06-12-25 - *FULL SHOW* Middle East rumblings; CO's insane insurance costs; Bison! - The Ross Kaminsky Show

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
We have a lot to do on today's show. This
is one of those things. I'm looking at my so
called show sheet right now and I see like literally
forty things, and I'm not going to get to all
of them, so we'll just do what we can. It's
just going to be that kind of day. So this
is a story that should probably be getting more attention

(00:20):
than it is. And I'll give you a couple of
versions of the headline. ABC News' version of the headline
is Trump confirms US personnel are being removed from parts of.

Speaker 2 (00:31):
The Middle East.

Speaker 1 (00:32):
Axios's headline is US evacuating personnel from the Middle East
amid growing tensions with Iran. Another ABC headline is State
Department orders departure of non essential staff from Baghdad Embassy.
Let me share with you a little bit more from
this last one. The State Department is ordering the departure

(00:53):
of all non essential staff from its embassy in Bagdad
due to concern over increased security risks in the rein
President quoting now from an embassy official, President Trump is
committed to keeping Americans safe, both both at home and abroad.
In keeping with that commitment, we are constantly assessing the
appropriate personnel posture at all our embassies. Based on our

(01:15):
later latest analysis, we decided to reduce our mission in Iraq.
So I guess that's not the only place. There's a
few places where they're reducing the number of American staff.

Speaker 2 (01:27):
So you might ask yourself why, Well.

Speaker 1 (01:29):
The Axios headline gives a bit of a clue where
they say amid growing tensions with Iran, and there's a
couple of things here that are very much worth noting.
So a little over twenty four hours ago, so let
me just back up, there's supposed to be another round
of US Iran nuclear negotiations this weekend in I think

(01:55):
they're supposed to be in Cutter and it's unclear at
this point whether these negotiations are even going to happen.
And it's well known, and I think it's intentionally well known,
by which I mean, I think there was a tactical

(02:15):
purpose to make sure that the world heard the news
that Iran, that Israel wanted to strike Iran, and that
Donald Trump said, no, don't do that, at least not
right now. I'm working on diplomacy. And I think that
was made known publicly to put pressure on Iran. The

(02:37):
problem is it doesn't seem to be working, and clearly
Iran understands that obviously Israel is thinking about attacking them,
but the United States may be thinking about either joining
in on the attack or at least doing so much
to support Israel that it's just short of a joint attack,

(02:59):
but my as well be a joint attack. And Iran
is aware of all of this, and so here's a
headline from Reuters from yesterday. Iran threatens to strike US
bases in region if military conflict arises. So now you
understand why the US is reducing the number of American

(03:21):
personnel at its embassy in Baghdad, because not only is
Baghdad obviously in easy missile or rocket range from Iran,
which borders Iraq, but also Iraq is full of pro
Iranian militias who you could imagine would be more than

(03:43):
willing and would be enthusiastic about hurling themselves at the
American embassy and hurling you know, bombs and rockets and
RPGs and Molotov cocktails and.

Speaker 2 (03:55):
Anything and anything else.

Speaker 1 (03:56):
And many of them wouldn't be worried about eye while
they're doing it. And so it's wise of Americans to know,
mostly get out of the way. A little more from Reuters.
If nuclear negotiations fail and conflict arises with the United States,
Iran will strike American bases in the region. Defense Minister
Aziz Nasr Zadath said on Wednesday that would be yesterday,

(04:19):
days ahead of a planned sixth round of Iran US
nuclear talks. Some officials, so again there's the same guy
quoting here. Some officials on the other side threaten conflict
if negotiations don't come to fruition. If a conflict is
imposed on us, all US bases are within our reach
and we will boldly target them in host countries.

Speaker 2 (04:43):
So they're saying they don't mind.

Speaker 1 (04:45):
They're saying the fact that an American military base is
in some other country will not deter them from striking
that American military basis, for example, if it's in cutter
or Bahrain or Iraq or wherever. So this all said
pretty serious, and I do think we need to take
it seriously. It doesn't mean you and I have any
control over it, but I just wanted you to be

(05:07):
very very aware of it. And I'm going to keep
going with this. There are so many parts to this story.

Speaker 2 (05:16):
So this also, and all.

Speaker 1 (05:18):
These things tie together, and it wouldn't surprise me if
you haven't heard any of them, or maybe only heard one.
But this story is actually just from the past less
than twenty four hours. The United Nations, the United Nations
Nuclear Watchdogs Board of Governors. Yes, so this would be today,

(05:40):
earlier today, because it says on Thursday. But it's Europe,
so there, however, many hours ahead, eight hours ahead, or
something like that. The United Nations Nuclear Watchdogs Board of
Governors earlier today formally found that Iran is not complying
with its nuclear obligations for the first time in twenty years. Now,
that doesn't mean for the first time in twenty years
Iran isn't complying. What it means is for the first

(06:02):
time in twenty years, the United Nations has formally found
that Iran isn't complying. That sentence should have been written
a little better, a move that could lead to further
tensions and set in motion and effort to restore United
Nations sanctions on Tehran later this year. Okay, so even
the UN now is saying Iran's breaking the rules and

(06:24):
enriching towards a weapon in violation of whatever their rules
and commitments might be. And then, as if that's not enough,
here's another one for you, also from today the International Okay,
some of this would be redundant, but the International Atomic

(06:45):
Energy Agency passed the resolution today declaring that Iran is
a non compliance with its nuclear safeguard obligations. Iran reacted immediately,
saying it will establish a new enrichment facility and scale
up uranium enrichment after the vote against Iran by the IAEA.
The announcement said the facility will be in a secure

(07:06):
location and that other measures.

Speaker 2 (07:08):
Are also being planned.

Speaker 1 (07:11):
Wow. Wow, this does sound like we are on a
path to war with Iran. It's not inevitable, and Trump
is the most anti war president of my lifetime. But
Donald Trump is made very clear that Iran can't have
a nuclear weapon, which means that Iran can't have the

(07:33):
enriched uranium with which to make a nuclear weapon, because
if you have that, the rest can come pretty easily.
And now they're saying, hey, not only do we not
care that you say we're not complying with our obligations,
We're actually gonna ramp it up and make another uranium

(07:54):
enrichment location. I don't know exactly why Iran is playing
it this way with Donald Trump, given that in his
first term, Donald Trump send the sent the Ninja missile,
the Ginsu knife missile to turn the head of the IRGC,
one of the world's leading terrorists, cost some Sulamani into

(08:17):
so much steak tartar when he had landed in Iraq
to go visit with some other terrorists. I don't know
what I realized that that Trump is an anti war president,
and he is, but that's not the same thing as
saying that he won't do anything. He's not Joe Biden,
and if I were Iran, I would be treading very
carefully right now, listener says, I think Iran wants a

(08:40):
nuclear war because they think it will unleash the twelfth Imam,
who is stuck in a well. Their previous president has
talked about this. People thought he was crazy, so there
is something to that. There is something to that. There
is certainly an apocalyptic bent to some of the Islamo
fascist rulers and the previous pres And his name was

(09:00):
Ahmed Dinajad. He was He was every bit as crazy
as the as the Mollahs, which is why he became president. Right.
The mulas get to decide who's even allowed to be
a candidate. So when you hear something like a reform president,
a reform minded president in Iran, right, that means.

Speaker 2 (09:22):
That like, instead of wanting.

Speaker 1 (09:23):
To kill all the Jews right now, they want to
kill him just after lunch. Right, that's the reform minded
president in Iran. But do they want a nuclear war?

Speaker 2 (09:34):
I don't think so. I actually believe it or not.

Speaker 1 (09:39):
Most, not all, but most of the jihadists that you
hear about who are willing to die in service of jihad,
most of them are Sunni, not nearly as many Shiite,
which is what Iran is.

Speaker 2 (09:54):
And I actually don't think.

Speaker 1 (09:58):
This leadership group, I actually don't think they have a
death wish. They probably don't fear death as much as
let's say Americans do, but I actually don't think they
want a death wish. And I don't think all the
leadership of that country believes this twelve femam stuff. So
I think I think what you say is true of
some people, but I don't think it's true of the

(10:20):
people who matter the most. All right, let's do something
a little different. I'm I'm really enjoying a lot of
these little AI stories I'm seeing from time to time,
and I want to share this one with you because
it's such an interesting cautionary tale how we have to
be really careful thinking about what is the actual input

(10:44):
into these systems and what is the output, and if
the output is somewhat surprising, you know, going back and
really thinking about why is it doing what it's doing.
Is it as smart as we think or is it
a stupid as we think. So this next one is

(11:05):
about what's called a neural network, which sort of an
early kind of version of AI, a computer network that learns.
It wasn't quite as sophisticated as AI is now, but
it's conceptually similar. And this is a story that I
think this actually happened several years ago, but I just
wanted to share it to you because it's such a

(11:25):
great object lesson. So they were teaching this neural network
how to look at a picture of a person's skin
and determine whether a mark on there was skin cancer
or skin cancer or not. You know, is it skin cancer,

(11:47):
isn't a mole, is it a freckle or whatever. But
if it's skin cancer, you want to catch it, and
you want to get rid of it before it spreads
and kills you. So I'll just share this with you.
And this is from a website called venturebeet dot com
and they're quoting an author named Brian Christian who wrote
a book called The Alignment Problem Algorithms to Live By.

Speaker 2 (12:10):
Yeah, these are different books. The alignment problem.

Speaker 1 (12:12):
The alignment problem, by the way, means making sure that
the goals that AI systems are trying to achieve are
the goals that humans would want the AI systems to
try to achieve, so that it, you know, the the
an alignment problem going badly is what creates sky net, right,
and the terminator and these AI systems that turn on

(12:35):
humans and how Okay, so that's the alignment problem. So anyway,
that's who's that's who they ask about this. This guy
and I'm quoting now points to an example of the
neural network that famously had reached a level of accuracy
comparable to human dermatologists at diagnosing malignant skin lesions, meaning

(12:55):
skin cancer. Now listen to this part however closer. Okay,
so let me just back this up for a second.
When the doctors were checking people for skin cancer and
feeding the pictures of the skin into the neural network.
When the doctors saw something they thought might be skin cancer,

(13:19):
they want to know how big it is. So they
take a fine ruler and they put it on the
skin right next to the mark so they can see
or right next to the thing the lesion, so they
can see how big the lesion is. So they got
the ruler right next to it, take a picture so
for their own reference, and.

Speaker 2 (13:36):
Then also they feed that picture into the AI.

Speaker 1 (13:40):
So a closer examination of the model's saliency methods revealed
that the single most influential thing the model was looking
for in a picture of someone's skin in determining whether
or not it was skin cancer was are you ready
for this? The presence of a ruler because medical issues.

(14:03):
Because medical images of cancerous lesions include a ruler for scale,
the model learned to identify the presence of a ruler
as a marker of malignancy because that's much easier than
actually being able to tell the difference between different kinds
of lesions from a picture. Now, I don't think they

(14:26):
ended up really using this. I think they sort of
They figured it out soon enough that they weren't using
this as a diagnostic tool, But it's just the kind
of thing I want to make sure we all understand.

Speaker 2 (14:36):
Remember garbage in, garbage out.

Speaker 1 (14:39):
You did hear a fair bit of talk this morning
on Colorado's Morning News about breaking story that the.

Speaker 2 (14:47):
Denver Broncos.

Speaker 1 (14:49):
They haven't announced it themselves, but it's become clear that
the Denver Broncos have been buying up a bunch of
land around an area called Burnham Yard, which is from
west to east basically between I twenty five and Spear
and from north to south between sixth Avenue and Colfax.

(15:09):
Like if you know where, what's that crazy steak restaurant
called Buckhorn the Buckhorn Exchange.

Speaker 2 (15:15):
It's kind of in that area.

Speaker 1 (15:17):
They've been buying up a bunch of land around there,
and people are thinking that maybe they're the new Broncos
stadium would go there. I don't think I have a
lot to add to the story right now, and my
colleagues talked about it at fair bid in Colorado's Morning News.
I wanted to share another story with you that I
just saw this morning about another sports team or teams

(15:38):
actually potentially and land here in the Denver metro area.
This comes from the Denver Business Journal, Kronkey Sports and
Entertainment's land ownership near Denver's Ball Arena just got bigger,
a lot bigger. Ks. And so these guys own the
Nuggets and the Avalanche and the Mammoth and what doesn't

(16:00):
he own the Rams or something?

Speaker 2 (16:02):
I think he think he owns the Rams as well.

Speaker 1 (16:05):
So they're just they're huge, huge in sports, huge in
real estate. The Kronky family, all right, KSE, Kronky Sports
and Entertainment. So they purchased the they purchased from a
company called Revesco Properties, their interest in what's called the
River Mile Development, which is, again quoting from the Denver

(16:28):
Business Journal, a sixty two acre project along the South
Platte River north of Ball Arena that includes Elich Gardens.

Speaker 2 (16:39):
Yeah, that includes Elitch Gardens.

Speaker 1 (16:41):
And the sale includes that stuff with Elich and the
water park and all this, and then going north to well,
the address is thirteen thirty eight First Street, but that's
where miaw Wolf is right now, right, So if you
if you're driving up up by twenty five and you

(17:02):
look left when you get to Callfex, this huge mew
Wolf building. And so now KSE owns all this stuff
and they've got huge plans. We've been talking about them
a little bit on the show as far as they've
just submitted their first draft of plans to redevelop one
of the parking lots just on the side of Ballerina
with all you know, multi use stuff, retail and restaurant

(17:25):
and residential and parking, underground parking and stuff like that.
So anyway, it's a it's a big deal. It's a
big deal, and they're going to, you know, just keep
developing this this area. The last paragraph of the Business
Journal story says the River Mile development is a twenty
to twenty five year project. Upon completion, it's expected to

(17:48):
create over twenty five thousand jobs, house up to sixteen
and a half thousand residents, and generate up to three
point one billion dollars in annual net economic and fiscal benefits.

Speaker 2 (18:00):
So there you go.

Speaker 1 (18:02):
And you know, assuming they get this done, and of
course they'll get it done, I don't know about whether
they'll get it done on time or on budget, whether
they'll run over, whether they'll run under.

Speaker 2 (18:12):
Maybe they will, depends much.

Speaker 1 (18:14):
I think depends on how much the City of Denver
impedes development with with you know, inspections and bureaucracy and
red tape, which I don't think they want to do,
so you know they'll get it done. And then the
question is what what will that impact be on Denver
as a tourist destination? And I think it could, believe
it could be a massively positive thing.

Speaker 2 (18:38):
It really could.

Speaker 1 (18:38):
And it's it's not all that far from where they're
talking about the new Broncos Stadium might be, and you know,
imagine this incredible area. It's not. It's it's more like
two areas. Now I won't call it quite one. They're
they're they're not quite close enough to call it one area.
But imagine two areas fairly close together, right in a city,

(19:04):
not in the suburbs that are that are new and
vibrant and beautiful and detractive and have places you want
to go and places you want to eat, and places
you want to shop and things you want to do.
It could be a really wonderful thing for Denver. It's

(19:25):
not gonna be next week, it's not gonna be next year.
It's not going to be this decade, but it might
not be much longer, especially with the Broncos thing right
because their lease is up I forget what year, twenty
thirty one.

Speaker 2 (19:38):
I think something like that.

Speaker 1 (19:39):
They've got I think five or six years to build
a new stadium, assuming they're going to build a new stadium,
and I think they will. So you know, we're talking
about early next decade, which isn't all that long. We
could see some massive, really beneficial changes to Denver. One
just has to hope that Denver Rights stop electing such
terrible politicians and maybe start electing some people who become

(20:03):
part of the solution rather than part of the problem.

Speaker 2 (20:05):
But that maybe maybe a little bit a little bit overly.

Speaker 1 (20:09):
Optimistic on my part, that might be the triumph of
the triumph of hope over experience, which I am not
immune to. So let's do this, Okay, all right, we'll
see if we got him. I don't see him, but
I see his name, and hopefully he's with us. I
recently read a really fun new thriller novel called Black Sunrising.

Speaker 2 (20:33):
By Otho Eskin ot h O E.

Speaker 3 (20:37):
S K.

Speaker 2 (20:37):
I n super interesting name, I have to say.

Speaker 1 (20:40):
And this book was just published a couple of days ago,
and I am very happy to have Othoeskin on the show,
both to talk about the book, and what seems like
a really fascinating career that at least somewhat informs you know,
what's in the plots of his books.

Speaker 2 (20:57):
Otho Eskin. Welcome to Koa.

Speaker 4 (21:00):
I'm delighted to be here.

Speaker 1 (21:01):
Are you hearing me? I am?

Speaker 2 (21:02):
I am hearing you. I am hearing you.

Speaker 1 (21:04):
Just fine, You're welcome to You're welcome to put your
camera on if you want to. Only you and I
will see each other. But if you don't want to,
that's okay too. All right, there you go, all right, I.

Speaker 4 (21:15):
Can see you visually.

Speaker 2 (21:17):
Okay, all right, thank you very much for that.

Speaker 1 (21:19):
So, first of all, a really fun and entertaining book
and quite an interesting plot. I don't want to give
away too much, but you know, from what do you tell?
Just as much of the plot as you would as
you would like to, so people still go buy the book.

Speaker 4 (21:34):
Well delighted.

Speaker 5 (21:36):
First place, I'm delighted to enjoin you and thank you
for having me. The story behind Black Sun Rising is
a DC homicide detective named Mark marco Zorn, who was
my same character in all of my previous books, and
it accidentally learns a plot that an extreme right wing

(22:01):
organization called.

Speaker 4 (22:02):
Black Sun is planning.

Speaker 5 (22:04):
He does not know what's going to be he does
not know who's behind it, but he sets out to
try to discover this. He this organization has detonated a
bomb in downtown Washington, d C. So that's the immediate
objective for his investigation. But what he learns is eventually

(22:28):
that there is this organization which was created in the
very end of World War Two and was by the
remnants of the Hitler's regime. Has discovered a weapon that
was Hitler developed in the in the final days of

(22:50):
the war, which was hidden away, and it has been
discovered just recently when they're rebuilding Berlin. When uh when
this when this organization Black Sun Uh, the plans to
use this in a major attempt to overthrow the US government.

Speaker 4 (23:12):
Obviously, marco Zorn.

Speaker 5 (23:14):
Doesn't know that de jails, doesn't know how it's going
to be done, and does not know who Black Son is.
The story of Black Sun Rising is marco Zorn's uh
investigation into this organization, and during that time he realizes
this organization has agents who.

Speaker 4 (23:36):
Are extremely violent.

Speaker 5 (23:39):
One of them, Jews, have to be a woman who's
later described as the bride of the apocalypse.

Speaker 1 (23:45):
So let's let let's all right, that's a that's a
good summary. And and I, you know, as uh as
somebody who is you know, both Jewish and somewhat of.

Speaker 2 (23:55):
A student of World War Two.

Speaker 1 (23:57):
The particular the particular UH weapon that they're worried about
here is is is one that has kind of a
visceral impact when you when you think about it, and
it should Yeah, exactly and uh and and one of
the interesting things about this story is is uh and
it's more at the end in the beginning, but the

(24:19):
fighting and other things going on in tunnels or is
this a tunnel system in it's dc right that that
is it really does it exist.

Speaker 4 (24:32):
Well as I've described it? Probably not.

Speaker 5 (24:35):
All city all big metropolitan areas have an underground world.

Speaker 4 (24:41):
That's where they're all the communication is.

Speaker 5 (24:43):
UH and uh seoage and transportation and whatever they you know,
if you look under beneath the streets in Manhattan or
Boston or or Sacramento, wherever you are, there's a whole
world down there. I invented it as a scene for
the climax.

Speaker 1 (25:03):
Yeah, and again we're talking with Othoesk in his new
book is called Black Sun Rising. It's a really fun thriller,
A great summer read if you want to buy it
and read something just really fun. It was just published
a couple of days ago. We just have several more
minutes out, though. But I wanted to ask you a
little about you, because as I read about you, it
just seems like you've had a fascinating career and I

(25:27):
just wanted to hear a little more about that. I
don't know whether you think the most interesting stuff was
in the army or after that in the Foreign service,
but some of the foreign service stuff really fascinates me.

Speaker 4 (25:43):
Well, thank you, yes, I'm here.

Speaker 5 (25:46):
Well, I got a lot of degree and then went
into the form accepted into the Foreign Service after some
gurly examination processes, and spent twenty five or so years
in the Foreign Service.

Speaker 4 (26:00):
About half that time in Washington, d c.

Speaker 5 (26:02):
And about half that time of serving abroad, and I
served in Syria, and I hardly recognize that today in
yugoslav what was in Yugoslavia no longer exists as a country.

Speaker 4 (26:17):
In Iceland, and my final signum was.

Speaker 5 (26:20):
In Berlin during the closing days of the Cold War,
when that part of East Germany was ruled by the
German Democratic Republic. So I've had experiences a whole range
of regimes, most of them kind of bad. I also
had I was involved in international negotiations of various agreements

(26:46):
of the Sea of the Agreement among other countries, dealing
with the International Space Station, also on deep sea bed mining,
a variety of others. So I had to travel around
the world, which was a wonderful experience. Uh, some of

(27:07):
these treaties didn't work out. Some of these agreements failed,
but some of them are in existence. A lot of
my activity in wrote out of space. This is kind
of a long time ago, and much has changed in
the space race as we used to call it. But
I had a lot to deal with NASA and with

(27:31):
NASA's counter points in other countries, in Europe and in Japan.

Speaker 1 (27:37):
Wow, it just sounds like it is a fascinating, a
really fascinating career. And I know someone I asked you
at some point if you were a spy, and you
said no. Part of me still thinks that's not the
right answer, But I know you wouldn't tell me even
if you were.

Speaker 4 (27:51):
But just no, I wouldn't. But it's true I wasn't.
It was just a simple service officer a secret.

Speaker 1 (28:00):
Uh huh, Well, I think I think a lot of
that experience filters through in subtle ways into the book,
which I really which I really appreciate. Otho Eskin's new
thriller is called Black Sun Rising. It's a very very
fun read. Just published a couple of days ago.

Speaker 2 (28:15):
Otho. Thanks for joining us here on KOA.

Speaker 4 (28:19):
Well, thank you for having me. I enjoyed it all right, me.

Speaker 1 (28:21):
Too, thanks so much. All right, So, yeah, I just
I did. I did read the whole book already. Generally,
I think you know this, and I think I'm a
little bit unusual.

Speaker 2 (28:30):
Among radio talk show hosts in this.

Speaker 1 (28:32):
But more often than not, much more often than not,
when I have an author on the show, I've read
the whole book. Sometimes I haven't quite finished a book,
but more often than not, I've read the whole book.
Let me just do a little tangent here. You may
remember I had Mark Graney on the show. He's one
of the best thriller writers in the world for me.

(28:53):
Mark Graney, Jack Carr, Brad Thor, you know, these are
the elite, right, and there's a few others. And when
I had Mark Greeney on the show last time, I
asked him, do you remember this, Shannon, where you were?

Speaker 2 (29:09):
Yeah?

Speaker 1 (29:09):
I remember, or it was in the beginning of the show.
I asked him what percentage of radio hosts have read
the book when they interview you, and he said it's up.

Speaker 2 (29:22):
To fifteen percent.

Speaker 1 (29:27):
So I think I wouldn't really be doing you a
service if I interviewed authors without having read the book,
or at least most of the book.

Speaker 2 (29:36):
But like I said, probably.

Speaker 1 (29:38):
Ninety percent of the time when I have an author on,
I've read the whole book. So all right, there you go.
Just one Okay, how about this for I don't know
whether Oops quite covers it. Now. You know, I'm I'm
Jewish and I'm a big fan of classic rock, so
I don't know that much about Christian music, but there's
a big genre of Christian music, and I guess there's

(30:02):
a big time or fairly big time Christian music star
named Michael Tait Tai. He was in a band called Newsboys, Shannon,
have you heard of them? And he was in another
Shannon has heard of Them? And he was in another
band called DC Talk, And oh my gosh, this is

(30:25):
just I'll just share with you from Fox News. I
barely even want to offer my own opinion on it.
I'm just going to share this story with you.

Speaker 2 (30:32):
A man known for.

Speaker 1 (30:33):
Singing Christian music, the guy we're just talking about, responded
to allegations of substance abuse and sexual assault of other men,
saying the accusations are quote largely true. Quote recent reports
of my reckulss, my reckless and destructive behavior, including drug
and alcohol abuse and sexual activity are sadly largely true.

(30:57):
For some two decades, I used an abused cope caine,
consumed far too much alcohol, and at times touched men
in an unwonted sensual way.

Speaker 2 (31:08):
I am ashamed of.

Speaker 1 (31:10):
My life choices and actions and make no excuses for them.
I will simply call it what God calls it sin.
The singer went on to say that he left Newsboys
in January to quote get help, wow wow. His comments
came about a week after a report came out from

(31:35):
a group that I here is described as a Christian
investigative journalism outlet called The Roy's Report.

Speaker 2 (31:43):
Roys The Roy's Report.

Speaker 1 (31:46):
With accusations against mister Tate going.

Speaker 2 (31:48):
Back to two thousand and four.

Speaker 1 (31:51):
They say their investigation itself took two and a half
years and included interviews with more than fifty sources. Two
men said that, while they were each twenty two years old,
Tate allegedly fundled their genitals after they had drunk alcohol
with him. Tate said, while I might dispute certain details

(32:11):
in the accusations against me, I do not dispute the
substance of them. So I don't think it would be
wise of me to add anything to that particular story,
other than to say I hope the man gets the
help he needs. I think the.

Speaker 2 (32:28):
Rest of the story speaks for itself.

Speaker 1 (32:33):
All right, let me do this. I've got about one minute.
I can probably do this in a minute. You may
have heard the story of this guy, but a really
bad guy named Mahmoud Khalil, who is a legal permanent
resident right a green card graduate student at Columbia University,
who has been very involved with organizing at least protests

(32:54):
maybe riots in favor.

Speaker 2 (32:57):
Well, now I'm gonna word this in my own biased way.

Speaker 1 (33:00):
I'm not attempting to be fair and balanced to how
I word this. Organizing protests and maybe riots in favor
of terrorism, and in favor of terrorists, and in favor
of killing Jews.

Speaker 2 (33:14):
That's what this guy is about. Now, the State Department ruled.

Speaker 1 (33:19):
That there is a law that allows the State Department
to kick people out of the United States, non citizens
out of the United States, if the State Department believes
that the person is a detriment to American foreign policy. Yesterday,
a federal judge granted a preliminary injunction in favor of

(33:44):
mister Khalil, blocking the government from detaining him or from
deporting him again, based on a State Department memorandum that
said that Khalil's presence quote, compromises a compelling foreign and
policy interest. The judge said the US government cannot claim
an interest in enforcing what appears to be an unconstitutional law.

(34:10):
It goes on from there. It's a very interesting legal argument,
but basically, the judge said that the government has committed
irreparable harm to this guy, to his reputation, costing him
a job, all this kind of stuff, and is now
trying to remove him from the country on the basis

(34:31):
of an extremely vague and unproven claim that his presence
here harms a foreign policy interest and that he demonstrates
the harm by engaging in protected speech. Now, I just
want to say, I think this guy is terrible and
he shouldn't be in the United States of America. But
that doesn't mean the federal government under current law has

(34:54):
the right to remove him. And I think, unfortunately the
judge is probably right. And this this part of the reason,
you know, we need to be very careful if people
try to address this by changing the law somehow, because
remember that bad cases make bad law, play stupid games,
win stupid prizes. Here's the headline from the Associated Press
from a day or two ago, Bison gore's man in

(35:16):
Yellowstone after visitors get too close A bison gordon man Tuesday,
after a large group of visitors got too close to
the animal, and Yellowstone National Park officials said the thirty
year old from Randolph, New Jersey was treated for minor injuries.
You know, I gotta say, a bison goring somebody would
not be the very first thing that leads me to

(35:37):
suspect that the description will be minor injuries. I would
expect something more than minor injuries, unless you know, he
got Gordon the buttocks or something. But if you got
Gordon the abdomen anyway, good for him. Minor injuries.

Speaker 2 (35:50):
He was gored.

Speaker 1 (35:51):
In case you were interested, he was gord around nine
to forty five am. That's a helpful detail in this
article because I'm sure you were wondering just what time
he was gored in the Old Faithful Area. Park officials
didn't release his name or condition. Well they must have
because he said it was minor injuries. Seeing what happened
was under investigation. Well, maybe what happened was a guy
got too close to a bison and the bison gord him.

(36:14):
I don't know. He was the second person gored by
a bison already this spring in Yellowstone, A forty seven
year old man from Florida. Of course, Florida man had
also minor injuries after being gored, and some other place.

Speaker 2 (36:27):
Bison gord at least two people in Yellowstone.

Speaker 1 (36:29):
Last year, an eighty three year old woman from South
Carolina who was seriously injured, and an Arizona woman in
twenty twenty three. Bison have injured more people in Yellowstone
than any other wild animal. They can run up to
thirty five miles an hour, which is faster than the
men's world record in the one hundred meter dash. They
stand up to six feet tall their way up to

(36:50):
two thousand pounds. They are the largest land animal in
North America. Park regulations require visitors to keep at least
twenty five yards, and this is very very helpful. In parentheses,
it says twenty two point eight six meters. That is that,
my friends, is a level of precision in the denoting

(37:14):
of the distance one must stay from a bison. That
is a level of precision that is entirely unnecessary. Imagine
if during COVID, when they were incorrectly telling us that
it will save lots of lives if we stay six
feet apart, Imagine if they had said stay six feet
or two point zero zero meters apart, as if two

(37:39):
point zero one meters or two point zero two meters,
which isn't exactly six feet anyway, but you get my
point two yards. Okay, let's say two yards instead of meters,
two point zero zero yards as if, as if.

Speaker 2 (37:53):
One point nine to nine or one point nine eight.

Speaker 1 (37:55):
Yards would be fatal. I just love that, So okay,
just nerd out with me for a stime. Do you
remember this show a hands if you remember what I'm
about to tell you now, I'm going back now to
like fifth grade math, but I have this this recollection
in very very early math classes, where you were sort

(38:17):
of converting a number into some other format. Anyway, the
principle was your answer should never represent more precision than
the original number. So in this case, twenty five yards
has to remember the concept.

Speaker 2 (38:34):
Of significant digits.

Speaker 1 (38:35):
This has two significant digits twenty five two five, and
that means if you're gonna then convert it to meters,
you can't have four significant digits twenty two point eighty six,
because it's not twenty five point zero zero yards necessarily.

Speaker 2 (38:54):
Anyway, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm nerding out with you.

Speaker 1 (38:56):
It just it just jumped out at me, right, and
then okay, so twenty two point eighty six meters away,
you have to stay that far from bison another large herbivores,
and you have to stay one hundred yards and then
in this case ninety one meters. It is a ninety
one point one seven meters, just ninety one. They did
that right, ninety one meters away from wolves and bears. Anyway,

(39:18):
play stupid games, win stupid prizes. Colorado Springs D eleven
School District. We've talked about them on some other issue recently,
and I don't even remember what it was, but we've
talked about these guys recently.

Speaker 2 (39:31):
Yesterday they voted six to one.

Speaker 1 (39:33):
Their Board of Education voted six to one to approve
a new policy entitled Preserving Fairness and Safety in Sports,
And I'm quoting from the Colorado Springs Gazette. It will
classify sports teams as either male men or boys, female
men or girls I'm sorry, female women or girls, or

(39:57):
co ed, mixed or open, So that first category or
would be all males, the second category would be all females,
in the third category would be anybody. And as the
Denver Gazette puts it, this will ensure that students are
not allowed to participate in sports, be present in locker
rooms or lodge in hotels with members of the opposite

(40:20):
biological sex.

Speaker 2 (40:21):
Of course, they will be able to in the co
ed team.

Speaker 1 (40:24):
So this wasn't written very well by that reporter, but
they will make sure that students aren't allowed to participate
in sports that are segregated by gender, or be present
in the other gender's locker room or lodge in hotel
rooms with people who are the other biological sex. There

(40:44):
was only one no vote, a director named Julie at Ott.
She said the policy is illegal, it's hateful, and it
benefits no one. I think that's wrong. Now, look as
for whether it's illegal, hmm, might it might it be?
Ill I llegal under state law. There's a chance. I'm
not an expert on the state law on this stuff.

(41:04):
It's not impossible. Is it illegal under federal law? Almost
certainly not illegal under federal law. Then there's a chance
that the Colorado state law itself, whatever state law someone
would use to say that this is illegal, there's a
chance that the Colorado state law itself is illegal under
federal law. The main thing, though, that I think is
important to push back on, is when this director says

(41:28):
that a policy to keep boys out of girls sports
is hateful and benefits no one. Both of those things
are not true. There are some people who have extremely
negative views of transgender people, maybe even going so far
that you would call them hateful.

Speaker 2 (41:44):
Mostly I think that's not the case.

Speaker 1 (41:47):
But it's patently false to say that it benefits nobody
to keep boys, especially boys who have gone through puberty,
out of competitive girls sports. I don't need to explain
why this director, Julie Ott might or might not be
well intended, but she's definitely wrong. I'll just tell you

(42:07):
what I'm seeing here on TV. I'm seeing I'm seeing
Donald Trump signing a bill right now that kills California's
electric vehicle mandate. That's quite an amazing thing now that
this is the way it's being worded, right kills California's
EV mandate. They're a bunch of smiling Republicans standing around him.

(42:31):
I see the I see John Thune, who is majority
leader in the Senate. I see Mike Mike Johnson, who
is Speaker of the House. So the biggest of the
big are here for this signing. I also see Transportation
Secretary Sean Duffy there, and this obviously falls into falls
into that, and I think I'll have to read a

(42:54):
little more. But I'm not sure whether what this does
is something as narrow is killing the EV mandate, or
whether it's something more broad, which is what I think
that it is, that it ends California's waiver. Let's listen in, mister,

(43:16):
all right, Brian, yeahs, yes, sir.

Speaker 6 (43:19):
I have some very close friends run some of the
largest auto dealer say something.

Speaker 4 (43:24):
House working post at all.

Speaker 6 (43:30):
Behind right now, they know they're going through some solid
sales carrierschoof what's your.

Speaker 1 (43:37):
Message to a prompts question that I've navigating to this
terrible all right, So he's taking reporters questions, and I'll
move away from that because it's not on the thing
that I just mentioned.

Speaker 2 (43:48):
Just before he stood.

Speaker 1 (43:49):
Up to take reporters questions, and that was the first
reporter's question, and it was about tariffs and car dealerships
and such, and it's a legit question.

Speaker 2 (43:55):
I just don't want to deal with it right now.

Speaker 1 (43:57):
Uh, But it was very interesting to see all these
happy people and he's sitting there signing this thing, and
I think it's great. And we talked about this the
other day with Will tour who heads up the Colorado
Energy Office here in Colorado. The fact that this was
likely to be coming, and you know, this is very

(44:17):
technical stuff and I'm not going to say I understand
it all. There are certain parts of California's environmental regulations,
including mandates for vehicle mileage efficiency, that Colorado has adopted.
John Haickenlooper did this when he was governor. Jared Polus

(44:39):
continued it. I've hated it since the very first day.
I understand it actually a little better than I used to.
In this sense, the way the law is structured, states
can either take the federal requirements or California's requirements, but
they can't make up their own. So when you have

(45:00):
very liberal states that want to be more environmentally radical.

Speaker 2 (45:05):
Well I would put it that way, they wouldn't put
it that way.

Speaker 1 (45:08):
Then the federal mandates and they want to require more efficient,
thiss and greener, that their only real choice is to
adopt the California standards because they are not allowed to
adopt their own.

Speaker 2 (45:21):
And now, as I think what the.

Speaker 1 (45:24):
Bill is that he just signed, because it was described
as ending California's electric vehicle.

Speaker 2 (45:29):
Mandate, but I think it's more than that. I think
it's more than that.

Speaker 1 (45:32):
I think it was the bill to end California's waiver
so that they can no longer make up their own standards,
because that was how they were creating effectively an electric
vehicle mandate by saying, Okay, under our vehicle efficiency standards,
it has to be up to such and such, basically

(45:52):
a number that's impossible in terms of miles per gallon
without having many or most or eventual all of the
vehicles being electric so I was a very very happy group.

Speaker 2 (46:05):
I think partly they were happy because.

Speaker 1 (46:07):
They actually don't like the California policy, and partly they
were happy because that's a big bunch of Republicans that
just really likes to dump on California where whenever they can.
And I have to say, I kinda don't blame them.
We have so much more still to do on the show.
I want to talk a little bit about Home Depot

(46:29):
in two different contexts, Home Depot in the context of
immigration and Home Depot in the context of retail theft.

Speaker 2 (46:38):
We're going to do all of that right after this
on Kawa.

Speaker 1 (46:40):
By the way, our iHeart Music Festival presented by Capitol
One is back September nineteenth and twentieth in Las Vegas,
one of a Rod's favorite cities, with live performances by
Jelly Roll, Mariah Carey, Tim McGraw, The Offspring, Brian Adams,
and more. iHeartRadio dot Com slash Capital one. To get

(47:00):
your tickets, check out the Capital one access pass.

Speaker 2 (47:02):
Before they're gone.

Speaker 1 (47:04):
Alright, let's talk about Home Depot in two different contexts.
By the way, I really like Home Depot. I've been there.
I was just there yesterday buying some stuff for the
house that we're remodeling. So home depot is important in
two different stories, one more national than the other. But

(47:27):
I want to talk about both with you a little bit.
So first we'll talk about the immigration side. So let
me just set a macro kind of picture first. When
Prisident Trump came into office and was introducing Tom Holman
in particular and to a certain degree Christinome, but Tom

(47:50):
Holman really is taking point on the deportation efforts. The
talk was about and mostly remains about deporting illegal alien criminals,
by which I mean somebody who committed a crime while
in the United States of America. So I'm not interested

(48:11):
in people telling me, well, they got here illegally, so
all of them are criminals. That's a dumb argument, and
I'm not interested in it. But somebody who robbed a store, raped,
somebody killed, somebody drove drunk, even criminals. Those are the people,
but especially the gang members and hardened criminals that the
Trump administration said these are our priority as well they

(48:36):
should be, and the American people want that. The American
people want a federal government that deports illegal alien criminals
who are risks and parasites in our cities. I think

(49:04):
that most Americans don't want ICE showing up at more
or less ordinary businesses looking for illegal aliens who maybe
have been working there for three years or five years
or seventeen years or whatever and not committing a crime,

(49:24):
offering their labor, doing a job, and then going home
to their families and all that.

Speaker 2 (49:30):
And I realized their illegal aliens.

Speaker 1 (49:32):
And I'm not making an argument in favor of illegal immigration.
I'm just telling you most Americans are not in favor
of the federal government going around looking to deport those people.

Speaker 2 (49:44):
I would also note that.

Speaker 1 (49:45):
There are so many illegal alien criminals and illegal aliens
who already have final orders of deportations placed on them
by federal judges for whatever reason, that ICE could spend
all of their time finding and deporting those people and

(50:05):
very likely not get close to exhausting that list of
true criminals and people with orders of removal already not
get close to exhausting that list by the end of
the Trump presidency. So do they need to start showing
up at workplaces now? The other thing I'll say is

(50:27):
I absolutely understand from the perspective of a federal government,
especially a federal government that wants to disincentivize illegal immigration
as much as possible.

Speaker 2 (50:41):
That one of the ways that.

Speaker 1 (50:46):
You disincentivize illegal immigration is if you make it harder
for an illegal immigrant to get a job once they
get here. And so part of the reason these guys
might be doing some workplace enforcement raids is to scare
em play lawyers. Really, if you want to disincentivize, you
need to punish the employers, regardless of what you do

(51:08):
with deporting the illegals or not, but whatever, whatever that is. Really,
if this is your thing, you need to punish the employers.
It goes on and on from there. Right, So I
could say this, but this, but this, but this, Right,
Americans don't want workplace enforcement. But if you're the federal
government you want to disincentivize a flow of illegal aliens,
you need to do it by making it more difficult

(51:30):
to get a job. So therefore you must punish, punish
the employers. But again, Americans don't really want that. And
where are you going to get the workers? Where are
you going to get the workers to do this? These
so called jobs I shouldn't say so called, these jobs

(51:52):
that Americans won't do.

Speaker 2 (51:53):
There are jobs that Americans won't do. And then people say, well,
just raise the wage.

Speaker 1 (51:59):
All right, there are jobs that Americans won't do at
a price that will allow any other Americans to afford
the thing. You think steak is expensive, Now, wait till
you try to replace the slaughterhouse jobs with native born Americans.

Speaker 2 (52:17):
You think fruit and.

Speaker 1 (52:20):
Vegetables I've gotten expensive. Wait till you can't get Mexican
workers anymore, and you've got to pay Americans whatever it
takes to get enough Americans to go pick crops. First
of all, I don't think you could do it at
any price, but imagine that you could. Well, I shouldn't
say at any price, but at some price you could.
I'm sure you could go get Americans to pick lettuce

(52:41):
for one hundred dollars an hour. For sure you could.
And then how much will your lettuce be? How many
people stopped? This isn't a labor question, but just go
with me here on the concept. The price of eggs
went up because the bird flu had nothing to do
with with immigrants and labor and stuff. But the price
of eggs went up a lot. And I saw story
recently that talked about demand for eggs dropping by something

(53:04):
like thirty or thirty five percent.

Speaker 2 (53:07):
Of course it does.

Speaker 1 (53:08):
That's basic microeconomics. In the upward and downward sloping supply
and demand curves, the price of something goes up, and
if it's not something that people absolutely positively have to have,
they buy less of it and either they just do
without or they substitute.

Speaker 2 (53:23):
If beef gets.

Speaker 1 (53:24):
Really really expensive, as it has, people will buy more
chicken and pork.

Speaker 2 (53:32):
So where are you going to get workers to do.

Speaker 1 (53:36):
The jobs that people need done when you're in an
economy that already has high inflation and low unemployment, not
as hot, not really high inflation anymore recently had high inflation.
It's still a little above target, but it's kind of
under control right now. Where are you going to get it?

(53:56):
So I think that on balance, workplace enforcement is meh.
It's not a zero, but it's not great as a
policy objective, and it's a loser politically. So this brings
me to a headline in the Wall Street Journal how
Home Depot became ground zero in Trump's deportation push, and

(54:20):
then subhead white House tells Ice to target the retail giant,
disrupting the company's relationship with Day laborers outside its stores.

Speaker 2 (54:30):
So we've all seen this.

Speaker 1 (54:32):
I mean, it's almost it's not really a joke, but
it's a It's just a thing that everybody understands and
everybody can picture in their minds, and that is you
go to home depot, at least if you go early
in the day. This isn't true in the afternoon. But
if you go early in the day, at many, not

(54:52):
all home depots, you will find a bunch of guys
out front, usually Hispanic looking, who are looking for work,
construction work, yard work, any work. They just want to
put food on the family. As George W. Bush would say,
they're looking for work. I've hired one or two of

(55:13):
those guys over the years for little things I needed done.
One of them was an illegal alien from Venezuela. Believe
it or not, I think he was about twenty years old.
We needed some stuff done in the yard, hired him.
I don't apologize for it, don't care what you think
of me for it. So here's the Wall Street Journal thing.

(55:34):
President Trump's immigration crackdown is starting to show up in
and around the parking lots of home depot stores around
the country. The unusual I'm sorry the usual crowds of
day laborers have begun to dwindle, scared off by increasing
and unannounced immigration raids. These laborers often lack legal status
in the US. Outside of Home Depot in northern New

(55:54):
Jersey on Tuesday, a handful of people, far fewer than
would have come a few months ago, waited for contractors
to come by at least two locations in Los Angeles.
At at least two locations in Los Angeles. The few
men who showed up were told by store security to
stay on the sidewalk. Into three Home Depot stores around Houston,
there were no laborers in sight. The Trump administration sweeping

(56:18):
deportations threatened the symbiotic and contentious relationship that stretches back decades.

Speaker 2 (56:24):
The laborers provide a service for.

Speaker 1 (56:25):
Home Depost customers, like contractors and homeowners in need of
help on projects. Officially, Home Depot does not endorse the activities.
They have long held a no solicitation policy. It means
that laborers can only gather off store property. But of
course you and I both know this is not the
journal now, It's just me. You and I both know
that that is not always or maybe not often enforced

(56:48):
at least until recently. The company has been criticized by
both pro and anti immigrant groups. Some have attacked Home
Depot for acting as a facilitator for an undocumented workforce,
and others oppressed the company need to do more to
make the workers these people's conditions better. Immigration agents conducted
a sweep on Friday. Last Friday at a strip mall

(57:12):
in the predominantly Latino neighborhood of Westlake in Los Angeles,
at a Home Depot. It set off dase of protests
around Los Angeles County. Now, there's a lot more to
this article, but I'm gonna stop there on that because
i have a lot more to say on this particular story,
because the politics of it are absolutely fascinating. So first,

(57:32):
because this will be quicker, I'm going to mention a
tweet from Nick Gillespie of Reason magazine.

Speaker 2 (57:42):
Nick is among people who are serious libertarians or libertarian.

Speaker 1 (57:46):
Intellectuals, as I fancy myself from time to time. Nick
Gillespie is a very well known guy, and here's what
he said in his tweet yesterday morning, arresting nail salon
work people in clothing wholesalers, and day laborers. So day
laborers relates to the Home Depot thing is where Trump's

(58:06):
immigration mania goes to die. Americans want criminals deported, not
hard working immigrants cutting lawns, tending children and delivering food.
Now again, I know that I have some very conservative
people in my audience who don't agree with Nick. And
I know that there are some people in my audience

(58:28):
and generally in the country, who believe that if Ice
contacts any illegal immigrant, that that illegal immigrant should be
detained and go through whatever the new process is and
then removed. I get it, And as I said yesterday
and said earlier today, I'm not really looking to debate

(58:49):
that question on the merits with you. What I'm saying
is most Americans agree with Nick, not with the Trumpet
meministration going after day laborers.

Speaker 2 (59:03):
At home depot.

Speaker 1 (59:05):
Now I want to give you the other side, though,
because I want to be, as they say, fair and
balanced about this. And you know what I need to
I need to get my log in going here for
National reviews so I can so I can share this
whole piece with you. As I'm doing that, let me
share with you another thing, and this ties into what

(59:29):
Americans really want done. Okay, what do Americans really want done.
Here's a headline, federal agents capture alien. They mean an
illegal alien, not a space alien, accused of rape and assault.
While LA politicians condemn ICE operations.

Speaker 2 (59:52):
We'll get to the if we have time.

Speaker 1 (59:54):
We'll get to this other thing in a in a bit,
as far as the protest and that angle of it.
But that is an example of the kind of thing
that Americans do want. I don't think what Americans want
is what I was saying before, is ICE agents at

(01:00:18):
home depot, Ice agents going into other businesses and stuff
like that.

Speaker 2 (01:00:22):
I just don't see it now.

Speaker 1 (01:00:25):
I do want to give you the other side of
the story, though, because a lot of people don't agree
with me, A lot of people don't agree with Nick Gillespie.
So here's Rich Lowry from National Review, and he's the
main guy at National Review, and his headline is home
depot can't be off limits.

Speaker 2 (01:00:48):
Here's what he says.

Speaker 1 (01:00:49):
The left is opposed to immigration enforcement as such, but
its biggest red line is home depot. A trigger of
the La anti Ice riots was a raid on one
of the retailer's home improvements stores, followed up by a
false rumor of another rate at a different home depot. Apparently,
the stores are to be considered little islands of lawlessness
in every community where ICE can't get within even a

(01:01:12):
certain distance, like a gun free school zone for illegal aliens.
The unrest in the town of Paramount began on Saturday
when rumors spread that ICE agents were heading to a
home depot. Quote. Typically, the store that is nestled along
the Los Angeles riverbed would be filled with weekend warriors
tackling home improvements, workers collecting surprise, and immigrants in search
of work. But that morning, Border Patrol agents were spotted

(01:01:35):
across the street from the home Depot gathering around nine am.
Word quickly spread on social media. Passers by honked their horns.
Soon protesters arrived. Home depot eventually closed. As it happened,
there was no raid at the home Depot. Instead, the
agents were using a DHS facility near the store for
a staging area. But on Friday, ICE agents did undertake

(01:01:58):
enforcement actions at work sites, including at a home depot.
Washington Post noted the enforcement operation and noted that protesters,
you know, came out in protests, and Rich Lowry says,
but what do they expect home depots have become? Perhaps
the foremost symbol of open routine defiance of US immigration laws,

(01:02:20):
with illegal immigrants gathering en mass for everyone to see
and getting hired by people who know they are breaking
the law in doing so.

Speaker 2 (01:02:27):
All right, So enough, there you get the idea. So
now I've given you both sides.

Speaker 1 (01:02:31):
Here's my take on how this is going to play
out and why I think it's going to play out,
with the federal government continuing workplace enforcement, going to home depots,
going to other places, going absolutely everywhere, because I think

(01:02:51):
that they want to create the disincentive I described earlier.
They are bound and determined to make the United States
a place where legal immigrants want to come, but illegal
immigrants don't. The other thing that I think is interesting

(01:03:14):
about this politically, all right, and I understand as I said,
I don't think the average American likes the idea of
raids and home depot parking lots. But as I frequently say,
leaders don't follow polls. They change them. And on some issues,

(01:03:37):
not all, but some issues. Trump is a leader in
this context. Remember in twenty sixteen, Americans weren't thinking all
that much about illegal immigration and Trump came on the scene. Well,
actually in twenty fifteen. But Trump came on the scene
and started talking about it. And if you watch the

(01:04:00):
when they were asking people, what's the most important issue
to you or the most important issues to you? Immigration,
illegal immigration, border enforcement and such kept moving up in
importance to voters as Trump was talking about it, and
then he ended up winning that election largely on the
basis of that, and then he won this election largely

(01:04:27):
on the basis of that and inflation.

Speaker 2 (01:04:31):
So I think that Trump thinks it.

Speaker 1 (01:04:34):
Has a little bit of advantage in the sense that
people like his overall purpose and maybe they don't like
this tactic, but I think he thinks he can explain
it to the public, and I think if he explains
it to the public.

Speaker 2 (01:04:52):
Or even if he doesn't, the primary reasoning is.

Speaker 1 (01:04:58):
The United States is a magnet for illegal aliens because
it's quite easy assuming they can get into the country,
which is now more difficult than it used to be.
But assuming they can get in, it's quite easy for
them to work and to make money and support a
family and send money back to their families wherever they

(01:05:18):
came from and all that.

Speaker 2 (01:05:20):
And Trump simply does not want.

Speaker 1 (01:05:22):
The United States to be a magnet he wants to
turn off the power to that electric magnet.

Speaker 2 (01:05:29):
And therefore, I think that even though most likely poll
after poll after poll.

Speaker 1 (01:05:35):
Will show that Americans don't like workplace enforcement, I think
it won't stop.

Speaker 2 (01:05:41):
More of an.

Speaker 1 (01:05:42):
Analysis that didn't surprise me, but I wished it did
surprise me. And this is a report from lending Tree
entitled State of Home Insurance twenty twenty five. And I'm
just going to jump to one life little part here,
and then we're gonna bring my guest on the show.

(01:06:03):
In the six years from gosh, what years are these,
twenty nineteen till now, I think home insurance rates rose
more in Colorado than in any other state twenty nineteen
through twenty twenty four, seventy six point six percent cumulatively
in the state of Colorado. Shocking sort of. But if

(01:06:28):
you live here, I guess you knew the numbers were bad.
Maybe you didn't know they were quite that bad. Joining
us to talk about it. Rob Batt is a home
insurance expert and licensed insurance agent with lending Tree.

Speaker 2 (01:06:43):
Hey Rob, thanks for being here.

Speaker 1 (01:06:46):
Thank you. I want to get a handle on why
rates have gone up so much in Colorado, and it
seems to me there are two primary possibilities, and maybe
the answer is.

Speaker 2 (01:06:56):
Both, but I want you to tell me.

Speaker 1 (01:06:58):
One is actual risk or perception of risk in terms
of houses being damaged or destroyed, and the other is
the actual price of real estate and new construction going up.
So what are we looking at?

Speaker 6 (01:07:11):
Very exactly right, it's a combination of these two factors.

Speaker 1 (01:07:14):
You know.

Speaker 6 (01:07:14):
One of the things we've seen is an uptick in
the number of really severe catastrophic storms that have done
mass damage. We're talking about these powerful thunderstorms, hailstorms, tornadoes,
and the.

Speaker 2 (01:07:27):
Other part of that, and of course wildfires as well.

Speaker 6 (01:07:31):
And then the other part of that is with inflation,
the cost to repair or rebuild homes has gone up too.
So there's these are two factors that are complicating each
other and driving up the cost that insurance companies have
to pay out to settle these claims and rebuild homes,
and unfortunately, those costs gets passed on to us as
consumers in the form of higher home insurance rates.

Speaker 1 (01:07:54):
We've we had a big blow up here in Colorado
is really a political thing a couple of years ago,
because in the immediate aftermath of COVID and zero interest
rates and all the helicopter money and all this stuff.
Real estate prices just went crazy and the and it

(01:08:16):
showed up in property tax bills right. And so in
the counties around Denver, for example, Douglas County of a
very a major county just to the to the south
of Denver, their average increase in property tax assessments was
forty percent forty So this was a huge political thing.

(01:08:36):
So as I see here in your data, seventy six
point six percent increase in home insurance rates. So that
forty percent was just over two years. There was plenty
of other years before that. How what I'm getting at,
and taking much too long to do it, is, how
much of this huge increase in home insurance costs do

(01:08:57):
you think is due to the price of real estate
and construcuction going up versus perception of increased risk here
in Colorado, because we did also have that huge Marshall fire,
which was in a place that probably most people thought
there really couldn't be a big fire.

Speaker 6 (01:09:12):
Well, these things are tied together in the sense that
you know, when you look at the value of real
estate includes the value of land plus improvements like buildings
and stuff like that. When you look at insurance rates,
you know, it's your insurance rate is based largely on
the cost, the potential cost of rebuilding your home if
it's completely destroyed. That's what lenders require for a loan

(01:09:36):
to protect their financial interest, and that's usually, you know,
what insurance companies offer. So the price of land itself
doesn't affect your real estate. I'm sorry, it doesn't affect
your insurance rates so much. But in addition to land,
when you look at a lot of the new homes
that are going up, some of them are custom built homes.

Speaker 2 (01:09:54):
They have more intricate features, they have.

Speaker 6 (01:09:57):
More advanced features, and so they're all so more they're
more expensive to rebuild. And then the other thing is,
you know, with the potential risk we're talking about, uh,
you know, I imagine this in a lot of parts
of the country, and I believe this is true in
several areas in Colorado as well. You have homes going
up in these urban wild wildland interface areas, and these

(01:10:18):
are the most beautiful places to live, but they also
have the highest potential fire risk. You know, with a
with these areas, these these urban interface areas, if there's
a wildfire, it could potentially take out several homes. You know,
that's different than the traditional house fire, like say something
starts in your kitchen, your garage, or something where that

(01:10:38):
fire will take out one home and the insurance company
only has to pay to rebuild one home. With wildfires,
insurance companies might have to pay to rebuild twenty or
thirty or fifty homes. So that's also another increased you know,
that's that's an increased risk for them in terms of
they're taking on more risk because these areas have higher
chances of being exposed to a wildfire.

Speaker 1 (01:11:00):
So I'm a homeowner and these insurance rates are absolutely brutal,
and I look for everything I can do to try
to get my rates down. A couple of the things
have been make sure I have a reasonably hail resistant roof.
Make sure when I lived up in the hills, make
sure that it didn't have trees too close to the house,
you know, for trying to prevent a fire from getting

(01:11:21):
too easily to the house.

Speaker 2 (01:11:22):
What are other things that or or raising deductibles?

Speaker 1 (01:11:27):
What are other things that our listeners that my listeners
can can do to try to reduce their home owners
insurance premiums. And as part of that answer, maybe let
me know whether whether there are large differences and prices
from one company to another, right are you are you
likely to be able to find a much better insurance

(01:11:49):
deal by shopping around or are they all pretty close?
You know, they're pretty close.

Speaker 6 (01:11:54):
We've seen differences of ten to twenty percent by shopping
around a couple one hundred bucks a year. So it's
it's something. It's it's it's still painful. Yeah, I wish
there were easy answers. I mean, the things you mentioned
are all good first steps in terms of shopping around,
choosing a higher deductible investig in your home to make

(01:12:17):
it better able to withstand the elements. That includes hail
resistant roofs, windproof windows, fire resistant materials in the in
the areas that are exposed to wildland fires.

Speaker 2 (01:12:28):
And you know the other thing.

Speaker 6 (01:12:32):
Another thing you could do to avoid rate increases is
just to avoid small claims, like if you have a say,
a broken window or something that's only going to cost
a couple of thousand dollars, just pay for it yourself
versus filing a claim. Insurance companies get really jittery with
clients who file claim. So if you have one claim,
your rates will go up. If you have two claims,
they might drop you. You know, in the old days,

(01:12:54):
people used to talk about five hundred dollars deductibles. But
you know that's five hundred dollars just doesn't go as
far as you used to. You know, if you're you're
talking about something that's going to cost a few thousand dollars,
maybe even three or four thousand dollars in the long run,
you might you might just be better off paying for
it yourself, you know, assuming you have the resources to
do that.

Speaker 1 (01:13:12):
Yeah, I mean, we we sold a house and then
we bought a house, so we're starting over with insurance.
And I noted that in that process of applying for
insurance on the new place, one of the questions was
have you ever filed a homeowners insurance claim? And you
know that you don't want to answer yes to that.
I mean, you have to answer truthfully, but you know
that you know you'll be much better off if the

(01:13:34):
answer is no. I'll give you the last seventeen seconds,
so much better off the answer is no.

Speaker 6 (01:13:39):
And they actually they can check, they'll run a check
at the last stage of the process. Yeah, and so
if something shows up that you didn't initially, they have
insurance company data, you know, the insurance company databases can
pull up those things, including prior claims, so they'll find
out eventually. It's just a matter they don't Sometimes they
don't check until the very end of the process, and
then you might get a surprise where the rate you

(01:14:00):
saw on your quote is going to be different lower
than what they actually want to charge you.

Speaker 1 (01:14:05):
Rob bat is a Lending Tree home insurance expert. He
joined us to talk about their new report State of
Home Insurance twenty twenty five, which said that home insurance
rates rose a little bit over forty percent nationwide from
twenty nineteen to twenty twenty four, but rose nowhere faster
than in Colorado over seventy six percent.

Speaker 2 (01:14:27):
Right here, we've all felt that pain. Rob, thanks so
much for your time.

Speaker 6 (01:14:32):
I wish we could speak about a more pleasant subject,
but it's a pleasure and thank you.

Speaker 1 (01:14:37):
Glad to do it. All right, we'll take a quick break.
We'll be right back on KOA. There was an aspect
regarding home depot that I didn't get to because I
spent so much time talking about immigration enforcement, and I'm
going to tie this a little bit into Colorado politics. Actually,
I have said, I know this maybe surprises some people,
but if you've been here a while and paying close attention,

(01:14:58):
you probably agree with me at point that right now
Colorado is to the left of California. And I've been
saying that for several years because I've seen some really terrible, expensive,
it's basically socialist ballot measures show up here in Colorado
and get passed, and some other really terrible ballot measures

(01:15:22):
show up in California and fail to pass.

Speaker 2 (01:15:25):
For probably the last four or six years.

Speaker 1 (01:15:27):
Now, I'm not saying California is anywhere close to a
conservative state overall.

Speaker 2 (01:15:31):
It's still a very liberal state, but.

Speaker 1 (01:15:35):
It seems like there's a little bit of sanity that
has not yet arrived in Colorado and may never.

Speaker 2 (01:15:44):
But at some point you would think that outside of Denver.

Speaker 1 (01:15:47):
And Boulder and I don't know, tell your Ride and
an Aspen, that outside of those places, reality might set
in a little bit and reality might cause voters to
do something different.

Speaker 2 (01:16:02):
So you are probably aware of this guy, George.

Speaker 1 (01:16:06):
Gascon, really terrible district attorney in Los Angeles, one of
the worst district attorneys in the country, along with Alvin
Bragg in Manhattan and whatever that dude's name was in
San Francisco who was recalled a year or two ago,

(01:16:26):
Chesa Boudin I think is his name, I remember, right.
So George Gascon is just horrific because his policy, and
remember his job is he's a prosecutor, and his office's
policy was prosecute as little as possible. And when people commit,
you know, almost any kind of crime short of murder,

(01:16:46):
will do our best not to prosecute them, even if
they have committed multiple crimes and they were just the worst.
And of course that attracts. It creates incentives. People respond
to incentives, and so that encourages people who might be
of a mind to commit a crime to go ahead
and do it. It. Also, it also encourages people who
might be criminally minded to go to LA because at

(01:17:07):
least there they know that if they commit a crime,
they'll get away with it.

Speaker 2 (01:17:10):
So where does the sanity come in? So back in November,
and I.

Speaker 1 (01:17:14):
Don't think I talked about this at election time. I
probably should have, but I don't think I did. Back
in November. Los Angeles now not Dallas, not Oklahoma City,
not Tampa. Los Angeles elected a Republican Attorney general.

Speaker 2 (01:17:34):
His name is Hawkman Hochma.

Speaker 1 (01:17:37):
And and a few years earlier, Colorado, I'm sorry, California,
you understand the Freudian slip. There passed something called Proposition
forty seven, and basically what it did was it decriminalized
theft as long as the amount was under nine hundred
and fifty dollars and some other things, but that was

(01:18:01):
a main thing.

Speaker 2 (01:18:02):
And so what you got was this massive rise in theft.

Speaker 1 (01:18:05):
And you'd have these organized gangs who would run into
stores with a specific plan, and there could be ten
or twenty or fifty of them, and this specific plan
was they'd run into the store and each would try
to steal stuff worth a little bit less than nine
hundred and fifty dollars. And then when that happened, they
knew the ag wouldn't prosecute them even if they did

(01:18:26):
it again and again.

Speaker 2 (01:18:26):
But the new guy is so.

Speaker 1 (01:18:31):
One of the things that's happened again to give us
a little hope here in Colorado is that California, Yes,
California voted this past November on something else called Proposition
thirty six that overturned a bunch of that previous idiocy
and has re criminalized.

Speaker 2 (01:18:51):
Thefts under nine hundred and fifty dollars and stuff like that.

Speaker 1 (01:18:56):
And one of the things the new ag is doing
is he is saying, if there is a group theft,
they do this as an organized thing. They go in together,
they're working together, they put the stuff together and sell
it together and split the money. He's not going to
judge the dollar amount based on any one person. He's

(01:19:17):
gonna judge the dollar amount based on the aggregate amount
of the theft. And also this proposition thirty six says
that your third robbery, and I know, I know you're
gonna say, why wouldn't it be the first or the
second or whatever, But the third robbery, even if it
would be a misdemeanor, the third ones a felony. And
the amount of retail theft in California has dropped a lot.

Speaker 2 (01:19:41):
People respond to incentives.

Speaker 1 (01:19:44):
And I hope that politicians here in Colorado and elsewhere
in the country, who might be well intended and not
wanting to punish people who come from bad circumstances or
whatever the excuse is, will realize that first their job
is to protect society and the criminal, and second that
incentives matter listener text Ross. For the most part, Colorado

(01:20:05):
is a conservative state. The front Range ownes the populace.
Tell you, right, in the eighties was such a groovy place.
I'm sad that's not true now Aspen imports can Aspen imports, right, Okay,
so people who move into Aspen can go with the
wind for all I care. I have built masterpieces in
both towns as a stone mason.

Speaker 2 (01:20:25):
The western slope is conservative.

Speaker 1 (01:20:26):
And what I would say to that, because I was
talking before about how liberal estate Colorado is so obviously
in the aggregate, Colorado is a very liberal state, just
like California. California has plenty of conservative places, the Central Valley,
Orange County. There are plenty of Republicans and conservatives in California.

(01:20:48):
And in fact, if you look at a map of.

Speaker 2 (01:20:50):
The United States.

Speaker 1 (01:20:53):
Of presidential elections, where you've probably all seen these maps,
you look at a map where the states that the
Republican one could be Trump could be someone else in
a different election.

Speaker 2 (01:21:06):
You actually, let's just stick with Trump.

Speaker 1 (01:21:11):
You look at state. You look at a map by county,
not states by county, where every state that Trump.

Speaker 2 (01:21:20):
Won is red.

Speaker 1 (01:21:22):
I'm sorry, I keep saying state, I'm brain did Every
county that Trump won is read and every county that
the Democrat won, Hillary or Biden or Kamala is blue.
And there's been some pretty big changes actually in this
last election, a pretty significant move toward Trump. And in

(01:21:43):
this last election, Trump did win the so called national
popular vote, even though that's irrelevant as anything other than
a bragging point in our political system. But if you
look at the previous two elections, one of which Trump
won and one of which Trump lost, even in the

(01:22:05):
one that he lost, let's stick with that one. If
the one that he lost in twenty twenty, the map
is almost all red. And that is, you know, kind
of the point this person is making. You can say
Colorado is a conservative state. You can say these many
rural counties that make up the majority of the not

(01:22:28):
the population, the majority of the land mass of the
state our majority Republican. And that's probably true for most
of them, but that's not how our politics works at
a state and federal scale. Sure, in your own local area,

(01:22:50):
right in welld County, in you know, some smaller county
on the western slope, maybe in Jackson, county people will
elect their own county commissioners and their own local city politicians,
and their own school boards and all that stuff. And
those people in those conservative areas can be conservative politicians

(01:23:11):
and they can have local conservative government all the way
up to the level of county. Once you get above that,
then you're really looking at the population of the state,
and of course your conservative county, your conservative area will
elect usually a conservative state representative and a conservative state senator.

(01:23:35):
But the state legislature, just like the federal legislature, is
apportioned based on population, not land mass. I'm sure you
know this already, but every ten years we have a
census that's actually required in the Constitution of the United States.
It's not just federal law, it's constitutional law. It's constitution.
And we do this census, and then we reapportion the

(01:23:58):
four hundred and thirty five House seats, and sometimes the
state will lose a seat, in another state will gain
a seat. All this stuff. But again you're probably aware
of this, but for those who aren't, the boundary lines
of House seats are determined so that in theory, in theory,
at the moment those lines take effect for the new

(01:24:22):
House districts, and it would really be only for the
moment because people are constantly moving around. But at that moment,
in theory, every member of the House represents the same
number of people. Did you know that. Obviously it's not
true of the Senate, right, because California has two senators
and Wyoming has two senators, so they're obviously not each

(01:24:43):
representing the same number of people.

Speaker 2 (01:24:44):
But in the House they are, So there's that.

Speaker 1 (01:24:50):
So again, you can say Colorado is mostly a conservative state.
And if you look at the map and just map
it out by which counties are red and which counties
are blue, you're probably going to be right. Although I
bet you there are more blue county then you think.
But it doesn't matter because the blue counties are where
the people are, so they have more state reps, more
state senators. State senators, by the way, are determined by population,

(01:25:12):
not like federal senators. And therefore we live in this
very blue world. In this very blue world, this person
says the census is a total fraud. No it's not.
You might not like every aspect of it, but that's
a silly comment. Also, this has been ruled on. I'm
not gonna I'm not even gonna dig into that anymore.

(01:25:34):
It's a dumb comment. Don't send me dumb comments. If
you were this guy, Vishwash Kumar Ramesh, I don't know
whether you think this is the most unlucky day of
your life.

Speaker 2 (01:25:45):
Or the luckiest day of your life. This guy forty
years old.

Speaker 1 (01:25:51):
British national, but clearly came originally from India or his
parents came originally from India with that name Vishwash Kumar Ramesh.

Speaker 2 (01:25:59):
But he's forty year old British national.

Speaker 1 (01:26:02):
This guy seems to be the only survivor of Air
India Flight one seventy one that crashed earlier today with
two hundred and forty two people on board, one of
the worst crashes in aviation history. I don't know if
we will ever know for sure what caused it, but

(01:26:24):
this plane had barely gotten off the ground when they
called out a made a and then they crashed.

Speaker 2 (01:26:30):
They actually crashed onto the top of a like a.

Speaker 1 (01:26:34):
Residence building associated with a medical college. No idea at
this point how many people in the building or how
many people on the ground died At the moment. It
appears that this one guy who was sitting in seat
eleven A. You have to thank everybody, now, not everybody.
Lots of people are going to try to sit in

(01:26:56):
eleven A, but this dude was sitting in eleven A
and walked away from the crash, and at the moment
appears to be the only person who survived that plane crash.
I know they've found more than a couple hundred bodies already,
so I have no idea whether he's.

Speaker 2 (01:27:14):
Going to be the only one, but so far he's
the only one.

Speaker 1 (01:27:21):
His brother was on the plane with him, and as
you know, so far, mister Ramash said he's been unable
to find his brother.

Speaker 2 (01:27:29):
His brother has probably perished.

Speaker 1 (01:27:31):
But nevertheless, can you imagine being the only person to
survive a crash like that? Or you know, again, I
hope there's more. I hope he's not the only one.
Let's talk about wolves a little bit. We talked about
bison earlier in the show. So there was a meeting
yesterday the Colorado Parks and Wildlife Commission, and the agenda
did not include conversation about the wolf program.

Speaker 2 (01:27:55):
But I saw a piece of coloradopolitics dot com.

Speaker 1 (01:27:59):
That I thought I meant to you, because you know,
I'm keeping up on this whole wolf thing because I'm
still so pissed off about it. And they weren't even
supposed to talk about this, but one of the commissioners
named Marie Haskett, She's from Meeker, she said, and I'm
guessing she wishes she didn't open her mouth, but she

(01:28:21):
said that she was glad that there weren't wolves on
the agenda. And then she said, I feel like wolves
have taken over this agency and we're not getting the
business done at this commission for all the other species
that we manage. And then this became a topic of conversation,
and the way Colorado Politics describes it is this. The

(01:28:45):
conversation that followed showed the frustration commissioners are experiencing over
the wolf reintroduction program, the public feedback in media scrutiny,
and they spent some time talking in particular about one
wolf pack called the Copper Creek wolf Pack, and that
was moved into which county was it? Which county was it? Anyway,

(01:29:07):
it was moved into a particular county, the Copper Creek Pack,
and it was brought from British Columbia. They were brought
to two counties, Eagle County and Pitkin County, and apparently
this wolf pack is particularly aggressive when it comes to
predating livestock. So, quoting from the article, over Memorial Day weekend,

(01:29:31):
wolves attacked at least three livestock herds in Pitkin County,
that's the county with aspen and so on. And the
state agency shot and killed one of the yearling wolves
from the Copper Creek pack for repeated attacks on livestock
and hopes that it would impact the behavior of the
rest of the pack. But a Pitkin County rancher who
is a commissioner on Parks and Wildlife named tide Jacober,

(01:29:53):
I'm sorry if I mispronouncing your name, Ti Tai. First
name Jacob e Er, whose neighbors are now dealing with
wolf attacks. He this guy has been criticized in the
pack by ranchers for failing to stand up for production
agriculture on the wolf issue. His comments on Wednesday were
very different. He said, it's been quite ugly. We went

(01:30:16):
against our management plan, captured the wolves, went further against
the management plan, re released the wolves, and here we
are today. He called it a blunder for the agency.
He also said it's a blunder for the wolves, and
it's been difficult for the ranchers, and he said it
all quoting in here. We need to be accountable for
a mistake that we've made by putting this depredating pack.

Speaker 2 (01:30:42):
Back on the landscape and make.

Speaker 1 (01:30:44):
A quick fast discussion about how to move forward with
clearly unfortunately a bad pack of animals. And I think
that if we don't deal with a chronic depredating pack,
it's just going to continue to kind of rub on
all of us and on the program and make it unsuccessful.
He said, we have an opportunity with a lot of
wolves out on the landscape that aren't causing problems, but

(01:31:07):
we went against what we said we were gonna do,
and here we are facing problems. There's a lot more
of the article, but in the interested time, I'm going
to stop there. But you get the point, and I'm
glad they're talking about it. I'm glad they're having that conversation.
I wish it weren't necessary, but you know, I'm not
going to relitigate the whole thing that just never should

(01:31:29):
have been in. It never should have been something that
people were allowed to vote on. We just don't or
shouldn't do biology by ballot box, and especially we shouldn't
do biology by ballot box when you are letting. And
actually this goes right to you know what. This is
a perfect tie in, a perfect tie in with that,

(01:31:50):
with that listener's comment he said, ross for the most
part of some conservative state. And I said, only if
you define for the most part based on land mass
and square miles, not if you base it on population.
And this ties in so perfectly, so perfectly to what
I was saying, to my reaction to all that and

(01:32:13):
my longtime commentary about the wolf thing. We allowed the
dense mass of population in the Denver Boulder metro area,
primarily where there are lots of liberals who love the
ideas of the idea of rewilding and bring back this
animal and bring back that animal, and they cry themselves

(01:32:34):
to sleep at night over the fact that some species
may have gone extinct. This year, we let those people
who will likely never see a wolf in the wild
in Colorado, never be impacted by it in any way.

Speaker 2 (01:32:52):
We let them vote on imposing these.

Speaker 1 (01:32:56):
Predators on the smaller population in the physically larger part
of the state, but the smaller population, and we let
these Denver rights and Boulder rights do great harm to
ranchers in much of the rest of the state, and
I will, I will forever, forever.

Speaker 2 (01:33:17):
Be angry that that was even allowed to be voted on.

Speaker 1 (01:33:23):
All right, let me do a couple of road, well
not exactly road, but if you're driving around stories this
is a very loose category, So bear with me. If
you're driving around on the north end of Denver on
I twenty five, and if you tend to drive around
at night, I want you to be aware of this.
This is from our news partners at KDVR Fox thirty one.

(01:33:44):
If you've been driving around over the past month or so,
you've probably seen these warning signs talking about upcoming paving operations.

Speaker 2 (01:33:52):
And I'll just quote from KDVR.

Speaker 1 (01:33:55):
The project was announced by sea Dot in April, but
impacts will last through January. Once completed, I twenty five
will have new pavement, repaired expansion joints, new signs, and
striping in twenty seven hundred feet of replaced concrete barrier segments.

Speaker 2 (01:34:10):
So where are we talking about exactly here?

Speaker 1 (01:34:15):
Starting next week, from Sunday through Thursday, resurfacing project impacts
will be seen in the southbound lanes of I twenty
five from forty fourth down to Alamedia Alameda. All right,
forty fourth down to Alameda. Now, just so they're gonna
be milling down the old pavement and replacing it with
new pavement. But don't fear that it's going to destroy

(01:34:38):
all the traffic patterns. Here's how they're doing it. One
lane will close at nine pm, a second lane will
close at ten PM. Both lanes will open by six
am the next day. Ay, Rod, If you are going
to be coming in early, as you do these days
while Draggon is on vacation, you might want to be
aware of that because you're usual driving before six am

(01:35:01):
when you're having to do this particular shift, and it
looks like you will be down two lanes on southbound
Eye twenty five from this coming Sunday to Thursday.

Speaker 2 (01:35:12):
And then over time, folks.

Speaker 1 (01:35:13):
This is just gonna They're gonna move it to different
parts of the highway and you know, different weeks northbound
or southbound and so on. So I just wanted to
be aware of that, in particular, if you're someone who
drives late at night early in morning, just be aware
of it. And then the other thing that I wanted
to share with you again if you're someone who's driving
around and this one isn't isn't ready quite yet, and
this will be an I seventy story rather than an

(01:35:35):
I twenty five story. But if you've driven out, if
you're driven two or past Idaho Springs, you've seen kind
of off in the distance, these very cool looking buildings
that I've always wanted to own, not that I could
afford to buy such thing, of the Rgo gold Mine
and mill, and I think they've repainted them so they're

(01:35:55):
kind of a very pretty red color now.

Speaker 2 (01:35:57):
But let me share this with you again from our
news partners at Fox thirty one.

Speaker 1 (01:36:02):
Mountain Towns along the I seventy car at or bustling
this week thanks to hot weather. Big projects are underway
to draw even more tourists. And this is what I'm
getting at now, including a seventy one million dollar gondola
and mountaintop development in Idaho Springs.

Speaker 2 (01:36:17):
I gotta say this sounds awesome.

Speaker 1 (01:36:19):
The mighty Rgo cable car will travel one point two
miles from the aforementioned Rgo gold Mine and Mill up
to the top of the mountain where they're going to
build an event center, bars, restaurants, probably shops too, where
you will have views of the Continental Divide from up there.

(01:36:41):
And yeah, there's a bunch of stuff in the article
about talking to tourists in Idaho Springs now saying how
cool that's gonna that's gonna be. And there was an
interview with a guy who owns the Tommy Knockers restaurant there,
who's actually an investor in the project as well. A
listener said, I should try to get him on the show,
So maybe I will, But still I think that's cool.
I think that will be a huge tourist draw. Just

(01:37:03):
like as I mentioned earlier, I think if the Broncos
build a new stadium where you know, it's being rumored
right now over by Burnham Yard, and at the same
time or similar kind of time frame, the Kronkie folks
redevelop the land they just bought that includes Elitch Gardens
and goes north from there. They just spent sixty something,

(01:37:26):
however many million dollars on I think sixty seven acres.
When that stuff is done, then you've got this thing
going on out at Idaho Springs. You're talking about a
city and a greater metro area I don't know if
you want to call ider a host Springs Greater metro area,
but I will for now. It's gonna be a place
that is going to be a wonderful, appealing, hopefully place

(01:37:52):
for tourists to come visit. And it'll boost the state
of Colorado. It'll boost employment, it'll boost tax revenue, It'll
boost a lot of things. Yes, people will have to
figure out the government will have to figure out how
to deal with traffic, we're necessary in other such things.
But I do think there are good things on the
horizon for our state. And I you know what, I'm
very glad to think there are good things on the

(01:38:12):
horizon for our state, because frankly, it's been a while
since I thought that way. All Right, that's it for
me for today. Well, it's kind of sort of it
for me for today. If you stick around for a
little bit, you might understand what I'm talking about. I
am your guest host for a very abbreviated version of
the show. My name is Ross. I am here because

(01:38:34):
Mandy's preferred guest host, Randy Cromwell is off having an
emergency colonoscopy. He had to dig deep at the last
minute for someone who could just get through it, and
she had to settle for me. What for those of
you who are expecting a much better show than I
could give you, I am so pleased to bring you

(01:38:54):
the big Kahuna herself, Mandy Connell. Mandy is in a
land far away, in a data and time unknown to
both me and her. Hi, Mandy, Hello, Hello, Hello.

Speaker 7 (01:39:07):
We are currently sailing between Kagashima, where we were yesterday,
and Hiroshima, where we will be tomorrow. And today is
the first day of this cruise that it has not
been raining absolute buckets all day long.

Speaker 3 (01:39:22):
The entire day we've.

Speaker 7 (01:39:23):
Done excursions and raining, pouring buckets. I mean it's just
been today. It's cloudy, but so far, so good. There's
no rain yet. And I did in the gym this
morning at five am actually see a ball of fire
in the sky as it came above the ocean before
it went behind the clouds, so I know it's still
out there, so maybe there's hope we'll see.

Speaker 2 (01:39:43):
What were you doing in the gym at five am?

Speaker 7 (01:39:47):
I got to tell you this time change has been
brutal for me, absolutely brutal. I'm waking up at like
two thirty three in the morning, wide awake, like I
could do my show kind of wide awake.

Speaker 3 (01:39:58):
So I'm trying to use my time constructively and went.

Speaker 6 (01:40:02):
To the gym.

Speaker 7 (01:40:02):
This I see Dragon there. Dragon's been every day. I
haven't been every day, but I see him every day in.

Speaker 3 (01:40:07):
The gym like a madman.

Speaker 7 (01:40:09):
So he's kind of shaming me into go into the
gym if I'm honest Ross, Otherwise I would still be
laying in.

Speaker 3 (01:40:15):
Bed right now. If I was like, damn it, Dragon's
gonna be in the gym. I got to get there.

Speaker 1 (01:40:19):
Have you since you're since you're in Asia, have you
done any interesting uh Asian type classes like large or like?
Right now?

Speaker 7 (01:40:31):
On the ship there was there was an lecture on
the samurai uh it was Showgun to Samurai, but I
chose to do a Tai cheek glass instead.

Speaker 3 (01:40:40):
Which I think counts as an enrichment.

Speaker 1 (01:40:43):
You know.

Speaker 7 (01:40:43):
I feel like I'm doing the same kind of thing,
only out loud. But of course we've been to several
museums already, and it's fascinating ross.

Speaker 1 (01:40:53):
They in the museums.

Speaker 7 (01:40:54):
Yesterday we went to the Kama Kaze Museum, which was
so fascinating, right, and they just kind of gloss over
how that whole World War II thing got started. They
just don't mention it, right, It's just like, here's what happened,
here's these people, here's what they did.

Speaker 3 (01:41:11):
But why were they doing it?

Speaker 1 (01:41:12):
We don't talk about that.

Speaker 3 (01:41:13):
It's just kind of very you know, hush hush. But
the Kamakazi Museum.

Speaker 7 (01:41:17):
Was incredibly sobering and you see the pictures of these
young men. The averagage of a Kamakazi pilot was twenty one,
so in the museum, and we couldn't take pictures in
the museum.

Speaker 3 (01:41:29):
It's all very highly personal stuff.

Speaker 7 (01:41:31):
In that museum, you see the last will and testaments
written by these pilots the night before they got their
final orders, right, and when they say final orders, they
mean final orders like you're not coming back.

Speaker 3 (01:41:43):
And you can read some of those.

Speaker 7 (01:41:45):
And the only way I can say it is there's
so much honor in the letters and in the last
Will and testament.

Speaker 3 (01:41:52):
A lot of them wrote to their mothers to apologize
for not being a better son.

Speaker 7 (01:41:56):
And so I hope you're proud of me after I,
you know, take down a ship with five thousand of
the enemy on it and it's it's such an honor
based system that it's kind of hard to be mad
about it, you know, And and you understand why they
did what they did, But talk about the futility of war,
I mean that it's between this and and seeing the
destruction in Nagasaki.

Speaker 3 (01:42:17):
It's it's it's it's it's.

Speaker 7 (01:42:19):
A very I'm glad we're doing all of that stuff. That, man,
it really makes you a pacifist in a way that
you you.

Speaker 3 (01:42:27):
Know, I wasn't before.

Speaker 7 (01:42:28):
It's I don't love war by any stretch of the imagination,
but this makes you go.

Speaker 3 (01:42:32):
Man, we got to get this under control.

Speaker 6 (01:42:34):
You know.

Speaker 3 (01:42:34):
It's just the devastation has been so complete.

Speaker 1 (01:42:38):
Not to make light of it, but your your comments
remind me of one of my favorite lines from the
movie Spinal Tap, where the two.

Speaker 2 (01:42:45):
Main dudes are at Elvis's grave.

Speaker 1 (01:42:47):
And one of them says, it kind of puts things
in puts things in perspective, doesn't it? You know what?
The other one says, what he says, too much effing perspective.

Speaker 3 (01:42:57):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's kind of how I felt yes day.

Speaker 7 (01:43:00):
By the time we did the Kama Cozing Museum and
then we went to a show, excuse me, a Samurai
village with all these little Japanese gardens, and it was
beautiful in the pouring rain where everything has been in
the pouring rain. But it's a beautiful country, you know,
it's it's lovely, and God knows it's green because of
all the rain. So it's been a really good experience

(01:43:23):
to just sort of dip our toes into.

Speaker 3 (01:43:24):
Some of these places.

Speaker 7 (01:43:25):
And I'm super excited about Kyoto because we have two
days in Kyoto, because there's so much to see in Kyoto,
it's not even funny, and I'm really looking forward to that.
But tomorrow we do the last, hopefully of the war memorials,
because they're a.

Speaker 3 (01:43:39):
Little bit exhausting. And oddly, I don't feel guilty. That's
the thing. I was like, am I gonna feel guilty?
But then I'm like, no, they kind of started it,
so I don't feel bad about it, you know.

Speaker 1 (01:43:48):
All right, one more, one more japan question, and then
I want to go to what you were doing the
previous days. You said you're going to Hiroshima. For some reason,
I didn't realize that Hiroshima is on the water. Is
it on the water or do you get somewhere and
drive inland.

Speaker 3 (01:44:04):
I don't think it's right on the water. A lot
of these ports here or not.

Speaker 7 (01:44:08):
You know, the stuff that we're going to see, you
have to drive inland for like twenty twenty five minutes
or or maybe a little longer.

Speaker 3 (01:44:13):
But it's in a bay. It's in this bay that
we're currently in.

Speaker 7 (01:44:16):
Because Jupian is just a series of islands, right, I mean,
it's it's not one contiguous country. There's there's a lot
of different islands down from Okinawa in the south up
to the Northern prefectures in the north, so you just
have these little chains of islands. Some of them are
bigger than others. And Hiroshima's kind of tucked into this
bay that is in one of the larger islands, so

(01:44:38):
it's close to the coast, but not like on the
Atlantic and not on the China Sea, if that makes sense.
Kind to see on the western side Pacific on the
eastern side, so it kind of has its own little.

Speaker 3 (01:44:50):
Bay that it is a part of, but it's not
on the major oceans.

Speaker 1 (01:44:54):
Were those of you just tuning in. My name's Ross
and I'm sure you recognize the other voice because it's
her show, and that's Mandy Connell. And she is, as
I said, somewhere far away in some time zone that
even she doesn't know, but may.

Speaker 2 (01:45:08):
A few days ago.

Speaker 1 (01:45:09):
Well, you started your trip in Korea, and you started
the start of your trip going to the DMZ, and
I really need to hear about this ross fascinating.

Speaker 7 (01:45:20):
First of all, instead of doing like a scheduled tour
when we travel, we use a company called Bio Tour
to scheduled tours for us.

Speaker 3 (01:45:28):
You know, we joined along with other tours, so they
didn't have a tour that we wanted.

Speaker 7 (01:45:32):
Because my husband had been stationed at Camp Casey and
he wanted to go to Camp Casey. So he called
by a tour and said, look, can you put together
a private tour for us that we can go on
that allows us to go to Camp Casey. So they
hooked us up with a guy who is he used
to be at Catusa and Catouosas are Korean soldiers that
are attached to the US Army. So it's I didn't

(01:45:53):
know this until we got here, but the Catuosas are
like the rich people's kids, so they get like the
plumb assignments. They don't have to live in the miserable barracks.
They get to hang out with the US Army. But
he was a Catouosa, so he gave us a tour.
We went to the official tourist DMZ area. South Korea
has built a whole tourist attraction on the DMZ, not

(01:46:14):
on the DMZ but close to it so.

Speaker 3 (01:46:16):
You can see it.

Speaker 7 (01:46:18):
And while we were there ross they were playing Rocketman
on the loudspeakers and I could not stop laughing.

Speaker 3 (01:46:24):
I mean, it was the funniest thing I've ever seen.

Speaker 7 (01:46:26):
But then he took us from there to a rock
Republic of Korea Army guard post where we were literally
on the DMZ so.

Speaker 3 (01:46:36):
We could see below us the barbed wire. There was
a lot a row of barbed wire that was the
South Korean side.

Speaker 7 (01:46:42):
Then there was a row of barbed wire right in
the middle that was the actual they call the DMBL,
which is the actual line between the two countries. And
there's supposed to be four kilometers between South Korea and
North Korea, but the North Koreans have a tendency to
in the middle of the night go build something in
the actual DMZ and they call it the line creep,

(01:47:05):
so where we were incipitating four kilometers apart, it was
more like three kilometers apart from the guard post.

Speaker 3 (01:47:12):
I was in to the guard post. I could see
across the valley from where we were, and I was looking.

Speaker 7 (01:47:18):
At monoculars and I said, do you think he's over
there looking at the monoculars at me? And they said,
absolutely they are. And then you could hear this noise
and I couldn't figure out what it was, and I said,
what is that noise? It sounded like in old style
cars when you would turn the radio dial and you'd
get a.

Speaker 3 (01:47:33):
Who that noise, That's what it sounded like. Well, North
Korea doesn't like that.

Speaker 7 (01:47:39):
There are South Korean organizations that broadcast propaganda into North Korea.
So twenty four hours a day, three kilometers away, they
play this noise, and they have this massive speaker bank
right next to the guard post, and I could hear
it three kilometers away. You can only imagine what it
was like in that guard post on the North Korean side.

(01:48:00):
So we had a great conversation with one of the
rock soldiers just about working on the DMZ and how
in the early two thousands, the president of South Korea
tried to sort of normalize things with the North Koreans
a little bit, and it was going well. They built
this huge industrial park in North Korea for the North
Koreans to work in.

Speaker 3 (01:48:21):
There's all these factories right across the.

Speaker 7 (01:48:22):
Border, and then Kim yung un fired a nuclear test
and South Korea said, sorry, we're done with you pulled everything,
all the resources out, so they're kind of back to
the stalemate that they've been in for a long time.
It was incredibly, incredibly interesting, really really cool.

Speaker 3 (01:48:38):
I'm very very glad we did that.

Speaker 1 (01:48:40):
I've heard that there are some tunnels involved with all this.
Did you see them? Did you hear about them?

Speaker 7 (01:48:45):
We saw The first tunnel they discovered was like in
nineteen seventy four, seventy three or early seventies, I don't
remember the exact date, but we could see the mouth
of that tunnel and from where we were in the guardpost,
so that was the first tunnel. There's a total of
five tunnels that they have discovered, the last one fairly
recently that they discovered. The tunnels coming from North Korea,
so now they don't know if they found them all.

(01:49:08):
There could be more, but It's fascinating because the whole
area has so many landlines in it now that you'd
have to be insane to you know, walk through any
of that. So the fact that those tunnels are there,
and perhaps we're being used until fairly recently is it
is pretty remarkable because I wouldn't walk in there. Their
sign everywhere, it's like, no, thank you, I'm good, I'm

(01:49:28):
not going to do that.

Speaker 1 (01:49:31):
How's Korean food or how did Korean food treat you?

Speaker 2 (01:49:34):
I just it's my favorite food me too.

Speaker 7 (01:49:36):
It's my favorite cuisine by far. It was outstanding. Everything
we ate was delicious. On the day of our tour,
we stopped at a mom and pop, you know, restaurant
that had six things on the menu, and we ate
our six things, and I asked our Korean guide. I
was like, whatever, just order some food and then don't
tell me what it is until after I eat it.

(01:49:58):
So I did have of spicy pork with a chunky
snail sauce rob or or ross that was actually remarkably delicious.

Speaker 3 (01:50:09):
I'm glad I didn't know what it was before I
ate it, because it didn't look that appealing. But I
was like when in Rome, right, I'm gonna I'm gonna
eat the food. It was outstanding. But it's just the
food has been great.

Speaker 7 (01:50:20):
And can I just say a moment about celebrity cruise lines. Dude,
I feel like a pretty pretty princess on this ship.
Before we could even ask for something, I think to myself,
I'd like some chocolate, and somebody shows up at the tray.

Speaker 3 (01:50:30):
Would you like some chocolate? It's unbelievable the service we've got.

Speaker 7 (01:50:34):
And this is a smaller ship, so you get just
this like next it's this trip is other than The
rain has been amazing, but everybody's kind of muscled through
the rain. We all wear our raincoats and we're still
going to do the things. And it just means there's
no other crowds there for us to fight against because
all the smart Koreans are Japanese just stayed home on
those days.

Speaker 2 (01:50:53):
How many listeners are with you?

Speaker 3 (01:50:56):
I think like forty five.

Speaker 7 (01:50:58):
We had a few drop off different reasons right at
the last minute, but we have forty five and we've
traveled with a lot of.

Speaker 3 (01:51:05):
These people before. Super good group of people. As always.
I'm sure your listeners are the same way we have.

Speaker 7 (01:51:10):
Some of your travelers with us too, so just really
phenomenal people and we're having a great time, and everybody
should come on these trips at some point because they're
just that good.

Speaker 1 (01:51:22):
That's Mandy Connell Sonning herself, or she would be if
there were any sun on a celebrity cruise boat in
Japan heading to hiroshiam on what sounds like an absolutely
fabulous trip, have a wonderful time. Thanks for doing this
with us. I'm sure your listeners are very glad to
hear you kind of in the interim here they get
their dose of Mandy and well.

Speaker 7 (01:51:43):
I've been posting a ton of pictures on Instagram at
the Mandy Connell and I'm trying to I'm not as
good on Facebook, but I've been trying to like basically
duplicate to Facebook.

Speaker 3 (01:51:54):
But some of the pictures I think are gorgeous. I
take great landscape photos.

Speaker 7 (01:51:57):
I take terrible pictures of people, but I take great
landscape photos. If you want to see any of the
stuff that we're talking about, just following me on Insta
at the Mandy Colin.

Speaker 3 (01:52:05):
That's the best way to do it.

Speaker 1 (01:52:07):
There you go, Safe travels, my friend, and thanks for
doing this.

Speaker 3 (01:52:10):
Don't break the show.

Speaker 1 (01:52:12):
I'll do my best to not ruin it, all right, man,
I'll talk to you later, all right, thank you? All right,
that's Mandy joining us from Asia and eating whatever she's eating.

Speaker 2 (01:52:22):
A lot of fun having that conversation.

Speaker 1 (01:52:25):
I figured it'd be fun for you, right the Mandy
Connor audience getting a little dose of Mandy wall She's away.
You know, I've got just a few minutes left with
you today because we've got an early Rockies game coming
up where the Rockies will try to avoid being swept,
and yet another season series.

Speaker 2 (01:52:41):
And there's a live thing going on right now.

Speaker 1 (01:52:43):
With Homeland Security Secretary Christine nom in Los Angeles. It
looks like they're talking about what federal law enforcement and
ICE and so on are doing in LA. Let's have
a listen and everyone for their comments.

Speaker 8 (01:52:57):
And with that, we're going to open it up to questions,
but we're gonn to keep it specifically to questions that
pertain to this topic and some of the operations that
are ongoing here in Los Angeles and how we will
sustain and build on those operations in the future. So
do you want to go first?

Speaker 2 (01:53:09):
Yes?

Speaker 5 (01:53:10):
Yes.

Speaker 9 (01:53:12):
The question for you about future planning we know that
there's more protest planned for this Yes, is DHS actively
planning on requesting more assistance from DFD more troops given
those protests that are companies.

Speaker 4 (01:53:24):
It's the administration's new playbook.

Speaker 6 (01:53:26):
You know.

Speaker 8 (01:53:27):
What I would say is that I'm not going to
telegraph exact statistics and numbers and what we are doing
as far as participation with the military, but we do
have several thousand engaged here in Los Angeles right now.
We are assessing this weekend's threat levels, not just here
but in cities across the country and pre deploying assets.
So we're using every tool that we have in our
toolbox and pre staging people task forces, specially swift response teams,

(01:53:52):
people with specific gifts and talents that they can contribute
to areas that we think they may be needed this
meeting this weekend, so that we can prevent any kind
of violence from being perpetuated.

Speaker 4 (01:54:03):
Table the idea of bringing more to me.

Speaker 8 (01:54:04):
Yeah, I would say the President has the right to
utilize every authority that he has under the Constitution, to
utilize Title ten and to bring in military assets and
National Guard units as needed, and he'll continue to assess
that and use his prerogative to decide when it's necessary.

Speaker 4 (01:54:20):
Thank you, Madam's Secretary.

Speaker 8 (01:54:22):
You had previously asked the Defense Secretary to direct troops
to arrest people.

Speaker 4 (01:54:27):
Is that something you'd still like to see, you know?

Speaker 8 (01:54:29):
I think what I had talked was a conversation with
a Department of Defense to ask them to use the
authorities that they have in conjunction with the President to
make sure that there's consequences for people who perpetuate violence.
So that is what the assessment is, and they're being
utilized to the fullest extent to which the President wishes
to at this point in time. And I'm so thankful
we have a US Attorney and a Department of Justice

(01:54:52):
that is going out there and prosecuting these crimes as well.
That's something that was very different under the Biden administration.
That is a game changer. Now we have a president
now that believes in the rule of law and that
is going to make sure that when people break the law,
no matter who you are, that you will be prosecuted
and you will be brought to justice. Yes, sir, the Secretary, Yes,
sold or drive with the Division wedwork.

Speaker 4 (01:55:12):
Yeah, two questions for you.

Speaker 1 (01:55:14):
The first one is do you have?

Speaker 4 (01:55:15):
And there's been number of people that have been detained
and reported.

Speaker 1 (01:55:19):
All right, I'll tell you what.

Speaker 2 (01:55:20):
Let's listen the interested time.

Speaker 1 (01:55:21):
We'll leave it there because we're going to bump up
against Rocky's coverage here in a moment, but I will
just say it's an interesting scene. Christy nom is there.
There's an Ice guy there in uniform, a couple other people.
You know. They're doing this live press conference right now
in Los Angeles. And the bottom line is, and I
talked about this earlier on my show. If you just

(01:55:42):
joined to listen to Mandy Show, then you wouldn't have
heard it. But I suspect that the Trump administration will
not back down on any of this, even if some
aspects of it, like enforcement at home depot and things
like that, even if that part is unpopular. I think

(01:56:03):
they will not back down at all. I think as
a matter of principle, they believe that it's their job
to enforce the law, where Biden did exactly the opposite
when it comes to immigration. So I think as a
matter of principle, they believe that's what they're supposed to do.
I also think that they believe, as a matter of politics,
they would have more to lose by backing down than

(01:56:28):
by just sticking with it, so their job is going
to be well sticking with it. All right, let's see
if the Rockies can avoid losing.

Speaker 2 (01:56:36):
Another season series. I will talk with you tomorrow

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