09-08-25 - *FULL SHOW* Broncos; New Tom Clancy Novel; How Do I Flush; Let NYC Fail

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
I had the privilege to, yes, as Marty said, be
on the parabolic microphones on the sideline of the Broncos
game yesterday. That was that was one of the sloppiest
games I've ever seen in my life. Very unusual that
a team wins a game with four turnovers and the
other team only having one turnover. But Tennessee was really bad,
and we still almost found a way to lose. But
we didn't, right, And I've got to say, you know,

(00:21):
two three years ago, perhaps the Broncos would have found
a way to lose that game. And instead, even though
they played very badly at least for you know, three
and a half quarters or something, they found a way
to win that game, which is the difference between a
good team and a bad team. We'll have to see
if the Broncos end up being a good team. Certainly

(00:42):
yesterday they didn't look like the team that we are
all have been hoping and expecting they would look like
this year. But like I said, they found they found
a way to win. And you know, I talked from
time to time about the microphone thing, which I swear
is the greatest perk of this job, the greatest perk

(01:02):
of working here at iHeart is being able to you know, usually.

Speaker 2 (01:06):
Once or twice.

Speaker 1 (01:07):
Sometimes I get lucky and can do a little more
per season, holding that microphone on the sideline of the game.
And if you're wondering what that looks like, it turned
out that producer Dragon went to the game and saw
me on the sideline and took a couple of pictures
there from kind of far away, so they're a little
bit greeny, but you can.

Speaker 2 (01:27):
You can see me.

Speaker 1 (01:28):
So if you want to kind of see what that
looks like when I talk about the sideline microphone, if
you go to the blog at Rosskominski dot com, you
can you can see that.

Speaker 2 (01:38):
You'll you'll see me and you.

Speaker 1 (01:39):
Can and then you can kind of visualize what I'm
talking about when I when I talk about this stuff,
and then I might talk about this more later.

Speaker 2 (01:48):
I almost never.

Speaker 1 (01:49):
Spend time talking about an NFL game that isn't the
Super Bowl and that doesn't.

Speaker 2 (01:54):
Involve the Broncos.

Speaker 1 (01:56):
But holy Moley, did you see the Buffalo The Buffalo
Baltimore game last night?

Speaker 2 (02:03):
The Sunday night game.

Speaker 1 (02:04):
That was one of the most insane games I've ever
seen in my entire life.

Speaker 2 (02:09):
It was absolutely Nuts.

Speaker 1 (02:12):
The Buffalo Bills were down by fifteen points with less
than five minutes left, and they scored sixteen points to
win the game by one. I think they scored sixteen
points in four minutes or something like that. And there
was there's a lot of history there at you know,
like that that team had never come back from being

(02:35):
down by fifteen points or more in the fourth first quarter.

Speaker 2 (02:37):
We hadn't done it since nineteen sixty seven.

Speaker 1 (02:40):
But this one other quick thing I want to mention,
and I'll actually probably mention this game again later because
it was just one of the greatest games you'll ever
see in the NFL. But the winning points were scored
a field goal by Matt Prater, former Denver Bronco, who
was just signed to the Buffalo Bills practice squad on

(03:02):
Thursday of last week and moved up to be on
the active roster on Saturday, the day before the game,
because the Buffalo Bills regular kicker is injured, so they
brought Matt Prader up. He's forty one years old. He's
the second oldest active player in the NFL right now,
and he is by about three years the oldest player
ever to play for.

Speaker 2 (03:21):
The Buffalo Bills.

Speaker 1 (03:23):
He basically he hardly knows the names of any of
his teammates. Right, He got there like late on Thursday
or something like that, and now he's playing on Sunday
and kicked the game winning field goal in one of
the most intense That's as intense a football game as
you will ever see before the playoffs. That was as

(03:44):
intense a regular season game as you're ever gonna see.

Speaker 2 (03:46):
And that could well be that preview.

Speaker 1 (03:49):
Of the AFC Championship, you know, in January. So I
was just an absolutely incredible game. And if you didn't
get a chance to see it, well I already told
you what happened.

Speaker 2 (03:58):
It's still kind of worth watching.

Speaker 1 (04:00):
All Right, let's do Let's do some other stuff luck
going on.

Speaker 2 (04:04):
Let's talk about today.

Speaker 1 (04:06):
So I want to talk a little national politics for
a second, and before I kind of get into the
scandal here, and I do think it is a legit
enormous scandal, and I'm gonna talk about Biden and the autopen.
The one thing I want to say before is I'm
not sure that this scandal will cause anything at all

(04:27):
to change in the sense.

Speaker 2 (04:29):
That the stuff that.

Speaker 1 (04:30):
Got done with the Autopen, I don't think is gonna
get undone.

Speaker 2 (04:34):
And also I don't know.

Speaker 1 (04:37):
That this is a thing that will impact any election,
because it seems to me like the people involved with
the scandal, one of them is Joe Biden, who is
obviously never running for office again, and all the other
people are these underling, functionary bureaucrats who may have been
very senior as far as advisors go, but are very

(04:59):
unlikely ever to be running for anything. You haven't heard
most of their names, probably, And so even though this
story to me is a it's a shameful story for
our country, in a way, it's a stain on our country,
and it's something that Joe Biden and all of these

(05:20):
people who worked closely enough with him to know that
this was going on, they should all be deeply, deeply
ashamed of this.

Speaker 2 (05:28):
But those people are incapable of feeling any shame.

Speaker 1 (05:32):
And isn't an unbelievable story, So axios, I think had
this first, and let me just share a little.

Speaker 2 (05:38):
High ranking Biden.

Speaker 1 (05:39):
Administration officials repeatedly questioned and criticized how the president's team
decided on controversial pardons and allowed the frequent use of
an autopendesign measures laid in his term. Internal emails obtained
by Axios show the messages are the latest sign of
the chaos surrounding the eighty two year old former president

(06:00):
during the final weeks of his administration.

Speaker 2 (06:02):
Skipping ahead a little bit, Trump has.

Speaker 1 (06:04):
Cited Biden's process and issuing pardons to try to justify
many of his own controversial pardons. But this, that's what
ACTUALLYO says. Actually, these these are very different. These are
very different, because what we're talking about here is process,
at least as much as we're talking about who got pardoned.
So after the political backlash to Biden pardoning his son
Hunter last December, the White House began pushing to find

(06:27):
more people to.

Speaker 2 (06:28):
Grant clemency to.

Speaker 1 (06:29):
According to people familiar with the internal dynamics, a person
who doesn't use his name says, there was a mad
dash to find groups of people that he could pardon,
and then they largely did not run it by the
Justice Department to vet them. Biden granted clemency to more
people than any president in US history four thousand, two
hundred and forty five, and more than ninety five percent

(06:50):
of those were in the final three and a half
months of his presidency, and many of those actions, including
pardoning other members of his family on his last day
in office, were signed with an auto panic puterized version
of the president's signature that didn't require him to physically
sign the document.

Speaker 2 (07:04):
Now here's the key. Autopen itself is not the problem.

Speaker 1 (07:08):
You could use an autopen and it would be all
right if the president knew what was happening. Okay, if
the president knew what was happening, he had, Yeah, I
want to do this, but I'm too busy to sign
it or whatever. You just use the autopen, but yes,
go do it. That would be okay. But that appears
not to be what happened. An email from Biden's chief

(07:29):
of staff confirmed the use of the presidential autopen for
Biden's pardons of his family members. And one of the
things that's interesting is an email from the chief of staff.
His name is Jeff Seenz. The order came from his
email address, but apparently he didn't personally send it. One

(07:49):
of his aides, who had access to his account, wrote
and sent the authorization to use the autopen to White
House officials on behalf of sience. But we don't even
know if sience, who is the probably the most senior guy,
even knew about it. Several junior, no senior Justice Department

(08:10):
official raised objections about the whole clemency process, and you
know what, in the interesting time, I'm gonna stop. I'm
gonna stop here. But it goes on and on and on,
and basically what Axios is concluding is that Biden pardoned
many hundreds or even thousands of people with very very
little knowledge of what was going on at all, and
certainly not with knowledge of who was being pardoned, including

(08:33):
one person who killed a woman and her child in
order to prevent in order to prevent the woman from
testifying against him in court. That guy got a commutation.
Joe Biden lied when he said he knew what was
going on, all right, couple of I'm gonna come back
later in the show to this whole auto pen thing.
Let me just answer a listener question or text on

(08:55):
one thing, so well, actually two of them. One listener said,
I think any documents signed by the president should be
in wet ink, but that's just my opinion, eh, And
then the other one listener texts, pardons should be done
through an official meeting with minutes available to the public
and have some limitations on how many are done. And

(09:16):
the response to that is, I understand why you want
those things, but it's impossible. And because in the Constitution
and Congress cannot pass a law limiting how many pardons

(09:37):
a president can issue or commutations or the process by
which the president does them. This is one of the
one of the few plenary powers within the Constitution that
cannot be limited by Congress and cannot be reviewed by
a court either. So that's part of the reason that

(09:58):
I think that even though that whole process, the way
it was done under Biden was absolutely corrupt, I don't
think anything is gonna happen based on it. I want
to mention this, uh, this Florida thing that I talked
about last week. I wrote a piece on my substack
about it. By the way, please do me the favor
of going to Rosskominsky dot substack dot com and subscribing

(10:21):
there to my substack. It's absolutely free, and as I
like to say, it's worth even more than that.

Speaker 2 (10:27):
And I try to write.

Speaker 1 (10:29):
A couple of times a week about whatever is going
whatever is going on. I'm probably going to start putting
more state and local stuff in there. It's been mostly
national and international so far. I've only been doing it
a few months, but about five hundred followers so far,
five hundred subscribers so far, so I hope you will
you will join me there, Rosskominsky dot substack dot com.

Speaker 2 (10:49):
Check that out now.

Speaker 1 (10:50):
One of the things that I wrote about last week
and then I did a little update this morning based
on what I'm going to tell you right now, is
this Florida thing. So they've got this wacky surgeon general
in the state of Florida who who likened vaccine mandates
to slavery. And yeah, again, wacky guy probably should have

(11:13):
a different job. But anyway, all the talk last week
and all the MAHA people cheering and toasting with whatever
beverage Maha people are allowed to drink was and news
reports along these lines Florida.

Speaker 2 (11:28):
Is getting rid of vaccine mandates.

Speaker 1 (11:30):
For k through twelve students, and even news reports in
Florida talked about it that way. And now yesterday there
was a little bit of an update which is rather interesting,
and it turns out I didn't know and it wasn't
reported very well. I went back and looked at some
of the other reporting and there were hints about this
very deep in in some of the reports that really

(11:51):
basically just said they're getting rid of mandates for K
through twelve education right back. So if you're a kid
in K through twelve, based on all the previous reporting,
they're getting rid of the vaccine mandates, so you can
go to school without a vaccine. What turns out is
the case actually that a few of the vaccines are
the mandates are created.

Speaker 2 (12:13):
By rule.

Speaker 1 (12:16):
From the state government, not the legislature, but the executive
branch and.

Speaker 2 (12:20):
The health Department whatever.

Speaker 1 (12:21):
They have these rules, but most of the other ones
actually created in state law, and the surgeon general and
the governor can't just say we're going to ignore state law.
So what's actually happening, at least so far, is that
they're only going to get rid of the mandates on
the things that are in rule. Hepatitis B, which not

(12:42):
that big a deal for most kids not to get
that vaccine, chicken pox, hib influenza, and newmaccal diseases such
as meningitis, but a lot of the biggies and the
famous ones measles, mumps, rubella, polio, whooping cough, that kind
of thing. Those ones are still going to be mandated,

(13:04):
at least for now, because if they're going to get
rid of them, it's going to have to go through
the state legislature. And I want to know which member
of the state legislature.

Speaker 2 (13:12):
I mean, it's going to be interesting.

Speaker 1 (13:13):
They're folks in very deep red districts who maybe don't
want a primary challenge from the MAHA right if they
vote to keep vaccine mandates.

Speaker 2 (13:20):
They might not want that challenge, but there may be other.

Speaker 1 (13:23):
Ones who say, I don't want to become the poster
child for a dead kid or a paralyzed kid from
polio or some other thing. Because I did vote to
get rid of these vaccine mandates for kids going to school,
and for those who missed it, I'm just going to
repeat my position very very quickly. I believe that adults
should have the right not to vaccinate themselves. I believe

(13:43):
that adult should have the right not to vaccinate their kids.
I don't believe you should have the right to put
an unvaccinated kid in a school. And here's my anal,
here's my metaphor. Not getting vaccinated has the potential to
be harmful.

Speaker 2 (13:59):
It's like getting.

Speaker 1 (14:01):
Going to school is like driving a car on a
busy road on a busy highway, you are welcome to
do one or the other, but not both at the
same time. You can get drunk, you can drive, but
you can't do both. You can refuse to get vaccinated,
refuse to have your kid get vaccinated, or you can
put your kid in a school, but you can't do both.

(14:22):
I'm just gonna do a real wacky little thing here.
So I was at Kingsoupers and I happened to be
walking down the aisle where they've got shampoo, and I
saw this bottle of shampoo, that kind of interesting looking
bottle of bright yellow bottle. It didn't even really look
like shampoo, but there it was, and there was the

(14:44):
brand is called Winning Formula, and I was looking at
the package, looking at the back of this kind of rectangular,
bright yellow thing. So I'm looking at the back and
it says made without weird stuff. So this is clearly
what they're going for, right, made without weird stuff. And

(15:05):
then it says parabins, thallates, artificial dies, and it has
all of those with the line going through them, meaning
we don't have parabins thallates or artificial dies and again,
made without Weird Stuff is the tagline on the shampoo,

(15:26):
and I thought, Okay, that's interesting. I'm going to go
read what's in the shampoo. Not that I care that much,
but like, okay, if you're going to emphasize this made
without weird stuff, and I'm a nerd like that, right.
So I start reading the ingredients list and I just
thought I would share some of this with you. This
is the ingredients in the shampoo where their tagline is

(15:46):
made without Weird Stuff. You ready, Shannon? Okay, here we go.
The first ingredient is water, not weird, not weird. The
next ingredient is sodium see fourteen DASH sixteen olefin sulfinate.
The next ingredient is coca midopropyl hydroxy sultane The next

(16:09):
ingredient is cocamide mipa, whatever that is. The next is
hydroxy propyl biss hydroxy ethyl dimonium chloride. The next one
is polyquaternium seven. The next is sodium chloride also known
as salt fragrance, polyquaternium ten, tetrasodium glutamate, diacetate, citric acid method,

(16:35):
chloro iso thiazolinone methyl isothiazolinone. Magnesium chloride tochofuryl acetate biotin,
which is a like a what do you call it,
not quite a not quite a vitamin, but like a
supplement that's supposed to be good for hair growth. Arnica
flower extract, some sunflower sunflower seed oil.

Speaker 2 (16:59):
So there you go.

Speaker 1 (17:00):
Oh, that's the list of the ingredients in the shampoo
where the tagline is made without weird stuff. I think
you understand where I'm going with that. Okay, Okay, I
have a question for you, and I'm not going to
do a big discussion on it. Mostly I want to
ask you a question and get your responses, and then

(17:21):
I'll share some of your responses on the air. And
this is in the context of my younger kid thinking
about applying to college. And I will say, if my
younger kid had gotten the same grades in his first
two years of high school that he got in the
third year of high school, he could probably get into

(17:43):
a lot.

Speaker 2 (17:43):
Of very good colleges.

Speaker 1 (17:45):
But he didn't work as hard as he should have
in his first two years of high school. And so
his overall GPA is three point zero, where last year
it was quite a bit higher than that. All a's
and b's a class or two, all that, right, But
in his first year or two, there was like more
c's than a's. And it's just and his SAT score

(18:08):
is a little above average. It's not stellar, but it's
a little above average. But anyway, you put together the package,
and this is not a kid who's going to get
into one of the top schools. And I'm trying to
figure out how much college is worth and whether it's
even worth going to college anymore. You know, I will

(18:32):
say that in my mind. And this is just observational
and just me thinking out loud. This is not based
on data. But when you and I were talking about
colleges two years ago, three years ago, four years ago,
one of the main objections that I had, and that
so many listeners had, was how unbelievably woke these colleges

(18:57):
were and how much leftist, anti American, anti capitalist, anti
Semitic propaganda they were filling these students' heads with. And
I have to say, I don't think that's gone. I'm
sure it's still there in a very substantial way. But

(19:18):
I do think that one of the great benefits of
the arrival of not just Donald Trump, although he's a
huge part of this, but also a bigger overall awareness
caused primarily by colleges themselves by how they allowed these protests,

(19:41):
this anti Semitic, pro terrorism, pro murder stuff on all
these various campuses. After the Hamas barbarians murdered twelve hundred
Israeli is, the vast, vast majority of which were civilians.
The colleges brought it on themselves, which the same way
that doctor Fauci brought disrepute on epidemiologists and on CDC

(20:09):
and government health research and government health data and all that.

Speaker 2 (20:14):
These people brought it on themselves. So I do act.

Speaker 1 (20:16):
But now people are awake to all of that, right,
and sometimes there's overreaction, Like you know, people get skeptical
enough of doctor Fauci as well they should be, and
some folks take that far enough that they then think
that RFK junior is a good idea. But of course
RFK junior is a terrible idea, just in a different
direction at least on the issue of vaccines. And but

(20:40):
with colleges and again Trump, yeah, maybe he takes it
too far.

Speaker 2 (20:44):
Maybe he's not going to get away with.

Speaker 1 (20:46):
Trying to trying to stop two point two billion dollars
from going to Harvard, right, But people are awake to
it now, the real kind of woke, and I do
feel much better about it. I do feel like kids
who go into college who are not leftists at least
that some colleges may have a little better chance of

(21:09):
going through it without being abused by their teachers or
other students, without feeling like they can't speak up because
they'll be at risk of either being shunned or getting
worse grades. I think it's probably a little better.

Speaker 2 (21:28):
I mean, you're.

Speaker 1 (21:29):
Talking about you're talking about a rot that pervaded almost
all of higher education except for Hillsdale College and maybe
some of the Christian schools like Liberty and so on,
and maybe a couple other places.

Speaker 2 (21:42):
Claremont used to be pretty good.

Speaker 1 (21:44):
I don't know that it still is on that, so
I do feel a little better about that. But I
was I asked chat GPT how much do private colleges cost?
And I had a couple follow up questions and so on,
and they say the average private college is something like
forty five thousand dollars a year. And I actually don't

(22:06):
know if that's tuition only or tuition with room and board,
but I suspect it's tuition only, and then some of
the top schools can be twice that much. Right, eighty
thousand and the first schools that we visited that my
kids said he liked and he wasn't paying attention to
the cost, and I didn't even know the cost until
we got there and heard about it, were in this

(22:26):
eighty thousand dollars range. Dude, We visited Pepperdine. You probably
heard of Pepperdine, which is in a spectacular location overlooking
the ocean in Malibu. It's one of the most beautiful
sites for a college you'll probably ever see.

Speaker 2 (22:43):
Did you know I haven't gone. A couple people told
me this.

Speaker 1 (22:49):
I actually didn't go look it up, but I believe
it based on the number they told me. Pepperdine is
the most expensive college in America. More than my alma mater,
more than Columbia University, more than Harvard, more than Yale,
more than Princeton.

Speaker 2 (23:01):
Freaking Pepperdine.

Speaker 1 (23:03):
And of course my kids saw Pepperdine and immediately loved it. Now,
the good news for me is that he probably can't
get in. He probably can't get in. I told him,
if you really want to try to get into one
of these very selective colleges.

Speaker 2 (23:22):
Go somewhere else for a year, you.

Speaker 1 (23:25):
Go to a junior college somewhere, go to a state
school here in Colorado that you could get into, right CSU, UCCS, MESA.

Speaker 2 (23:35):
And anything like that.

Speaker 1 (23:36):
He really wants to go to California, and my thought
process and I do have a decent amount of money
saved up for him to go to college. So like
if he were to get into a school as expensive
as Pepperdine, and I wouldn't pay full price for Pepperdine
even if he got in, if they weren't willing to
lower the price.

Speaker 2 (23:55):
I wouldn't pay it period.

Speaker 1 (23:56):
But for a school of that kind of price, I
don't have enough money saved up for that. For a
school that's normal is like average forty thousand years forty
five even plus some more for room and board. Actually
do have that saved up. So what I'm trying to
get him to do is maybe go to an inexpensive

(24:18):
school for your gosh, you could go to a state
school in Colorado for I don't know what fifteen or
twenty thousand dollars including room and board. Probably maybe not
see you but one of these other ones I was
talking about, Shannon, do you ever recollection what it cost
your daughter to go to college because she went to
one of those that I mentioned. No, Okay, So anyway,

(24:43):
it's affordable. It's much more affordable than these other things
I'm talking about. So the other thing I'm thinking of
saying to him is go to some other school that's
affordable for a year, get good grades, prove to these
better schools or.

Speaker 2 (25:02):
I should say more selective.

Speaker 1 (25:04):
It doesn't even necessarily mean they're better, because Colorado State
is a fine school. And if you really want to
transfer and you can get the grades that they'll take you,
then go ahead. And if you've gone to an inexpensive
school for a year, then if you end up going
to a very expensive school for three years instead of four,

(25:25):
I can probably afford that out of savings, out of
college savings.

Speaker 2 (25:30):
So we'll see.

Speaker 1 (25:31):
But putting all this together, I got two.

Speaker 2 (25:34):
I got a few thoughts.

Speaker 1 (25:35):
First of all, I think there are schools that charge
eighty thousand dollars that really aren't much better than schools
that charge forty or forty five thousand dollars.

Speaker 2 (25:42):
And I don't think I should pay for that, But.

Speaker 1 (25:46):
Even beyond that, what about a school that's fifty thousand,
let's say, let's say fifty thousand including everything that sounds
a little low these days? Is it worth it? What
do you what do you get from a college education
these days?

Speaker 2 (26:04):
It is true, though I do have to say this.
It is true.

Speaker 1 (26:08):
The data are consistent and clear and have been for
decades and are still clear now that for most people,
if you go to college, you will make a lot
more money over the course of your lifetime. But very
that's a long time. And in the meantime, you know,
are you going to college because you want to have
some fun, because you want to party, because you want

(26:28):
to meet girls, because you or or less cnically you
love learning? Okay, that's something. But what about and I
tell my kid this, what about becoming an electrician? And yeah,
you got to work for somebody for a little while,
but then start your own business, be your own electrician,

(26:48):
hire others, become a company where you're I mean, this
is a business that's not going to be replaced by AI.

Speaker 2 (26:55):
And and if you do this right, you know, in
ten years.

Speaker 1 (27:00):
He could be making more than I'm making now, he
could be making a good living. I don't know. I
really struggle with it, and my kid seems to go
back and forth. But I think he wants to go
to college because in part because he wants the experience,
and I don't think that's a terrible reason actually, But
I'm just struggling with its college worth it.

Speaker 2 (27:21):
I don't know. I don't know.

Speaker 1 (27:24):
One thing that I know isn't worth it is some
B level so not a level, not IVY League or
not even close to IVY League, but some B level
liberal arts college that wants to charge seventy thousand dollars
a year for tuition plus whatever the extra is. So

(27:45):
maybe you're in for eighty or eighty five or something
like that. All in No, I'm not doing it. It's
just not worth it. Here's the other thing I've told
my kid. I said, look, we've got money in a
college state account for you. Is called A five twenty nine.
Been putting money in every month since he was born
until a year ago. And I said, look, what you

(28:12):
don't spend on education, we can take out. There are
some penalties to take it out, you got to pay
some taxes, but whatever is there after paying the taxes
and penalties or whatever. I'll split it with you, and
you could have, however, many thousands of dollars for a
down payment on a house or whatever it is you
want to, you know, investing in your future.

Speaker 2 (28:34):
I'll split it with you.

Speaker 1 (28:35):
But he doesn't seem highly motivated by that, which kind
of surprises me. That would have motivated me a lot.
On the other hand, when I went to college, he
was much much cheaper than it is now. So I
don't know. All right, let me switch gears, but tell
me what you think, please, five sixty six nine zero.
I didn't ask you a very specific question, just anything

(28:56):
you want to say in reaction to what I just
talked about, because I'm actually looking for some guidance, because
I often find that when I ask for some insight
or advice from listeners, I get really good inside and
advice from listeners, because you guys are smart. All right,
let me switch gears and talk about something else. This

(29:17):
story I find very interesting, but not necessarily for the
reason that shows up in the headline. This is from
the New York Post. So you've probably heard of Nantucket.
It's a place in is it Massachusetts? Is it part
of Massachusetts? I think an island where rich in people,
rich and famous people hang out, like Martha's minyard, that
kind of thing. And here's the headline. Is it an

(29:41):
island or is it Maybe it's not an island, Maybe
it's just a neighborhood. Can you tell me, Shannon, Can
you look up Nantucket and tell me if it's a
neighborhood or an islands or just like something on the
end of a little peninsula somewhere.

Speaker 2 (29:54):
I don't know. I don't know. I may even have
been there, but I don't know. I thought it was
an island, though it.

Speaker 1 (30:00):
Says a small windswept island off the coast of Cape
con Okay, there you go, all right, So check this out.

Speaker 2 (30:08):
A test on sewage.

Speaker 1 (30:11):
In Nantucket has discovered cocaine levels fifty percent higher than
the US average, according to data published by local health officials.
Health officials, levels of cocaine and wastewater tested around the
wealthy Massachusetts enclave measured over.

Speaker 3 (30:29):
I can't.

Speaker 1 (30:29):
I don't know what that says. They put a comma
in a weird place, so okay, I see they added
an extra zero. They have a typo in the article.
But I figured out what it's supposed to say measured
over fifteen hundred nanograms per lead, compared to the national
average of one thousand nanograms per leader, according to testing
results on the town's website. The result based on testing

(30:49):
carried out over six weeks from the middle of June
to the end of July. This is so much fun
also detected traces of fentanyl, meth and zlazine, along with
prescription opioids including codeine, morphine, and oxycodon. By the way,
xylazine is this animal tranquilizer that is getting mixed into

(31:11):
drugs and causing people's flesh to waste away like a
flesh eating bacteria. It is a very, very dangerous drug.
Fentanyl and methamphetamine levels were lower than the national average
and the average for the Northeast.

Speaker 2 (31:25):
Results show so apparently.

Speaker 1 (31:26):
What that says is there's more cocaine than average, the
drug of rich people, and less fentanyl and math, the
drugs of poor people in this rich neighborhood. Nantucket has
long been known In Nantucket Island, There You Go has
long been known as a summer playground for the rich
and famous.

Speaker 2 (31:43):
Among its wealthy residents.

Speaker 1 (31:44):
Are Barstool Sports founder Dave Portnoy, actor Ben Stiller, and
former Google CEO Eric Schmidt. Experts say further testing will
be carried out in the winter, when the island typically
enter empties out of its rich and famous summer visitors.

Speaker 2 (31:59):
They quote a doctor here from in the Boston Globe.

Speaker 1 (32:02):
I think it's interesting that cocaine was so high, and
I was surprised fentanyl was so low, because fentanyl is
in everything.

Speaker 2 (32:08):
I thought fentanyl would be higher, he says.

Speaker 1 (32:10):
I'm interested to see in the depths of winter when
people with large amounts.

Speaker 2 (32:14):
Of disposable income have left the island.

Speaker 1 (32:17):
And so for me, okay, that's so all kind of
sort of interesting. Oh, by the way, the samples of
sewage are collected from the Surfside Wastewater Treatment Facility, which
serves about seventy percent of Nantucket Islands roughly fourteen thousand residents,
and it's then analyzed by a group called biobot Analytics,
which is founded in MIT.

Speaker 2 (32:37):
But anyway, here's the part that's interesting to me.

Speaker 1 (32:39):
Why were they testing that, Like, what is the purpose
of going around and testing in neighborhoods sewage for drugs?
I know sometimes they also test sewage these days for
a presence of COVID actually, and I don't know what else,
but isn't that interesting You don't have to run a
test for drugs. If you're testing sewage to see if
there's a COVID out breaking a place, it doesn't mean

(33:01):
you've got to go the test the poop for cocaine
as well.

Speaker 2 (33:05):
And so the fact that they have the.

Speaker 1 (33:06):
Number there and they also have a national average means
they're also testing the pee and the poop in other
places for levels of drugs, so they have a national
average to compare it to. And I just wonder why
really interesting listener texts in response to what we were
talking about in the last segment of the show, And
if you're just joining what we were talking about, I

(33:27):
just sort of was speaking my mind. It was sort
of a stream of consciousness conversation about my thoughts as
my younger kid is thinking about applying to college or
is going to get ready to apply to college in
the next month or two, and just not being sure
you know what's worth doing, what's not worth doing? Is

(33:49):
college generally worth it, as college generally not worth it,
you know? Or expensive college is worth it or not
worth it? Dragon, Sorry, I don't mean to interrupt here.

Speaker 4 (34:00):
But this most recent text that came in has reminded me, Yeah, did.

Speaker 2 (34:04):
You take out your trash today?

Speaker 1 (34:06):
Look, I will never ever live in a place where
Monday is a trash day. Monday is the worst trash day.
Monday is still the best trash day according to this text.
This listener says, Ross, I wish I had your dilemma.
I didn't get that education. By the way, pet Co
sells turtles. So that's referring to the conversation we had

(34:28):
with Kevin Fitzgerald, the veterinarian and comedian on Friday. And
when I said that you can't buy what Kevin had
as a pet, and his first pet was a turtle,
I probably said this very quickly. I didn't, but I
didn't mean you can't buy any turtles. Actually this did
come up, so I didn't mean.

Speaker 2 (34:47):
You can't buy any turtles.

Speaker 1 (34:48):
But if you remember back in the day, and I
remember this, the very very very common pets were these
two or three inch turtles, and they carry salmonella and
a lot of kids got sick. So what got made
illegal turtles that were smaller than four inches, Because whoever
it was decided that a turtle that was four inches

(35:09):
or bigger. And I don't know what to mension they're measuring,
but a turtle that's four inches or bigger can't fit
in a kid's mouth.

Speaker 2 (35:16):
So it wasn't that you couldn't buy any turtles.

Speaker 1 (35:18):
It was you couldn't buy the small turtles, those little
ones that were super popular when I was a kid.
Ross I thought usc would be the most expensive in California.

Speaker 2 (35:27):
It's right up there.

Speaker 1 (35:27):
There's a bunch of just confirm you did not take
your trash la morning. Did not, would not, would not
no trash should no, Okay no, because then you got
to take you either. Look Monday morning. Your brain isn't
that functional on a Monday morning anyway, So on a
Monday morning, you're probably not gonna remember to take out
the trash.

Speaker 2 (35:47):
And on Sunday you.

Speaker 1 (35:49):
Shouldn't have to interrupt watching football in order to take
out the trash. So Monday is the worst trash day.
A couple of listener texts on this Gosh, there's some.

Speaker 2 (35:58):
Just great stuff.

Speaker 1 (35:59):
Emphasized your kids that a bachelor's degree is designed to
be a four year program, not five, not six. I
did that with my daughters. They both finished in four years.
One at CU and one at DU. Also, I had
a friend who said his kid sent his kids to
two years of junior college or community college, and their
credits transferred to the university, and when they got to

(36:20):
the university, they were twenty years old already and more
mature and could resist the temptations of the party life
at the university. Ross, my son asked to do something
his senior year. Hold on, I lost that, Let me
let me hit this little button here so my screen
doesn't keep moving. My son asked to do something his
senior year when he turned eighteen that I didn't approve of,

(36:42):
and he didn't understand because he said he was an adult.

Speaker 2 (36:46):
I quickly told him that he.

Speaker 1 (36:47):
Was a C, so instead of adult, he was a C,
like grade C adult when he was living under my
roof and I was paying for everything. He would be
a B adult when he moved out, like going to
college and live under a different roof, but I was
still paying for it, and he would be an adult
when he was living under a different roof and he
was paying for it. It worked out well for us,

(37:08):
as he is a very responsible husband and father. Now, Ross,
I believe my kids got a lot out of college
because of.

Speaker 2 (37:15):
What they put into it.

Speaker 1 (37:16):
All three went to state schools, one in Montana, two
in Colorado. All have good careers, good professions. They would
not have any incremental value from more expensive schools. Their
experiences in college also shaped them.

Speaker 2 (37:28):
For their future.

Speaker 1 (37:29):
I worked in higher education for nine years and don't
seem more value if you spend more ross.

Speaker 2 (37:37):
It depends. Look up what you want.

Speaker 1 (37:40):
Them to or what they want to do as a career,
and look at what those companies require in their application,
and adjust your education accordingly.

Speaker 2 (37:48):
Like most things in life.

Speaker 1 (37:49):
Your education trolybeans after schooling or training. And don't let
your kids get one hundred thousand dollars education in Eastern
European underwater basket weaving unless you want them to scream
up from the basement to make them a sandwich.

Speaker 4 (38:04):
That's awesome. Monday is the best day you get the
weekend trash out. And also Monday is the best trash day.
Households accumulate most of their trash on the Weekend's that's.

Speaker 1 (38:13):
A fair point. That's a fair point, especially if you
entertain a lot. You could have a lot of food
and stuff dumped in the trash, and so I will,
I will give some credit to that point, and I
will say, dragon, just in the interest of being fair
and balanced, if I'm going to credit that point a
little bit, I will say that point is especially valid
in the summer for two reasons. One, you tend entertain more.

(38:34):
You barbecue more, right, you might generate more food waste,
have more parties and stuff like that. And the other
reason it's more valid in the summer is that unless.

Speaker 2 (38:43):
You are real bougie and you know, pinkies up.

Speaker 1 (38:47):
Nicely heated garage sort of person, which I certainly am not,
in the winter, your garage will be kind of cool, right,
And in the summer, your garage will be kind of hot,
and in the hot all that food stuff will get
had a little stanky. And whereas in the in the
winter it's your your garaja be a little bit like
a refrigerator and you really don't.

Speaker 2 (39:06):
Smell the stuff as much.

Speaker 1 (39:07):
So I will I will give some credit to that,
although I still wouldn't want to interrupt my football watching
to put the trash out.

Speaker 2 (39:14):
Anything to add, no, no, I do.

Speaker 4 (39:17):
Well this one also to help you, no one does
trash on Monday, ever, right, hi.

Speaker 1 (39:23):
Ross, I went to college for a year, then came
to Colorado and started digging ditches by hand for a
plumbing company. Then years later I started my own plumbing business.
I pay between two hundred and fifty thousand and three
hundred thousand dollars in income taxes every year. Thank god
I didn't finish college. See I love that. I love that.

Speaker 2 (39:47):
My oldest son went to school of Mines. My younger
went to Hellsdale.

Speaker 1 (39:50):
I split the cost fifty to fifty with both of them.
They're both doing very well. My son doesn't have the
grades or scores or mathematical aptitude to go to of
those to spend the math part, especially the mines.

Speaker 2 (40:02):
He's just not He's just not that. He's just not
that kid. Ross.

Speaker 1 (40:06):
I sent my son to Embry Riddle in Prescott, Arizona.
He got his degree in three years at a cost
of ninety eight thousand dollars total. He had a job
lined up eight months prior to graduation. I also had
leftover money in the five twenty nine and I let
him have it all. His degree was in cybersecurity. See,
I think cybersecurity is a pretty.

Speaker 2 (40:26):
Good place to go.

Speaker 1 (40:27):
You will have AI taking some of those jobs.

Speaker 2 (40:31):
But not all of them, right, I don't know.

Speaker 1 (40:35):
Ross who keeps the trash in the garage? What oh
you mean like leave the trash can outside?

Speaker 4 (40:42):
Apparently both my trash cans, the recycle and the regular
trash are in the garage.

Speaker 2 (40:47):
You don't have to leave the house, yeah, right.

Speaker 1 (40:49):
You don't have to leave the house and open up
the door of the garage, right. And you don't want
you know, raccoons and possums and bears and mountain lions
and homeless people getting into your trap. So I you know,
we do keep it in the in the garage, and
in some neighborhoods, I assume, and probably I mean, we're
renting right now, but there is an hoa that has.

Speaker 2 (41:09):
Rules about the neighborhood.

Speaker 1 (41:10):
I haven't studded them closely because I don't, you know,
we've already lived there longer than I thought we would, but.

Speaker 2 (41:14):
Not gonna live there much longer.

Speaker 1 (41:15):
But I'm guessing that a lot of neighborhoods with covenants
also have it. So you're not allowed to keep the
trash cans outside of your house.

Speaker 2 (41:22):
All right?

Speaker 1 (41:23):
Keep those cards and letters coming at five six six
nine zero. Very grateful for your insights. Will take a
quick break. We'll be right back on Kowa.

Speaker 2 (41:30):
Ross.

Speaker 1 (41:31):
I live in Denver. Trash pickup is in the alley.
My bins stay in the alley. Although on my side
of the alley and under an awning there are definitely
raccoons around, but they don't knock them over. And yes,
my trash pickup is on Monday, so for sure, in
these sort of like denser urban areas, where the trash
is in the alley makes sense. And also a lot

(41:51):
of times, and this was true back when I lived
in Chicago, when some of the older neighborhoods of Chicago
as well, there would be a garage in the back
on an alley, and the garage would be pretty small,
pretty tight, like you know, you could fit a car
in there, that's about it. So in some of those situations,
it's it's difficult to even fit to even fit trash
cans in there. Ross, I've lived in two different neighborhoods

(42:13):
for thirty years. Always had Monday trash day. Makes holiday
schedule really easy for trash Day. About three months ago,
my local trash company changed our neighborhood to Friday. It's
causing me to have minor mental breakdowns on holiday weeks.
The entire neighborhood puts out the trash on Friday on
the holiday weeks, and they don't pick up until Saturday.
We will still be putting the trash out on the
wrong day on holiday weeks for years to come. There

(42:37):
you go, and then two listeners on another thing, two
different listeners basically texted in the same thing at almost
the same time. Have your kid join the military, right,
and then in that way, the military pay for college,
and you know, get some structure and discipline in my
kid's life one way or another.

Speaker 2 (42:54):
So that's not it's not a bad not a bad idea.

Speaker 1 (42:57):
You can roll unused five twenty nine funds to a
roth ira, but only if certain conditions are met.

Speaker 2 (43:03):
That is true, but it's pretty limited.

Speaker 1 (43:06):
So if you end up, just as an example, saving
up quite a bit of money for your kid, figuring
he's going to go to a you know, an expensive
private school, and then your kid ends up going to
an inexpensive private school or an inexpensive state school where
you know, in your state, where you.

Speaker 2 (43:21):
Get that in state tuition.

Speaker 1 (43:22):
And you have a lot of money left over in
your five twenty nine, which is a great problem to have.

Speaker 2 (43:26):
You can only roll a fairly limited amount.

Speaker 1 (43:28):
Of it into the roth IRA And I don't remember,
I don't remember the amount. I want to say it's
something like thirty five thousand dollars in total. But if
you've you know, if if you were planning on a
kid going to MINDS and instead the kid goes to CSU,
you might be saving forty thousand dollars a year for

(43:50):
four years, you might have one hundred hundred and fifty thousand.

Speaker 2 (43:52):
Dollars in that account. All right, let me this.

Speaker 1 (43:55):
Is a piece from the Denver Post that I want
to share with you some good news that I that
I wanted to share. The suicide rate for Colorado's older
children and teens last year reached its lowest level in
nearly two decades, with fewer than half as many youths
taking their own lives as at the worst point in
twenty twenty. In May of twenty twenty one, at the

(44:17):
height of the pandemic, Children's hospital and other health leaders
rang the alarm about a youth mental health emergency in
the state.

Speaker 2 (44:25):
By the way, that was everywhere, not just here.

Speaker 1 (44:27):
Four years later, Children's reports that the number of youth
mental health visits has largely plateaued around pre pandemic levels,
which it described as already concerning. The most recent state
data shows suicide rates and self reported distress among teenagers
are down from their pandemic highs, and in some cases
lower than they had been for more than a decade.

(44:48):
Experts attributed that to the combination of a generation uniquely
open to discussing mental health, evidence based prevention programs, and
efforts to catch people at risk of self harm when
they show up in hospitals. But providers say too many
young people still aren't getting help until their problems are severe,

(45:08):
and some indicators.

Speaker 2 (45:09):
Suggest the mental health of.

Speaker 1 (45:11):
Colorado's younger population could be taking another turn for the worst.

Speaker 2 (45:14):
So we'll see. But the data right now is pretty good.

Speaker 1 (45:17):
Last year, thirty nine kids, which by the way, is
thirty nine too many. Thirty nine kids between the ages
of ten and eighteen by died by suicide just five
years ago, or actually that was last year, so four
years previously, in twenty twenty, it was more than double
that number, eighty seven eighty seven, so that's an enormous drop,

(45:40):
and adjusting for population level, so the rate as a
percentage of population. The last time the suicide rate was
lower than this for sort of tweens and teens was
in two thousand and seven. And this is a nationwide thing.
Suicide rates down are down nationwide as our self reports

(46:01):
of suicidal thoughts and attempts. And I just wanted to
share this with you because about the time we get
some good news for a change, and I hope that
makes your day a little brighter.

Speaker 2 (46:11):
All right. I am holding in my hands right now.

Speaker 1 (46:15):
M P.

Speaker 2 (46:16):
Woodward's new novel in the.

Speaker 1 (46:17):
Tom Clancy Jack Ryan Junior series. It's called Terminal Velocity
came out last Tuesday, and another great one. And I
got to say, I love these characters. You know, I
read a lot of thrillers. I really love the characters
Jack Ryan Junior character and John Clark from the campus.
If you don't know what I'm talking about, I just
got to start reading these books. But MP, welcome back

(46:38):
to KOA. It's good to have you here. Hey Ross,
it's great to be here.

Speaker 3 (46:42):
Thank you.

Speaker 1 (46:43):
So we're going to talk a little bit later about
the other book that you've written recently, but I want
to ask you a question that kind of relates to it.
You are one of the authors who writes your own stuff,
like your own, your own characters, your own with not
a continuation of something somebody else started, while also having

(47:06):
the privilege of being asked to continue a series from
one of the most famous writers of all time.

Speaker 2 (47:13):
And there's only a few people who get.

Speaker 1 (47:15):
To continue, you know, Robert Ludlum and Vince Flynn and
you writing Tom Clancy. And one of the things I
wonder about doing that is is it easy or difficult
to keep these things separate in your head so that
you don't make the characters in your own books feel

(47:36):
too much like the Tom Clancy characters or vice versa.

Speaker 2 (47:39):
And what about the styles of writing?

Speaker 3 (47:44):
Yeah, that's a great question. It's something I've pondered at length.

Speaker 5 (47:49):
I think there is a definite style that you don't
necessarily fall into too much, like you know, poetically or romantically,
because there's a structure difference.

Speaker 3 (48:01):
In the Clancy books.

Speaker 5 (48:02):
You are almost always working with multiple points of view,
You're almost always working with technology, new technology related to
defense and a geopolitical context, and so that means you
have you tend to think about story construction for a
Clancy book a little bit differently than I might in
one of my one of my own novels. So right

(48:25):
from the get go, those are different. Then when it
comes to inhabiting characters, I've done enough of these and
read so many of them, you know, kind of really all.

Speaker 3 (48:34):
My adult life that it's it's not too difficult.

Speaker 5 (48:37):
For me anyway to slip into the character mode that
that was originally created by.

Speaker 3 (48:43):
By Tom Clancy and to inherit them.

Speaker 5 (48:45):
That's much different when I than when I'm writing my
my own things, where you know, I've really thought through
a biography of a completely different person.

Speaker 3 (48:54):
So I suppose it's a little bit.

Speaker 5 (48:55):
Like an actor who plays a role, you know, sometimes
one way, and then plays a role in the next
movie that is completely different. It's it's a bit like
that mindset to where you're just completely focused.

Speaker 3 (49:08):
In that area while while you are authoring the book.

Speaker 2 (49:12):
We're talking with MP Woodward.

Speaker 1 (49:14):
His newest Tom Clancy novel is called Terminal Velocity. So
one of the things that really struck me about this book.
Some years ago, lots and lots of thrillers were about
Islamic terrorism, and then a lot of thriller authors have
moved on to you know, Russia this, or China that,

(49:34):
or Iran this or North Korea that. And in this book, you're,
in a way, you're you're reminding us that the Islamic
terrorist groups and that people with that mindset still exist
and we shouldn't forget about it.

Speaker 5 (49:51):
Yeah, for this book, I really wanted to focus in
on a number of the people that I interviewed who
were the warriors and what is what they referred to
as the GWOT or the Global War on Terror. And
in so many ways, you know, we're out of Afghanistan now,
We're out of I Rock now.

Speaker 3 (50:08):
It's not something that is in the daily headlines.

Speaker 5 (50:11):
But in this book, I started with a series of
these guys showing up dead, and I was intrigued by
the idea that well, you know, what if what if
there was blowback from what they did, and that these
terror organizations haven't necessarily gone away. They've reconstituted themselves, or
they've they've hidden, et cetera, but they still bear quite

(50:33):
a grudge and they've just been trying to get stronger.
And in doing that, I also wanted to pick up
the thread that was created by Tom Clancy and his
original work called Dead or alive, And I spent quite
a bit of time researching that book, in resurrecting sort
of a next generation of villains from that book, and

(50:54):
I thought it was a way to help deepen not
only these characters presently, but but remind every one of
of their of their their previous exploits.

Speaker 1 (51:05):
This book is interesting because it has a lot of
moving parts, a heck of a lot going on, multiple
storylines at one time. Uh an Islamic terrorist group that's
been as MP just said, sort of in hiding, regrouping,
biding their time while killing American former spec Ops guys
in America, but also planning another terrorist attack somewhere else.

(51:28):
There's really a lot going on, and a lot of
several main characters as.

Speaker 2 (51:34):
Well, including of course Jack Ryan Jr.

Speaker 1 (51:37):
And who who I still picture as John Krasinski, right,
or however you pronounce his last year, and then and
then Jack Ryan Senior the president who I still pictures
Harrison Ford.

Speaker 5 (51:51):
Yeah, so do I in in the Jack Ryan Junior series.
What part of my brief is to make sure that
Jack Ryan Senior is really He's really more of a cameo.
He's more of a presence than an active participant, So
he might he might show up in a chapter here,
a chapter there, or in the in the epilogue, But

(52:11):
I want to keep the action focused around Jack Ryan Jr.
As the center of the storm, even if he's not
always the one you know, directly doing the.

Speaker 1 (52:21):
Action right and and you you do that that that
comes through very clearly. I'm also curious the main bad guy,
the guy who's running the Islamo fascist Islamo terrorist organization
UH is psychologically very interesting and I wonder where that

(52:44):
came from.

Speaker 3 (52:47):
Yeah, I in research.

Speaker 5 (52:49):
One of the hardest things to do as a thriller
writer is to create new and novel villains. And you know,
you can't have villains that feel like like cutout. So
I like to think of villains as you might not
necessarily agree with them, you want to root against them,
but you can understand their motives, and their motives are plausible,

(53:09):
and you can understand why they think.

Speaker 3 (53:11):
The way they do.

Speaker 5 (53:12):
So in this book, we have you know, brothers who
are separated at a young age, who are both intensely
damaged by by their by their parents, and it inflicts
one differently than inflicts the other. But we know psychologically
what that can do to a person. And one of
those brothers, and I think that the character you refer to,

(53:34):
you know, has been taught all his life that he's effectively,
you know, the the Mahdi, the next the next Messiah
in the Islamic world, and has all these reasons to
believe that.

Speaker 3 (53:44):
And so he effectively becomes a cult leader.

Speaker 5 (53:47):
And we can imagine what that would do to someone's
psychology who's been told that, you know, since like age eight.

Speaker 1 (53:53):
Yeah, a couple other quick things. And folks, if you're
just joining, we're talking with MP Woodward. Is new Tom
Clancy novel in the Jack Ryan Junior series is called
Terminal Velocity. It just came out less than a week
ago last Tuesday. Go buy it, go read it. You'll
have a lot of fun with it. I really enjoyed
all the stuff surrounding the the rich people's uh Indian wedding.

(54:18):
Indian weddings are unbelievable and I've never been in one,
but I've seen them while I while I was in India,
and there's there's nothing like in Indian wedding. And and
and I I love all that conversation.

Speaker 2 (54:30):
I'm kind of curious how you researched it.

Speaker 1 (54:34):
Well.

Speaker 5 (54:35):
So I wanted to set the book UH for the
terrorist hunt portion up in Kashmir be because it's a
disputed and UH a disputed province between India and Pakistan,
and so I liked the idea of setting setting these characters,
you know, up near there.

Speaker 3 (54:53):
So I chose Amritsar, which is a.

Speaker 5 (54:55):
Sikh community, and then UH and then created this tycoon
who's seek and the wedding, the wedding concept episode. I've
been to an Indian, an Indian wedding. I've been to
India a number of times, and I've worked with with
many Indians, and I find them to be such It's
such a colorful and rich culture that I thought it
would just be very vibrant in.

Speaker 3 (55:16):
A in a fictional setting.

Speaker 5 (55:18):
And it also applied because you know of the whole
of the whole India Pakistan tension, right and before you
know I was writing this book, and shortly after I
sent it in, there actually was a major terrorist Islamo
fascist terrorist and a sidate in Kashmir that was very
similar to this and it caused Indian Pakistan to practically

(55:39):
go to blows over it. And that's exactly you know,
the geopolitical thing that I that I set up, So
the wedding was really just a way to sort of
exemplify rich Indian culture.

Speaker 1 (55:50):
I loved all that. That was just fantastic. All right.
I just have a couple of minutes left, and I
want to switch gears with you, kind of going back
to where we started. So your Tom Clancy book came
out a week ago, and Red Tide, which is not
in the Cliancy series, it's just your stuff, is coming
out two weeks from tomorrow.

Speaker 2 (56:10):
So I don't know whether you were writing them at the.

Speaker 1 (56:12):
Same time or whether the publication, you know, just sort
of made it look like they're coming out around the
same time and you wrote them.

Speaker 2 (56:18):
Actually tell me that.

Speaker 1 (56:19):
Were you writing two books at the same time, or
did you write one and then the other.

Speaker 5 (56:23):
I tend to Red Tide was the product of a
couple of years effort, and so I took a pause
while I was writing Terminal Velocity and then picked it
up again.

Speaker 3 (56:35):
And then I had because they're two different publishers, I.

Speaker 5 (56:37):
Really had no control over the dates that they were
coming out. But it comes out on September twenty third.

Speaker 1 (56:44):
Right, and the book is called a Red Tide, a
novel of the next Pacific War, And obviously I haven't
read that yet, but give me a give us a
few seconds.

Speaker 2 (56:55):
On Red Tide.

Speaker 1 (56:56):
This is one of the few times where listeners will
hear us say, like, go buy two books from the
same dude that are coming out in the same month.

Speaker 2 (57:03):
So tell us a little bit about Red Tide.

Speaker 3 (57:06):
Yeah.

Speaker 5 (57:06):
Red Tide is speculative fiction about a war between the
US and China in the Pacific, and it starts with again,
I started this a couple of years ago, but it
actually starts with a trade war and an embargo the
US does against China over AI chips, which in the
real world we've seen happen with in Nvidia and has
led to all kinds of tension. And so then then China,

(57:29):
because so many semiconductors are manufactured in Taiwan, China just
makes a move to basically grab it, but not in
the way readers would expect.

Speaker 3 (57:38):
It's not a classic invasion. It's more it ends up.

Speaker 5 (57:42):
It ends up unfolding on the high seas and is
somewhat evocative of I would say the Battle of Midway
for World War II.

Speaker 1 (57:49):
Wow, all right, folks, so now I've given you two
books from MP Woodword to add to your reading list.

Speaker 2 (57:55):
Just go buy them right now.

Speaker 1 (57:56):
Terminal Velocity was published last week, so you can order
it and they'll send it right now. Red Tide you
can order it in advance and they'll send it on
publication date, which is two weeks from tomorrow. MP, thanks
so much for joining us as always on KOA. Thanks
as always for entertaining me as well. Really enjoy enjoy

(58:17):
your books a.

Speaker 3 (58:17):
Lot, love joining Ross. Thank you so much.

Speaker 2 (58:21):
All right, thank you.

Speaker 1 (58:22):
All right, folks, MP Woodward go buy everything that he
reads and you'll you'll have a lot of fun that way.

Speaker 2 (58:27):
All right, let's do some other stuff.

Speaker 1 (58:29):
I'm still reading your text messages, so keep those coming
about colleges and so on.

Speaker 2 (58:35):
So I want to do some other things though, just
just briefly. So let's let me.

Speaker 1 (58:41):
Talk to well not just too, but to my Catholic
friends and listeners for a moment, because I found this
story super interesting, and it's a little bit outside of
kind of what it's a little bit outside of what
I know a lot about. So I don't know a
lot about the process in the Catholic Church for creating

(59:07):
a new saint for turning someone into a saint.

Speaker 2 (59:09):
And I apologize in advance.

Speaker 1 (59:10):
Because I'm sure I'm going to use all kinds of
wrong terms. They're very specific terms of art canonized. Right,
So on Sunday, the new Pope, who I like to
call Pope Bob, but his official name is Pope Leo
or the fourteenth, and I'm going to quote from the
hill here, canonized the first two saints that he has

(59:34):
canonized since since being pope, including a fifteen year old
who sought to use technology to spread his faith. So
they're the two people who the Pope is doing whatever
the next step is, or maybe this is the final step.
Maybe they're officially saints now, maybe this is the end actually, right,
So I'll just deal with one first and I'll go

(59:56):
back to.

Speaker 2 (59:56):
The Pierre p I. E. R.

Speaker 1 (59:59):
Georgio Frasati died in nineteen twenty five at the age
of twenty four, So that's a very young saint and
just an interested time. I'm not going to spend time
on him right now. The other young person who I
want to talk about, he actually he died in two
thousand and six, and he is the first millennial to

(01:00:20):
be made a saint again. His name is let me
get the name right, Carlo Acutis. Acutis he was, and
I'm going to again read from the Hill dot com.
He was born to a wealthy family in London before
moving to Italy. He was not born into a religious family,
but he became increasingly devout as he grew up. He

(01:00:42):
had a particular knack for computer science and studied college
level programming. Even as a teen, he launched a multi
lingual website to document church recognized eucharistic miracles. He became
known as God's influencer for a chie being such a feat.

Speaker 2 (01:01:00):
And keep in mind this would have been.

Speaker 1 (01:01:02):
The very very early days of it being even marginally
possible to be an influencer. He passed away in two
thousand and six, almost twenty years ago, and if you
think back to the state of social media at the time,
that was that's pretty early, and it was it was
you know, it's different now.

Speaker 2 (01:01:24):
My understanding, again, I'm not Catholic.

Speaker 1 (01:01:26):
I don't claim to be expert, okay, but my understanding
is that in order to be able to be canonized
as a saint, you have to have done a miracle,
and there has to be enough, confirmation, enough, proof, enough

(01:01:48):
whatever that. Yeah, this person, really, I don't even know
what the right verb is. What's the right verb, Shannon?
When somebody makes a miracle, somebody performs performs a miracle.
They so let me just share this a little with
you from Wikipedia in twenty twenty. By the way, he
died at the age of fifteen from leukemia. Okay, so

(01:02:12):
he was born in nineteen ninety one and he died
in two thousand and six.

Speaker 2 (01:02:17):
In twenty twenty, he.

Speaker 1 (01:02:18):
Was beatified by the Catholic Church after the recognition of
a proposed twenty thirteen miracle in Brazil attributed to his intercession,
while a second miracle in Costa Rica was confirmed in
twenty twenty four.

Speaker 2 (01:02:33):
And again, I want to be.

Speaker 1 (01:02:34):
Really careful how I talk about this, because I do
not want to sound or be disrespectful.

Speaker 2 (01:02:40):
In any way.

Speaker 1 (01:02:42):
I find the concept of miracles, you know, interesting, I
don't really know what to make of them, I have
to say. And then the idea of confirmation of a
miracle is also I think interesting. Let's see. In twenty twenty,

(01:03:05):
the Catholic Church recognized the curing of a child's pancreatic
disease as a miracle attributed to Acutus's intercession. On the
death anniversary of Acutus, Luciana, Viana had taken to mass
her son, who had a congenital defect of what's called

(01:03:25):
an annular pancreas that made eating difficult. Beforehand, she had
prayed a novena asking for Acutus's intercession. During the prayer
service following mass, matheis kissed the clothing record of Acutus.
So Acutus is already dead at this point, but and
I guess he's some again. I sincerely apologize for not

(01:03:49):
knowing how to talk about this. So he was already
something short of a sint whatever that is, okay, And
so you might have people who pray to him or
who you know, ask him for right Well, you know,
I take that back too. You don't pray to a saint.
You don't pray to a saint, but you might ask

(01:04:09):
a saint for something, okay. So, but he was already dead.
So this kid kissed a clothing relic that belonged to
young mister Acutus.

Speaker 2 (01:04:21):
And asked that he should quote not.

Speaker 1 (01:04:23):
Throw up as much as he had been immediately following
the mass, he told his mom he felt healed and
asked for solid foods when they arrived home. Until then,
he had been on an all liquid diet. Following this,
Acutus's mother told the press that her son had appeared
in her to her in dreams, saying that he would
not only be beatified. Acutus his mother not this kid's mother,

(01:04:46):
but Acutus. His mother told the press that her son
had appeared to her in dreams, saying that he would
not only be be atified, but canonized as a saint
in the future.

Speaker 2 (01:04:54):
After a detailed investigation, the Pope.

Speaker 1 (01:04:57):
Confirmed the miracle's authenticity and cree in February of twenty twenty.
Then the pandemic hit and they were going to do
this stuff.

Speaker 2 (01:05:07):
Then the pandemic hit.

Speaker 1 (01:05:08):
It was rescheduled until later in twenty twenty, and then
stuff got delayed more. And then I guess there was
another one. A miracle attributed to his intercession. In twenty
twenty two, when a Costa Rican woman had fallen off
her bike and suffered a brain hemorrhage. Doctors gave her
a low chance of survival. Her mom prayed for the
intercession of Acutus and visited his tomb. The same day,

(01:05:32):
the injured woman began to breathe independently again and was
able to walk the next day, with all evidence of
the brain hemorrhage having disappeared.

Speaker 2 (01:05:45):
So there you go.

Speaker 1 (01:05:47):
Those are the two miracles attributed to this young man
Carlo Acutis. But it's a super interesting story. Again, I
don't understand all this. I'm not Catholic. I don't know
it very well. But the idea that here's the first
millennial saint, and the first saint whoever probably had anything
important to do with computers, right, he was online doing stuff,

(01:06:07):
bringing attention to the Catholic church, talking about miracles, all
this stuff. Died much too young of leukemia, and now
he's a saint. Interesting story, don't you think. Texts I
wanted to share with you. Ross, You're correct. Catholics do
not pray to saints. We do ask for their intercession.
In other words, we ask them to pray for us.
It's an interesting way to put it, Okay, Ross, I

(01:06:29):
got t boned by a garbage truck coming down a
hill that ran a red light. I couldn't sit in
the same position for more than five minutes. Went on
for over a year until I had someone pray for
me or over me at a non denominational church here
in Denver. I was immediately without pain and it never returned.
Miracles do happen. Excellent story. I love that story. I

(01:06:52):
like the way they incorporated your trash day with where's that?

Speaker 2 (01:06:56):
Oh with the garbage truck? Yeah? Oh no, but no,
how's that?

Speaker 4 (01:07:01):
How's that? How's that not divine intervention? We were talking
about trash day earlier. Yeah, this guy was hit by
a trash truck and it just comes together or uss.

Speaker 1 (01:07:10):
A person doesn't necessarily have to perform a miracle to
become a saint. They just have to be associated with
the miracle. It can happen to somebody else from them,
or happen to them. I don't know, you're I mean,
you probably no better than I do.

Speaker 2 (01:07:21):
So can I can I just talk about football for
a minute.

Speaker 1 (01:07:25):
And Dragon, you were at the game yesterday, so obviously
a very very sloppy game.

Speaker 2 (01:07:29):
Oh, Dragon took some pictures. Dragon, was were you in
the koa suite?

Speaker 1 (01:07:33):
No?

Speaker 2 (01:07:33):
I was. It was the three hundreds in the book.

Speaker 1 (01:07:35):
Okay, So Dragon was in the seat somewhere on the
north side north north east side when I was doing
a parabolic microphone on the west side, and Dragon got
a couple of pictures of me, or a picture of
me that he cropped or whatever. And so when you
hear me talk from time to time about doing the
parabolic microphone, if you want to know what that looks like,

(01:07:57):
Dragon got a picture of it and it's up on
the blog Rosskiminski dot com, so you can go see
what so you can visualize it. Next time you hear
me talking about doing the sideline microphones, you'll know what
I'm talking about. Now that that was an extremely sloppy game. Yes,
so many errors by both teams. Yes, And.

Speaker 2 (01:08:15):
I have to say just.

Speaker 1 (01:08:17):
Before the end of the first half, when the Titans
were backed up almost to their own goal line, and
they could have run out the first half by just
running the ball three plays in a row, and instead
they threw three incomplete passes in a row and had
to punt from their own end zone, and the Denver Broncos,

(01:08:39):
for the first time in that half, drove down and
scored a touchdown that was some of the worst clock
management I've ever seen, ever seen. And then the Broncos
made a mistake right afterwards, because the Titans have a
very good returner and the Broncos should have kicked it
off out of bounce, and instead they kicked it to
this guy who ran back fifty or six yards seventy

(01:09:00):
yards and and it set them up for a field goal.

Speaker 2 (01:09:04):
So that was That was all pretty bad.

Speaker 1 (01:09:05):
But here's this kind of an interesting thing dragon with
that bad clock management stuff. I was that in the
first half, I was on the Titans side of the
field and at some point I happened to be standing
next to a guy and I could see his credentials
and he was Titans Home Radio okay and yeah probably yeah,

(01:09:31):
like there's yeah, very good and uh And during some
break where he wasn't talking and I didn't have to
be holding up the mic like a television timeout or something.
Shortly after that that happened, I said, man, you guys
are going to be talking about that for a long time,
aren't you. Like that clock management was terrible. And I
said to him, like, I'm listening to Denver radio side yeah,
And Dave Logan had said, there's gonna be a lot

(01:09:54):
of questions in Tennessee about what just happened there, and
and that guy I was talking to said, you were
already talking about it, and this was like forty seconds
after it happened, right and you know, like waiting for
the kickoff after that touchdown. It was right then, and
he said, yeah, we're already talking about it. That was
that was exceptionally bad and that and that could have
been the I don't know who knows how it would

(01:10:16):
have played out after that, but they they would have
gone into halftime with what a three point lead instead
of being down by one.

Speaker 4 (01:10:25):
Anyway, well, I am thankful that you get to switch
sides of the field at halftime because when you when
you came over to the Broncos sideline, that's it when
when things really started to happen. We had that you know,
fifty something yard run and yeah that run for the
touchdown too. So although we did score in the first half,
but it was just more felt, more impressive and for
more meaningful, especially with the running backs that we have

(01:10:47):
that need just a little oomph, and that that happened.
You brought it to him when you switch sides to
the Broncos sidelines.

Speaker 2 (01:10:52):
So stay there. Okay, all right.

Speaker 1 (01:10:54):
One thing that's kind of cool when I get to
do this, Oh, Russ, do you get paid to do
the microphone work at the Broncho those games? No?

Speaker 2 (01:11:00):
I do it for free, and I probably would pay
to do it, right.

Speaker 1 (01:11:04):
It is the best for an NFL fan, a Broncos fan,
It is the greatest thing.

Speaker 2 (01:11:10):
So no, I don't get paid for it. And what
was I gonna say? I don't know. Oh.

Speaker 1 (01:11:17):
One of the fun things when I'm doing this is
I'm wearing headphones where I can hear the Kowa broadcast.
I can also hear what the people in the studio
are saying to each other during the ad breaks that
note that people who are listening on the radio can't hear.

Speaker 2 (01:11:29):
But on the air.

Speaker 1 (01:11:30):
On the air, I heard Dave Logan say that that
fifty yard run by RJ Harvey, Right, RJ Harvey. That
fifty yard run by r J Harvey. This really kind
of surprised me, even though the Broncos have been bad.
Was the longest run by a Broncos since twenty twenty two. Wow,
we're in twenty twenty fivesh Yeah, give or take fifty

(01:11:53):
yards not that big a run. That's why you need
to stay on that side of the sideline.

Speaker 3 (01:11:58):
Wow.

Speaker 1 (01:12:00):
Yeah, yeah, we won. Though maybe it was the whole
package of me going from one side to the other.

Speaker 2 (01:12:05):
Side that allowed them to win. I don't know. But
here's the other thing.

Speaker 1 (01:12:09):
Since there's always two people doing it, I don't think
it would be fair to the other person for me
to say, hey, I want the Broncos sideline, and I
don't have that kind of pull anyway. And it's not
like I'm Dragon and can just say do whatever I
wanted to do here staying here.

Speaker 2 (01:12:24):
So there was that the other thing. And Dragon, did you.

Speaker 1 (01:12:28):
Happen to watch the Buffalo Baltimore game last night?

Speaker 4 (01:12:31):
I saw it right before I went to bed and
Buffalo was getting blown out. So I was like, all right,
no worries, they're gonna lose. I'm gonna go to bed, and.

Speaker 2 (01:12:38):
I woke up. Yeah, very different, very different.

Speaker 1 (01:12:42):
That was one of the most amazing fourth quarters I've
one of the most amazing games I've ever seen. They
could not stop Derrick Henry one hundred and sixty nine
yards rushing. I think he had two touchdowns and he
averaged about nine and a half yards per rushing. They
could not stop him until the one play that they
did right, So the Buffalo looked like they.

Speaker 2 (01:13:05):
Were getting blown out.

Speaker 1 (01:13:06):
The uh the Ravens already had forty points. And then
the Ravens got the ball back, and Buffalo forced a
fumble out of Derrick Henry and went down and scored
a touchdown on that and missed the two point conversion,

(01:13:27):
and then they and then the defense stopped Baltimore again,
and then they drove down again and scored another touchdown,
and oh my gosh, the quarterback play of both of these.

Speaker 2 (01:13:40):
Guys just insane.

Speaker 1 (01:13:42):
They missed the two point conversion there as well, which
was going for a tie, so they were down by two.
And then they and then they stopped Baltimore again, got
the ball back, drove down for a game winning field
goal kicked by Matt Prater for We're Denver, Bronco.

Speaker 2 (01:14:02):
Check this out. And this is.

Speaker 1 (01:14:04):
From a newspaper whose name escapes me from Rochester, New York.
Listen to this dragon. Matt Prater has made an NFL
record eighty one career field goals from fifty yards or longer.

Speaker 2 (01:14:23):
Eighty one in his career.

Speaker 1 (01:14:27):
If you add up every Buffalo Bills place kicker in
the history of the team, they have eighty two and
Matt Prater by himself has eighty one. He only got
there on Thursday night, added to the practice squad, was
added to the roster for the game the day before.

(01:14:49):
He doesn't even know the names of his teammates, and
he just kicked that unbelievable, unbelievable field goal. One other
thing that on that game, This is pretty nuts.

Speaker 2 (01:15:00):
Check this out.

Speaker 1 (01:15:01):
And they said this if you are on TV, if
you watched into the postgame show, check this out. Draggon,
you're ready. Josh Allen sixteen of twenty one for two
hundred and fifty one yards and a touchdown.

Speaker 2 (01:15:16):
It's pretty good. That was just his fourth quarter.

Speaker 1 (01:15:19):
Oh can you imagine that's that's pretty good. That's sixteen
of twenty one with two hundred and fifty one yards
and a touchdown. If you watched that game last night,
you understood why those two guys were the top vote
getters last year for MVP.

Speaker 2 (01:15:36):
It was incredible. Brouss.

Speaker 1 (01:15:37):
Does one have to be a KOA employee to do
the microphone at Broncos games or could it.

Speaker 2 (01:15:42):
Be a listener.

Speaker 1 (01:15:44):
You know, there's an immense amount of demand for not
very many, you know, so pretty much it goes to
employees every once in a while, like, yes, they were.

Speaker 2 (01:15:52):
Very trusted members of the radio crew.

Speaker 1 (01:15:56):
Yeah, and yesterday was a guy who was an employee
here for a long time. But I think it could
be almost impossible to get a listener to be able to.

Speaker 4 (01:16:05):
Execute husband Chuck has done at a time.

Speaker 1 (01:16:08):
And Chuck has done it, and I've done it with Chuck,
and I'm doing it with Chuck again this year for
the Bengals game. Actually, so that'll that'll be fun. But yeah,
all right, let me do something different here. So we've
been talking a little bit about vaccines in recent days
with RFK Junior doing his sort of liar grifter thing
and Florida doing their thing where they said they're going

(01:16:30):
to get rid of the you know, all the K
through twelve vaccine mandates so you don't have to have
be vaccinated to go to school. But it turns out,
we learned over the weekend, they're actually only getting rid
of a few of them because most of them are
in law and they can't simply override the law. There
are a few that are in rule, a rule that
was created by the executive branch of the state government,
and they can change that rule but you know, stuff

(01:16:51):
like polio and measles and pertussis and diph theory and
all these things, those are actually still going to be
mandated unless the state legislature changed. Is the law now.
President Trump was asked about this Florida nonsense, and I
thought his.

Speaker 2 (01:17:07):
Answer was fascinating.

Speaker 1 (01:17:09):
And I'm going this is a YouTube short storm to
try to make this work. Let's see if I can
get this working.

Speaker 6 (01:17:16):
I think we have to be very careful. Look, you
have some vaccines that are so amazing. At the polio
vaccine I happen to think is amazing. A lot of
people think that COVID is amazing. You know, there are
many people that believe strongly in that. But you have
some vaccines that are so incredible, And I think you

(01:17:36):
have to be very careful when you say that some
people don't have to be vaccinated. It's a very you know,
it's a very tough position. So i'd give you an answer,
I'll give you a feeling, but just initially I heard
about it yesterday, and it's a tough stance. Lolick, you
have vaccines that work. They're just pure and simple work.

(01:17:58):
They're not controversial at all. And I think those vaccines
should be used otherwise some people are going to catch
it and they endanger other people. And when you don't
have controversy at all, I think people should take it.

Speaker 2 (01:18:12):
I think we have to be very careful. So that's
that's super interesting. Right.

Speaker 1 (01:18:15):
So Donald Trump is basically coming out with as full
throated a defense of vaccines as I've ever heard from him,
as I've ever heard from him. And this again, now
it's like twice in a week or so. Is the

(01:18:36):
is a shot across the bow or a gauntlet thrown down,
or however you want to put it in front of
RFK Jr.

Speaker 2 (01:18:44):
Because RFK Junior and rumer n RFK Jr.

Speaker 1 (01:18:46):
Was going through his confirmation process, he said that he
would operate within more or less at least within the
existing framework, and that he wouldn't do a couple of
things that he actually ended up doing. That's why you
have some even Republican members of the Center the Senate
pretty upset with him. You have John Barrasso from Wyoming
who's a medical doctor who's calling out RFK Junior in

(01:19:07):
public saying that RFK is wrong to you to be
trashing vaccines like this, And now Trump is standing up
for vaccines.

Speaker 2 (01:19:15):
Again, this particular thing.

Speaker 1 (01:19:16):
Is not so much against RFK, even though it can
function as a message to him, as it is a
message against Florida. And what I think that will do,
or what it may do, is it may give a
little bit of spine to some members of the Florida legislature,
so that if this were to come up, that enough

(01:19:37):
members of the Florida legislature would decide they don't want
to become the poster boy for some kid who died
of measles or got crippled from polio because the Republican
legislature decided not to mandate vaccines for kids going to school.
I said this earlier in the show. I'll say it
one more time. I believe a parent has the right
not to have their kid vaccinated. I also believe a

(01:19:58):
parent has a right to send their kid to school.
But I don't think the parents should have the right
to do both, because the risk from an unvaccinated kid
to other kids beyond your own is quite significant. And
that just the same way that you are allowed to
drink and you are allowed to drive, but you're not

(01:20:19):
allowed to do both at the same time.

Speaker 2 (01:20:21):
That's how I feel about that, all right. Let me
do a.

Speaker 1 (01:20:24):
Couple of quick things. This is an interesting question from
a listener. We were talking about vaccinations a bit, and
this is tangential, right, But I said, I said parents
can either parents.

Speaker 2 (01:20:37):
Cannot vaccinate their kids. I think they should have that right.

Speaker 1 (01:20:40):
Parents can send their kids to school, especially public school.

Speaker 2 (01:20:43):
Of course they have that right.

Speaker 1 (01:20:45):
But I don't think you have the right to do both,
just the same way that you have the right to
drink and you have the right to drive. But you
don't have the right to do both at the same time,
because the risk of harm to others is so hot.
And this is as a libertarian, this is how I
tend to think about things. I care very very little
about what kind of risk adults want to put themselves at.
I care a little bit more about what kind of

(01:21:07):
risk adults want to put their own kids at, But
mostly this is up to the parents. I draw the
line at stuff like if a parent says that, due
to my religious convictions, I'm not gonna.

Speaker 2 (01:21:19):
Let my kid get a blood transfusion, even though the
doctor said my kid is definitely going to die without it.
I draw the line there.

Speaker 1 (01:21:26):
And I do think the government can can say no,
that kid's going to get a blood transfusion, and then
and then it's a whole different thing when a parent
is going to put somebody else's kid at risk, just
the same way that I wouldn't care if somebody were
driving drunk, if the only person who might.

Speaker 2 (01:21:43):
Die from that activity is the person who's doing it.
But really, they put other.

Speaker 1 (01:21:48):
People at risk at least as much as they put
themselves at risk.

Speaker 2 (01:21:51):
And that's why it's not okay.

Speaker 1 (01:21:54):
And a listener asked, do students have a right to
the school funding or just a spot at the government
runs And it's kind of an interesting question. I'm not
really sure how to answer it. I'm not really sure
what the answers are, And partly I think it is
based on I think the answer is contingent on what
you think the word right means in this In this case,

(01:22:18):
do you have a right to the school funding? I
know I don't think so, and I mean this as
a contractual thing. Does a kid have or do you
just have a right to a spot at a government
run school? That's a hard one too, and actually it
might be different in different places. Right, Some schools have
passed laws where the money follows the child right, So

(01:22:39):
you in a sense, you have a right to the funding.

Speaker 2 (01:22:42):
And if you want to leave a.

Speaker 1 (01:22:43):
Public school and go to a private school in certain
of these states, the money follows you. So in those
states you have a right to the funding, and other
states haven't done that, so you only get the quote
unquote government funding if you go to the government school.
And we should be very careful, We should always make
sure that we call public schools government schools and remind

(01:23:05):
people what they are right they are government schools. So
I guess in that sense, and maybe this is what
the listener is getting at, do you have a right
to the funding or do you have a right to
a spot in the school. So if you're talking about
a theoretical right, a philosophical right, you're gonna have to
decide that for yourself. If you're going to talk about
a right as defined in law, it's different in different states. Dragon,

(01:23:28):
what have we learned about supertramp and touring A.

Speaker 4 (01:23:30):
Couple of different things. The text are just texted and
said twenty fourteen. I saw something that said seventeen, but
there was also an eleven pointing out there. So it
depends on what you would call Supertramp and what kind
of original members or founding members were still in it
as to when they were still touring.

Speaker 2 (01:23:45):
Interesting, it's hard to tell with.

Speaker 4 (01:23:47):
Some of these some of these bands that have members
that move on or pass away.

Speaker 1 (01:23:51):
So it's your guess is as good as ours. Yeah, yeah,
I didn't realize that any version of super Tramp was
touring that recently, Right, I would have. I had no idea,
So I could easily have guessed if you would ask me,
because I never heard of I might have guessed they
had stopped touring in the nineties or something, right, So, Ross,

(01:24:12):
I'm fully behind your stands on vaccination.

Speaker 2 (01:24:14):
For kids, but I don't understand if my kid is.

Speaker 1 (01:24:16):
Vaccinated, what risk does he have when another kid comes
into the classroom who wasn't vaccinated and might be infected
like measles, maybe coming in.

Speaker 2 (01:24:24):
Through illegal aliens. Right, So, how.

Speaker 1 (01:24:27):
Do they infect kids or what is the risk of
kids that are vaccinated?

Speaker 2 (01:24:30):
All right, let's do this for a second. Let's do
this for a second.

Speaker 1 (01:24:33):
So even the best vaccines are not one hundred percent effective,
they are more than ninety percent effective, and they might
even be more than ninety five percent effective, but they
are not one hundred percent effective.

Speaker 2 (01:24:47):
So let's just do a little math here for a second.

Speaker 1 (01:24:50):
I'm kind of make this up as I go along,
so imagine, and I'm going to use kind of round
numbers because my brain isn't good enough to do the
exact numbers in this math.

Speaker 2 (01:24:59):
But let's just imagin as an example that.

Speaker 1 (01:25:03):
The measles vaccine is ninety seven percent effective, and it is.

Speaker 2 (01:25:07):
I believe if you get two doses.

Speaker 1 (01:25:08):
If you get one dose of the measles vaccine is
something like ninety three percent effective. Second dose brings it
up to something like ninety seven percent effective. The other
thing you need to know with measles is it is
incredibly viral. It is incredibly transmissible if if an unvaccinated
person or perhaps a person for whom the vaccine happened

(01:25:29):
not to be effective. And in this case, I'm not
using degrees of that. I'm just saying completely ineffective because
I don't maybe there's some partial level of effectiveness. I
don't know. I'm not an epidemiologist, but just just stay
with me.

Speaker 2 (01:25:44):
Let's see this.

Speaker 1 (01:25:45):
Is this is a I think I've gotten this text
from a listener before Ross you sound about as libertarian
as Governor Jared Poulis. You're a person who doesn't understand
what libertarian means. You know, I believe you've said that
to me from time to time. Libertarian does not mean
that you let a person hurt other people. It means
you let people hurt themselves, But it doesn't mean you

(01:26:06):
let a person hurt other people. So I think that
you should understand what libertarian means before you start throwing
out comments like that. So let's say then that if
a person who was not vaccinated or for whom the
vaccine didn't work, is near a person with measles, Measles

(01:26:26):
is so transmissible that there is over a ninety percent
chance that you will catch it.

Speaker 2 (01:26:33):
So here's the thing.

Speaker 1 (01:26:34):
Imagine that the vaccine is ninety seven percent effective. Okay,
ninety seven percent effective, but that means that for three
percent of the people in that population, you think you're protected,

(01:26:54):
but you're not.

Speaker 2 (01:26:56):
Then imagine that.

Speaker 1 (01:26:58):
An un vaccinated person catches measles, comes into the school, and,
just for the sake of argument, to make the conversation easier, assume.

Speaker 2 (01:27:10):
That that unvaccinated person.

Speaker 1 (01:27:11):
Who has measles is exposed to everybody in the school,
just to make it easier, and you can adjust if
you want to say, only exposed to half the school,
or only exposed to quarter the school, or whatever you
want to say. All right, well, let's say it's a
thousand person school. Let's say they're only exposed to half.
It's a thousand person school, and for three percent and

(01:27:33):
all of them, it's a thousand and one person school. Okay,
there's one person who has measles, probably unvaccinated, and then
there's a thousand people who've been vaccinated. Of the thousand,
for three percent, the vaccine won't be effective, so that's
thirty people.

Speaker 2 (01:27:52):
And let's say that.

Speaker 1 (01:27:53):
The sick person is exposed to half the kids in
the school, so that's fifteen people.

Speaker 2 (01:27:57):
And then ninety of the people for whom.

Speaker 1 (01:28:01):
The vaccine wasn't wasn't effective, who are exposed to that
vaccine will catch it.

Speaker 2 (01:28:09):
So we'll call it thirteen people.

Speaker 1 (01:28:12):
So even though all thousand people are vaccinated, if an
unvaccinated person with measles, or even a vaccinated person, but
especially an unvaccinated person comes through, you could see at
least ten let's say people in that school catch measles,

(01:28:35):
even though they've been vaccinated, and that's the problem.

Speaker 2 (01:28:38):
That's the problem.

Speaker 1 (01:28:38):
The vaccines are highly effective, but not one hundred percent effective,
and that's why. And some people say, well, if you've
been vaccinated and you could still get it, then the
vaccines are worthless.

Speaker 2 (01:28:49):
That's not true.

Speaker 1 (01:28:50):
These vaccines save thousands or tens of thousands, or hundreds
of thousands, or millions of lives every year, depending on
the particular disease. Eaesels itself does not have a high
mortality rate. It's only about zero point one five percent
of people who catch measles will die from it. But
it can make you quite sick, and it's not fun

(01:29:12):
at all. And anyway, so there's the answer to that.
I think I said. I think I said enough.

Speaker 2 (01:29:20):
Ross.

Speaker 1 (01:29:20):
I believe motorcycle riders should be able to ride without
a helmet, but they shouldn't receive emergency medical treatment if
they don't. If they want to roll the dice, that's there, right,
But public taxes shouldn't be expended to.

Speaker 2 (01:29:30):
Protect them from their decisions. I agree. I agree.

Speaker 1 (01:29:33):
So what you should have if your motorcycle rider is
insurance that's going to cover you if you need medical
care because you're not wearing a helmet, and of course,
if you're not wearing a helmet, the insurance is going
to cost you a lot more.

Speaker 2 (01:29:45):
But that's right.

Speaker 1 (01:29:47):
You're choosing to ride without a helmet or do any
other thing, you should not be able to dump the
expense of that other thing on everybody on the rest
of us.

Speaker 2 (01:29:56):
I agree with you, I absolutely agree with you.

Speaker 4 (01:30:00):
Say that the helmet didn't fall off or get cracked and
fall off. Now you're now the rescuers are wasting time trying.

Speaker 2 (01:30:07):
But did you have a helmet? Did you not have
a helmet? Wait, we gotta find a helmet first. It's
not over there that bush. No, the rescuers are there
to rescue and save. Yeah, that's an interesting point.

Speaker 1 (01:30:17):
Ross and Dragon, thanks again for the Kevin Fitzgerald tickets.
The show last night was even better than expected.

Speaker 2 (01:30:22):
Beautiful.

Speaker 1 (01:30:22):
Yeah, I'm glad. Yeah, we're both glad you enjoyed it.
Let's see a few other things I want to do. So,
there was a story you may or may not have
heard of about a young boy in Gaza and eight
years old. So there's a there's a group that is
operating in Gaza called the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation and they

(01:30:45):
are the primary group distributing aid. Right now, there's a
guy who appears to be a disgruntled former employee of
GHF named Anthony Agualar and the guys actually he you know,
at least on the surface, he seems pretty legit. He's
a retired Green Beret colonel or Green Bray lieutenant colonel,

(01:31:08):
one of those ranks. And he went on MSNBC and
claimed that the Israeli military had murdered this young boy
just after the young boy had come to the Gaza
human Humanitarian Foundation and picked up some food, and he
claimed that the Israeli military murdered this group. Now, this

(01:31:29):
guy who made the claim again seems to he's been
fired and he seems to have some real problem with
GHF and he's trying to get back at at the
foundation or the Israeli military or whatever. I don't I
don't know exactly what his major malfunction is. But he

(01:31:49):
was named this young boy was named called Emir by
this former contractor Aguilar, and he said that the Israeli
military killed him.

Speaker 2 (01:32:00):
Him and the guy. I'm sorry the boy.

Speaker 1 (01:32:04):
The boy has been missing for a long time and
is you know, and this guy was out saying he
was dead.

Speaker 2 (01:32:11):
It turns out he wasn't dead. He was alive.

Speaker 1 (01:32:14):
He was hiding or something, and he's not dead, and
he's been actually now taken out of Gaza.

Speaker 2 (01:32:22):
They don't say where.

Speaker 1 (01:32:23):
It's probably Egypt, but he and his mom are fine.
And there's there's some thought here that part of the
reason they stayed in hiding is that Hamas loved the
propaganda of this claim that Israel killed this young boy.

Speaker 2 (01:32:47):
And so there's some thought.

Speaker 1 (01:32:48):
That if this family were gonna come out and say, hey,
we're alive, that Hamas would retaliate against them, because Hamas
doesn't care who dies.

Speaker 2 (01:32:56):
And let's see who who said this.

Speaker 1 (01:32:59):
The some organization following this as GHF themselves or who.
But they say the publicity placed the child squarely in
the crosshairs of Hamas, who have benefited greatly. This is
from GHF, from mister Aguilar's lies and the media amplifying them.
If the boy was proven alive, it would unravel their propaganda,

(01:33:20):
expose the lies and discredited narrative that Hamas has used
to stoke outrage and violence.

Speaker 2 (01:33:27):
So there you go.

Speaker 1 (01:33:27):
So this guy again, former Green Beret I don't know
what's gone wrong in his head. I don't know whether
he was wrong or intentionally lying, but it sure does
seem like he's one of these guys who gets disgruntled,
says all kinds of terrible stuff because he's mad at
his former employer, and then says, I'll shut up about
it if you hire me.

Speaker 2 (01:33:46):
Back, and then they say no. So anyway, this young boy.

Speaker 1 (01:33:50):
Who was reported murdered by the Israeli military is in
fact alive and well thought I would share that with you. Oh,
let's do let's actually do a little bit more here
on some Gaza stuff, just for a minute, because there's
a lot going on there well. And also Israel, there
was a terrorist attack this morning in Israel where a

(01:34:12):
couple of Palestinian terrorists who live in the West Bank
apparently smuggled into Israel by an Israeli Arab who lives
in Israel, not in the West Bank, but apparently brought in.

Speaker 2 (01:34:23):
They attacked a bus and a bus stop. They killed
six people.

Speaker 1 (01:34:28):
There was an off duty member of the Israeli military
there and a couple of armed civilians who shot and
killed the terrorists, but six people died. In Jerusalem this morning,
based on a terror attack from these Palestinians. In the meantime,
President Trump is now saying that he wants and he

(01:34:50):
said this for a while now, that he wants.

Speaker 2 (01:34:52):
It to be a ceasefire. He wants the hostages released.

Speaker 1 (01:34:55):
Apparently there's this plan that's been proposed that frankly, I
don't I'm sick of this.

Speaker 2 (01:35:00):
I'm let me back up.

Speaker 1 (01:35:04):
It's very, very difficult for an American to understand the
way that Israelis think about the value of every single
Israeli life and every single innocent life, and the value
of the hostages. And there's a big push in Israel
right now to do anything to get the approximately twenty

(01:35:27):
we think remaining living hostages freed, even if it means
releasing one hundred times as many or more. There's rumors
of this deal being proposed allowing twenty five hundred or
more Palestinian prisoners out of Israeli jails, including people who

(01:35:51):
have been convicted of murder. And look, I'm not a
Israeli and I understand the thinking, but I'm just not
okay with releasing twenty five hundred or three thousand Palestinian criminals,
including people in prison for life for murder, and they've

(01:36:11):
released a bunch of them already in order to get
twenty people back.

Speaker 2 (01:36:16):
I'm just not okay with it.

Speaker 1 (01:36:17):
Again, I'm not Israeli, don't and being Jewish is not
the same as being Israeli, and their mindset is very,
very different, and they many of them prioritize the life
of a hostage over any number of Palestinian lives. If
Israel does more of this, they should make sure that
if these are people who are released from in Israeli jail, Israeli.

Speaker 2 (01:36:41):
Prison for.

Speaker 1 (01:36:44):
Murder, they should do whatever they can to track them
after they are freed and go kill them.

Speaker 2 (01:36:50):
That's what they should do.

Speaker 1 (01:36:51):
And in the meantime, Donald Trump posted yesterday on truth
Social everyone wants I'm quoting, everyone wants the hostages home.
Everyone wants this war to end. The Israelis have accepted
my terms. Now we're not sure if that's true. It's
time for Hamas to accept as well. I've warned Hamas
about the consequences of not accepting. This is my last

(01:37:13):
warning that will not be another one. Thank you for
your attention to this matter. And the problem is that
Trump has done this before. Trump has said before to Hamas,
accept my deal or else, and so far they haven't.
Here's the other thing to keep in mind. Remember, members
of Hamas do not care who dies. They do not

(01:37:35):
care how many civilians die. They don't care how many
Palestinians die. They want Americans to die, they don't care
if they die. And therefore, when President Trump says to Hamas,
do what we say or else, Hamas might be thinking,
you know, oh, no, breer Fox, please don't throw me
into that briar patch, because I think it would be

(01:37:58):
a huge win for Hamas US and for Islamo fascist
terrorists everywhere to drag the United States into this fight.
And I don't know what President Trump is thinking, because
I don't think America can do anything to help this situation,
and it's hard for me to see any upside of

(01:38:20):
American involvement. Trump might be trying to talk his way
into a settlement to help himself towards that Nobel Peace Prize,
but now he's drawn a red line, and it's a
red line that I don't think he can or should enforce.

Speaker 2 (01:38:34):
Hi, Mandy, can you ah, how the heck are you?
I'm good? I'm good.

Speaker 7 (01:38:38):
Can I take you back to your vaccine conversation for
one second. Here's the thing about vaccines that I'd like
to know, kind of like the Epstein files. I just
want to know how he got away with it for
so long, who protected him? I want to know why
we're not allowed to question anything about vaccines. It's almost
like climate science is quote settled science. There are a
lot of people who have been injured in significant ways

(01:39:00):
by vaccines, and we're not.

Speaker 2 (01:39:01):
Allowed to talk about it. I disagree with you.

Speaker 7 (01:39:03):
There's an entire database, yeah, tens of thousands. Who's investigating
those things?

Speaker 1 (01:39:07):
Well, I don't know who's investigating, but remember that anybody
can put anything into that day.

Speaker 7 (01:39:12):
You're saying, who's investigating those claims? Yeah, I know one
database of.

Speaker 2 (01:39:17):
Nothing that goes nowhere. And why is that?

Speaker 1 (01:39:19):
I don't know if that's true. I'll have to research
this database via E R S. But there's it's not
that your people aren't allowed to question. It's that these
questions have.

Speaker 2 (01:39:29):
Been asked and scientifically study for years and years and
years and years.

Speaker 1 (01:39:32):
Now. Put aside the COVID vaccine for a minute. This
is a whole other thing. But these other vaccines have
been tested I'm not saying nobody's ever been heard.

Speaker 2 (01:39:41):
I'm sure there have been some.

Speaker 1 (01:39:42):
I'm sure bad side effects that are extremely rare, but
the public benefit from the vaccines is enormous. I think
the people who say we're not allowed to ask these
questions are just you know, blocking yourselves off from going
to look for the answers. The the questions are there,
the answers are there. Well.

Speaker 7 (01:40:02):
I don't think that the CDC is doing themselves any
favors by continuing to call the COVID shot a vaccine,
because it is clearly not well.

Speaker 2 (01:40:08):
It's an illness.

Speaker 7 (01:40:10):
It doesn't prevent the spread of illness, it doesn't really
do the things that vaccines are supposed to do.

Speaker 2 (01:40:14):
Well.

Speaker 1 (01:40:15):
For some populations, it saves their lives and prevents prevent
serious illness.

Speaker 2 (01:40:20):
The treatment that you can get.

Speaker 1 (01:40:21):
That's not a treatment. That's not a treatment. A treatment
is something you do after you've gotten it.

Speaker 7 (01:40:26):
So you take inventive treatment is still a treatment. A
preventive measure is still agentcy.

Speaker 2 (01:40:30):
No, I don't think so.

Speaker 1 (01:40:31):
I don't think people think of the word treatment as
something you do in advance. It's still a vaccine, it's
just not a vaccine that does everything we would like
it to do, but it's still a vaccine, and it's
still saves.

Speaker 2 (01:40:43):
Something that prevents something that you.

Speaker 1 (01:40:45):
Take in advance to prevent some level of harm from
a transmissible illness.

Speaker 7 (01:40:50):
That's okay, all

Speaker 2 (01:40:54):
Your show, all right, everyone to stick around for Mandy