10-20-25 - *FULL SHOW* Back from Non-Vacation; Broncos Insane Win; Louvre Heist

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
I am joined in studio by my buddy Rick Lewis,
who is, along with his broadcasting partner Dave Logan, the
voice of the Broncos. And of course I wanted to
have Rick in studio today because Rush is coming to Denver.

Speaker 2 (00:16):
That's what we're talking about. Just briefly.

Speaker 3 (00:18):
You just meed.

Speaker 2 (00:20):
Yes.

Speaker 4 (00:21):
We announced it this morning on my morning show on
the Fox at eight am. We actually gave away a
pair of tickets too that apparently we weren't supposed to
do that. I kind of jumped the gun on that
one a little bit, but we did give away a
pair of tickets. Yeah, they are coming next year in
Rayly October October twenty twenty six. Tickets will go on

(00:43):
sale next week and that's a big deal. Rush with
a new drummer.

Speaker 2 (00:48):
Yeah. Have you checked her out?

Speaker 4 (00:49):
Oh yeah, a little bit Anakin Nills. Yeah, yeah, I
checked her out. I really liked the way she went.

Speaker 1 (00:55):
For those who don't know, Rick is a musician, right,
not just a I shouldn't say Rick. No on Lizzy
does he call the Broncos games, But he's a number
one rock and roll morning host in the state for
decades on the Fox and he's a musician, drummer.

Speaker 4 (01:10):
I'm a drummer as well. A lot of people don't
consider drummers musicians. That's why I said that.

Speaker 3 (01:17):
Huh.

Speaker 4 (01:17):
But I'm glad you said that. That's a compliment.

Speaker 2 (01:19):
H huh.

Speaker 4 (01:20):
Yes, she's really tasty. She's more tasty than Neil Peart's
part was so technical. Her style is more tasty, groove oriented.
And if you're a drummer, you know what I'm talking about.
I really like her as a drummer, and she's beautiful.

Speaker 2 (01:34):
Are you going to go to the show? I think so.
I've never seen Rush before. Wow, that'd be the time
to do it. Well, let me know, I'll go with you. Okay,
you want to go? Yeah? You think we'll be able
to get tickets? I don't know. You got a better
shot than I do. Know. We'll try. I'll try to
buy on them. No, I neither do I all right.

Speaker 1 (01:51):
I want to talk a little bit about the Broncos
game yesterday, But I don't want to ask you the
usual x's and o's kinds of questions, because I'm sure
you've done a ton.

Speaker 2 (01:57):
Of that already.

Speaker 1 (01:58):
I want to know, just for you, as a dude,
who's doing what you did yesterday calling the game?

Speaker 2 (02:04):
What was that like for you? And did you get
any sleep?

Speaker 1 (02:07):
No?

Speaker 4 (02:08):
Those are two good questions. The answer is no, I
did not get much sleep at all. The adrenaline rush
was incredible. The celebration afterwards, I've never I don't think
I've ever seen a game like that before, let alone
called a game like that before. And even Dave Logan,
who's called hundreds of Broncos games, He's never seen a
game like that before either. It was the most improbable

(02:31):
come from behind when you'll ever see in the National
Football League. You may see that, you know, in a
high school game on occasion, but NFL that just doesn't happen.
They were down twenty eight to six with like six minutes, Yeah,
just ridiculous. Then everything just started going the Broncos way. Yeah,
and it was a miracle. Giants missed two extra points,

(02:54):
which that kicker probably didn't even make the flight back
home to New York. They probably made him take a
his own commercial flight. Nuh yeah, you won't see him
kicking anymore. For the Giants, I wouldn't be surprised if
their head coach gets fired after a epic meltdown like that.
It just can't happen in the NFL, So it was amazing.

Speaker 2 (03:14):
Ross. I was so pumped, man, And you know you've
been in the booth.

Speaker 4 (03:18):
There's fans just right below us in the booth, and
when the Broncos won, I was fist bumping and high
five and the people below us, we were all celebrating together.
Take it selfies together. I almost fell out of the
booth at the end of that football game.

Speaker 2 (03:34):
It was so much fun.

Speaker 1 (03:35):
And if you've been under a rock for the last
however many hours. The Broncos beat the Giants thirty three
to thirty two yesterday on a field goal with no
time left on the clock, and one of the most incredible.

Speaker 2 (03:45):
I won't see the quote unquote. The game was incredible.

Speaker 1 (03:49):
The fourth quarter was the most incredible quarter of football
I've ever seen. And the Broncos scored all of their
thirty three points in the fourth quarter, which is the
most they've ever scored in the fourth quarter of a game.
I don't know if it's the most they've ever scored
in any quarter of a game, but check this out.
I heard this one there. Let's see what thirty three
points is. The most ever scored by a team in

(04:10):
the fourth quarter that had not scored previously and that
had been shut out up to that point in the game.

Speaker 4 (04:14):
I believe you're right. I believe I heard that as well.
Here's another one. Bo Nicks had two touchdowns passing and
two touchdowns rushing in the fourth quarter. That's never happened
before in the history of the league. Wow, two and
two running and passing never happened. Now, it was historic
in many many ways. You'll probably never see a game

(04:35):
like that the rest of your life. Yeah, and we
came out on the good side of it. Broncos now
five and two Cowboys coming up this week. That'll be
an interesting matchup because you have the number one offense Cowboys,
number one defense.

Speaker 2 (04:49):
Broncos.

Speaker 1 (04:50):
How how were you feeling doing your job yesterday at
the end of the third quarter?

Speaker 2 (04:58):
Not good.

Speaker 4 (05:00):
It started reminded me of the way the Jets game
went the week before in London, where the Broncos did
almost nothing for three quarters, and I was we were
both shaking our heads to Dave and I like, come on, man,
this is crazy, this is ridiculous. Now that being said,
I had a feeling going into the game that the
Broncos might be flat in that game, because.

Speaker 1 (05:23):
You told me that before the game. You texted me that, Yeah,
that's right, I did right.

Speaker 4 (05:27):
Yeah, they played in London. We all flew home all night.
Nobody slept all night going back home. The Giants had
ten days to prepare for that game, so when the
Broncos were playing in the London, the Giants had already
had three days off and so they had a long
time to prepare. Broncos I thought, came out flat and
obviously really really slow. But listen, man, they've become the

(05:49):
new cardiac kids for sure. Man, I'm going to have
to start taking blood pressure and medication after that. If
this is Howay games are gonna go, I'm gonna need
some help, some pharmaceutical help.

Speaker 1 (06:01):
Was the What was the most interesting thing about calling
a game in London?

Speaker 2 (06:06):
Well, this is the second time I've had a chance
to do it.

Speaker 4 (06:09):
There were a lot of Broncos fans there, more than
there were Jets fans at the game, and it was
noticeable the locals don't really know much about American football
as they call it. They know everything about soccer, and
we played the game at a soccer stadium. But a
lot of fans will travel to London because London's a
really cool town. I highly recommend going there. We stayed

(06:33):
way outside of London. I never saw London on this trip, honestly,
because even this stadium is outside of London. It's in Tottenham,
and so I pretty much spent the whole week at
our hotel. We were way out in the countryside, which
was very cool. It was beautiful. I liked that my
recreation every day was taking a walk through the hedgerows

(06:54):
and the forest and tried not to get attacked by
a werewolf. You know, werewolves. There's werewolves out there. I
know were a wolf country man, know that.

Speaker 2 (07:02):
I do.

Speaker 3 (07:03):
Song.

Speaker 4 (07:04):
Yes, were wolves in London, American werewolf in London.

Speaker 2 (07:07):
The movie movie too, Stay off the foor.

Speaker 1 (07:09):
I don't think a lot of people know that that's
a documentary.

Speaker 4 (07:13):
No, of course not. Yeah, that's that's all true.

Speaker 1 (07:16):
All right, Uh but okay, I've got like one minute.
So what was the most interesting thing about calling a
game in a British stadium?

Speaker 2 (07:25):
Is anything different about it?

Speaker 1 (07:26):
Or might as well be you know, any away stadium
or even homestand but I didn't.

Speaker 2 (07:32):
Like about it at this stadium.

Speaker 4 (07:34):
The booth was enclosed, so there was glass, and that
glass had was tempered glass where it it you couldn't
see through it very well. That was really hard to
call that game interesting because it was a little distorted.
Your visions a little distorted. We are in the corner
of the inzee and I did the game with a fever,

(07:54):
So that's kind of what I personally remember. I don't
remember a whole lot about it.

Speaker 2 (07:58):
There wasn't much to call in that game, so it was.

Speaker 4 (08:00):
A very boring game. It was a very ugly game,
and I wasn't feeling very good.

Speaker 1 (08:04):
All right, last question for you, uh listener text, how
is it possible that Rick Lewis has never seen Rush before?

Speaker 4 (08:11):
That's a great question. I'll be totally honest with you.
I've never been a huge Rush fan. They just weren't
my cup of tea. I respect the musicianship and the
caliber of music that they made. I mean, they did
some very technical stuff, the progressive rock stuff. Yeah, I
wasn't a big progressive rock fan, gotcha. But this would

(08:32):
be a chance for me to finally go see the
band without Neil though.

Speaker 1 (08:35):
Well, I mean, okay, I'm out of time. But I'm
gonna ask anyway. This new drummer, Yeah, does she in
a way make going to see Rush a little bit
more appealing?

Speaker 4 (08:46):
I think it does up the interest factor in the
fact they haven't played in ten years.

Speaker 2 (08:49):
Yeah, yeah, no, but I mean for you personally.

Speaker 4 (08:53):
Not necessarily. I mean I maybe I am more interested.

Speaker 3 (08:56):
Yeah.

Speaker 4 (08:56):
I like the fact that it's a female drummer too.

Speaker 2 (08:58):
Yeah. I think male musicians are really sexy. Uh, me too.

Speaker 3 (09:04):
Uh.

Speaker 1 (09:04):
You should see the violinist who plays for Trans Siberian Orchestra.

Speaker 2 (09:09):
Did you tell me this already? Maybe? I thought you're just.

Speaker 1 (09:12):
Like one of the hottest things you'll ever see on
Stive may have told me about her last time we talk.
She's unbelievable. All right, I really want to go to
the Rush concert with you, for real.

Speaker 4 (09:19):
If you can get us tickets or if you get
us tickets either way, either way, I'll.

Speaker 2 (09:23):
Try to buy them. I have zero pull. I have
less than you.

Speaker 1 (09:28):
That's Rick Lewis morning Morning post on the Fox k
RFX one O three five and of course a voice
of the Broncos along with Dave Logan. Thanks for making
time for us, Ross And I'm just trying to mess
with the resolution because the default resolution isn't isn't.

Speaker 2 (09:43):
Uh.

Speaker 1 (09:43):
Everything's too big and I can't fit enough on the screen.
So I'm just trying to sort all this out right now,
and I think I should probably just keep talking because
it's my job and and probably bad if I don't.
But in any case, if I if I sound distracted,
that's what's going on. I'm trying to change the resolution
on the monitor on the monitor in here.

Speaker 2 (10:02):
Oh my gosh, what a world. All right.

Speaker 1 (10:04):
We had a ton of stuff to do on today's
show because I was out for a week.

Speaker 2 (10:08):
And thanks so.

Speaker 1 (10:09):
Much to Jimmy and Ben and Ryan for filling in
for me and makes me makes me feel good about
being away because I know it's in such good hands.
So many things happened over the past week, and there's
a lot to catch up on, and you know, I
don't always want to spend a bunch of time talking
about things that happened already.

Speaker 2 (10:28):
But even though this was a week ago, I feel
like I really.

Speaker 1 (10:32):
Must say something about the Israeli hostages coming home. All
twenty living Israeli hostages came home just over a week ago,
and it just a miracle it's not a it's not
a miracle in the sense of you can't really explain
how it happened. It's a miracle just in that it

(10:53):
did happen. But I mean, this was this was Donald
Trump's doing. He Donald Trump got something accomplished that I
didn't think anybody could accomplish. And it just really really remarkable,
really really remarkable. And I feel so happy for the families,

(11:16):
and I feel so happy for the country of Israel
for getting those folks back. But I also would just
want to remind you and me, I want to remind
all of us that that twelve hundred people still died,
and that some hundreds of hostages didn't come back, and

(11:40):
that for Israel, for Israel, the holiday of Simkhatra, which
is normally quite a happy time, is something that will
forever be be associated with murder and misery. And you

(12:01):
get the idea.

Speaker 2 (12:03):
So it's.

Speaker 1 (12:05):
A remarkable thing that has happened, and I just wanted
to give a little voice to that because I you know,
I wasn't here to talk about it on the day
that it happened.

Speaker 2 (12:15):
Was just such a big deal.

Speaker 1 (12:16):
You know, if a listener or a friend emailed me saying, hey,
I wish you know you Ross, you had spent so
much time just talking about the war and all the
terrible stuff going on. I wish you were there today,
so just have the opportunity to talk about the good stuff.
And you know, I thought, I thought, yeah, I get it.

Speaker 2 (12:39):
I get it. I appreciate that.

Speaker 1 (12:41):
But I could use a day off too, just like
anybody else.

Speaker 2 (12:44):
So anyway, there's that now.

Speaker 1 (12:47):
As this is progressing, Hammas being Hamas, and they're also
always being splinter groups. So this isn't actually a very
important thing to keep in mind. In lots of situations
like this, where there are ongoing wars, and especially where
one side functions as a terrorist group or close to

(13:08):
a terrorist group, there will often be splinter groups that
want the war to continue no matter what right. They
want the war to continue, no matter who dies, because
their only motivation for living is war, and many of
the people who are in Hamas that is their only

(13:28):
motivation for living. You're talking about a bunch of brain
damage seventeen year olds who have been taught from the
time they were three that their job is to killed Jews, right,
and they deeply believe it. They truly believe it, and
there probably is no talking them out of it.

Speaker 2 (13:47):
And so a couple of days ago.

Speaker 1 (13:51):
Some of these terrorists apparently popped out of a tunnel
in southern Gaza and fired an anti pank rocket at
an Israeli vehicle and killed two Israeli soldiers. And in
response to that, the Israeli military conducted somewhere around one

(14:13):
hundred different air strikes against Hamas targets in southern Gaza,
near Rafa and other parts of Gaza as well. The
Hamas people said that twenty three Palestinians were killed. Of course,
Hamas doesn't differentiate between terrorists being killed and non terrorists
being killed. But what I wanted to mention about this
is that Israelis said, all right, we did what we

(14:35):
need to do. In response to that, we're fine with
continuing the ceasefire.

Speaker 2 (14:39):
And meanwhile, the US now is.

Speaker 1 (14:40):
Working hard and working through the various intermediaries to try
to keep the ceasefire in place. The real thing to
keep an eye on going forward is what happens with
Hamas having to give up their weapons. Right, Hamas is
not going to want to give up their weapons. What
will happen if they refuse to. It's an incredibly important
part of the deal for Israel and for the US

(15:02):
to not have these barbaric, murderous terrorists who are this
generation's version of the Nazis, but maybe a little bit
worse because they want their own people to die too.
I don't mean worse in terms of quantity, but just
in mindset.

Speaker 2 (15:16):
I mean even the Nazis didn't.

Speaker 1 (15:18):
Want didn't you know, didn't want Germans to die, but
Hamas wants Palestinians to die. It's pretty incredible thing. But
Jade Vance is going to Israel, supposed to get there tomorrow,
and Wick Coffin Kushner, who negotiated the thing, are supposed
to get there sometime this week, and they're going to
try to keep this ceasefire in place, and I sure.

Speaker 2 (15:38):
Hope they do. We'll be right back on Koa.

Speaker 1 (15:41):
So let me just mention a couple of things, just
because we're friends and it's Monday.

Speaker 2 (15:45):
I'll tell you what's going on. So I was off
last week.

Speaker 1 (15:48):
Took the first couple of days to travel with my
younger kid to go look at some colleges in California.

Speaker 2 (15:54):
He really wants to go to college in California.

Speaker 1 (15:56):
So he's basically, my kid is applying to a bunch
of colleges in California, a few in Colorado, and one
in Texas.

Speaker 2 (16:03):
Anyway, so we did that and it was fine.

Speaker 1 (16:06):
But my kid is, you know, he's a bit of
a sullen, entitled whatever and not really the most fun
person to travel with, in part especially in the morning,
because he is the worst morning person in the entire world.
He is the crabbiest person you can imagine in the morning.
So anyway, I did that net then came home Tuesday night,

(16:31):
and the plan was to take it easy on Wednesday
and then for me and my lovely bride, Kristin, to
have a few days off to celebrate a birthday that
I had recently and a birthday that Kristin had just
a few weeks before my birthday and our anniversary, because
we hadn't really done too much for that stuff, so

(16:52):
we were going to take a trip out to the
Western Slope to a hotel we like out there and
do some hiking and just hang out out for a
few days, right, and that was supposed to be my vacation.

Speaker 2 (17:04):
So the day.

Speaker 1 (17:07):
I was coming back from California with my kid and
We don't know how this happened. Our little English bulldog,
Agnes hurt her leg badly, so it wasn't cut, but
she couldn't put any weight on it. So the next day, Wednesday,
I took her to the vet and the vet said

(17:29):
it could either be a bad sprain or it could
be a torn ligament ACL, like you know with football
players and so on. And she said, normally the test
for an ACL tear is you hold the leg above
and below the knee and just try to move it
a little bit and see if you can kind of

(17:49):
move the lower and upper part of the legs separately
a little bit more than you should normally be able to,
because that ligament isn't holding it together.

Speaker 2 (17:58):
And she couldn't.

Speaker 1 (17:59):
But he said, with Agnes, our little bulldog, She said, Agnes,
Agnes has such strong muscles that you really it's it's
hard to tell. So anyway, we Christy and I were
supposed to go away, but we didn't stay at home
giving the dog medicine.

Speaker 2 (18:15):
I'm picking the dog up to.

Speaker 1 (18:17):
Carry the dog out to pee and and to carry
the dog out.

Speaker 2 (18:22):
To you know, do other business.

Speaker 1 (18:23):
But because our backyard is down some fairly steep steps,
and I do not want the dog going up or
down that with a bad right rear wheel.

Speaker 2 (18:33):
So I'm you know, I'm carrying the dog all the
time and.

Speaker 1 (18:36):
Giving the dog meda you know, doggy version of ibuprofen,
and we'll we'll see it's it's been five days now
and she doesn't seem much better. And if if it
is the ligament, you know, then with the cost of
surgery being what it is, we're gonna have to give
away the dog. No, I'm kidding, I'm kidding. Uh, but

(18:57):
I just just just trolling you there. I know we're
not going to give away the dog, but I have
to say I won't be looking forward to putting my
dog through surgery and putting my bank account through dog surgery.
So hopefully she'll get better and it won't be and
it won't be that. If any of you, by the way,
has any experience with a dog and ACL surgery, please
text me and tell me what to what to expect

(19:18):
in case that becomes necessary, because I really don't know.
I don't know what to what to expect from it,
and I just hope, I hope it doesn't become a
thing that we need to do. Here's the other thing
that I wanted to share with you, and this is
this is really dumb.

Speaker 2 (19:33):
This is really extra dumb, even for me, even for me.

Speaker 1 (19:38):
So okay, so we spent the last few days, Kristin
and I spent the last few days.

Speaker 2 (19:45):
Working hours and hours and hours at the house.

Speaker 1 (19:47):
We are remodeling, working in the yard right so, putting
in edging, and there's a lot of very hard dirt there.
So I'm working out there with a pickaxe and doing
all this stuff and Kristen just lots and lots of stuff,
our and hours of work in the yard. And one
of the things I wanted to do because my wife
was just busting her butt with a pickaxe and fairly

(20:08):
large areas, I said, this is ridiculous. I'm gonna go
rent to I'm gonna go rent to tiller. And so
I went over to a hardware store. I rented a tiller.
I brought it over and you know, kind of busting
up the and the tiller is having a hard time
dealing with it, that's how hard the dirt is. And
so then I need to bring the tiller back to
the hardware store.

Speaker 2 (20:28):
Am I boring you with this? Story. Yet I need
to bring the tiller back to the.

Speaker 1 (20:31):
Hardware store, and so we put in the back of
my suv, and just to kind of keep it padded
a little bit, we put one of those moving blankets
under it, you know, and those moving blankets are kind
of thick things you buy for ten bucks at Harbor
Freight or whatever.

Speaker 2 (20:46):
So we put one of those under it, and as
I was.

Speaker 1 (20:49):
Driving there, the tiller leaned a little bit further over
than I wanted it to, and even though the gas
tank was closed, a bunch of gasoline leaked onto the
moving blanket. So I returned to tiller, and then I
came home. I and I went on to the source
of all wisdom, which is chat GPT, and I said,

(21:10):
we'll laundry detergent get gasoline out, and chat GPT said,
sure it will, especially if you get it while, you know,
very shortly after the spill. And I did have it
very shortly, and then the spill was, you know, ten
to fifteen minutes earlier. And so I put the moving
blanket that had a bunch of gasoline in it in
the washing machine and I washed it, and then I

(21:32):
took it out and not only did the blanket still
stink of gasoline. But now my washing machine stinks of gasoline.
So I washed it again and it didn't help, and
I washed it so then I took the moving blanket
out and I just put it out on the driveway
and just to let it air out and get some
sun and all that. And after several days it actually
seemed like that's worked. But in the meantime, in the
meantime with my own washing machine, now I've done a

(21:57):
wash using vinegar, I've done or two and a wash
using bacon soda or two, and run a bunch of
regular washes with clothes with detergent, was with bleach, and
my washing machine still stinks like gasoline a little less
than before.

Speaker 2 (22:14):
So I need your advice.

Speaker 1 (22:16):
I need your advice on what to do other than
just wait, or maybe just waiting is the only thing
I can do, but I need to know what to
do to get the stink of gasoline out of my
washing machine. I feel very, very stupid, and this is
this has been my past week. It was supposed to
be vacation.

Speaker 2 (22:35):
Dude.

Speaker 1 (22:36):
I need a vacation now, and I need a nap
and I need uh, I don't know what.

Speaker 2 (22:43):
I don't know. So that was that was it. That
was my last several days, and.

Speaker 1 (22:47):
I just thought, you know, maybe you would, maybe you would,
you would, you would like to know what?

Speaker 2 (22:54):
Oh?

Speaker 1 (22:54):
Yeah, ask the Secretary of Energy if he can ask
his people, a Department of Energy how to get gasoline out.

Speaker 2 (22:59):
That's a good idea.

Speaker 1 (23:00):
Chris Wright probably knows everything to do with fossil fuels.
That would be kind of funny. Actually, that would be
kind of funny. I should actually email him that question
and say, my producer suggested you would be the right
person to ask. What's your answer? He has a pretty
good sense of humor. So you've talked to him, right, Jennon. Yeah,
So so we'll see. I am expecting a guest here,

(23:23):
but I don't have him yet. I don't know where
he is, and I don't I don't know that I
have a backup number for him.

Speaker 2 (23:30):
So we'll we'll see what happens, all right.

Speaker 1 (23:33):
In the meantime, In case he doesn't show up, I'm
just gonna keep talking because I think that's my job,
even though i'm, you know, semi professional. So here's a
headline from the Denver Post from a few days ago.
Owner of Denver area spa accused of offering clients sex
during massages. So apparently this is a place called the
Mango Spa sixty six fifty South Vine Street, according to

(23:57):
an arrest affidavit, And apparently a customer was there and
was offered some kind of sexual activity for money by
the owner of the spa, and he declined, and he
didn't particularly enjoy being offered that, so he went to

(24:18):
the Rapo County Sheriff, and the Rapa County Sheriff's office
sent a deputy in undercover, and that deputy was offered
the same services or similar services, I don't know exactly,
and the deputy then arrested the forty six year old

(24:39):
woman who owns the spa. Now, I have a couple
of quick thoughts on this, and this is a topic
that comes up from time to time on the show
just because I'm a libertarian. But so before I go further,
I want to make one thing very clear. Some of
the places that I guess do this kind of stuff.
And I've never been to one, and I've never paid

(25:00):
for sex in my life, but these places do engage
in sex trafficking, which not only is it illegal, it
should be illegal, and it should be very very very
harshly punished.

Speaker 2 (25:14):
It's it's essentially.

Speaker 1 (25:15):
A form of kidnapping, and and it's and it's horrendous.
Now at this particular place where this woman was arrested,
law enforcement has said there is no evidence of any
sex trafficking and it was just this woman who who
owns this massage place, looking to make a few extra
bucks by offering horny guys whatever. You know, so quote

(25:39):
unquote happy ending, right, And so here's my here's my
question for you. Why should that be illegal?

Speaker 2 (25:49):
Really? And I'm not saying this.

Speaker 1 (25:52):
Look, you know that I argued just to you know
that I argued in favor of marijuana legalization. I never
smoked marijuana or ingested it in any other form. I'm
not trying to be tricky by using the word smoke,
but when I was a kid, that was the only
way you could you could ingest it. Now there's lots
of other ways. I've never ingested marijuana in any form,

(26:14):
even now that it's legal. And so what I was
arguing for it being legal, that wasn't because I was
trying to make a case for me to be able
to go smoke pot and not go to jail for it.

Speaker 2 (26:26):
Right.

Speaker 1 (26:26):
I just thought as a matter of freedom, it should
be legal. And that's how I feel about prostitution if
it's if it's two consenting adults and no trafficking involved,
or right trafficking.

Speaker 2 (26:39):
In this I'm using a sort of narrow definition.

Speaker 1 (26:42):
Here of somebody with some pressure or leverage being placed
on her. It's usually a woman being put in a
position of having to offer some kind of sexual activity
to somebody she doesn't know in order to you know,
off a debt to a coyote, or do some other thing.

(27:03):
But it's not voluntary, Okay, It's fundamentally not voluntary, So.

Speaker 2 (27:08):
That's not what I'm talking about. In this case, you
had a massage.

Speaker 1 (27:14):
Parlor owner, and presumably from time to time she might
have a guy come.

Speaker 2 (27:21):
Through who might say yes to the question of, you know,
can I offer.

Speaker 1 (27:26):
You this or that this sexual favor quote unquote for
this or that number of dollars?

Speaker 2 (27:32):
And I'm not asking this to.

Speaker 1 (27:33):
Try to to troll anybody, or I actually don't even
think the question I'm asking you is a particularly edgy question, right,
I really don't Why should somebody's ability to sell a
sexual favor to a customer be treated any differently under

(27:54):
the law than the ability to sell just a massage
or a meal or anything, or gardening services or whatever.

Speaker 2 (28:06):
Why is it different? Why is it different? And I
do wonder this is one of those things where.

Speaker 1 (28:13):
A lot of times people say, Ross, prove to me
why it should be legal.

Speaker 2 (28:17):
Right. You heard that all the time.

Speaker 1 (28:18):
With marijuana as well, Ross prove to me why it
should be legal. And I say to you, that's the
wrong question or the wrong approach. We live in a
free country theoretically, and shouldn't the court. Shouldn't the burden
be on those who want a particular thing to be illegal.

(28:41):
Shouldn't you have to prove to me why it should
be illegal? I think so. So in any case, there's
that I'm not going to spend more time on it
because frankly, I don't care that much. It's not like
I'm going to go partake in those services.

Speaker 2 (28:58):
I just think it should be legal. All right. Let
me do something completely different.

Speaker 1 (29:03):
I was never a huge Kiss fan, but they certainly
were a massive cultural institution, and when I was a kid,
Kiss was one of the biggest bands on the planet,
not just in the United States, and I just wanted
to share a little thing with you from the New
York Times that they published a day or two ago

(29:25):
after the passing of Ace Freely, who was a guitar
player for Kiss. Growing up in the Bronx, Paul Freeley
had a problem. He wanted to be a guitar god
at a time when guitarists were everywhere. When he joined Kiss,
after years of playing with bands that were going nowhere,
he took the name Ace Freely. By this time, he
knew he needed something more than skill to make it big,

(29:48):
and he found himself more than willing to adopt a
gimmick or two, maybe even three or four to achieve
his aim in life. In his days as a half
hearted high school student, he had devoted much time energy
to art classes. His rise to stardom began when he
put his graphic design skills to use in creating the
Kiss logo, making the last two letters lightning bolts. When

(30:11):
his fellow band members decided to wear makeup for their
stage debut as Kiss in January nineteen seventy three, he
was more than happy.

Speaker 2 (30:20):
To go along with it.

Speaker 1 (30:22):
Quote it didn't bother me at all, he said in
an interview for Kiss Behind the Mask, the Authorized History
of the band by David Leaf and Ken Sharp, he said,
I was always into wild things. That first night, I
painted my face silver. The second night, I thought that's boring.
I'll have to think of something more and imaginative, and.

Speaker 2 (30:41):
I started painting stars on my eyes.

Speaker 1 (30:44):
The sharply painted stars helped transform this workaday club musician
into the superhero known as the Spaceman or space Ace.
Mister Freeley, who died on Thursday at the age of
seventy four. This part I did not know all that
other stuff that I basically knew, because everybody knew that
about Kiss If even if you weren't a huge fan.

Speaker 2 (31:06):
This part I did not know.

Speaker 1 (31:07):
Mister Freely, who died on Thursday at the age of
seventy four, saw himself as an alien from the planet
Jendell j E N d e LLL in the Claw
two Solar system k l A a Tu Solar System,
and spoke in jovial interviews of wanting to live far

(31:28):
from Earth. There's a lot more in the article. I
think I've got this up on my blog. If not,
you tell me and I'll put it up there. But
in any case, oh here, let me just one little
bit more, And an early show in Manhattan, mister Freeley
and his bandmates performed at top volume, wonder if that
amplifier went to eleven in front of a four foot
illuminated sign of the Kiss logo he had designed.

Speaker 2 (31:50):
They had yet to master.

Speaker 1 (31:51):
The pyrotechnics that would become a staple of their act,
and the eyebrows of a kid in the front row
were singed, but the audio loved them.

Speaker 2 (32:01):
That's awesome. Kiss had come along at just the right time.

Speaker 1 (32:04):
After the rise of singer songwriters like James Taylor, Joni Mitchell,
and Paul Simon, who presented their nuanced songs in Bear
Bowen's fashion, many music fans.

Speaker 2 (32:14):
Were in the mood for something circus like.

Speaker 1 (32:17):
With their comic book Fun and fire Breathing Tricks, Kiss
made rock simple and fun, as it had been in
the days of Eddie Cochran and gene Vincent. The band's
message can be summed up in the refrain of one
of its best known songs, I Want a rock and roll.

Speaker 2 (32:32):
All night and party every day.

Speaker 1 (32:34):
Critics were not impressed by the way Lester Bangs, who
regularly praised raw rock music in the pages of Cream
CR E E M Magazine and Rolling Stone was a
ghast to find that children preferred Kiss to Aerosmith.

Speaker 2 (32:49):
But as the music writer.

Speaker 1 (32:50):
Sylvie Simmons noted, Kiss had a special appeal. The band
was metal, bubblegum more than scary stud rock, she wrote
in a nineteen nine ninety eight reassessment for Mojo magazine,
and it produced quote punch along anthems with just the
right pauses for fireworks, bombs and solos.

Speaker 2 (33:10):
All right, I definitely will stop there.

Speaker 1 (33:12):
There is more in the article, but I've done enough,
so rest in piece. A's freely definitely a rock legend,
and a guy who made himself into a rock legend
while understanding that as big time guitar players went, he
wasn't necessarily the most talented.

Speaker 2 (33:29):
I definitely.

Speaker 1 (33:30):
I mean, obviously he's infinitely more talented than I am,
because I have none, So I'm not downplaying his talent,
but I'm saying he's a guy who knew that he
was good, but maybe not quite the elite of the elite.
So we needed to come up with something a little more,
not just for him, but for the whole band. And
they did it, and I got to say, as far
as band gimmicks go, I mean, Shannon, you've seen a

(33:53):
lot of music used to work at Red Rocks a lot.

Speaker 2 (33:55):
You ever seen a band that did all that kind
of let's.

Speaker 1 (33:59):
Say stage and gimmicks is a little bit of a
cheapening word because they did they really did something.

Speaker 2 (34:05):
But have you ever seen anyone who did it better?
Not better? But Gwar does a very good job with
their show. Yes, I have heard that. I have heard that.

Speaker 1 (34:14):
Anyway, Ace freely rest in peace, will take a quick break,
We'll be right back on KWA. Just still so much
to do today, and I'm you know, what a what
a crazy week.

Speaker 2 (34:22):
I haven't read your text, and I'm going to go read.

Speaker 1 (34:24):
Your text about about getting gasoline out of my clothes
clothes washer. Dragon's looking at me like, what the heck
are you talking about, because he wasn't wasn't here for
that conversation.

Speaker 5 (34:35):
Well back in the day, Rick Lewis had spilled some
gas on his shoes and he actually threw them outside.
Yeah here, and they were out there for days before
the snow.

Speaker 1 (34:43):
But yeah, but then, but so this is the thing,
I got gasoline on one of these moving blankets and
I tried to wash it in the washing machine two
or three times, and all it did was cause my
washing machine to stink of gasoline. And then and of
course I can't go put the clothes washer outside on
the driveway and just leave it there to out for
a while.

Speaker 2 (35:01):
So I'm just trying to figure out.

Speaker 1 (35:02):
Maybe all I can do is wait, maybe just leave
it open, maybe get a fan blowing into it, and
just try to.

Speaker 5 (35:08):
Got I'm assuming you've already tried a washing machine cleaner.
They have like little pods or a little detergent that
you can put in there and run it through a
hot cycle.

Speaker 1 (35:18):
I've tried everything. I haven't so I've tried detergent. I've
tried vinegar, which was online possible. I've tried baking soda.
I've tried multiple, multiple washes, you know, and I just
I don't know. I don't know what to do. Oh,
I have to ask you a question.

Speaker 2 (35:35):
So were you here?

Speaker 1 (35:37):
Were you working my show on Wednesday when Ben Albright
was in.

Speaker 2 (35:41):
The second half? Yeah, like normal normal, And.

Speaker 1 (35:44):
A listener said, I need to ask you about the
eject button conversation.

Speaker 4 (35:50):
Is that?

Speaker 2 (35:50):
Okay? What was that about?

Speaker 5 (35:53):
I don't recall exactly how it's started. I think it
was just something long that, you know, don't wreck the
ferre the ferrari, okay, kind of conversation. And then that
kind of spilled over into what show television show vehicle
had an ejected button and we were trying to figure
out if it was not right or something. Oh, okay,

(36:13):
did you ever figure it out? Because I don't know
the answer from the text line, I believe they said, yeah,
it was night Writer, So sure, all right, okay, that
wasn't It was probably James Bond, but nobody can for
sure James Bond.

Speaker 2 (36:25):
So all right, Well that wasn't as interesting as I
thought I was gonna be sorry. All right.

Speaker 1 (36:31):
So there was a stupid thing that happened for many years,
and it took a long time for people to figure
it out. And they're figuring it out, and I'm glad
to tell you that they're figuring it out, because it's
just a little bit a little bit less stupid now.
So Dragon, when you were a kid, yeah, how many
other kids did you know who had peanut allergies?

Speaker 2 (36:55):
Very few? I don't I don't know if I knew any.
May maybe one.

Speaker 5 (37:02):
Just probably one in our entire grade. Okay, you know,
because elementary school, and I think that we couldn't bring
anything in because it was that, you know that one kid,
so shit, And.

Speaker 2 (37:14):
I'm gonna do that in a bit.

Speaker 1 (37:17):
What happened over the course of maybe the last ten
years is at some point somebody gave some very silly,
wrong guidance to mothers, which is, don't expose your kids
to allergens, not just peanuts and peanut butter, but eggs

(37:37):
and other things.

Speaker 2 (37:38):
Don't expose fish and shelfy, yeah, all that, all.

Speaker 1 (37:42):
That, anything that people are commonly allergic to. Somehow we
got this this advice.

Speaker 2 (37:51):
To not expose your kids to it.

Speaker 1 (37:53):
And I wanted to share this excellent story with you
from the New York Times. Food allergies and children dropped
sharply in the years.

Speaker 2 (38:03):
Since twenty twenty one.

Speaker 1 (38:04):
I think it was where new guidelines encouraged parents to introduce.

Speaker 2 (38:11):
Infants to peanuts.

Speaker 1 (38:12):
A study has found, now let me just be clear,
as one study, and it's a fairly big study, but
it's only one study, so I will not say it
has been replicated yet, and there have been much smaller
studies in some other places that did not have these
same findings, but in any case, I'm going to share
this with you. A landmark trial in twenty fifteen found

(38:33):
that feeding babies feeding peanuts two babies could cut their
chances of developing a peanut allergy by over eighty percent.
In twenty seventeen, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious
Diseases formally because SINS a little longer ago than I thought,
formally recommended the early introduction approach and issued national guidelines.

(38:56):
The new study, which is published today in the journal Pediatrics,
found that food allergy rates in children under the age
of three fell dramatically after those guidelines were put in place,
dropping to zero point nine three percent, so just under
one percent between twenty seventeen and twenty twenty from almost

(39:20):
one and a half percent between twenty twelve and twenty fifteen.
So that's a thirty six percent drop in all food allergies,
driven largely by a forty three percent drop in peanut allergies.
And with that actually eggs overtook peanuts as the number
one food allergen in young children. Now, the study did

(39:42):
not actually examine what the kids ate, so it is not.

Speaker 2 (39:46):
A direct causal thing.

Speaker 1 (39:48):
Where they looked at, you know, did did kids get
exposed to peanuts or peanut butter very early on in
life and then not have a food allergy by the
time they're seven or ten.

Speaker 2 (40:00):
And all it looked at was how has the.

Speaker 1 (40:03):
Rate of food allergies changed since the government changed their guidance? Right,
And it's much cheaper to do that kind of study anyway, Right,
rather than going to ask thousands or tens of thousands
of mothers, you know, probably more likely mothers, you would
ask this, did you give your kids? Did you expose
your kids to peanuts or peanut butter when they were

(40:24):
very young? So they didn't look at that question. They
just looked at did these rates go down?

Speaker 2 (40:31):
And as the.

Speaker 1 (40:32):
Article says, the data is promising. While food allergies all
food allergies can be dangerous.

Speaker 2 (40:38):
Eighty percent of people who have a food.

Speaker 1 (40:40):
Allergy don't outgrow it, which is very interesting. Now, scientists
don't fully understand what causes food allergies. Some believe that
an increased rate of C section deliveries and early childhood
exposure to antibiotics, and our increasingly sanitized environment may player role,

(41:00):
but may Scientists also have another working picture of how
allergies might develop. And this is really interesting. As a nerd,
I'm telling you this is really interesting. Allergens first encountered
through the skin like a cut or a rash or
something like that can prompt the immune.

Speaker 2 (41:20):
System to mistake them.

Speaker 1 (41:21):
For threats, according to a pediatric allergist at Children's Hospital
of Philadelphia who.

Speaker 2 (41:26):
Led the new study. So, in other word, but when food.

Speaker 1 (41:30):
Allergens are introduced through the gut instead, it can build tolerance.
So what they're suggesting is that if a kid is
let's say, never exposed to peanuts or peanut butter as
a very young child, but then has a cut or
a rash, because because food can penetrate the skin through
a rash through inflammation in the skin and gets exposed
to it that way, the body might see that as

(41:52):
an outside threat coming through a cut in the skin.
Whereas if it's something you ate and not build tolerance for,
but just try to attack it and that ends up
attacking you. But if you eat it as a very
young kid, then the body, this is one theory. In
any case, the body will look at that as a
different thing and build up tolerance for it for the

(42:13):
past decade, studies have shown that introducing allergenic foods in infancy,
as the immune system is developing, can help the body
recognize food proteins as harmless.

Speaker 2 (42:24):
So there you go. This is not definitive, but it
looks sure looks like.

Speaker 1 (42:28):
A step in the right direction. With for many, many
years women. I'm not blaming the moms for this, by
the way, I'm blaming the medical establishment who told the moms,
don't let your kids.

Speaker 2 (42:38):
Be exposed to peanuts.

Speaker 1 (42:39):
And that's why you have all this insanity of you know,
school lunches with warnings saying you know, this was prepared.

Speaker 2 (42:48):
In a facility that sometimes has peanuts.

Speaker 1 (42:50):
Think about the idiocy of all that that we have
had to deal with for years because of bad guidance
from the medical community. And now, by the way, you've
got you've got RFK saying he thinks he thinks vaccines
are causing peanut allergies. The guy's an idiot in any case.
In any case, there's a little bit of good news.
I realize anybody who's got a peanut allergy now because

(43:10):
their mom did what doctors told him to do, you're
probably stuck with it for the rest of your life,
but hopefully going forward we'll do things that are a
little better for our kids. I shouldn't even had to
look at you. I just thought you were trolling me
because I don't like that show. But yeah, that's pretty funny.

Speaker 2 (43:25):
Thank you. That's pretty funny.

Speaker 1 (43:27):
And you know what, just sticking with the with the
world of medicine and RFK Junior and nonsense. Right, So,
RFT we were talking about peanut allergies in the last
segment and RFK Junior has said that his theory is
that is that vaccines cause peanut allergies. Remember that RFK
Junior is a liar and a grifter and doesn't care
about science. So the other thing that he has done

(43:50):
now and there may be a little bit of science here,
I'm not inclined to trust anything that comes out of
Rfk's mouth when it comes to this stuff because he's
really just a you know, like trial lawyer's best friends
and a massive grifter when it comes to.

Speaker 2 (44:05):
This healthcare stuff.

Speaker 1 (44:06):
But there may be a suggestion that the use of
tail and all during pregnancy by pregnant women, and this
would be not like taking it once or twice, right,
but the use of a lot of tail and all
throughout a pregnancy there is.

Speaker 2 (44:22):
A suggestion that it might it might.

Speaker 1 (44:28):
Have some relationship to autism then in the eventual baby.
And please do keep in mind that these things are
are there's no there's no proof of causation here. There's
maybe there may be correlation and there may not be right.
This is all very very tenuous stuff. But in any case,

(44:51):
the FDA, which falls under HHS, which RFK is in
charge of, that's a lot of initials in one sentence,
have said that they a aim to change the label
on thailand All to warn that it may cause autism.
And I'm not going to go too far into this
right now, but the company that owns thailand All called

(45:12):
Kenview k E n v U E is fighting back
pretty hard and basically saying that the the evidence of
actually that I think they're the ones who own who
owns thailand All specifically, but they certainly sell a lot
of a set of menef and whether it's under the
Tileanhol brand or another brand, and they're basically saying there's

(45:32):
no science to this, and that warning women not to
take tilan all during pregnancy poses its own risks because
high fevers can definitely harmed a fetus in utero.

Speaker 2 (45:48):
And they have put out and this is up on
the blog if you want to go check it out.

Speaker 1 (45:52):
But they have they have written a letter to the
US FDA saying that this would be improper to change
change the label on tail and all, and they talk
about an interesting concept called over warning and what their
what their argument is.

Speaker 2 (46:09):
One of their arguments is that.

Speaker 1 (46:13):
Warning people against a medication when that medication actually can
benefit them sometimes is a thing that you should be
very careful about doing.

Speaker 2 (46:25):
And they also say that.

Speaker 1 (46:28):
And I'll quote, the proposed labeling changes are not supported
by scientific evidence and would represent an unexplained departure from
FDA's long standing position regarding the use of a set
of innefit during pregnancy and the current the current warning
is basically, if you're pregnant, don't take this without talking
to your doctor, which seems fine to me, right, It

(46:50):
seems fine to me.

Speaker 2 (46:51):
After all.

Speaker 1 (46:52):
The little little little bit of evidence there is that
might connect tail and all use during pregnancy to autism
in the child involves, as I said, the use of
a lot of tailand all repeatedly throughout a pregnancy or
every day for a long time throughout a pregnancy and not.

Speaker 2 (47:10):
For example, a woman gets.

Speaker 1 (47:12):
A let's say, a virus, has a high fever and
wants to protect the baby from the harm that a
high fever can cause, so takes tyland all for a
day or two. That's not what it's about in any case.
It's I realize that's nerdy, but I think it's interesting.
I think it's important. All right, I'll tell you what
I need to hit a break here, because when we
come back, if all goes according to plan, we are

(47:33):
going to talk with the author of one of the
most interesting business books.

Speaker 2 (47:36):
I have read in my entire life. Keep it here
on Kowa.

Speaker 1 (47:40):
Just back from a week off and just try and
remember what I'm supposed to do here for a living.

Speaker 2 (47:45):
I am. I am so pleased because.

Speaker 1 (47:49):
I've been working on this for a long time to
welcome to the show. Patrick McGee, who is a very
interesting journalist San Francisco based correspond for the Financial Times,
which is kind of like England's Wall Street Journal. And
he wrote a book called Apple in China that maybe

(48:12):
the best business book I've ever read, really remarkable, and
I've been working Patrick has been much in demand because
of the book and because of his daily job, but
he found some time for us today and I'm very grateful.

Speaker 2 (48:27):
Patrick McGee, Welcome to Kowa Frost.

Speaker 3 (48:30):
Love that introduction. Glad you enjoyed the book.

Speaker 1 (48:33):
Yeah, And I find I interview a lot of authors,
and I find, because I hear it from authors, that
most radio hosts don't read the book or don't read
much of it.

Speaker 2 (48:43):
I make it my job to almost.

Speaker 1 (48:45):
Without exception, to read the whole book, and I did
read yours. And my background, just so you know, Patrick,
my background is investing and finance, and I used to
be a trader on the options exchange in Chicago, so
you know, I'm very much a business guy already.

Speaker 2 (49:00):
So anyway, I thoroughly enjoyed the book.

Speaker 1 (49:03):
So I think I want to start with a very
macro kind of thing and then you can take it
wherever you want to go with it. A lot of
people think that, and not entirely wrongly, that Apple used
some things that China offered in terms.

Speaker 2 (49:21):
Of scale and costs and so on.

Speaker 1 (49:25):
Apple used China to make Apple hugely successful. And you
argue that, while that's certainly true, that it runs just
as much in the other direction. As well, that China
used Apple, and I thought it was a fascinating thesis.
So why don't you go wherever you want to go
with that?

Speaker 3 (49:45):
Yeah, so you're right that that's absolutely true. The first
part that, of course, you know, China is the only
place in the world that offered the right combination of cost,
quantity and quality to meet Apple's demand. The thing that
people don't get and I didn't get, and I was
an Apple reporter for four years, and so I sort
of stumbled into this narrative is that there's a massive

(50:08):
story of technology transfer here because essentially what happens is
in order for Apple to build at the enormous scale
that it builds that and you've got to remember, you know,
they go from five million iPhones in two thousand and
seven to two hundred and thirty million iPhones in twenty fifteen.
That just to do that, there are hundreds of suppliers,

(50:28):
and everybody is incentivized to locate in China when you're
working with those kinds of volumes. So even if many
of the suppliers let's say making memory are Korean, our Taiwanese,
our Japanese, all of them are sort of moving over
to China during that year of sorry, those multiple years
of exponential growth for the iPhone, And there's just like
technology transfer embedded in that. Right, you have employees at

(50:51):
each of those places that have to work on the iPhone,
and then they get coached by other places, right, they
go other places or just the suppliers themselves that are
directly feeding Apple. You know, they're only making the iPhone
for a certain number of weeks per year at peak capacity.
But of course, once they've invested in the machinery, and
indeed Apple would often purchase the machinery for them, they

(51:11):
still need to keep the lines running. So in a sense,
like what do they do? Well, they do the most
obvious thing. If Apple's been teaching them how to sort
of shape corning gorilla glass, how to etch it with
little invisible circuits so that multi touch works and so
on and so forth, well then you're going to go
to Apo, Vivo, Shaomi, Huawei and do the same thing
for them. So I argue essentially that there's a massive

(51:32):
technology transfer story that hasn't really been told, and that
Apple really built up its supply chain for its own need,
but then China used it for its own purposes, right,
so the exploitation goes both ways.

Speaker 1 (51:44):
I'm going to go in in probably no particular order here,
but who is Uncle Terry.

Speaker 3 (51:51):
Uncle Terry is the name that Apple gave to Terry Guo,
the founder of Fox Cohn. Interestingly, Fox con is Taiwanese,
not Chinese, and that's really interesting just because the formation
of modern Taiwan is really the losers of the nineteen
forties Civil War on mainland China fleeing to this little
adjacent province and setting up their own government, laying claim

(52:11):
for several decades to the entire mainland. And it's great
for a narrative because you didn't want a book that
was just about engineering, and then two thirds of the
way through, all of a sudden, we're in a geopolitical story.
And so really we're in a geopolitical story from the
get go, because when Steve Jobs comes back to Apple
in nineteen ninety seven, they struggle to build that candy
colored iMac that lots of listeners will remember because it's

(52:34):
sort of just like with the first computer, really really
to be designed not to sort of sit in a
corner basement, right, but maybe be adjacent to the kitchen
I mean it was beautiful, and it was actually made
in Korea by LG, a company that most people are
probably familiar with, and at first it's a massive success.
But then when Apple wants to expand production, LG essentially
fails in building it in Wales and in Mexico. And

(52:56):
Terry Guo had some relationship with Apple at the time,
but he sort of bets his company on pleasing Apple.
He calls up some guy by the name of Tim Cook,
who is today the CEO, and they form this relationship together.
And so I I'll tell you one of the best
lines of the book, and I can say that because
my wife wrote it, is that Johnny I've and Steve
Jobs made Apple products unique, but it was Kerry Glow

(53:19):
and Tim Cook that would ensure they were ubiquitous.

Speaker 2 (53:23):
Who owns who? Now?

Speaker 3 (53:26):
I don't know that Apple has a lot of leverage.
I mean my narrative is very much one of the
student has become the master. Anyone familiar with the phones
being made out of China today will know that they've
moved well beyond cheap imitations. In fact, I think the
best phone in the world right now is called the
Huawei Mate XTS. And if people want to google it,
what they'll find is that in Apple terms, it is

(53:47):
an iPhone and an iPad in one. In other words,
it unfolds twice to become an ultra thin iPad like tablet,
and when it's unfolded, it's actually thinner than the iPad pro,
which Apple has built at as it's thinness product. Ever,
and it costs twenty six hundred dollars. Sometimes critics have
derided it for costing so much, and they're sort of
missing the point. This is the Porsche of smartphones, and

(54:09):
it's made by a Chinese company, not an American one.

Speaker 2 (54:12):
Is it possible for an American to buy that in
the US?

Speaker 3 (54:18):
Yeah, there's no store that would sell it here. I mean,
I've played with it because people have bought it overseas
and then shown it to me here. Frankly, I do
so many speaking gigs that I should probably sell out
the twenty six hundred dollars just so that.

Speaker 2 (54:28):
I have it on hand so people can use it.

Speaker 3 (54:30):
I mean, in a sense, the key thing is just
not that it's a miracle in the sense of manufacturing
it is, but also of industrial design and product design.
In other words, the whole sort of scope of the
special sauce of what Apple has contributed to design and
manufacturing over the last twenty five years is now really
fully owned by the other side. So I kind of
call Apple and China the marriage of skill and scale,

(54:53):
and China, of course has both the skill and the scale.
We don't have the scale. I don't know that we
ever did, and our we're losing the skill as well, right.

Speaker 1 (55:02):
Yeah, for sure. We're talking with Patrick McGee. His remarkable
book is called Apple in China. Without veering too far
away from Apple and the direct thesis of your book,
but it seems that you argue that China learned an
immense amount from Apple that they needed to become an
electronic powerhouse in their own right and get out of

(55:25):
making quote unquote cheap Chinese junk. And there still is
plenty of cheap Chinese junk, but a lot of people
don't know just how high the quality is of a
lot of Chinese stuff these days. And I wonder, and
again slightly but only slightly off topic from your book,
do you think the same thing is going on with
electric cars and Tesla? And did they steal whatever they

(55:47):
needed from a steel might not be the right word
because these companies sort of did it voluntarily. So are
we creating the competition that's.

Speaker 2 (55:55):
Going to kill us?

Speaker 3 (55:59):
In short? Yes, I mean I'm pretty optimistic as a person.
I'm kind of a happy, go lucky goals golden retriever.
I've written quite a pessimistic book, and that's just based
on the conversations and the evidence I'm confronted with. Honestly,
I'm constantly hoping that someone shakes me out of my
pessimism by, let's say, showing me a factory in America
based on artificial general intelligence or something right, or like

(56:22):
just just the idea that we're going to get there,
but were were years away from that. So yeah, I mean,
there's actually a section on Tesla in my books, and
essentially the story of Tesla in China is that Elon
Musk is considering around twenty eighteen building a giga factory
in Shanghai, wants to do it in twenty four months,
and the mayor of Shanghai says, let's do it in
twelve months. And Musk's sort of taken them back and

(56:44):
he says, look, we'll give you the free land, We'll
give you the subsidized machinery, let's make this happen. And
basically what was going on was that Tim Cook had
been in China just the previous year or so and
had explained the massive technology transfer that was taking place
at the pest of Apple giving rise to China's like
global competitors in the smartphone scene. And by the way,

(57:04):
some listeners, probably most listeners maybe aren't familiar with most
Chinese smartphones because for a variety of reasons, they're not
really sold here, but they have more than fifty percent
global market share. And so it had worked out really
really well for China, or for China's industrial prowess, to
have so much of Apple's operations in the country. And
so Tesla is basically told, look, we want you to

(57:26):
do for electric vehicles what Apple has done for the smartphone.
And so Tesla actually hires a bunch of Apple people
with experience in China to set the plan into motion,
and within just a few years of Tesla localizing its
supply chain, meaning that they would bring in some of
the best people and train up all the suppliers that
are going to work with Tesla for making their cars there.

(57:49):
Of course, you know, even before Trump's two point out
Joe Biden puts one hundred percent terriffs on the evs
coming out of China. So I think Tesla's influence has
been enormous. But really, what they've done is taken the
playbook about and applied it to a new sector.

Speaker 1 (58:02):
All right, Let's go with a wild hypothetical and imagine
that somehow the United States of America elects a president
who is not a big fan of international trade and
thinks that China is treating us unfairly. I don't know
that something like that would ever happen, but let's just
imagine it. And let's imagine that such a president tries
to put an immense amount of pressure on American companies

(58:24):
to not manufacture in China and to manufacture in the US,
but at least to not manufacture where, you know, in
a country that he considers to be something between a
competitor and an enemy. So at that point, Patrick, I'm
going to put you in the position of being a
strategic advisor to Tim Cook. What do you say to
Tim Cook if you believe that there is something close

(58:47):
to an existential threat to Apple if they keep making
so much product in China?

Speaker 3 (58:55):
Well, it would be something like this. So Tim, you
know better than me that our operations are almost exclusively
in China. We might rely on a global supply chain,
but essentially all roads lead through China, and it would
be way too complex, expensive and frankly fanciful to move
those operations anywhere else. So thankfully we have the last

(59:16):
ten years of dealing with Shijinping. We understand how to
respond to a dictocatic regime, and we're now going to
apply our China playbook to Washington.

Speaker 2 (59:28):
Wow. Wow, that's a remarkable answer. So the answer, the
answer is, of course, you know, the answer.

Speaker 1 (59:37):
Is that what what Trump in this case would want
Apple to do is not something that Apple could do
even if it wanted to.

Speaker 3 (59:48):
It really couldn't. And so what's Apple actually doing. They're
making pledges of enormous investments in America and India. Financial
analysts that I'm familiar with knows how any of the
math is done. So just must have been about two
months ago that Apple pledged to spend one hundred billion
dollars on American manufacturing. And this is actually on top

(01:00:08):
of a five hundred billion dollar pledge in February. So
most of these things happened since my book was written.
But there's basically a nonsense. I mean, what they're counting
as investments are really just part of overall spend. And
I believe, and this is a speculation on my part,
I need to sort of disclose that, but I don't

(01:00:30):
know where else and how else the mass adds up.

Speaker 2 (01:00:33):
I believe they're.

Speaker 3 (01:00:34):
Counting their scareholder buyback and dividend program alone is more
than one hundred billion dollars a year. So you multiply
that by four, you're already accounting for more than four
hundred billion dollars of the six hundred billion. And of
course the main thing, of course, is that that is
not restoring, That is not us manufacturing. That's just the
financial game that Apple's been playing since twenty thirteen.

Speaker 2 (01:00:54):
So what I imagine is.

Speaker 1 (01:00:58):
I imagine Tim Cook and as finance people opening up
a chat GPT app and saying, hey, chat GPT, please
generate a random number for me between one hundred billion
and a trillion, and then we'll tell Trump that's how
much we're gonna spend. That's what I think they're doing.
And I think after they put out the press release

(01:01:19):
and then Trump buys it and says, look at these
huge numbers. Because Trump is most impressed.

Speaker 2 (01:01:23):
With huge numbers.

Speaker 1 (01:01:25):
I think they sit around in their executive conference room
with a few shotglasses and toast each other and chuckle
at how they got away with it.

Speaker 2 (01:01:35):
Again.

Speaker 3 (01:01:36):
Yeah, honestly, I mean pretty much. And the other thing,
of course, is that if you take that number to
be remotely serious, just consider that no products that you've
ever purchased from Apple over the last twenty years say
made in America on the back. All of them say China.
So if you think they're investing tens or hundreds of
billions of dollars a year in America, how much do
you think they're investing in China?

Speaker 1 (01:01:57):
What about all this chatter about moving supply chains to India.

Speaker 3 (01:02:02):
So I'm personally very much in favor of this, And
it's very true that loads of people will be able
to purchase the phone next year and it will stay
on the box made in India. But there's a bit
of sleight of hand here. Terraflaw isn't really all that
demanding if you have a phone and takes a thousand
steps to make it, But the sub assembled phone essentially

(01:02:23):
goes to India, and the final step is just assembling
it together and then putting it in a box. That
is enough in terms of terraflaw. That's a substantive change
to the product to say made in India, but that
phone will not be any less dependent on the China
centric supply chain than any iPhone you've ever had. So
that's kind of step one of what Apple's doing. I
do believe there's steps two, three, and four, in which case,

(01:02:46):
over many years, they're hoping to replicate the depth and
breadth of the entire supply chain that exists in China
and put it outside. And I'm wildly in favor of that.

Speaker 1 (01:02:55):
Yeah, and it's not impossible. It's difficulty, but that's an
enormous population. They speak English mostly, they have lots of
really really big tech brains over there. Cost of labor
is pretty low. I mean, they're more likely to be
able to get this done in India than here.

Speaker 3 (01:03:14):
Oh absolutely, Look, I mean that's why I'm more bullish
on India than I am on America. Let's say, you know,
iPhone factories in Pittsburgh. This isn't going to happen that
they said. I think there's three reasons why we have
to be you know, circumspect. Let's say so for starters.
The more successful Apple is in expanding to India, the
more Beijing can tighten the screws in the sense that

(01:03:35):
factories in the Apple supply chain might just lose electricity
the random Onnesday that Apple puts out a press release
hawking its latest advantages in India. That's sort of how
Chinese politics works. It's not that there's an explicit order.
It's that something happens and you're you, as an engineer
in that area, have to go, huh, I wonder if
this is because of that right when it sort of

(01:03:56):
puts you in a position of pause. The second reason
is that the Chinese rightfully consider the iPhone to be
an indigenous product. I mean, of course, the iPhone's been
built in China since two thousand and seven, and they're
proud of it as an indigenous product. You can be
a nationalist and still own an iPhone. The more that
Apple is becoming the poster child for diversifying or de
risking from China, the worse it is for their seventy

(01:04:19):
billion dollar business in the country. The final reason is
that as much as Apple, and readers or listeners might
not know this, but the thesis of the book to
some extent, is really basing it on the fact that
Apple didn't just build a supply chain or didn't find
a supply chain capable of supplying its components for the iPhone.
It went over there and built it. And so the

(01:04:39):
number of people Apple trained over the last seventeen years
is thirty million people three zero million, Larger than the
labor force of California, larger than the labor force of Canada.
I mean, just an enormous level of training. And I
don't even really think this is outsourcing. And my point
is that Apple has this sort of hubristic belief that
they can copy and paste model and do it in India,

(01:05:02):
and to a certain extent that's possible. The trouble is
India isn't quite knocking out of the park. Building the
eight lane highways, building the high speed rail, building the
world beating ports, I mean, competing against China and all
of those things is just really, really tough. So you said,
is it impossible. It's not impossible in the sense of
I'm not pointing to physics or anything, but I don't

(01:05:22):
know that India can get it back together. It's got
a pretty fragmented government and a lot of work ahead
of it, right, I agree.

Speaker 1 (01:05:27):
And as communist as the Chinese government is, when they
want to do something through industrial policy, something fundamentally capitalist,
Xhijin Ping or his couple of top henchmen say the
word and the lower level government officials make it happen,
whereas India doesn't work that way, and India is all
about how can we slow people down, how can we

(01:05:49):
get bribes out of the process. It's just that India
has an immense amount of political reform to do before
they could before they could get there. Patrick McGee's new
book is called Apple in China, The Capture of the
World's Greatest Company. It's it's the best business book I've
ever read. I could talk to you all day, but
that's all we got time for Patrick, And I know
you're busy anyway, but thank you so much for making

(01:06:11):
time for me. And thanks for this incredible and incredibly
well researched book.

Speaker 3 (01:06:16):
Thank you so much. Ross really appreciate it.

Speaker 2 (01:06:18):
All right, So, folks, Apple in China is the book.

Speaker 1 (01:06:22):
Even if you're not a huge you know, business The
story here. We talked in that interview mostly about things
right now, but there's so much history in this book
of how Steve Jobs and Apple and so on got
to be where they got, you know, dealing with China
and just with the company overall. It is an incredible,
truly incredible story. That's why I spent so long talking

(01:06:43):
to him. Normally I don't go that long in interviews,
but this book is worth it.

Speaker 2 (01:06:47):
Apple in China. We'll be right back.

Speaker 1 (01:06:48):
Got our news partners at katiev R Fox thirty one.

Speaker 2 (01:06:51):
I've got that on.

Speaker 1 (01:06:52):
And there's a there's a young lady standing out somewhere
in the in the high Country, standing in a snowstorm.
So I did see some warning about possibly some weather
coming our way. We'll see, But gosh, doesn't it feel
like it was just ninety degrees like a couple of
weeks ago.

Speaker 2 (01:07:09):
Is that a weird almost eighty yesterday?

Speaker 1 (01:07:11):
Well, yeah, yeah, I think the high was seventy nine
yesterday and now we might get snow anyway. You live
in Colorado, well most of you live in Colorado, so
you know, I don't need to explain this to you.

Speaker 2 (01:07:23):
I'm kind of curious.

Speaker 1 (01:07:25):
I realized that this that my audience is not really
the target audience for the question I'm going to ask next,
But I'm going to ask anyway, did any of you
go to any of the No King's protests over the weekend.

Speaker 2 (01:07:39):
They are, you know, very big in Denver.

Speaker 1 (01:07:41):
I don't know the numbers, but they were very big,
and there were in lots of places, not just Denver.
There are lots of towns and cities in Colorado had
these No Kings protests over over the weekend.

Speaker 2 (01:07:50):
I just I want to talk about a little bit.

Speaker 1 (01:07:52):
But I'm also very very curious to hear from anybody
who went what your experience was like. So if you
could text MEIX six nine zero and let me know,
I would certainly appreciate that. I would like to know
what that was like for you. There was a piece
over at the Denver Gazette. Here's the headline. Union workers

(01:08:13):
and military brats among tens of thousands at downtown Denver
No King's protest on Saturday.

Speaker 2 (01:08:21):
A little more from the Denver Gazette.

Speaker 1 (01:08:23):
At eleven am Saturday morning, Denver's Capitol Hill was beginning
to fill with people. Just an hour later, neither the
grass nor the pavement of Lincoln Street in front of
it were visible through the crowd. As October gusts lifted
swirls of yellow leaves into the air. Tens of thousands
of people descended upon downtown Denver to take part in
the second No King's Protest, holding signs and yelling chants

(01:08:43):
criticizing the actions of the Trump administration. The protest was
one of fifty No Kings demonstrations scheduled across Colorado and
one of many hundreds taking place across the country on Saturday.
It wouldn't surprise me, actually, if there was a more
than a thousand or two thousand second one in Denver
this year. I think this one was bigger.

Speaker 2 (01:09:05):
I didn't go. I don't have much interest, but I.

Speaker 1 (01:09:08):
Do want to talk about it a little bit because
I think there's some interesting things to say. I'm not
going to spend a long time on it, just a
few minutes here so. And I also note that Donald
Trump was asked about it, and he came out and said,
you know, I'm not a king. I'm just trying to
do things right for this country. But then then he
put out this AI generated video that's up on my website.

(01:09:29):
If you want to see yourself. It was kind of stupid,
kind of kind of juvenile. But it's you know, Trump
and Trump's people trolling everyone all the time, and it's
Donald Trump as a fighter or bomber pilot wearing a
crown and set to the top gun music, danger zone
music that Dragon played like a week and a half

(01:09:51):
ago when we were talking about something and essentially dive
bombing the protesters and what basically looks like either a
combination of huge pieces of Pooh and just thousands of
gallons of let's say, liquid pooh, and then the AI

(01:10:14):
you know, the AI generated part, well, all of that's
kind of air. And then they show, you know, people
like wiping this brown sludge off of their off of
their heads.

Speaker 2 (01:10:22):
And a few listeners.

Speaker 1 (01:10:24):
Actually have texted me, texted and asked what I think.

Speaker 2 (01:10:26):
Of that video. I think.

Speaker 1 (01:10:31):
I think it's stupid. I think it's juvenile. I think
it's typical Trump. I think his base likes it. I
think everybody who likes Trump likes it. Everybody who doesn't
like Trump doesn't like it. There aren't that many people
who are kind of ambivalent about Trump, although I'm one
of them. And and I guess what I would say,
if you, if you really want to push me on it,

(01:10:51):
what do I not like about it? I don't like
the idea of a president of the United States.

Speaker 2 (01:10:59):
How should I say to if I.

Speaker 1 (01:11:00):
Can use a pun here dumping on people for civil protests.
The protests were not violent, and they were out there.
You know, they don't like Trump, but they're allowed to
not like Trump.

Speaker 2 (01:11:15):
They weren't hurting anybody.

Speaker 1 (01:11:17):
And I don't think it's great when we've got important
politicians who are just metaphorically, you know, bashing Americans for
engaging in in free speech and talking about their government.
So I didn't like that, But it's also not the
most important thing. It's just more Trump, you know whatever.
Now here's the thing I want to talk about, though,

(01:11:40):
just briefly, there's some percentage of America, and we might
loosely call them maga who believe that Trump is close
to infallible and they will at least by default, support
everything he does, and maybe on very rare occasion they

(01:12:01):
will disagree with him about something, but it's rare. And
so these are folks who, for all practical purposes, think
that Trump never does anything wrong.

Speaker 2 (01:12:10):
And then on the other side and many.

Speaker 1 (01:12:13):
I'm not gonna say all, but many of the No
Kings protesters are all the way in the other direction,
which is to say, they believe that Trump can't do
anything right. A lot of these are people who were
calling for ceasepire now in Israel and Gaza and so on.
But once there is a ceasefire, since it was Donald

(01:12:34):
Trump who got it done, they're not happy about it.
They don't even talk about it. They don't even acknowledge
that it happened. And I think both of those.

Speaker 2 (01:12:45):
Extremes are suffering from unclear thinking.

Speaker 1 (01:12:51):
And I also you know, if you put those two
extremes together, they might represent a majority of the country. Right,
Maybe it's maybe it's twenty eight percent on each side.

Speaker 2 (01:13:03):
Right, twenty eight percent.

Speaker 1 (01:13:04):
On one side thinks Trump can't do anything wrong, and twenty
eight percent on the other side thinks Trump can't do
anything right.

Speaker 2 (01:13:09):
So you've got a majority of the country.

Speaker 1 (01:13:10):
There who are kind of brain damaged by Trump derangement syndrome.

Speaker 2 (01:13:14):
In both directions.

Speaker 1 (01:13:15):
We usually talk about Trump arrangement syndrome is people who
hate him so much that they can't think clearly. But
there's also people who love him so much that they
can't think clearly. I think the plurality of Americans are
those of us. Well, look, I'm sitting here behind a microphone,
but I think the plurality of Americans are not behind
a microphone, and they're sort of keeping their opinions to
themselves because they don't want to be be rated by

(01:13:38):
the kind of crazy people on both of those other
two sides that I mentioned.

Speaker 2 (01:13:42):
And they think that.

Speaker 1 (01:13:44):
Trump does some things right and something's wrong, and you
know what's insane. That's true because Trump is a person,
and Trump does some things right and something's wrong. Like
every politician, even the greatest Ronald Reagan did some things
wrong right and Jimmy Carter did some thing's right.

Speaker 2 (01:14:01):
It happens. It happens now.

Speaker 1 (01:14:04):
I will say, when it comes to the no Kings thing,
that first, I think it's a pretty effective metaphor.

Speaker 2 (01:14:10):
I like the concept.

Speaker 1 (01:14:11):
If I were a Trump opponent, Like I said, I'm
pretty neutral on him, But if I were a Trump opponent,
I think no Kings is not a bad name for
a movement. That said, I think it's overwrought. I don't
think he's I don't think he's a king. I don't
think he's fully acting like a king. But I also
think from time to time he does things that gives
people legitimate reason to say he is overstepping his authority.

(01:14:35):
Stuff that he's doing with the National Guard, for example,
I think is overstepping his authority. I think that the
most of his tariffs I think are illegal. That said,
there are a lot of other things that Trump is
doing that many people on the left think of as
being dictatorial or kingly, even though they are clearly within
the law, but just haven't been done before. And that's

(01:14:59):
the area where all of us need to think clearly
and we need to get I realized this is so
much easier said than done, especially for some folks, Like
I said, some folks who love him so much they
can't think clearly.

Speaker 2 (01:15:10):
Who hate him so much, they can't think clearly.

Speaker 1 (01:15:12):
But we just really need to stay focused on the policies.
And that's why coming back to the video of the
fighter dumping poop on people, I think it's a distraction,
and I think this is not a time where we
should let ourselves be caught up in distractions. But I
got it. Thank you for that dragon Gosh. I sure
blew up that break didn't. I how did it get

(01:15:33):
to be this time already? Oh my gosh, can I Yeah?
I just I need to talk briefly about the Broncos game.
We are the Broncos station, after all, and I haven't
really talked about the game since I had Rick Lewis
in studio with me to start the show.

Speaker 5 (01:15:48):
And it's okay, you can take credit for the win.
It's fine. I'm you do that a lot more.

Speaker 2 (01:15:51):
Than I do. Okay. So here's the thing.

Speaker 1 (01:15:53):
Dragon believes that the Broncos win, and the Broncos only
win when I listen to you have owned The Broncos
have only won this year when I have listened to
at least some of the game, listening to Rick and Dave,
either by standing on the sidelines of the game or
by just listening.

Speaker 2 (01:16:12):
To usually on the iHeartRadio app.

Speaker 1 (01:16:15):
And I wasn't doing that yesterday and Dragon texted me
and said, are you listening? And I said no, I'm busy,
And he said they need you, and I said, I said, look,
these guys are professionals. They are going to have to
learn how to do this without me. And but but
then what happened. I started listening huh.

Speaker 5 (01:16:33):
And then then what was the result of the game?
We please do tell me.

Speaker 1 (01:16:37):
It was the most incredible fourth quarter comeback I've ever
seen in any in any game. It was the most
insane quarter of football I've probably ever seen.

Speaker 2 (01:16:46):
You can take credit for it, that's fine, and I'm
not going to do that. I'm not I'm not going
to take credit for it. I'll tell you what.

Speaker 1 (01:16:52):
I'm a little nervous though, Dragon. I believe that I'm
working the game this Sunday, the Cowboys game. I think
that it's an easy win. That's not gonna be an
easy win. That's the I think that's the number one
offense in the NFL right now.

Speaker 2 (01:17:07):
And you're on the side, Lamb and sin Javonte Williams.
Doesn't he play for them? Now?

Speaker 1 (01:17:11):
Come from the Broncos. I think he plays for them.
And Dak Prescott is playing great. Anyway, let me just
tell you a few things about that. And probably most
of you have heard these stats already, but some there
they're pretty crazy. Okay, So the Broncos were down nineteen
to nothing at the beginning of the fourth quarter. They
scored all thirty three of their points in the fourth quarter,
which is the most points that the Broncos have ever

(01:17:32):
scored in the fourth quarter of a game. And it's
also the most points and that is a little bit
in the weeds here. It's the most points that any
team in the NFL has ever scored in the fourth
quarter after being shut out for the first three quarters. Okay,
so there's that NFL teams had won one six hundred
and two consecutive games when leading by eighteen points or

(01:17:55):
more in the fourth quarter. Okay, one six hundred and
two consecutive game when leading by eighteen points or more
with with six minutes or less to go in the
fourth quarter. I want to make that. Get that right,
with six minutes or less to go in the fourth quarter.
So that's that's pretty incredible. What else, That nineteen point

(01:18:16):
comeback as they were down nineteen to nothing at the
beginning of the quarter tied the Broncos record for the
biggest comeback, biggest fourth quarter comeback, I think, and the
previous one was against the Colts or Baltimore Colts at
the time in nineteen eighty three.

Speaker 2 (01:18:37):
And then here's a really kind of crazy thing.

Speaker 1 (01:18:40):
I saw this on Twitter or now it's called x
and it's a post from Next Gen Stats, right, and
they one of the things they track during the game
is the probability of a team winning the game. And
with you know, six minutes or so left in the game,

(01:19:00):
with the with let's see the the Giants were up
twenty six to eight and the Broncos had the ball,
but they had fourth and three, so it's fourth down
for the Broncos and they were down eighteen points.

Speaker 2 (01:19:17):
Next Gen Stats had.

Speaker 1 (01:19:18):
The Broncos chance of winning the game at zero point
seven percent. And I think it was ESPN that does
something similar to this. They had a zero point two
percent to be one out of five hundred chants of
winning and they ended up winning again. Now here, this
is this is one of the this is what really

(01:19:40):
stood out for me though. In the Next Gen Stats post,
they said it's the most improbable comeback of the season
and the eighth most improbable comeback of the Next Gen
Stats era, which started in twenty sixteen, so a little
about a decade ago. So isn't that something that there
have been seven comebacks in the NFL?

Speaker 2 (01:20:00):
And I realized we're talking about nine.

Speaker 1 (01:20:02):
Or ten seasons, but there have been seven comebacks in
the NFL that were more improbable than what happened yesterday.

Speaker 2 (01:20:10):
Gosh, sports is fun sometimes.

Speaker 1 (01:20:12):
What this relates to is the fact that Dragon now
deeply believes that the Broncos, because it's true, only win
when I am listening to Rich Correlation Dave Logan, whether
it is listening on the iHeart app or or on
the car radio, or when I'm working the sidelines of
a Broncos game, because when I'm holding that parabolic mike,
I'm wearing headphones and I can hear them in the booths,

(01:20:33):
so it's like I'm listening that way as well.

Speaker 2 (01:20:36):
And so Dragon, your question for listeners is what what.

Speaker 5 (01:20:39):
Is your Broncos superstition? And or how did you help
the Broncos win yesterday?

Speaker 2 (01:20:45):
I didn't tell you this part of the story before.

Speaker 1 (01:20:47):
So listeners please answer answer Dragon's question five six six
nine zero.

Speaker 2 (01:20:51):
What is your Broncos superstition? What do you do to
help them win?

Speaker 3 (01:20:54):
Now?

Speaker 1 (01:20:54):
Let me just tell you tell you this Dragon, I
don't think I shared this part of the story with you.
Yesterday I started watching the game sitting on my couch.
It was going badly. I wasn't listening just and I
mean I wasn't listening to Rick and Day right, and

(01:21:14):
it was going badly, and the Broncos were just so flat,
and I don't need to explain to you what it
was like in the first part of the game. And
I just decided, whatever I'm doing right now, like where
I'm sitting on the couch, when i'm because I was
watching it on a slight delay so I could fast
forward through the ads. It wasn't quite real time. He
was half an hour delay or something like that, fast
forward through the ads, and I just decided, this isn't working.

(01:21:36):
I'm not winning, right, So I'm gonna stop watching. I'm
gonna get up. I'm gonna go do something else and
then and then I will consume the game some other
way later, because clearly consuming it this way doesn't work.
And so I got up, and I left and I
went to do other things, and then Dragon texted me
to say, are you listening to the game, And I said, no,
not right now, and he said, well, you need to

(01:21:58):
because they need your help.

Speaker 2 (01:22:00):
They need your help, and so then I did, and
then we know what happened.

Speaker 1 (01:22:03):
And then so Dragon Dragon is assigning me both the
credit and the responsibility for these victories.

Speaker 5 (01:22:10):
And I would prefer to have neither. It's not that complicated.
All you gotta do is listen to every game for
the rest of the season. I mean, come on, it's
not like you have to go out on the field
and do anything.

Speaker 1 (01:22:19):
Well. Then I want to listen to Rick and Day.
I know, and I will be on the sidelines. I
just learned I will be on the sidelines for this
Sunday's game. So that's good. I guess that's gonna be
a hard That's gonna be a hard one. So so
Dragon's question is, what's your Broncos superstition.

Speaker 2 (01:22:35):
It's funny.

Speaker 1 (01:22:36):
I I'm a little bit superstitious like that. You know,
if I'm watching a game and my and it's going
very badly, I will do things like move to another
part of the couch or couch cushion over, get a
refill of your soda. Yeah, I haven't thought about flipping
a couch cushion that's in it.

Speaker 2 (01:22:54):
I've never heard of that one, But I get it.
I get it.

Speaker 1 (01:22:56):
But usually but I'll move to another part of the
couch or I we'll move to another room, Like if
it's going really badly and I'm watching in the living room,
I'll go sit in bed and watch the game after,
you know, I'll just it could be the TV, it
could it could be anything. It could be it could
be absolutely anything. Take a shoe off. Who knows, ye, Ross,
you're the hero of Broncos Country.

Speaker 2 (01:23:17):
See. I don't want that responsibility. I do not want
that responsibility.

Speaker 1 (01:23:21):
These folks are they're professionals, and they need to be
able to do it without man.

Speaker 2 (01:23:25):
They need your help.

Speaker 3 (01:23:26):
Ross.

Speaker 1 (01:23:26):
We left the game and that's why they won. I
think a lot of people feel that way. I bet
there were I bet there were a lot of people
who left, you know, when they when they were down
by eighteen with six minutes left, and you're thinking, all right,
I'll leave now and it'll I'll get home half an
hour earlier because I'll beat the worst part of the traffic.

Speaker 2 (01:23:43):
So I bet a lot of people left. Ross. I
started smoking a cigar.

Speaker 1 (01:23:46):
I wore my Osweiler jersey nice uh huh.

Speaker 2 (01:23:52):
I help.

Speaker 1 (01:23:52):
I helped them win by yelling do it for DT.
That was a good thing. Yesterday when they they inducted
Damarius Thomas into the Ring of Fame and he's right
next to Peyton Manning and the Ring of Fame. And
it was also that the anniversary of the fifty fifty
Super Bowl fifty, so that was pretty That was pretty
cool all around.

Speaker 5 (01:24:10):
Could be slightly dangerous. I don't recommend everybody try this.
I hold my breath until they win. Oh that's good. Yeah,
I like it. I like it.

Speaker 2 (01:24:19):
What else?

Speaker 1 (01:24:19):
Oh, this is a I think this is a point
worth mentioning. The giants regular kicker was out. I guess
he's injured and they had some backup dude, And remember
the Giants.

Speaker 2 (01:24:29):
The Broncos won by one point.

Speaker 1 (01:24:32):
That guy missed two extra points, including they.

Speaker 2 (01:24:36):
Converted a two point conversion, so that makes up.

Speaker 1 (01:24:39):
Yeah, I know, but he also missed an extra point
on that last touchdown.

Speaker 5 (01:24:45):
With like what was it thirty seconds left of the game,
tied and gone to overtime one and then the Broncos
was listening to the game.

Speaker 2 (01:24:51):
Yeah, old tradition of slapping your arm hard with a
flexible machete sheath when the Broncos are behind.

Speaker 1 (01:24:58):
That's very specific and sounds rather painful, and I think
I think love.

Speaker 2 (01:25:05):
Let me let me read that again.

Speaker 1 (01:25:07):
Old tradition of slapping your arm hard with a flexible
machete sheath when the.

Speaker 2 (01:25:12):
Broncos are behind. You know what?

Speaker 1 (01:25:13):
My favorite part of that text is, what do you think?
My favorite part is.

Speaker 2 (01:25:17):
An old tradition, old tradition, so it's been going on. Wow,
whoever you are, how old is that tradition? And how
did it start? Was it your idea? Was your dad?
Was your dad a huge Broncos fan?

Speaker 1 (01:25:31):
And when they were losing he would whack you with
a flexible machete sheath until the Broncos won.

Speaker 2 (01:25:36):
How did this happen? Please? How did this happen?

Speaker 1 (01:25:40):
Randy and Ford Collins said after the Broncos got stalled
at fourth and goal, I turned it off and didn't
check the final score until about six o'clock.

Speaker 2 (01:25:47):
Ross, I have to wear blue and orange.

Speaker 1 (01:25:49):
I have to be watching seventy five percent of it.

Speaker 2 (01:25:52):
Not sure what that means. And during the week I
should have watched.

Speaker 1 (01:25:55):
Some game film and pestered my coworkers chew on head
Mariners tonight. Ross supports superstition wearing the correct clothes slash hat.

Speaker 2 (01:26:05):
Yes true.

Speaker 5 (01:26:06):
Oddly enough, I started smoking crack and they won. Okay,
all right, all right.

Speaker 1 (01:26:11):
I hope you got your crack supply for this coming Sunday, Ross,
I have salmon and a Mexican beer when the Raiders
come to town. Had this at a game tailgate one
year and the Broncos won, So I continue the tradition.

Speaker 2 (01:26:23):
That makes absolutely perfect sense to me. Ross. I was
at the game. I never leave early.

Speaker 1 (01:26:29):
I was so close to leaving, but I stuck it
out and we're so thankful.

Speaker 2 (01:26:34):
Ross and Dragon.

Speaker 1 (01:26:35):
This is from Andy during a close Broncos or Avalanche game,
I play center couch. I always watch the game from
the center couch position.

Speaker 2 (01:26:42):
I once asked big Al how.

Speaker 1 (01:26:44):
He watched an Avalanche game, and he said he plays
from the left couch position.

Speaker 2 (01:26:50):
Who I'm on the right couch.

Speaker 1 (01:26:52):
Tamarius Thomas was thirty three years old when he died,
and the Broncos won with.

Speaker 2 (01:26:56):
Thirty three points. Uh, all right? Is that enough? Is
that enough? Dragon? If you've gotten Sue got enough?

Speaker 5 (01:27:03):
But you understand the responsibility that you have, no guys,
you gotta help me out. I don't buy you gotta
help me. He he doesn't believe. It's been five professionals,
five times the Broncos have won, and five times Roskiminsky
has listened to the game. The two times Roskiminsky has
not listened the game. He watched the game, but he
was not able to listen, and they lost. So how

(01:27:27):
else can we convince that that is all true? I
will which is true. It is all true, and at
some point.

Speaker 1 (01:27:32):
We will get to a statistically significant sample size.

Speaker 2 (01:27:35):
I don't know if we are very yet. Seven is
not good enough. I don't think so. I don't think so.
Five out of seven isn't good enough for you. It
just feels like a lot of pressure. Tough, Hea, you
is the head that where's the crown? I go with it?
I didn't.

Speaker 1 (01:27:52):
I didn't haven't trained for this tough who were born
for it?

Speaker 2 (01:27:55):
I didn't play. I didn't play whatever you call this
role in college tough.

Speaker 1 (01:28:01):
All right, I'm gonna switch gears. This next story is
a very heavy story, actually not being sarcastic, and.

Speaker 2 (01:28:09):
I just all right.

Speaker 1 (01:28:11):
This is from the New York Post, and you may
be aware. Of course, everybody is aware of the whole
Jeffrey Epstein thing, and the whole Lowlita Express and his island,
and the various accusations about young women that's certainly Jeffrey
Epstein himself sexually abused, and it does appear to it
does appear very credible that he offered some of these

(01:28:31):
young underage girls, many of them under age at least
to his to his friends, and the whole thing is
just disgusting and sickening. And I actually wish Jeffrey Epstein
weren't dead because I wish he could suffer for a
long time. So one of the young women who was
caught up in the story of Virginia Giuffrey g I

(01:28:52):
U F F R E, who I believe was recruited
from mar al Lago by Glaine Maxwell, who is serving
a prison sent about all this, and she was I
think relatively old for the girls that Epstein got involved
in all this. I think she was maybe seventeen at
the time. And she killed herself. But before she killed herself,

(01:29:18):
she drafted a book that is it's either just about
to be published or was just published. Let me check
tomorrow tomorrow, and it's called Nobody's Girl, And the subtitle
of the book is a memoir of surviving abuse and
fighting for justice. Again, this is a posthumous memoir. And

(01:29:45):
let me just read a little bit of the summary
of the book from Amazon. The Unforgettable Memoir by the
late Virginia Roberts Giuffrey, the woman who dared to take
on Jeffrey Epstein and Gallaine Maxwell.

Speaker 2 (01:29:54):
The world knows her as Epstein and.

Speaker 1 (01:29:58):
Maxwell's most doubt spoken victim, the woman whose decision to
speak out helps send both serial abusers to prison, and
who's photographed with Prince Andrew catalyzed.

Speaker 2 (01:30:08):
His fall from grace.

Speaker 1 (01:30:09):
But the story has never been told in full in
her own words until now. In April of this year,
just six months ago, Virginia Giuffrey took her own life.
She left behind a memoir written in the years preceding
her death, and stated unequivocally that she wanted it published.
Nobody's Girl is the riveting and powerful story of an

(01:30:31):
ordinary girl who would grow up to confront extraordinary adversity.
And there's more to this blurb from Amazon, but I'm
going to stop there, and I want to go back
to this piece in the New York Post that's just
absolutely shocking.

Speaker 2 (01:30:42):
All of this is absolutely.

Speaker 1 (01:30:44):
Shocking when you hear the Epstein thing and then you
come across a story that shocks you after you already
know all this stuff that you know. This is why
I tell you that the story I'm going to share
with you now is a very check challenging story.

Speaker 2 (01:31:02):
So this is from the New York Post.

Speaker 1 (01:31:05):
Prominent Jeffrey Epstein victim Virginia Roberts. Jeffrey was brutally bloodied, beaten,
and raped by a quote well known prime minister in
a series of savage encounters that finally helped the teenager
break free from the sex traffickers spell. This is very

(01:31:28):
difficult even I have no connection to this story. I
just know what I know from the news, the same
way you all do. I doubt anybody listening to me
right now has a direct connection to this story.

Speaker 2 (01:31:40):
I could be wrong. In her posthumous memoir.

Speaker 1 (01:31:44):
Giuffrey recalled begging Epstein to step in after the unnamed
politician forced her to beg for her life, but the
pedophile meaning Epstein coldly told her it was simply part
of her job, Giuffrey wrote, and this is in her book,
with an excerpt in the book that's shared with The
New York Post. After the attack, I couldn't stay a fool,

(01:32:06):
having been treated so brutally, and then seeing Epstein's callous
reaction to how terrorized I felt. I had to accept
that Epstein meted out praise merely as a manipulation to
keep me subservient.

Speaker 2 (01:32:18):
Epstein cared only about Epstein.

Speaker 1 (01:32:21):
Now, Giuffray simply referred to this man as the Prime Minister,
saying she was afraid that he would seek to hurt
her if she printed his name.

Speaker 2 (01:32:32):
In the past, however.

Speaker 1 (01:32:34):
She pointed to a former Israeli prime minister named A
hud Barak in court filings as one of the many
elites who had raped her, a claim he has repeatedly denied.
In her memoir, Giuffray says she first met the quote
Prime Minister on Epstein's private island in the US Virgin

(01:32:57):
Islands sometime.

Speaker 2 (01:32:58):
In two thousand and two, when she was eighteen.

Speaker 1 (01:33:04):
She was ordered to escort him to a cabana, but
the man made it clear as soon as they were
alone that quote he wanted violence.

Speaker 2 (01:33:12):
This is another quote from the book. Now, this was
hard for me to read to myself. It's going to
be very difficult for me to read to you, but
I'm going to.

Speaker 1 (01:33:28):
He repeatedly choked me until I lost consciousness and took
pleasure in seeing me in fear for my life. Horrifically,
the Prime Minister laughed when he hurt me, and got
more aroused when I begged him to stop. I emerged
from the cabana bleeding from my mouth and a couple

(01:33:49):
other body parts that you can imagine that I will
not name that are below the waist.

Speaker 2 (01:33:56):
For days, it hurt to breathe and to swallow.

Speaker 1 (01:34:00):
The politician quote raped me more savagely than anyone had before,
she said. She immediately rushed to Epstein and begged him
not to send her.

Speaker 2 (01:34:11):
Back to the Prime Minister. Quote.

Speaker 1 (01:34:13):
I got down on my knees and pleaded with him.
I don't know if Epstein feared the man or if
he owed him a fever, but he wouldn't make any promises, seeing.

Speaker 2 (01:34:20):
Coldly of the politician's brutality.

Speaker 1 (01:34:23):
You'll get that sometimes, Oh my gosh. Sometime later, Epstein
sent her back to the politician for another encounter, conducted
entirely in a cabin aboard the airplane, the Lolita Express.
Although her experience there was far less violent, she spent
the entire hour in fear that he would suddenly strike
or choke her. Giuffrey admitted that before the violence experience,

(01:34:46):
she had given Epstein the benefit of the doubt and
believed that he cared for the girls he's sexed trafficked.

Speaker 2 (01:34:52):
She was not completely naive, she wrote.

Speaker 1 (01:34:55):
Acknowledging that his quote predilection for childlike girls was a sickess,
but that in his twisted way he meant well, that
was what was going through her mind as a seventeen
and eighteen year old. I don't know when she first
got involved with with Epstein. His indifference to her, fear
and injuries from the Prime Minister forced the eighteen year

(01:35:17):
old to face the truth.

Speaker 2 (01:35:19):
And then she.

Speaker 1 (01:35:21):
Said in the same part of her book, she said
that she would not survive a life of sex trafficking
and would either die at the hands of one of
Epstein's friends or take her own life.

Speaker 2 (01:35:36):
And she said, and I'm quoting from the book. I
didn't know what then, but my.

Speaker 1 (01:35:40):
Second interaction with the Prime Minister was the beginning of
the end for me. It was also and I'm gonna
not read anymore there there's more to the article, but
it was where she realized I have got to get
away from Epstein, and she did, and she became his
most vocal critic. And as the article said a little
bit earlier, she was the one who really kind of
led to the public downfall of Prince Andrew. And there

(01:36:02):
was more on that story just in the past few days.
But I have to say a story about Epstein really
has to be unbelievably shocking to be shocked by it,
because everything we already know about what that guy did
and who he did it too was so terrible that

(01:36:25):
I that I think what surprised me most about that
story was that I could read something about Jeffrey Epstein
even now and have it shocked me. I. I sort
of apologize for sharing that story with you on a
on a Monday, but I felt like it was important.

Speaker 2 (01:36:44):
All right, Hi, Mandy, right right? Such a heavy story,
and all I want it is the ladies room. Is
it is gorgeous? Really? Yes? Is it worth the weight?

Speaker 5 (01:37:03):
Yes?

Speaker 2 (01:37:03):
Oh well I haven't actually used to it all a
full report at wait, so what do you mean it's gorgeous?
We were talking about the floor or floor we got
new vanity.

Speaker 6 (01:37:10):
It's just nice. It's in the lady's room. Hasn't had
properly working lights yeah or forever? Oh and it's like
nice and illuminated properly wow, lightful.

Speaker 2 (01:37:20):
Can't wait to go in there. You know, it's funny.

Speaker 1 (01:37:21):
I don't think your average guy would care very much
about the illumination in a bathroom because you are no offense.

Speaker 2 (01:37:27):
Yeah right, as long as I can see, I've seen
behind the curtain. Now that we have this unisex bathroom crap. Yeah,
that's what have you learned? That men are pigs in
the bathroom?

Speaker 6 (01:37:38):
And you do do you realize how many women like
tidy up a bathroom before they leave it? No, it
is commonplace for I'm not talking about like clean the toilet.

Speaker 2 (01:37:48):
Why are you making such a mess that you need
to clean it up? There's no mess.

Speaker 6 (01:37:52):
We're wiping the counters off, We're making sure it's nice
and really beautiful for the next person who comes in.

Speaker 2 (01:37:57):
Uh huh. Men apparently have no desire urge to do that.

Speaker 6 (01:38:00):
So basically, unisex bathrooms are within into you tidy things up,
cleaning up after men You don't.

Speaker 1 (01:38:05):
Okay, so I didn't make a mess in the bathroom,
and you didn't make a mess in the bathroom, but
somehow you consider it your responsibility to clean up someone else's.

Speaker 6 (01:38:13):
It's just kindness to clean the water up so you.

Speaker 2 (01:38:15):
Don't get stuff on your clothes. No, why do you
want to touch it?

Speaker 1 (01:38:17):
And I'm like, you know, I'm not a jermaphoe, but like,
why would I do that?

Speaker 6 (01:38:22):
Because it's not you just take the towels and just
wipe the counter and throw it away. It's not like
you're you know, you're not cleaning toilets, you're not scrubbing
out the sink. None of that is necessary because we're
not savages.

Speaker 2 (01:38:35):
Whatever.

Speaker 1 (01:38:35):
You've confused me with many things that you've said in
our years of friendship, but this is very, very high
on the list, extremely high on the list.

Speaker 2 (01:38:44):
I am a complex woman Ross.

Speaker 1 (01:38:45):
Indeed you are, or a woman with a complex perhaps
our mutual friend.

Speaker 6 (01:38:50):
Doug Johnson is on our show today at o o'clock
as we kick off the sale for the Mandy Cottle
Adventure Awesome next October.

Speaker 2 (01:38:57):
Where is it?

Speaker 1 (01:38:58):
Uh?

Speaker 6 (01:38:58):
We are going down the Rhine River Valley Austin, going
Basil Switzerland, of course, Switzerland, my favorite country, right under
theneath the United States, down to Amsterdam.

Speaker 2 (01:39:07):
We really beautiful trip.

Speaker 1 (01:39:09):
Yeah, that'll be great, And folks haven't mentioned my trip
which is also Central Europe. Actually I'll be a little
east of where Mandy is rosstrip dot com to learn more.
That trip is coming up in April, and Mandy will
tell you all about her trip coming up soon