of what
was expected, and the prior number for March was revised downward.

Speaker 2 (03:30):
So those are not great looking numbers.

Speaker 1 (03:32):
Right, not terrible, not losing jobs, not a recession at
least not yet, but a little weaker than the market
was expecting. And so that's what's going on today. So
let me do let me do another thing with you,
and I'm I'm going to just do this in just
about three minutes. And I timed it this way intentionally

(03:52):
so I don't have a very long time to talk
about it, because I could rant for hours about this.
But I'm I'm more than a little annoyed what the
White House did yesterday. I wrote a whole substack on it.
I think is probably the best substack note I've done
so far, and I've a you know, it's been only
about a week of doing substacks, and I think this
one's really good. So if you go to Rosskominski dot
substack dot com. You can subscribe and get my free notes.

(04:16):
I don't write every day, but most sticks. So yesterday,
yesterday there was a press conference at the White House
that I did that I did mention on the show yesterday,
and the Press Secretary took a question about Amazon, and
I just I.

Speaker 2 (04:36):
Really didn't like it.

Speaker 1 (04:38):
I really didn't like what happened here, Shannon, you put
my audio up. Please have a listen to this. On
the announcement. This is a hostile and political act by Amazon.

Speaker 2 (04:50):
Why did Amazon do this.

Speaker 3 (04:51):
When the Biden administration height inflation to the highest level
in forty years?

Speaker 2 (04:56):
And I would also add that it's not a.

Speaker 4 (04:59):
Surprise because, as Royers recently wrote, Amazon has partnered with
a Chinese propaganda arm.

Speaker 2 (05:06):
All right, So that was.

Speaker 1 (05:09):
That was just disgusting behavior by the White House. The
question was, what do you have to say about this
report about Amazon showing on their website how much tariffs
will cost on items that people buy that are imported.

Speaker 2 (05:22):
And she was she was so prepared for this question.

Speaker 1 (05:26):
That I think she planted the question because it was
only reported that thing was only reported in one place
at punch Bowl News, which isn't a terrible place. They
have a decent reputation, but they're not very big. They're
just online. It wasn't corroborated by a report anywhere else,
not the Wall Street Journal, not any other business place,

(05:47):
not anywhere. And she was ready, Caroline Levitt was ready
with a piece of paper that.

Speaker 2 (05:54):
Had been printed. That was the front page of an
article with a.

Speaker 1 (05:56):
Picture of Jeff Bezos from Reuters from some time ago
to And I didn't read the details the article, but
some kind of connection between them and some Chinese group
or whatever. And she was ready for that. And she
calls it a hostile political act. If Amazon shows how
much tariffs are I have so much to say about this,
and I said a lot about it in my sub stack,

(06:17):
which I really hope you'll go read. But this was
one of the most disgusting pieces of behavior I've ever
seen from the White House, assaulting a private company for
a report that they were going to show how much
the additional tax was going to be on the thing
you were buying. Now, Meanwhile, keep in mind, this is
the White House that signed an executive order about concert

(06:41):
tickets saying you can't have all these hidden fees. There
has to be price transparency all the way along. It's
basically fraudulent if you just, you know, let there be
this this charge at the end that you're not told
about early on, but.

Speaker 2 (06:56):
You can't get out of paying.

Speaker 1 (06:58):
That's the whole thing that Biden was calling junk fees too. Right,
you buy something, you commit to buying something, there's a
fee that's not disclosed. Then you committed to buying it.
You really can't get out, and you are only told
about the fee at the end. That's a junk fee.
So Amazon doesn't want to be in that position. Now

(07:19):
just bear with me here for a second. The report
suggested that Amazon didn't want to get on the wrong
side of all this junk fee stuff because a lot
of politicians are saying you got to show all the
costs all the way along.

Speaker 2 (07:34):
Then President Trump called.

Speaker 1 (07:37):
Jeff Bezos and said, what are you doing like again,
badgering a political a private company. And Jeff Bezos says,
that report's not true. We were talking about doing something
like that on a small different website that we have
that called Amazon Hull Haul h Aul that imports lots

(07:59):
of very inexpensive everything's under twenty dollars from China. Trying
to compete with TIMU. We were thinking about doing it
on that site, but we didn't actually do it. It
wasn't approved, and it was never thought about for the
big site. Say the web this article that you're going
crazy about is wrong. It would be a patriotic thing

(08:22):
for Amazon and every other retailer to show the impact
of tariff's on the cost of something you buy.

Speaker 2 (08:28):
Whether it's a.

Speaker 1 (08:29):
Final good that you're buying from China and you're just
buying it and there's going to be an extra dollar
in tariff, they should show it an extra dollar in tariff,
just the same way that FedEx showed an extra three
dollars in fuel surcharge when fuel prices were high. Every
company should do it, not just Amazon's not doing it.
Some companies are. I bought stuff on websites that show.

Speaker 2 (08:49):
The amount of tariff.

Speaker 1 (08:50):
The most patriotic thing that could happen in America right
now would be for thousands of companies to all at
the same time say we're showing the tariff amounts.

Speaker 5 (08:58):
That way.

Speaker 1 (08:58):
Trump wouldn't be able to steamroll one of them. But
there's a word for an economic system where the central
government tries to co opt and coerce private companies to
act on the behalf of the central government. And the
term for that is fascism. Most people use the term
fascism wrong. This would be a proper use. So this is.

Speaker 4 (09:20):
Another reason why Americans should buy American.

Speaker 1 (09:23):
It's another reason why, Oh my gosh, to text into
Mandy during Mandy Show and she'll and she'll see it. Then.
Kind of funny every once in a while, not everyone's
a wrong one hundred percent of the time, when I
say something on the air or post something online that's
critical of the president, even if the previous thing I

(09:44):
said was positive about the president, somebody will text in
or message or whatever saying, oh, you have TDS. And
I think if if your only answer to what I
say is that I have TDS, then I think you're
the one with the problem, not me.

Speaker 2 (10:00):
I did not mention this too much yesterday.

Speaker 1 (10:04):
I talked briefly about the Canadian election yesterday where the
Liberals so three months ago, betting odds were something like
ten to one in favor of the Conservatives going into
the election, and the betting odds were something like seven
to one in favor of the Liberals, and the Liberals
did in fact win because Donald Trump.

Speaker 2 (10:22):
Started running his mouth about Canada.

Speaker 1 (10:24):
I don't know why he did that, but that wasn't
the main the story that I wanted to mention today
that I forgot to mention yesterday. So not only did
the Conservatives lose, but the guy who is the leader
of the Conservative Party and his name is Pierre Polievra.
He and he's thought of as a very talented politician.

(10:48):
It's very difficult to compare politicians, but if you were
going to try to compare him to someone, it might
be Ron de Santis. I wouldn't I wouldn't compare him
so much to Donald Trump, but more like Ron de
Santis thought of as ay, look a little bit alike,
but just thought of as a very talented guy and
a very up and coming guy, and maybe running the
country one day kind of guy. And then suddenly something

(11:11):
happens and they, at least in the short term, they
don't end up, you know, reaching their the goal that
a lot of people thought they would reach in the right.
You may recall there was a period of time, it
wasn't very long, but there was a period of time
where Ron DeSantis was leading all the polls, including being
ahead of Donald Trump in terms of who was likely

(11:33):
to be the Republican nominee and who was likely to
be president again.

Speaker 2 (11:36):
It didn't last very long.

Speaker 1 (11:38):
And it's not like he's you know, been swept away
into the dust bin of history. He's running. He's running
Florida and may well run for president again. After all,
Donald Trump can't run again, so you know it'll be
an open seat on the Republican side. But Pierre Poulieva
not only did his party lose the federal election and

(12:00):
he lost his own seat in the parliament. So they
have a parliamentary system, right, they don't have their prime minister.
It would be as if a member of Congress were
selected to function as something like president. We don't have
that system here, right, But if you're going to be

(12:20):
prime minister in Canada, in England, in any place that
has a prime minister, basically as far as I know,
you have to have a seat in Parliament the equivalent
of Congress, and then you're picked from there to be
the prime minister. A lot of places, by the way,
have both prime minister and president, and it's different in

(12:41):
different places as to who.

Speaker 2 (12:43):
Has more power, who has what power.

Speaker 1 (12:45):
If I can give you a bad analogy, right, there
some cities where you have a mayor and a city manager,
and in these cities it's depends on the rules as
to who has the most power and who has the
power to do what things right. So, for example, in Aurora,

(13:07):
I think that's a weak mayor system. The mayor is
on the city council, but the mayor doesn't have a
ton of authority over a lot of things. The mayor
and the city council hire the city manager, and then
people like the police chief, for example, work for the
city manager, not for the mayor. So in many places
where there is a prime minister, the prime minister has

(13:30):
a lot of power, and sometimes much more power than
the president. I actually don't even know if Canada has
a president, so if there is one, that's how weak
that person would be. Israel as another example, the president
has almost no power in Israel.

Speaker 2 (13:44):
The prime minister has a lot.

Speaker 1 (13:45):
In any case, Pierre Polievra, who was kind of the
golden child, thought to be the next prime minister, and
maybe he will be prime minister one day, right, just
like maybe Ron DeSantis will be president one day. But
Pierre Polievra lost his own seat in Parliament. So now
he's out of government entirely for the time being, and
that is quite a remarkable thing. Gosh, I have so

(14:08):
much more still to do on today's show. It's one
of those. I mean, we still have two and a
half hours left, and I know there's gonna be a
lot I'm not going to get through.

Speaker 2 (14:15):
But keep it here.

Speaker 1 (14:15):
We'll do is we'll we'll get through as much as
we can. Coming up in the next few minutes. By
the way, is this hour's chance to win a thousand
bucks thanks to Maverick and our keyword for cash instead
of wordle. It's world w wrld l E. And it's
on some French website and they show you a black picture.

(14:39):
It's just black, right, there's no features of a country,
you know, with its its outline on a white background.

Speaker 2 (14:47):
And then you're supposed to guess the country.

Speaker 1 (14:49):
And what you do is you put in a country
name and then if you're not right, it tells you
how many miles away you are from the correct country
and in what direction.

Speaker 2 (15:01):
So like today's well, I'm.

Speaker 1 (15:03):
Not even gonna tell you, but I put in a
particular country and then it said, you know, I was
four thousand miles off obviously. I mean it could be anywhere, right,
I don't recognize the shape. I could guess the country
in South America, and it could be in Africa. I write,
who so tells you? How how so on my second guest,
now I'm I'm fourteen hundred and forty miles off. So
I gotta it's it's a really interesting game. And there's

(15:25):
only you know, however, many countries in the world, somewhere
around two hundred I forget the number one eighty something
or one ninety something, and so I guess you can't
really play it forever. But it's kind of fun. It's
kind of fun. You can go look it up world.
So a ton of stuff talk about here today, of course,
and let's just jump into some things. I was going
to get to this one earlier and I didn't. I

(15:48):
hope that I hope that President Trump gets this information
that I want to share with you now. And it's
I've got to post it on my website also at Rosskimman.
It's uh, it's from the Institute for the Study of War,
which is a great organization.

Speaker 2 (16:06):
If you watch Fox News.

Speaker 1 (16:07):
You probably see General Jack Keene on there from time
to time. Very serious guy, very smart guy. He founded
this organization, the Institute for the Study of War, and
they put a report out I think every day, entitled
Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, and it's just a.

Speaker 2 (16:27):
Clear eyed look.

Speaker 1 (16:28):
It's it's not partisan, it's not about policy, it's not
what a president should.

Speaker 2 (16:33):
Do, it's nothing like that.

Speaker 1 (16:34):
It's just what's going on in the war and what's
going on in news that is relevant to the war.
And I just want to share a couple of quick
things with you from today's from from today's note, because
I just I hope that somebody that that President Trump's,

(16:56):
that Marco Rubio, for example, would give this information to
President and perhaps nudged the president away from what has
been his obvious siding with Vladimir Putin over Ukraine.

Speaker 2 (17:12):
So let me just share a little bit.

Speaker 1 (17:14):
Russian Security Council Secretary Dmitri Medvedev stated yesterday that Russia's
war in Ukraine must end in Russian victory, that's the
Russians victory and the destruction of the current Ukrainian government.
Senior Kremlin officials continue to signal that Russia has greater

(17:38):
territorial ambitions than just the occupied areas of Ukraine, particularly
in areas bordering the Black Sea. And then they go
on to talk about how Russia wants to take over Odessa,
which they don't have control of right now.

Speaker 2 (17:53):
It's where my.

Speaker 1 (17:53):
Great grandparents came from, was from Odessa, and it's a
very very important Black Sea port. Without Odessa, Ukraine would
have a much more difficult time economically because they do
export a lot of stuff, for example, a lot of
grain to feed the world.

Speaker 2 (18:09):
So the Russians want Odessa.

Speaker 1 (18:12):
And then the second thing in this Institute for the
Study of War report, senior Russian officials reiterated the longstanding
false narrative that the Ukrainian government is legitimate. Now this
is this next part is key now likely in order
to set conditions to manipulate ceasefire negotiations and renege on

(18:33):
any future Russian Ukrainian agreements at a time of Russia's choosing.
So what they're doing here is they're setting the table
not just internationally but domestically.

Speaker 2 (18:42):
They're setting the table to.

Speaker 1 (18:44):
Say, well, that's not really a legitimate Ukrainian government in
case somehow they end up doing a ceasefire deal.

Speaker 2 (18:51):
Because remember Vladimir Putin. I don't think he's ever honored
any deal he's ever made.

Speaker 1 (18:56):
And what you know, he's just a sociopath KGB spy,
and it's really kind of odd that the American President
seems to like him so much. But in any case,
they're setting the table so that later, well, let's say
they feel like they're in a position to attack Ukraine
again for whatever reason. Right, they've they've built up more men,
they've got a new weapon, they whatever the reason is,

(19:18):
and they want to go try to take more of Ukraine.
They'll say, well, that's not the legitimate Ukrainian government, so
we're not going to honor the deal, and we're going in.
So in any case, here's one more Actually the same place.

Speaker 2 (19:31):
Institute for the Study of War. Russian officials are.

Speaker 1 (19:34):
Setting conditions to baselessly accuse Ukraine of violating Russia's unilateral
May eighth, two eleven ceasefire, as the Kremlin has done
during previous ceasefires, while rejecting Ukraine's proposal for a thirty
day ceasefire. So everything about the Russian behavior is not
just aggressive and warlike, but it's all lies.

Speaker 2 (19:54):
Everything out of their mouth.

Speaker 1 (19:56):
About this war is always a lie, and I hope
that somebody gets President Trump to understand this. A few
days ago, the President made a comment that he was
starting to think that Vladimir Putin, and this is Trump's
phrase now, was tapping him along, meaning leading him along, right,

(20:19):
and not serious about wanting peace. And obviously that's true,
and Vladimir Putin has never wanted peace. And again, it's
very disappointing that Donald Trump ever either believed him or
even was willing to believe him. But really he believed him,
and he was siding with Russia over Ukraine. That's bad
for the US, it's bad for Ukraine, it's bad for
the world.

Speaker 2 (20:39):
And I hope that Trump realizes.

Speaker 1 (20:41):
What Putin is doing, that Putin is not a partner
for peace, and I hope that Trump has the US
continue to support Ukraine with weapons and with intelligence. However,
I also support, strongly support Trump's pushed to get some
kind of mineral deal with Ukraine, whereby the US either

(21:03):
gets minerals or gets cash flow from the sale of
minerals to the tune of billions of dollars to offset
I don't know how much some or most or all,
or who knows, maybe eventually more than all of American
taxpayers spending in this war. But that's how it should

(21:25):
play out. So I just wanted to share that with you.
All Right, I'm going to do something different but also
kind of serious. And I had this yesterday and didn't
get to it. And when I say this is serious
or this is a big deal, I think this is
the biggest deal of any issue.

Speaker 2 (21:46):
Facing the United States of America. And there's a lot of.

Speaker 1 (21:50):
Different ways to look at it. But first I'll start
with sort of the way I think about the headline,
and then we'll jump into some details.

Speaker 2 (21:59):
Here's how I think about it. The United States.

Speaker 1 (22:02):
Is a Ponzi scheme or a handful of Ponzi schemes
put together with an army with a military. That's what
we are. That's what we are. We're a few Ponzi
schemes with a military. That's what we do. Axios has
a piece from a couple of days ago how the

(22:24):
US government spends money. And if you just break it
down and look at it, like you know, a dollar, right,
how the US government spends a dollar, thirty one cents
of it is writing checks to Americans. So just straight
up income redistribution or entitlement stuff. The next fourteen cents

(22:45):
buying health insurance, subsidies for health insurance, the next thirteen
cents interest on the national debt, the next twelve cents
paying actual medical bills, not just subsidies to buy health insurance,
but paying bills to health providers. Okay, so thirty one
cents just writing checks to Americans, fourteen cents for health insurance,

(23:08):
thirteen cents for interest on the national debt, twelve cents
for paying actual medical bills. Wages to the US military,
which is not the same as the whole Defense Department,
to be very very clear, but wages two members of
the military is two cents. Cost of federal law enforcement
salaries and operations one cent. Everything else in the federal

(23:30):
budget is twenty six cents, including the Department of Defense,
which is somewhere a little bit smaller than interest on
the national debt right now. If the Department of Defense
were its own thing, it would be probably around twelve
cents in this thing. But think about this of a
dollar that the US government spends. So let's do this

(23:51):
math real fast. Forty five fifty eight seventy. I think
this may be off by half a cent with with rounding,
but somewhere over around or just over seventy cents on
the dollar goes to those things I just described, redistribution

(24:13):
of income, healthcare, and interest on the debt that, my friends,
is a wildly unsustainable system. So I'm gonna tie this
into a bunch of things. There was an interesting piece
over at the Free Press, and I'm by, oh, by

(24:36):
my friend Gabe Kaminski, who's been on the show one time.
I actually don't know Gabe Kominski, and he's probably a
relative if you go back enough generations to the old country,
but we're not related as far as as far as
we know. So he wrote a piece for the Free
Press entitled Musk pledged to cut a trillion dollars at doze.
Republicans say it was always a pipe dream. Gabe commit

(25:00):
He's not a liberal, he's a conservative writer the subhead
of the piece. The target was far fetched, say musk defenders,
though they vow to keep cutting.

Speaker 2 (25:10):
Let me share a little elon.

Speaker 1 (25:12):
Musk blew into Washington after predicting he could deliver at
least two trillion dollars and cuts to the federal government.
That was the pledge he made to the roaring crowd
in Madison Square Garden just before the election last year.
After he arrived in DC, the target was cut in half,
but Musk's goal was still wildly ambitious and his confidence
never wavered, he said in an interview with Brett Baher

(25:33):
in March. Our goal is to reduce the deficit by
a trillion dollars, he said. The government is not efficient
and there's a lot of waste and fraud, so we
feel confident that a fifteen percent reduction can be done
without affecting any of.

Speaker 2 (25:45):
The critical government services. So let me say two things.

Speaker 1 (25:48):
First, I think he's right, and I think it's the
most important goal. And then the less positive comment, but
it's not negative about us, it's just about our system.
Is that this is such a Rube Goldberg system with
so many entrenched interests and bureaucrats who don't want to

(26:10):
lose their jobs, and special interests on the outside like
NGOs and whoever is getting funded by the bureaucrats, and
they don't want to lose their job.

Speaker 2 (26:18):
They don't want to lose their.

Speaker 1 (26:18):
Funding, even though it's a thing that the government should
not be funding. So they fight back and you get
all these politicians fighting back, and it is just much
much harder to cut than you thought. Continuing with Gabe Cominsky,
and I promise I'm going to tie this back to
what I was talking about a moment ago. As the
Trump administration hits the one hundred day mark and Musk
takes a step back from his government role, it looks

(26:40):
more likely than ever that Doze will miss his ambitious
cost cutting targets. Even the estimated savings of one hundred
and sixty billion dollars so far touted by Doze on
its website are almost certainly dramatically, drastically overstated.

Speaker 2 (26:57):
And again this is a conservative writer.

Speaker 1 (27:00):
This isn't The Atlantic or MSNBC, you know, trying to
make fun of Doze or Musk or Trump or or
this goal. It's just talking about the real world of
what's going on.

Speaker 2 (27:16):
And I'm skipping ahead in the article.

Speaker 1 (27:20):
The question of whether the one hundred and sixty billion
dollars of estimated savings touted on the website is a
question of whether that's a reliable figure. It repurportedly reflects
asset sales, So keep in mind, even if those are real,
it's a one time thing. It doesn't mean you've reduced
spending by that much every year. It's just you sold

(27:40):
a building and you collected that money, and maybe you
save a little money on maintenance costs on that building
every year. But the big number of selling the building
is a one time thing. Cancelations or renegotiations of grants
and contracts against some of that'll be a one time thing.
Some of it not workforce reductions. That's awesome, we need
more of that other benefits. But the website, the DOSE
website is riddled with inconsistencies and omissions that make it

(28:03):
impossible to fact check the estimated savings with public records
like federal funding documents.

Speaker 2 (28:09):
For example, Doze's Wall.

Speaker 1 (28:10):
Of receipts still includes one point nine billion dollars from
an IRS contract with a company called Centennial Technologies, even
though the company itself.

Speaker 2 (28:22):
Not the government. The company itself.

Speaker 1 (28:24):
Says that that contract was canceled last year. So now
so you know, there is an example one point nine
billion dollars of savings that isn't actually savings. The largest
estimated savings listing is two point nine billion dollars from
canceling an Interior Department contract with a nonprofit organization called

(28:45):
Family Endeavors to house immigrant children in West Texas across
the US Mexico border. To calculate the savings, DOZE subtracted
four hundred and twenty seven million dollars in obligated funding
from the potential award of three point three billion dollars.

Speaker 2 (29:00):
The math reflected an assumption.

Speaker 1 (29:02):
That the contract would be extended until twenty twenty eight,
but the Texas facility actually stopped housing immigrant children in
March of last year during the Biden administration.

Speaker 2 (29:15):
So again I'm not going to go into this further.

Speaker 1 (29:17):
I'm just saying Doze is not only saving much less
than they said they would at the beginning, but they're
saving much less than than they're claiming right now, almost certainly.
In fact, here's how bad this is. From the price
from the very top price of Tesla's stock, which was
just over just after Donald Trump got inaugurated and when

(29:39):
it became clear that Musk was going to be very
involved in government, and the market started thinking that that
was going to be very helpful to Tesla, which it
hasn't been. But from the top in the value of
Tesla's stock, and of course very much of Elon Musk's
networth is in Tesla stock two.

Speaker 2 (29:55):
Now the decline.

Speaker 1 (29:58):
Listen to this carefully, now, the decline in Elon Musk's
net worth, just his net worth may end up being
more than Doze saves the federal government. Now, I don't
want you to think I'm happy about any of this.
I'm not cheering for Elon must to lose money. I

(30:20):
don't care one way or another about that. I'm very
much not cheering for Doze to fail. This is the
most important thing facing the country because this, you know, Okay,
how from time to time I talk about American financing.
In fact, I'll probably talk about him again in four
or five minutes, and I talk about the burden of debt.

(30:45):
The debt in the United States of America right now
is insane and growing an insane pace, and it has
for all of the last few presidents. And I want
to tie this together now, the Doze thing with the
thing I was talking about before, where around seventy cents
on the dollar of American government spending goes to redistribution

(31:06):
of income, healthcare stuff, and interest on the national debt.

Speaker 2 (31:11):
That is going to destroy this country.

Speaker 1 (31:14):
All this stuff, especially as the price of healthcare keeps
going up, and we keep redistributing more money, and we
add people to Medicaid, and interest rates are high.

Speaker 5 (31:24):
So interest on the.

Speaker 1 (31:24):
National debt is going to go up, partly because the
debt is going up, and partly because interest rates are
higher than most of the debt we have outstanding right
now because idiot Janet Yellen, when she was Treasury Secretary,
when she could have sold thirty year bonds and locked
in really low interest rates for American taxpayers at two
and a half or three percent, instead sold two year notes.

(31:46):
And this stuff is now coming up and interest rates
have doubled and we're gonna have to refinance. Imagine if
you had to refinance your house at a double the
interest rate. That's what the American government is about to
have to do, thanks to that moron who was a
previous Treasury secretary. So my point is, if you think
about all this stuff that the federal government does that

(32:07):
kind of falls under so called entitlements, and you've got
less than thirty cents on the dollar left as the rest,
and a fair bit of that, by the way, is
a big chunk of that is the Defense Department, which
does need cost savings, does need reform to how they
buy weapons systems, for example, the procurement process. But since

(32:32):
DOSEE isn't working on healthcare costs and those can't impact
interest on the national debt, and those can't impact Medicare
and Social Security, any effort like DOZES, which is a good,
worthwhile effort.

Speaker 2 (32:51):
To control spending, to reduce spending.

Speaker 1 (32:56):
Is necessarily only going to be focused on this small
percentage we call the discretionary budget within the federal budget.

Speaker 2 (33:03):
It can't touch anything else.

Speaker 1 (33:05):
The only way you save the real money that needs
to be saved in order to save this country financially
is to reform entitlements. You need to add work requirements
to Medicaid. We will see if Republicans have the spine to.

Speaker 2 (33:19):
Do that soon.

Speaker 1 (33:20):
You need to slowly gradually raise the retirement age for
Medicare and Social Security, and it can be done in
a way that doesn't impact anyone who's currently in it,
or even anyone who's almost in it. Increase the retirement
age by I don't know, by a month every six

(33:44):
months for some number of years.

Speaker 2 (33:49):
Not that hard to do, not that painful for anybody.

Speaker 1 (33:52):
Right though, some people who are you know, younger adults
are not that close to retirement instead of instead of
retiring it what you know at sixty five will retire
at sixty five and a half or at sixty six.
But these are people who are not going to be
in retirement for ten, fifteen, twenty thirty years. But my
point is those can't do it, and the government, our

(34:17):
country can't be saved unless somebody does it. It's got
to be Congress and the president. At the moment, we
have a president who specifically campaigned against doing this. Will
you remember the whole probably apocryphal Willie Sutton line, why
do you rob banks because that's where the money is.

Speaker 2 (34:38):
To save our government.

Speaker 1 (34:40):
From bankrupting our country, we need to go where the
money is, and the money is in mostly medicare, also
social Security, and Donald Trump has said so far, I'll
go anywhere except where the money is, and in order
to save our country, that has to change.

Speaker 2 (35:01):
To respond to a couple.

Speaker 1 (35:02):
Of listener texts on what I talked about in the
last segment with government spending and entitlements and Doze and
all and all that listener text, my opinion on Doze
is the following. As a voter, I care about where
my tax money is being spent. I've always felt the
government was wasting my tax money while the debt kept increasing.
If it shines a light on corruption, it's a good thing.
Thank you for the other inside on entitlements, I agree

(35:24):
with you completely.

Speaker 2 (35:25):
This is why I'm in favor of dose. It doesn't
mean with any of these things.

Speaker 1 (35:28):
There are lots of things that any government will do,
and there are certainly lots of things that the Trump
administration is doing where they make some mistakes and the
mistakes get in the news, and then you know people
who want to just constantly bash the administration because that's
their goal.

Speaker 2 (35:41):
We'll only talk about those things.

Speaker 1 (35:42):
This is why yesterday in our crossover with Marty and Gina,
they asked me what grade I would give the Trump
administration so far, and I actually said a B, which
I think shocked them. I thought that I think they
thought I'd give a much lower grade. I was on
with Ryan Schuling on our sister station k How yesterday.
He asked me a one to ten, what would you
give them? And I said six and a half or seven. Again,

(36:03):
I think people would expect me to give a lower
number than that, and My reasoning is pretty straightforward. There
are some things they're doing that I really really don't like,
the biggest of course being tariffs, and I think tariffs
could destroy this presidency. But that's just one thing. It's
a big thing, but it's one thing. And if you
look at across the range of things that the Trump

(36:25):
administration is doing, and I'm not going to go into
the list right now, but I can name ten things
that I like. So if they can rein in some
of these bad things, they're doing so many things that
I that I like, they should just focus on that
more and get it a little bit more under control.
So I'm not just you know, bashing these guys.

Speaker 2 (36:45):
Ross.

Speaker 1 (36:45):
You seem to have all the answers, so do something. No,
it's not my job to do something. It is my
job to share you with you what I think the
problem is and answers when I have them, sort of
gave you the answers, right, the answers.

Speaker 2 (36:59):
The answer is, have Congress.

Speaker 1 (37:03):
Put together a plan to massively cut the growth of
cost of so called entitlement programs like Social Security or medicare.
That's the answer, and it's the most politically difficult thing
to do. Because Americans are addicted to other people's money
and believe that they're entitled to stuff so many and

(37:26):
I get it, I get it. You believe you're entitled
to Social Security and Medicare because you paid in for
all these years.

Speaker 2 (37:33):
Legally, you're not entitled to anything. Just so you know, right, the.

Speaker 1 (37:36):
Supreme Court is ruled you are not entitled to anything.
That payroll tax that you pay in is just money
that goes to the treasury and they can spend it
on anything they want.

Speaker 2 (37:45):
And the only.

Speaker 1 (37:45):
Reason that you are essentially entitled to this is that
politicians are afraid to take it away because they think
they'll get voted out of office and they will. Why
because you want other people's money. Yes, you paid in
for a long time, but you didn't pay enough, especially
on the healthcare side. Right, A lot of people think

(38:06):
our biggest financial problem is social security, the unfunded liability
for social security. Unfunded liability meaning if things kind of
stay as they are right now, the amount of money
that the Social Security system will have to pay in
excess of the amount of money that the social Security
system is expected.

Speaker 2 (38:23):
To take in.

Speaker 1 (38:24):
Looking all looking out more or less to infinity or
like one hundred years or something. Social Security is twenty
five trillion dollars twenty five trillion. Medicare is more than
double that, somewhere around fifty five trillion dollars. And in
some number of years when these things are out of

(38:44):
money in existing law, there's going to be like a
twenty percent cut in benefits. Well, what they should do
is raise the retirement age and maybe cut benefits in
a way that isn't too painful. Remember when we're talking
about compounding here, right, Albert Einstein is reputed to have
said that the most powerful force in the universe's compound interest.

(39:07):
Compound interests can also work against you. Right, You build
up a debt, and then there's interest on that debt,
and you don't pay off all the interest on the debt,
so that adds to the debt, and then you pay
interest on the debt and the accrued interest, and it
compounds against you. So we need to at the margin

(39:29):
decrease the rate of growth in these programs. So maybe
very slightly change how cost of living increases are done,
you know, slightly increase over a period of time, so
it doesn't hurt anyone a lot all at once. The
retirement age, anything and everything you can think of, and
it's going to be very politically difficult because our politicians

(39:52):
are spineless. You even have Republicans who are already saying
they won't go along with a Republican bill to.

Speaker 2 (40:03):
Do something like.

Speaker 1 (40:06):
At work requirements are slightly cut back on Medicaid. And
just to give you a sent so, Obamacare expanded Medicaid.

Speaker 2 (40:15):
Most states went along with it.

Speaker 1 (40:17):
Colorado went along with it, and of course the federal
government is paying a lot of the freight in the
earlier years and then the states have to start picking
up a little bit more.

Speaker 2 (40:25):
But it's bankrupting everybody. The Colorado.

Speaker 1 (40:28):
Colorado added so many people to Medicaid that this actually
in today's news that they are talking about potentially having
a special session of the state legislature depending on what
the federal government does. If the federal government puts in
some federal cuts to Medicaid, the state legislature may have
to come back and figure out how to cut another billion.

Speaker 2 (40:51):
Dollars out of state budget.

Speaker 1 (40:52):
Because the Democrats who run the place allowed so many
people to get on Medicaid really shouldn't be on it
because they want to buy everybody's votes with free healthcare,
even if it's bad healthcare, So it's it's bad. This
listener says, if I could opt out of the THEFT,
I would opt out of the partial payment, that money

(41:14):
would look better in my brokerage account. Yes, I think
a lot of people would be This would be a
complex plan, and Paul Ryan was trying to go down
this road, but he got vilified for it. Paul Ryan
is the last Republican to make a serious public effort
to talk about entitlement reform. And I know Paul Ryan
is not popular with a lot of MAGA types and

(41:35):
certainly not popular with Democrats. I think he was mostly excellent.
But some kind of plan where people could opt out
of Social Security, but you have to do it in
a gradual way where over some number of years, not months,
some number of years.

Speaker 2 (41:55):
From your payroll tax you get a.

Speaker 1 (42:00):
Slowly increasing share of your payroll tax going into your
own investment account that you can control, and less going
into Social Security. And then you don't get social Security,
or you don't get as much Social Security as you
would have.

Speaker 2 (42:17):
That's what we need to do.

Speaker 1 (42:19):
Remember also, this is an important thing. Social Security keeps
poor people poor.

Speaker 2 (42:26):
How does it do that.

Speaker 1 (42:28):
Poor people often have more difficult jobs, worse health care,
physical jobs, I mean worse health care. Poor people are
more likely to smoke, more likely to drink more. Poor
people have a lower life expectancy. And you cannot inherit
social security. But somebody who's working at the factory, working

(42:50):
his butt off, breaks his body, and I mean over
I don't mean in an accident, I mean over the
years of working hard and dies at the age of
sin seventy one instead of the age of eighty five.
If that money had been going into his own account,
his kids could inherit that.

Speaker 2 (43:10):
Otherwise the government just keeps it.

Speaker 1 (43:13):
There's so many things wrong with these with these systems,
a listener says, it will always hurt retirees.

Speaker 2 (43:20):
Don't even go there.

Speaker 1 (43:21):
We have to go there, and it does not have
to hurt current retirees. In fact, politically they will never
be able to do something that hurts current retirees. But
they must absolutely must do something that reduces that total
benefits to future retirees, because if we don't, we're going bankrupt.

(43:41):
But I do have a link on my website today
for a very interesting compilation of short notes over at
the Free Press THEFP dot com, where they ask a
whole bunch of very interesting writers across the entire political
spectrum what they think of President Trump's first one hundred
days in office. And I don't even think I'm going

(44:02):
to share any of it with you right here. It's
just it's worth a read. I've got it linked on
my blog or you can go to VFP dot com.
And it's just interesting because you've got leftists, you've got
center left, you've got center you've got libertarians, you got
moderate conservatives, you've got hardcore Trump supporters. Thinking about those
the first hundred days, and there's there's a lot there.

(44:22):
And my my short take on the first hundred days
is that most of I've said this a lot, Most
of what the Trump administration is doing is stuff I
support anywhere from supporting a little to supporting massively. The
stuff that I don't support happens also be to be
the stuff that is is sucking up all the oxygen

(44:43):
in the news cycle, like the tariffs and some of
the mistakes with immigration. But I think if you know,
some some adults get a little bit of control of
the process. Of course, President Trump is still going to
set the agenda. But if you get a little bit
more control of the process, I think the first one

(45:03):
hundred days that seems so chaotic, to use the word
that we talked about yesterday, too many people may start
looking still aggressive but controlled. And my view on this
and I very much doubt that this will will change.
I think the American public is absolutely fine with a
level of aggressiveness because there are a lot of There

(45:26):
are a lot of problems that the American public thinks
and their right need an aggressive and an aggressive effort
to change them. Government spy, I won't go through all
the stuff, the border probably being the most obvious though,
and and the Trump administration is doing that stuff, So
the public will be fine with aggressive. The public is
fine with like the public doesn't mind seeing, you know,

(45:49):
raids getting illegal.

Speaker 2 (45:51):
Immigrant criminals out.

Speaker 1 (45:52):
Even if the ACLU doesn't like to see it, the
public loves it. So the Trump administration just needs to
get a little bit more under control and not giving
the media and other enemies of the administration so much
ammunition to fire at them so that the stories about
the good stuff they're doing can break through.

Speaker 2 (46:10):
That's my take.

Speaker 1 (46:12):
I heard on Kway's News this morning, and I just
wanted to share a little bit with you a little
bit more of a local story here from the Denver Post.
Park Hill golf Course land swap plan to create new
park passes through Denver Council committees. This is an interesting thing,
and it's been going on for years, right park Hill
Golf Course closed down and then are trying to figure
out are you going to develop it? And then that

(46:33):
got blown up, you know, and so they're trying to
figure out a way to move forward. Park Hill Golf
Course is on its way to becoming a public park
this summer, after two Denver City Council committees forwarded plans
for a land swap deal and zoning changes to the
full city Council yesterday. Under the swap agreement, Denver would
trade a one hundred and forty five acre city owned

(46:56):
property near Dia to Westside Partners in exchange for the
one hundred and fifty five acres of open space in
North park Hill that west Side owns. The committee votes
set the council's gears in motion more than three months
after the city leaders first.

Speaker 2 (47:13):
Unveiled the plan.

Speaker 1 (47:15):
Joelon Clark, who used to be on city Council, and
I called him paper Straw. That was my nickname for
Joelon Clark, because he was like this environmentalist dude who
liked paper straws, which I think are a curse and
maybe a biblical sin. I bet somewhere in the Book
of Deuteronomy it says somebody made a paper straw and
God smote him. In any case, Joelon Clark said, this

(47:35):
was a very complicated deal to get done because he's
the executive director of the city's Department of Parks and
Recreation right now. So the Committe's approved the trade deal
and the necessary rezoning, the full Council still still needs
to consider.

Speaker 2 (47:48):
Both of those issues.

Speaker 1 (47:50):
Those votes are expected to be coming up sometime fairly
soon here in May and then the following month in June.
And based on I don't know who did the valuations,
but you're looking at these two massive properties of land,
and based on the valuations, the difference between the value
of one and the value of the other is only

(48:11):
like ten thousand dollars, which is kind of amazing. Twelve
point seven six million for one and twelve point seventy
five million for the other. So that's probably the reason
they're gonna get it done. And I you know what,
I applaud the creativity. I applaud the creativity. Let's look
for a land swap. Right, this development this development company
bought the park Hill area intending to develop it. They

(48:31):
were basically shut out by government essentially. And government has
a responsibility. You can't just say you bought this thing
and now we're gonna make it worthless.

Speaker 2 (48:39):
You can't do that.

Speaker 1 (48:40):
It's a taking, right, And everybody wanted a solution, and
they came up with a creative one. And I think
it's great, even if paper Straw is involved. When we
come back on an amazing life story about one of
the most famous music djys of all time. I don't
have the music DJ on the show. I don't think
he's alive anymore. But you're gonna love this story. What

(49:02):
an iconic voice, what an iconic character. And you know
Wolfman Jack a little before my time, right, I saw
this fabulous article which actually sent over to sent over
to Rick Lewis, who has been you know, the the
DJ on our classic rock station, The Fox here for decades.
Uh and and it's the incredibly true story of the

(49:24):
rise of Wolfman Jack.

Speaker 2 (49:27):
Join us to talk about it.

Speaker 1 (49:28):
This is such a cool story. Scott Shay, who was
a music historian and the author of the best selling
book All the Leaves Are Brown about.

Speaker 2 (49:36):
The Mamas and Papas.

Speaker 1 (49:38):
And he's actually a producer over on I shouldn't mention
our competition, but he's a he's a producer over on
Sirius XM. But we're here to talk to him as
a music historian and a and a DJ historian, and
so let's just jump in a little bit. I mean,
Wolfman Jack, what a character and you know, and what
made you think right about this guy?

Speaker 6 (50:00):
Well, you know, I am a huge fan of Wolfman Jack,
especially those XCRB air checks. You just played one coming in,
And that's where he kind of got his start. He
actually started on xcrfter. It was a Border Blaster, a
Mexican radio station. But XDRB is really really made his name,
and it's featured in an American graffiti. And it was back

(50:20):
around this time nineteen seventy two that he did his
last show as on the Border Blaster. It was XCRB,
it had changed to XPRS, and then shortly after that
he moved over to kDa in Los Angeles and then
had the great reveal in American graffiti. So it's kind
of timely been wanting to write about it and is
just waiting for this day.

Speaker 2 (50:42):
So the X.

Speaker 1 (50:44):
Radio stations are those all Mexican radio stations.

Speaker 6 (50:46):
Like we have KNW here. Yeah, those are all south
of the border Mexican stations. That's the letter designation that
they have received. I think all of them in Mexico
are start with X. I'm not sure, but I'm I'm
pretty sure that.

Speaker 2 (50:59):
Yeah, I bet you're right.

Speaker 5 (51:00):
Now, there's so much cooler than K and W. I
just think it's just so cool.

Speaker 1 (51:05):
It is. It is cool. I think I think you're
right about that. So I'm you know, I'm reading his
life story and wolf So let's let's start with growing up.
I mean, his name's not Wolfman Jack, right, even though
my producer's name is Dragon Redbeard and that's really his name.

Speaker 2 (51:23):
But Wolfman Jack not so much. Tell us a little
about about his youth.

Speaker 5 (51:29):
Well, his name is Bob Smith.

Speaker 6 (51:31):
So he tried doing research looking up background information for
Bob Smith. It's not easy. But he grew up in Brooklyn.
He's born in the late thirties. I think nineteen thirty eight,
if I'm not mistaken, And he kind of grew up
in a you know, a wealthy home, but a broken home.
His father was like into investing and was the editor

(51:55):
for for an investment magazine, but his family, you know,
broke apart.

Speaker 5 (52:00):
His family, his parents divorced.

Speaker 6 (52:01):
They actually switched partners with another Couple's really weird story.
But so he kind of retreated to the radio and
rhythm and blues. And he grew up right in the fifties,
in the early to mid fifties, right when rock and
roll was coming on strong, and in the early days
he was more of an R and B fan, loved
rock and roll. Though worked at the Allen Freed the

(52:23):
Brooklyn Paramount shows a few times as a teenager, met
Alan Freed briefly and it just inspired him. Listening to
the radio and listening even to those border blasters back then.
He would listen to XCRF, which was two hundred and
fifty thousand watts, if you can fathom that, and it
just really blasted across the country and almost around the world.

(52:43):
So it just it led him on this journey to
play R and B and bring it to the world
and he finally did so.

Speaker 1 (52:51):
Just historical tangential question, why were there border blasters? Was
it because they could be two hundred and fifty thousand
watts and they couldn't be if they were in America?

Speaker 2 (53:03):
And I don't know if that's true.

Speaker 1 (53:04):
I'm just guessing why why did stations like that exist
that were really aiming at the American market but located
in Mexico.

Speaker 6 (53:13):
Well, I guess that was kind of a deal of
the SEC had made with Mexico. The American wattage power
could not exceed fifty thousand watts, but because you know,
we had big cities and denser population, but in Mexico
they don't have it.

Speaker 5 (53:29):
They didn't have as big.

Speaker 6 (53:30):
As population back then, at least not in those northern areas.
Lots of the Chihuahuan Desert was right there, and it
was just there was a fewer people and it needed
larger reach. So they agreed on two hundred and fifty
thousand watts as the max. Most of them are around fifty,
between fifty and one hundred and fifty. XDRC was really
the only two hundred and fifty thousand watt one, which

(53:51):
is absolutely ridiculous and unsird. And eventually it got to
the agreement that if the only you know, directionally speaking,
when they blasted into the United States, it could only
be pre taped shows. They couldn't do live shows, I
guess for competition, but you know, Wolfman kind of showed
it didn't really need to be live did It's for
people to be captivated and entertained.

Speaker 1 (54:14):
When and how did he come up with that character
of Wolfman Jack.

Speaker 6 (54:20):
It was around nineteen sixty three when he was looking
to unveil this character. He had been on the station
in Newport News, Virginia called Wyou and he had broadcast
both under Bob Smith and as Daddy Jewles. And that's
kind of where Daddy Jewles characters where he kind of
started to flirt with, you know, having a just a different,

(54:41):
you know, just a different persona. And you know, when
he got the idea to go to XCRF, he just
wanted something just that was just so different. And he
used to make the Wolfman voices from the Lon Cheney
Junior movies when he played with his nephews, and he
just kind of hard and back to that. And then

(55:01):
Jack was just kind of hip slang, you know, like
hit the road Jack, you know, things like that. So
it's for the for the early sixties. So he just
kind of combined those two became Wolfman Jack and you know, debuted.
There's no real like, nobody's ever going to know the Actually,
I don't even taking his autobiography, Wolfman said when he started,

(55:22):
but it was around December nineteen sixty three.

Speaker 2 (55:25):
And let's go to the end and then we'll come
back to the middle.

Speaker 1 (55:28):
Just because before you came on the air, I kind
of teased it by saying, you know, we're to talk
about one of the most famous DJs of all time,
and I said, I said, I don't think he's alive anymore.
And as I look at it now, he actually died
thirty years ago, and he died pretty.

Speaker 6 (55:42):
Young, right, Yeah, it's an interesting story. He died in
his wife's arms as he was coming home from a
book tour. He had just put out his autobiography Have Mercy,
and was coming home to his house in North Carolina.
Came through the door and just had a mass of
heart attack and died. I believe right then and there.

(56:03):
He might may have died in the hospital, but I
think it was one of those where he just really
went as like cardiac arrest, like just right there on
the spot, so he was or something like that. So, uh,
you know, it was it was I remember when that happened.
He was I was listening to CBSFM. I grew up
outside of New York City and the CBSFM would have

(56:23):
a rock and roll radio Legends weekend and he had
just was on there not that long before he died,
and that was really the only time I ever got
to hear him live.

Speaker 1 (56:31):
Yeah, I mean he he when he died. He was
a little younger than I am right now, and.

Speaker 5 (56:38):
Yeah, I think it was fifty seven, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1 (56:40):
So where where did he go? You mentioned a little
bit already, but where did he go? After XDRF?

Speaker 6 (56:49):
He went to XDRB, which was he had the studio
set up in Los Angeles where he would pre record
his show. But the tower was in Rosarito Beach, Baja California,
which is about thirty minutes south of Tijuana. And that
was a fifty thousand watt order blaster, but they had
put some installed some directional devices on it to so

(57:12):
it wouldn't go out into the Pacific Ocean, so it
gave it great to reach almost like the reach of
one hundred and fifty thousand WAT station. And then after
that he went to kDa Kday in Los Angeles, and
then shortly after the movie American Graffiti came out, WNBC
in New York hired him for a nighttime show, and
you know, that's when it became a I mean, he
was he made a lot of money at XDRB because

(57:34):
he would sell all this all these records and all
this stuff and got a fifty percent profit on all sales.
And he was making like fifty thousand dollars a week,
you know, just on those That's why of those border
blasters were so coveted. You know, people could make a
fortune selling stuff on them. So but you know, he
went back. By the time he went to w NBC
in New York, you know, he was making big bucks

(57:55):
as a DJ.

Speaker 2 (57:56):
That's just what you're talking about. And I love the
fact cash checker money orders.

Speaker 1 (58:00):
There is no mention of credit.

Speaker 6 (58:00):
Card, right, no cash check our money or ye that
that could have been the name of his autobiography.

Speaker 5 (58:07):
He said that so many times.

Speaker 1 (58:09):
You know, yeah, as you say, nearly you mention of venmo.

Speaker 5 (58:16):
Yeah, no PayPal, you know, and you know.

Speaker 6 (58:19):
The interesting about those XCRB air checks is there's only
a handful of them out there, you know, there's a
there's like maybe seven or eight of them, and I
think only two of them are just are completely untouched,
like the rest of them are been kind of are
like composites. So I think the ones from sixty six
and sixty seven are are are you know, haven't been touched.
Here that's the actual show. There's a link to one

(58:41):
of them on my on my article We're.

Speaker 1 (58:44):
We're talking with Scott Say wrote a great article about
Wolfman Jack and it's this is linked on my blogs.
You can find it easily, but it's at the strange
brew dot co dot uk.

Speaker 2 (58:56):
At least that's where I found it.

Speaker 1 (58:57):
I don't know if you posted it anywhere else, but
it's called there. It's called The Incredibly True Story of
the Rise of Wolfman Jack. Scott also wrote a very
well reviewed and a good selling book called All the
Leaves Are Brown, How the Mamas and Papas Came together
and broke apart. So let me actually, let me ask

(59:18):
you a question that relates to nothing except what you
and I were talking about off the air for a minute.
Scott'm gonna switch away from Wolfmanjack, but men, we'll come
back to you. So I told you that I interview
a lot of interesting people and occasional famous people, and
I'm never, you know, nervous.

Speaker 2 (59:33):
I don't get starstruck.

Speaker 1 (59:34):
I don't think i'd be I don't think i'd be
nervous if I were talking to the President of the
United States. But the one time that I felt just
a little bit starstruck was when I interviewed John Anderson,
the lead singer of Yes, because that was the music
I grew up with. And I'm wondering, what's the story
like that for you. You're a music historian, so you

(59:55):
would have talked to infinitely more you know, rock stars
and so on than I would have. So just tell
us one story like that for you.

Speaker 6 (01:00:04):
Well, you know there's you know, there's a few of them,
but I would say for this. You know, I'm such
a Wolfman Jack fan and a radio guy because like
you said, I do work for serious XEM I've been
in radio for twenty years. And I got in touch
with Lonnie Napier for this article. And Lonnie Napier was
Wolfman Jack's board op engineer and then at XCRB back

(01:00:26):
in those days, and I was just so honored when
I reached out to him and he got back to me,
and you know, we've kind of forged a bit of
a friendship.

Speaker 5 (01:00:34):
So you know, that's that's pretty interesting, you know.

Speaker 6 (01:00:37):
Working at Serious, I remember seeing Sting one time. I
didn't interview him, but I walked and I looked in
that we had this big glass the studio, in the
glass and case studio, and I see Sting sitting there. Now,
I'm not the biggest Sting fan in the world. I
do love the police, but when you see somebody like that, yeah,
you know, like that you've seen all your life. It's

(01:00:57):
just like I had to stop and look just for
a second.

Speaker 1 (01:01:00):
Uh huh, No, little dude, little Stings a little dude.

Speaker 2 (01:01:04):
Yeah, and he was.

Speaker 5 (01:01:05):
He was sitting on the stool playing a bass, so
I couldn't.

Speaker 2 (01:01:09):
I'm with you.

Speaker 1 (01:01:09):
I'm a much bigger police fan than Sting fan. But
Sting's all right. I saw him in concert. He's good
and he does does some police. So when you when
you met or did you meet in person with Wolfman
Jack's board up with Lonnie, did you meet.

Speaker 5 (01:01:23):
Him or just he corrected by phone.

Speaker 2 (01:01:25):
Okay, and would would he be like eighty or ninety.

Speaker 6 (01:01:30):
No, he was, he's in his early seventies, early to
mid seventies. He's okay, he was nineteen when he started
with Wolfman. Yeah, just just out of high school, did
a little bit of broadcasting school. Has a great story
about how he got involved with Wolfman Jack. But you know,
it's to meet somebody who was that involves you know,

(01:01:50):
because Wolfman Jack, the story, the mystery. That's why I
say I think he's the greatest DJ because he had
the energy and the passion that a lot of them have,
but he had that mystery because for like ten years,
nobody knew who he was, where he was broadcasting, from,
what color he was, what his ethnicity was. Yes, yeah,
So it's you know that that that third element is

(01:02:14):
something that nobody else has.

Speaker 1 (01:02:15):
All Right, So let's just finish up with just a
little bit on that because you mentioned this earlier, but
it you mentioned this particular thing earlier, but it plays
into what you just said about how people really didn't
know who he was. So that that's a scene from
American Graffiti that you mentioned earlier in the show, and
that's a young Robert Richard Dreyfus, right, Richard d Yes,

(01:02:40):
Richard Dreyfus. It looks like he's eighteen or something. And
I don't know how ollybody young Richard Dreyfus in that movie.
It's pretty incredible. But tell us a little bit about
why that movie is so important for the Wolfman Jack story.

Speaker 6 (01:02:55):
It was his coming out party. You know, in a sense,
he had, like I said, he had not been seen.
He had been There was a Billboard article in sixty
nine that said who he was and what he did.
But you know, when you're a fan of music, you're
not reading articles in Billboard. You're checking out the top
one hundred, you know, and things like that that said
mostly a trade journal. So and if you lived in

(01:03:15):
Los Angeles when he moved to Kday, there were billboards
and our advertisements, people saw he was. But you know,
he had been heard across the nation, at least on
the West Coast and XCRF.

Speaker 5 (01:03:26):
You've been heard everywhere, but people didn't know who he was.

Speaker 6 (01:03:29):
I remember my dad telling me about that when when
we watched that movie when I was a kid for
the first time. He said, you know, no, this was
the first time anybody saw what Wolfman Jack look like,
you know, and he'd been around ten years, so, you know,
George Lucas and the writers Willard Hike and Gloria Katz
approached the wolf Man. They included him in the specifically
in the screenplay, and then then they approach him a

(01:03:49):
kDa why and asked him if he would do it,
and he said absolutely. You know, I think I think
the thing. I think things were starting to get to
the point where he just couldn't keep up the facade anymore,
and he was just kind of ready to be out there,
you know, And and American Graffiti was an incredible outlet.
It's such a great movie. It's a great story. The
movie is really kind of radical for its time in

(01:04:10):
the way it was filmed. And it has, like you said,
a young Richard Dreyfus that also has young Suzanne Summers,
young Harrison Ford, young Ron Howard.

Speaker 5 (01:04:19):
Paula.

Speaker 6 (01:04:19):
Matt plays one of the greatest movie characters ever, John Milners.
So it's just a great movie. And he supplies the
soundtrack and he's a common thread that ties all the
storylines together.

Speaker 1 (01:04:31):
Scott Jay is music historian author of the best selling
book All the leaves are brown, how the mamas and
papas came together and broke apart, and this fantastic article
entitled the incredibly True Story of the Rise of Wolfman Jack.
Thanks a lot, Scott, appreciate the conversation.

Speaker 5 (01:04:49):
Thank you, Ross.

Speaker 2 (01:04:51):
All Right, that was great, absolutely great. I hope you
enjoyed that too.

Speaker 1 (01:04:55):
All right, I liked working that audio in there. What
do you think Dragon did that reasonably? Well? Right, not
too bad. Wolfman Jack is a little before my time.
I guess when he was in southern California, maybe early
seventies would have been. So I moved to Southern California

(01:05:18):
when I was, you know, less than ten, in the
early mid seventies. So Wolfman Jack is, you know, just
a little before my time.

Speaker 2 (01:05:27):
But yeah, I definitely knew who he was.

Speaker 1 (01:05:29):
I don't know that I ever heard his radio show,
but I would hear his voice from time to time
here and there. Maybe he did some advertise. I don't
really remember, but I just remember him as this figure,
like the most famous DJ, you know, almost it's not
the same kind of character and it's not the same
kind of show.

Speaker 2 (01:05:48):
But I would.

Speaker 1 (01:05:49):
Say, and we gotta ask, we gotta ask Dave Tepper
about this a program director, right, because Dave Tepper is
the biggest Howard Stern fan I know, and Hepper grew
up listening to Howard. I actually grew up listening to
Howard Stern and then another guy called the Greaseman, who
actually liked better than Howard Stern.

Speaker 2 (01:06:06):
They were actually both my local mourning.

Speaker 1 (01:06:09):
DJs when I was growing up in Washington, d C
on DC one oh one, so I had Stern before
he went national. Greaseman also, to me, to me, the
only guy who I can think of who has gotten
to that very very very very top level that everybody
knows him as a DJH. Again, Stern's a little different,

(01:06:33):
and I'm not talking about talk radio like Russia Limbaugh
and all that.

Speaker 2 (01:06:36):
It is a Wolfman and he did it first.

Speaker 1 (01:06:38):
You know, in a way I realized, I said, I'm
not talking about talk radio. But I mentioned the other
day that Limbaugh created the talk radio industry. Right, I
wouldn't have this job because this job probably wouldn't exist
if Limbaugh didn't prove to the world that this job
could exist as a category of job. And I wonder
if Wolfman Jack did a similar thing. I mean, I'm

(01:07:02):
sure he wasn't first of the somewhat flamboyant DJs, but
he did it bigger and better than anybody else.

Speaker 2 (01:07:08):
Anyway.

Speaker 1 (01:07:09):
I wasn't planning on talking to Scott for that whole segment,
but it was so fascinating. Just kept going. I hope
you enjoyed that as much as I did. We'll be
right back on KOA. I'm reading all your text a
lot of a lot of great stories from folks here,
you know, who listened to all kinds of stuff as
a kid, and I'm not gonna I'm not gonna share
them on on the air, but i want you to
know I'm reading all your texts and I appreciate him

(01:07:31):
very very much. And uh yeah, I think you'll really
even if you don't really remember Wolfman Jacket's fascinating life story.
So if you go to my blog at Roskeyminski dot com,
you can you.

Speaker 2 (01:07:44):
Can read the story.

Speaker 1 (01:07:45):
So a couple of things I want to do with
you in this segment.

Speaker 2 (01:07:47):
Actually, let me start.

Speaker 1 (01:07:48):
With this because I want to get some input from
you on this on this particular question.

Speaker 2 (01:07:53):
Audio up, please if you will.

Speaker 1 (01:07:54):
Dragon. This is Donald Trump yesterday when he was asked
by a reporter if he had an opinion about who
he would like to be selected to be the next pope.
I'd like to be pup.

Speaker 5 (01:08:14):
That would be my number one choice.

Speaker 2 (01:08:17):
So, first of all, that's hilarious.

Speaker 1 (01:08:21):
I know there's plenty of people out there who hate
Trump so much they can't ever admit when he is funny. Actually,
Trump did two really funny things yesterday.

Speaker 2 (01:08:28):
So there was that one, right, there's this.

Speaker 5 (01:08:32):
I'd like to be pup. That would be my number
one choice.

Speaker 1 (01:08:36):
Okay, that's again, that's hilarious. The other really funny thing
he did. And then I'm gonna come back to the
pope thing for a reason. So Trump did a big
rally in Michigan yesterday. Was it Warren Michigan? I forget,
somewhere north of Detroit. I think it might have been
Warren Michigan. I didn't go, and the governor of Michigan
was there. And part of the reason, and you know,

(01:08:58):
I just sort of read this in passing. I think
I'll get it close enough to be incorrect. Part of
the reason was there was some facility that was going
to be destroyed or something like that, and the government
and the state government and maybe the Feds would work
together and saved it. And so they you know, they're
at this place. They feel proud of themselves. So it's
all fine. Now. You may recall that two or three

(01:09:19):
weeks ago, Gretchen Whitmer was visiting the White House. Yeah,
she was visiting the White House, and I guess she was,
you know, lobbying Trump for something she wanted to get
done for her state. And that's what governors do when
they need help from the federal government. It doesn't matter
if you're a Democrat and it's a Republican president, and
that could make it a little trickier, but I mean,

(01:09:40):
they all go when they all do it, and they
work together. And Trump won Michigan, right, so Trump likes Michigan.

Speaker 2 (01:09:47):
So anyway, you will recall Gretchen Whitmer came and she
was wanted.

Speaker 1 (01:09:51):
Something, and a photographer came in the room, which I
guess she wasn't expecting, and she picked up this binder,
this like little three ring binder that she had and
held it up in front of her face so she
wouldn't be caught in a photograph like she thought it
would be.

Speaker 2 (01:10:02):
Bad for her politically with her.

Speaker 1 (01:10:04):
Democratic base because maybe she.

Speaker 2 (01:10:06):
Wants to run for president.

Speaker 1 (01:10:07):
To be seen Trump wasn't even in the frame, I
don't think, to be seen, you know, in the White
House or in the Oval Office or wherever the heck
that was.

Speaker 2 (01:10:14):
And it was really dumb, and that will be.

Speaker 1 (01:10:17):
Used against her in whatever her next election is. Just
how utterly pathetic and spineless that was. But it showed
how important it was for her to not be associated with.

Speaker 2 (01:10:33):
President Trump in any way at all.

Speaker 1 (01:10:36):
So yesterday at this rally in Michigan, Gritch and Whitmer
was there because they were, you.

Speaker 2 (01:10:44):
Know, celebrating whatever this.

Speaker 1 (01:10:45):
Thing was they accomplished, and without prior planning, Donald Trump
invited her to come up and speak, and she said
something like, oh, I didn't expect to say anything. And
I didn't listen to what she said after that because
I don't care. But that was That was grade A trolling,
absolutely grade A trolling of Gretchen Whitmer, because you know
what that did. That reminded absolutely everybody of what she

(01:11:09):
had done two or three weeks two or three weeks earlier,
and how much she wanted to go out of her
way not to be associated with President Trump. And then
when the President says, come up and speak. You're gonna
come up and speak. It was really really funny, really funny. Okay,
So the reason I mentioned the pope thing, So the conclave,

(01:11:30):
that's what they call it, the conclave to elect.

Speaker 2 (01:11:33):
It really is an election.

Speaker 1 (01:11:34):
The next pope starts a week from today, and I
haven't been closely following the stories about how many people
are in the running, somewhere between five and ten, I
think somewhere in that number, and they're gonna have to
choose from all that, and I don't care very much,
but I mean, it's interesting. It's interesting because a pope,
more often than not, will tend to be in that

(01:11:54):
job longer than let's say, an American president is right,
not always, you know, but sometimes they can be there
for a long time, and they have a lot of power.
And there's a lot of Catholics in the world for
whom the pope is an extremely important person. So I
care a little. So that's gonna that's gonna start in
a week. And what I wanted to to ask you, uh,

(01:12:15):
two questions. I'm not sure which one is the better question,
And I'm gonna ask you the dumber question. I'm gonna
ask you the dumber question because a lot of people want.
So here's the thing you need to know. When somebody
becomes pope, they pick a name. It's not their name, right,
Pope Francis, his name was Jorge, right. Pope John Paul's
name I'm pretty sure wasn't John Paul. Pope Benedict's name

(01:12:37):
was definitely not Benedict. And you pick a name because
you want it to reflect the historical person that you
identify with and want to channel and want to exemplify.
For example, the pope who just passed away, Pope frances

(01:13:00):
picked his name after Francis of ASSISI. And actually, let
me just check my my list here, so dragon just
take a guess how many Pope francis Is have there
been in the in the history of all popes And

(01:13:22):
I don't remember. The total number of popes is two
hundred and something.

Speaker 4 (01:13:25):
I think he's probably the first, because if there.

Speaker 2 (01:13:27):
You know, Pope John Paul the second.

Speaker 1 (01:13:30):
So there's there's that, So.

Speaker 5 (01:13:31):
I think he was probably the first.

Speaker 2 (01:13:33):
All right, that's not fair using logic, because that's right.

Speaker 1 (01:13:35):
Sorry, Yeah, the number of all popes to the president
is two hundred and sixty four. But Pope Benedict the
ninth was elected pope three times, so there have been
two hundred and sixty six what they call pontificates. Right,
So like how Trump was president and then not and
then president again. So is he is he won president

(01:13:58):
or two? It depends on how you're counting. So like that,
So if you just count Trump once, if you just
count that one, dude wants two hundred and sixty four
and yes, only won. Francis So what I wanted to
let me tell you this actually about the most common
pope names, and then I'm gonna ask you a dumb question,
or not that dumb, but kind of dumb. The number

(01:14:19):
one pope name, the most common pope name in the
history of Pope Doom's pontificates is John twenty three of them.
Next is Gregory sixteen of them. The last Gregory, even
though there's been sixteen. The last Pope Gregory died in
eighteen forty six. Pope Benedict Clement is next, and the

(01:14:46):
last Clement died in seventeen seventy four.

Speaker 2 (01:14:51):
There were fourteen Clements.

Speaker 1 (01:14:53):
There have been thirteen popes named Innocent and also thirteen
named Leo. The last Innocent died in seventeen twenty four.
The last Leo was a little more recent, died in
nineteen oh three. There were twelve popes named Pious pi Us.
There was actually a Pope Pius in the nineteen forties

(01:15:16):
and fifties died in nineteen fifty eight. And then you
get to names like Stephen, Boniface, Urban, Alexander, Adrian Paul.
Interesting that there have only been six Palls. Anyway, you
get the idea. I wanted to share a little bit of
that history with you. So here's my dumb question for you.
And I don't want to make this question a complete joke,
so it's a half serious question. If you became pope,

(01:15:41):
what name would you choose? And why? So I don't
want you to give me like Pope bugs bunny. I
mean you could, I guess, but foot face but yeah,
Pope mc pope face if but if you've seriously though,
I mean, you can give me a joke answer if
you want. But if you were going to be pope
and you were going to pick a name that represented
a person in history whose values you wanted to reflect,

(01:16:06):
what name would you pick? And you can't pick Jesus
really you can't pick there's no pope Jesus, and you
can't pick Jesus. And I know a lot of religious
people might say, I'd like to reflect Jesus, but you can't.
For purposes of this question, text us your answers at
five six six nine zero five six six nine zero.
We'll share some of them with you after this. Of
the two hundred and sixty four different popes, there have

(01:16:32):
been thirty eight thirty eight who have been the only
pope to have that name. And there have been twenty
two popes who there have been twenty two names, twenty

(01:16:53):
two pope names that only two popes have had. And
I'm sorry twenty eight twenty eight.

Speaker 2 (01:17:00):
And by the way, John Paul, who was pope recently.

Speaker 1 (01:17:02):
John Paul the second was only the second John Paul.
You may recall that he died in two thousand and five.
The first John Paul died in nineteen seventy eight, so
it's a fairly recent name. Let me just give just
for fun, I'll just give you a couple of names
of popes who they were the only popes with these names. Agatho,

(01:17:27):
I'm gonna not read all of them. Caius, which sounds
really really Roman, doesn't it. Oh? Yeah, okay, So Pope
Caius was the Bishop of Rome from seventeen from December
in the year two eighty three until he died in
two ninety six. I thought that sounded like a Roman name.
Roman name fabian Lando. That's a cool name, Linus. I

(01:17:50):
wonder if you had like piles of dirt clouds around him. Peter,
how about that so named for Saint Well, Saint Peter
is the only person who counts as a pope who's
ever been named Peter. Right, So he's one of the
twelve apostles and he and I guess he counted his pope.
I'm not an expert on Catholic history, but there's never

(01:18:12):
been another one. All right, So let's just do this.
Let's do this quickly. So, Dragon, do you have any
that you want to share? You want me to go through?
It's your show. I mean, I just want to make
sure we do it the way you want.

Speaker 4 (01:18:23):
Oh, come on, like Pope Gorilla and Pope the Beast,
Pope Beast?

Speaker 2 (01:18:27):
Why not? All right?

Speaker 1 (01:18:29):
So you know I did ask for some slightly serious
answers Pope Xavier. I asked the question if you're just
joining that I asked was, if you became pope, what
name would you take as pope if the purpose of
the name is to reference a person from history whose
values you would like to emulate while you held the job.

(01:18:52):
And I would note, by the way, that there has
never been a Pope Xavier, even though there's a very
famous Saint Francis Xavier Ross. I'm a chick, and i'd
be Pope Bernadette for Saint Bernadette Sue Biros.

Speaker 2 (01:19:07):
I'm sorry if I'm mispronouncing that.

Speaker 1 (01:19:08):
I think she epitomizes values to strive for humility and
service to others. Oh wait, Dragon, before you give us
the next one. I forgot to mention something yesterday. Remember
yesterday I was talking about the scene in the movie
This is Spinal Tap where where Nigel and the blonde
dude or at Elvis's grave. The blonde dude at Elvis's grave, who,

(01:19:30):
by the way, is played by Michael McKean. It was
just a wonderful actor who's been in so many things.
But the blonde dude, his name in Spinal Tap is
David Saint Hubbins, and Saint Hubbins according to the movie,
I can't vouch for this. According to the movie, Saint
Hubbins was the patron saint of quality footwear.

Speaker 2 (01:19:53):
If you recall from the movie, all right, keep going.

Speaker 4 (01:19:56):
Uh, Pope Inigo Montoya, Oh my gosh, that's not bad,
Pope Moses.

Speaker 1 (01:20:01):
This word doesn't mean what you think it means. Pope Moses,
Pope Trump, Oh my gosh, Pope George Ringo. All right,
I guess I guess a lot of people decided not
to take the question seriously.

Speaker 2 (01:20:15):
I think as long.

Speaker 1 (01:20:16):
As we're not gonna take it seriously, I think you
got to give it least honorable mention, if not an
outright award to uh Pope Beavis of Beavis, Yeah, Pope
Bob Pope, Uh Pope l Way, Oh yeah. Linus said
pig Pen was the dirty one. Not Linus. Linus just

(01:20:36):
carried his blanket around thing Pope's door.

Speaker 2 (01:20:38):
I think not.

Speaker 1 (01:20:39):
I think not.

Speaker 2 (01:20:40):
What about you, Dragon? Sort of seriously, like, is there someone.

Speaker 1 (01:20:44):
In history who you think I'd really like to live
up to those values? And if you had that kind
of job, like you'd pick no.

Speaker 4 (01:20:50):
No, but I do like the unique one I think
you would like, said Pope Steve.

Speaker 1 (01:20:54):
I mean come on, yeah, Pope Kevin, Mike, you know, yeah, Ross,
even Dragon, let me go look, and many Pope dragons.
There have been no no, none, no, no, no dragons.
Seven Redbeards, So you could be Pope Redbeard the eighth,
I'll take it, the last Redbeard by the last Pope

(01:21:16):
Redbeard died in sixteen thirty three, so you'd be the
first one in a very long time.

Speaker 2 (01:21:20):
And I'm just doing a little more digging here.

Speaker 1 (01:21:23):
So yeah, none of them was none of them was
actually named Mephistopheles red Beard.

Speaker 2 (01:21:27):
So you'd be alone in that, alone in that What
a very strange what a very strange day. Yeah, Pope Jagger.

Speaker 1 (01:21:37):
No, if Ross, if Cardinal Pizza Bala becomes Pope, maybe
he might choose the name Hilarious. There was a Pope
Hilarious from four sixty one to four sixty eight, used
only once.

Speaker 2 (01:21:48):
In Latin. It means cheerful, and that's that's right.

Speaker 1 (01:21:50):
Oh, they didn't spell it the way Andy spells it
in the text, but that's that's exactly right. There was
there was one okay that was a little bit still,
and I asked you to play along seriously and you didn't.
So now I understand the mood you're in today, and
we will behave ourselves accordingly for the rest of the show. So,
what was the pope name that you wished had come

(01:22:11):
through earlier? But we got to say it now. I'm
so happy it came through. There there are two of them,
two of them, Okay.

Speaker 4 (01:22:16):
One, I'm disappointed in myself for not thinking of it,
but very grateful that this Texter came through with it. Okay,
Pope Pearie brilliant. Yes, absolutely, you win, uh huh okay.
And then there's another one, Steve. Thanks for clarifying afterwards,
but we got it right away, Pope.

Speaker 1 (01:22:36):
Me m m yeah. And I apologize for saying that
Linus was dirty. Linus has the blanket. I apologize to
Linus and the and the pope named Linus. Now you
all decided not to follow my very sincere request to
take that question seriously, and you didn't.

Speaker 2 (01:22:55):
So therefore, I'm going to waste your time for a minute.

Speaker 1 (01:22:57):
Dragon.

Speaker 2 (01:22:57):
Are you ready for some play by play?

Speaker 5 (01:23:00):
Bring it?

Speaker 1 (01:23:00):
Here we go.

Speaker 4 (01:23:05):
We're you gonna crumple up the paper in a nice
tight wad.

Speaker 5 (01:23:07):
Today.

Speaker 1 (01:23:08):
I worked pretty well yesterday. You want to tell people
what we're doing. In case they didn't hear listen yesterday.

Speaker 4 (01:23:13):
Ross is going to attempt to make a basket from
that tight, wadded up piece of paper that he's got
in his hands. He's roughly about ten to twelve feet
away from the trash can, which he averages a miss on.
So we'll see how he does right now. Okay, so
now you gotta do like a golf announcer.

Speaker 1 (01:23:30):
Go ahead.

Speaker 4 (01:23:31):
Ross takes the water up paper in his hand, crimples
up a little tighter.

Speaker 1 (01:23:34):
Checks the wind. Oh wait, no, move the chair out
of the way.

Speaker 5 (01:23:37):
Checks in the wind.

Speaker 4 (01:23:37):
It has a weird easterly to westerly rather than west
east normal, So gotta adjust for the wind. Shakes his
head confidently, eyeballs it very closely. He sets things up
and banks off the back of the trash can into
the trash can.

Speaker 1 (01:23:57):
Oh my god, that golf club, that golf clap, that
golf clap.

Speaker 2 (01:24:04):
Was That was the cherry on the Sunday.

Speaker 1 (01:24:06):
That was well, that was fabulous, welcome, absolutely fabulous. And
I feel like like a guy in the in the
Masters who birdied two holes in a row, because I
made it in the first shot.

Speaker 2 (01:24:18):
Two days in a row.

Speaker 4 (01:24:19):
No for you, cannot say for two days in a row. Yeah,
yesterday when you did the well it was on air. Yeah,
on air. But the thirty shots you did prior to
that were terrible.

Speaker 1 (01:24:30):
Yeah, but I still made it twice in a row
now on air. There were no misshots in between those two.

Speaker 5 (01:24:36):
True.

Speaker 1 (01:24:37):
Mm hmm. I think I just.

Speaker 2 (01:24:40):
Need the moral support of an announcer.

Speaker 1 (01:24:44):
Announcer, all right, if we wasted enough of their time,
probably not, But yeah, all right, I got some stuff
I want to share.

Speaker 2 (01:24:51):
We've got a lot of a bunch of short stories I.

Speaker 1 (01:24:53):
Want to share. You heard this one already on k
W News this morning, but I'm gonna mention it again
right now. I'm going to go to the New York Times.
But it's all over the place. The NFL has fined
the Atlanta Falcons quarter million dollars and their defensive coordinator,
Jeff Olbrick one hundred grand over the leak of Schudor
Sanders' phone number before the twenty twenty five NFL Draft,

(01:25:14):
according to a league source. Specifically, the league's fines stem
from the organization's failure to prevent the disclosure of con
confidential information distributed to the club in advance of the
NFL Draft, because so deonce Shudor Sanders signal lap. Sudor Sanders,
as you may recall, got a prank call on the

(01:25:34):
second night of the draft. And if I remember the
story right, it doesn't say it here, but if I
remember the story right, I think it was someone pretending
to be with the New Orleans Saints organization. I think
that's what it was. And it was a prank phone call.
And it turned out to be this guy Ulbrick's son
whose name is jax ja X and I somehow they

(01:25:55):
so so Sanders.

Speaker 2 (01:25:57):
I guess Jack's wasn't smart.

Speaker 1 (01:25:58):
Enough to turn off caller ID. So Shdor Sanders had
the phone number that the call came from, and he
gave it to the NFL and gave it to teams
and they investigated and then they and then they sorted
it out and huh, so this is interesting. In a

(01:26:20):
video that was shared on various social media platforms, Jacks
can be seen next to the person who made the
call to Sanders. So I don't know at this point
then whether Jacks was the voice on the phone and
like ask someone else to you know, he said, like, oh,
call this number and I'm gonna talk, so I don't
know if that's what happened, but in any case, in

(01:26:40):
any case, the falcons lose a quarter million dollars and
the defensive coordinator loses one hundred thousand dollars. All right, next,
The stock market is only down a little bit right now.
It was down quite a bit this morning. It's been
slowly steadily recovering all day after a bad GDP report
and a bad private sector jobs report from ADP. The

(01:27:02):
official federal government jobs report, I believe is tomorrow.

Speaker 2 (01:27:06):
The Dow was down.

Speaker 1 (01:27:07):
I saw a down seven hundred, but I think it
was down a little more than net this morning, and
last I I saw his own, the Dow itself was
down only one hundred and something points. The market has
been very, very resilient for the past week or so.

Speaker 2 (01:27:19):
It's been up six days in a row.

Speaker 1 (01:27:21):
And I think a lot of folks are hoping that
Donald Trump will back off on all this tariff stuff.

Speaker 2 (01:27:26):
And I don't have I don't have more to.

Speaker 1 (01:27:27):
Say about that right now, but what I did want
to say is Trump was asked about the negative GDP
print this morning, and he said, that's not on us,
that's on Biden. We came in and you know, things
are fine, and it's absolutely on.

Speaker 2 (01:27:42):
Biden has nothing nothing.

Speaker 1 (01:27:43):
To do with us to the negative gdpre GDP print,
And in fact, I'll just read to you what he said.
This is Biden's stock market, not Trump's. I didn't take
over until January twenty. So, first of all, nobody believes that.
Nobody believes that this is still Joe Biden's economy because
Donald Trump has done so much and said so much,

(01:28:05):
and because people know that by far the most important
economic policy change that has happened in the past few
months has been tariffs, and people are attributing much of
what is going on in the economy now to tariffs.

Speaker 2 (01:28:20):
So when Trump.

Speaker 1 (01:28:22):
Says that the negative GDP print it has nothing to
do with tariffs, it's not so much that he's wrong,
is as that it's a bald faced lie.

Speaker 2 (01:28:33):
It's an absolute, outright lie.

Speaker 1 (01:28:35):
But I want to make sure you understand the point
I'm making, because it's a somewhat technical point. I am
not so I'm not saying that the negative GDP number,
which means which means gross domestic product as measured by
the government and calculated with this formula that they use

(01:28:55):
was down three tenths of a percent from the previous quarter.

Speaker 2 (01:29:01):
So, and the point I'm making is very important.

Speaker 1 (01:29:06):
Now, it's not that we went into recession then, and
it's not that the economy was weak. And this is
part of the reason that Trump is feeling so defensive
that he has to lie about it because he thinks
that people will think and he might be right. He
might be right to assume this because most people won't
understand what I'm about to tell you. He will think

(01:29:29):
that people will see negative GDP and think that means
we're in a recession, that the economy is contracting, and
that things are getting bad.

Speaker 2 (01:29:37):
And the whole tariff chaos that he caused.

Speaker 1 (01:29:43):
Didn't happen early enough in the first quarter to cause
that kind of effect, and the tariffs really didn't come
into place.

Speaker 2 (01:29:50):
So what was going on in the first quarter was.

Speaker 1 (01:29:53):
A reaction to tariffs in a way that I'll get
to here in a second. But it wasn't really a
slowing economy in any significant way. Although I do kind
of expect that this quarter, I would not be surprised
if you see a negative GDP print for the second
quarter that will be reported a few you know, in
a few months, and we'll see.

Speaker 2 (01:30:13):
What happens there.

Speaker 1 (01:30:13):
That wouldn't surprise me, because I do think there's a chance,
a real chance of a recession due not just to
the tariffs, but the instability caused by the rollout of
the tariffs. But for the first quarter and this negative
GDP print, here's why Trump is completely lying when he
says it had nothing to do with tariffs. You may

(01:30:38):
think it's not very sensible, but in the formula for
gross domestic product, and we talked about this with Brian
Westbury the other day. When you think about the term itself,
gross domestic product, the domestic part how much stuff we
are making in the United States of America, Okay, domestic

(01:31:02):
and therefore.

Speaker 2 (01:31:05):
Imports count as a negative.

Speaker 1 (01:31:09):
Right If somebody is buying something that is imported, then
it counts against gross domestic product because it's by definition
not a domestic product. And what happened in the first quarter,
and this is why I predicted, even against Brian Westbury,

(01:31:30):
who's a better economist than I am, and against like
my banker who does this every day. They both said
GDP is going to be positive, and I said.

Speaker 2 (01:31:37):
No, it's not. Why did I say it's not again.

Speaker 1 (01:31:41):
It's not because I thought there was there was a
significant slow down the economy. It's because I thought there
would be an enormous rush of people and businesses going
to buy everything that they needed soon or thought they
would be able to sell soon as long as they
can afford to buy it now, to buy absolutely as

(01:32:04):
much as they possibly could before the tariffs hit. And
of course everybody understood that people were going to do
that and that it would bring GDP down. I just
thought people were going to do it more than the
experts thought they would do, and that it would bring
GDP down enough to actually make it a negative number.

Speaker 2 (01:32:23):
And it doesn't mean.

Speaker 1 (01:32:24):
I'm a genius. You could say I got lucky, but
it is what happened. So Trump is very defensive because
he thinks people will see the negative GDP number as
meaning a bad economy. It really doesn't. What it means
is that people consumed a lot. Consumer spending was still
really strong, or business anticipation of future consuming consumer spending

(01:32:47):
was really strong.

Speaker 2 (01:32:47):
So they went and.

Speaker 1 (01:32:48):
Bought a ton of this stuff that they expect to sell.

Speaker 2 (01:32:51):
Next month, in the month after and the month after.

Speaker 1 (01:32:53):
But They just want to have it in inventory before
the tariffs hits that our profit margins don't get crushed.
So it's not it's not a sign of a weak economy. Right,
we might get that in Q two. I think we will.
I think the economy is slowing. I don't know if
it's slowing enough to be a recession, but it is slowing.

Speaker 2 (01:33:11):
But that Q one GDP print.

Speaker 1 (01:33:14):
When Trump says it's not because of tariffs that the
number is negative, he couldn't be more wrong. It's only
because of Terraff's It's absolutely positively only because of tariffs.
But as I said, it's a technical, mathematical formula thing,
not a slowing economy. What else do I want to
do here? Oh?

Speaker 2 (01:33:35):
This is a local thing here.

Speaker 1 (01:33:37):
I talk quite a bit on the show about this
whole wolf reintroduction thing.

Speaker 2 (01:33:42):
Are you gonna say something, dragon?

Speaker 1 (01:33:43):
No? I talk about this wolf reintroduction thing, and you
know my take on it, right, Wolves are fine, They're
beautiful animals. I'm just really I'm really mad that there
was a vote about it. I'm mad that the vast
majority of the population of Colorado that lives along the
Front Range and all the liberals in Boulder in Denver
who love the pretty wolves, but we'll never see one

(01:34:05):
and will never be impacted by one, got to vote
on whether to impose the cost of there being more wolves.
There were already a few, but the cost of there
being a lot more wolves in Colorado on you know,
ranchers and other folks, but especially ranchers in northern and
northwestern Colorado. And that really pisses me off. That should
never have been allowed to be voted on. Now it

(01:34:26):
has been a problem. In fact, let me share with
you from our news partners at KDVR at Fox thirty one.
Colorado voters approved the wolf reintroduction plan backed in twenty twenty,
but since then, costs and controversy have only grown.

Speaker 2 (01:34:41):
On Monday, that would be two days ago, Governor Polus.

Speaker 1 (01:34:44):
Signed the state's latest budget, which includes funding to continue
the wolf reintroduction program, but also adds new guidelines aimed
at better protecting ranchers. Tucked inside the budget is new
money for the wolf program, but lawmakers now say the
future coming the future funding will come with stronger controls.
State Senator Dylan Roberts So I'm not much of a

(01:35:06):
fan of although he's not the worst said, how do
we put guardrails on this program?

Speaker 2 (01:35:11):
How do we make sure they're adequately funded?

Speaker 1 (01:35:13):
How do we make sure things don't get out of
hand as they started to last year. Now, before I
share this new paragraph with this next paragraph with you,
I want to just go back to something that's been
a pet peeve of mind and a thing of mine
for some time now, and that is Democrats consistently misunderestimating
the costs of their silly plans. Right so they give

(01:35:36):
you I'm gonna do this very quickly because I talk
about it so much. They do a bill to give
free babysitting that they call pre K, and they put
in some estimate of how many parents are gonna want
the free babysitting for their kids, and of course the
actual number is much higher, and the program starts costing
much more, and then they have to raise taxes or
take money from somewhere else, or cut some kids.

Speaker 2 (01:35:57):
Out or whatever.

Speaker 1 (01:35:57):
And then they did the same thing with quote unquote
free which really means just paid for by somebody else
school lunches, and they misunderestimated the number of kids who
would want the free breakfast and the free lunch. Once
they took off the means testing. It used to be
that if you were a low income kid or moderately
low income kid below some income threshold, you'd get free
breakfast and or free lunch. However that works, and that's fine,

(01:36:21):
that's absolutely fine. And they decided to vote in this thing.
We're gonna give free lunch to everybody, even the rich kids.
And we're going to do it by reducing the uh
the tax deductions that people making over three hundred thousand
dollars can get. And now it turns out a lot
more people want the free lunch and the program is
costing a lot more. So now they're going to have
to go after those productive people more or cut back
the lunch program. And they always, and I think it's intentional.

(01:36:43):
They always misunderestimate. Please don't text me about that word.
If you don't understand misunderestimate, go look it up. Don't
text me about it. And if you and they always
this intentionally so that people will pass their stupid bills.

Speaker 2 (01:37:05):
So back to our KDVR thing.

Speaker 1 (01:37:08):
The wolf reintroduction effort was originally expected to cost about
eight hundred thousand dollars per year. However, actual costs have
surged past two million, so more than two and a
half times, getting close to three times the estimated cost.
State Senator Roberts said, I think the amount of depredation,
and that means wolves killing live stock primarily. I think

(01:37:31):
the amount of depredation, the amount of killing of livestock
that we have seen by wolves over the last two years,
has been much more than anybody expected. Wait, who's anybody
in that sentence? Now, I'm not an expert, and I
have I have no I if you had asked me
at the beginning of all this, how many cows calves,

(01:37:52):
especially cows are kind of big, although wolves can take
a cow a couple of wolves fighting together are attacking together.
But calves, sheep, you know what, a smaller livestock.

Speaker 2 (01:38:02):
If you would ask me how.

Speaker 1 (01:38:03):
Many of them will be killed by wolves, I'd say,
I have no idea.

Speaker 2 (01:38:10):
I'm not an expert.

Speaker 1 (01:38:12):
Just take the number that the Democrats are telling you
it will be and triple it and you'll be probably
kind of close. So in any case, in this new budget,
they're gonna do some things to try to get this
a little bit better under control, a little more safeguards
on this stuff. I'm not going to go through all
the details right now, but I am happy to see

(01:38:32):
that was in the budget.

Speaker 3 (01:38:34):
Hi, Mandy, whoa, I'm just getting excited for my half
hour show.

Speaker 1 (01:38:41):
Oh my gosh. I don't know. I always say this.
I don't know whether that makes you lucky or unlucky.

Speaker 3 (01:38:48):
Well, today it's lucky because I gotta go take care
of my side gig stuff this afternoon, so freaks me
up for a little bit of stuff I gotta do
for that mm hmm. And but I do have some
really good stuff a blog today, because of course, you know,
I still prepare for a full show as if you know,
just in case Ross.

Speaker 2 (01:39:05):
In case you get rained out.

Speaker 1 (01:39:06):
Although it's not Mandy's blog dot yeah, and what's my
blog website?

Speaker 7 (01:39:11):
That would be Ross?

Speaker 1 (01:39:14):
No, what is it you have?

Speaker 7 (01:39:16):
It's not Ross's.

Speaker 1 (01:39:18):
No, it's not Ross's blog. It's your friend had to
spell though, you know. So here's the problem. And I
thought of this because because mandy'sblog dot com is a
brilliant U r L.

Speaker 3 (01:39:32):
Except people get confused because there's no apostrophe, right, I know.

Speaker 1 (01:39:35):
But people who get confused by that are not smart
enough to listen to your show anyway.

Speaker 2 (01:39:40):
They do, but they do, but they do so.

Speaker 1 (01:39:43):
So my problem is if I did Ross's blog, nobody
would know if it's two s's or three Yeah, I
have to buy both.

Speaker 2 (01:39:51):
Yeah, and I don't know you're.

Speaker 1 (01:39:52):
Gonna account for the silent three? Yeah right, I could
do r O three S S the silent three in
my name. Not many people know about that. That's kind
of supposed to be a secret. What do you have?

Speaker 3 (01:40:02):
Yeah, well, I want I want to say something. I
know you're a big fan of the Free Press, as
I am. The Freepress dot com. So Susie Weiss writes
a column on pop culture and I'm throwing this out
here because I suggested a title for her column on
pop culture today, and if it gets chosen, I just
want to make sure I get credit.

Speaker 7 (01:40:17):
Okay, what do you think, Susie pops off?

Speaker 1 (01:40:21):
That's awesome.

Speaker 5 (01:40:22):
See, I'm an.

Speaker 7 (01:40:23):
Excellent namer of things you are. I have a gift,
I really do. We'll see if she likes it.

Speaker 2 (01:40:28):
I don't know.

Speaker 7 (01:40:28):
I sent it to her and we'll see what's happening.

Speaker 1 (01:40:29):
That's absolutely brilliant. I mean, and look at your kid's name, Q.
That's a brilliant name.

Speaker 7 (01:40:34):
And we probably just named her after the James Bond guys.

Speaker 1 (01:40:36):
Right, and we I mean, I got to say in
this category, Dragon's parent's not so good.

Speaker 4 (01:40:43):
You know.

Speaker 2 (01:40:43):
Is his name on his.

Speaker 1 (01:40:44):
Birth certificate his Mephistopheles Redbeard, and that first name was
just such a mouthful they had to change it to Dragon.
So I think I think Dragon's parents are not as
good at naming as you are.

Speaker 3 (01:40:54):
Well, I think they're ambitious and thought that baby Dragon
was off going to be smart enough to spell that
in first grade.

Speaker 2 (01:41:00):
Still can't even still can't spell Mesistopheles. All right, you ready, Mandy,
I am.

Speaker 7 (01:41:04):
Let's do it.

Speaker 1 (01:41:05):
Keen making one k a month selling paintings made by
her trained rats. Scientists find possible treatment for blindness gold
Neuroscientists develop headphones that can detect when your mind has
wandered mid conversation. Pilot pilot threatens to turn plane around
after passenger vapes in bathroom.

Speaker 3 (01:41:28):
M okay, so I've been on an airplane where the
pilot literally threatened to turn the plane around, so I
know that that can happen. I'm gonna go the one
about the headphones that can tell you when your mind wanders,
because why would anyone want those, You're gonna out yourself,
do whoever you're talking to.

Speaker 7 (01:41:45):
I need to be able to have a mind wander freely.

Speaker 1 (01:41:47):
Yeah, but what if it alerts you, like a little
flashing light that your mind has wandered, and so way
to get you back on track.

Speaker 3 (01:41:54):
If my mind is wandered, it's wandered for a reason.
Ross dragging it now.

Speaker 2 (01:41:59):
If Mandy has it right today, what does she win?

Speaker 5 (01:42:01):
I'm sorry, I wasn't paying attention to my mind was wondering.

Speaker 1 (01:42:05):
The actual fake headline is neuroscientists develop headphones that can
detect when your mind has wondered mid contract, detect.

Speaker 3 (01:42:13):
That nobody wants right there. And seriously, the rat painting.
That was totally believable.

Speaker 1 (01:42:18):
Everybody, stick around for Mandy's fabulous, if slightly abbreviated show
and I'll talk with you tomorrow