12-11-24 - *FULL SHOW* Bill O'Reilly; Evolutionary Thinking; Supermarket Non-Merger

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Start just following up on something David Kale was just
talking about in our news broadcast there, and that is
the Kroger Albertson's merger. Here in the state of Colorado,
Kroger is best known as King Supers or in some
other parts of the state city market, and Albertson's is
best known as Safeway in this state. So Kroger is

(00:24):
much much bigger than Albertsons. I don't have the numbers
in front of me. Maybe I'll look him up, but
maybe I won't. But Kroger is a bigger one. And
these two were looking to merge. In their claim was
that is that they need to merge, Well, I should
say it was. It's more of a past tense thing
at this point. They need to merge in order to
be able to more successfully compete against Walmart. To a

(00:48):
lesser extent, Trader Joe's right, also Aldi, which is a
German supermarket chain, low.

Speaker 2 (00:54):
Cost supermarket chain.

Speaker 1 (00:55):
Right, It's like the Frontier Airlines or something of grocery stores.
It is making pretty significant inroads in the United States
of America, and Kroger and Albertson said they wanted to
merge so that they can better compete against against these forces,
and the government argued, the government being not only the
federal government, but also as you just heard on KOA

(01:19):
Phil Wiser, the attorney general of the State of Colorado.

Speaker 2 (01:22):
And some other attorneys general as well.

Speaker 1 (01:23):
I think State of Washington maybe, and those two often
do things together because they're both very, very liberal. But anyway,
they also they argued essentially that it would be anti competitive,
and the argument, I don't think you need to get
into a deep legal argument about it. The concept is
basically this, if there's a town or a big part

(01:45):
of a bigger town, you know, a section of Denver,
or a whole town somewhere else where.

Speaker 2 (01:51):
Let's say there's two supermarkets in town.

Speaker 1 (01:54):
There's a safe way and there's a King Supers or
a safe way in a city market.

Speaker 2 (02:01):
If those were to merge, obviously.

Speaker 1 (02:03):
The companies would not keep both of those stores open.
One of the stores would close, and then the town
would only end up with one supermarket. And one of
the arguments was that will allow the supermarket to raise prices,
so because there will be less competition, so that will
be bad for consumers to the extent that supermarkets offer

(02:25):
different choices, and you got to say, most of what
Safeway and King supers have is the same until you
get to their own store branded stuff, and then even
a lot of that might be.

Speaker 2 (02:34):
The same with just a different label on it.

Speaker 1 (02:36):
But to the extent that there are fewer choices, then
that's also bad for consumers. The stores would argue that
combining would give them economies of scale that would actually
let them lower prices, and they basically say, trust us,
we won't raise prices, even though we will be able
to the government.

Speaker 2 (02:56):
I think wasn't buying that.

Speaker 1 (02:58):
And then the other reason I think there was a
big push on this, and it's not getting as much
talk in the media, But a reason I think there
was a big push here from the left to block
this is that many supermarket workers are unionized, and so
the union always cares more than anything else about making

(03:21):
sure the union makes as much money as possible, and
the union makes as much money as possible by having
as many dues paying members as possible. And so the
union fought bitterly against this merger because they think it
would mean stores will close and some of their members
will be, you know, out of that job. They'll probably

(03:43):
go get a job somewhere else, and they might be
even a member of a different union somewhere else, but
they won't be a member of this union anymore. And
that's what they care about. So the left also pushed
based on that. And so yesterday a federal judge named
Adrian Nelson agreed with the government and agreed that this

(04:05):
twenty billion dollar merger would erode competition. And she said
evidence shows that the defendants engage in substantial head to
head competition, and the proposed merger would remove that competition now.

Speaker 2 (04:19):
Here in Colorado. Here in Colorado, Kroger, which.

Speaker 1 (04:24):
Would kind of be the dominant force in this when
they merged because they're bigger, said.

Speaker 2 (04:28):
Look, we're willing to.

Speaker 1 (04:31):
We're willing to sell a bunch of our stores in Colorado.
Wasn't always clear to me whether they were going to
be safe. Was the Safeway stores or the Albertson stores
or just a bunch of the stores from the combined
entity we're going to we're going to sell them to
a third party, a different company that will keep running
them as supermarkets. Right, so instead of instead of Safeway

(04:54):
in King supers five blocks from each other, it'll be
a whatever they're going to call it if they were
to merge, let's say it's still called King Supers and
then something else that used to be a safe way
with a new name. But some folks, including our state
Attorney General, thought that the company that they were looking

(05:15):
at to buy those stores was not a credible operator
of supermarkets, would not be able to successfully compete against
King super the combined Kroger Albertson's, and would likely just
end up shutting all the stores anyway, And so it
didn't satisfy them at all when they were looking for

(05:36):
a way to maintain competition. Now, the other thing that
David Cale mentioned, and I just saw this this morning,
and this goes into the files of oh mom and
dad are fighting. And I'm actually looking just to give
you a sense how you know how aggressive this is.
I'm actually looking at the Albertson's website right now, right

(05:57):
not just a news outlet's, but this is from Albertsons,
the company that was trying to merge with Kroger, and
the headline from their press release from today, it's from today.
Albertson's files lawsuit against Kroger for breach of merger agreement.
So what they're saying is, I'll just share a short paragraph.

(06:18):
Kroger willfully breached the merger agreement in several key ways,
including by repeatedly refusing to divest assets necessary for antitrust approval,
ignoring regulators feedback, rejecting stronger divestiture buyers, and failing to
cooperate with Albertson's. So, in short, Albertson's, which is the

(06:40):
smaller company, issuing King Supers, which is the bigger company,
saying King Supers didn't do a good enough job of
doing what.

Speaker 2 (06:47):
It took to get the merger done.

Speaker 1 (06:50):
And this is now straight out of the press release.
Albertsons is seeking billions of dollars in damages from Kroger
to make Albertson's and its.

Speaker 2 (07:02):
Shareholder's whole wow.

Speaker 1 (07:05):
Albertson's shareholders have been denied the multi billion dollar premium
that Kroger agreed to pay for Albertson's shares, and have
been subjected to a decrease in shareholder value on account
of Albertson's inability to pursue other business opportunities as it
sought approval for the transaction. Now they're already Albertson's is
already going to get six hundred million dollars from the

(07:27):
deal falling apart six hundred million, but Albertson's wants more,
and they say they are entitled to relief reflecting the
multiple years and hundreds of millions of dollars that devoted
to obtaining approval for the merger, and on and on.
So I'm not surprised and they're filing this lawsuit. I
would file it too if I were them, If I
were they, but I'm not sure this has a real

(07:49):
a significant chance here.

Speaker 2 (07:51):
They would really have to prove that Kroger.

Speaker 1 (07:53):
Did all these didn't do what they should have done
to maintain the merger, and I think that is going
to be very difficult to prove. In a way, it
reminds me of, I don't know, Let's say you're let's
say you're a guy who's dating a girl for a
while and you're trying to figure out if it's gonna
if it's gonna lead to marriage, and there's another girl
you really like. You really really like this other girl too,

(08:16):
not quite as much, but you really like her, and
then suddenly the relationship you're in, you know, breaks up,
the girl you're dating decides she doesn't want.

Speaker 2 (08:24):
To marry you, and in the meantime, the other.

Speaker 1 (08:27):
Girl that you like moved on to somebody else, and
now you got nothing and you want to sew over it,
even though you're the one who made the decision to
date the girl you were dating. That's my bad. Analogy
for the day, Bill O'Reilly on the show today, coming
up in about fifteen minutes, and then an hour after that,
at about ten thirty three, we're gonna have Professor James
Pampush back on the show. He joins us. He joined

(08:50):
us a couple of days ago talking about evolution and
particular the question of why do humans and only humans
have a chin? And it was a fascinating conversation. He
was a great guessed and a great speaker, and I
was emailing a little with him a little bit after that,
and we were talking about some stuff about evolution and
natural selection and this sort of thing, and I just

(09:11):
thought it was so fascinating and he's so good at
talking about this stuff that I asked him to come back.
So we're gonna do that at ten thirty three. So
let me do a few other things with you. Here,
let's talk about CNN a little bit. You may remember CNN.
It used to be an important news network, and in fact,
it used to be it used to be a good
news network many years ago, like when Wolf Blitzer was

(09:34):
still really young, and when Bernard Shaw was one of
the main voice. You remember Bernard Shaw, very distinguished African American.

Speaker 2 (09:41):
Man who was just oh my god, Shannon.

Speaker 1 (09:47):
And so anyway, CNN's had some trouble, and they've earned
the trouble. I don't really feel bad about, you know,
bad for them, because they've surely earned it. But you
will recall during the Trump administration, a guy named Jeff
Zucker was running CNN and he hates Donald Trump, and
he decided to turn CNN into the second coming of MSNBC,

(10:10):
and he made it this permanent anti Trump. Just it was.

Speaker 2 (10:15):
It was annoying, the watch was, it was boring.

Speaker 1 (10:18):
It was, but it worked for them for a while,
kind of sort of they didn't catch up to MSNBC,
but they got sort of close. And they were in
this media environment where you had people like Stephen Colbert
and Jimmy Fallon and Jimmy Kimmel, especially Kimmel more than Fallon,
Fellon wasn't as bad as the other two just going
all in on the Trump hatred because their audience is

(10:42):
people between probably the ages of, you know, twenty and forty,
who at least at the time, I think this has
changed very significantly in the past year or two as
shown in the election, but at the time, between twenty
sixteen and twenty twenty, those kind of younger adults really
despised Donald Trump well, and in part because these people

(11:02):
on TV that they watched told them to despise Donald Trump,
and then they became their own little, insular kind of
cult and it was working for them pretty well in
the ratings. They weren't getting conservative watchers, but they were
getting enough liberals and muddle headed young people that it
was working for them. And CNN kind of wanted a
piece of that, and they effectively rebranded themselves as part

(11:25):
of the anti Trump resistance, which is not what journalists
should be and beyond that, separate from what journalists should
and shouldn't be. There's already a network that was doing that, MSNBC.
So not only are they doing something that isn't great
for journalism, but they're also being copycats. Right, So I
wanted to share this story with you from the UK

(11:45):
Daily Mail. CNN is continuing it's downward slump in the ratings.

Speaker 2 (11:50):
Listen to this, Shannon.

Speaker 1 (11:51):
As last week, it was overtaken in the ratings by
the Food Network and the History Channel. The cable news
network struggled to gain momentum despite a busy news cycle
that comprised the point blank assassination of United Healthcare CEO
Brian Thompson and the ensuing manhunt for his killer, news
related to President elect Donald Trump's cabinet picks, and.

Speaker 2 (12:13):
A rebel group gaining ground in Syria.

Speaker 1 (12:15):
It's prime time shows and I won't bother naming him
only averaged three hundred and sixty seven thousand viewers for
the week. By comparison, Fox News averaged two and a
half million viewers. So it's what eight times nine times more?
Fox News eight times nine times more? Then let's call

(12:37):
it eight then CNN. CNN's audience was also smaller than
I love this list. You're ready, TNT, Food Network, Discovery,
Hallmark Mysteries, TLC, TBS, History, HGTV, USA, MSNBC, which I

(12:58):
mentioned before. The Hallmark Channel, which is different from Hallmark
Mysteries and ESPN, and that the demographic that most media
outlets want. TV and radio people always talk about twenty
five to fifty four. I don't see much use in
twenty five year olds. They don't have much money to spend.
I think thirty five to sixty four is a more
interesting group.

Speaker 2 (13:18):
But anyway, twenty.

Speaker 1 (13:20):
Five to fifty four is kind of like the holy
grail for the target demo what they call it in media.
And in twenty five to fifty four, CNN received only
sixty seven thousand viewers average over the week, behind TV Land,
MTV and Comedy Central.

Speaker 2 (13:40):
Unbelievable.

Speaker 1 (13:42):
It's CNN's in big trouble, very very big trouble. I
mean trouble to the degree that it's not clear that
they can continue to exist as a brand. And they've
got a new CEO in place, and he's firing a
lot of people, and other people are leaving. Allison Camarado,
who used to be at Fox and then was an
for a long.

Speaker 2 (14:01):
Time for ten years, she just left. Chris Wallace is gone.

Speaker 1 (14:05):
Other people are being fired, and I'll tell you, this
guy has his hands full. It's very, very difficult to
recover a once strong brand that has drifted into irrelevance.
It's not impossible. You can refresh a brand, but it
takes a lot of hard work. We'll be back with
Bill O'Reilly. Kioway is going to be one hundred years old.

(14:27):
What Saturday, I think on the fifteenth, whatever the fifteenth is.
I don't pay much attention to the calendar. Yeah, it's
is Sunday, Sunday, the fifteenth. We're going to be a
hundred that's pretty amazing. I don't know if my next
guest was around when Koway was founded. I don't think
he's quite that old. But the last time, sorry, the
last time we had Bill O'Reilly on the show, out
of in all seriousness, we had him on talking about

(14:49):
his most recent book, Confronting the Presidents, which of course
I read because I read all Bill's books, and fabulous book.
And so Bill O'Reilly, welcome, welcome back to Koway. It's
great to have you here, and congrats on the book
reaching number one on the New York Times bestseller list.
You're probably not surprised, but it's still great.

Speaker 3 (15:09):
Well, thank you. And Ross and Bob Palmer was around,
and he was a pal of mine when I was
out in Denver. So he told me all about KOA
coming on the air, and I think Annie Oakley was
shooting at some of the broadcasters back then in Colorado.

Speaker 1 (15:24):
But it could be wrong about that.

Speaker 3 (15:27):
You got a long, proud legacy at KOA. Confind the
presidence could be back to number one. We'll get the
data in this afternoon. Phenomenal bestseller. Thank you for reading it.
I really appreciate it.

Speaker 1 (15:43):
I watched the special you did. I want to say
maybe it was in two parts, but I don't remember
for sure. But the special that you did with my
friend Leland on News Nation about the book, and so
I know the answer to the question I'm going to
ask you, but I'm going to ask for the benefit
of listeners. In your book confronting the Presidents, you go

(16:03):
through them all and you rank them.

Speaker 2 (16:04):
Where did you rank Joe Biden?

Speaker 3 (16:06):
And why I didn't rank them? News Nation did? Okay,
I wanted the reader to do that, But I have
made it quite clear on my television broadcast and No
Spin News and on our radio outlets that I believe
that mister Biden is the second worst president in history.
Now some people they look askance at that, but my

(16:29):
argument is that unlike the other failed presidents Herbert Hoover,
Warren Harding, Martin Van Buren, Franklin, pierrece hanan On, unlike
those men, bidened him in the office and created problems.
He opened the border. Congress didn't do that, No political
party did that. He did it, never explain why, never,

(16:53):
leading to unbelievable societal and physical chaos. He ran out
of Afghanistan didn't have to the US forces were fairly
competent to defend themselves at that point. Taliban had slocked
off under Trump, and Biden is surrendered for what I

(17:16):
don't know, and then spends nine trillion dollars more than
any other president. Nobody's inclose, igniting inflation for everybody. So
when you have a president that's creating the problems and
then has no idea how to solve them, that's not good.

Speaker 1 (17:33):
Russ Just for fun, I don't want to spend too
much more time on president because I want to talk
about Carrent events. But tell so, look, I agree with
you that Joe Biden agrees to be ranked somewhere near
second worst. I don't know if would be second or
third or first, but somewhere around there. But the guy
you ranked first actually does sound like he really does

(17:56):
deserve to be Again, you said you didn't rank him. Sorry,
I don't mean that again, but you probably do think
the guy who was ranked as worst deserves to be.

Speaker 3 (18:05):
Juret James Buchanan was a coward, and he allowed the
South to rise in ferocity, never confronted any of them
on their law breaking. He got into the White House
in eighteen fifty six and could have squelched the growing
rebellion in the South. The North was strong enough to

(18:26):
do that, but after four years of Buchanan turning the
other way, when Lincoln came in, it was a FATA complete.
More than a million Americans killed, by far, the worst
thing that's ever happened in this country. And you can
lay it right at Buchanan's doorstep. So there's nobody ever
going to be worse than him.

Speaker 2 (18:46):
We're talking with Bill O'Reilly.

Speaker 1 (18:47):
You can check out his website, the No Spin News.

Speaker 2 (18:50):
You can check it out at Bill O'Reilly dot com.

Speaker 1 (18:53):
Make sure the emphasis is on the dot Bill O'Reilly
dot com. And confronting the presidents would be a great
christ Mister Honka President, if you've got a friend, a
family member who who is a reader or would like
to be All right, let me switch gears with you, Billy.
I mean, you were arguably the most successful cable news
host ever.

Speaker 2 (19:13):
So I want to ask you a a cable news question.

Speaker 1 (19:16):
I saw a piece in the UK Daily Mail that
I just shared with listeners in the previous segment before
you came on. The headline is fresh humiliation for CNN
as ailing news channel is overtaken by Food Network in
the ratings war. My question for you, Bill is, if
you were CEO of CNN, what would you do to

(19:39):
try to recover a brand that when I was watching CNN,
you know, thirty years ago, when Bernard Shaw was on
and so on, was a good brand and isn't anymore.
What would you do?

Speaker 3 (19:52):
It's like the Colorado Rockies baseball team. It's exactly the
same thing. In order to turn the franch guys around,
you have to bring in talent, and there isn't a
lot of talent out there in the television news industry anymore.
It maybe in Denver, that's where I worked and built

(20:13):
my reputation up at Channel seven. It may be out there.
I don't know, But CNN needs top to bottom new talent.
It is clear that the American people do not want
to watch who they have on Now. Some people say, well,
they're declining because of ideology. That was true up to

(20:36):
about six months ago. A new guy took over, Robert
Thompson is his name, and he issued addict them and said,
we're going to get off the left wing lunatic cycle.
There's still liberal, there's no doubt about it because their
talent lives in that culture, which another reason to have
to revamp the talent. But the big problem with CNN

(20:59):
is it's boring. Now, if you're boring Ross, you're not
going to be a koa. Your ratings are going to
go down. If I'm boring, I mean I run the
most successful independent news agency in the world. Well I
wouldn't if I were boring. CNN's boring. And in order
not to be boring, you have to get people who

(21:22):
have a pulse out there. You know who, you know
how to present, who, you know how to provoke the
audience to some extent into taking positions at the feeling something,
and they don't have it. I can't name one person
on Cienna not want the best of them. Is this
Caitlin Collins a young woman at night, but she needs,

(21:45):
you know, to be mentored. But the rest of them,
Anderson Cooper and all these people, they've had their shot.
Americans don't want it.

Speaker 1 (21:53):
I couldn't agree more on the entertainment piece. I never forget,
you know, as much as in my mind I want
to change people minds about something, or get people to
support the Constitution or individual liberty more or whatever. I know,
I never forget the bottom bottom line. My job is
to entertain people. And if I don't do that, nothing
else matters and I won't have a job. So I
couldn't agree with anymore what I what? I one more

(22:15):
question on this. Is it possible that the viewing habits
of the American public have changed so much that that
that American viewers have become so insistent in wanting confirmation
bias that an honest network can't make it. And I
hope that's not the case. The News Nation is trying

(22:35):
to disprove that theory.

Speaker 3 (22:38):
Yeah, I hope it's not the case either. But the
choir certainly is there, but there aren't that many of them,
even Fox News, which is number one, because it's really
the only major outlet that gives conservatives and traditional Americans

(22:59):
a platform, prominent platform. So if you are a diehard conservative,
you go to Fox and there are three five million
people who want that every night. But there is a
trend for Americans just to hear what they want to hear,
believe what they want to believe, and if you go
against them, they don't like you, they won't watch you. Yeah,

(23:22):
but I still don't believe ause ive never done that.
I have never done that, never panterered to the audience,
never catered to an ideology, not a party person. And
I've been successful everywhere I've been, So I still think
that independent minded Americans. You could be conservativeor a liberal,
that's fine, but you want to hear the truth. You
want to hear facts presented in a stimulating way. And

(23:45):
that's the secret of success in both television and radio.

Speaker 1 (23:50):
Yeah, and perhaps putting your last two concepts together, perhaps
even with an audience that might be somewhat seeking confirmation bias,
and overcome that if you're entertaining enough.

Speaker 3 (24:02):
Yes, and no doubt about that. But you can't be irrational.
So the guy like Morton Downey Junior, I don't know
you remember, Yeah, I'd a crazy guy. It only lasted
a year and a half because he was so insane.
There's a lot of guys on social media that are
just off the chart, and they get some attention with
people that quickly wears out. You know, you've got to

(24:24):
be a legitimate source of information and you've got to
be authentic. And the authenticity that's where cable news lacks.
People who work there are doing what they are told
to do, same thing in the network news because they
want to check. And if you don't do what your

(24:44):
managers tell you to do, you're not going to get
the check.

Speaker 1 (24:48):
So all right, let me let me make this about
you for a second. And this just occurred to me.
So although it was probably not your choice at the time,
you kind of moved from cable news to an online
home early, far before most people. And now what seems
to be happening is the world is turning to news

(25:11):
sources online far more and trusting television far less. And
I'm wondering, looking back, if in a way you think
that what probably felt bad at the time turned out
to be one of those things, you know, the proverbial
best thing that could have happened to me well, it
did turn.

Speaker 3 (25:31):
Out well for me, and I'll never work for a
corporation again because the corporation is going to do what
it wants and you don't have any control over that.
So I don't want to work in that kind of
an environment. I did it for forty two years and
I made a great living doing it. I made people money.

(25:51):
But you know, I lived under a regime, and whatever
the regime did, I went against the regime a lot,
but I got away with it because I was making
the money. But what's happened now is interesting. So my
presentation every night is a forty two minute newscast and
we have you in order to access that. You pay

(26:16):
a small subscription to my operation. You got that's concierge
and premium membership to Bill O'Reilly dot com can access
twenty four hours a day. We also have distributors, the
first Direct TV, and they put it on and you
can watch it there. But by far, our audience is

(26:37):
centered now in YouTube and Spotify. It is unbelievable, and
the whole broadcast doesn't run there. We break it down
to two or three segments a night, and millions of
people consume those segments because number one. It's easy, it's shorter,

(26:59):
and it's what you want to watch because we say
this segment's about this. So there are millions of people
who want to see the entire broadcast, but many more
are cherry picking the segments that we have on YouTube.
And that has changed everything and we dwore the cable

(27:19):
news audiences.

Speaker 2 (27:20):
Now that's fascinating.

Speaker 1 (27:21):
All right, you can feel free to decline to answer
my next question, and I'll ask it pretty generally. But
when when you were on Fox, you made a lot
of money doing what you're doing. Now, are you kind
of sort of in the same range of income even
though you're not working for the you know you're doing
it the way you're doing it.

Speaker 3 (27:40):
Yeah, I would say I'm in the range very good, so.

Speaker 1 (27:44):
Very I mean, congratulations, fabulous.

Speaker 3 (27:46):
I got sixty people working for me, wow. And we
have three corporations and we sell advertising on radio and television,
and then we have the books, and so it's a
jugger not people said, look, when you leave Fox, you're
not going to sell as many books. I sell more books, Wow,

(28:07):
Because again, the books are in social media. People are
that wouldn't watch Fox News because they're not conservative or whatever.
They are watching on social media, so more people got
worried about the books. It's very interesting what has happened.
And I consider myself very lucky. I'm very hard worker.

(28:28):
As you know, I work very hard, and I'm an
old guy. I should be playing pick a ball, riding
around a golf cart. I should be in veil yodling,
But you know, I still like what I do. But yeah,
we're in a ballpark. But more importantly, our charitable institutions
are tremendous, and the people that work for me, mostly

(28:49):
younger people making good money and getting good experience.

Speaker 1 (28:53):
Love it.

Speaker 2 (28:53):
We're talking with Bill O'Reilly.

Speaker 1 (28:55):
His most recent book, Confronting the Presidents, was number one
on the New York bestseller list and may soon be
there again.

Speaker 2 (29:02):
And it's a wonderful, easy read.

Speaker 1 (29:05):
And I always encourage people to learn more about history,
So by confronting the presidents for a kid or a brother,
or a parent, or somebody for Christmas or Hanukah. So Bill,
let's talk a little bit about the election, or rather
the upcoming presidency. It seems to me, and not just
to me, this isn't exactly a deep insight that the

(29:25):
resistance to Trump is a shadow of a fraction of
pittance of what it was the first time around, Like
they seemed defeated, demoralized. So what do you think the
opposition to Trump is going to look like this time around?

Speaker 3 (29:42):
Well, it has to subside for a little while. Say
remember seventy one million people voted against Trump. Well, most
of those people weren't voting for Kamala Harris. I mean,
she was a terrible candidate, awful they're voting against Trump
seventy one So there's still a force out there that
doesn't like him. He knows that, and he's targeted with

(30:08):
fulfilling his campaign promises. There are four major ones. If
he's able to fulfill those promises, then his opposition will
even be more scattered than it is now. The media
has just been decimated by this election. MSNBC is going
to go out of existence. I mean, that's how bad
it is. And the three networks they've lost all credibility,

(30:31):
all three of them. So Trump won across the board,
not only in the presidential election, but he destroyed his enemies.
But if he doesn't do well like Grover Cleveland, who's
the only other man elected a non consecutive term and
if he doesn't do well, they'll be back with a vengeance.
And I think Trump knows that as well.

Speaker 1 (30:51):
What do you expect as far as the focusing on
an issue deportation? Right? I live in a city where
we had the mayor saying, well, if they send these
agents on mass, we'll have Denver police standing at the
city line at the county line to stop them. I
mean that's the kind of place I live.

Speaker 3 (31:11):
Now.

Speaker 2 (31:11):
You know what Denver's like. You lived here, although it's worse.

Speaker 1 (31:14):
Now, what do you how do you think the immigration
thing and the deportation thing will play out?

Speaker 3 (31:21):
Well, you can't deport migrants in a mass way because
each one, each person that's here is entitled constitutional rights.
So once you get to America, even if it's illegally,
the constitution covers due process. So you could be detained,
but then you would have to have a hearing in

(31:41):
front of a judge and immigration court judge, and don't
take time. Take a lot of time, and it'll cost
a lot of money to detain all millions and millions
of people. So what I expect them to do is
a crackdown heavy on any undocumented migrant who's been arrested
for a crime, they can go immediately. They don't need
to do says, because they violated immigration law, it's much

(32:04):
easier to get them out of the country. And so
that's where he's going to go. And interestingly enough, my commentary,
which has been picked up all over the world, is
if the mayor of Denver says to Homeland Security, we're
not going to cooperate with you, even on criminal aliens.
When we arrest somebody who's not supposed to be in
this country, we're not going to alert you. Then if

(32:25):
I were Trump, I would have Pam Bondy order the
FBI chief probably going to be cash Buttel to fly
to Denver and put the handcuffs on the mayor and
take them into custody for violating interfering with a federal investigation.
It's felony. I would arrest him and a message to everybody.

(32:47):
It had to be Denver, it could be Boston, can
be Gavin Newsom in California, but they would be in cuffs.
The press would be there, taken into custody and charged.
Cannot have anarchy. There is immigration law. You don't obey it,
you are subject to being indicted.

Speaker 1 (33:10):
It'll be a tricky thing if it comes to that here,
because actually we have a state law. It's not really
even a Denver thing, although Johnston, for I think his
own political purposes is hamming it up. But we have
a state law that makes this the whole place of
sanctuary state, as you just described, will not cooperate with
the Feds, and federal law.

Speaker 3 (33:29):
Over supersed state law everywhere.

Speaker 1 (33:33):
Right, So I think it'll come down to a question
of is the action being done by the city or
state a form of not cooperating, which they can probably
get away with, versus impeding, which they can't get away with.

Speaker 3 (33:45):
Oh, you can make a strong case that by not
handing over a criminal alien to a Homeland security that
you are interfering in a federal investigation of the undocumented criminal.
I don't think there'd be any problem with that in
the courts. You would lose and you'd have to go
to trial in federal court, and the process would be

(34:11):
that would cause almost all of these politicians to back down,
them back down fast.

Speaker 1 (34:16):
I agree, and I think someone I think Trump's crew
are going to be the first crew in a long
time with the Cajones to go make that argument.

Speaker 3 (34:24):
I don't know if you'll do it. It's a pretty
extreme position. I would do it because I do not
believe in anarchy, and that's what we have right now
on the undocumented front.

Speaker 1 (34:35):
Bill O'Reilly's website is Bill O'Reilly dot com. Go there,
sign up for the No Spin News, for the news
broadcast that he just described to us, and by his
latest book, Confronting the Presidents, which may return to the
number one position and on the New York Times bestseller list.
Will soon find out. It's a great Christmas or Honike Gift, Billy,
It's always so good to talk to you. Thanks for
spending time with us.

Speaker 3 (34:57):
All right, ross Ay, you have a great Christmas. No
better place send Christmas in Colorado?

Speaker 1 (35:01):
You got it.

Speaker 3 (35:02):
Sounds like a Hallmark movie, but it's true.

Speaker 1 (35:04):
It's absolutely Come visit.

Speaker 3 (35:06):
Everybody enjoys it.

Speaker 2 (35:07):
Come visit us. We'll we'll have a beer together.

Speaker 3 (35:10):
Excellent.

Speaker 1 (35:10):
See you see you all right, folks, We're gonna take
a quick break. We'll be right back on kawa uh Okay.
I wanna got a lot of small stories I want
to get through today, and so I'm just gonna keep
going through them as I as I've got him here
on my.

Speaker 2 (35:22):
So called show sheet. This is an interesting choice.

Speaker 1 (35:25):
You remember Kimberly Gilfoyle, she was on Fox News for
a long time. She's a reasonably good looking young ish
woman who was on Fox News for a long time. Then,
I think the past tense is appropriate. Here was I
believe was engaged to Donald Trump Junior. I believe it

(35:48):
looks like they're not engaged anymore. I don't follow this
kind of stuff closely, but it happens to be in
the article that I'm working from here that Don Junior
apparently has been seen out and about holy the hand
of some somebody else, some Palm Beach socialite of course,
So it definitely seems like the relationship with Kimberly Gilfoyle

(36:09):
is over. By the way, Kimberly Gilfoyle, do you know
Kimberly Guilfoyle was married to in the past dragon not
a clue. She was married to Gavin Newsom, oh, the
governor of California. He wasn't governor at the time, I think,
But so she was married to Gavin Newsom, a left
wing governor. Then she's engaged to but not anymore with
Don Junior anyway. The reason I mentioned this to you

(36:30):
is that Donald Trump is naming her as his ambassador
to Greece, which is quite interesting and you might think, well, grease,
who cares? But actually Greece is a very very interesting spot,
right It's a southern Europe. A lot of flow of

(36:51):
immigrants from the Middle East up into Europe goes through Greece.
There's an immense amount of stuff that actually happens in
that part of Europe. Even though Greece doesn't seem like
a very important country, particularly to America, it's a very
interesting spot, and the ambassadorship in that country is a little.

Speaker 2 (37:12):
Bit more important than you might think.

Speaker 1 (37:16):
So anyway, that's an interesting choice, especially since she's not
dating his son anymore. But he's going to name her
to that anyway, What else do I want to talk about? Okay,
So there have been stories that there have been leaks
from Congress about the Ethics Report written about Congressman Matt

(37:38):
Gates after the Ethics Committee's investigation. Now, I have not
found an articles.

Speaker 2 (37:47):
That gives information from the report.

Speaker 1 (37:50):
Like you know, according to an anonymous source, this and
that is in the Ethics Report. I haven't.

Speaker 2 (37:54):
I haven't found that.

Speaker 1 (37:57):
Still, there are rumors out there that there were leaks
unreleased Ethics Committee released release of information about what's supposed
to be unreleased Ethics Committee investigation about former Rep. Matt Gates.
And when Matt Gates was still the nominee to be

(38:21):
Attorney General, there was a pretty decent chance that that
report would have been made public. It did go to
a vote of the Ethics Committee, which tied on a
party line vote, and therefore it wouldn't be released that way.

Speaker 2 (38:32):
But if Matt Gates was still going to be the nominee, there.

Speaker 1 (38:36):
Was a very good chance that there would be some
big leaks about that as Democrats tried to torpedo Matt Gates.
But Matt Gates was just so toxic a choice that
even Trump had to back away from him, and Matt
Gates dropped out, And so there doesn't appear to be
very much reason to release the report at this time.
Still still there is there are stories out there that

(39:03):
there have been leaks of the report, or at least
parts of it.

Speaker 2 (39:08):
And here's what I want to share with you.

Speaker 1 (39:09):
So the House Ethics Committee, right the top Democrat on
the panel, her name is Susan Wild.

Speaker 2 (39:16):
She's called the ranking member.

Speaker 1 (39:18):
Okay, the ranking member of a House committee is the
most senior member of the minority party. Right in the
House and the Senate, the majority party holds the chairmanships
of every single committee. They don't split it based on
proportion in you know, proportion in the House or anything
like that. If you're in the majority, you control them all,

(39:39):
and then the most senior member of the other party
is the ranking member. So Susan Wild is the ranking
member on the House Ethics Committee, a Democrat from Pennsylvania,
and she was absent from last week's meeting. And I'm
quoting from The Hill now, after being traced as the
source of leaks to the press regarding the investigation into
former Metgates. Former Repmatgates, sources told The Hill it remains

(40:03):
unclear if Wild voluntarily skipped the meeting or was asked
not to. It's unclear what information she leaked into whom,
and it's unclear how the panel tracked the leaks back
to her. Two sources to The Hill ultimately acknowledged.

Speaker 2 (40:22):
Two sources ultimately.

Speaker 1 (40:23):
Said that Wild ultimately acknowledged to the committee that she
had leaked information.

Speaker 2 (40:31):
And I obviously this is.

Speaker 1 (40:33):
Very bad behavior, and this kind of thing should never happen. Obviously,
we live in the real world, and this kind of
thing does happen. What's different about this one is normally
they don't figure out who the leaker is. Now they
know who the leaker is, and something like that should
be severely punished.

Speaker 2 (40:50):
Here's the problem.

Speaker 1 (40:52):
Susan Wilde lost her reelection bid She's not going to
be in the next Congress, and therefore there is no
way to punish her. I guess she gets away with one.
What am I looking at? Oh? Okay, all right, I
was gonna do that later, but I'll do it now
because the boss said do it now, and as you
had it time for now, I know I had a time.

(41:13):
Do you want some tea? By the way, I could
reach this out with soap. Why would I put this
soap in there? Rinse it out with soap and water.
I don't think I've ever done that. Why would I
start now? It's just tea? I'm good then, thank you? Though,
all right? The reason Dragon played that song is that
he saw that I had on my show sheet this
story from the Associated Press. I'm gonna take just a
few minutes here and do a little bit of international

(41:36):
stuff thanks to being pressed by the boss, even though
I was gonna talk about something else. And the headline
at the Associated Press website AP news dot com is
Israeli warplanes pound Syria as troops reportedly advanced deeper into
the country.

Speaker 2 (41:51):
So this is a very interesting thing.

Speaker 1 (41:53):
The Syrian Army, of course, was manning the border between
Syria and Israel near the Goal on Heights.

Speaker 2 (42:00):
The Syrian Army basically.

Speaker 1 (42:01):
Doesn't exist anymore, and the rebel forces appear not to
really be even efforting a word that should never be
used as a verb to They don't appear to be
trying to maintain that border. I think for now they're
busy trying to clean up Syria, and I think they're
reasonably content to let Israel handle that border for now.

(42:23):
So here's the thing. The part of the reason that
Israel took some of the Goal on Heights or most
of the Goal on Heights after the nineteen sixty seven
war is that, as you can tell from the name,
it's high, right, it's a hill, and it overlooks a
lot of stuff. So it's really really important to have
that from the perspective of being able to have overwatch

(42:45):
and see if your enemies are moving towards you or
anything else you.

Speaker 2 (42:48):
Need to see from there.

Speaker 1 (42:49):
So when the Syrian regime collapsed, Israel moved in and
they took more territory around there. They are apparently it's
not confirmed yet, but they seem to be moving some
more troops into their in there, and I don't know
how much. But Israel, according to the AP, did acknowledge
pushing into what's called a buffer zone inside of Syria.

(43:12):
But again, as the AP says, it remains unclear if
Israeli soldiers have gone beyond that area, which was established
more than fifty years ago. We talked about that. Some
people were claiming that Israel was going to try to
get to Damascus. That's absolutely nonsense. So Israel wants to
make sure that they have control of that area and
that it can't be used by, for example, Islamist groups

(43:34):
if they might feel a little freer to act with
the Asad regime not in place. So that's one thing
Israel is doing. Oh let me add one other thing.
What's going to be interesting in the medium term. Let's
say about that is how much of the territory that
Israel has moved into will they give back to Syria
versus will they try to hold it? And I think

(43:56):
much depends on the not just word but actions of
whatever the new Syrian government is in terms of acting
like they want to have good relations or at least
neutral relations with everybody. I wouldn't be surprised if Israel
tries to maintain some of the territory that is on

(44:16):
the highest ground, overlooking the points that are most important
to help you with your own defense, but maybe give
back everything else. We'll see the other thing Israel is
doing in the last forty eight hours.

Speaker 2 (44:28):
Actually they said this yesterday.

Speaker 1 (44:30):
In the last prior to forty eight hours, Israel admitted
to carrying out more than three hundred and fifty airstrikes
in Syria, hitting and I'm quoting most of these strategic
weapons stockpiles. And the concept here is Syria has a
lot of sirious weapons. Is that a Syria upon Syria

(44:53):
as weapons, including chemical weapons that pshar Asad used on
his own people. And Israel is rightly, very concerned if
Syria turns into something more of a failed state than
it almost appears to be right now, it's borderline, it's teetering, right,

(45:14):
But if it actually turns into a failed state, you
wouldn't want all these Jihattist groups running around getting the
chemical weapons out of these Syrian Army former army weapons
depots and using them against Israel, against the US, right
against it. I don't mean the US here, but against
American interests in that part of the world, maybe transporting

(45:37):
one to Europe somewhere, which is a lot easier than
transporting one of the US and using it there. So
Israel is striking these places and blowing up the Syrian weapons,
and I think that is very clever of them. I'll
tell you what I've got more I want to do
on the international stuff. But I'm going to hit a
break here so that we can start on time with
my next guest. Because we had such a great time

(45:58):
talking with James pampush On on Monday about evolution, I
asked him to come back. I really think you're going
to love this conversation. Keep it here on KOA. This
coming Sunday, Koa is going to be one hundred years old.
That's pretty fabulous. I'm looking forward to the birthday party
with a whole bunch of one hundred and twenty year
old people who were on Koah when it first started.
Not actually sure if that party is happening all right.

(46:20):
I don't do this very often. It's pretty rare that
I have a guest back on the show just a
day or two or three after having him or her
on previously.

Speaker 2 (46:31):
But I so thoroughly enjoyed.

Speaker 1 (46:34):
Our conversation with James Pampush from High Point University on
Monday that I asked.

Speaker 2 (46:39):
Him to come back.

Speaker 1 (46:40):
We talked for a few minutes on Monday about why
humans and only humans have chins, and it led to
this much bigger conversation that James and I had buy
email while he was drinking beer and watching football about evolution,
and it just seemed like so much fun. I wanted
to have have him back, and he kindly agreed to

(47:00):
share some of his time with us. So James, welcome
back to Kowa and thanks for doing this.

Speaker 4 (47:07):
Of course, happy to be here.

Speaker 1 (47:09):
So what we got into when our email conversation was
a much bigger conversation about evolution and natural selection and
how people think about that stuff. And I'm not even
sure I know what questions to ask, but let me
just start with this.

Speaker 2 (47:26):
Something I shared with you an email.

Speaker 1 (47:27):
I think that I am like most people who knowed
not enough to be helpful, but enough to be dangerous
in that when I think of evolution and I think
about a characteristic of an animal or even a plant,
I think that's probably there because it aided that being's

(47:50):
ability to reproduce and survive as a species. And I
tend to think of evolutionary adaptations as functional, because after all,
why would it have persisted if it weren't functional. And
you were saying, well, there can be a lot to that,
but most people stop there, and you definitely shouldn't stop there.

Speaker 2 (48:13):
So can you elaborate or correct me?

Speaker 4 (48:19):
Yeah, I mean I think that.

Speaker 5 (48:22):
You have a pretty common perspective, and I think that
you even share this perspective with a lot of like
academic researchers too, even who have a very similar perspective.
What I would how I would classify your approach. There's
a term for it. We call it functionalism, and it's
this idea that you know, every piece of an organism

(48:45):
serves some kind of important function that natural selection has
sort of honed it for over the course of you know,
countless millennia, and it's it's a very it's a it's
a powerful because we know that adaptations are real, we
know that they're true. But what's also powerful about it

(49:07):
is it seems to give the sort of very non
random explanation to a lot of features all at once,
and it's very useful in that regard for us to
understand the world. The problem is that it clearly doesn't
explain everything. And the chin is one of those examples
of you know people have, and I know that you've

(49:29):
been receiving a lot of emails since you had me
on the air on Monday, so.

Speaker 4 (49:33):
Welcome to my world.

Speaker 5 (49:34):
I get these kinds of emails all the time where
there's people offering these very functional explanations for why humans
would have and whether it be because you're going to
paint your pillow to your chest while you put on
a pillowcase, or maybe it's because you are anticipating getting
punched and you need that extra bone to protect yourself somehow.

(49:56):
These are all explanations for why why humans have from
a purely functional standpoint.

Speaker 4 (50:03):
But there's another suite of ideas.

Speaker 5 (50:06):
Out there that attempt to basically argue that, yes, natural
selection is very important and it's a significant contributor to
the evolutionary process, but it's not the only one, and
that there's other forces at play that also shape our

(50:27):
shape the observable morphology, and among them is this concept.

Speaker 4 (50:34):
And I introduced it to you over email. There's this
idea and evolutionary theory called a spandrel.

Speaker 5 (50:41):
It was coined by the late evolutionary biology Stephen J.

Speaker 4 (50:45):
Gould.

Speaker 5 (50:45):
And if your listeners are curious, he has a lot
of popular work out there that is pretty accessible to
people that I would encourage him to read it. But
his his idea is basically this, imagine that you have
let's let's use a common analogy that will I think
a lot of listeners would understand. Imagine that you have
You have a living room, right, and it's full of furniture, okay,

(51:08):
and you've decided that you're going to rearrange your living
room to accommodate a larger TV.

Speaker 4 (51:14):
But you're not going to throw away any of your furniture, Okay, So.

Speaker 5 (51:18):
You're going to keep all this stuff you have except
for your new TV, and you need to rearrange the
room to fit the TV in there better. Well, in
the process of rearranging in the room. Let's imagine that
you move the sofa somewhere and that requires you to
move some other pieces around the room, and before you know,
you've had this awkward little corner somewhere in the room
that you didn't really have before. But you've made this

(51:41):
awkward little space because to accommodate the larger TV, you
accidentally had to make it.

Speaker 4 (51:47):
It's this byproduct of the fact that.

Speaker 5 (51:50):
All these parts are sort of interrelated to each other
in the living room, and in order to do one
thing somewhere else in the room, you had to make
this extra piece that you didn't intend to make. So
it's a by product of the selection process. So you
did not select to make that weird corner, but now

(52:10):
you have it because you selected to get the TV
into the room. And so we can think about natural
selections potentially having these kinds of effects too, like.

Speaker 4 (52:19):
Byproducts of selection. So the cham might be one of
those things.

Speaker 5 (52:24):
It might be that other changes in the mouth and
face were happening, and because those changes were being selected for,
it necessitated this accidental production of bone elsewhere in the
mouth and face in this integrated structure.

Speaker 1 (52:40):
Wow, and I don't think I gave you as full
an introduction as I should, so just so listeners understanding
case they didn't hear you.

Speaker 2 (52:46):
On Monday, we're.

Speaker 1 (52:48):
Talking with James Pampush who has studied for many, many
years anthropology evolution, including a lot of focus on evolution.

Speaker 2 (52:56):
Of primate and human faces.

Speaker 1 (52:58):
He teaches at high University right now, Highpoint dot edu.
If you want to check out the website and and
and learn more about the school and about James. He
teaches anatomy there. So you you mentioned kind of in
passing before you know, you said the functionalist approach doesn't
leave enough room for randomness, or you said something like that,

(53:20):
and and you know, my background is kind of financial
markets guy, but also I think a lot about physics,
chaos theory, randomness, and it occurred to me that, really,
how do I want to put this?

Speaker 2 (53:34):
Would it be reasonable to assume.

Speaker 1 (53:35):
That almost any or almost every evolutionary adaptation, whether or
not it helped the survival of the species, happened randomly
the first time and then either.

Speaker 2 (53:49):
Got passed along or not.

Speaker 1 (53:50):
Right a badass Adam hit a piece of DNA, it
changed something in the DNA that just passed along to
a kid, and then the kid had a chin that
he didn't have before, or the kid had blue eyes
that didn't have before, and it was random, and then
the process takes over from there. And if that's true,
does it does? How do you think about that?

Speaker 5 (54:13):
That's a great question, actually, because I think that part
of the part of the functionalist argument is that mutations
arise totally randomly, and that once and that a mutation
is cape that well, it's it's that they're totally random,
and that they're they're capable of a like a basically

(54:36):
an infinite range of being able to produce variants. Okay,
and what we and and that's sort of one of
those If that's true, then natural selection can then be
the sculptor on the back end, shaping those variants into
useful forms.

Speaker 4 (54:52):
But that what that sort of ignores is this basic principle.

Speaker 5 (54:56):
Think about this for a moment, you look more like
your parents than you do any other random person, right,
And what that and that everybody intuitively understands that, I
think immediately, and what that sort of says to you
is that, well, no, it's not totally random how.

Speaker 4 (55:17):
You're going to be made. Right, So, even though you
have a bunch.

Speaker 5 (55:21):
Of mutations in yourself that are introduced from you know,
the generation of your forum compared to your parents' form,
because like it's not a perfect copy of your parents,
that you're not getting a perfect copy of their DNA, okay.
So instead, instead, what's really happening is there's a sort
of a finite range over which you're allowed to vary, okay,

(55:45):
and then selection can operate on that range, all right.
And so this is the concept called the phylogenetic constraint.
This this idea is that you know, any one individual
looks more like their parents than they do any other
random individual. But that's also true if you scale it
up to the species level, such that any daughter species

(56:07):
of a parent species is going to look a lot
more like that parent species than it will some other
random species. What that immediately tells us is that, like, no,
there isn't an infinite range of mutational possibilities. Instead, what
it means is that there's like a finite set of them,
and that some mutations are more likely to occur than others,

(56:27):
all right, And so because of that, like, it's not
a truly random walk through time with selection kind of
buffering it.

Speaker 4 (56:34):
Instead, it's sort of like.

Speaker 5 (56:35):
A guided walk, where you know, some elements of the
form are permitted to vary a lot more than other
elements of the form are.

Speaker 4 (56:44):
So for example, like the number of limbs.

Speaker 5 (56:49):
That like tetrapod organisms or vertebrates have is pretty constrained, okay,
Like you see animals that have forelimbs like ourselves.

Speaker 4 (56:59):
You see animals that have two limbs.

Speaker 5 (57:01):
Sometimes, and you see animals that have no limbs, but
you don't see vertebrates that have six limbs or eight limbs.
You know, you don't have It's pretty finite, okay. And
as such, like that constrains the world of possibility. So
it means immediately that selection can't be an engineer because

(57:21):
it can't dream up any scenario at once. It has
to work within the confines of what's kind of available.

Speaker 1 (57:29):
Okay.

Speaker 2 (57:29):
I have two follow up questions, So.

Speaker 1 (57:34):
Are there no six limbed vertebrates because a vertebrate DNA
cannot be coded in a way that could create six limbs,
or be a mutation that would create six limbs, either

(57:54):
because of that itself or because of some other thing
would also change, would create a zygote that cannot come
to term, or a baby that will always be still born,
or something that may be born alive for a little
while and will absolutely die before it reproduces, but in
some form can never be passed on.

Speaker 2 (58:15):
Which one of those is it? Or is it both?

Speaker 4 (58:19):
It could be either.

Speaker 5 (58:20):
I mean, those two things are very hard to distinguish
from each other in an experimental basis, because what you're
saying is that if we introduce an insult to the
productive mechanism, will it just cause the entire system to collapse?

Speaker 4 (58:34):
Which it might if.

Speaker 5 (58:36):
You make a big enough change to the underlying like
the if you make a big enough change to like
the basic components of the code, yeah, like big parts
of the code might not be able to be executed,
and then which case, you know, you have a non
viable offspring. Alternatively, you know what you're saying is there
there might not be room in the code to sort

(58:56):
of accommodate this, right, Like, so there's not like a an
obvious place where you would go like adjust it. And
that's potentially true too. But in either case, both of
these things are basically arguments of Both of these arguments
are descriptions of a constraint prohibiting the ability to produce

(59:18):
a new mutation that selection could potentially operate on. And
so like, at the end of the day, if you're
just trying to get it pass it up to the
selection regime, you still are running it.

Speaker 4 (59:30):
It doesn't matter what one of.

Speaker 5 (59:31):
Those two barriers it is, it's still preventing those possibilities.
But you know, something is very interesting about vertebrate limbs,
And I actually I think that it's very powerful to
be able to understand this because I teach my anatomy
class from this perspective too. Like, for instance, just ask
your listeners, like to compare their upper and lower limbs.

Speaker 4 (59:53):
I mean they are copies of each other.

Speaker 5 (59:56):
That it's a copy paste job that are just on
different end ends of the tube that is your body.
I mean they're they're constructed the exact same way. They
just have minor shape changes to them. They use the
same code to be made. Like it's it's like it's
natural selection in a sense is of course working to

(01:00:16):
shape these things. But it's not random that they look
so similar because all it was was a simple mutation
that said, all right, you know how to grow an
upper limb. Now let's let's like copy paste this lower
down on the on the body and now we'll turn
that into a lower limb. And so you can see
literally the constraints of our of our potential in our

(01:00:40):
own forms, you know, in our own bodies. It's and
when you teach it that way, you can really streamline
how much students have to memorize you. That can you
can deep delve more into like understanding of things.

Speaker 1 (01:00:53):
Very interesting.

Speaker 2 (01:00:53):
All right, we just have a couple of minutes left,
so give me.

Speaker 1 (01:00:56):
I want to get quick answers from you on my
last two questions.

Speaker 2 (01:01:00):
What is expectation?

Speaker 4 (01:01:04):
Okay, acaptation?

Speaker 2 (01:01:06):
Axaptation? Sorry wrote it now?

Speaker 5 (01:01:09):
Yeah, that's a it's a great word. It's another one
of these Gouldian terms.

Speaker 4 (01:01:15):
So Stephen J.

Speaker 5 (01:01:16):
Gould, it's this idea that a trait has evolved for
some purpose, okay, but then gets repurposed for a new
use that selection did not choose it for. But now
that it's being used for that new thing, it might
be selected on by selection. So the example I gave

(01:01:37):
you in the email when we were exchanging emails was
an egret shading the water. This is the same example
that Stephen J. Gould used in one of his famous papers.
So what it says is if there's a big glare
on the surface of a pond or whatever, you'll sometimes
see egrets use their wings like a like a like
an umbrella to shave the surface so they could see

(01:01:58):
down into the water and then strike a fish. I
think every one of your listeners would agree that wings
did not evolve to be shades on top of water
for egrets. That they still use them to fly, But
now that they're being repurposed, we call that an acceptation.

Speaker 4 (01:02:17):
And this must happen again and again and again throughout evolution.

Speaker 5 (01:02:20):
It's almost like, oh, you have this thing, you didn't
expect to use it for this, but now that you are,
now it's being selected to do that thing. So it's
like a turning point in the history of like a
trait if.

Speaker 1 (01:02:33):
Wow, that's fascinating. All right, My last question for you,
what are you researching now?

Speaker 5 (01:02:42):
Actually I have a colleague that lives in Denver who
works at the medical school there.

Speaker 4 (01:02:48):
His name is Paul Morris. If you guys want to
harass him because he owes me some work.

Speaker 5 (01:02:52):
Actually, but he and I and another guy at Duke
we're working on measuring the change and shape of tooth surfaces.
So traditionally it's thought that like monkey teeth in particular
aren't supposed to change shape very much, or they're not
sort of quote unquote designed to wear down.

Speaker 4 (01:03:12):
But what we're.

Speaker 5 (01:03:13):
Showing is that that as these teeth kind of break
down throughout the life cycle of an organism, that they're
that some of these monkey teeth are getting sharper with
that introduction of wear. So it's almost like the tooth
needs to break in a little bit before it's really effective.
And this is just such an interesting area of research
because it's pointing to this idea that like maybe morphology

(01:03:36):
should be viewed more dynamically, you know, not like a
set snapshot of what the thing is, but rather like
a continuously changing thing throughout the life cycle of a
of a singular organism. And it's it's just it's just
a fun way of applying our understanding of evolution.

Speaker 2 (01:03:55):
Well, absolutely love it, folks.

Speaker 1 (01:03:57):
James Pampush teaches anatomy at High Point University. The paper
that got me on to talking about James called The
Enduring Puzzle of the Human Chin. All this stuff is
up on my blog if you want to go read
more about it yourself. Thanks so much for making time
another great conversation.

Speaker 2 (01:04:13):
I really appreciate it.

Speaker 4 (01:04:16):
Of course, anytime. Ross all right, having me.

Speaker 1 (01:04:18):
Thanks James, thank you all right?

Speaker 2 (01:04:20):
Oh boy, was that cool?

Speaker 1 (01:04:21):
How cool was that? Oh my gosh, what a great concept. Axaptation.
Acaptation that is just really something. Why is that little
red line going dragon? Did I accidentally hit a button?

Speaker 3 (01:04:33):
No?

Speaker 1 (01:04:33):
That was no, I don't know.

Speaker 2 (01:04:34):
All right, anyway, what I love that concept?

Speaker 1 (01:04:37):
Right the bird? Let me just say that one again.
So wing's adept for flying, obviously, and then this bird
uses it to put shade over the water so that
there isn't the reflection of the sun off the water.
So therefore, because it's shaded, the bird can see the
fish in the water, and the bird.

Speaker 2 (01:04:51):
Can catch the fish.

Speaker 1 (01:04:53):
And now, with natural selection, the concept of natural selection,
that adaptation makes that bird more likely to survive because
it's more likely not to starve to death because it
figured out to use wings that way.

Speaker 2 (01:05:06):
And so the wings will continue to.

Speaker 1 (01:05:09):
Be selected for not just for flying anymore, but for shading.
I mean even in a way where you can imagine
in some number of you know, million years or whatever,
maybe you get a flightless bird that has wings, but
only uses it for shade. I just think all of
that is so cool. I hope you found that half
as interesting as I did, or twice as interesting as

(01:05:29):
I did. Keep it right here on Kiowa. Thank you
to the listener who sent this text that made my day,
Ross Bill o'idley. Bill o'reiley said that if you were boring,
you wouldn't keep your show with interviews like this one,
and I think he was talking about the evolution one
we just did. There's no chance of you becoming boring.
It's part of what I like about you and Mandy.

(01:05:50):
You all don't just talk about politics all the time.

Speaker 2 (01:05:55):
So thank you very much. I appreciate that.

Speaker 1 (01:05:57):
And then there's another person who said it was actually
boring with some z after with some z's afterwards. I
think that was probably that was probably dragging tech texting
into that text line.

Speaker 2 (01:06:10):
Did you take your trash out this morning?

Speaker 1 (01:06:12):
Stop? Stop?

Speaker 2 (01:06:13):
I don't know anymore.

Speaker 1 (01:06:15):
I'm just so here. Here's what it's devolved to, because
you have so me so confused. I take my trash
out on the mornings when Kristen tells me it's trash day,
and take the trash out. You don't even know when
your own No. You have me so completely confused I
have I have no no idea. At least you're not
just taking it out every morning and then bringing it.

Speaker 2 (01:06:35):
All back, which is what you want me to do.

Speaker 1 (01:06:38):
Right, it's clearly what you're what you're trying to get
me to do. This listener, says god Zekes in all caps,
goad Zekes Ross. I absolutely love your guests. I love
learning new stuff. I've learned so much listening to you.
And yeah, Mandy too, well, thank you so much for listening.
It's part of what's fun. Don't know if I have

(01:06:59):
time for this, but I'm I'm gonna try. This is
kind of This is interesting. This is written by a
guy named Brendan O'Neill writing for The Spectator, and it's
entitled The Creepy Idolization of Luigi Mangione. Right, so he's
the guy who killed the CEO of United Healthcare. So
let me just share this with you and I'll see
if I got time to get through it. So, according

(01:07:20):
to the modern left, killing the fascists of Hamas's genocide,
but killing a CEO and father of two is justice.

Speaker 2 (01:07:28):
How else are.

Speaker 1 (01:07:29):
We supposed to make sense of the creepy idolization of
Luigi Mangioni, the suspect, and the shooting death of Brian Thompson,
the CEO of the health insurance firm United Healthcare. Seriously,
the swooning over Mangioni is a new low for the
very online left. Thompson was slain on the streets of
Manhattan last Wednesday. He was fifty years old, a dad.

(01:07:51):
He'd been a boss. He'd been the boss of United
Healthcare for three years. Almost instantly, even before we knew
the identity.

Speaker 2 (01:07:58):
Of the suspect, leftists.

Speaker 1 (01:07:59):
Were swarming social media to make excuses for this barbaric
attack on an innocent, unarmed man. Some even celebrated it.
In some corners of the web, there was, as one
report described it, outright ecstasy over this brazen assassination. He
had it coming, cried thousands of sunlight starved online radicals.
This was just desserts for America's unfair system of health insurance.

Speaker 2 (01:08:22):
They insisted.

Speaker 1 (01:08:23):
They went on Wikipedia to edit Thompson's page, branding him
a parasite and a con man who was quote currently
burning in hell. When United Healthcare posted about their CEO's death,
on Facebook, the comments section was clogged up with people
posting the cry laughing emoji. Seventy seven thousand people posted

(01:08:45):
that guffawing face.

Speaker 2 (01:08:46):
And mockery of the dead dad.

Speaker 1 (01:08:49):
When it was revealed that the mysterious masked gunman had
used bullets inscribed with the words denied, defend, and deposed,
as slogan often used to describe health insurance tech of
delaying payments.

Speaker 2 (01:09:01):
Payments, the leftist web went wild.

Speaker 1 (01:09:04):
Some have even embraced those three D words as a
rallying cry in tribute to their hero killer, to the
privileged toy Town revolutionaries of TikTok, the shooter, whoever he was,
was nothing short of a twenty first century Robin Hood.
Even some mainstream commentators, while not quite dancing in the
streets over Thompson's death, did wonder out loud if the
quote gleeful reaction to it made sense. Former Washington Post

(01:09:29):
reporter Taylor Lawrence, by the way, She's one of the
worst people in America, posted a celebratory image, a celebratory
image saying CEO down. She later told Piers Morgan she
felt joy at his death. When Morgan pushed back, she
dialed it down, maybe not joy, but certainly not empathy.
Over at The Guardian, ur Wa Madawi said the reason

(01:09:50):
Thompson's death elicited so little sympathy is because he was
the face of an unfair system for those who are
quote shocked by the satisfaction Thompson's murder is inspired.

Speaker 2 (01:10:01):
She had a terse request.

Speaker 1 (01:10:02):
Quote, spare me the pearl clutching, it says, if pearl clutching,
it's back up.

Speaker 2 (01:10:09):
If it's pearl clutching.

Speaker 1 (01:10:11):
To be concerned that we live in an era of
such casual cruelty and digital spite, the tens of thousands
of people will happily taunt the colleagues of a murdered
man with a cackling emoji.

Speaker 2 (01:10:22):
I guess I'm a pearl clutcher now.

Speaker 1 (01:10:25):
Then the identity of the suspect was revealed and things
got really crazy. Luisi Mangioni Luigimanngioni is twenty six, an
Ivy League student from a well to do Mariland family
and cute. He's being fawned over everywhere. Quote he can
serve the sentence in my house, your honor end. Quote.
That's been the tenor of the memes. In the eyes

(01:10:46):
of the tragic leftists addicted to doom scrolling, the kind
of people who put the hammer and sickle in their
social media bio to piss off.

Speaker 2 (01:10:54):
Their rich parents.

Speaker 1 (01:10:55):
Mangioni is a brooding, one man slayer of the capitalist order.
Not since the Weyward hippie girls got ensnared by Charles
Manson have so many youthful members of the bourgeoisie obsequiously
snuggled up to a suspect in a murder case. Until
that is, it was revealed that mangione has some unwoke views.

(01:11:15):
He seems to be less a blazing revolutionary than a
centrist tech bro. He appears to be a fan of
the right leaning entrepreneur Peter Thiel and a cheerleader for traditionalism.
Some of his fans are mighty disappointed in summary being
the suspect in a murder case cool, retweeting Jonathan Hate
cancel him. It should go without saying, and yet apparently

(01:11:38):
it doesn't that killing people is not a reasonable response
to social problems. I agree with Josh Shapiro, the Democratic
governor of Pennsylvania, who said, quote, in America, we do
not kill people in cold blood to resolve policy differences
or express a viewpoint. If that makes me an old
square worse a pearl clutcher, so be it. Frenzied beatification

(01:12:01):
of a murder suspect speaks to a serious moral malady
in the digital world. That so many of the virtual
left got a vicarious kick from the death of Thompson
suggests they're increasingly.

Speaker 2 (01:12:14):
Unmoored from reason and decency.

Speaker 1 (01:12:17):
It's the kind of juvenile barbarism where confused, isolated leftists,
bereft that the working classes have wholly abandoned them in
favor of Donald Trump, get to feel alive and revolutionary
for once. The price of their fuzzy, warm feeling the
life of a human being for shame. Behold the twenty

(01:12:40):
first century radical who will melt into a puddle of
tears if you misgender him, but who's cool with murder
if the.

Speaker 2 (01:12:49):
Victim is a CEO.

Speaker 1 (01:12:52):
The sea of online range has dragged these people so
far from the shores of moral Reason's.

Speaker 2 (01:13:00):
My moral code.

Speaker 1 (01:13:01):
Don't murder people and don't celebrate when people are murdered.

Speaker 2 (01:13:06):
Boring and not very mimeable, I know.

Speaker 1 (01:13:10):
But there we are. We'll be right back. The article
I just shared with you from the Spectator about the
odd and disturbing leftist fascination and appreciation oddly enough of
Luigi Mangioni, the guy who killed the Brian Thompson, the

(01:13:32):
CEO of United Healthcare. So a couple of interesting listener texts, Ross,
have you noticed how much the media went from not
saying the shooter's name the loving saying Luigi Mangioni. Oh,
they love it. No one can say the shooter's name enough.
Everybody clicks on stuff that says Luigi Mangioni. He sounds
like a character from a video game, and he shoots
people dead on the street. Luigi Mangioni's that's pretty good.

(01:13:56):
Let's say, Ross, They're not just celebrating murder. They're celebrating
murder by gun violence. Right.

Speaker 2 (01:14:03):
What else? Okay? One other, just quick thing here.

Speaker 1 (01:14:07):
This other listener says, everything I've read about the killer
is what I perceived as leftist.

Speaker 2 (01:14:10):
Beliefs and actions.

Speaker 1 (01:14:13):
I'm not gonna spend a lot of time on this
and say very quickly, having looked at his Twitter feed,
I do not think the guy was a leftist. I
think the guy had a very interesting wide range of views,
and he's the kind of guy who, if he hadn't
turned into some kind of deranged murderer, might actually be very.

Speaker 2 (01:14:30):
Interesting to have a conversation with.

Speaker 1 (01:14:32):
If a lot of the people he was reading and
tweeting about are the kinds of people I like having
on the show, very interesting thinkers with a wide range
of views, and not leftist primarily. Truly what I believe,
based on the fact that the guy was apparently in
pain for a long time, and also that he clearly

(01:14:56):
fell out of touch and out of communication with friends
and family for months, the better part of a year
I think before he did this makes me think that,
you know, maybe caused by ongoing pain and maybe not.
I think that it's there's some likelihood also given his

(01:15:16):
age at twenty six, that the guy suffered a psychotic break.
And when you hear him yelling out of the jailhouse,
when he's you know, being brought into the police station
and he's yelling back at the camera about you know,
it's an insult to the intelligence of Americans. He seems.
He seems at the same time intelligent and crazy, and
you can be both. Right, Look at Ted Kaczinski the Unibamber, right,

(01:15:38):
there are plenty of people who have very high IQs
who are also psychopaths, and it wouldn't it wouldn't surprise
me at all.

Speaker 2 (01:15:47):
It wouldn't surprise me at all.

Speaker 1 (01:15:50):
That this comes down, if this comes down to an
insanity defense. So I just want to share that with you.
I don't think he's a leftist. I do think he
hated health insurance companies, but I think it was personal
more than just a leftist hatred of any and all corporations.
And I think he had a psychotic break. That's my guess.

(01:16:12):
It's pure speculation, but I'm allowed to speculate. I'm not
on the jeury. I'm not a judge. I'm just a
guy sharing my opinion. Okay, so Dragon, a listener says,
I need to address the bumper music. And I think
you did that bumper music because twice in one show
now you looked at the show sheet and said, well,
this is what Ross said he was going to talk

(01:16:33):
about here. I look at the show sheet more often
than you do.

Speaker 2 (01:16:36):
Well, that's not hard to do.

Speaker 1 (01:16:40):
Everybody. I mean, people who don't ever look at the
show sheet look at it more often than I do. True,
the only time I look at it is when I
have a guest maybe, or when I'm making it the
night before so that I can come in and ignore
it the next day. Very true, double true, double true.
So you just played it's raining men as though you
play that is correct? Yeah, are the weather girls the

(01:17:03):
weather girls? So yesterday we talked a little bit about
Google in their new chip called Willow that can do
a benchmark calculation in five minutes that would take a
typical current supercomputer, not a regular computer or a supercomputer
ten to the power of twenty five ten septilian years,
which Dragon determined yesterday was a lot, although he can

(01:17:24):
count to it right relatively quickly too. All right, let's
hear it one two ten septilian see done, done.

Speaker 2 (01:17:33):
So maybe it's not that impressive a feed after all.

Speaker 1 (01:17:36):
So anyway, I got another Google story for you, and
that's why Dragon played that bumper music.

Speaker 2 (01:17:40):
So let me share this with you.

Speaker 1 (01:17:42):
Google has an AI thing called gen Cast ge n
capital cast, and they published a paper in the very
prestigious journal Nature just in the last several days, I believe, yeah,
a week ago, let's call it a week ago.

Speaker 2 (01:17:59):
And what they're writing about.

Speaker 1 (01:18:02):
What Google is writing about is that their gen cast
system which uses their deep mind AI can predict the
weather twenty percent better than what is currently probably the
most highly regarded, at least in Europe, the most highly
regarded medium range weather forecast.

Speaker 2 (01:18:25):
It's called the.

Speaker 1 (01:18:25):
European Center for Medium Range Weather Forecasts. It's the the
ENS forecast is the actual forecast, and as The Guardian
in the UK puts.

Speaker 2 (01:18:35):
It, that's widely regarded as the world leader.

Speaker 1 (01:18:37):
In weather forecasting and gen cast. This AI thing can
can forecast twenty percent better. Here's this is what the
Guardian says in a head to head comparison. The program
turned out more accurate forecasts than NS on day to
day weather and for extreme events up to fifteen days
in advance, and was better at predicting the paths of

(01:18:58):
destructive hurricanes and other topical cyclones, including where they would
make landfall. A research scientist at Google said outperforming NS
marks something of an inflection point in the advance of
AI for weather prediction, at least in the short term.

Speaker 2 (01:19:13):
These models are going.

Speaker 1 (01:19:14):
To a company and be alongside existing traditional approaches.

Speaker 2 (01:19:19):
Well, what does that last sentence means?

Speaker 1 (01:19:21):
That last sentence means we are going to put a
whole bunch of weather forecasting people out of business.

Speaker 2 (01:19:26):
Eventually, just not this week.

Speaker 1 (01:19:29):
As you know. Right now, they're going to use our
tool as another tool in their arsenal and try to
make their forecasts a little better. But we do think
that eventually we are going to dominate all of them
with our AI And you know what, they're probably right? Wait,
three segments in a row? That is that we're doing here?
I don't know if they were in a row? Were
they in a row? Three segments?

Speaker 2 (01:19:49):
Three segments?

Speaker 1 (01:19:50):
Not quite in a row, but three out of four
or three out of five or something like that. Wow?

Speaker 2 (01:19:56):
What did I do wrong? Why are you harassing me
like this?

Speaker 1 (01:19:58):
Boss? What have I done?

Speaker 2 (01:20:00):
This mean you're about to fire me?

Speaker 1 (01:20:01):
It's yours.

Speaker 6 (01:20:02):
You are in a contract, the it's your show sheet.
I just follow along, all right? Fine, So since I'm
supposed to talk about the supermarket.

Speaker 1 (01:20:14):
Thing which you just which you just heard, no I know,
which you've probably already talked about. Yeah I have. I
talked about it, but it's a big story, so I
can talk about it again. You know. What's like? We're
for married people out there. I canna see if I
can worry this carefully for for married people out there.

Speaker 2 (01:20:34):
Have you ever been in a situation where your.

Speaker 1 (01:20:36):
Wife says something trying to just come up with a
with a good example a couple of your wife. Your
wife says something like, boy, our kid's hair is getting
really long, which is code for you need to take
him to get a hair cut, right, And and sometimes

(01:20:57):
I will say to my wife, does that mean ross,
please take him to get a haircut? I need clarification, right,
because because women won't say it directly, they'll they'll or
maybe they'll see the goal of some kind of weird
I don't know.

Speaker 2 (01:21:13):
Do you have an example from your life?

Speaker 1 (01:21:15):
Dragon? Do you know?

Speaker 2 (01:21:16):
Do you understand what I'm talking about?

Speaker 7 (01:21:17):
Even we're both guys, so we don't pick up on
those kind of hints anyway. So yeah, true to say, hey, yo,
take take him for a haircut. Dude's hairs get a
little long?

Speaker 1 (01:21:27):
Yeah sure, yeah, right, So we've we've all, we've all
been there, and but they they don't say it directly.
But then when you don't pick up the clue and
do the thing, then you get in trouble because you're
supposed to be a mind reader, right with me, And
that's like my relationship with Dragon, right, he plays it.

(01:21:51):
He plays weird Al. He plays weird Al, which which
I like? Which is his? This is weird one of
the guys you've seen in concert? I have not, but
I think he's coming to Red Rocks this coming next year.
That sounds accurate, So I might go see if I
can get tickets.

Speaker 2 (01:22:07):
Do you want to go?

Speaker 1 (01:22:08):
Hell yeah, I do, even if it's on a work night.
You still want to go? Hell yeah, I do. All right,
I'll try to get that done. That'd be Does does
missus Redbeard want to go? You think you? What if
she could? Yeah? So so Dragon will play something and
then I'm supposed to understand what it is, and I'm
supposed to then like do the thing like I'm some

(01:22:29):
kind of mind reader. That's obvious. Really, why is it obvious?
Is this about food? The grocery thing? Correlations right there
to one?

Speaker 3 (01:22:39):
Right there?

Speaker 1 (01:22:40):
One to one correlation? All right, let's keep going. So
Cynthia Veil just talked about this, the Kroger Albertson's thing
falling apart. But yeah, but but Dragon is insisting that
I need to talk about it too, so I will.
It's not all that surprising that a judge ruled against.
It ruled against this because even though I tend to

(01:23:02):
default in favor of allowing mergers, I think there needs
to be a really strong argument to block a merger,
and the argument must be that it is clearly against
the interest of consumers. That is my only interest, by
the way, in anti trust law, and that has been
the federal government's approach to antitrust law for probably thirty

(01:23:24):
or forty years, although the current Federal Trade Commission is
broadening it out way beyond that to other things. All
I care about in general in economics, right, all I
care about is the well being of the consumer.

Speaker 2 (01:23:38):
Everything else follows from that.

Speaker 1 (01:23:40):
If the consumer is being taken care of, jobs will
be created, profits will be created for shareholders, even things
that I don't care about, like union membership that could
come along as long as the consumer is being taken
care of. So the federal government and a couple of
state governments like our own Attorney General Phil Wiser argued

(01:24:01):
against this, saying that allowing Safeway and King Super and
allowing Albertson's and Kroger, which in Colorado is Safeway and
King Supers or City Market to merge, would eliminate competition
in many places where the town just has those two
things and no other real supermarkets.

Speaker 2 (01:24:23):
You know, there's some places that also have a Walmart.

Speaker 1 (01:24:25):
But some don't, and so the government argued that merger
would be wildly anti competitive. And I think there's something
to that, right, I can picture in my mind, which
is not the same thing as data. Okay, anecdotes are
not the same thing as data. But I feel like
I can picture in my mind. And surely, of course

(01:24:47):
the Attorney General did actual research on this, but I
can picture in my mind plenty of towns that I've
been to in Colorado that have some form of Kroger, right,
either a safe either a supers or a market and
a Safe Way and no other big supermarket. I'm thinking,
And I could be wrong. You tell me if you're

(01:25:08):
more expert than I am. But one that comes immediately
to mind is Idaho Springs. I think someone can tell
me in my mind, Idaho Springs has a Safe.

Speaker 2 (01:25:19):
Way and a King Soupers and not a Walmart.

Speaker 1 (01:25:22):
Can you check dragon, But anyway, that's an example. So
imagine if it had those two stores and now and
now there's only one, And you can imagine how that
could be bad for consumers in a variety of ways, choice, price,
that kind of stuff. I mentioned earlier unions were against
this because they didn't want to lose jobs if some
of these stores closed. In any case, as you heard
Cynthia Vail report, as you've heard us reporting all morning,

(01:25:44):
as you've heard other people reporting, the deal got blown
up by a federal judge. And rather than appeal at
Albertson's decided, and Albertson's is more of the target in this,
and King Supers is more the acquirer in this, Androbertson said,
you know what, we just don't think this is gonna
go anywhere.

Speaker 2 (01:26:02):
We don't think we're gonna win on appeal.

Speaker 1 (01:26:04):
We don't want to waste more money, spend more money
on lawyers.

Speaker 2 (01:26:07):
So we're done. And then so that part.

Speaker 1 (01:26:09):
Is interesting enough, Dragon, have you found anything. I'm having
a hard time trying to figure that one out.

Speaker 2 (01:26:15):
Okay, all right, let's see here. Way, let's type this.

Speaker 1 (01:26:17):
Maybe someone will just text any answer. Can Can somebody
please text us at five six six nine zero and
tell us what supermarkets of reasonably large size exist in
Idaho Springs. I would like to know, I really I
really would ross. It's called wife speak. Married for thirty
five plus years, and I'm fluent in understanding it. Evergreen

(01:26:39):
only has King Supers in Safeway. Okay, this person says
Idaho Springs only as a safe way. I'm not sure
if that's true, but that's what this person says. Evergreen
only has King Supers in Safeway. I'm sure there's some
other mountain towns as well that don't have a Walmart
and have these things.

Speaker 2 (01:26:52):
So you get the idea got blown up.

Speaker 1 (01:26:54):
But for me, that's not even the most interesting part
of the story at this point. For me, the most
interesting part of this story is this headline that is
from Albertson's from today. Albertson's files lawsuit against Kroger for
breach of merger agreements. And I talked about this earlier,
so for the benefit of people who are listening in podcasts,
I'm gonna do it briefly now, and that is Albertsons

(01:27:16):
is suing Kroger, saying that Kroger, the bigger company, didn't
do enough to make sure that the merger happened. So
here's their argument. I'm just going to talk as if
I am Albertsons. Right now, our stock price was trading
at X. Kroger came in and offered a lot more

(01:27:37):
than X. Our shareholders were going to get a lot
more than X because of Kroger's offer, and we expected
to get that money.

Speaker 2 (01:27:50):
The merger fell apart.

Speaker 1 (01:27:52):
And so now not only are we not going to
get more than X, we might not even get X
because now we've missed other opportunities.

Speaker 2 (01:28:01):
To do other.

Speaker 1 (01:28:02):
Things while we were waiting for the merger with Kroger.
So now not only are we not going to get
the more than X that we thought we were going
to get from the merger, our stock may not even
be worth what it was worth at the time that
Kroger said that they are interested in taking us over.
And furthermore, it's Kroger's fault. Again, I'm giving Albertson's argument.

(01:28:26):
It's Kroger's fault because they didn't work closely enough with regulators.
They weren't open to selling stores to more credible buyers
who really could be potentially keeping the stores open, rather
than the people Kroger said they wanted to sell the
store to, which was not a credible outfit for keeping

(01:28:47):
stores open, and So Albertsons is arguing the deal fell
apart not just because it was opposed by the government,
but because it was opposed by the government because King suit,
because Kroger didn't do everything they could have done to

(01:29:08):
keep it together. And therefore, according to Albertsons, they want
not only this six hundred million dollar termination fee that
they're absolutely going to get anyway, but what they're saying
is they want billions of dollars from Kroger. And I'm
quoting to make Albertsons and a shareholder's whole because Albertson's

(01:29:31):
shareholders have been denied this multi billion dollar premium. And
I'm quoting from Albertsons that Kroger agreed to pay for
Albertson's shares and has been subjected to a decrease in
shareholder value on account of Albertson's inability to pursue other
business opportunities.

Speaker 2 (01:29:48):
At YadA, YadA, YadA.

Speaker 1 (01:29:49):
So I made this analogy before, I'll make it one
more time now and I'm.

Speaker 2 (01:29:53):
Gonna move on to another story.

Speaker 1 (01:29:55):
Imagine that there's a girl who you really you'd love
to marry her, you think she's into you, you're dating
her you hope to marry her. You know that over
here there is this other girl that you also really
like a lot, and you wouldn't mind having a relationship,

(01:30:15):
maybe even a marriage with that other girl if this
one doesn't work out and it turns out that the
girl you're really hoping to marry decides not to marry
you for whatever reason. Again, this is a bad analogy.
That's why I'm president of the Band Analogies. Thank you. So,
the girl you're dating decides not to marry you, and

(01:30:36):
in the meantime, while you were waiting for her to
make up her mind, the other girl who you really
liked moved on to somebody else, and now she's not
available anymore. And now you want to sue the girl
who won't marry you for not marrying you because you
missed that other opportunity.

Speaker 2 (01:30:52):
And this will be this will be my argument.

Speaker 1 (01:30:54):
Now, even though you missed the opportunity because you made
the decision to pursue the first girl, how can you You
can't blame the first girl for losing the opportunity at
the second girl. You should have just made a better choice.
You should have chosen better The partnership, the relationship that

(01:31:15):
was likely to work out. Oh, you chose one that
wasn't to stay away from the red head. Oh, I'm
not going to comment on that. You're a redhead sort
of yeah, no, not that you have any hair on
your head, but from your beard. Yeah, when you had hair,
was it the same color as your beard is now?
It was a brownish brownish.

Speaker 2 (01:31:37):
People wouldn't have called you a redhead.

Speaker 1 (01:31:41):
Could right light? You know, interesting? Not that interesting.

Speaker 2 (01:31:46):
So sorry, I'm feeling very silly.

Speaker 1 (01:31:50):
I got some new parts for my speakers coming tomorrow,
and I'm very very excited about it. I can't wait
to put them in and try all this. Oh my gosh,
I'm so exciting. Very silly.

Speaker 7 (01:31:58):
You didn't place on the blog at roskovincy dot com
one of the videos that I sent yesterday or.

Speaker 1 (01:32:03):
The day before. I didn't get to those yet, Okay,
I will put so. When I got your emails, I
had already pretty much filled up the show sheet that
I don't look at.

Speaker 7 (01:32:12):
Not that I'm complaining about what you put on your
blog at Roskvinsky dot com, but one of those videos
is absolutely phenomenal.

Speaker 1 (01:32:18):
From which day, uh, yesterday, from yesterday before? All right,
I'll go, do you remember, like vaguely what it's like.
Can you give a clue without too much of a
spoiler so I can talk to your dog how you
talk to your dog. Okay, I'll go find it and
I'll make sure to put it up. Usually, you may notice, Dragon,
since you pay more attention to the blog than I do,
that often the videos that you send me end up
in the blog a couple of days later after behind

(01:32:39):
after you sent him, I'm a day or two, but
I was disappointed today that I didn't see it.

Speaker 2 (01:32:42):
Yeah, all right, I'm sorry.

Speaker 1 (01:32:43):
I don't mean to let you down, but we will
will take care of that. So I spent a little
bit of time earlier talking about Israel and Syria, and
I actually said at the time that I have two
international affairs stories to tell you about, and so this
is the other one.

Speaker 2 (01:32:55):
I'm just gonna do this briefly now.

Speaker 1 (01:32:57):
The other day we head on the show and Wilson, right,
Brian Andrews and Jeff Wilson, two navy guys who are
writing Tom Clancy novels, and we just had him on
for their new one called Defense Protocol, which is a
lot of fun. Now, the premise of that book. And
if you don't want any kind of spoiler about the
book Defense Protocol, if you just went to buy it

(01:33:18):
and you haven't read it yet, or if you haven't
bought it but you do plan to read it, then
maybe just don't listen for the next twenty seconds, all right,
because I'm gonna.

Speaker 2 (01:33:27):
Give a little bit more about the story.

Speaker 1 (01:33:29):
So the premise in Defense Protocol is the president of China,
the premiere of China, wants to take over Taiwan, wants
to do it in the worst way, and wants to
do it now. And so what he does, and again
this is definitely a spoiler for the book, So if

(01:33:50):
you're gonna read the book and you haven't done it yet,
don't listen to this part. Just come back in a
few seconds. What he does is he uses an annual
military exercise that the Chinese Communist Party government, the mainland
China government, does every year around China. He uses that,

(01:34:13):
or he intends to use that as a cover from
which to launch an actual invasion of Taiwan by doing
what looks like an exercise that they've done before, but
turning it into the actual invasion. And so I thought
of that, and the story is a lot more complicated

(01:34:34):
and interesting than that, but that's kind of the underpinning
of the.

Speaker 2 (01:34:39):
Plot of the book.

Speaker 1 (01:34:40):
So I saw this story yesterday and this is on
CNN's website. Actually, multiple formations of Chinese naval and Coastguard
vessels are moving in waters around the Taiwan Strait and
the Western Pacific, Taiwan's Defense ministry said Monday, as the
island braces for potential military drills by Beijing. Taiwan's armed

(01:35:04):
forces had identified Chinese People's Liberation Army PLA vessels.

Speaker 2 (01:35:10):
And by the way, the.

Speaker 1 (01:35:11):
Ships for the Chinese military are part of their navy.

Speaker 2 (01:35:16):
This is really weird.

Speaker 1 (01:35:17):
Check this out. But their navy is controlled by their army,
so normally that organization is a very confusing term. It's
called the PLA N. So the PLA is the People's
Liberal is a Liberation Army. The PLA N is the
People's Liberation Army navy. Odd huh. Anyway, these must These

(01:35:39):
are probably PLA N vessels from the Eastern, Northern, and
Southern Theater commands, as well as Coastguard vessels entering the areas,
The Taiwan Ministry said in a statement. The military movement
comes days after the President of Taiwan sparked Beijing's ire
by making unofficial stops.

Speaker 2 (01:35:58):
In Hawaii and Guam during.

Speaker 1 (01:36:01):
A week long South Pacific tour, which wrapped up on Friday.
Chinese authorities voiced opposition to the president.

Speaker 2 (01:36:08):
His name is is Lii ching Ta.

Speaker 1 (01:36:11):
And again I mentioned this previously, but in these East
Asian names, the first part of the name is the
family name, so his name is Lai ching Tu, so
he is president Lai Lii is the family name. The
second part is his given name. So Chinese authorities voiced
opposition to Li's trip, referring to him as a separatist.

(01:36:31):
So in any case, there's a lot more to the story,
but I just wanted to share that with you. It's
pretty interesting to see a large Chinese exercise right next
to Taiwan, right after reading a book about the Chinese
government using that kind of thing as a cover to
actually invade Taiwan.

Speaker 2 (01:36:50):
All right, let me do a little political story here.

Speaker 1 (01:36:53):
Senator John Fetterman, he's a very odd dude, the hoodie
wearing dude, very much opposed by me and of other people,
but he won his Senate race. He won because Donald
Trump endorsed doctor.

Speaker 2 (01:37:06):
Oz, who was a uniquely terrible candidate.

Speaker 1 (01:37:09):
Although doctor Oz is now likely to have a job
in the Trump administration.

Speaker 2 (01:37:13):
By the way, I don't dislike doctor Oz. He's just
a terrible.

Speaker 1 (01:37:16):
Candidate, not least because he wasn't from Pennsylvania. And it's
not easy to win a race just dropping in when
you don't live in a place, and you just can't
claim that while I was here before, and so I'm
going to try to be your senator. Now, that's a
difficult thing, and that's what he tried to do. So
John Fetterman, who at the time couldn't even speak because
he had had a stroke, we won anyway. And in

(01:37:36):
his past he has very much appeared like a hardcore leftist,
you know, sort of Bernie Sanders Elizabeth Warren type, and
he's turned into something completely different, completely different, hardcore in
support of Israel killing all the terrorists, in support of
strengthening the border, pushing back on Democrats who want to
leave the border open, Fetterman said, no, this is not okay.

(01:38:01):
And now Fetterman actually joined Donald Trump's truth Social platform
and made his first post on truth Social yesterday and
I quote the Trump hush money and Hunter Biden cases,
where both bs and pardons are appropriate. Weaponizing the judiciary

(01:38:26):
for blatant partisan gain diminishes the collective faith in our
institutions and sews further division. Now, I will say it's
very odd for him to claim that the Hunter Biden
prosecution was politically motivated, because that happened under the Biden administration,
not under the Trump administration. So I think it's wrong

(01:38:47):
to say that the Hunter Biden case was politically motivated.
If there's anything that was politically motivated, it was the
prosecutors trying to let Hunter Biden off with the most
sweetheart of all sweetheart deals of all time until the
judge blew it up. So I think Fetterman is wrong
about that. But he is calling for Governor Kathy Hokele

(01:39:09):
of the state of New York to pardon Donald Trump
for the completely bogus hush money cases. Bogus case. But
he was convicted in that bogus case. But Kathy Hokel,
who's the governor of New York, does not like Donald
Trump very much and the feeling is mutual, and it's
unlikely that she will pardon Donald Trump, but pretty interesting

(01:39:31):
to hear. A Democratic member of the Senate, John Fetterman,
called for Kathy Hokele to pardon Donald Trump. I do
wonder if Trump would want the pardon, because in a way,
it wouldn't be him sort of admitting that he did
something wrong.

Speaker 2 (01:39:46):
But he's already convicted in that case.

Speaker 1 (01:39:48):
And if I were Trump, I actually think he should
take it. Hi, Mandy, do you get to turn down
of pardon that thing?

Speaker 2 (01:39:54):
See, I don't know, Kathy, Yeah, I don't know. Let's so.

Speaker 1 (01:40:01):
Yeah, I don't think so either. I don't think so either.
That's quite a nice shirt you've got it going on today.
Tried to dress like a grown up. I have a
client meeting after the show.

Speaker 2 (01:40:08):
What do you got coming up?

Speaker 1 (01:40:09):
We got weather Wednesday? And then are you familiar with
Upworthy on the internet.

Speaker 3 (01:40:13):
They have uplifting positive stories, they have a new book out.

Speaker 1 (01:40:16):
We're going to talk to them. And then of course
we've got a lot of just this and that and
what not to talk about today as well. So just
a quick thing in response to your question before, and
this is from like an AI answer on the Google machine. Yes.
According to US law, a person can refuse to accept
a pardon, meaning they can turn down a pardon offered

(01:40:37):
to them. This was established in a Supreme Court case
called Verdick versus Us, which ruled that a pardon must
be accepted by the recipient to be effective.

Speaker 4 (01:40:45):
Who turns that down?

Speaker 1 (01:40:46):
Who says no, thank you?

Speaker 2 (01:40:48):
If Joe Biden pardon Donald Trump for let's.

Speaker 1 (01:40:53):
Say the January sixth stuff, I bet you Donald Trump
would refuse it. He'd say, I don't think I did
anything wrong. I refuse to accept a harden because it
would mean that I am I was guilty, that I
was guilty. Everybody stick around for Mandy stuff and things
in her very lovely blouse today.

Speaker 2 (01:41:09):
Keep it here on koa