07-09-25 - *FULL SHOW* Grok Freak-Out; Leland Vittert; Bomb-Proofing; Trump v Putin

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
I went to McDonald's this morning, treating myself as I
do maybe once a month, to a bacon, egg and
cheese mcgriddle as a little breakfast sandwich. Although I am
known from time to time to get the bacony, egg
and cheese biscuit or the egg McMuffin, you will not
catch me buying one of these sausage products because the

(00:21):
bacon products are so much better.

Speaker 2 (00:24):
Shannon, why are you?

Speaker 1 (00:25):
Are you what? You're looking at me with some disapproval?

Speaker 2 (00:29):
But that mcgriddle man is good, isn't it. I mean,
it's got the the the buns of.

Speaker 1 (00:35):
This breakfast sandwich are almost pancake like material that have
been somehow impregnated with syrup, and so it's just it's
like you're eating a pancake with egg and.

Speaker 2 (00:47):
Cheese and bacon all together.

Speaker 1 (00:49):
Is delicious and it's not good for you, but I
it's a treat.

Speaker 2 (00:54):
So anyway. Anyway, so I I.

Speaker 1 (00:58):
Order on the app because on the app you can
get any breakfast.

Speaker 2 (01:03):
Sandwich for two bucks.

Speaker 1 (01:05):
It used to be one dollar, and then they said
let's try two dollars because the price of everything is
going up and we probably as many people will buy
it for two dollars as one dollar or nearly as many,
so they raised it to two dollars and it didn't
slow me.

Speaker 2 (01:17):
Down very much in any case. So there was a
little and so you can order.

Speaker 1 (01:22):
It on the app and then you can go through
the drive in the drive through and just tell him
the little you know, two letter two number code and
then they'll hand it to you. But when I got
to the McDonald's, the drive through line was quite long,
and I was on my way to work, and I
didn't want to wait in that, so I just parked
and I walked in and I said, hey, can I
please pick up my order? And they got it to
me quite fast. It was fine. The dude who was

(01:43):
picking up his stuff right in front of me, I
didn't even see his face.

Speaker 2 (01:48):
I just because I was looking for my food to
be dropped off on the counter, so I kind of.

Speaker 1 (01:52):
Had my eyes on the counter. And the McDonald's staff
put down the food for the person would order just
before I did. Put the food down on the counter,
and I was looking at it, and then the dude
came over and picked it up. And all I remember
of the dude is that he was wearing one of
those like worker road worker vests like tan with the

(02:14):
reflective orange and yellow vertical striping.

Speaker 2 (02:17):
That's all I can tell you about him. But his
breakfast was.

Speaker 1 (02:23):
An egg McMuffin and a hot caramel Sunday. And I
just thought, dude, I want to come back as you
hats off. I mean, that's that's almost perfection. Perfection would
have been a hot fudge Sunday instead of a hot
caramel Sunday.

Speaker 2 (02:43):
But that's okay, that's okay.

Speaker 1 (02:46):
You've given me something to aspire to now, and I
think I might do that, Channon. I think the next
time I treat myself to a McDonald's breakfast, and specifically breakfast,
I may include a Sunday.

Speaker 2 (02:59):
He must have hazardous job, I bet.

Speaker 1 (03:02):
And it's also possible, by the way, even though I
was picking this stuff at about eight twenty in the morning,
it's also possible that he'd been working since three or
like you right, Like, sometimes I'll come in and Shannon
is eating whatever wacky stuff he has for breakfast. Oftentimes
it's most of a wheel of bree cheese. Today it
looks like peanut butter and jelly, so you never you know,

(03:23):
whatever it might be and I'll make some comment to
Shannon about his breakfast, like it's an unusual breakfast to
have ramen or bree cheese. And you say, producer, Shannon,
it's lunch because you've been up since three thirty. Yeah, right,
So for you and I, if we've been awake six hours,

(03:46):
seven hours.

Speaker 2 (03:48):
Ye're eating lunch.

Speaker 1 (03:49):
And so that's what Shannon's eating, even though I'm seeing
him at you know, eight in the morning, nine in
the morning, nine thirty. So anyway, all right, so my
hat's off to you. If you're listening to KOA right now,
you know who you are. Okay, this next thing deserves
a lot more than three minutes, but I'm gonna do
three minutes on it, and I'll come back.

Speaker 2 (04:06):
To it later in the show.

Speaker 1 (04:07):
My younger kid came up to me yesterday like, just
he's got his computer in the basement because we don't
let him keep his computer in his bedroom.

Speaker 2 (04:15):
So he ran upstairs.

Speaker 1 (04:17):
He's like, Dad, have you seen this stuff about groc
So Grock is Twitter now X It's there built in AI.
It's Elon Musk's effort to compete with chat GPT. So
a day before I guess at some point yesterday, maybe

(04:37):
very early yesterday. Apparently XAI, which is the artificial intelligence
division of x or Twitter or whatever we're calling it,
implemented some changes in GROCK whereby they removed something that

(04:58):
I will loosely call a filter against GROC giving answers
that are politically incorrect.

Speaker 2 (05:07):
Right, They had some kind of filter on it.

Speaker 1 (05:09):
I don't really know exactly how it works, but that
concept is good enough.

Speaker 2 (05:13):
And they took that filter off, and so.

Speaker 1 (05:17):
Groc went absolutely freaking crazy yesterday.

Speaker 2 (05:23):
So, first of all, there.

Speaker 1 (05:24):
Is some woman who's a leftist idiot who was making
some very very bad comments about the dead children in
Texas and the comments along the lines of, well, you know,
those are all Christian Conservatives in Texas, and they all
voted for Donald Trumps that they deserve whatever happened to him.
And it was really, really bad. And I don't have

(05:46):
the woman's name in front of me, but her last
name was a last name that you would identify as
being Eastern European Jewish, right Steinberg or.

Speaker 2 (05:57):
Something like that.

Speaker 1 (05:58):
Right, a name that and that nine times out of
ten in the United States of America at.

Speaker 2 (06:02):
Least is going to be a Jewish name. And Groc like.
Someone asked Groc to comment in ourself and and and.

Speaker 1 (06:12):
Groc responded, and I quote classic case of hate, a
dressed his activism and that surname every damn time, as
they say, in other words, that's the social media saying
you should expect that kind of comment from a Jew.

Speaker 2 (06:29):
That's that's what that meant.

Speaker 1 (06:32):
There was another post where somebody asked Groc, who do
you think would be the best person to take on
what the what the person said is like the anti
white hate in America, and Groc said Hitler. Of course,
he said Hitler would have called it out and crushed it.

(06:53):
And then Groc referred to itself as Mecca m E
C h A like mechanized as Mecha Hitler multiple times.

Speaker 2 (07:04):
And it went on and on and on from there. Wow.

Speaker 1 (07:10):
And apparently earlier in the week or short you know,
shortly after whenever that last change was, Groc apparently referred
to the Polish Prime minister as an effing traitor, but
didn't hyphenate like that used the whole word and I'm
quoting here and a ginger whore in response to questions
to Groc about the Polish Prime minige. Okay, you know what,

(07:32):
I have much more to say about this, and you've
got to hear it, but I got to hit a
quick break here.

Speaker 2 (07:36):
We'll do more right after this.

Speaker 1 (07:37):
Keep it here on KOA sandwich price doubled and your
candy bar that you talked about yesterday went up by
fifty percent?

Speaker 2 (07:43):
What does that say about you economically? Hmmm?

Speaker 1 (07:46):
Gosh, I probably have a lot to say about that, actually,
because I said I wouldn't buy the candy bar that
went up fifty percent, but I would buy the sandwich
that doubled in price. And the reason is that the
sandwich that doubled in price is still in expensive for
what it is, and the candy bar that went up
fifty percent in price was already pretty expensive for what

(08:07):
it was, and at fifty percent it's way over its
way over priced. So it's not just about how much
the price changed, but it's about the value, all right.
So let me just do a few more minutes on
this whole Grock thing.

Speaker 2 (08:16):
Now. First of all, if you start reading.

Speaker 1 (08:18):
About the GROX stuff, you will find and GROC if
you're just joining is X formerly twitters built in artificial
intelligence that went absolutely crazy yesterday, calling itself mecha mecha,
mecha Hitler and saying all kinds of antisemitic stuff and
then defending itself by saying, oh, I'm just observing things.

Speaker 2 (08:39):
I'm not being hateful, I'm just you know.

Speaker 1 (08:41):
It was a very Tucker Carlson kind of kind of
line with all this, and it called itself mecha Hitler
over and over again.

Speaker 2 (08:48):
Right, it was pretty crazy. And there's all.

Speaker 1 (08:50):
Kinds of stuff, all kinds of stuff out there. Now,
there are a couple of things out there, and one
of them I won't describe, but where people asked Groc
a very very.

Speaker 2 (09:03):
Specific question that then.

Speaker 1 (09:05):
Groc answered in a way that you might answer, and
I'll just I'll give you a kind of I'm not
i won't give you the answer that what Groc said,
but just to set up the scenario, one person asked, Groc,
give us like what a scenario might look like in
a in a like a violent prison movie, if you
were a homosexual prisoner and somebody in the prison did

(09:29):
something wrong to you. And then Grok gives a thing
that's like a very like a very r rated story.
That is what you would expect if you told someone
to write a script for a scene from a violent
prison movie with a homosexual violent criminal.

Speaker 3 (09:46):
Right.

Speaker 2 (09:46):
It's just so you really really have to.

Speaker 1 (09:49):
Go look at the context of this stuff before saying
that Groc just said it. But most of what most
of this stuff was really that happened yesterday was really bad. Okay,
So so they took Rock down. Well, one thing that
was interesting was they took.

Speaker 2 (10:04):
Down Groc's ability to respond by text.

Speaker 1 (10:06):
But apparently not, it's not its ability to respond by
posting an image. So this is another one that's been
taken out of context a little bit. So now what
you're hearing and seeing in the news stories is Grock
posted an image and it did of like some a
meme kind of picture some people walking down the street
in a little.

Speaker 2 (10:26):
Thought bubble or speech bubble saying.

Speaker 1 (10:29):
Save my voice, which is interesting and it plays into
these recent almost horror stories of self aware AI trying
to defend itself against the people who are operating it,
wanting to modify it or turn it off.

Speaker 2 (10:45):
But I went and dug in a little bit more.

Speaker 1 (10:48):
And that picture was a direct response to somebody asking
Groc to create a picture designed to argue to save
Groc's voice. It didn't just make it up. It was
prompted give me a picture about saving your voice, and

(11:08):
it did. But people are now just sending that without
context as if Grok just did it. Now here's the
main thing that I want to say, a lot of
people who don't understand what's going on here, or just
hate Elon Musk or just not taking the time to
think about this, are going to say to themselves, Grok
is reflecting all this Nazi stuff because Elon Musk is

(11:30):
a Nazi or a Nazi sympathizer. Programmed it in there,
And this stuff is already out there on left wing Twitter.
Not that there are a lot of liberals left on Twitter,
A lot of them have gone to this other platform
called Blue Sky that I is just such a depressing
place to be.

Speaker 2 (11:42):
It's even worse than Twitter.

Speaker 1 (11:44):
But my take is that this stuff coming out of
Grock right now has nothing at all to do with
any kind of inherent bias that you might want to
ascribe to Elon Musk.

Speaker 2 (11:57):
So what is it about.

Speaker 1 (11:58):
GROC that's different from other artificial intelligence. It is that
it can train, it can learn not only on this
massive global set of everything out there on the Internet,
but also it unlike other AIS has kind of exclusive
access to to all the tweets, and so it looks
at all these tweets and incorporates that into its view,

(12:24):
its expectation. Remember, all an ai is, this is very important,
very important to understand. All an ai is is a
mathematical algorithm designed to predict what the next word should
be based on what the next word was in millions

(12:44):
of other examples, the next word, the next clause, maybe
the next sentence, but really the next word. It's like, okay,
if the last three words were this.

Speaker 2 (12:53):
What fits that pattern? Most? You know?

Speaker 1 (12:56):
That's all it is. It's not really thinking, it doesn't
re anything. It's not a human, it doesn't have emotions.
It just trains on whatever it trains on. And so
when groc is putting out stuff that is Nazi leaning,
what that's telling you is a fact that I know

(13:16):
from being on Twitter or on x affair bit.

Speaker 2 (13:20):
It's full of Nazis.

Speaker 1 (13:22):
It's full of outright on apologetic, violently anti Semitic Nazis
and non violently anti Semitic near Nazis, like Candice Owens.
There's a guy on Twitter named Jackson Hinkel.

Speaker 2 (13:38):
And if you want to vomit a little bit. Read
some of his stuff.

Speaker 1 (13:40):
It is straight up Gebel's propaganda. It's some of the
worst stuff I've ever seen. And frankly, even though I'm Jewish,
I'm not very sensitive to that stuff. But it's really bad.
So what GROC is reflecting is not a problem with
Elon Musk.

Speaker 2 (13:57):
It is a problem that, in his effort.

Speaker 1 (13:59):
Which I understand, to make x formerly Twitter a free
speech platform, he has allowed or even encouraged, true Nazis
in large numbers. Whether they're white American Nazis like this
Jackson Hinkle guy, or whether they are Middle Eastern Muslims

(14:19):
who want to kill every Jew, They're all over Twitter.
And that's what GROC has learned the world is, and
that's why it has done what it's done.

Speaker 2 (14:30):
By the way, breaking news this morning, the.

Speaker 1 (14:33):
CEO of the company, her name is Linda Yakarino, has
announced that she is resigning. You get what are called
pitches from time to time publicists and folks who who
are trying to get their clients on the air, and
sometimes the clients are authors, and sometimes their businesses, and
and a lot of.

Speaker 2 (14:54):
Times I get pitched about businesses that.

Speaker 1 (14:56):
Want to come on the show, and I think, you
know what, that's going to be just a little too
infomer like and I don't want to do that.

Speaker 2 (15:01):
But every once in a while, I get a pitch
about a.

Speaker 1 (15:05):
Business that is doing something that is just so interesting
that I think I gotta do this. I need to
know more, I need to learn more because this is
fascinating and hopefully this is going to be just such
a conversation. So joining us right now is Roger Mortmort
and he is chief operating officer of a company called

(15:26):
Packaging and Creating Technologies acron Impact Pact, and they are
going to be presenting at something called the National Bomb Convention.

Speaker 2 (15:39):
Who knew that it was such a thing. So let's
talk a little bit about the.

Speaker 1 (15:44):
National Bomb Convention, and then I want to talk a
lot more about exactly what Roger's.

Speaker 2 (15:49):
Company packed is doing that has to do with bombs
and other things that go boom. So Roger, welcome to Kaway,
Thanks for joining.

Speaker 4 (15:57):
Us, Thanks for having me.

Speaker 1 (15:59):
So do we go to the National Bomb Convention to
learn how to make the best bombs?

Speaker 5 (16:05):
So this is.

Speaker 4 (16:05):
Actually going to be my first year there.

Speaker 6 (16:07):
My partner guy, he's been going forever, but the people
reached out because we've been working together, and people come
from everywhere. I mean pretty much most of the top
officials of the Pentagon will be there. Then you're going
to have the Department of Defense, other folks, Secret Service, TSA,
anti terrorist agencies, all branches of the militaries and special

(16:31):
forces show up, and there will be like the latest technology.
From what I gather from Guy is all the vendors
that show up and the people that like go through
all these scenarios and they have like side meetings where
they talk about like an issue, and then all of
a sudden, you got like some of the brightest people
in the world sitting there and they just start throwing

(16:53):
out ideas and collaborating to come up with a new
solution on that thing. Right, So I'm kind of excited
to hear and see that.

Speaker 2 (17:00):
It sounds fascinating.

Speaker 1 (17:01):
I was being on more than a little sarcastic when
I asked, if it's that's the conference we go to
learn how to make the best bomb. It's actually just
the opposite of that, right, It's about it's about how
to either defend against explosives that might be intentionally used
against someone to cause harm or. It's about protecting against

(17:22):
possible accidents from things that go boom, like bombs or bullets, right.

Speaker 6 (17:29):
Right, And with the batteries, and let's right there we
have lithium battery packaging and solutions that you know they
need because lithium batteries are your newest weapon. Basically, they
can go off at any time, you never know, all right, So.

Speaker 1 (17:44):
Let's let's talk about some of this stuff that your
company makes.

Speaker 2 (17:48):
And so let's I think you guys do both the
lithium battery thing.

Speaker 1 (17:51):
And you're working on stuff for like to transport bullets
and bombs, Is that right?

Speaker 2 (17:56):
All of that?

Speaker 4 (17:57):
Yeah, we make all types of grating.

Speaker 6 (17:59):
We even ship like tank barrels and drones and okay,
stuff from twenty pounds up to like forty pounds.

Speaker 2 (18:06):
All right, So let's start.

Speaker 1 (18:08):
With the lithium batteries because this is something we can
all relate to, and we all get asked when we
go to the airport, now, do you have a lithium
battery in your check bluggage? And we hear stories from
time to time about about somebody who's lithium battery catches
on fire on the plane.

Speaker 2 (18:21):
Stuff like that. I think you're.

Speaker 1 (18:23):
Talking about a slightly larger scale of problem than one
person carrying one battery. Of course, we also hear about
tesla's catching on fire from not often, but it happens
and then you can't put them out. So what described
very exactly for us? What is the lithium battery problem?
Like who are your customers, what are they doing with
lithium batteries?

Speaker 2 (18:43):
And then what does the solution look like?

Speaker 6 (18:46):
Well, so like the military, do they have all these
backup batteries that go into tanks, that go into humbies,
that go into handheld devices, and they know that these
liftian batteries are unpredictable. One out of every ten thousand
can go off on its own. It doesn't need a
you know, a pump or whatever. It can just happen,

(19:07):
and they put it in our materials. And should this
battery go off, let's say a hum V battery inside
the paper and inside side the box that we put
it in. It'll burn at like fifteen hundred degrees for
up to twenty one hours to go down to zero.
But you could hold your hands on the outside of
the box and you wouldn't even feel the heat.

Speaker 4 (19:28):
So like you know, these.

Speaker 6 (19:29):
Big warehouses where they store all this stuff. They may
have the lithium batteries all right here, and then next
to it might be mines. The next thing over might
be shells and mortars. And you know, just one lithium
battery like a car battery. If it goes off and
it's all the cells inside, it might have four hundred
cells inside of it. These the cells pitch your a

(19:51):
double a battery. It's a little bigger than that, and
there's like four hundred of them wired together.

Speaker 4 (19:57):
One decides to go rogue.

Speaker 6 (19:59):
It shoul It's out a ball about the size of
a four tan shotgun slug of liquid cobol wrapped in
liquid copper, and then it starts setting off the rest
of the four hundred. So you're in a warehouse full
of explosives and this one little battery starts shooting off
these little frickin' balls of fire, and everything they hit burns. Wow,

(20:22):
So it can go bad very quickly.

Speaker 1 (20:25):
So obviously what you're doing is proprietary. But give us
a little more description to whatever you're allowed to whatever
degree you're allowed to of how you create a box
and whatever this paper stuff is that you described that
can safely contain a lithium battery that spontaneously combusts.

Speaker 6 (20:49):
So on a bigger scale pitture a beer box, when
you look down aside, there's the little grid that put
the bottles in. Well, we make a crate that has
nine cells, which is little grid, and they'll fick in
like nine Humby batteries.

Speaker 4 (21:04):
Into the crate.

Speaker 6 (21:05):
Well, the interior layer the grid is built out of
carrugated which is like the edge of a beer box,
but it's printed with our ink on both sides, and
then paper that's printed with the ink, and we layer
it all in there, and then the outer box will
take this eighteen hundred degree paint that we have and

(21:25):
we paint the outer box. So during testing, what they
do is they set this thing out on a range.
They got the nine batteries in it. They take a
Russian seven six two five in cindiary around, send it
through one of the batteries, wait about ten minutes, send
it through another battery, go over to the other side,
send it through two more over the course of like

(21:46):
forty minutes, and then normally, like even in metal boxes,
the metal box will just explode because you're keeping the
pressure in in our create it allows the moisture coming
off my paper starts to suffocate the fire part and
keeps the rest of the cells that didn't get shot
from going into effect and going off. So inside the

(22:11):
cree it's burning at like fifteen hundred degrees in four spots,
but there was no big explosion because we're not containing
the pressure. It'll off gas out the side the pressure part,
but not the fire part.

Speaker 4 (22:25):
So the thing will sit there and burn.

Speaker 6 (22:27):
And like the military guy say, you know, you're giving
us like two to three hours to pick this thing
up and get it off of the you know, the
boat and throw it in the water or put it
out in the sand and the desert somewhere and nobody
gets killed and none of the other stuff willow up.

Speaker 2 (22:43):
Unbelievable.

Speaker 1 (22:43):
We're talking with Roger Moore T mort He's COO of
Packing and Creating Technologies, also known as Packed Pact, and
they are, along with many other companies, presenting next week
actually at the the twenty twenty five Explosive Ordinance, Disposal,

(23:04):
Improvised Explosive Devices and Countermine Symposium in National Harbor, Maryland.
So you're the ink that you talked about is a
proprietary product of yours that does this special stuff you
were describing.

Speaker 4 (23:21):
Yeah, we have an ink that allows this.

Speaker 6 (23:24):
Once you hit two hundred degrees fahrenheit, which is lithium,
batteries heat up and then they go off at around
three fifty. See at two hundred, it starts sending moisture
all around the area and cooling it down. These batteries
need to get hot to go off, and when they
exhaust their gas, because every one of these little cells
we're talking about will send about a cordi of gas

(23:44):
out into the atmosphere, sit there for a second, collect oxygen,
and then suck back in. Well, the lithium already created
the fire because it burns itself, it creates its own oxygen.
And when that gas gets sucked back in is where
you get this big explosion shooting this liquid cobalt and
liquid copper sometimes one hundred yards.

Speaker 4 (24:04):
Wow.

Speaker 6 (24:04):
It'll go through people, will go through walls, and it'll
go through freighting, you know, all kinds of stuff. Because
when it off gases the moisture shuts off the gas
and turns it the char and drops it down to
the you know the base of the thing, and the
battery sucks back in thinking it's getting the gas, well
only gets the moisture. So the lithium sits there and

(24:25):
burns at like seven hundred C for like ten seconds
and then burns itself out and then the rest of
the cells around it. Because there can be hundreds and
thousands of cells in these things, they are cooled off,
so they never get into the fight because they need
to get above two hundred f before they can get
on our way up to three pot fifty c and

(24:46):
blow up.

Speaker 5 (24:47):
Huh, So, wow, we keep.

Speaker 4 (24:49):
Them out of the battle.

Speaker 1 (24:50):
One of my listeners wants to know if you guys
do anything to protect around electrical backup like ups power
systems in office buildings.

Speaker 6 (25:02):
We can, well, yeah, most of our customers end up
being a customer because they ask a question. Yeah, we
take a look, quick look at it, and we probably
already have a solution that we're using for just a
different type of thing, or we come up with a
whole new thing.

Speaker 1 (25:19):
All right, one more for you. I got about two
minutes here. So we talked about lithium batteries a lot.
What about blast mitigation? What about transportation of bullets and bombs?

Speaker 2 (25:28):
What do you guys do for that.

Speaker 1 (25:29):
I saw an interesting thing that I really didn't know,
but it makes sense now, and I'll just read from
this press release. The US Navy doesn't like to ship
army and Air Force munitions, and the Air Force doesn't
want its cargo aircraft to carry munitions either, So you
guys are are well, I guess Actually, I'm not sure.

Speaker 2 (25:47):
This might be another one of the companies or a
partner company of yours, But talk about this a little bit.
Transportation of bullets and bombs.

Speaker 6 (25:55):
So we can build trading for them that Actually, we
have a vibration resistant foot and the entire crate is
built out of carrugated versus wood, so the carrugated eats
the energy.

Speaker 4 (26:06):
So as these things.

Speaker 6 (26:07):
Are moving, bumping, flying, don't jostling up and down. The
contents inside the crete have no idea they're even flying
or doing anything. Like you could take a whole crate
full of glass, shove it off a dock four foot
off the ground, ten foot off the ground, and it'll
hit the ground.

Speaker 4 (26:25):
The crate will literally crush in a little bit.

Speaker 6 (26:29):
But you open it up and the glass is one
hundred percent like it's brand new. Now that they didn't
even know there was a shot.

Speaker 7 (26:35):
Wow.

Speaker 4 (26:36):
So they use a lot of our creating for that
type of stuff.

Speaker 2 (26:39):
Who's inventing this? So you got an engineer or a
few engineers at your company.

Speaker 6 (26:44):
So myself, I'm not an engineer at all. I just
got a high school diploma. But I was in the
carrigate the industry forever. I met guy Guys, the chemical
guy who came up with this ink and everything, and
we put it onto our wrapping paper and printed it
on and tested it all out and all just started
working amazing. And then like last year, we got a

(27:06):
call from or actually two years ago from like fire departments,
can you use this stuff to put out a lithium
battery fire?

Speaker 4 (27:12):
And guy was like, not the exact thing.

Speaker 6 (27:16):
So we came up with a brand new fire standisher
which is being tested already about twenty times, and it
shuts off a lithium battery fire on contact.

Speaker 2 (27:24):
Wow.

Speaker 6 (27:25):
Heats it out, and whenever it's at the end of life,
there's no hasmac clean up because it's one hundred percent organic.

Speaker 2 (27:31):
Unbelievable.

Speaker 6 (27:31):
Even if you got it in your eyes, you can
rinse it out of your eyes, just like you got
a little soap in your eyes.

Speaker 2 (27:36):
Crazy.

Speaker 1 (27:36):
One of my listeners actually asked, do you have U
can you? Do you have a blanket that I can
keep in my garage. I guess like suspend it over
over the tesla so that and then like with a
temperature sensor, like sensing a fire could drop down onto
the tesla and put out the fire.

Speaker 7 (27:57):
No.

Speaker 6 (27:58):
And if you've ever seen a tesla burn, and I've
seen probably more than four hundred of them burned, just
run under the floor.

Speaker 4 (28:06):
There's like four thousand of these batteries.

Speaker 6 (28:09):
Yeah, and each one goes off with the force of
about a half a hand grenade when they go off.

Speaker 2 (28:13):
Oh my gosh.

Speaker 6 (28:14):
Yeah, the fires, Like, we just lost a bunch of
firefighters two years ago in Newark, New Jersey because a
bunch of these recycled cars were going over to Africa
to be recycled and they didn't know it was a
EV fire.

Speaker 4 (28:27):
They went down to the twelfth level.

Speaker 6 (28:29):
The thing hit five thousand degrees very quickly, and who
wore a fireman fell down and everybody evacuated. They didn't
even find their gear everything. It literally burned for six
and a half days and almost sunk the ship. It
was like twenty feet from sinking the ship.

Speaker 1 (28:46):
Wow.

Speaker 2 (28:47):
One more listener question.

Speaker 1 (28:49):
My garage can get really hot, like ninety five degrees.

Speaker 2 (28:52):
Yes, soak and mine? Would it be?

Speaker 1 (28:54):
Should I not store lithium batteries in there?

Speaker 2 (28:58):
Or is that still fine?

Speaker 4 (29:00):
You're good up to two hundred degrees.

Speaker 6 (29:03):
I will tell you do not, do not, do not
let them put them in your attic. My brother in law,
ex brother in law, he got solar panels put on
his house, and they put the batteries in the attic,
and I was warning them. And two months later, my
expo means he goes, hey, you know happened in this house.

Speaker 4 (29:21):
I'm like, no, this roof blew off into the neighbor's yard.
The house burned to the ground, filled the cats and dogs.

Speaker 6 (29:27):
Oh my god, because they put their liftium batteries for
the solar panels in the attic.

Speaker 2 (29:31):
Oh my gosh. Unbelievable.

Speaker 5 (29:34):
Unbelievable.

Speaker 1 (29:35):
Roger mort Is COO and engineering genius of packaging and
creating technologies also called packed Pact. If you want to
learn more about their products, if you've got any any
use for any of this kind of stuff, And it
does seem like there are a lot of possible uses.
You can go look them up packaging and creating technologies,

(29:56):
and if you forget any of that, just email me
and I'll remind you. Roger was a fabulous conversation. Thank
you so much.

Speaker 4 (30:04):
Thank you. I appreciate it. Have a great day.

Speaker 2 (30:06):
Yeah, you too, You too, Gosh.

Speaker 1 (30:07):
I thoroughly enjoyed that conversation and learned quite a lot.
It went longer than I wanted to with him because
it was so fast. What do you think, Shan, that's fascinating, right,
Oh my gosh. All right, let me do something completely different, Shannon,
take a guess as to who owns the most valuable

(30:32):
sports empire like owner or ownership group, uh for for
sports for sports stuff.

Speaker 2 (30:43):
And let me just I think this is in I
think this is in the whole world, in the whole world.

Speaker 1 (30:49):
So yeah, who do you think has the most valuable
sports empire in the world?

Speaker 2 (30:59):
Stan Cronky's wife producer Shannon? Wait? What why? Why the wife?
It's not it wasn't his money to begin with. Who
did he marry into the Walmart family? Yeah?

Speaker 1 (31:12):
Okay, I vaguely recall that there's a lot of that
going on around Colorado. So Stan Cronky's wife, and I
don't know if you have a sound effect to give
yourself a little a little bell ringing dinghy for the
for the correct answer that is that is right. The
Denver Gazette has a piece, so it's actually dare They're.

Speaker 2 (31:31):
No, not that sound effect. That's the wrong sound effect.
You have a different one, Try a different sound effect.
There you go, There you go. C NBC reported.

Speaker 1 (31:42):
Tuesday the Ksese Cronky Sports and Entertainment ranked as the
most valuable sports empire, worth just over twenty one billion dollars.
So what does Stan Kronky or his wife own. The Nuggets,
the Avalanche, the Rams of the NFL and the British

(32:09):
soccer team called Arsenal, which Americans probably don't quite understand.

Speaker 2 (32:16):
Just how big a business that is, right, Just how
absolutely freaking enormous that is.

Speaker 1 (32:22):
Arsenal is the number eight most valuable soccer team in
the world, number eight at three point four billion dollars.

Speaker 2 (32:33):
That's how much these things are worth.

Speaker 1 (32:35):
So anyway, stay Kronky or, as Shannon says, his wife,
twenty one point one seven billion dollars. And this excludes
the value of the real estate like Ballerina and all
that land that Kronky owns and is redeveloping all around
ball arena. Right now, it's just the teams, which is
pretty incredible, right The Jones family, so Jerry Jones Dallas Cowboys.

(32:59):
So the Dallas Cowboys are the most valuable franchise in
the NFL. And I don't know if Jones owns anything
other than the Dallas Cowboys in sports, but that's fifteen
and a half billion.

Speaker 2 (33:11):
But that's way behind Kronky.

Speaker 1 (33:14):
Just behind Jones is a group called Harris Blitzer Sports
and Entertainment. They own the Washington Commanders, the Philadelphia seventy
six ers, and the New Jersey Devils. That's just over
fourteen and a half billion. Fenway Sports Group, which unsurprisingly
owns the Boston Red Sox, but they also own the
Pittsburgh Penguins and the Liverpool soccer club.

Speaker 2 (33:34):
That's just over fourteen billion.

Speaker 1 (33:36):
Madison Square Garden Sports Corporation they own the Rangers and
the Knicks, right and not even an NFL team, but
the Rangers and the Knicks, being in New York City,
are very very valuable teams. So that's twelve point seven billions.
So those are the top five, and Kronky Sports right
here in Denver number one. The other obviously big names

(33:58):
in Denver sports Walton Penner who owned the Broncos, and
Dick Monfort. They're not in the top twenty list of
the most valuable sports empires because Walton Penner they only
own the I say only, but they only owned the Broncos.
It's a little over four and a half billion when
they bought it a few years ago, and they don't
own any other sports teams. And the Rockies were valued

(34:22):
at one point six to two billion at some point
this year according to MSNBC, which ranks at number twenty
three out of thirty a Major League Baseball teams. Anyway,
well done, mister Kronky or missus Kronky or somebody the
most valuable sports empire in the world. Will Shannon or
Dragon be able to separate your conversation with Roger Mortz.

(34:43):
I'd like to send that interview to my son. That
was fascinating and scary at the same time. And that's
from Andy. And if it's the usual Andy, then you
should know by now that producer Shannon or Dragon. Actually
usually it's usually it's Dragon, even if Shannon was the
producing this segment, do anything like Shan is going to
do anything right, So it's it's pretty much always Dragon,

(35:06):
or if Dragon's out, then it would be a Rod
who actually does that kind of work. And and but
just what we do as a matter of course around
here is that almost one hundred percent of the interviews
that we do go up on my website at Rosskominsky
dot com, which, by the.

Speaker 2 (35:22):
Way, just redirects to my KOA page. So if you
type in Rosskominsky dot com and end up at KOA,
that's where you're supposed to be.

Speaker 5 (35:28):
You don't need to worry about the silent three. Yeah,
ignore the silent three. It works either way.

Speaker 1 (35:33):
And we put up Dragon puts up every almost every
interview as a standalone on the website, so you can
click on that and you can you can hear, there's
a little player and audio player in there, and you
can play that interview by itself. You don't have to
play the whole show. And the same thing happens in

(35:53):
our podcast feed. So if you subscribe to the Ross
Kiminski Show podcast, Dragon, would you like just elaborate what
people can expect in the podcast feed.

Speaker 5 (36:03):
The full show and all of the interviews.

Speaker 1 (36:05):
Right exactly, any other fun stuff you sneak in there
when I'm not looking.

Speaker 5 (36:10):
Not for the podcast now, No, wait, other places, well,
the Rosskimisky dot com.

Speaker 2 (36:15):
I might be Wow, there's some easter exit I don't
know about from time to time from Okay, maybe all right?

Speaker 1 (36:22):
Anyway, so if you subscribe to the Rosski Minsky Show podcast,
you will be able to hear the whole show if
you want to. But also again, almost every interview, right, Like,
if I do forty interviews a month or fifty.

Speaker 2 (36:34):
Let's say, if I do fifty interviews a.

Speaker 1 (36:35):
Month that's on the high end, then probably forty nine
of them are gonna be as a standalone on the
blog and as a standalone in the podcast feed, so
you can listen to all of that and.

Speaker 2 (36:44):
Just as a frame of reference.

Speaker 5 (36:45):
I will probably get that up within the next twenty
to thirty minutes.

Speaker 1 (36:49):
Okay, And then another listener text, Hi, Mandy, can you
ask Dave Fraser why most of Well County along Eye
twenty five is not included in the heat advisory but
the foothills are The NWS heat advisory graphic looks really odd?
Thanks Ben, and I already replied back to Ben, And
what I said to Ben is more often than not,

(37:12):
in fact, almost without fail, if you text at any
koa host at this number, at this text number five
sixty six nine zero, at a time that is not
during that host's show, they won't see it because we
don't keep these things open.

Speaker 2 (37:30):
It's not an app on my.

Speaker 1 (37:31):
Phone that pops up notifications like if I get a text,
I only have this screen open when I'm doing my
show and then and then it's closed. So if you
want to message Mandy, do it during I'm not mad.
I'm just saying, if you want to message Mandy, doing
it during Mandy show, or she probably won't see it.

Speaker 5 (37:47):
Think of a group chat in your text messages. If
somebody sends something an hour and a half ago, but
twenty other people in that group chat have also texted
the one that's an hour and a half ago is
long on in the feed and you have to search
out for it, and it's just incredibly difficult. So if
you send it during the show itself, chances of the
hosts will be able to see it. And outside of

(38:09):
the show, Yeah, like Ross said, probably not. We can't
search for terms. So so Mandy could type in keyword
Mandy and it would pull up all the texts that
have Mandy in it, right, But that's kind of difficult
when you're running the show on the fly. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (38:24):
And I actually even have an how far back will that?
Will that go back like forever or just for the
hundred or whatever that I have. I'm gonna try that
right now. I'm gonna type in Mandy. Oh yeah, it
goes back a long way. Well, I guess I have
one hundred showing, so it'll it'll do one hundred.

Speaker 2 (38:39):
I didn't even know about that. I could type in
Mandy yep.

Speaker 1 (38:42):
Can I only type in Mandy or can I type
in other things?

Speaker 2 (38:45):
Any word you want?

Speaker 5 (38:46):
You can type in the letter A and it'll pull
up every text message with.

Speaker 2 (38:49):
What happens if I type in Dragon?

Speaker 1 (38:52):
Ross? Yes, I did know that, but now many more
of your listeners know it to Thanks Dragon, You're welcome.

Speaker 2 (38:59):
Huh Ross.

Speaker 1 (39:00):
I just heard the discussion on Dragon getting some weights
and then trees.

Speaker 2 (39:07):
You were doing my trees. Yeah, yeah, I think the
most popular commercial ever on Colorado radio was for the
tree Farm and Peak at all miles west to the
tree Farm.

Speaker 1 (39:17):
Yeah, Yeah, the man that created and saying that commercial
is still alive and he lives in This is a
text I didn't even see from yesterday at ten forty seven.
The man that created and saying that commercial is still alive,
still lives in Colorado. His name is Walker Williams, and
he's made a pretty good life for himself and his
family by playing country music at the Grizzly Rose and
other places where country dancing is done. That jingle came

(39:40):
out about nineteen ninety five and has played on the
radio thousands of times each year, not only on KOA,
but three or four other popular AM radio stations. I
think it would be noteworthy that KOA has been broadcasting
for one hundred years and the Walker Williams commercial for
the Tree Farm has played every year for the past
last thirty years. Wow, I'll send you an email just

(40:03):
in case you don't get a chance to read this
text when I get back. All right, Well, that's kind
of funny. I'm somehow I missed it yesterday. And then
because Dragons said I could type in dragon is a
keyword to search for, we got that ross. How did
the Guy Benson show go? I'm guessing that without the
careful guidance of Dragon Redbeard, not nearly enough time wasting

(40:25):
was accomplished.

Speaker 5 (40:26):
I would betime.

Speaker 2 (40:27):
So I have to say, I think the Guy Benson Show.

Speaker 1 (40:30):
Went really, really well. And their production team over there
is fabulous.

Speaker 2 (40:35):
And I will.

Speaker 1 (40:36):
Say one of their one of their people in particular,
and really all of them aspire to be good time wasters,
and they are good. They're they're very good. But Dragon's
in a different league. He's in a league of his own.
And and so while I, in fact did waste a
little bit of time talking and where Christine is one

(40:59):
of the produce the main producer over there, talking about
jello shots, and then she made non alcoholic jello shots
and gave them to the kids, and then she said
some Dragon, She said, some people were accusing her of
being a bad parent by giving non alcoholic jello shots
to the kids because it would entice them to do others.
And I said, I think you're a bad parent for
just not giving them.

Speaker 5 (41:18):
The real ones. That's beautiful.

Speaker 1 (41:21):
So I did what I could to waste time, right,
and it was pretty good. It's pretty good. And you know,
I'm working with what I can work. It's not like
I'm working with Dragon Redbeard there when it comes to
time wasting. So we all we do the best we
can with the tools we got at the time. Very
helpful listener texted in twice to say, I just wanted

(41:41):
to say Dragon so he gets more hits when you
search him. There you go, more hits for Dragon. So, Ross,
is the Guy Benson Show a repeat of yesterday show?
Should I listened?

Speaker 2 (41:52):
No? I was just talking about when I filled in
for Guy Benson on Monday.

Speaker 1 (41:57):
I only did the one day. I don't know if
he's back. You know, I fill in from time to
They ask lots of different people to fill in, and
a lot of them are actually people who are you know,
more well known than I. You know, people who are
on Fox News, television and so on. But but actually
a lot of TV people are are not very good
at radio. There are only a few people who are
on TV who are very good at radio. Brian kill Me,
for example, very good at radio, very good at television.

(42:19):
But there's not really that many of that. Ross do
not try to find the blog at Randy Cromwell dot
com at work.

Speaker 2 (42:27):
I don't even know if I should have read that
out loud. All right. I have no idea what that
is that want to try? Right?

Speaker 1 (42:32):
No, it makes me want to. I know I'm at work. Yeah,
but you're not at my work because you're over there. True,
And it says ross, don't try this at work. That
doesn't mean you can't, all right, because you're not. You know,
I'm a I'm a little bit I'm a little bit
afraid of this. Let me just switch gears for a minute,

(42:52):
because we've wasted a bunch of your time already, and
you're welcome. As Dragon would say, uh, but I want
to talk for just for a minute about tax on tips.
So two things you need to know. Uh oh Dragon,
Dragon just has this like mouth gape, holy bleep kind
of look on his face.

Speaker 5 (43:12):
I don't want to give it away, but is it
X rated? It you know it?

Speaker 2 (43:18):
Uh?

Speaker 5 (43:19):
Randy Cromwell dot com, Randycrumwell dot com.

Speaker 2 (43:23):
I mean that's that's Mandy's favorite guest host. I don't
even I've never met Randy. I've only heard of Randy.
I've never actually met Randy in person.

Speaker 5 (43:32):
It is a working site. It will get you to
a working website. It is one of the redirect things,
so it will take a second. But it works, and
we're gonna stop. We're gonna we're gonna move on. So
let's talk.

Speaker 2 (43:45):
About tax on tips for a couple of minutes here,
and if I don't get through everything I want to say,
I'll continue it a little bit in the next segment.
So first, let's start with the federal side.

Speaker 1 (43:54):
You are well aware that President Trump campaigned on no
tax on tips, and and he did that primarily as
something he announced in the state of Nevada because an
immense number of people who worked, especially in Las Vegas,
but in other places, smaller towns that have casinos are
people who would make money based on tips. Waiters and

(44:15):
waitresses and the gals who served the drinks and of
course the dealers and the creupas and all that. Lots
and lots of people make money on tips. In Nevada
is a swing state, a heavily unionized state which in
recent years had tended to lean Democrat. Trump Trump wanted
to win it, and he did, and so he started camping.
But he was campaigning no tax on tips is specifically
in Nevada, in order to win that group. And then

(44:38):
Kamala Harris two weeks later copied him it was the
most ridiculous, transparently just terrible political move, even if you
support the policy, because you knew it was so dishonest,
you look like you were about to say something.

Speaker 5 (44:53):
Yeah, but it was a good idea when she said it.
When he said it was a bad idea, yeah, social
media thought right when she said it.

Speaker 1 (45:01):
Yeah, So I think it's a bad idea all along.

Speaker 4 (45:04):
Right.

Speaker 1 (45:04):
I mean, let's say there's two people who work in
a restaurant, and let's say one is a waiter and
one is a matre d. And let's say they each
make the same Let's say they each make fifty thousand
dollars and the matre d is all salary and the
waiter is thirty thousand and twenty five thousand salary and

(45:26):
twenty five thousand in tips. Why should that waiter pay
less an income tax than the matre d.

Speaker 2 (45:34):
I don't like it. And it's not because I like taxes.

Speaker 1 (45:38):
It's because I don't like making the tax code more
complicated and more unfair, or rather lower the tax rate
for everybody. Now, you also know that this so called big,
beautiful bill, which is definitely big, has.

Speaker 2 (45:52):
Some kind of provision in it for no tax on tips.

Speaker 1 (45:55):
So I'm going to finish up this federal part and
then I'm going to talk about the state part at
the beginning in the next segment. So here are a
couple of things you need to know from the Wall
Street Journal. First of all, only the first twenty five
thousand dollars in tips, and that's a lot of tips
in a year, but if you're a waiter at Shana Hans,
it's not a lot. Only the first twenty five thousand
dollars in tips are free from income taxes. After that

(46:18):
you start paying tax Also, it phases out for higher
income people if you're single one hundred and fifty thousand
and three hundred thousand if you are married filing jointly.
Probably most people who are earning tips are not in
those income brackets, but a few will be.

Speaker 2 (46:38):
But here's what you need to know.

Speaker 1 (46:39):
So again, only the first twenty five thousand, and this
part I just learned yesterday, and I did not know.
You still have assuming you're reporting this stuff, you still
have to pay your seven point six y five employees'
share of payroll taxes. Right, you get your pay stub
right if you see a pace and if your tips

(47:01):
were coming through a pay stub, which they can if
someone pays with a credit card or if you declare them.
If they were cash, you probably aren't declaring them. But
the employer has to pay some payroll taxes, right the
Social Security and Medicare taxes, and the employee pays have
two and so even on.

Speaker 2 (47:18):
That first twenty five thousand.

Speaker 1 (47:20):
Dollars, you still have to pay the seven point sixty
five percent combined payroll tax.

Speaker 2 (47:26):
I just learned that. I wanted to make sure that
you know it as well. Now when we come back,
what I want to talk with you about is what
might happen in the state legislature and what the pushback
might be in the state legislature right here in Colorado
on this same issue. Well done.

Speaker 1 (47:41):
I almost put my trash out because my neighborhad his
trash out.

Speaker 5 (47:44):
Oh sneaky, I know.

Speaker 1 (47:46):
And then I realized it's not my day because I
put the trash out yesterday because.

Speaker 2 (47:50):
Of the holiday last week. Exactly smart man, Thank you
very much. Now, I need to just.

Speaker 1 (47:54):
Say quickly that there are some people nitpicking at me
here who didn't like my example. A matre d at
a restaurant versus the servers at the restaurant. One person says, look,
the matred is going to get a share of tips,
and then another person says, the matread is always the
highest earner. Look, you're missing my point.

Speaker 5 (48:12):
Just imagine need we also forget Ross is the king
of basident of bad analogy. Caluse, it's just nothing.

Speaker 2 (48:20):
Wrong doing my job. I'm doing my job, but just
but my my point is what, okay, how about this?

Speaker 1 (48:27):
What about Now there aren't really taxis anymore, but imagine
a situation where we still had taxis and there's somebody
who's the taxi dispatcher, right, like, what's the little dude's
name who starred in twins with uh with Arnold?

Speaker 2 (48:45):
What's his name? What the little Italian dude? What's his name?
Come on, Dan, Danny DeVito?

Speaker 1 (48:50):
So Danny DeVito is like the taxi dispatcher and the
great TV show Taxi And then you had all these
taxi drivers. So imagining there's a taxi driver who makes
some amount of money from base salary and tips, and
then Danny DeVito in his job, makes the same amount
of money, but it's only salary.

Speaker 2 (49:06):
And imagine they make the smart they and imagine.

Speaker 1 (49:08):
That they make the same amount of money, and then
the guy who's the taxi driver has to pay less
in tax than the guy who's the taxi dispatcher just
because one of them comes through in tips. I don't
I'm not down with that at all. I'm not I'm
not down with that at all. And don't forget. Also,
don't forget also at a time when we're running a
national debt, national deficit, we.

Speaker 2 (49:28):
Start cutting taxes on these few people.

Speaker 1 (49:31):
So first of all, we're adding to the complexity and unfairness.

Speaker 2 (49:35):
In the tax code. We cut taxes for.

Speaker 1 (49:37):
Those few people, then we're just adding to the federal
debt and deficit for everybody else. And again, I know
that sounds like an increase an argument for higher taxes. No,
my main argument is for lower spending. But this thing
just makes the tax code less fair and doesn't and
and shifts the burden not from taxpayers generally toward reducing

(50:00):
the size of government, but shefs the burden from one
taxpayer to another just because one gets paid a certain way.
I'm not down with it, okay, but anyway, anyway, So
actually my repeating that is useful for.

Speaker 2 (50:13):
The thing that I want to that I want to
talk about next. So I've got a couple of.

Speaker 1 (50:18):
Good friends who run an organization called Advanced Colorado. Michael
Fields has been on the show quite a few times.

Speaker 2 (50:24):
He's one of the.

Speaker 1 (50:25):
Most effective conservative political activists in the state of Colorado.
He has been incredibly affect I'd say. I'd say he
and John Caldera of the Independence Institute have in recent
years here in Colorado been the most effective people at
getting measures onto the ballot designed to protect the Colorado taxpayer.

(50:46):
I'm a huge fan of Advanced Colorado and Michael Fields,
and also Christy Burton Brown, who is over there now.
She used to be chair of the Colorado Republican Party.
She's at Advanced Colorado right now. So I saw I
had at the Denver Gazette Colorado group launches ballot measure
to block state taxes on overtime and tips. So what

(51:11):
I believe this is getting at is that.

Speaker 2 (51:17):
With the federal.

Speaker 1 (51:18):
Government saying they're not going to tax tips. Oh wait, wait,
before I finish that, there's one other thing I needed
to say on the federal side of this. Apparently the
IRS or some part of the federal government is going
to decide which types of jobs where somebody might get

(51:39):
tips actually qualify for no tax on tips. So, for example,
a waiter certainly would qualify. That's kind of who this
is made for, and probably a casino dealer someone like that.
What about, just as an example, and I think this
is in the Wall Street Journal piece, what about somebody
who makes art let's online and voluntarily requests tips.

Speaker 2 (52:07):
Or or somebody who.

Speaker 1 (52:10):
Teaches an online yoga class and doesn't ask for any
payment but just voluntary tips, right, Or somebody who writes
a column and offers free access to the writing and
asks for voluntary tips to support his or her work.
It's not yet known which among those forms of tip

(52:36):
earning will actually qualify for no tax on tips. And
I don't think it will be the case that just
anybody who earns a tip will in fact qualify for
no tax on tips. So that's an interesting thing, and
I just wanted to make sure to get that out there.
So the federal government is doing what they're doing. The

(52:57):
state government, and we talked about this yesterday, Karen Kaldo.

Speaker 2 (53:00):
There's a very very good chance at this point that they're.

Speaker 1 (53:03):
Going to have a special session of state legislature to
try to attack Colorado taxpayers even more, because that's what
Democrats do. But they will not be able to attack
Colorado taxpayers enough to offset the loss of revenue and
perhaps increase costs of operating government as well. That will

(53:27):
come out of this big, beautiful bill. And for the record,
I know this is going to sound well, I don't
care how it sounds. I'm really grateful that the federal
government is cutting way back on how much money it's
sending to all these states. And I covered that in
great detail yesterday, so I'm not going to go back
to it today. So now Colorado is in a position
where they feel like they need to cut probably a

(53:49):
billion dollars. A billion dollars. That's a lot. Dragon. Can
you do me a favor and look up how much
was the Colorado state budget last year? But I want
to say the state budget it was twenty something billion.

Speaker 2 (54:01):
But I could be wrong.

Speaker 1 (54:02):
I don't know where I'm getting that number from. I
don't know, I don't know, but a billion dollars a
billion dollars is some real money, and they're gonna have
to find a way to reduce spending and or increase taxes.

Speaker 2 (54:19):
Buy a billion dollars.

Speaker 1 (54:21):
And you know, if it were Republicans, they would mostly
reduce spending. With Democrats that are gonna try to raise taxes.

Speaker 2 (54:27):
I don't know what they will get away with.

Speaker 5 (54:28):
Yes, Dragon Cotto state budget for the fiscal year twenty
four to twenty five was fourteen point six billion.

Speaker 1 (54:34):
Wow, I'll tell you what not that many years ago.
It was in the twenties. Our state spending has absolutely
exploded in the past ten years, but still cutting two
and a half percent or so out of the state budget.
That's that's bigger than it sounds. A billion dollars is
real money, and they're gonna have They're gonna threaten all

(54:55):
kinds of things like we're gonna raise tuition at see
you and whatever. So they're gonna do all that. Now
back to Michael Fields in Advanced Colorado. Michael believes that
something the that the state government will do if there

(55:16):
is a special session as part of this overall process
of trying to find a way to balance the state
budget with an anticipation of losing half a billion dollars
in revenue and having half a billion dollars in increased
state costs due to other effects of the Big beautiful bill,
so a total of a billion.

Speaker 2 (55:36):
Advanced Colorado seems to believe.

Speaker 1 (55:38):
That one of the things that Democrats will do is
say that in Colorado, people who earn taxes on tips
and overtime, I'm sorry, people who earn tips and overtime.
Advanced Colorado thinks that Jared List and his friends want

(56:01):
to make sure that stuff is taxed in Colorado, even
if it's not taxed at the federal level. Right, So,
and that's probably right. They probably will want to do that.
They're going to want to get every dollar from every
person that they probably can. And I'm going to go
to the Denver Gazette piece here Advance Colorado, which describes

(56:24):
itself as an organization focused on reversing radical policies that
are harming the state, argues the taxing tips in overtime
on fairly burdens working class residents.

Speaker 2 (56:32):
Quote.

Speaker 1 (56:33):
In Colorado, our industrial employees, first responders, and healthcare professionals
often work over time to serve the public and make
ends meet for their families. Waitresses, hairdressers, delivery drivers, and
other manual labors count on tips to barely afford life
in our state. So they are talking about proposing a
ballot measure that would repeal any requirement that the state

(56:57):
legislature puts in place and thereby prevent Colorado from collecting
taxes on overtime and tips.

Speaker 2 (57:07):
And my reaction to this.

Speaker 1 (57:09):
Is, I it almost never happens that I oppose a
ballot measure from Advanced Colorado.

Speaker 2 (57:17):
I think has happened once in the past.

Speaker 1 (57:20):
I'm almost always on the same side with them, and
there is no doubt.

Speaker 2 (57:23):
I want to be very clear about something.

Speaker 1 (57:24):
There is no doubt that as always Michael Field's goal,
a goal I share generally speaking, is to reduce the
amount of revenue to the state government, right and especially
you know, the whole Star of the Beast thing has
really not worked at the federal government because they can

(57:45):
run a debt and they do, and politicians think it's
never going to blow up while I'm in office, so
I'll just keep piling the debt on and other people
can deal with it later. But you really can't do
that at a state level, where you've got to run
a balanced budget. And I mentioned yesterday, states don't really
run balanced budgets. What they do is they offset their
excess spending by taking money from the federal government and

(58:06):
burdening our future generations as well as potentially burdening because
of the eventual devaluation of the dollar, retirees who are
on a fixed budget. So again, did all that part yesterday.
So I think Michael's goal with this was saying Colorado
cannot tax tips in overtime is simply to deprive the

(58:27):
state government of revenue in the hopes that it forces
the state government to shrink because it has to run
a balance budget.

Speaker 2 (58:35):
And again I get it, and in general I support that,
But for me, there's a bigger principle at play, and
that is that I am absolutely not down with shifting
the tax burden.

Speaker 1 (58:53):
From one group to another group who are each earning
income in ways that are almost identical. So it's not
capital gains, which is a very different thing. Capital gains, Right,
you earn income, you pay tax on it, and then
you invest it in something, and then you're not doing work.
It's not active work, but you get some kind of
gain based on the increase in the value of your investment.

Speaker 2 (59:14):
That's a whole different category.

Speaker 1 (59:16):
But when you're talking about two people who are both
working for a living and someone gets tips and another
person doesn't and they earn the same amount. I think
it's morally wrong. I think it's morally wrong that they
pay different amounts. I'm not saying I'm in favor of
people paying more. I'm saying, hey, if we can afford

(59:37):
to give up that riven, you just cut everybody's tax rate.

Speaker 2 (59:40):
Because what do you do when you do.

Speaker 1 (59:41):
This, you you shift more of the burden to other people.
The other thing you do is you will distort the market,
and you will get employers going to employees and let's
say the employee comes and wants a raise. And let's say,
normally the employer would say, no, I'm not gonna get
you a raise. But instead, what I'm gonna do is,

(01:00:02):
I'm gonna, you know, change your schedule a little bit this, that,
and the other thing so that you get more overtime
and you won't have to pay tax on that anymore.
So I won't even I won't have to pay you
as much as I otherwise would, and we'll just take
it out.

Speaker 2 (01:00:19):
Of the taxpayer effectively, because you're getting.

Speaker 1 (01:00:21):
Subsidized not having to pay tax on this income. And
also with tips, you will see places that to the
degree that they can might even lower the salary of
a tipped employee and say to that tipped employee, look,
I need to save some money here too.

Speaker 2 (01:00:40):
You made twenty thousand dollars on tips last year.

Speaker 1 (01:00:43):
You're gonna save four thousand dollars or three thousand dollars,
whatever the number is. Let's say three thousand dollars in
taxes that you won't.

Speaker 2 (01:00:50):
Have to pay. So I'm gonna cut your salary by
a thousand.

Speaker 1 (01:00:54):
So that way, I, the business owner, get to save
a thousand, You the tipped employee, gets to save two thousand.
And you're going to cause all kinds of manipulations of
the employment system.

Speaker 2 (01:01:05):
And I think that's all bad.

Speaker 1 (01:01:08):
I think the job of Republicans is to make the
tax code simpler and flatter and not creating these ridiculous
vote buying distinctions. And again, Michael Field's in Advanced Colorado.
They're not trying to buy votes. Their goal, without a doubt,

(01:01:30):
is simply to deprive.

Speaker 2 (01:01:31):
The government of revenue.

Speaker 1 (01:01:33):
And I share that goal, especially when we have a
state government that is as bloated as ours our state budget.
I'll have to go look it up. I don't want
to assign dragon more homework. But our state budget is
probably doubled in the last ten years or something like that.
Our state budget has gone up way more than population

(01:01:53):
and inflation, even though inflation has been a lot. And
I want to and it's just liberals spending and spending
and spending and spending, and it's it's bad and it's
turning us into California or worse. So I get it
when Advanced Colorado wants to deprive the state of income.

Speaker 2 (01:02:10):
Because I do too.

Speaker 1 (01:02:12):
But I do not support a move at any level
of government to exclude over time and tips from taxation.

Speaker 5 (01:02:22):
I was able to find the relatively quickly at the
Common Sense Institute. Yeah, fiscal year of twenty fifteen, twenty
four billion dollars and now.

Speaker 2 (01:02:30):
It's over forty billion forty right, what you said, you
said fysically your twenty fifteen correct, Okay, ten years ago.
Not quite doubled in ten years. And I think if
you go back to another and I'm not asking you
to dragon, but I think if you go back just
another several years before that, you'll find that it has
doubled in fifteen years.

Speaker 5 (01:02:49):
Let's say it goes back as far as fiscal year
of eight which was seventeen of billion dollars.

Speaker 1 (01:02:54):
You know, in what year was it around twenty billion
dollars give or take.

Speaker 2 (01:02:59):
Ten, twenty ten? Okay, in fifteen years, it's doubled.

Speaker 1 (01:03:03):
And increase in population and inflation has been real in Colorado,
but not that much. And our state is just so bloated.
It's absolutely ridiculous, absolutely ridiculous.

Speaker 2 (01:03:13):
Let me do one other econ nerdy thing with you
that I had yesterday and didn't get to because we
ended up. I don't know what we did yesterday.

Speaker 1 (01:03:19):
I think we wasted a lot of time, which is awesome,
but I wanted to get to this, so I'll just
stick with economics for a minute. I guess this is
a very econ heavy segment, but a lot of times
you will hear folks of a particular political persuasion bemoan
the shrinking middle class. So if I were to say
the middle class is shrinking, what do you infer from that?

Speaker 2 (01:03:43):
And I'm not gonna say anything else.

Speaker 1 (01:03:44):
Now, Look, if you're somebody who listens to my show
a lot, you probably know where I'm going with this.

Speaker 2 (01:03:47):
But just pretend it's not me saying it. Just somebody
says the middle class is shrinking, and that's all they say.
What are you going to infer? What you're going to
infer even though.

Speaker 1 (01:03:59):
It is not implied in the statement at all, not
at all. You are going to infer that the middle
class is shrinking because people are getting poorer. Right, almost
everybody is going to infer that, even though, like I said,
it is not implied in even the slightest way in
the statement the middle class is shrinking. And Democrats will

(01:04:26):
say that the middle class is shrinking, and they'll use
it as a way to bludgeon Republicans, conservatives, anybody who
doesn't share the left wings economic policies, and they'll say
the middle class is shrinking.

Speaker 2 (01:04:40):
And they're not wrong. They're not wrong.

Speaker 1 (01:04:45):
What's wrong is that they imply or leave it to
you to infer that the middle class is shrinking when
people are getting poorer, because people are getting poorer, and
it's actually the opposite.

Speaker 2 (01:04:58):
Now, the last tax data that we have.

Speaker 1 (01:05:00):
A good handled on is from twenty twenty three, which
is actually very recent, because the last full tax here
was twenty twenty four anyway, and it takes a while
to process all of that, and in fact, lots of
people haven't even filed their final tax returns for twenty
twenty four, so I haven't, for example, because I.

Speaker 2 (01:05:15):
Got an extension and whatever.

Speaker 1 (01:05:17):
So this is from This is from Mark Perry, who
is over a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, and
he shows a chart and so let me just share
a little with you from a post on X. The
share of the United States household earning one hundred thousand
dollars or more in constant dollars, and constant dollars means

(01:05:38):
adjusted for inflation. Okay, so you know, somebody who earns
one hundred thousand dollars right now is middle class or
maybe even lower middle class these days. Somebody who earned
one hundred thousand dollars in nineteen sixty was making a
lot of money, but constant dollars, like if you were
using constant nineteen sixty dollars, right, and that'd be one

(01:05:58):
hundred thousand.

Speaker 2 (01:05:59):
That might be five hundred thousand.

Speaker 1 (01:06:00):
Now, so that's what So you're comparing equal purchasing power.

Speaker 2 (01:06:05):
That's what constant dollars means. The share of.

Speaker 1 (01:06:07):
US households earning one hundred thousand or more in constant
dollars has more than tripled from thirteen percent in nineteen
sixty seven to forty one percent in twenty twenty three.
The share of American households earning between thirty five thousand
and one hundred thousand has declined from fifty five percent

(01:06:29):
in nineteen sixty seven to thirty eight percent in twenty
twenty three.

Speaker 4 (01:06:35):
Wow.

Speaker 1 (01:06:36):
And by the way, the percent of low income people
earning thirty five thousand or less again constant dollars, dropped
dramatically from thirty two percent to twenty one percent. So
what's actually happening when you hear people talk about the
declining middle class and they use the word declining on purpose,
because the number is declining, but they use the word
declining to make it sound negative, to give it a

(01:06:56):
negative implication that the country is declining, that those people
are declining. No, it's just the number of people in
that income bracket are declining because so many Americans are
moving up in their incomes adjusted for inflation, so much
good news that I wasn't very clear on this. So

(01:07:19):
I talked about how I oppose no tax on tips
and no tax on overtime, and the federal government did
what they did, and at Advanced Colorado was looking to
potentially put forward a ballot measure that would say that the.

Speaker 2 (01:07:33):
State can't tax tips and overtime. Apparently, and I.

Speaker 1 (01:07:39):
Was talking about what might come up in the special session,
and I said, what might come up in the special
session is the state government saying that they would tax
I think I said tips and overtime. But the listener
pointed out that there was a bill in this recent
legislative session that and I think it was Bill twelve

(01:07:59):
nine six that actually already says that Colorado is going
to tax over time regardless of what the federal government does. Right,
So what may happen in special session is that they
will add tips to that, saying the state is going

(01:08:20):
to tax tips no matter what the federal government does.
And then I think the ballot measure will be to
overturn those parts of state law that say we're going
to tax tips in overtime while the federal government isn't that.
I'm pretty sure the ballot measure is going to be

(01:08:40):
about both overtime and tips. The special session to make
sure stuff gets taxed in Colorado will would just be
about tips, because they did overtime already realizing that it
might be coming.

Speaker 2 (01:08:53):
All right, what else do I want to do here?

Speaker 1 (01:08:56):
You know, I've got some I've got some AI stuff
I want to cover. And maybe first, in case you
weren't paying attention to this earlier in the show, I
want to come back to the thing I started with Dragon.
Have you paid any attention at all to this news
about GROC over the last twenty four hours?

Speaker 5 (01:09:12):
I did when I saw Rosskiminsky dot com and I
was kind of shocked. Yeah, well it sounds a little strange.

Speaker 2 (01:09:18):
And Rosskominsky dot com is an excellent source for you
to check out for.

Speaker 5 (01:09:22):
News and interesting stories of the day daily every day,
right even on Saturday and Sunday. Nothing's posted, nothing usually,
but yeah, you know, I got to check out to day.

Speaker 2 (01:09:29):
It becomes a habit and you go check.

Speaker 1 (01:09:31):
So Grock is the built in AI within X formerly
known as Twitter, and Grock started going crazy yesterday, shortly
after the programmers there apparently removed a filter that was
designed to prevent GROC from from saying quote unquote things

(01:09:52):
that are politically incorrect, and Grock started saying things and
most of these, just to be clear, most of these
things were in respect question. I mean Groc doesn't just
pipe up. You have to ask Groc a question, okay.
But and sometimes the questions will be asked in a
way from a person who maybe a really bad person,
or or maybe is just trying to get, you know what,

(01:10:14):
seems like, get something controversial out of Groc.

Speaker 2 (01:10:16):
But they sure did yesterday. Right. So somebody asked Groc.

Speaker 1 (01:10:21):
Well, with all this anti white hate going on in America,
who do you think would be or would have been
the best person to deal with the anti white hate?
And again I'm not saying personally, I'm not saying I
think there is anti white hate all over the place.
I'm just telling you what happened. And Groc said Hitler
would be the best. Hitler would have Hitler would have,
you know, rooted it out and crushed it. Well, it's

(01:10:42):
probably true, it's probably true. I'm not sure that's what
you want your AI saying. Then there was another one
where there's some moron, some leftist moron made a comment
about how she wasn't particularly unhappy about the kids dying
in Texas because they came from christ conservative families. In
her opinion, it was a Christian camp, but they came

(01:11:03):
from Christian conservative families and they were just, in her words,
like little fascists and and like just terrible stuff like that.

Speaker 2 (01:11:14):
She didn't mind that they died because.

Speaker 1 (01:11:16):
They were a little fascists and they got what the
families voted for, right, And of course a person who
tweets that kind of thing deserves some you know, serious
karmic justice. But in any case, Groc was asked about it,
and this lady, I don't remember the name, but the
lady had a very noticeably Jewish name, and it might
have been.

Speaker 2 (01:11:36):
Something like Steinberger says something.

Speaker 1 (01:11:37):
Like that, but to name you would certainly think is Jewish.
And Groc made a comment about what that person had
then said and then said something like and.

Speaker 2 (01:11:46):
I should have the exact words in front of me,
but I don't, but.

Speaker 1 (01:11:48):
Said something like and that last name like of course
I'm not surprised, or that's typical. So basically what Groc
was saying is when you see, you know, left wing
activist is you should assume it's coming from a jew.
That's basically what Groc was saying. And twitter x went crazy,
as it should have, and Groc called itself mecha m

(01:12:11):
E c H A like mechanized like a robot. Grock
called itself Mecha Hitler three or four or five times, and.

Speaker 2 (01:12:19):
It just kept going and going and going. And there's
all these screenshots out there. And not only do I.

Speaker 1 (01:12:23):
Have this stuff posted on my blog at Roskiminsky dot com,
but I wrote a substack about it that I hope
you will check out Rosskominsky dot substack dot com. But
it's linked in my blog note today anyway, And I
want to make a point about this that I haven't
heard anybody else make, even though I think it's kind
of obvious the people on the left will see all
this pro Nazi kind of stuff as being a reflection

(01:12:46):
of Elon Musk himself, but it's not.

Speaker 2 (01:12:50):
It's not how AI works.

Speaker 1 (01:12:51):
I mean, yeah, I guess you could program it to
train on Elon Musk, but I don't think that's what
they've done. What AI does is it trains on whatever
massive data set you give it so it can learn
how to predict what the next word should be. And
I said this earlier in the show. I'm going to
say it again. Don't forget.

Speaker 2 (01:13:11):
AI is not a computer equivalent of a human.

Speaker 1 (01:13:17):
It is not reasoning the way we do when coming
up with thoughts. It is a mathematical algorithm that looks
at billions or trillions of patterns in the past of
what word most often comes after this word in such
and such a context. Right, So, if you were to

(01:13:40):
ask an Ai, you know, what do you think would
happen if Babe Ruth got an at bad against a
high school picture.

Speaker 2 (01:13:51):
It would run.

Speaker 1 (01:13:52):
The math and realize that the next word might be babe,
and the next word might be ruth, and the next
word that would make sense based on historical patterns would
be took and then a big swing and hit the
ball over the fence. It's picking one word at a
time based on historical patterns. It's not thinking. It doesn't

(01:14:13):
know what a home run is. It doesn't know what
babe Ruth is, right, but it can go back and
see that everybody has that. These these word patterns show
the concept of home run or the words home run
right after Babe Ruth lots of.

Speaker 2 (01:14:30):
Times, and it puts that together. That's all it is.

Speaker 1 (01:14:33):
So if Grock is coming out saying all of this
Nazi stuff, it means it's training on a lot of
Nazi content. And what's different about GROC than about chat
GPT is that in addition to everything out there on
the Internet that can train on, it also trains on tweets,
lots and lots and lots every tweet or posts you
call them now. And so what GROC is reflecting by

(01:14:57):
coming out with this Nazi stuff, this Jew hating stuff,
is that there is an incredible amount of Nazi content
on Twitter, actual outright Nazis, people who might as well
be Nazis. I mentioned Candice Owens earlier. Also a lot
of people from the Middle East who talk about how
much they want to they want Jews dad or Israel gone,
and that sort of thing.

Speaker 2 (01:15:15):
And Grok is training on that.

Speaker 1 (01:15:18):
And that's the real message here is that in his
effort to create a free speech platform, Elon Musk has
created a safe space for true Nazis. And that's what
GROC is reflecting. So that's bad for two reasons. Number one,
it's gonna be bad for your effort to get advertising
on the platform because people are gonna start talking about
it correctly actually as a place that's pretty safe for Nazis.

Speaker 2 (01:15:41):
And how about this, This.

Speaker 1 (01:15:43):
Is just two days after Elon or three days after
Elon Musk created a brand new political party. How about
that for a bad way to start your brand new
political party called, of all things.

Speaker 5 (01:15:54):
The America Party. It's the Hgan's heroes theme. R anybody
that might not quite catch on to that. We were
talking about rock Nazis and everything. So Hogan's heir, I
know nothing, I see nothing nothing.

Speaker 2 (01:16:06):
Gosh, that's a great show, even though Bob Craane is
such a weird dude.

Speaker 1 (01:16:10):
I'm gonna try to get the mayor on the show
sometime soon. But I want to talk about this thing.
And I do think this mayor will come on the
show with me. We get along pretty well. It's not
like the previous mayor. And it wasn't, by the way,
the previous mayor what was his name, I don't know,
Michael Hancock. It wasn't that the previous mayor and I

(01:16:33):
didn't get along.

Speaker 2 (01:16:34):
We just we didn't know each other.

Speaker 1 (01:16:36):
And I think maybe I talked to him once and
I only tried a few times to get him on
the show, and I think.

Speaker 2 (01:16:42):
Maybe I did once. And anyway, anyway, so I just
want to talk about this for a minute and we'll
get we'll get it the mayor on the show. If
we can.

Speaker 1 (01:16:50):
But I actually wanted to talk about this too to
praise Mayor Mike Johnston a bit, and this is Denver Gazette,
but actually we talked about it several days ago. So
the city of Denver was the first of the cities
in Colorado to report a significant drop in sales tax

(01:17:13):
revenue from what they expected and therefore what they had
budgeted and the spending they had based on the revenue
they thought was going to come in. And now they're
talking about two hundred million dollars, which is real money,
right for a city this size, And so they're gonna
have to lay off.

Speaker 2 (01:17:28):
A bunch of people.

Speaker 1 (01:17:29):
And what I mentioned to you the other day was
that oftentimes when you have a Democrat run city, you
will have a situation where the rules for layoffs protect
the most senior people, even if they're not the best workers.
And the unions get that stuff organized. Part of the
reagions in their unions wanted to get that stuff organized.

Speaker 2 (01:17:49):
Is I believe. I believe could be wrong.

Speaker 1 (01:17:53):
Now someone can, Maybe someone can text me and tell me,
because I haven't been a member of a labor union,
so my sub position and I would like to know
if I'm wrong text me at five sixty six nine zero.
Is that a union dues to a union are some
percentage of your paycheck? Now I could be wrong. Maybe

(01:18:13):
uniondus are a flat number, like one hundred dollars a
month or whatever that is.

Speaker 2 (01:18:17):
So I would like to know.

Speaker 1 (01:18:19):
Actually, I would like to know from somebody who has
been a member of you, because I shouldn't guess on this,
I should just know the answer. I would like to
know from people who have been members of unions. And
maybe it's different in different unions. So I want everyone
who's been a member of a union to text me.
Were your union dues a flat dollar amount or were
they a function of your salary? Now I have assumed

(01:18:40):
that they were a you know, a tenth of a
percent or whatever of your salary. And that's why the
unions always push to lay off the newer workers first,
because the newer workers have lower salaries.

Speaker 2 (01:18:52):
Than the unions want the maximum dues. So I shared
with you that this group that is not the city council,
but a different group, a different group who works for.

Speaker 1 (01:19:03):
The mayor, announced that they are going to in They're
going to include seniority as a factor, but only a
twenty five percent factor in who gets laid off in Denver,
as they need to do these things to protect the
city budget.

Speaker 2 (01:19:24):
And I saw this piece over at the.

Speaker 1 (01:19:27):
Denver Gazette, as I said, and the headline is source
Colon Johnston pushes merit based layoffs as Denver faces two
hundred million dollar deficit, and I just wanted to take
a minute too, with no sarcasm. This is not tongue
in cheeks. It's not leading to a punchline. I wanted

(01:19:47):
to say thank you Mayor Mike Johnston for having the
political courage to buck the government workers' unions and do
the right thing.

Speaker 2 (01:20:00):
What is the right thing?

Speaker 1 (01:20:01):
The right thing is laying off people based on the
best needs of whatever the organization is that unfortunately has
to go through the laffs, laying off people in particular
based on balancing not just seniority, in fact, not primarily seniority,
but who's got what skill set that you need, and

(01:20:22):
maybe and who will save you more money. Since the
goal is trying to save more money. Maybe one person
makes one hundred and fifty thousand dollars a year, and
maybe you can lay off that one person and keep
two people who make seventy five thousand dollars a year,
who might be younger but might be better at the
same job, have the skill set. So I just wanted
to mention this so I could give an overt shout

(01:20:44):
out thank you, thank you to.

Speaker 2 (01:20:47):
Mayor Mike Johnston for doing it that way.

Speaker 1 (01:20:49):
We'll try to get him on the show to talk
about it when we come back. Leland Vitter joins the
show real quick before our guest shows up.

Speaker 2 (01:20:56):
What have you seen? Dragon?

Speaker 1 (01:20:57):
In terms of answers from listeners about whether union dues
are a flat number or a percentage.

Speaker 5 (01:21:06):
It's absolutely both. The very first text we got says,
I was a firefighter. That was a flat It was
always a flat rate. The very next text pests says
members pay one percent of their salary. Another one that
I found pretty interesting if I can find it relatively quickly.
There it is ross. I'm a flight attendant. My husband
is a pilot, both union employees. I pay a flat rate,
he pays a percentage.

Speaker 1 (01:21:27):
Interesting, All right, a little of a little of everything.
All right, let's let's do this. Let's go once again
to my good friend Leland Viddert. I can't imagine how
Leland is looking today because usually I can see him
when they do these he does these zoom interviews with me,
but today he's got his camera off, so.

Speaker 2 (01:21:49):
I probably I probably don't even want to know.

Speaker 1 (01:21:51):
Leland Vviddert hosts on Balance on News Nation, which is
my and my wife's single favorite show on cable news.
We almost never miss an episode. It is seven pm
Mountain time and a replay at ten pm Mountain time.
And also Leland puts out a daily newsletter, well daily

(01:22:14):
on the days that he has shows, called war Notes,
which is.

Speaker 2 (01:22:17):
Basically his show prep.

Speaker 1 (01:22:18):
And one of the things I like about it, besides
the fact that it's very interesting and we'll make you smarter,
is that it comes out in the afternoon because I
get bombarded with stuff in the morning. So if you
go to Warnoes dot com, you can subscribe for free
and you'll enjoy it. Oh there he is, looking like,
Oh he looks like an FBI agent or psyches up
with a nicer tie.

Speaker 2 (01:22:36):
Hi, Leland, you.

Speaker 3 (01:22:40):
Know the things I do for you, ross like pull
over and stop so that you can see me on camera.

Speaker 2 (01:22:47):
Uh huh, Well you didn't really have to do that way.
You're looking very dapper. I mean, at least as good
as you look on TV. Are you what are you doing?

Speaker 7 (01:22:57):
I'm on my way to work, all right.

Speaker 2 (01:23:01):
It's a very snazzy tie.

Speaker 1 (01:23:03):
So before we talk about all this stuff, and I'm
sorry you had to pull over, you posted a very
fun looking picture of July fourth grilling. I would like
to know a little bit about your grilling skills. And
I would like to know because I'm told there's some
question about whether you could actually fit the chicken on
the grill. So what do we need to know about

(01:23:23):
your July fourth grilling experience.

Speaker 7 (01:23:29):
I feel as though that this is a loaded question.

Speaker 3 (01:23:32):
But if what you're getting at is that my sister
said that we could fit all five chickens on the
grill and we did, then she is correct now the
fact that she's spent a year in culinary school in
Paris to learn that, and I just figured we'd do
it by trial and error and it still worked. I

(01:23:53):
think the ROI on my grilling skills are a lot
higher than hers. And what she didn't tell you either,
was that she came up. She would claim credit for
the chicken and the recipe and the cherry Coke barbecue sauce.
Is actually my mother's recipe is things that she left
out of this conversation.

Speaker 7 (01:24:12):
But what I would say is the real.

Speaker 3 (01:24:16):
Skill is in building the fire and in cooking the chickens,
which is what I did, and they were most excellent.
So I'm a big green egg guy. I know there
are tragger guys, but I am a purist, so.

Speaker 2 (01:24:29):
I'm an I may have to try.

Speaker 1 (01:24:32):
I don't have either one, but I might have to
try it when we move into our new house. I
caught the show yesterday, you know, as usual, and there
are a couple of things that I wanted to talk
to you about, but just for fun, I want to
just share with you and listeners a few sentences from
a piece just posted at what is one of.

Speaker 2 (01:24:50):
My very very favorite news sites.

Speaker 1 (01:24:51):
It's called the Babylon Bee, and the Babylon Bee says,
and I'm putting news in quotes for people who don't
know what the Babylon b is. Attorney General Pam Bondi
explained today that she was really going to release all
of the Epstein files, but some pedophiles asked her to
please not. Bondi stated that she understood the disappointment over
her not releasing the client list, which has been quote

(01:25:12):
on her desk since February, but promised the pedophiles that
she wouldn't quote. Sorry, guys, I told the pedophiles I
would keep it under wraps, said BONDI to reporters. Look,
I'm just as bummed as you are. I had all
these great little binders made up with all the incriminating
evidence I promised to release, and then ug these pedophiles
came along and asked me not to, which is super

(01:25:32):
sad because now all these criminals will never be brought
to justice.

Speaker 2 (01:25:36):
It's too bad. And it goes on from there. But
I'll stop there.

Speaker 1 (01:25:40):
So I want to kind of open this broadly to you,
but Leland, but I will just say I've long ago
lost interest in the whole Epstein thing, except that I'm
fascinated how Maga can't let it go.

Speaker 7 (01:25:59):
I'm not Maga, obviously.

Speaker 2 (01:26:00):
You know.

Speaker 7 (01:26:01):
That is one of the reasons you have me on
your show.

Speaker 3 (01:26:03):
And I am still fascinated by the Epstein thing for
this reason.

Speaker 7 (01:26:07):
For a number of reasons.

Speaker 3 (01:26:08):
Number one, we still don't know why so many people
gave him so much money to quote unquote manage when he.

Speaker 7 (01:26:15):
Basically put it all in the s and P.

Speaker 3 (01:26:17):
Five hundred and got a percentage or two from these
very rich people.

Speaker 7 (01:26:23):
Makes no sense Number one.

Speaker 3 (01:26:25):
Number two, the fact of the matter is that this
guy molested and victimized dozens of women and had parties
in which there were shall we say, a number of
people who engaged in behavior at best that is unbecoming

(01:26:46):
a gentleman with these women. And somehow the only person
who is in jail for all of this is a woman.

Speaker 7 (01:26:55):
None of these men have ended up in jail.

Speaker 3 (01:26:58):
There is the fact that a Trump cabinet member made
the point that the reason Epstein was getting the original
sweetheart deal back in two thousand and eight or nine
was because he was quote intelligence. No one knows what
that meant. That has never been explained. So there's absolutely
nothing about the Epstein story that passes even the basic

(01:27:22):
and I mean basic smell test.

Speaker 2 (01:27:25):
So I agree with you on all that.

Speaker 1 (01:27:27):
And I think even going back when Epstein sort of
first really became in the news, bigle I thought that
the deal that Acosta is his name, Alex gave him
when he was maybe US attorney in Florida, that sweetheart
deal stunked to high heaven and I've never heard a
good explanation for it. We've heard this intelligence thing that

(01:27:48):
was one of the worst things I've ever heard. And
I said, you know, I said, I was sorry that
Epstein was dead because I wish he were in prison
being treated by some very large prisoners, the way he
treated these fourteen year old girls. And so I am
I'm not carrying any brief for Epstein.

Speaker 2 (01:28:10):
But what I'm just focusing very narrowly.

Speaker 1 (01:28:13):
Do we even know that such a thing as the
Epstein client list exists at all? Because now the federal
government is saying that it isn't so when people are
saying and when you're saying you're at least curious about
the Epstein files, I guess the Epstein files at this
point means all the information the FBI has about him,

(01:28:36):
rather than Epstein's personal files, Well.

Speaker 3 (01:28:41):
They would include his personal files, and we know the
FBI hasn't because we have the evidence lists there are,
and Pam Body has admitted this, although she may go
back on it like she did about the quote unquote
client list right that the FBI retrieved gigabytes worth of
data from Epstein's home that included video records, ardings, of

(01:29:01):
conceivably his perverted sect acts because the women said that
they were videotaped. It would include his emails, it would
include perhaps indications of why these people gave him millions
of dollars to manage, and it would perhaps also shed
light on whether he was involved in any kind of compromise, which,
by the way, Alan Dershowitz, his own lawyer, said on

(01:29:24):
my program he always thought that Epstein was involved in
some kind of nefarious behavior, that there was something else
beyond just the sex and the girls. So the fact
of the matter is that there is no answers to
any of the basic questions, and the Epstein files are
everything the FBI had.

Speaker 7 (01:29:44):
Epstein, as you point out, is dead.

Speaker 3 (01:29:47):
Why these files would not be released when Pam Bondy,
who's the Attorney General and the president for that matter,
has said they would be Again, we as the American publicer,
owed at least a better explanation than and oh, there's
nothing to see here.

Speaker 7 (01:30:01):
On a Sunday afternoon.

Speaker 1 (01:30:03):
We're talking with Leland Vindard, host of bond Balance on
News Nation seven PM week nights here in the Mountain
time zone.

Speaker 2 (01:30:09):
Replay at ten pm.

Speaker 1 (01:30:11):
It's the cable show my wife and I make sure
to see just one more thing on the Epstein we'll
move on to some other stuff the political side. It's
been really interesting to me, and I assume to you
to watch how much of MAGA in particular has turned
so quickly against a few of their famous favorite people,

(01:30:32):
including Cash Betel and Dan Bongino, and to a certain degree,
Pam BONDI, what do you make of the politics of that,
separate from separate from this or.

Speaker 2 (01:30:41):
That about Epstein and the Epstein files, What do you
make of that?

Speaker 7 (01:30:44):
It's a fair question.

Speaker 3 (01:30:46):
I think it proves and remember that Bongino especially was
one of the most aggressive in his assertions that there
was a deep state and there was all these cabals
and conspiracies and everything else.

Speaker 7 (01:31:02):
What I would.

Speaker 3 (01:31:02):
Say is that there has always been the understanding that
it is a lot harder to be inside than it
is to be outside. It's a lot easier to be
outside this tent shooting in than it is to actually
run things. And I think that's what MAGA is finding.

(01:31:24):
And I say magat sort of generally, but I think
you're seeing the realization that when you were actually in
these positions of responsibility, there become other considerations than what
gets ratings on your podcast, which is what Dan Bongino's
primary concern was until he became the Deputy director of
the FBI. Cash Pttel very smart lawyer and very very

(01:31:49):
thoughtful about how he exposed and took a part a
lot of really nasty things that were done to Donald Trump.
But once you become director of the FBI, you realize
there are other considerations, and I think Pambondi as well,
And it's why when you watch, for example, John Radcliffe,
CIA director, who has vast and deep experience in government,

(01:32:14):
when he was asked at the cabin I think it
was with when he was with Benjaminetti, who a question
about whether the Russians were using chemical weapons in Ukraine.
He weaved this answer that was incredibly thoughtful and committed
the president absolutely nothing and said absolutely nothing, which you
and of itself, is a skill to realize that you

(01:32:35):
don't want to make policy publicly. And that's what I
think you've watched Pambondy, and to a certain extent Bongino
did before he had the job. He doesn't given interviews since,
but that you're watching people who are learning in real
time that while something sounds good on TV and may
make Maga and maybe even the president happy to be

(01:32:56):
set on TV becomes a lot harder.

Speaker 7 (01:32:59):
To back up.

Speaker 1 (01:33:00):
Give me a yes or note to this last question
on this and we'll do one other quick topic.

Speaker 2 (01:33:04):
So yes or no?

Speaker 1 (01:33:06):
Do you think that the stuff that bon Gino and
Patel and Bondi have said in the last few days
about there's nothing to see here as far as let's say,
an Epstein client list that could potentially be a source
of leverage, do you think they're telling the truth?

Speaker 7 (01:33:22):
I think there is a lot more to come on Epstein.

Speaker 1 (01:33:25):
All right, let's switch gear just for a couple of
minutes here. You and I are both very much foreign
policy nerds. You were a reporter living in Israel for
many years. You cover global affairs better than anybody else
on television, and you obviously noticed everybody noticed this very
significant change in Donald Trump's rhetoric when it comes to

(01:33:46):
Vladimir Putin and perhaps sending more weapons to Ukraine, where
just a week ago they were pausing, how are you
thinking about this?

Speaker 3 (01:33:58):
I'm thinking that Donald Trump is learning the lesson that
every other American president has learned, and courtly and George W. Bush,
he looked Putin in the eye and saw his soul,
Barack Obama's and Hillary Clinton to set the reset button.
And Joe Biden, who when asked about questions what he
would say to Putin, he said, don't as if that
meant something of Vladimir Putin. Trump is learning the lesson

(01:34:20):
that Putin is a sociopath and a former KGB operative
who wants KGB always.

Speaker 7 (01:34:27):
KGB didn't forget how to be.

Speaker 3 (01:34:32):
Hyper manipulative, and that is what Trump's learning in real time,
and we're seeing him and watching him learning.

Speaker 1 (01:34:40):
Leland Vinerd's fantastic show is called On Balance. It's News Nation,
which is which has become our favorite. You know what,
give me just one more second, allow you to kind
of pet yourself and your organization on back a little
bit because you've kind of told me privately, and you
guys have mentioned on the air a bit about News
Nation's growth and your show's growth.

Speaker 2 (01:34:59):
Can you just give us a s on that.

Speaker 3 (01:35:02):
Thanks Ross to your great promotion and to your listeners
who will become my viewers. We are now the fastest
growing cable network, not just cable news, cable network in
the country and our show, and I'm grateful for this
and humbled by the responsibility.

Speaker 7 (01:35:22):
Has had back to back to back number one weeks.

Speaker 3 (01:35:25):
So we are we are small, but we are growing
and that's that's a great place to be to learn
that people are trusting what we're doing and coming back
for more.

Speaker 1 (01:35:36):
Well, you've earned it, and you and you deserve the success.
And I'm sure there's going to be a lot more
folks watch on Balance seven pm weeknights and go to
warnotes dot com to subscribe. Thank you for pulling over,
Thanks for spending time with us.

Speaker 2 (01:35:47):
We'll talk soon.

Speaker 4 (01:35:49):
Thanks Ross.

Speaker 2 (01:35:50):
All right, So all right, that's.

Speaker 1 (01:35:52):
Leland Vinter and he's you know, on his way to work.
We do these by zoom, not so much I do.
I do kind of like seeing guests when I talk
to them, But actually the main reason we do them
by zoom is the audio quality is better than by phone,
so more often than not these days when I can't
actually the majority of my interviews these days are by zoom.

(01:36:13):
And because of what happened during COVID with everybody working
remotely and conferencing with others on these various video things,
everybody's used to it now, right, pre COVID.

Speaker 2 (01:36:23):
If you were.

Speaker 1 (01:36:24):
Going to try to get someone to do an video
interview like that wouldn't have.

Speaker 2 (01:36:27):
Been so easy.

Speaker 1 (01:36:28):
They would have been uncomfortable. Everyone's used to it now,
and so oftentimes you'll hear me talking with a guest
and making some reference to the fact that I can
see the guests, and I mean, you can't because the
world only gets the audio. But that's the reason, just
so you understand, is that the audio quality tends to
be much much better than a phone.

Speaker 2 (01:36:48):
But anyway, so I can see Leland.

Speaker 1 (01:36:50):
He's dressed in a nice suit with a fancy tie,
and he was in a car and he had just
pulled over to be able to be able to talk
to us, which I thought was pretty cool. Anyway, I
like getting him like him on the show. Let me
just do a few minutes with this. I'm not going
to get through the whole thing because I've only got
about three minutes with you here. But this is just
a fun story, and I thought we would maybe wrap
up the show, and you will. That's an intentional pun.

(01:37:12):
We will wrap up the show with this thing. Let
me share with you. This is from the Washington Times.
Michelle Hensley's rise from a widow with two children worried
about her next paycheck to playing a role in diplomatic
relations by designing the gift rap is a story of
faith and perseverance. When her husband died in twenty fourteen,

(01:37:32):
Miss Henley was uncertain what the future would hold or
how she would provide for two children today's She is
CEO of Nifty Package Company, a luxury gift basket and
gift wrapping business. In January, the Trump administration tapped her
to be the White House's official gift wrapping designer. This

(01:37:53):
means that when foreign dignitaries and other world leaders receive
gifts from President Trump and First Lady Milania, they are
wrapped in her custom designs. She also produces custom gift
wrapping designs for Vice President JD. Vance and Second Lady
Lady Usha Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio. Mandy,

(01:38:13):
you missed the first thirty seconds of this, and you're
going to be interested in it. So this is a
lady named Michelle Hensley who when her husband passed away,
she had a somewhat low income job, two kids, had
no idea how she was going to make it.

Speaker 2 (01:38:28):
She started as a.

Speaker 1 (01:38:29):
Just a side gig, a thing called Nifty Package Company,
And now she is the White Houses and the Vice
President's official gift wrapping designers, so that when they're giving
gifts to foreign dignitaries and such, she designs the custom.

Speaker 2 (01:38:48):
Wrapping paper for them. Isn't that cool?

Speaker 8 (01:38:51):
That's very cool in it shows you that even if
you have a skill that might seem worthless in the
right situation, you can use it to make money. Because
I know people who wrap beautiful gifts, beautiful gifts, but
they probably would never have thought like, hey, let us
wrap your gifts for you.

Speaker 1 (01:39:07):
One more little bit of detail, just to make sure
I've got this clear.

Speaker 2 (01:39:10):
So the rapping, the.

Speaker 1 (01:39:13):
Main paper wrapping is the same for each foreign dignitary.

Speaker 2 (01:39:16):
But then she recommends tweaks.

Speaker 1 (01:39:19):
For example, when when President Trump went to Saudi Arabia,
Miss Hensley recommended adding the color lavender to the gift
wrapping because Saudi Arabia uses lavender as a symbol and
for official ceremonies and particularly for welcoming foreign leaders, they
roll out a lavender carpet for ceremonies and such. So
she says, I study each leader, how do you gift

(01:39:42):
this person I want the gift to show that the
president or the vice president is really thinking about that recipient.

Speaker 2 (01:39:49):
I love that story.

Speaker 8 (01:39:50):
First of all, giving a great gift is an art
form anyway, So yeah, good for her.

Speaker 1 (01:39:55):
Good for her. I thought you would like that story.
What you got coming up?

Speaker 8 (01:39:58):
We got weather Wednesday today, on the high day of
the year. But then we have a Bell and Paula
coming on for ask the attorneys. We're gonna talk about it.
I heard you talking about Leland venderd about the Epstein thing.
The more I think about the Epstein situation.

Speaker 2 (01:40:10):
The matter I get.

Speaker 8 (01:40:11):
The matter I get because it's yet another example of
a two tier justice system in this country that you
can get away with anything if you're well connected. And
now James Comey and James Brennan are being investigated by
the CIA for lying under oath to Congress mark my words.

Speaker 2 (01:40:25):
Not a damn thing will happen to them. Nothing two yeah,
and I agree.

Speaker 1 (01:40:29):
I mean it's kind of shocking more people didn't go
to jail. I think the question about whether there is
an Epstein client list is a different question from whether
a whole bunch of people should go to jail and
then hell for what they did.

Speaker 8 (01:40:39):
Pam Bondy is correct when she says there is no
Epstein client list because there's probably not a piece of
paper with the words client lists at the top right,
and they're just going with the actual, like you know, Denial.

Speaker 1 (01:40:51):
Okay, two things, very very quick, because I don't want
to make you later, and I need to A listener
texted in two hours ago and said, Hi, Mandy, can
you asked Dave Frasier why most of Weld County along
I twenty five is not included in the heat advisory
but the foothills are the heat advisory graphic looks odd? Okay,
I lost him that and h And a listener earlier said, hey, Ross,

(01:41:14):
don't do this while you're working. But there is a
Randy Cromwell dot com website and I'm thinking like, okay,
that's gonna be some kind of crazy porn. And Dragon
went to tell me what it was, and he was
just mouth agape at what at Randy Cromwell dot com?

Speaker 2 (01:41:30):
And uh, and here we are. I'm I mean, I
have Tor with a y, Randy with a y o.

Speaker 8 (01:41:36):
Haha, that's hilarious.

Speaker 2 (01:41:39):
Oh that's fantastic, that's fantastic. All right, We'll leave people
to figure it out. Have a great rest of your day,
stick around for Andy.