05-21-25 - *FULL SHOW* Alan Dershowitz; The Other Golden Dome; Denver's Way; Norm

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
My younger kid is a junior in high school.

Speaker 2 (00:06):
And without getting into too much.

Speaker 1 (00:08):
Detail, we UH drive to and we drive him to
and from school.

Speaker 2 (00:15):
It's actually quite convenient for me.

Speaker 1 (00:17):
I drive him to school and then come straight onto work,
and it's all it's all pretty easy. Now Tomorrow is
his last day of school this year and next year, and.

Speaker 2 (00:31):
I drove him.

Speaker 1 (00:32):
I drove him to school yesterday, and uh, next year
he will have a parking permit and he will drive
himself to school.

Speaker 2 (00:42):
So tomorrow is his last day of school.

Speaker 1 (00:44):
And I think my wife is taking him to school
tomorrow rather than me, which means that yesterday was my
last day ever of driving a kid to school. And
it's it's such a such a.

Speaker 2 (01:02):
Strange thing and so so.

Speaker 1 (01:05):
First of all, when I when that thought occurred to me,
this is my last day ever of driving a kid
to school, My my first thought was winner, like awesome, right.
So I was having this conversation in iHeart offices yesterday
morning over near some some folks who were working back there,

(01:27):
and it was it was really funny. So I was
I was telling this one gal who works next to
me this story, and there was then further away on
one side, there was a there's a guy who was
working there, and on the other side there's another lady working.

Speaker 2 (01:48):
And so as I tell this story.

Speaker 1 (01:49):
About how yesterday I say, I said something like today
is my last day ever driving a kid to school,
And simultaneously the guy says awesome, and the and the
woman across the room the other way says that's sad.

Speaker 2 (02:09):
And the woman I was telling this story too.

Speaker 1 (02:11):
Also had a reaction kind of like that sad or
My reaction was this is awesome, And it was really
I mean, I realized it's a small sample size. It's
two dudes and two women, and both dudes said that's awesome,
and the and both women said that's sad.

Speaker 2 (02:28):
I would like to know from you now.

Speaker 1 (02:30):
I'm not talking about looking back in retrospect, but as
best as you can remember, was the last time you
had to drive a kid to school? Was that a
sad moment for you or an awesome moment for you?

Speaker 2 (02:43):
I want you to.

Speaker 1 (02:44):
Text me at five six six nine yeero and tell me,
and also include with your answer whether you are male
or female. You could put like female colon sad, male
colon awesome, like that right, the last time you had
to drive a kid to school, did you feel like
that was sad or awesome?

Speaker 2 (03:06):
So that was kind of that was kind of funny.

Speaker 1 (03:10):
So the other school story, one of my kids went
to the high school graduation of a friend yesterday. And
I'm not going to name the school. I will just
say it's south of Denver. It's somewhere between Denver and
Colorado Springs. And I guess the principle of this school,

(03:35):
who apparently is going to be replaced soon. As the
principal of the school stood up and said to the
assembled to the graduation, to the graduating seniors, something along
the lines of I've come to a difficult realization that
were all replaceable and just not that special.

Speaker 2 (04:00):
She said this to the graduating seniors.

Speaker 1 (04:02):
And then she's had something along the lines of, for example,
all this year's juniors will be next year's seniors. In
other words like yeah, you're gonna be replaced too. It
was one of the most I wasn't there to hear
it myself. I bet somebody got it on tape somewhere.
If you were there, I'm sure you know exactly what

(04:23):
I'm talking about. I'm not going to name the school,
but that was kind of a remarkable thing. So I
do see going on right now. I don't know, Shannon,
if you can get I don't know if this is
on Fox. I've seen it on CNN at the moment,
but I'll just describe it and if Shannon can get
to the audio quickly, then we will. But we've got

(04:46):
members of the Freedom Caucus, which is the conservative part
of the Republican Party, speaking right now, and they have
been some of the most vocal opponents of this so
called One Big Beautiful Bill.

Speaker 2 (05:00):
We had Senator Ron.

Speaker 1 (05:01):
Johnson on the show yesterday talking about why Republicans should
not support the bill in its current form.

Speaker 2 (05:06):
And I absolutely agree.

Speaker 1 (05:08):
I absolutely agree.

Speaker 2 (05:10):
I will be not that anybody cares.

Speaker 1 (05:15):
I will be very disappointed in any Republican who votes
for this bill, and I think almost all of them will,
which means I'm going to be disappointed almost everybody except
you know, Chip Roy and Ron Johnson and whoever else,
and will see how they vote. But this bill is terrible.
I'm not saying there's nothing good in it. There's lots
of there's lots of good stuff in it, okay, but

(05:36):
it is so full of bad.

Speaker 2 (05:38):
Stuff that it must not pass. This is a This
is a.

Speaker 1 (05:40):
Republican budget during a time of a strong economy, which
is when the federal government should be running a surplus
and paying down debt. And this is a budget that
intentionally raises the deficit every year, not just adds to
the debt, actually makes the annual you have to sit
bigger because it includes some very stupid things like no

(06:05):
tax on tips, which is a terrible idea, no tax
on overtime a terrible idea, making tax deductible certain auto
loans terrible idea. And then Donald Trump yesterday went and
twisted the arms of House members trying to get them
to do less Medicaid reform. And then you've got some
Republicans who want to keep a lot of this insane

(06:29):
green energy subsidy from the so called Inflation Reduction Act.

Speaker 2 (06:32):
Do you have this, Let's have a listen to.

Speaker 1 (06:34):
Chip Roy driving up inflation so Americans can't afford homes,
the Moody's Bob rating gets dropped, and people are getting
left behind no more.

Speaker 2 (06:43):
Now's the time for transforming reform.

Speaker 1 (06:45):
We're going to work with the White House and delivery
c st last night that it would increase the deficity,
all right, so, and it was fiery like that.

Speaker 2 (06:56):
And these guys.

Speaker 1 (06:56):
I'm very proud of these guys, Chip Roy in particular,
who seems to be leading them. And I don't agree
with chip Roy on everything, but I don't agree with
any politician on everything. And these guys are saying what
needs to be said and doing what needs to be done,
and their little press conferences over right now, but basically they're.

Speaker 2 (07:12):
Saying we need.

Speaker 1 (07:15):
One of the things they want is ending all of
the subsidies in the Green New Deal, which was renamed
the Inflation Reduction Act.

Speaker 2 (07:22):
And you know what We've got.

Speaker 1 (07:24):
I hate to say this, but I'm going to right
one of my to the extent that I have politicians
that I like. One politician that I really like and
support very much in this state is Jeff Heard, the
new member of Congress from Colorado's third congressional district, which
covers something like almost half.

Speaker 2 (07:45):
Of the land mass of Colorado.

Speaker 1 (07:47):
It's a like a big l from the western part
of the state than going south and coming across to Pueblo.

Speaker 2 (07:54):
Right.

Speaker 1 (07:55):
So, Jeff has been saying he doesn't.

Speaker 2 (07:58):
Want to get rid of all of the all of.

Speaker 1 (08:01):
The renewable energy nonsense, because I guess some of that
money is being spent in his district.

Speaker 2 (08:07):
And look, I get it, but this.

Speaker 1 (08:09):
Is not what we elected you for, is not what
we elect any Republicans for.

Speaker 2 (08:13):
And I really don't like it when there are members.

Speaker 1 (08:16):
Of Congress who you know, would have voted against the
bill the first time, who now want to keep some
of the bill in place now that it's there, and
all of these people, men and women are like need
to grow a pair and stand up and do what's right,
even if it means standing against Donald Trump.

Speaker 2 (08:34):
I am a little bit.

Speaker 1 (08:34):
Sad that George went Norm has passed away. He was
only seventy six years old, which doesn't seem very old
these days. And maybe a little later in the show
we'll play some normisms for you.

Speaker 2 (08:49):
Let's talk about Denver for a second.

Speaker 1 (08:51):
So did you know that Sixteenth Street Mall is no
longer going to officially be called Sixteenth Street Mall?

Speaker 2 (08:58):
Do you know what the new name is? Shannon?

Speaker 1 (08:59):
Did they talk about this on CMN already? So on
Colorado's Morning News. I'm not surprised they got to this
before I did. But the new name, the very very dramatic,
massive rebranding of Sixteenth Street Mall. The new name is
Sixteenth Street. This is from Axios. The one hundred thousand

(09:20):
dollars rebrand I would have done it for less. Is
part of the city's one hundred and seventy five million
dollar effort to revive the downtown strip and reshape the
narrative around a corridor that's struggled since the pandemic.

Speaker 2 (09:35):
Mayor Mike Johnston made.

Speaker 1 (09:36):
The announcement yesterday, saying the name change reflects the area's
evolution from a shopping district to a mile of diverse restaurants, businesses, retail, commercial,
It's a whole downtown experience. They're also introducing a secondary
name for the formerly known as Sixteenth Street Mall, like

(09:57):
the Artist formerly known as Prince the Street former known
as Sixteenth Street Mall. The secondary name will be the
Denver Way, which has a double meaning, the mayor said,
a literal route through downtown and a symbolic nod to
the city's value.

Speaker 2 (10:13):
So there's here. Let me just mention another thing.

Speaker 1 (10:16):
So overall pedestrian traffic is back to eighty five percent
of twenty nineteen levels.

Speaker 2 (10:23):
That's not very good, right, that's not very good.

Speaker 1 (10:28):
Yeah, the right people getting stabbed doesn't really help that much.
I think the real problem for the street formerly known
as sixteenth Street Mall. And again this is from Axios
weekday foot traffic, meaning people who work in office buildings
in you know, downtown might go wander sixteenth Street. Weekday

(10:52):
foot traffic is compared to twenty nineteen levels, is at
seventy one percent only and part of the reason for
that is that there are so many vacancies in office buildings.

Speaker 2 (11:06):
People are working from home.

Speaker 1 (11:08):
People you know, companies moved out of Denver for you know,
Denver is obviously very strict.

Speaker 2 (11:13):
During COVID, and then when you're.

Speaker 1 (11:15):
Talking about working in these office buildings, it's not just
year around your colleagues, but then you're going to like
being an elevator with people from lots of other companies
and just kind of scared people out of downtown and
they didn't come back. And so since there isn't that
much of foot traffic during the week there is, it
puts downward pressure on interest in having a retail location

(11:38):
there because there are not enough people walking around. So
the retail vacancy rate is still around twenty two percent.

Speaker 2 (11:45):
Now, let me just.

Speaker 1 (11:48):
Look at this as a take the positive view for
a second. It's easy to be critical of all this
stuff and how long it's taken in all that, I
get it, But we want our city to succeed. This
is the capital city of Colorado, and it's one of
the great cities in the Western United States, or at
least it should be. And I want this to work.
So if I were gonna try to put an optimistic

(12:09):
spin on it, this is it. As they get more
and more of the newly renamed Sixteenth Street opened, and
it's gonna have you know, stores and restaurants, and they
planted a lot of trees, and they're gonna have art
displays and stuff like this, as they make Sixteenth Street
a place that feels fun and interesting and this is

(12:32):
important safe Okay, maybe that will create some kind of
virtuous cycle of bringing commercial tenants bringing businesses back to downtown.

Speaker 2 (12:48):
Now I don't know, I'm just saying this.

Speaker 1 (12:50):
It could happen because we've always talked about, and I
sort of described a moment ago the fortunes of Sixteenth
Street to be based on, well, how are the fortunes
of the downtown commercial real estate market and the downtown
business population. But maybe it could be a positive cycle

(13:10):
in both directions. Maybe if sixteenth Street becomes nice enough,
then more businesses will come downtown again, and maybe people
will come back to downtown as far as living there,
and then that will make sixteenth Street that much better.

Speaker 2 (13:26):
You will get more people.

Speaker 1 (13:27):
Renting, you won't have a vacancy rate so high, and
maybe the whole situation will improve itself in what you
might call a virtuous cycle. And I sure, sure hope
that's the case. One other thing I want to mention
just briefly, and we covered this well, I didn't put
Colorado's morning news and our news coverage yesterday talked about.

Speaker 2 (13:46):
It is the.

Speaker 1 (13:47):
New rules for scooters in Denver. And I don't fully
understand all the details, but one of the things, well
two main things. They're going to be more aggressive about
making sure people riding scooters on the sidewalk. And I
don't know exactly how scooter sidewalk detection technology works, but

(14:09):
apparently that's a thing. And I don't think it's going
to turn off a scooter, but rather I think what
it'll do is it'll beep or yell at you get
off the sidewalk. They are doing something like this in
other cities, so that'll be good getting off the sidewalks.
The other thing they're gonna do that I think is
interesting is it's very very inconvenient, especially when you're in

(14:32):
a busy place. A lot of people narrow sidewalks, and
people just drop their scooters right on the sidewalk.

Speaker 2 (14:38):
It's in the way.

Speaker 1 (14:39):
So one of the things that looks like they're going
to be doing is in certain parts of the city,
especially around Union Station and some other stuff like that,
parts of Five Points as well high use neighborhoods for scooters.

Speaker 2 (14:50):
It looks like they're going to impose.

Speaker 1 (14:52):
Something where you can't end your ride, meaning you can't
stop paying for the scooter until you park it in
a designated parking space. That also could make downtown a
nicer place to be. First, just one thing, a listener
says here, let me just let me just find the
exact text, so I don't paraphrase it.

Speaker 2 (15:09):
I'll just read it. Ross.

Speaker 1 (15:11):
You'd be a rock star if you can find the
buffalo theory of brain cells and alcohol consumption discussion between
Cliff and Norm. So let me just read this to you.
Rather than playing audio. And then in a moment I'll
explain to you why I'm reading it rather than playing audio.
So this is cliff Claven, So it's not norm it's

(15:37):
cliff On cheers. Well, bear with me, I'll explain in
a second. And here's the quote. Well, you see normans
like this. A herd of buffalo can only move as
fast as the slowest buffalo, and when the herd is hunted,
it's the slowest and weakest ones at the back that
are killed first. This natural selection is good for the

(15:57):
herd as a whole, because the general speed and hell
to the whole group keeps improving by the regular killing
of the weakest members. In much the same way, the
human brain can only operate as fast as.

Speaker 2 (16:08):
The slowest brain cells.

Speaker 1 (16:10):
Now, as we know, excessive drinking of alcohol kills brain cells,
but naturally it attacks the slowest and weakest.

Speaker 2 (16:17):
Brain cells first.

Speaker 1 (16:19):
In this way, regular consumption of beer eliminates the weaker
brain cells, making the brain a faster and more efficient machine.
In that norm is why you always feel smarter after
a few beers. M hm. And so the listener is
challenging me to go online, go through YouTube or whatever,

(16:39):
and find that conversation from Cheers and play it on
the air, to which my response was nice.

Speaker 2 (16:48):
Try. You know why my response.

Speaker 1 (16:51):
Was nice try because this thing, this is like a
huge thing. Everybody knows about the buffalo theory of alcohol
consumption on Cheers, except it was never on the show.

Speaker 2 (17:03):
It was never on the show.

Speaker 1 (17:05):
It's an urban legend that was attributed to Cheers and
made its way around however much that so many people
actually think it was on Cheers, but it wasn't. So
we'll see, we won't see. I won't go find it.
I won't go find it. Lots of other stuff still
to do. What else do I want to do here?

(17:25):
I did that? I did that.

Speaker 2 (17:27):
Oh, let's talk.

Speaker 1 (17:28):
This is an interesting thing. So I'm you know, I'm
a bit of a financial market's nerd. And you may
recall that about a month ago or so, Elon Musk
announced that he was going to be taking a big
step back from being involved in politics, from doge all

(17:49):
that stuff and get back to.

Speaker 2 (17:52):
Working on his company.

Speaker 1 (17:55):
And in the last month, Tesla stock is up fifty
percent five zero percent. Pretty incredible because from the top
of Tesla stock, which was a little bit after Donald
Trump got elected a little before Donald Trump was inaugurated,

(18:18):
But when it became clear that Elon Musk was gonna
be involved with government and close to Trump, I think
a lot of people were thinking, this is gonna be
great for Tesla because he'll get Trump to do all
these things that will be good for the company. And
that never happened. And so the top at that point
was about four hundred and eighty dollars a share. Then,

(18:40):
as Musk started doing more and more and more stuff
with Trump, Musk's reputation and again I'm not saying this
is good or bad. I'm just telling you what happened. Okay,
Musk's reputation started getting just wrecked in the United States.
I mean there, yeah, there are some maga people who
suddenly like Tesla, when normally a lot of conservative folks

(19:02):
would say, you know, it was almost a form of
conservative virtue signaling to oppose electric cars, right, And I
don't oppose electric cars. I just opposed government subsidies and
government rules to force us into electric cars. If people
want to buy electric cars, then fine, I mean I
might one day, but I don't know. So anyway, Elon

(19:24):
Musk started getting less and less popular, not just in
America but also massively so in Europe. And so from
the top of Tesla's stock price after Trump's election to
the bottom of Tesla's stock price, about let's call it
a month and a half ago, a little, a little

(19:46):
less maybe, yeah, we'll call you Actually, let's call it
two months ago. That's accurate enough. Two months ago, Tesla
stock lost more than.

Speaker 2 (19:55):
Half of its value from the top to the bottom.

Speaker 1 (19:58):
So even though yes, the stock market had a rough
time during part of that, Tesla stock went down much
more than the stock market. And then in recent days,
it is also true in the past couple of weeks
that the stock market has been quite strong, but Tesla
stock has.

Speaker 2 (20:15):
Been much stronger than the stock market, and.

Speaker 1 (20:18):
It's gotten back essentially half or yeah, it's gotten back half.

Speaker 2 (20:23):
Of its losses.

Speaker 1 (20:25):
And I thought of this when I saw a couple
of stories just yesterday, one from Politico. Why has Elon
Musk disappeared from the spotlight?

Speaker 2 (20:35):
Right? This is interesting.

Speaker 1 (20:37):
Elon Musk and Donald Trump were the main characters on
the Internet and across Washington day after day. Then the
world's richest man started to fade away. Now ask yourself
this when's the last time you heard anything from Elon
Musk other than if you're on x formerly known as
Twitter and saw a tweet? But when's when's the last
time you saw him make a statement on television? I

(21:01):
think he was briefly visible but not saying anything. You
could hear when Donald Trump was visiting Saudi Arabia and
there were and Jeff Bezos was there, and you know,
these very very rich industrialist types were there talking about
foreign investment and all this stuff, and I think Musk
was there, but he didn't say anything. When's the last

(21:21):
time you saw you heard, not saw tweet, you heard
Elon Musk say anything political? It's probably around a month
or something like that. And on truth Social Again, this
is from Politico, where Trump is known for sharing his
unfiltered thoughts. He used to mention Musk every few days,

(21:44):
but now hasn't posted about him in more.

Speaker 2 (21:45):
Than a month.

Speaker 1 (21:47):
Trump's fundraising operation has largely ceased sending emails that name
checked the tesla's CEO. The billionaire's name, once a staple
of White House briefings, now hardly gets mentioned at all.
Even members of Congress essentially dropped him from their newsletters.
It's a remarkable change for the man who was seemingly
everywhere in the early days of the Trump administration. He

(22:09):
was in the Oval Office, he was in cabinet meetings,
he was on Air Force One, he was at the inauguration.

Speaker 2 (22:13):
He was in the.

Speaker 1 (22:14):
House gallery for Trump's first address to Congress, the thing
that's typically called State of the Union speech except for
the first one during a presidency, so they call that
when they addressed to Congress, and he was with the
president with a row of Tesla cars on the White
House lawn.

Speaker 2 (22:29):
Remember all that.

Speaker 1 (22:30):
Remember him in the White House wearing a baseball hat
with his kids standing there with him.

Speaker 2 (22:34):
He's vanished. He's vanished.

Speaker 1 (22:37):
There is also and I think for Republicans, I think
this story is actually more interesting.

Speaker 2 (22:45):
Musk says he'll do a.

Speaker 1 (22:46):
Lot less political spending moving forward.

Speaker 2 (22:49):
Wow, maga ally.

Speaker 1 (22:51):
Elon Musk said yesterday he plans to spend a lot
less on political donations moving forward, after funneling millions into
Donald Trump's twenty twenty for presidential campaign.

Speaker 2 (23:01):
The comment from the richest man in the.

Speaker 1 (23:03):
World could come as a disappointment for Republicans. In twenty
twenty six, he spent more than two hundred and fifty
million dollars to help Trump get back to the White House,
And when he was asked at the Cutter Economic Forum
if he would continue spending at such high levels in
future elections, he said he thinks that quote in terms
of political spending, I'm going to do a lot less

(23:24):
in the future. When they pressed him on why, he said,
I think I've done enough.

Speaker 2 (23:30):
He was there virtually, he wasn't there in person.

Speaker 1 (23:32):
He says, if he sees a reason to spend, I
guess he will, and then he added, I do not
currently see a reason. Very interesting. So I think there's
a few things going on here, but I think the
primary I think there's two primary things going on.

Speaker 2 (23:49):
I think there was a certain degree to which Donald Trump.

Speaker 1 (23:51):
Probably got annoyed with Elon Musk being the center of attention.
And I think Elon Musk recognized that a massive percentage
of his net worth is in Tesla stock, and Tesla
stock had dropped by more than half, and his reputation
was getting crushed because of his involvement in politics, And

(24:12):
at that point, I'm thinking he decided he needed to
make a decision. Am I a businessman or am I
a quasi politician, and he decided correctly that he's a businessman,
and he said, you know what, I've done what I can.
I've sure suffered the slings and arrows, and I'm done

(24:33):
with the slings and arrows and I'm going back to
running my businesses and it's my ball and I'm going home.
And I think that's what happened. And I think it's
the right decision for him. I think it's the right
decision for his companies. And I think it's pretty interesting.
So I thought I thought I would share that with you.
What else do I want to do here? Okay, there

(24:55):
is a substance. I suppose you would call it that
I did. I really don't know anything about I hear
it mentioned from time to time, and I don't even
know if I'm going to pronounce it correctly.

Speaker 2 (25:10):
All Right, it's k r A T O M.

Speaker 1 (25:13):
I think it's kratum, but I don't know. I could
be a short A.

Speaker 2 (25:18):
I don't know. I've heard it pronounced as something like kretum.

Speaker 1 (25:22):
Can can somebody please text me at five six six
nine zero and tell me what this stuff is? And
the reason the reason that I ask is it's in
the news now, and I've seen it around at places
that kind of seem like the they have a vibe
about them, similar to the vibe that you would expect
at a at a marijuana dispensary. Not that I've been

(25:43):
to a marijuana dispensary either, but it just it just
looks like like a head shop kind of place, a
pot shop kind of kretum shot, if that's how you
pronounce it, don't.

Speaker 2 (25:51):
I don't know.

Speaker 1 (25:52):
I don't even know what this stuff is, Okay, but
I wanted to share it with you because it's in
the news. From Axios Denver. Cretum is becoming the new tobacco.
Colorado is poised to put constraints on the sale of
the intoxicating herbal supplement that are similar to those in
place for tobacco products as concerns mount about fatalities and addiction.

(26:14):
A bill sent to the Governor's desk would require cretum
packaging to again, sorry if I mispronouncing it, I just don't.

Speaker 2 (26:21):
I don't know, to.

Speaker 1 (26:23):
Createum packaging to remain behind the counter and prohibit sales
to those under the age of twenty one. A warning
label would need to include dosage and drug interactions, interaction concerns,
as well as warnings for pregnant women. Other provisions include
limiting synthetics and the high potency component seven h to
two percent. So there's more from there. There's more, but

(26:46):
I'm just I'm not even gonna say more. I'm not
even gonna share more.

Speaker 2 (26:49):
With the article about the article, because I don't think
if I have.

Speaker 1 (26:53):
No idea even what this stuff is, then I'm guessing
not very many people are ingesting it, but enough people
are ingesting it that the legislature thinks they need to
put in rules. So if you can please explain it
to me, I would I would appreciate that. One listener
says it's a short a rhymes with bratt like kratam,

(27:15):
and that could be Again, I have no idea. I
have no idea. I'm not claiming to know. I'm asking
you so that you can help me understand. Let me
go back to some listener text if I might, so.
I asked a little bit earlier in the show. I
mentioned that yesterday was probably the last day that I
will ever need to drive one of my kids to school,

(27:37):
and I mentioned that I was telling this story out
in our KOA or our iHeart office area here, and
I was telling it to one lady, and as I
was telling it, it was overheard by one guy.

Speaker 2 (27:50):
And another lady.

Speaker 1 (27:52):
And as I was saying, you know, today was my
last day of having to drive a kid to school,
or just even that formulation right makes it sound like
something I'm happy about, of having to drive a kid
to school, I could have said, today is my last
day driving a child or driving my own child to school.
Up the dude who overheard it said awesome, and the

(28:13):
lady who overheard it said that's sad. And I wanted
to know from you, are you male or female? And
do you think that's awesome or sad? So you can
still chime in on that at five six six nine zero,
and I would say overall, more people think it's sad
than awesome. I will also say the gender gap is

(28:38):
not what I would have thought. There are basically as
many on a percentage basis as many men as women
saying it's sad, and also as many men when men
as women saying it's awesome. And I did get a
couple of more subtle answers that I like ross For me,
it was awesomely sad or maybe sadly awesome.

Speaker 2 (29:00):
Ross, I'm a guy.

Speaker 1 (29:01):
I'm proud, but sad because I loved spending that time
with my kids. Ross, you might have to drive him
the school after he wrecks his car.

Speaker 2 (29:11):
What else? What else? Ross?

Speaker 1 (29:13):
It was an awesome day as a dad, But now
I'm driving my grandson every so often when my son can't.

Speaker 2 (29:18):
Take his son to school.

Speaker 1 (29:23):
Awesome yet kind of sad, mostly a relief, And I think.

Speaker 2 (29:32):
I think the idea that it's a.

Speaker 1 (29:35):
Blend of awesome and sad is probably the right answer.
But there's one caveat I have to make. A bunch
of people who said it was sad said it was
sad because they no longer got that time talking with
their kids in the car. And this kid doesn't talk
to me in the car. And this kid is the

(29:57):
grumpiest morning person in the world. And more often than not,
I'm driving the kid in the morning and my wife
picks him up in the afternoon, So more often than not,
when I'm trying to talk to him in the morning,
he just grunts at me like one grunt. If I'm lucky,
he'll say I don't.

Speaker 2 (30:16):
Want to talk and that's the extent of it.

Speaker 1 (30:18):
So it's not as if I get an equality time
a little bit.

Speaker 2 (30:22):
It's not always like that.

Speaker 1 (30:24):
Sometimes I'll get a conversation going that'll last for a
few minutes. But to me, I didn't really get that
kind of quality time talking with my kids while driving
to school since they became let's say, over the age
of fifteen and just didn't care anymore.

Speaker 2 (30:43):
So there you go.

Speaker 1 (30:45):
There you go, Rosburg, guy who waits taxes, Why are
you upset about whittling away taxes, tips, overtime, etc. I'm
against the spending in the bill. The reason I'm against
these particular things is that I think it's really bad
for the United States of America to increase the already
overly large percentage of Americans who don't pay any federal
income tax. And most people who earn tips don't pay

(31:10):
much in federal income tax, and some don't pay any,
but the ones who do on average. I'm not saying
this is all right. There are waiters at Shanahan's who
make an immense amount of money, right, but most people
who earn tips don't pay a lot in tax, and
their effective tax rate is probably five percent or seven
percent or something like that. And you know what, everybody

(31:31):
should be paying for national defense. Everybody should be paying
for the legitimate functions of government. Now nobody should pay
be paying for all the illegitimate functions of government. But
why is it okay if somebody whose effective tax rate
is seven percent gets knocked down to having to pay
no federal income tax at all, so that only people

(31:52):
who earn a little.

Speaker 2 (31:53):
More have to pay for everything.

Speaker 1 (31:55):
I think that's immoral, and I also think.

Speaker 2 (31:57):
It's stupid politically, because.

Speaker 1 (31:59):
Then what haveppons as you create even more people with
no incentive at all to care about the cost of government,
the size and cost of government, because they think this
is never gonna cost me anything. It's all those evil
rich people who are gonna have to pay for it.
This is, in effect, a redistribution of income from people

(32:20):
who happen to earn income through one method, namely tips,
versus people who happen to earn income through any other method.
And that is not tips. Same thing with overtime. Why
should somebody who gets paid time and a half or
double time for overtime not have.

Speaker 2 (32:39):
To pay income tax on that income. I'm for cutting.

Speaker 1 (32:44):
Taxes for everybody, but not for these narrow interest groups
where it's nothing more than Donald Trump trying to buy
the votes for Republicans of tipped workers in Nevada, which
is mostly what this is about. Cut taxes for everybody.
I believe that tax cuts should go to taxpayers in

(33:07):
the proportion that they are paying taxes.

Speaker 2 (33:11):
And you know what if if a rich.

Speaker 1 (33:13):
Dude is paying fifty thousand dollars in tax and another
person is paying five hundred dollars in tax, and then
everybody gets a one percent tax cut, and the rich
dude gets five hundred dollars off his tax bill and
the other person gets five dollars off his tax bill.

Speaker 2 (33:32):
That's how it should be.

Speaker 1 (33:34):
I don't want each of them to get fifty dollars off.
That's not right. That's not right. So I'm very much
against this. This kind of no tax on tips, no
tax on overtime. This is Bernie Sanders policy, is not
Republican policy. It's really bad and is taking the Republicans

(33:56):
in a really bad direction. Essentially the end of the
Republican brand as far as I can tell, Really, what
is the purpose of the Republican Party if they are
going to pass a budget that knowingly increases our dead
and deficit and locks into place as the new baseline

(34:17):
all of the insane COVID spending during Biden.

Speaker 2 (34:22):
That's what this budget does.

Speaker 1 (34:23):
And I am telling you this is not a sort
of a generic attack on Donald Trump, who has been
doing a lot of good things lately. But this particular
thing is an assault on the future of our country,
on our children's futures, and on what remains of the
Republican brand. So Dragon, actually, let me just ask you
a thing. I was asking asking listeners. Have you heard

(34:46):
of a substance kratum or cratam kratom?

Speaker 2 (34:51):
Have you ever heard of this stuff?

Speaker 3 (34:52):
Is that the thing that makes spicy peppers spicy?

Speaker 2 (34:54):
No?

Speaker 1 (34:55):
No, it's a thing that the government of Colorado looks
like they're about to regulate. Is some kind of lightweight drug, basically,
And I don't know.

Speaker 2 (35:04):
I don't know anything about it.

Speaker 1 (35:05):
I didn't even know how to kind of pronounce it.
So I asked listeners. One says it's like an herbal opium.
Another says it's addictive.

Speaker 2 (35:16):
Let's see, let's see what else where did that go?

Speaker 1 (35:20):
Since it's like a synthetic marijuana. Another listener says, I'm
seeing it correctly, right. So one listener said, I I
said it wrong. Another listener said that I said it
correctly with a long a. It's a plant from Asia
which provides pain relief and relieves people of opium dependence.
Another listener said, as a friend of mine, he said,
it's an.

Speaker 2 (35:40):
Herb I've been taking for years, never once got a buzz.
It relaxes me a little bit. So I don't I
don't know. It's a weird thing to for me to think.

Speaker 1 (35:48):
There, Okay, there's a substance out there that on the
one hand, I've seen it as I've driven by some
little strip mall somewhere and you'll see a sign that
says them if that's how you pronounce it, And and
it looks to me like the kind of place that
would be a head shop or a marijuana dispenser, that
that kind of vibe about it. And so but I

(36:12):
don't know anything about it, and and yet the government
wants to regulate it.

Speaker 2 (36:16):
So so there's that dragon.

Speaker 1 (36:18):
Let me ask you the other question I was asking, yeah,
asking listeners this morning. So yesterday was probably the last time,
other than maybe some special situation that might arise in
the future just as a one off. The last probably
the last time that I will be driving a kid
to school.

Speaker 2 (36:38):
And I was.

Speaker 1 (36:39):
And my question is is that awesome or sad or
or both?

Speaker 2 (36:43):
Both? Definitely both.

Speaker 3 (36:44):
It's kind of like, you know, dropping your kid off
for the first day of school. It's a wonderful thing
because you know they're going moving on to new experiences.
But it's like, that's my baby, so it's the same
kind of thing. So it's like, okay, m hm, that's
my baby, and that now no longer my baby.

Speaker 1 (37:00):
Hi, Ross, I will start tipping less if tips are
tax free. If most people reduce tipping to fifteen percent
or less than tip workers will make less money than
if they were still paying taxes on tips. That's from Daniel,
so let me stick with that for a second, and
let me also note that if what gets implemented is

(37:21):
is no tax on overtime as well as no tax
on tips, then what you're going to get is businesses
doing everything they can to recategorize more of their workers'
incomes as tips and as overtime in order to be
able to then not have to give their workers a raise.
Because the rest of us will be subsidizing that raise by.

Speaker 2 (37:45):
Saying, all right, you don't have to pay tax on this.

Speaker 1 (37:47):
But to go back to this thing that Daniel said, Daniel,
you're partly right. So Daniel says, I'll start tipping less
if tips are tax free, and then he says again,
if most people reduce tipping to fifteen percent or less,
than tip workers will make less money than if they
were still paying taxes on tips. It's actually worse than
that for tipped workers if people start doing what you say.

Speaker 2 (38:08):
And I bet people will do what you say.

Speaker 1 (38:11):
I bet plenty of people will, even if it's just
a little bit right in their minds.

Speaker 2 (38:16):
Yeah. Cut, you know, if I have to pay tax.

Speaker 1 (38:18):
On my income, if you're not paying tax on your income,
then I'm going to pay you a little less because
you're gonna end up with just as much. And I
say that even while fully understanding that. For example, I
do go out of my way when I can. Now
I don't carry cash as much as I used to.
I don't carry cash as often as I used to,

(38:39):
but I will from time to time, especially in a
restaurant where that isn't a really high dollar restaurant that
people working there are probably not making a lot of money,
but I.

Speaker 2 (38:51):
Will if I have cash, I will.

Speaker 1 (38:54):
Pay the tip in cash rather than putting it with
the credit card, just to make sure they don't pay
tax on it. Now, of course, those people are already
getting at least some tips in cash and probably not
disclosing that to the irs, right, and therefore already not
paying tax on some. But if people start cutting back

(39:20):
on what they pay in tips, because in the minds
of diners at restaurants, well, you're not going to pay
tax on it, so I can.

Speaker 2 (39:28):
Pay you less.

Speaker 1 (39:29):
Think about the impact of that on people who earn
tips but pay little in tax overall because they don't
make very much or a very small tax rate. Right,
maybe they pay a twelve percent marginal federal tax rate.

Speaker 2 (39:48):
But if you start, if you cut the amount of
your tip.

Speaker 1 (39:51):
From twenty percent to fifteen percent, you've cut the tip
by twenty five percent, which very much offsets what they're
saving in taxes. So in a way, this could actually
I think that's a fabulous point. I think this actually
could come back to hurt tipped workers if people cut

(40:14):
their tips based on thinking, well, you're not going to
pay tax on it so I can pay you less,
so we'll see A listener says, white color spite. No,
I don't think that's right at all. Well, well, I
should say I don't. Maybe you should elaborate what you
mean by that, but I don't think it's I don't
think it's any sort of spite. I think it's gaming

(40:36):
the system, which, by the way, everybody should game the system,
by which I mean everybody should do everything possible that's
legal to not pay taxes.

Speaker 2 (40:52):
I do you should.

Speaker 1 (40:56):
I'm not saying you should do things that are illegal,
all right, I'm not saying you should hide your income.
But on the other hand, if there's somebody who's making
twenty seven thousand dollars a year and doesn't want to
report the cash part of their tips to the IRS.

Speaker 2 (41:09):
I really don't care.

Speaker 1 (41:11):
And I'm actually happy to bet that I'll give you your
tip in cash and you can decide whether or report
it or not. Wink wink, nudge, nudge. But everything that
you can do within the law, you should do. Yeah,
And maybe by my own standard, maybe those people should
declare their tips. They probably depending on where they're working

(41:32):
and how much they're making with given how high the
standard deductions are right now, they probably would still pay
little or nothing in terms of.

Speaker 2 (41:39):
Tax on those tips.

Speaker 1 (41:40):
So then I'll just do this last thing you might say, Ross,
if you're saying these people are paying very little anyway
in tax, then why do you care if we eliminate
tax on tips? And the reason is that it's not
very much money per person, But there's a lot lot
of people who have tipped income. So the aggregate amount

(42:03):
of income loss of revenue loss to the government from
having no tax on tips is a lot, even though
for any one person it's not that much unless you're
a waiter at Shanahan's right, in which case it's an
enormous savings for you. And again, I'm not saying I
want people to pay more taxes. I'm saying I don't
want the tax code to be further to be further

(42:27):
twisted into a tool of politicians trying to buy votes.

Speaker 2 (42:30):
Of particular people.

Speaker 1 (42:34):
Ross, you're struggling to make a coherent point on the
no tax on tips. It's a complicated issue. Tax is
a complicated issue. Although I do think I've made my
basic point pretty coherently. I'm against keep those requests coming
to producer Dragon at five six six nine zero. So
next segment of the show, we're gonna have Alan Dershowitz on.
Very excited for that conversation. Dragon, you were asking me

(42:55):
a couple things off the air, and just before Dragon
and I get into this, I just want to make
sure we understand. I'm not going to claim to be
an expert, even close to an expert on the thing
we're going to talk about for a couple of minutes next,
but I am going to try to get an expert
on the show on Friday to talk about this stuff.
And this is in the context of the pretty big

(43:17):
thing presentation that President Trump did yesterday. Secretary of Defense
Hegseth was there, several senators were there, A four star
general who is going to be the guy in charge
of this new Golden Dome project was there. And it
was Trump's announcing of this Golden Dome anti missile system

(43:39):
that is really the modern version of what President Reagan
had envisioned with what people at that time derisively called
star Wars, but as a missile defense system. So what's
on your mind about it?

Speaker 2 (43:53):
Dragon?

Speaker 3 (43:53):
I'm just curious, and I saw it on your blog
this morning at roscmanc dot com and I just produced
it relatively quickly, and you're skeptical of the cost and timeframe.
I'm more questioning is this something that we need? Are
rockets being fired at us and we don't know? Is
this already happening? When was the last time a rock

(44:15):
was fired on the United States mainland? I just don't know.
And another question is, Okay, so if somebody fires a nuke,
are we shooting that out of the sky and having
the nuke go off and in the atmosphere over.

Speaker 4 (44:29):
To the United States?

Speaker 3 (44:30):
I mean, does it able to distinguish between just a
regular old missile versus a nuke?

Speaker 2 (44:34):
I have questions.

Speaker 1 (44:35):
Okay, so I will take a stab at these things
and I'll give you my best guess. And then, as
I said, I'm going to try to get an actual
expert on Friday.

Speaker 2 (44:48):
All right, So here's my best guess.

Speaker 1 (44:50):
No, there have not been missiles lobbed at the United
States of America. The problem is that if there are,
if we get into a shooting war with a serious
ally I'm not talking about the huthis lobbing some small stuff,
we would potentially be looking at nuclear tips, missiles coming

(45:10):
in and we will sure wish we had defense against it.
There's also this actually a very interesting thing that I
do understand a little bit. For so, in college, one
of the classes I majored in foreign policy, and one
of the classes I took was called nuclear strategy and
National security. And one of the interesting things you may
recall this term MAD mutually assured destruction, and it's a

(45:36):
very subtle concept, but you think back to the Cold
War and the idea that the concept was neither the
US nor the Soviet Union would fire nuclear weapons at
each other, would start a nuclear war because the other
one would be able to respond, and then both countries
would suffer massive damage, maybe complete destruction. As far as

(46:00):
mutual assured destruction, what's interesting about the idea of a dome,
of some kind of system that would protect you against
that is that now, if it works, you don't have.

Speaker 2 (46:13):
Mutually assured destruction anymore, and only one side is afraid.

Speaker 1 (46:18):
Of being destroyed, and that could potentially make them more
likely to do something reckless, more likely to attack you sooner.
It changes the dynamic in a way that isn't always
positive for the country that has the defensive system. It's
a very interesting thing. But China is developing hypersonic missiles,

(46:42):
space based missiles, perhaps space based nuclear missiles. And if
we were to get in a shooting warn now in
the twenty first century, and somebody's lobbing some missiles at us,
like I said, these could be missiles that could destroy cities.
And it's not a question of are there already missiles

(47:05):
coming at us?

Speaker 2 (47:06):
It's a question of do we need this kind of defense?

Speaker 1 (47:09):
And I think we probably do, as I noted in
the blog, and you noted that I noted in the blog.
President Trump said yesterday he thinks that this system will
be operational while he is still president.

Speaker 2 (47:21):
There is a round a zero percent chance of that.

Speaker 1 (47:25):
It's also budgeted for one hundred and seventy five billion dollars.

Speaker 2 (47:29):
No chance that it'll only be that much either.

Speaker 1 (47:32):
The other question that you asked, and again we'll ask
my expert friend when we get them, what about if
we intercept and destroy a nuclear weapon coming in? My
expectation is that the way we would destroy a nuclear
weapon would not cause the nuclear part to be set off.
It would not cause a nuclear detonation in our atmosphere.

Speaker 5 (47:53):
It could cause some part of the bomb that holds
nuclear material to come apart, and maybe some nuclear stuff
would fall on the country, but I don't think it
would cause it's very, very, very difficult to set off
the nuclear stuff in a nuclear bomb, so I don't

(48:13):
think that's a huge risk, but I do think it's
a legit question.

Speaker 1 (48:17):
All right, we're going to take a quick break here.
When we come back, the great Alan Dershowitz. I am
so pleased to welcome Alan Dershowitz back to the show.
I think I've only had dershawn one or two times
in the past. And he is not only one of
the pre eminent attorneys in America, he's a emeritus professor
of law at Harvard, but he's also a guy who

(48:39):
has taken some real risk stepping out and standing up
for what he believes in. And we'll talk about all
that a little bit. Also, I'm holding in my hand
the Professor's new book. It's called The Preventive State. The
subtitle is the Challenge of Preventing serious harms while preserving
essential liberties. Brand new book from Professor Dershowitz, and I have, yep,

(49:04):
he's showing it to me.

Speaker 2 (49:05):
Well, I can I can show it to you, professor.

Speaker 1 (49:08):
Look, I can show it to you because because I've
actually read almost all of it, I've just got a
few pages left to go. So thank you so much
for being here. First of all, appreciate it.

Speaker 4 (49:20):
Thanks. If you haven't gotten the end, you haven't gotten
to the best part, you don't know if you did it. Yeah,
whether whether he So this is my fifty seventh book,
Oh my gosh, the one I'm most proud and the
one I think I'll be remembered for by certainly by
law professors and scholars, because it talks about a problem

(49:41):
that is very very deeply concerning but almost nobody writes about,
and that is that governments are moving much more toward
preventing harmful conduct, and that's very risky in terms of
civil liberties. I mean, it's very important. If we could
have prevented nine to eleven, or we could have prevented
Pearl Harbor, or Israel could have prevented October seventh, Wow,

(50:02):
that would have been great. But what it's the cost.
What would we have to do to prevent it? Would
we have to torture people? What would we have to
arrest people without due process? So these are the kinds
of issues that I confront I talk also about, you know,
issues obviously like deportation and what you do when you
have a pandemic. Do you require people to get and

(50:23):
occulated to prevent the spread of the pandemic? All these
contemporary issues. Should Israel engage in preventive attack on Uron's
nuclear reactor? What would Trump's reaction to that be? Those are,
you know, the kinds of questions that we're facing today,
and I write about all of them in the book
The Preventive State.

Speaker 1 (50:41):
Yeah, it is fascinating, and I was going to talk
with you about other things and then the book.

Speaker 2 (50:45):
But maybe i'll talk to you about.

Speaker 1 (50:46):
The book first and then some other things since we're
already going on this. By the way, the answer to
your question, should Israel takeout Iran's nuclear weaponsites?

Speaker 2 (50:53):
The answer is yes, But I hope.

Speaker 4 (50:57):
I think so. But I wonder if Trump thinks, I know,
he was a good deal and he doesn't want to
have that deal interfered with by Natanello. And so I
don't know what he's telling Natano. But you know, everybody's
learned the Zolensky lesson. You don't piss off President Trump
if you expect to get help in protecting your country.

Speaker 1 (51:22):
Tell me a little bit about I guess i'd call
it a framework that very much underlies the discussions of
the preventive state in every aspect in the Book of
True and False, positive and negative.

Speaker 4 (51:38):
Yeah, I mean, take for example, what happened in nineteen
what didn't happen in nineteen thirty five? In Europe, Nazis
we're building up in violation of the Versaides Treaty. They
were threatening to take over Poland and Czechoslovakia, and the
British and the French had a decision to make. Should
we go in and kill Hitler and Gerring and Gerbel

(52:00):
maybe they wouldn't have done anything, maybe they were just bluffing,
Or should we allow them to continue to build? And
they made a terrible false negative mistake. They thought Hitler
didn't mean it, and he ended up killing fifty million
people as the result of that mistake. On the other hand,
in Iraq, we made the opposite mistake. We went in

(52:20):
thinking they had nuclear weapons and they didn't. So Iraq
was a false positive mistake. Failure to go into Nazi
Germany was a false negative mistake. Israel made a false
negative mistake by not going in on October seventh and
trying to preempt You know, these are the kinds of
hard decisions that governments make. The one thing that's constant

(52:43):
is we will always make mistakes, will never be one
hundred percent right, and so you need a framework for
evaluating which kinds of mistakes are worse right.

Speaker 1 (52:52):
And you go through this quite a bit, and it
does seem fairly obvious, but obvious doesn't always mean anything
when it comes to law. That the decision on which
way to go, as far as the preventive states, should
have something to do with the with how bad the
harm might be if you get it wrong.

Speaker 4 (53:15):
Now, but how bad the harm might be if you
get it wrong either way. Take, for example, a policeman
having to use lethal force against somebody who might be
using legal force against him. If the policeman doesn't shoot,
maybe the policeman dies. If the policeman does shoot, maybe
it was overreaction, maybe there was too much. And so

(53:35):
there are always going to be mistakes, and the question
is which mistake is worse. And every one of these
preventive decisions is a cost benefit analysis of what kind
of mistakes we prefer You know, it's easy. When somebody's
submitted a crime, we say, better tan guilty go free
than one innocent be wrongly confined. That ratio is pretty

(53:56):
well established ten to one. We don't have a ratio
for the prefit of state. Is it better for ten
terrorist acts to go forward rather than one person be
improperly deported? No, probably not, But we don't know what
the ratios are. We're going through that right now with deportation.
We know we're making mistakes, but we know our heart's

(54:18):
in the right place. We want to make sure we
prevent illegal immigrants from committing horrible, horrible crimes, which many
have done. We also know that we sometimes make mistakes
when we pick up the wrong people.

Speaker 1 (54:31):
We're talking with Professor Alan Dershowitz from Harvard of his
new book The Preventive State, which you heard him say
is the book he's most proud of and that he
thinks he'll be remembered for. And the subtitle is the
challenge of preventing serious harms while preserving essential liberties. I
want to jump in fairly far into the book here,
because you write about something that I'm not an attorney,

(54:55):
but I love reading Supreme Court opinions, circuit course of
appeal opinions, and I really enjoy thinking about constitutional law and.

Speaker 2 (55:08):
A lawyer.

Speaker 4 (55:08):
It's not too late. We've had lawyers. I don't know
how old you are, but we've had law students, probably
your age. So come become a lawyer if you love
reading Supreme Court decision.

Speaker 2 (55:17):
I really do.

Speaker 1 (55:17):
I would if I were a lawyer, I would probably
go work for the Institute for Justice and spend my
time suing the government over violations of individual rights because
that's where my Yeah, I know you have. So you
write a fascinating segment about this overly used and constantly

(55:37):
misused thing about yelling fire in a crowded movie theater.
And I love this part of your book, and I
wonder if you could just tell my listeners a bit
about it.

Speaker 4 (55:47):
Yeah, it's the dumbest thing a smart man ever said
all Voidelhome is one of the smartest people having to
serve on the Spring Court, and by using the analogy,
oh you can't chat fire wrongly in a crowded theater,
you really hurt free speech enormously. The case itself involved
somebody handing out a leaflet telling people who are being

(56:08):
drafted that they had the right to claim conscientious objective status.
That isn't quite shouting fire. Shouting fire in a crowded
theater is not speech at all. It's like setting off
an alarm. It's a claning sound. It's not designed to
make you think about anything. It's not an invitation to debate.
It's a message to your legs and you're a general,
you're adrenaline. Get the hell out of there, don't think

(56:29):
about it, don't ask anything. And to use that as
an analogy for free speech is to diminish the importance
of free speech. So I've always hated that term, and
yet it's quoted all over the place. People tell me
all that, oh my god, that's like shouting fire in
the crowded theater.

Speaker 2 (56:45):
No it's not.

Speaker 1 (56:47):
I have never heard anybody until reading you in this
book analogize shouting fire to being an alarm sound like
it doesn't. It isn't even really speech versus just a
you know, a form of speech that a judge said
is not protected. I think that's did you come up

(57:08):
with that? And that's a that's a brilliant thing I did.

Speaker 4 (57:11):
I actually wrote an essay on it that won an award,
and then I included it in my book. Remember recently,
a congressman, a former congressman, thankfully he was defeated, a horrible,
horrible congressman. The thing, his name was Bowman, and he
set off an alarm in Congress because he didn't like
what Congress was doing. So he pulled the alarm. Nobody
would ever suggest that was free his speech. And if

(57:34):
instead of pulling the alarm he had stood in front
of it and you know, fire, fire, fire, it would
be exactly the same thing. So yeah, it's an it's
it's an argument I came up with, and you know,
it's something I'm proud of. Look, this book is my
fifty seventh book. My wife calls it my Heinz book
because Heinz fifty seventh flavors.

Speaker 2 (57:53):
Uh huh.

Speaker 4 (57:53):
And so it's the one that I think we'll have
the biggest, hopefully have the biggest impact on change the
way we think about at legislate and decide cases involving prevention,
because every single day we're making prevented decisions, and we're
doing it without the benefit of a jurisprudence. So I
try to create a jurisprudence for this, all.

Speaker 1 (58:15):
Right, I want to try to tie this to stuff
that's very much in the news right now, and I
think it's sort of on the edges of the preventive state.
It's not entirely the preventive state, but the deportation stuff
that's going on right now, and the controversies around just

(58:36):
how much due process and illegal alien is due and
then the next step, just how much due process and
the illegal alien who's been convicted of a crime other
than the crime of crossing the border illegally. I'm not
counting that as a crime. What do processors they do?

Speaker 4 (58:53):
Yeah, it fits in perfectly to the prevented state, because the
vast majority of people who want to see gang members
supported wanted to see that in order to prevent them
from committing crime. So deportation is a major preventive mechanism.
By the way, goes back to the earliest times in
history when people were exiled, they were told they had

(59:17):
to leave the country. Exile was a very important form
of prevention, and I write about that in the book,
and so deportation fits perfectly.

Speaker 6 (59:26):
Now.

Speaker 4 (59:27):
Due process is the most misunderstood term. After shouting fire,
the most misunderstood term. People think it means the same
thing for everybody. What due process means is the process
that is due you based on your status, who you are,
and what the government is trying to do to you.
So if you get arrested and you're a citizen and

(59:48):
they charge you with a serious crime, you get all
the due processes in the world. You know, you get
a right to council, you get confrontation of witnesses, you
get bail, you get you name it, you get everything.
On the other hand, of your hear visa and you
lied on your visa or you're misusing your visa not
to learn but to make trouble, the due process that

(01:00:09):
you're entitled to is very minimal. They have to prove
you're the right person, that you did what they say
you did, made a speech, or do something like that,
but not very much. And if your example, if you
just clumb over, if you just climb and just swim
across the Rio Grande and make it into Texas and

(01:00:30):
they catch you, they just take you back, there's no
due process, and all the process that's due you at
that point is zero, except if you're Cuban, because there
they had the idea of a wet foot and a
dry foot. If you made it onto land during the
Castro period, then you could stay in the United States.
But in general, if you illegally cross over and you're caught,

(01:00:53):
they just take you and put you back in. But
if you're here for a while and you're a student, etc.
You get a little bit of due process, but not
an awful lot.

Speaker 1 (01:01:01):
Yeah, and this temporary protected status thing, right, so I
think Biden maybe put in TPS for Venezuelans. The current
administration wants to take it off. I'm not an expert
on this law, but it seems to me the word
temporary is included in temporary protected status, and I'm I'm
guessing they're allowed to take it off.

Speaker 2 (01:01:20):
But this all this stuff all ends up in court.

Speaker 1 (01:01:22):
But you know, I think some Americans are a little
bit uncomfortable with we're just gonna round up these people
and send them wherever we're going to send them. I
think some people feel like there is some process do,
even if it's less than the process that would be.

Speaker 4 (01:01:37):
Due to you and me, right, And they're right. And
one way of dealing with this, by the way, is
to say, if there's probable cause, probable cause, that's the
same thing. You need to have a search. If there's
probable cause for believing that you're here illegally and that
you have no status, you don't have green card, you
don't have a visa, there probable cause for that, then

(01:01:57):
they can deport you. Give you the phone number of
a call in, and you can then by zoom have
a hearing, but not in the United States. You have
the hearing from Salvador from Nicawaga, from Mexico, and then
if you win, you get taken back into the United States.

Speaker 2 (01:02:14):
So you know, due.

Speaker 4 (01:02:15):
Process can occur after your deporter as well as before
your deporter. Remember that much of the issue is about timing.
For example, people seek amnesty, but ninety percent of those
who seek amnesty don't get it, and and their claims
are frivolous. They claim that they're going to be subject
to torture in you know, Argentina or Chile, and they're not,

(01:02:39):
and the courts are going to reject it. So why
are they applying Because they know they're going to get
two three years out of that, because it takes that
long to reject the claim. So a lot of it
is game playing by lawyers for the immigrants who are
just seeking to allow them to stay in the country
for a longer period of time, knowing eventually that they'll

(01:03:00):
lose the case, and on the other side, they want
to expedite it. So we have a constitutional conflicts, not
a crisis. It's a conflict. Then ultimately it'll be resolved.

Speaker 1 (01:03:10):
All right, I've got about four or five minutes left,
and I want to get to a couple other things
with you, So you may or may not recall that
I went to Columbia. My dad went to Columbia after
I My dad, he's not rich, but he likes liked
past tense giving Columbia some money.

Speaker 2 (01:03:26):
Almost since I graduated.

Speaker 1 (01:03:28):
I was telling my dad that Columbia, which I think
has probably the highest percentage of Jewish students in the
Ivy League, and I'm Jewish. I told them this is
a haven for anti Semitism and you should not give
this place any money. I've been telling him that since
at least since at least the nineties. Now you're at Harvard.
Harvard has its own struggles going on right now, own
its own fight with the Trump administration. First question, do

(01:03:50):
you think Harvard deserves the attention that Trump administration and
many other people are giving it.

Speaker 4 (01:03:59):
Yes, because it's a leading institution and it's failed in
its mission. I have a new book that I'm working
on now, my fifty eighth, and it's called Trump to Harvard,
Go fund Yourself. A big title, but it is about
the fact that the government is entitled to put pressure
on universities not to violate Title six and other parts

(01:04:23):
of the civil rights law. Look think about if this
were the nineteen fifties when I was in college, and
you had Southern schools that were allowing the plan to
come on campus with masks and attimiday black students and
teachers teach white supremacy, we would be all in favor
of the government stepping in and do something about it.
And I think it's okay for the government to step

(01:04:44):
in and do something about Columbia Harvard as long as
it doesn't interfere with basic scientific research. Medical research, cancer
research that ould to be out of bounds. But anything
political and ideological cutting off funding is a good idea.

Speaker 1 (01:05:00):
Okay, you went where I was where I was going
to go there, so that the science question is interesting
because you can say you did say that the value
of that research is so much that government should leave
that out of the conversation. But do you, as a
matter of law, other than perhaps if there is a
signed contract with the government, and I've even that might

(01:05:21):
be terminable based on violations of civil rights law, do
these universities have any legitimate claim on taxpayer money.

Speaker 2 (01:05:30):
Well, you would have.

Speaker 4 (01:05:30):
Been a great lawyer, because that's the question, and the
answer is no, they don't. If you discriminate against the
school based on race or gender or religion. Yeah, But
if you discriminate because they're not following the law, no,
they have no right. They have no right to a
tax exemption either, and therefore the government is going to

(01:05:52):
win these cases. Now, Harvard is getting very bad advice
from its very bad lawyers, and the president of Harvard
is a lawyer doctor has been told that they're gonna win.
They're not gonna win, They're gonna lose. They may win
a couple of rounds on due process issues, but in
the end, the government is entitled to withhold funding from

(01:06:12):
universities that are violating Title six of the Civil Rights Law.

Speaker 1 (01:06:16):
Last question for you, professor, Last time you and I
talked it a few years back, you had you had
made some statements about law and process and fairness that
weren't exactly you standing up for Donald Trump, but rather
you standing against.

Speaker 2 (01:06:40):
Misuse of the.

Speaker 1 (01:06:41):
System and other things to attack Donald Trump. And when
we talked you and you were very public about all this,
you lost a bunch of friends. And maybe they weren't
really that good friends to begin with, but you go ahead.

Speaker 4 (01:06:57):
Some of them were close friends, at least long term friends.
I've still lost them. Larry David is a perfect example.
We were good friends with dinner, you know, several times
a month. He would come to my house. We would
choose over lunch. And he now won't talk to me.
He calls me disgusting and despicable just because I defended
Donald Trump on the floor of the Senate against an

(01:07:18):
unconstitutional appeachment. I didn't vote for him in those two
times when I defended him, but I defended him and
I would continue to defend him because I believe strongly
in the Constitution. But there are a lot of people
who don't believe in the Constitution and attack you for
who you defend. You know, I've been attacked with defending
Jeffrey Epstein for defending O. J. Simpson for defending Klubs

(01:07:41):
from Bulo. I also defended Bill Clinton. And you know,
you don't attack lawyers for who they defended. Otherwise you
would have to attack John Adams, who defended the people
accused of the boss and massacre, and he was criticized
for that as well. So I stand in his footsteps.

Speaker 2 (01:07:59):
I have just a few seconds left.

Speaker 1 (01:08:00):
So the what I wanted to ask you now is,
you know, we've seen in the world. We've seen a
pushback against cancel culture, and a pushback against DEI, and
a pushback against wokeism. And I wonder if any of
the friends and I almost feel like I want to
put friends in air quotes, but I wonder if any
of these friends who abandon you have come back to you.

Speaker 2 (01:08:23):
I know you said Larry David didn't, but.

Speaker 4 (01:08:24):
Have doubled down. They're embarrassed, they're shamed, but they've doubled down.
And you know, guy comes up to me on the
porch of the Chill Monk store in Massachusetts and he
starts screaming at me. I said, wait a minute, all right,
you can yell at me, But is it Trump? Is
it Epstein? Is it Israel. What are you attacking me

(01:08:45):
for everything you know? And so yeah, No, people are unforgiving.
I've been canceled by many major institutions, schools, colleges, and
lecture circuits. And even though they admit privately that they
were wrong, they won't admit it publicly, and they don't
come back the double down.

Speaker 2 (01:09:04):
They should be ashamed of themselves.

Speaker 1 (01:09:06):
Alan Dershowitz's fantastic new book, I will I will read
the rest of it. I only have a few pages left.
Is called the Prevented Ending right as a surprise ending.
It's a cliffhanger. It leaves you waiting for the sequel.
The preventive state, the challenge of preventing serious harms while
preserving essential liberty is always an honor to talk with you, professor.

Speaker 2 (01:09:26):
Thanks for being here, my honor.

Speaker 4 (01:09:28):
Thank you.

Speaker 1 (01:09:29):
We'll take a quick break. We'll be right back on Kowa.
It's all up to producer Dragon. I have very little
to say about what gets placed you when you're head
over there like you're not liking any No.

Speaker 2 (01:09:38):
I actually think it's amusing.

Speaker 3 (01:09:40):
It's it's a it's also fun because it's our little
live secret. So if you're listening, on the podcast, you
have no idea what just happened.

Speaker 1 (01:09:48):
Right, no idea at all, no idea at all. And well,
they'll know that something happened because they're going to hear this.

Speaker 3 (01:09:54):
So you'll just have to tune into the new and
improved iHeart app and listen live here it There but a.

Speaker 1 (01:10:00):
Couple stories I want to I want to share with you,
and I okay, So I sent an email to one
of the people who runs the Rocky Mountain Prep High
School and I haven't heard back, and you know, very
very busy time of year for high school administrators and such.
So I just I'm gonna go ahead and talk about
this without without having a guest, because I think it's

(01:10:22):
such an awesome story. And here's the headline from the
Denver Post. Every senior at this Denver Charters school network
got accepted to college. There were fireworks and tears, and
the subhead is Rocky Mountain Prep's senior class reached one
hundred percent college acceptance rate for the second.

Speaker 2 (01:10:42):
Year in a row. Let me just share a little
of this article with you. I just I love this.

Speaker 1 (01:10:47):
The shrieks of thousands of elementary and middle school students
filled the Denver Coliseum on Wednesday morning, as kids with
homemade signs and this last Wednesday Morning, I guess homemade signs,
pom poms and light up toys leaped in the stands
with enough enthusiasm to match a greeting fit for a
pop star. The celebritiesher took the stage may not be
household names just yet, put to the households packed.

Speaker 2 (01:11:08):
Into the venue, they were far more beloved.

Speaker 1 (01:11:10):
More than two hundred Rocky Mountain Prep High school seniors
made a grand entrance on the floor of the roaring coliseum,
clutching the hands of their escort too. In many cases
where mom and dad seniors graduating from the Denver Area
Charter School Network's twelve schools were celebrated for achieving a
one hundred percent college acceptance rate, the students had the

(01:11:35):
honor of standing before their peers, teachers, and families to
declare their next steps.

Speaker 2 (01:11:39):
The Signing Day, that's what they call it. The signing
Day event, a play.

Speaker 1 (01:11:44):
On the tradition when high school athletes formerly commit to
the college of their choice, brought more than four thousand
of the younger Rocky Mountain Prep students to watch the
seniors celebrate their academic success. During the ceremony, students presented
a rose to whoever they deemed their biggest supporter.

Speaker 2 (01:12:03):
I just I love I love these stories.

Speaker 1 (01:12:06):
Senior Ashley Prisel b lined towards her mom, Amanda. Ashley
placed the rose in her mother's lap, bending down to
embrace her and accommodate her mother's wheelchair.

Speaker 2 (01:12:17):
The two state locked and embraced while Mom.

Speaker 1 (01:12:19):
Wept quote, I'm so proud and overwhelmed, Amanda said, The
ceremony is amazing. I've never seen anything like it before.
It's been a rough year and she worked really hard,
and I'm just so proud. Students lined up and stormed
the stage, screaming their names and their post secondary destinations
while hoisting flags from the institutions in the air metro

(01:12:41):
state Colorado, State see You, Cornell, West Point Pickins Technical College,
Tennessee State, Pima Medical Institute. Each proud declaration elicited raucous clopping, clapping,
and hooting from the crowd.

Speaker 2 (01:12:59):
It goes on from the I don't think.

Speaker 1 (01:13:00):
I don't think I need to read more, but I
just think that's fantastic. I also note that the senior
class throughout the twelve schools that make up the Rocky
Mountain Prep network earned more than nine million dollars collectively
in in scholarship money.

Speaker 2 (01:13:20):
One young woman, one young woman.

Speaker 1 (01:13:23):
And I guess I don't know how this scholarship now,
maybe they sort of add up every offer from every school,
even if you're not going to take all of them.
But one student named Jacqueline Fuentes Pacheco got more than
seven hundred and twenty five thousand dollars in offered scholarship
money and was accepted to twenty colleges. I just I

(01:13:46):
absolutely love it, and congratulations, A huge congratulations to everybody
at Rocky Mountain Prep. And if anybody knows, you know
folks who work there, or you know Principle and all that,
please tell them. I please tell them my I talked
about him on the radio. Another thing I wanted to mention,
a very different thing. Say, I'm trying to fit what
day is this coming up? It's coming up pretty soon?

(01:14:10):
Where is this? So big head Todd in the Monsters
are are playing at Red Rocks and June eighth, okay,
June eighth, that's a Sunday, a couple of weeks from now.
So the do you know who's like the Dragon. You
know the singer is gonna be for the band that's
gonna open for Big Head Todd in The Monsters at

(01:14:31):
Red Rocks on Sunday, June eighth.

Speaker 3 (01:14:33):
I did peruse the blog at Roskiminski dot com. I
did not enter them in the Silent three in order
to get to Roskivinski dot com.

Speaker 2 (01:14:39):
But I don't recall. Oh and you still don't remember.
It was a big name Bill Murray. That's a big
name Bill Murray.

Speaker 1 (01:14:48):
Is gonna be opening and is it's the band is
called Bill Murray and his Blood Brothers. And when I
saw the headline Bill Murray will open for Big Head
Todd in the Monsters, I thought he was gonna be
doing comedy set and that does it's it's it's unusual,
but it's not unheard of to have a comedian open
for a band. It happens, and it wouldn't surprise me
if he talks a fair bit. But he's got a band,

(01:15:09):
and I've heard a little bit of it in the
article actually that I've got posted on the blog. As
Dragon said at Rosskaminski dot com, they've got Bill Murray
doing a cover of a Bob Dylan song, and I
guess most of what they're doing is covers. They do
the Beatles and the Stones and the Kinks.

Speaker 2 (01:15:22):
Kinks are my favorite band of all time.

Speaker 1 (01:15:24):
And anyway, I actually don't know if there's still tickets left,
But if you want to hear Bill Murray open for Big.

Speaker 2 (01:15:32):
Head Todd and go check that out.

Speaker 1 (01:15:34):
I think it's a fairly early show on Sunday, a
couple a couple of weeks from now, so go check
that out.

Speaker 2 (01:15:40):
I just think that's cool.

Speaker 1 (01:15:42):
Bill Murray does seem like a dude I would want
to have a beer with. He seems like a really interesting,
obviously funny dude, and I think it would be cool
to see him in that context. All right, we're gonna
take a quick break. We'll be right back on Kawai.
Let me just take one quick moment here. Tell you something.

Speaker 2 (01:16:01):
Going on in the in the stock market right now.

Speaker 1 (01:16:04):
So, the way the US government funds itself is by
selling bonds or notes or bills, and bonds, notes and
bills are all really the exact same kind of thing.
The difference between them is how how long they last. Right, So,

(01:16:25):
when the government sells one of these things, they're borrowing
money from you. When you buy one of these things,
you are loaning money to the government at whatever yield.
And this is if you buy it right when the
government is issuing it right.

Speaker 2 (01:16:40):
So if you buy one that's already been on the market,
you're sort.

Speaker 1 (01:16:43):
Of indirectly loaning money to the government the person who
directly loaned the money.

Speaker 2 (01:16:47):
You're sort of taking over the position of the person
who loaned the money first.

Speaker 1 (01:16:50):
But you could do it at a different price than
the original price, and so your interest rate will be different.
I know that's a little bit technical, but how the
way this works is the government does not set an
interest rate because they don't know. You can't what's called
I'm gonna use an economic term here. You can't clear
the market, Okay, you can't clear the market generally, or

(01:17:12):
at least not at not at the right price, not
knowing you're not paying too much or paying too little.

Speaker 2 (01:17:17):
By setting a price.

Speaker 1 (01:17:19):
Right.

Speaker 2 (01:17:19):
So, if the government's gonna try to sell.

Speaker 1 (01:17:21):
Ten billion dollars of I'm just making up a number
of let's say ten year notes or twenty year notes,
is what they had today. They had a twenty year
note auction. If they're gonna sell those they if let's
say they put an interest rate on it of five percent,
I'm just gonna make up a number. Say they put

(01:17:42):
an interest rate on it of five percent and they
sell all of it. Well, they don't know in that
case whether they could have stoled all of it at
four point nine five percent and save the taxpayers. However,
many millions of dollars of accruit interest over the life
of what.

Speaker 2 (01:18:02):
Is effectively that loan.

Speaker 1 (01:18:03):
Right, So if you just set that number and it
all gets sold, there's a decent chance that you could
have paid less, the government could have paid less, and
then you got the other side. Let's say they set
the rate at five percent and they want to sell
ten billion dollars of stuff, but there isn't that much
demand at five percent, and so they only sell eight
and a half billion dollars of stuff. Now, not only

(01:18:26):
are they one and a half billion dollars short of
the money they need, but that's also a very very
bad look, like, oh my gosh, you couldn't sell your bonds.

Speaker 2 (01:18:35):
So what they do instead is they do an auction.

Speaker 1 (01:18:38):
Now the auction still can kind of have the second problem.
So again this is nerdy, but I'm telling you about
it because it's significantly impacting the stock market just over
the past five to ten minutes.

Speaker 2 (01:18:55):
Okay, So what can happen?

Speaker 1 (01:18:58):
The government offers in this case, I believe it was
twenty year notes today, the government offers this stuff and
people come in bidding for them, and whatever is the
effectively the lowest interest rate that the government can pay
that allows them to sell all of the bonds is

(01:19:21):
the is the interest rate that they all get done at.

Speaker 2 (01:19:25):
Right. So let's say let's say.

Speaker 1 (01:19:27):
I say I'm willing to buy them at a five
percent yield, and another person says four point ninety five,
and another person says four point nine, and they and
they need to sell, and they need to sell two.
I'm gonna mess this up, But so what will happen
is they just they can sell two of them at

(01:19:48):
four point ninety five, And so everybody who is willing
to pay at least four point ninety five gets filled
at four point ninety five. Right, in this case, what
it would be the four point nine person in the
four point nine to zero, the person who said they
wanted five percent doesn't get filled, but the other two
four point nine to five guy gets his price, and

(01:20:11):
the four point nine the guy who said I'm willing
to take just four point nine percent interest, he also
gets four point nine to five.

Speaker 2 (01:20:18):
It's all done at the one.

Speaker 1 (01:20:19):
Price whatever is the lowest interest rate that lets the
government sell them all.

Speaker 2 (01:20:26):
Does that make sense? I don't think I explained that
very well.

Speaker 1 (01:20:30):
And part of the reason it's difficult is that yields
and prices move oppositely. Let me give another example that
hopefully is a little bit easier. Let's say a company
is trying to sell stock, and they want to sell
one thousand shares of stock, and they don't care what
the price is. They just want to sell a thousand
shares of stock, and somebody bids. Somebody bids five dollars

(01:20:54):
a share for four hundred shares. Another person bids six
dollars a share for four hundred shares, another person seven
dollars a share for four hundred, other person eight dollars
a share, So four, five, six, seven, and there are
bids for four hundred shares at each price, and they
want to sell a thousand. Well, in order to be
able to fill a thousand starting at the highest price,

(01:21:14):
they can't sell a thousand at seven because there's only
four hundred bid for. They can't sell a thousand at
six because there's only the four hundred and seven and
the four hundred and six bid four. In order to
be able to sell a thousand, they have to get
down to five. So what will happen is I guess everybody.
I think the way it works with the bonds, everybody
who bids six or seven is going to get filled

(01:21:35):
at five, and then half the people who bid five
will get filled at five or something like that. Anyway,
So here's I'm taking too long to explain this. Here's
what happened today. There was an auction of twenty year
notes just a little bit ago, and it did not
go well, and the interest rate the US government had
to pay to sell the twenty year notes was much

(01:21:56):
higher than expected. And the interest rate all on the
ten year note now is up eleven basis points from
a bit under five percent to a bit over five percent.
And the yield on all of this government stuff, the
thirty year bond is now over five percent and the
stock market for now, it could completely change later in

(01:22:18):
the day, but the Dow went from down three hundred
to down seven hundred in a hurry. All right, I'm
taking way too long on this. I'm gonna hit a
quick break.

Speaker 2 (01:22:26):
We'll be back.

Speaker 1 (01:22:27):
The passing of George Went, who played Norm on Cheers.
He passed away at the age of seventy six. I
didn't go read a lot of stories about this, so
I didn't see any mention of how he passed away.

Speaker 2 (01:22:42):
But I did read.

Speaker 1 (01:22:44):
So I'm looking at Variety dot com, obviously one of
the big websites for Hollywood and TV and movies and
all that. So George Went obviously Norm from Cheers. He
appeared in all two hundred and seventy three episodes of
that series, all two hundred and seventy three up episodes.

Speaker 2 (01:23:01):
He did have his own show.

Speaker 1 (01:23:02):
For a little while on CBS, called The George Went Show,
but it didn't last very long and lived ran for
about him a month. He played a radio host car
mechanic Guy, but eleven seasons on eleven seasons on Cheers.
He was one of the many, many guys who all
had not only larger than life personalities but sort of

(01:23:24):
physically larger than life. Two who came through Chicago's Second City,
you know, Chris Barley for example, and then John Candy.
I think, wasn't it second I think John Candy might
have come from Canada with that whole Canadian group up
there with Eugene Levy and all. Maybe he was Second
City two and then the Blueshi and these guys trying
to remember about John Candy?

Speaker 2 (01:23:45):
Was he Second City looked? Anyway?

Speaker 1 (01:23:47):
George went was born in nineteen forty eight in Chicago.
He went to Notre Dame for a little while, then
he went to another college called Jesuit Rockhurst College. He
actually graduated with a degree in economic and what else?

Speaker 2 (01:24:03):
Second City? Okay, there you go. So George Wentz is.

Speaker 1 (01:24:08):
Also the uncle to Jason Sudeikis, who was on SNL
from time to time in the and the.

Speaker 2 (01:24:14):
Star of ted Lasso as well.

Speaker 1 (01:24:16):
Anyway, he did a lot of movies, right He was
in Fletch and Spice World, and he was in a
horror movie in the mid eighties called House, and so
much other stuff. But basically, as I was reading about him,
once he did Cheers, it was pretty easy for him
for the rest of his career to be able to
get some jobs. But the the stuff that he's you know,

(01:24:39):
famous for is Cheers, how doing cut.

Speaker 2 (01:24:48):
The small tug and give me a beer? Late boss
kept me after got chewed out a little bit. Yeah,
what's I guess he doesn't have a talk. You get
the idea. There's lots of that.

Speaker 1 (01:25:04):
I've got a clip on the blog at Rosskaminsky dot com.

Speaker 2 (01:25:07):
But if you want to go, check out.

Speaker 1 (01:25:08):
A little more of norm from Cheers.

Speaker 2 (01:25:12):
But that's an all time classic.

Speaker 1 (01:25:14):
And you know it's funny, is I. When I was,
let's say, in my twenties and I heard about somebody
dying at the age of seventy six, I might have
thought I had a decent long life. And now that
I'm not in my twenties, I think seventy six doesn't
sound very old.

Speaker 3 (01:25:31):
Yeah, you're slightly closer to seventy six than your.

Speaker 1 (01:25:33):
Twenty Yeah I am, And that kind of pisses me off.
But I guess I guess maybe the only thing worse
than getting older is not getting older, Right, So I
don't know anyway, George went rest in peace?

Speaker 2 (01:25:48):
Should try that again? I mean we can, all right,
let's try it again.

Speaker 1 (01:25:52):
So for those of you who are fans of the Doors,
you're probably well aware that Jim Morrison is buried in Paris.
Heads up if you're a fan of and you may
or may not be aware that for some years there
was at his grave site a bust, a carved bust
of Jim Morrison. I think for a long time it

(01:26:13):
was missing a nose and maybe an ear and something
like that.

Speaker 2 (01:26:17):
I think that reset went pretty well, Dragon, Sure, yeah,
nobody knows, nobody noticed.

Speaker 1 (01:26:21):
Cut it out of the podcast, but leave this in
that I'm mentioning to cut it out of the podcast,
and then the podcast people will have no idea what
I'm talking about.

Speaker 2 (01:26:30):
Okay, so you might do it.

Speaker 1 (01:26:32):
Dragon, might actually do that just to miss work, just
to mess with the podcast people a little bit. Anyway,
So there was this statue there, this bust of Jim Morrison,
and it was stolen from the grave site thirty seven
years ago. Okay, thirty seven years ago. So police in

(01:26:53):
Paris were just did some kind of investigation raid based
on on something completely different related to corruption and financial
fraud and all that sort of thing, and during that
they found this bust of Jim Morrison. And the BBC

(01:27:16):
says little information has been released about the investigation and
no suspects have been named in the theft of the
statue of the singer, who died in nineteen seventy one.
The police made the discovery when looking into a case
of fraud. It's not clear if the bust will be
put back on the grave, with the cemetery's curator telling
the La Figuerot, which is a French magazine, the police
haven't contacted us, so I don't know whether the bust

(01:27:39):
will be returned to us. It was carved from white
marble the statue by a Croatian artist named Maladen mccoolin
to mark the tenth anniversary of the singer's death, but
it disappeared in nineteen eighty eight, seven years after being
placed on the site.

Speaker 2 (01:27:58):
And anyway, the police have it.

Speaker 1 (01:28:00):
They haven't said whether they're whether they're giving it back.

Speaker 2 (01:28:03):
Did you know, quick, real quick though?

Speaker 3 (01:28:05):
Yeah, according to the listener Andy, Yeah, apparently my joke
was a bust.

Speaker 2 (01:28:13):
Andy's joke was funnier than yours, it really was.

Speaker 1 (01:28:16):
Did you know that Jim Morrison's dad was US Navy
admiral I think, a big time admiral in World War Two?

Speaker 2 (01:28:28):
Anyway, Yeah, there you go. So there's that.

Speaker 1 (01:28:31):
What else, dragon, you ever hear of or go to
a place over on I think it's on I think it's.

Speaker 2 (01:28:37):
On Evans Evans or eye left.

Speaker 1 (01:28:40):
I'm trying to remember called the breakfast In, you know,
the breakfast In.

Speaker 2 (01:28:45):
It's been around for fifty years or so.

Speaker 1 (01:28:48):
It's been around since it's been around since nineteen seventy six. Anyway,
it's it's closing. The breakfast In is closing. And what's
happening in a lot of these places, by the way,
the smaller kind of standalone diner ish kind of restaurants
that have been around for a long time. What's happening
is that the real estate that they're on has become

(01:29:10):
so valuable as Denver gets, you know, more and more expensive.
People are buying, you know, owners of the real estate
are selling the real estate because the real estate is
worth so much. And then in a lot of these places,
they're just finding that financially for the owners of the property,
the best tenant is not a restaurant. It's not where
they can make their most money. So you're having place

(01:29:32):
after place shutting down because they essentially someone buys the
land and the new owner will not renew the lease
of the restaurant because they can lease it for more
to somebody else, or maybe they want to use it
for their own purposes. So the Breakfast In will close
permanently at two pm on June eighth.

Speaker 2 (01:29:52):
And I know June eighth.

Speaker 1 (01:29:53):
Is a Sunday because that's the day we were already
talking about with Bill Murray opening for Big Head Todd
at Red Rock. So what you might do is go
have a meal at breakfast In that morning, just before
it closes, and then get over to Red Rocks for
the concert. I talked a little bit in the past
couple of months about twenty three and me and lots

(01:30:17):
of you know, many millions of Americans went through twenty
three and me, I did the thing you spit in
the tube and then they tell you stuff about yourself,
and it did seem quite accurate what they told me
about myself. They're like ninety nine point nine percent Ashkenazi Jewish,
which is what I believe to be true, right, And.

Speaker 2 (01:30:34):
So anyway, it was fun for a while.

Speaker 1 (01:30:38):
And then you know, people sort of didn't seem to
be very interested in anymore, and the people who wanted
to do it had done it, and then you get
these they had a huge problem actually where they had
a data breach and a bunch of data about their
users was released to whoever stole it, whoever got it.
I don't think we really know who took it or
who got it, but that really damaged them a lot

(01:31:00):
because people are thinking, you know, if there's any kind
of information out there that I really don't want floating around,
it's basically my health information because it goes just beyond.

Speaker 2 (01:31:10):
It goes beyond like.

Speaker 1 (01:31:12):
You know, Ross's all jew and Dragon is all Viking, right,
it goes beyond that stuff.

Speaker 2 (01:31:18):
So they ended up filing for bankruptcy.

Speaker 1 (01:31:21):
The woman who was I think a co founder, really
wanted to buy the company out of bankruptcy, but it
ended up being sold to Regeneron, which is a company
that was in the news affair a bit during COVID.
They created some not vaccine, but some kind of treatments.
In fact, I want to say that Donald Trump got
Regeneron treatment for COVID when he got COVID.

Speaker 2 (01:31:44):
In his first term.

Speaker 1 (01:31:45):
So anyway, they're buying it for two hundred and fifty
six million dollars. They say that they are going to
honor and all of the privacy protections that people who
signed up for twenty three and me had expected. I
think I mentioned on the show while back that I
did this process where it took a while because I

(01:32:05):
think so many people were doing it, but where I
asked them to kind of summarize all my data, including
the raw data, and they they send you a link
where you can then download the raw data and then
delete your account. And that's what I did. So I
downloaded all my data. I doubt I will ever need
or use it for anything, and then I deleted my
account because I didn't know who would buy this thing,

(01:32:27):
and I didn't know what would happen with the data,
and I just didn't want to have that risk, and
there's no upside for me to keeping my account there,
so I closed it. So Regeneron is buying it and
they say they're going to take good care of everything.

Speaker 2 (01:32:41):
Now.

Speaker 1 (01:32:42):
One of the other things that really jumped out at
me in this story.

Speaker 2 (01:32:46):
It's just a small thing, but I noticed this kind
of thing from time to.

Speaker 1 (01:32:49):
Time, and it always strikes me as interesting how people
can spend an immense amount of money that ends up
being absolutely wasted in a fairly short period of time.
Even some people you'd think of as very smart business
people can make these decisions and they just end up,
you know, just completely blowing up. And uh, actually, before

(01:33:10):
I get to the regenera on twenty three and meters
aspect of that, I think one of my favorite examples,
and I don't actually know how this worked out for Yahoo,
but Mark Cuban sold his I guess it was a video.

Speaker 2 (01:33:22):
I think it was a video thing, kind of like YouTube.

Speaker 1 (01:33:24):
But before that he sold it to if I remember right,
he sold it to Yahoo. And Mark Cuban, of course billionaire,
owns the Dallas Mavericks all that.

Speaker 2 (01:33:32):
And my recollection of the story is.

Speaker 1 (01:33:36):
That when Mark c and this could be apocryphal, this
could be urban legend, but the urban legend at least
is that when Mark Cuban sold his company to Yahoo
at some insane price, he then went and shorted Yahoo
stuck like betting on Yahoo stock going down. And he
and basically his argument was, any company stupid enough to

(01:33:59):
pay what Yahoo just paid me for my business is
a company that is not going to succeed. And so
after Yahoo paid him all this money, then he went
and bed against Yahoo because he said they paid me
way way too much. There were a lot of transactions
like that with people paying way too much during the
kind of internet boom ninety nine.

Speaker 2 (01:34:21):
Two thousand, that kind of timeframe.

Speaker 1 (01:34:23):
Going back to the twenty three and Me thing, So
twenty three and Me had a telehealth subsidiary I did
not know this, called Lemonade Health. And as part of
this deal where Regeneron is buying twenty three and Me,
they are not buying Lemonade Health. So Lemonade Health is
just gonna shut down and it'll be gone, and I

(01:34:45):
don't care. But the reason that I wanted to mention
it to you is that twenty three and Me bought
Lemonade Health just four years ago for four hundred million
dollars and now it's worthless. And I always think it's
fascinating when these big businesses, these public company that theoretically
have boards of directors that are fairly smart, do this.

Speaker 2 (01:35:05):
Kind of thing.

Speaker 1 (01:35:05):
By the way, twenty three and Me at its top,
because it was a public company at its top, was
worth about six billion dollars and it just got sold
off in bankruptcy for two hundred and fifty six million dollars. Mandy,
did you ever spit into that tube? And do the
twenty three and me things.

Speaker 7 (01:35:20):
No, but I actually I am thinking about doing one
of these other sort of DNA tests where they tell you,
like what exercises are best for your body, what foods
you should eat. I mean they're getting very very specific now,
so I'm kind of fascinated by that. But my brother
did one and my sister did one, so eh, you know,
I kind of got everything, like we're all from the

(01:35:40):
same tree.

Speaker 1 (01:35:41):
So so before you read whatever reports you got from
your brother and sister, like how much did you think
you knew about your genealogy?

Speaker 7 (01:35:49):
And full on east. I am so Western European it's
not even funny. I'm kind of Eastern European. One half
of me is Hungarian like that, okay, and then the
other half is like Mutts, you know, Scottish English whatever.
We're like the whitest Honky family. But we are four
percent Neanderthal in my family.

Speaker 2 (01:36:06):
Four percent.

Speaker 4 (01:36:08):
I mean, I don't know.

Speaker 7 (01:36:09):
What that says, except I mean I feel like at
this stage of the game, that's probably a good thing.
And if we go to a post apocalyptic world, I've
got a.

Speaker 2 (01:36:18):
Shot y, you know, I don't know, we'll see, can.

Speaker 7 (01:36:21):
I tell you my George Went story really fast. So
I told this yesterday on the air, but I thought
about it last night and I thought about more detail
because I just thought of it yesterday when we found
out he died. So I was working as a producer
on a show in Orlando and evening show and we're
interviewing George Went. He's coming in the studio. So this
is like the late nineties, right, So this is before IMDb,
this is before the Internet allowed you to just find

(01:36:43):
out whatever about everyone. So he's in the green room
waiting thirty seconds before he comes on the air. The
publicist walks in and goes, oh, hey, guys, he doesn't
really want to talk about cheers.

Speaker 2 (01:36:55):
What we were like, what what? What are we supposed
to talk about?

Speaker 7 (01:37:02):
And he was starring in a play or something. I mean,
it was something he was he was promoting a project.
There was a reason he was coming on it. Obviously
it was so successful. I can't remember what it was.
But the interview was like, hey, how you doing? I mean,
because you got nothing at that point, like until you
looked at variety, could you have told me one other
thing that the man did?

Speaker 2 (01:37:22):
Oh maybe fletch? And that was it.

Speaker 7 (01:37:24):
Oh God, it was so awkward and he was he
was very nice. George went was very nice. But it
was just like you just walked in and pulled the
rug out from under us and didn't hand us anything
like talk about this instead.

Speaker 1 (01:37:36):
I wonder if that's when he was maybe trying to
promote the new TV show that he did after Cheers
that only lasted, wasn't that.

Speaker 7 (01:37:43):
I looked at it, and that was before that was
then ninety five, and this had to have been at
least ninety eight ninety nine. Yeah, so I don't remember
what he was promoting, but I'll never forget. It was
like what do we do?

Speaker 2 (01:37:54):
Like? So we were just like, are you enjoying? Orlando?

Speaker 7 (01:37:57):
I just gotta it was the most surface interview ever
eighties GD stars.

Speaker 2 (01:38:02):
I have a lot of those stories.

Speaker 7 (01:38:04):
The guy from Chips, not Paunch, but John uh huh.
He stuck his talking about my throat and what he
met me at the radio station. Literally put his song
in my mouth, kiss me on the mouth, and put
his tongue in my mouth and I went, ah, like,
I was like, WHOA stop doing that?

Speaker 2 (01:38:23):
It was weird. That's definitely weird.

Speaker 1 (01:38:27):
I'm guessing you and I so i'd never talked to
George went, Yeah, I'm guessing you and I have both
talked to John Ratzenberger.

Speaker 7 (01:38:32):
Yes, And as a matter of fact, I'm hoping to
get to interview him again on.

Speaker 2 (01:38:35):
The side project, on what project? On the side project?
What's that the side project? Your side project?

Speaker 6 (01:38:42):
Yes, he's very involved in the trades and apprenticeship and
things like that, and so we're trying to get him
on because it's the end of the school year, graduation
is happening, and I guarantee you there's a ton of
people in this listening audience who have kids that are like,
I have no idea what I want to pay when.

Speaker 2 (01:38:59):
I well my kid.

Speaker 1 (01:39:01):
Yep.

Speaker 7 (01:39:01):
So trade school, apprenticeships, those things are they are kind
of cool now, Whereas before, if you didn't go to college,
you were like second tier. But now kids are coming out,
they're going to trade school for two years and they're
coming out and they're getting jobs making seventy five eighty
thousand dollars a.

Speaker 2 (01:39:17):
Year, yeah, without one hundred and forty thousand in debt.

Speaker 7 (01:39:19):
Doing a high skill job. So I think trade school
is coming back, which is good.

Speaker 1 (01:39:24):
Listener texts Mandy just four percent. I'd ask for a retest.
That seems a bit low.

Speaker 4 (01:39:29):
Fuck.

Speaker 7 (01:39:29):
I didn't know that people could still be me, so
imagine my surprise.

Speaker 2 (01:39:33):
All right, let's do this real quick.

Speaker 1 (01:39:35):
Retired library and opens world's first book scented candle shop
woman loses the ability to speak a language she's fluent in.
Teenage monkeys are kidnapping baby monkeys from other monkeys for fun.
UK supermarkets are warning customers that strawberries are too big.

Speaker 2 (01:39:56):
Okay, number four is so dumb.

Speaker 7 (01:39:58):
It has to be real, has to be. I'm gonna
say monkeys are not stealing babies.

Speaker 2 (01:40:03):
That is fake.

Speaker 7 (01:40:04):
I'm going to say that.

Speaker 1 (01:40:05):
Not human babies, monkey baby steal monkey babies.

Speaker 7 (01:40:08):
I just I don't think that teenage monkeys are.

Speaker 2 (01:40:10):
Are that mean?

Speaker 1 (01:40:13):
Listener text John from Chips is Chris Pine's dad?

Speaker 2 (01:40:16):
Shut up?

Speaker 1 (01:40:17):
I haven't gone to very I haven't gone to fact check, No, Chris,
I have not gone to fact check dad.

Speaker 7 (01:40:23):
They do look alike. All right, Oh my gosh, you
did No, that's not him. Did I have the no
that that guy was the sergeant? He was sergeant get
geitrare or whatever?

Speaker 2 (01:40:34):
In what in chick your father?

Speaker 6 (01:40:36):
Robert Pine.

Speaker 2 (01:40:36):
Yeah, the guy who played their boss.

Speaker 7 (01:40:38):
No, who was who was John in Chips? What is
his name?

Speaker 2 (01:40:42):
I think he's dead now? Larry Wilcox. No, he's still alive. No,
Larry Wilcox, diad dragon. If Mandy has it right, what
does she win? Jim Morrison's bust.

Speaker 1 (01:40:51):
The actual fake headline is retired library and opens worlds.

Speaker 2 (01:40:57):
Candleshop, You are fake news. I wanted to be true.
What you got coming up?

Speaker 7 (01:41:02):
I got David Strom coming on from hot air dot com.
He wrote a column in defense of Thomas Matthew, so
of course you know I had to have him on
and talk about this. We're elseo gonna have weather Wednesday,
and we're just gonna talk about the big beautiful bill
that is big, but it is not beautiful.

Speaker 2 (01:41:17):
Did you do a rundown on this thing yet? I
talked about it briefly.

Speaker 1 (01:41:20):
As long as you have given the opening here, folks,
go to Rosskominski dot substack dot com. This is my
substack for today and the title of it is take
another bite, and it means meaning take another bite of
that bleep sandwich. God what that bill is?

Speaker 7 (01:41:34):
Yes, and it is a crap sandwich. So that's all
coming up.

Speaker 2 (01:41:37):
Next stick around for Mandy