8-9-24 - *FULL SHOW* Dr Jay Bhattacharya; Bettors Fleeing Trump

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Mandy and I co hosted from training camp yesterday on Thursday.

Speaker 2 (00:04):
We had a lot of fun. We had the.

Speaker 1 (00:06):
Opportunity to talk to one of the Broncos players, linebacker
Justin Sternad, for just a few minutes after our show,
and that's up on my blog at Rosskominski dot com.
I'm sure it's going to be in Mandy's blog as
well at mandy'sblog dot com.

Speaker 2 (00:21):
And if you want to go check that out.

Speaker 1 (00:22):
If you're a Broncos fan, you are more than invited
to go do that, and I'll share a couple little
audio clips with you later.

Speaker 2 (00:29):
We have a lot of stuff to talk about.

Speaker 1 (00:32):
At the moment, I only have one guest booked, I say,
at the moment, I don't think I'll end up adding
another one. Uh Doctor j Botcharia, who if you were someone,
as I mentioned to Marty and Gena, if you're someone
who paid close attention to what was going on during
COVID with policy decisions and what should we do and
how should we do it and all this stuff. Jay
Boticharia was kind of on the leading edge of making sense,

(00:53):
which is why doctor Fauci and the government and the
media and social media and everybody shut him down because
he write about almost everything, and they did not like
those answers. He's one of the few people who came
out of COVID with I think a stellar reputation, almost
a heroic reputation what he went through being right, which

(01:17):
is kind of the craziest thing at all. Anyway, he's
going to join us at ten thirty. I want to
share with you a quote. I don't have video on this.
I couldn't find video on it, so I just found
a still picture with a quote, and this is from
longtime NBA great Kevin Durant and somebody asked him, I
guess about patriotism.

Speaker 2 (01:38):
I'm not sure what the question was, but.

Speaker 1 (01:40):
His answer was a lot of bowl bleep happens in
our country, but a lot of great things happen too.

Speaker 2 (01:50):
And I love that line.

Speaker 1 (01:52):
If it's simple, it's to the point everybody can understand it,
and it has.

Speaker 2 (01:57):
The benefit of being true. So there you go. Bull
happens in our country, but a lot of great things
happened too. And that's that's about it, right, That's that's
the world we live in.

Speaker 1 (02:09):
I do want to spend just maybe five minutes now
on some quick hits from politics from yesterday.

Speaker 2 (02:16):
So a couple of things I want to mention.

Speaker 1 (02:19):
So Donald Trump gave an hour long news conference yesterday,
press conference, and he said some good.

Speaker 2 (02:26):
Things on policy. He said some dumb things.

Speaker 1 (02:29):
He told a story or two that got him in
some trouble. He compared his January sixth crowd size to
Martin Luther King Junior's crowd size for the I Have
a Dream speech, which was really dumb, But that wasn't
the main point. The main point was he gave a
press conference and he emphasized, Hey, where's Kamala Harris. Kamala

(02:51):
Harris has been dodging the media, hasn't been seen for
any kind of interview for going on three weeks now,
basically since the day Biden dropped out.

Speaker 2 (03:02):
I think she showed up and spoke.

Speaker 1 (03:04):
She was on the tarmac at the airport, I think
it was in Detroit maybe yesterday, and decided to speak
to reporters because she's getting a lot of heat about this.
Guess how long she spoke to reporters for Shannon You
gotta guess. You gotta guess how long Kamala Harris decided
to talk with reporters for just over one minute, in
fifteen seconds, seventy seven seconds.

Speaker 2 (03:26):
That was her presser yesterday.

Speaker 1 (03:28):
Okay, so another thing that happened at Donald Trump's news
conference is he announced that his campaign and the Harris
campaign have agreed on a September tenth debate on ABC.
He is also calling for two more debates.

Speaker 2 (03:45):
The Harris campaign hasn't said that they have.

Speaker 1 (03:48):
Agreed to them, although in the macro they have always
said that she's willing to debate him anytime, anywhere. What's
quite interesting about this is that Trump had said repeatedly
in recent one that he would not honor his debate
commitment that he had made when Joe Biden was the
nominee to do a debate on ABC on a particular date,

(04:11):
and right shortly after Harris became the Democrats nominee. He said, look,
if you want to debate me, we'll debate on Fox.
I'm you know, my previous agreement was not an agreement
with you, and it's no longer valid, and we can
start over and make an agreement and have a debate,
and I would love to he you know, basically, that
was what he said yesterday. He based backpedaled and he

(04:35):
agreed to the ABC debate. And the reason that he
agreed to the ABC debate there is I think pretty straightforward,
and that is this.

Speaker 2 (04:47):
This race has changed a lot when.

Speaker 1 (04:52):
Joe Biden dropped out and Kamala Harris became the presumptive nominee.
Before she was the official nominee with all the delegates,
but it was immediately clear that she was gonna be
the nominee.

Speaker 2 (05:05):
In terms of betting odds.

Speaker 1 (05:07):
And I'm looking at this website called Polymarket, which is enormous, right,
five hundred and sixty million dollars bet on the presidential
election so far on this site, five hundred and sixty
million dollars. When Trump was first facing Harris, he had
a thirty five point lead, approximately sixty five to thirty,

(05:27):
with the remaining five percent being betters thinking there was
some chance that maybe some other Democrat would parachute in
or or RFT Junior or whatever.

Speaker 2 (05:37):
But that's why it didn't add up.

Speaker 1 (05:39):
To one hundred, because there were some other potential possibilities.
So Trump was up by thirty five points as of
this moment. As I look at this website, it's a tie.
It's a tie at basically forty eight and a half
percent each call it forty nine.

Speaker 2 (05:59):
And so.

Speaker 1 (06:01):
Debates are things that people who are in a significant
lead do not want to do and do not need
to do. This is why Donald Trump did not participate
in any of the Republican primary debates, because he knew
he was going to get the nomination and why bother
take that risk. And so when it seemed like he

(06:23):
was ahead, he could really kind of strong arm this
and say to Harris, like debate me on Fox News
or forget about it. But now that he's not winning anymore.
In fact, most betting webs Polymarket is one of the
ones that's best for Trump, and.

Speaker 2 (06:36):
It's a tide. Other websites have Kamala.

Speaker 1 (06:39):
Harris in the lead, and polling now has her in
the lead nationally, and polling now has her in the
lead in at least some swing states where Trump had
a lead before.

Speaker 2 (06:48):
So Trump is at best.

Speaker 1 (06:50):
Tied right now, and the momentum is against him, and
he needs to change it. And that's why he agreed
to the ABC debate, why he has asked for more debates,
it's why he gave a press conference yesterday, and he's.

Speaker 2 (07:05):
Got to do this. He absolutely has to do this.

Speaker 1 (07:08):
He has to stop Harris's momentum, and it's not going
to be easy because Harris has the media on her side,
chilling for her in a way that I've never seen
from the media before, not even with Obama.

Speaker 2 (07:23):
It's shameful what.

Speaker 1 (07:25):
The media is, how they're whitewashing all of her failures
and how they're not well they're let me get to
this a little bit later. They're just starting to call
her out a little bit for not showing up for interviews.
And it's not because they care about having an honest debate.
It's just because they care about not having access. All Right,
there's more where that came from, but lots of other non.

Speaker 2 (07:46):
Political stuff too. Keep it here on Kowa.

Speaker 1 (07:49):
Okay, So first, is Trump coming off as desperate.

Speaker 2 (07:53):
Desperate's probably a little strong.

Speaker 1 (07:54):
But Trump is coming across as a guy who realizes
he's not in the leite anymore and he needs to
change something. And that's a correct analysis on his part.
And so there's that. I don't think that Harris is
feeding the no interview thing because we're starting. I mentioned
this before, so I guess I'll get to it now. Axios,

(08:15):
which is a pretty major news outlet these days, just
had a peace out yesterday. Harris hot on the trail
but stayed away from reporter questions until now.

Speaker 2 (08:28):
Now. The until now part makes it sound like she's
done something important.

Speaker 1 (08:31):
She talked to reporters for just over a minute and
a quarter okay, seventy seven seconds. But there's a fair
bit of stuff in this article about how Harris is
not giving interviews except she'll talk with reporters on her airplane,
speaking only off the record, And it does seem like

(08:53):
the media is starting to get a little bit frustrated
by it. As I said, it's not because the media
wants to do their job. They are as much in
the tank for Kamala Harris as I've ever seen for
any candidate ever. But they think they are special, They
think they should have access. They also want the clicks
and the eyeballs that would come from Kamala Harris giving

(09:17):
more time to reporters. So they are getting frustrated with
Kamala Harris not showing up. But they're getting frustrated out
of their own self interest, not because they actually care
about doing their jobs in any way that's really important.

Speaker 2 (09:33):
So let's see what else rosso it's smart politically.

Speaker 1 (09:38):
For Trump to skip the Republican debates, but shameful for
Harris not to do interviews when she has the momentum.
I do think there's something of a difference here. Now
we're talking about the actual presidential race and not just primaries.
And I would also note, I don't know, shameful is
a bit of a strong word.

Speaker 2 (09:58):
And in politics it's hard to.

Speaker 1 (09:59):
Say, you know, is there anything really shameful if it's
leading to you winning, other than like murdering somebody.

Speaker 2 (10:09):
I don't know. Politics isn't about truth and honesty. It's
about winning.

Speaker 1 (10:12):
So you really have to go pretty far for me
to say that something political was shameful. You know, we
have to separate again, truth from politics are very different,
very different things. So I don't know that I would
say it's shameful for Harris not to do interviews when
she has the momentum. But it does say a couple
of things. I wasn't planning on talking about this more
right now, but you asked, Okay, So if you're saying

(10:36):
that she's not doing interviews because she has the momentum,
your implication, which by the way, I agree with, is
that is that Kamala Harris is taking some significant risk
of stopping her own momentum by doing an interview, because
she's not very smart and not a very good speaker
and is famous for word salads.

Speaker 2 (10:58):
So I think you made a point that.

Speaker 1 (11:01):
You didn't intend to make, which is that Kamala Harris
threatens her own momentum when she opens her mouth.

Speaker 2 (11:09):
I do think that's true, and in.

Speaker 1 (11:11):
That sense, as a political calculation, it does make sense
to keep her away from interviews the same way it
made sense to keep Joe Biden in his basement.

Speaker 2 (11:19):
And he won doing that. So yeah, so there you go. Ross.

Speaker 1 (11:26):
Do you think the American electorate is dumb enough to
elect Harris and continue this train wreck? Yes, I absolutely do.
I absolutely do. They elected Joe Biden, and actually, since
Donald Trump won election in twenty sixteen, basically every federal election,

(11:46):
almost every federal election has been impacted by the presence
of Donald Trump. And I'm not say saying he caused
the outcome in all of them, but he caused the
outcome in many of them, and in general elections, Donald
Trump has been the cause of the decimation of the
Republican Party. Not only did he lose his own election,
but he lost the House, then he lost the Senate.

Speaker 2 (12:07):
Then he got back the House.

Speaker 1 (12:08):
But by a much much smaller margin in a year
that everybody thought was going to be a red wave
and thought Republicans were going to come out with a
twenty or thirty seat majority, and they came out with
like a five seat majority, and then lost a couple
of those since then.

Speaker 2 (12:22):
So that represents you.

Speaker 1 (12:26):
You can decide whether you call that the electorate being dumb,
but what I call it is a clear representation that
the electorate doesn't like Donald Trump. So now the question
is does the electorate dislike Donald Trump enough to elect
an incompetent socialist who just picked as a running mate
a more competent socialist.

Speaker 2 (12:49):
Way too much talking. We'll get to this later in
the show.

Speaker 1 (12:52):
About Tim Wallas's military record, it's a massive distraction. What
we should be focusing on is how terrible a governor
he is. Raising taxes, raising gaz taxes, all these regulations,
the stuff about the state can take a kid from
a parent if the parents aren't sufficiently supportive of the
kid's transgenderness, the snitch line during COVID, there's so much

(13:17):
to criticize Tim Waltz about he's terrible. He's really really terrible.
But the public hates Donald Trump so much that this
election is really close. We have two really bad, really
weak candidates with high disapproval numbers.

Speaker 2 (13:39):
We have had that for three elections in a row.

Speaker 1 (13:41):
And I'll tell you what that says more about the
American public than it says about the candidate. Keep those
texts coming at five six, six nine zero.

Speaker 2 (13:48):
I'm reading them all, I'm responding to a lot of them.

Speaker 1 (13:50):
Normally, if you get a response to a text during
my show, most of the time, it's from me. If
you address a text to Dragon or Shannon, while Shannon
doesn't do a lot of texts, but if you address
a text to one of my producers, then they might
answer that. But just just so understand, normally, if you
text during my show and get a response, it's from me.
And also if you email me, which you're welcome to

(14:13):
do if you would like to Ross at iHeartMedia dot com.
One hundred percent of the time, if you get a
response by email, it is from me. I don't have
an assistant or anything like that, you know, managing my email.
So please do keep in touch. I love being in
touch with listeners, even or maybe even or maybe especially

(14:35):
when you're disagreeing with me. H, just don't be rude
about it. And not because I've got thin skin or anything.
I mean, heck, I was a trader in Chicago. I'm
used to being called all kinds of names by all
kinds of people, and I don't mind that. But I
just find it a little bit annoying if you're calling
me names when all I'm trying to do is have
a conversation about an issue or a policy or or whatever.

(14:58):
So be in touch. Disagree with me, but don't be
a jerk about it, and we'll get along. Fine, we'll
get along, absolutely fine.

Speaker 2 (15:06):
All right.

Speaker 1 (15:06):
I got a bunch of things I want to do
right now that are not political. There's plenty of time
for more politics, but we'll do some we'll do some
other stuff. So there's a young woman named Arisa True
and that's t R e W. She's an Australian girl,
and she just won the gold medal for skate skateboarding

(15:33):
park skateboarding in the Olympics yesterday. I think it was
and really pretty. This girl is an incredible skateboarder. She's
she's the only female ever to land seven twenty, which
is two full circles in the air in competition, and

(15:54):
the only woman known to ever have landed a nine
hundred anytime. It wasn't in competition, just goofing around in
a skate park.

Speaker 2 (16:05):
She landed a nine hundred, and that means, you know,
going up in the.

Speaker 1 (16:07):
Air and your on your skateboard and spinning three full times, No,
a nine hundred five uh, nine hundred two and a
half times, that's right, two and a half times, and
then and then landing is pretty incredible. Anyway, she just
won the gold medal. I posted a link to that

(16:28):
up on the blog. And the reason I'm sharing this
story with you is that she had been talking with
her parents about wanting to get a pet as a
present if she won a gold medal, and she said,
my parents definitely wouldn't let me get a dog or
a cat because these days were traveling so much, so

(16:49):
she said, but I feel like a duck might be
a little bit easier, and I don't know, I just
want a duck. So she's she's told her parents that
she told her parents if she if she won a
gold medal, she would she wanted a duck and she
got a gold medal, so I hope her parents get
her a duck. She is now the youngest Australian ever

(17:11):
to win an Olympic medal, and she did it at
fourteen years and eighty six days of age, the previous
Australian record. And by the way, I like I like
checking the Australian stories because I lived in Australia for
a while. I moved to Australia chasing a girl who's
now my wife.

Speaker 2 (17:30):
So I like Australia.

Speaker 1 (17:32):
The previous record for an Australian medal was would you
believe nineteen in nineteen fifty six with a woman named
Sandra Morgan or a girl named Sandra Morgan who won
a medal. I think it was a gold medal in swimming,
and she was fourteen years, one hundred and eighty three

(17:53):
days old, So miss miss True is about one hundred
days younger and gold medalist in skateboarding.

Speaker 2 (17:59):
Good for her.

Speaker 1 (18:00):
I hope she gets a duck. All right, this is
a more serious story. You may recall a couple of
weeks ago we talked about it on the air and
you probably saw it all over the news as well,
this massive failure by cybersecurity company CrowdStrike. CrowdStrike is a
company that you almost certainly are impacted by, even if

(18:26):
you don't know it. They're a business to business company.
They don't do very much business to consumer, but they
provide cybersecurity for so many companies that you are almost
certainly when you are on the web doing business with somebody,
you almost certainly have gone through CrowdStrike cybersecurity, and if

(18:47):
you don't know it. So they put out an update
and their update was not properly tested and it crashed
computers around the world. We actually had Ben Albright, who
is not only you know football genius, but tech nerd.
Ben Albright is a major, major tech nerd. In fact,
he built a technology company and sold it after he

(19:10):
came out of the military. Not everybody knows that about him,
and he actually came on the show, came on my
show and told people how they could fix this thing
by themselves if they needed to fix it in a
hurry anyway. One of the biggest victims of the crowd
Strike failure was Delta Airlines, and Delta Airlines and CrowdStrike

(19:32):
are in a pissing match about how Delta is going
to get compensated. So I want to share this with you.
This is a letter from David Boys from his law firm.
David Boys is one of the most high power attorneys
in the United States of America. Like, if you can
name like top ten attorneys that you would not want

(19:54):
to go up against, David Boys would be one of them.
He's argued in front of the Supreme Court. He's just
a bri attorney. So this is a letter dated yesterday
from his law firm to crowd Strikes. Law firm. David
Boyce is representing Delta Airlines.

Speaker 2 (20:11):
He said, we.

Speaker 1 (20:12):
Appreciate crowdstrikes a quote unquote apology to Delta. However, an
apology alone is vastly inadequate, and when accompanied by misstatements
and attempts to shift the blame to Delta of doubtful sincerity.

Speaker 2 (20:26):
We were surprised and disappointed.

Speaker 1 (20:28):
By crowdstrikes efforts to minimize the international disaster it caused,
including by seeking to downgrade it to an incident or
an outage. The crowd strike update caused a catastrophic shutdown
of more than eight million, oh my gosh, eight million
computers around the world and disrupted countless companies business operations.

(20:49):
At Delta, it shut down more than thirty seven thousand
computers and disrupted the travel plans of more than one
point thirty million Delta customers. I think remember correctly, Delta
had to cancel something like seven thousand flights because of
this thing.

Speaker 2 (21:05):
And so Delta has been telling CrowdStrike.

Speaker 1 (21:08):
We want millions of dollars for all the harm that
you caused us and all the harm that you caused
our customers, our flyers, and so far CrowdStrike is telling
them to pound sand and they go through in this
long letter and in all these bullet points, you know,
people suffered because of your faulty updates, and CrowdStrike showed

(21:30):
no sense of urgency or appreciation of the scale and
scope of the damage. And crowdstrikes Monday evening offer of
additional support was too late, and there's a whole bunch
of other stuff like that. The letter ends like this,
We're still working to understand the full extent of what
CrowdStrike did and didn't do that resulted in the disaster
that everyone in the world other than CrowdStrike seems to

(21:51):
know occurred. Rather than continuing to try to evade responsibility.
I would hope that CrowdStrike would immediately share everything at No,
it'll all come out in litigation anyway. If CrowdStrike genuinely
seeks to avoid a lawsuit by Delta, then it must
accept real responsibility for its actions and compensate Delta for

(22:12):
the severe damage it caused to Delta's business, reputation and goodwill.

Speaker 2 (22:17):
Sincerely, David Boys, right.

Speaker 1 (22:19):
And that's coming from Delta Airlines attorney to Crowdstrikes attorney
and what to me, what's interesting about this is that
we have it. The fact that this is out there
in public means that David Boys is engaging in a
strategy of telling and showing CrowdStrike, Hey, if you don't

(22:40):
compensate us for the harm that you cause to us,
we're gonna shred you in public. Because there are other
companies who do what CrowdStrike does. Crowdstrike's probably the biggest,
but there are other companies that do it. And basically
this is David Boys saying, I'm going to make sure
that when other businesusinesses are thinking about what companies to

(23:03):
use for their cybersecurity services, they're going to know that
CrowdStrike doesn't do the right thing when CrowdStrike causes a
huge problem, So you better settle with us, or where
we're going to make your life in public even more miserable.
And in a sense, I think this is a negotiating tactic,
but a smart one. One of the things I do

(23:23):
wonder about, you know, is Delta still and.

Speaker 2 (23:27):
Is Delta planning?

Speaker 1 (23:27):
If so, is Delta planning to remain a customer of CrowdStrike? Right,
you would think that a business that hurts you at
bad would be one that you might not want to
continue being a customer of.

Speaker 2 (23:40):
All right, let's lighten it up a little bit. The
New York Post has a piece about.

Speaker 1 (23:45):
A survey and it's entitled average Americans need sixty lazy
days a year.

Speaker 2 (23:50):
Now, that sounds like a lot to me.

Speaker 1 (23:52):
Now, maybe I'm just less lazy than the average American,
But I don't think so, because I'm a fairly lazy person,
and I think I'm about average when it comes to
this kind of thing. And so there's this new poll
of two thousand people that investigated how the average person
leverages days literally doing nothing for quote unquote self care.
With self care became a thing in recent years didn't it.

(24:14):
We never talked about self care when I was a kid, Right,
if you were to talk about or even a young adult,
if you were to talk about self care more than
let's say, ten years ago, people would just think that's
your overly generous way of describing the fact that you're
a slacker. That's how people would have talked about it.

(24:34):
I actually think there's something legit to self care. I
think people can burn out, either on a short term
basis or a long term basis. In fact, in fact,
I will just admit this in public.

Speaker 2 (24:45):
A couple of.

Speaker 1 (24:46):
Weeks ago, I don't remember exactly what it was. I
think it was a Monday. I think it was a monday.
I had the day off, and you know what, I
didn't go anywhere. I had the day off because I
freaking needed a day off.

Speaker 2 (25:02):
That's all it was. That's all it was.

Speaker 1 (25:03):
I had worked two weekends in a row here on
the radio, I mean because of breaking news with Trump
getting shot and Biden dropping out and all that, and
I just needed a day off. Now, that's the thing
that for me is typically it was zero or one
day's a year, right that I don't work and I

(25:25):
don't leave town, right, I just needed a day off,
But I did, and I'll tell you it helped. It
really did make a difference. Now I didn't just lie around.
I ended up having to go over to this well.
I don't know if I had to, but I ended
up going to this nineteen seventies house that we bought
and spending some time on there, working in the basement,
prying up old floor tiles and doing some other things

(25:48):
like that.

Speaker 2 (25:49):
But in a way, that was kind of mindless work.

Speaker 1 (25:53):
And for me, based on what I do for a living,
I think what gets burned out for me is my brain,
not so much my body, because it's not exactly a
very physical job.

Speaker 2 (26:04):
But I needed a day off.

Speaker 1 (26:06):
And so I'm actually I'm good with the idea of
self care. I'm absolutely good with the idea of self care,
and you should do it. What I wonder about is
do people really need sixty lazy days a year.

Speaker 2 (26:19):
I don't know. So I got a.

Speaker 1 (26:21):
Couple of listener questions for you. Five six, six nine zero.
I want you to text me the answer. Have you
ever taken a day off just because you felt kind
of burnt out and you felt like you just needed
a day off.

Speaker 2 (26:32):
And again, I just did that. It's not something I
do often, but I felt like my brain fatigue.

Speaker 1 (26:42):
Was negatively impacting my performance on the radio, and I
felt like my day off really helped and recharge my batteries.

Speaker 2 (26:50):
Now have you done that? Text me at five sixty
six nine zero.

Speaker 1 (26:54):
Have you Have you ever taken a day off just
because you felt like I desperately needed day off and
it's actually better for my boss if I get a
day off right now because I just need a quick recharge.

Speaker 2 (27:09):
Have you ever done that? Now? This study, and I'm.

Speaker 1 (27:14):
Not saying this is a highly scientific study, but they
said Americans are most likely to take lazy days on
Sundays and Saturdays. That makes perfect sense, right, Thirty nine
percent Sundays, twenty seven percent Saturdays.

Speaker 2 (27:28):
So you put those things together.

Speaker 1 (27:29):
And you're already at two thirds of lazy days or
on the weekend. What I found really interesting in this article,
because you all know because we're friends, that I hate Tuesdays.

Speaker 2 (27:41):
Always hated Tuesdays. Don't know why.

Speaker 1 (27:45):
Maybe it's because I just try to be a little
bit odd and most people hate Mondays, So I feel
like I should choose something else that's not impossible. I
also like Thursdays. Most people like Fridays. It's not that
I don't like Fridays. I like Fridays a lot. I
like it when my show is in fact. In fact,

(28:05):
I was telling someone just in the past couple of days,
I don't remember who, that on Fridays. You know you
have this term. It's usually metaphorical. Just take a deep breath,
like let the stress.

Speaker 2 (28:20):
Out, let it go, relax a little.

Speaker 1 (28:23):
I find myself literally doing that on Fridays all afternoon
and evening, knowing that I don't have to spend hours
that evening getting ready for the next day's radio show
because I work mine tuck us off, and so does Mandy.
I work my butt off making sure that I can

(28:44):
do a good show for you. And I'm not saying
I always do a good show for you, but I
am saying I always try to.

Speaker 2 (28:51):
Do a good show for you.

Speaker 1 (28:53):
And part of that comes from a lot of preparation
and just knowing that I have stuff to talk and
I pride myself on that.

Speaker 2 (29:02):
But it's a lot of work.

Speaker 1 (29:04):
I put in hours in the evening before a show,
and then I put in hours more the morning of
the show, and people ask me this all the time,
so I'll just tell you in case you're wondering this question, Ross,
how how much time do.

Speaker 2 (29:18):
You spend preparing for an average show?

Speaker 1 (29:21):
And the answer is somewhere around four hours or maybe
a little more. If I were more efficient, and I
should try to be, I'd be able to do maybe
an hour of prep for an hour of show, right,
So with a three hour show three hours of preparation, No,

(29:42):
it's rarely less than four. So I put in a
ton of work so I can do a good show,
and I get tired sometimes.

Speaker 2 (29:48):
And you know, a lazy day is a fine thing
for me.

Speaker 1 (29:52):
But what I've noticed, to go back to the lazy
day story, the most unpopular lazy day turns out to
me Tuesdays, with only five percent labeling Tuesday as their
go to lazy day.

Speaker 2 (30:04):
And I think maybe.

Speaker 1 (30:06):
That's subconsciously part of the reason that I hate Tuesdays.
Tuesdays feels like a day where there's absolutely no room
for even a little bit of laziness, and I don't
know why. So, in fact, let me ask you one
more follow up question on this. What day of the
week do you hate most and why I'm not going

(30:27):
to ask you what day of the week you like most.
Maybe we'll get to that at some other point, but
that seems like an easier question, and I think most
people will say Friday to that. I want to know
what is your least favorite day and why five six
six nine zero. I'll share some of the best answers
on the show, So text me those those you know,
as they say, send those cards and letters by texting

(30:49):
me at five six six nine zero and telling me.
And I'm gonna look at all the answers over this
next break. But meanwhile, I want to switch gears yet again, because.

Speaker 2 (30:57):
This is a thing that happens on Fridays.

Speaker 1 (30:59):
I up sometimes with a bunch of topics that I
had over the course of the week, and due to
breaking news or co hosting a show with Mandy where
we go off and all these wild tangents.

Speaker 2 (31:10):
Together, which is so much fun. Yesterday we were talking.

Speaker 1 (31:13):
About how ath leisure may determine ath leisure, where may
determine the presidential election. Anyway, so I go off and
all these tangents, and I had all these topics to
talk about, and then I don't talk about them, but
I should talk about them, and then I save them
up for Friday, and now we're talking about him. So
a couple weeks back, NASA made a very very specific

(31:36):
point of saying that the two astronauts who went up
to the space station on the Boeing Starliner that they
are definitely not stranded. They're definitely not stranded. Now, they
were supposed to be up in space. These guys were
supposed to be up in space for a little over

(31:58):
a week, eight days, nine days, ten days. And this
was in June. And now it's what does this machine say?
This is it's a thing called August now, which I
think is not the same thing as June. And they're
still up there. And what happened was that this Boeing

(32:19):
spaceship had some issues, in particular some helium leaks, and
we were told, oh, it's no big deal. The helium
leaks Simoka now and the thrusters that they need to
get back down to Earth. We got almost all of
them working now, and so they're definitely not stranded. That
was the last thing, and I posted that in my
blog probably a week and a half ago, two weeks ago.

(32:40):
They're definitely not stranded. So now here's the headline. From ABC.
NASA says Boeing starlineer astronauts may have to come home
on a different spacecraft. That sounds almost stranded to me.
I don't know if your your definition of stranded, but
like if you took a car somewhere and then your
car broke and you couldn't get home, that's at least

(33:04):
at least temporarily stranded. The two astronauts who went up
to the International Space Station on the star Liner may
have to come home on a different spacecraft, NASA officials
said during a press conference on Wednesday. Barry Wilmore, who
goes by Butch, and Sunita Williams, who goes by Sonny,
who performed the first crude test flight, and that crewed

(33:29):
not crude of the Starliner, have been in space for
more than sixty days. When they launched on June fifth,
they were only supposed to be on a three hour
tour like Gilligan. No, they were supposed to be on something.

Speaker 2 (33:43):
For a little over a week.

Speaker 1 (33:44):
Not quite like Gilligan and missus Howell isn't there, but
it probably feels like that to them. Boeing and NASA
officials have been resistant to exploring the option to bringing
them home some other way. But now a guy named
Kenneth Socks, which is a cool name bow e r
so X, I like that name. NASA's Associate administrator for

(34:07):
Space Operations, has said they are considering it. Quote, we
don't just have to bring a crew back on Starliner,
for example, we could bring them back on another vehicle.

Speaker 2 (34:15):
In that case we.

Speaker 1 (34:17):
Have with the in the case we have with the
Starliner crew flight test, the option to bring the crew
home on Starliner or on another vehicle.

Speaker 2 (34:24):
We could take either path.

Speaker 1 (34:26):
And now they're talking about maybe one of Elon Musk's things.
But anyway, they're considering sending SpaceX's Dragon Crew nine, set
to launch the ISS in September with only two of
the four astronauts that would normally be assigned to which
so there's room for two more to come home. They
would carry extra space suits for these two people, Will Moore.

Speaker 2 (34:47):
And Williams, who as I said, are definitely not stranded.

Speaker 1 (34:53):
Producer Dragon joins me now wearing his insane red and
yellow Dragon shirt that is secret code for being a
Kansas City Chiefs fan, a huge Joppin.

Speaker 2 (35:03):
He will not admit John, we all know, we all
know I asked.

Speaker 1 (35:08):
I asked you to text me to tell me what
your least favorite day of the week is. Dragon, Do
you have a least favorite day of the weekend? Why?

Speaker 3 (35:17):
I never really thought about it too much.

Speaker 1 (35:20):
Okay, you're a dragon, by the way, is one of
the most Mondays happy positive. Dragon is almost an annoyingly
positive person, like all the time. He's always smiling, he's
always happy, he's always laughing, he's always wearing shorts.

Speaker 2 (35:35):
I don't know if that those things have to.

Speaker 4 (35:37):
Do with each other, but maybe I did wear pants
in Egypt, though you did, Andy Galibea. Yes, indeed, let's see, Ross,
I hate Mondays because it's my trash day.

Speaker 1 (35:49):
My old house was first neighborhood to get the trash
picked up, and I often frantically ran to get the
trash out before he came by at seven am.

Speaker 2 (35:56):
Awful. I hate it, Ross. I hate Tuesdays.

Speaker 1 (36:00):
I'm fresh on Monday, the weekends insight on Wednesday. Everyone
says it's only Tuesday quite often. See that's how It's
exactly how I feel. But that's why I hate Tuesday.

Speaker 3 (36:10):
Thursday is pretty bad because it's not Friday.

Speaker 1 (36:13):
No, But Thursday is really good because the next night
day is Friday. And also back when I was a
much younger man, when I lived in Chicago, Thursday was
the night that you would go out to the bars
to try to meet girls, which is a thing I
absolutely loved doing, even though my success rate was hold on,
let me get a calculator zero, But I still loved

(36:36):
it go out on ladies' night, try to talk to
women who I had no chance with at all.

Speaker 2 (36:44):
But I still enjoyed it.

Speaker 3 (36:47):
What no, no, what I mean you can't your failing
attempts at Thursday evening bar nights. Yeah, we had bar
nights here at the radio station, where I would I
would have to work, Yeah, at events, so i'd have
to work past midnight. Oh I'd be back here at
five am, real morning show. So Thursdays were terrible.

Speaker 1 (37:08):
Oh gosh, this is kind of a this is a
rough one, but I'm going to read it anyway because
a listener was willing to share it.

Speaker 2 (37:16):
I don't like.

Speaker 1 (37:16):
Saturdays because that's when my dad would get drunk and
be belligerent. That's a that's unfortunate to remember your weekend,
your weekend days like that.

Speaker 2 (37:26):
But maybe just maybe.

Speaker 1 (37:27):
Just saying it will we'll make you feel a little
better and get it, get it off your chest. A
lot of people also did did share with me things
about being able to being able to just take a
little work day Dragon I mentioned I mentioned before that
a couple of weeks ago, I wasn't here on a Monday,
just randomly right, And that was and I admitted it

(37:48):
on the air. The reason I wasn't at work is
that I just really, really really felt like I needed
a day off, Like my brain was so tired. I
felt like the previous show or two weren't as good
as they could have been. I wasn't focused. I was
just burnt out. That was after we had we worked
two weekends in a row. And I also want to
make one other thing clear, lots of people work harder

(38:08):
than I do. I'm not feeling sorry for myself. I'm
not saying I'm overworked. I'm not saying anything other than
I just felt like I was worn out and not
giving you my best show, and so I took it.
I took a day off just because I was exhausted,
which is I'd like to feel like I was Superman
and never needed to do that. That's literally a zero

(38:32):
or one time a year thing for me where I
just like I need a day off, and I actually
kind of felt bad about needing a day off, but
now I've decided I shouldn't feel bad about it, allowed
to take days off. But I tell you feel that way.
I'm I'm of the generation where you really weren't, right.

(38:53):
I mean, you're only a little younger than I am.
I think a lot of people who are younger than
you are living this kind kind of you know, COVID
world where you can work at home and work your
own schedule.

Speaker 2 (39:04):
And I didn't grow up that way.

Speaker 1 (39:05):
I didn't grow up in the generation where you were
allowed to keep living with your parents after college.

Speaker 3 (39:10):
It's just a.

Speaker 2 (39:10):
Whole different mindset.

Speaker 1 (39:12):
And in my mind, it's very very hard for me
to get away from this idea that taking a day
off just to have a day off, you know, versus
taking a vacation or doing something with my wife or
doing something with listeners. It's hard to think that that's
not a form of being a slacker.

Speaker 3 (39:29):
It's hard for the hard workers around here like you
and I because I don't know about your contract specifically,
but for me, it's vacation days. I use them, or
I lose them. So if I don't use them all
up by the end of the year, they're just gone.

Speaker 1 (39:43):
But you and I have the opposite problem, right, and
that is that I so I have the same thing.

Speaker 2 (39:49):
If I don't use my vacation days, I lose them.

Speaker 1 (39:52):
The issue for me is that I take you the
past couple of years, at least a pretty big listener trip,
and those do come out of my vacation, true, And
so the way it works for me is that the
listener trip comes out of my vacation. The days at
the end of the year that aren't federal holidays come

(40:16):
out of my vacation. And that leaves me with very
few vacation days for the rest of the year. And
so what happens during what happened this summer, I mean
I had let'sten, My wife went to Mexico, one of
my kids went to Australia, another one of my kids
went to Austin, Texas, uh, and I stayed home to work.

(40:40):
I you know, so I do hope that in my
next contract I'll get a little more vacation. And again,
I also I want to make one other thing clear.
I'm not feeling sorry for myself, and we're just we're
friends and we're just talking here about about our lives.

Speaker 2 (40:53):
I'm not complaining.

Speaker 1 (40:56):
I would like to have one more week of vacation,
but I don't hate my life. I love my job.
I love talking with you every day. And so yeah,
you know here we are, here, we are, Ross, You're
lucky to work with such a positive dude. Dragon is
a badass.

Speaker 2 (41:15):
Oh thank you. That's that's true. Ross, You and Mandy
are my favorite radio voices.

Speaker 1 (41:20):
Neither of you seem to be qualified to be spin
doctors or manure spreaders.

Speaker 2 (41:25):
Ross, could you please.

Speaker 1 (41:26):
Explain why you frequently feel the need to spell simple
words during your monologues. Uh, well, sometimes I spell homonyms,
and it's mostly not because I think my audience is
too dumb to know which is the right word. Because
I have very smart listeners. I think I've got the

(41:47):
smartest listeners of.

Speaker 2 (41:48):
Any any radio show.

Speaker 1 (41:50):
And so partly it's for humorous effect, to to remind
people that it might have been funny if it were
the other one.

Speaker 2 (42:03):
Right. So, we were.

Speaker 1 (42:04):
Talking about the NASA mission and I said, NASA's are
the the Boeing star Liners first crude mission, And I said,
that's cre w d, not crude, And it's not because
I would have expected you, sir or ma'am to think
it was crude crude, but rather spelling it is a

(42:29):
is a kind of subtle way to make a joke,
like what if Boeing really did have a crude mission?
So that's that's the answer to uh, to that question.

Speaker 2 (42:39):
Ross, good answer.

Speaker 1 (42:39):
I'm not sure which which thing was I was answering
that he's responding to Ross.

Speaker 2 (42:44):
Good answer. For being such a smart ass.

Speaker 1 (42:46):
I'm voluntarily placing myself in the listener penalty box for
ten minutes for two major penalties. All right, as long
as there's no game misconduct, we'll be fine when we
come back. Plenty of other stuff to tell you about
a property that I would buy property in the Denver
metro area closer to Boulder. If it's a hint, Okay,
how about this, take a guess. Text me at five

(43:08):
six sixty nine zero.

Speaker 2 (43:09):
With your guests.

Speaker 1 (43:10):
An iconic property that is kind of sort of near
Boulder just came up for sale, but you probably have
to be a billionaire to buy it, and if I
were a billionaire, I would buy it. What do you
think the property is that just came up for sale

(43:33):
that you probably need to be a billionaire to buy.
And also I'm gonna tell you about a famous restaurant
in Cherry Creek that's closing down. So I want to
make sure to answer the question that I asked. A
lot of people texted in with the right answer. So
this is from the If I were a billionaire, I'd
buy this files. So I used to live the first

(43:56):
place we ever bought in Colorado, The first place Christen
and I ever bought was near Netherlands, Colorado, and on
the other side of Netland from where we lived, there's
a very very famous property called Caribou Ranch, and it
became famous actually from from the music scene. All kinds

(44:16):
of famous people have recorded music there. Elton John and
Stevie Wonder and Michael Jackson and Earth Wind and Fire.
I don't I don't think the Beatles went there, but
just on and on and on. Just you know, it's
a legendary property. But it's a gorgeous property. This place
is seventeen hundred acres near Netland, not very far from

(44:41):
the Eldor Ski resort.

Speaker 2 (44:45):
So some years back, ten years ago.

Speaker 1 (44:50):
A group called Indian Peaks Holdings LLC bought Caribou Ranch
for thirty two and a half million dollars, and was
of funny was when they registered the property with the state. Right,
this is an LLC, so you could have put a
registration address here in Colorado or whatever, but somebody who

(45:11):
was probably incautious used the address for apparently the real buyers,
and the address happened to be the same mailing address
as Walton Enterprises of the Walton family who owned Walmart

(45:32):
in Bentonville, Arizona, so it became clear. And then eventually
they changed them and removed the Arkansas address, but people
had figured it out by then, so it seems pretty clear,
although they haven't said it, that Caribou Ranch is owned
by the Walton family. All that's really going on now
as far as identifying the owners is that the agent

(45:53):
who's selling the property, which is now listed for forty
eight and a half million dollars, the agent.

Speaker 2 (46:01):
Says, look, the people who bought the.

Speaker 1 (46:03):
Property had younger kids, and we're using it more and
now it's just their lives have changed. It just doesn't
fit them very much anymore, and so they're looking.

Speaker 2 (46:11):
To sell it. According to the Denver Post.

Speaker 1 (46:13):
There's a primary residence, two horse barns, two equipment buildings,
five guest cabins, and a six room lodge with a
gathering space. The primary residence about nine thousand square feet
only three bedrooms, by the way, three bedrooms, two baths
in nine thousand square feet.

Speaker 2 (46:27):
Imagine how big that living room.

Speaker 1 (46:28):
Is constructed in the nineteen eighties building on or around
in eighteen sixties cabin. And then there's five guest cabins
that are between five hundred and thirty one hundred square feet. Anyway,
if I were a billionaire, I would buy this forty
eight and a half million dollars. Yeah, it's an immense
amount of money, but if I were a billionaire, I
wouldn't care. And actually, when you think about real estate

(46:51):
prices and you think about how much after COVID people
have decided that they want to have some land or
a place that they can get away to that's away
from the city and even away from this just a way,
the fact that this thing is only up like fifty
percent in terms.

Speaker 2 (47:06):
Of the asking price, I don't know what you could actually.

Speaker 1 (47:08):
Buy it for in ten years, actually seems relatively cheap,
you know, I don't mean forty and a half million
is cheap.

Speaker 2 (47:15):
But again, if I were a billionaire, I buy it.
The other thing that I wanted.

Speaker 1 (47:19):
To make sure you know, the original location of John
Elway Steakhouse in Cherry Creek is closing at the end
of this month.

Speaker 2 (47:29):
The last day will be the last day of this month.

Speaker 1 (47:31):
It's because they did a rezoning and they're gonna knock
down a bunch of stuff and and redevelop the area
with office buildings and apartments and a bunch of stuff.
So the original always location is going away, but he's
got other locations, including at the airport, and he'll be fine,
Okay when we come back a conversation I'm incredibly excited about.

(47:53):
I've been trying to book this for at least a month.
Doctor j Boticharia from Stanford one of the few people
who got almost everything right about COVID, and that meant
that social media, being pushed by the government censored him.
It's going to be an unbelievable conversation right after this.
Bear with me here because I'm going to do a
slightly longer introduction than usual for my next guest. Going

(48:16):
through COVID. There were a lot of people who were
either on the medical side, or the policy side, or
the political side, whose reputations either got shredded or deserved
to get shredded. There were very few people who came
through COVID looking smart and honest. And my next guest

(48:42):
is one of those very very few, Doctor j Bodicharia
got through that, and of course and maintains a level
of intellectual honesty about the stuff we're going to talk
about today that I think is unmatched, and also especially
during COVID, was was very courageous. Jay he is Professor
of Health Policy at Stanford.

Speaker 2 (49:02):
He's a research.

Speaker 1 (49:03):
Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research NBER. For
econ nerds out there. You know NBER, and I am
an econ nerd. He also directs the Stanford Center for
Demography and Economics.

Speaker 2 (49:15):
Of Health and Aging. I'll also know one other thing.

Speaker 1 (49:18):
You will hear occasionally of very small smart people, all
of them smarter than I am, who have both mds
and PhDs. Most of the time those PhDs are in
medical related fields, which might not surprise you for someone
who is a medical doctor. Jay's PhD is in economics,
and that's part of the reason I think he's such

(49:40):
a clear thinker who understands that, as his Stanford colleague
Thomas Sowell puts it, there are no solutions, only trade offs.

Speaker 2 (49:48):
So with that long.

Speaker 1 (49:49):
Introduction, Jay Bauditaria, it's a pleasure to have you on
the show.

Speaker 2 (49:52):
Thank you for making time for us.

Speaker 5 (49:56):
Ross, thank you for inviting me. I'm blushing a little
hearing you talked about me.

Speaker 1 (50:01):
So I want to start with a sort of personal
version of you know, questions about the things you said
and wrote and did during COVID, when you were saying
what you were saying, the Great Barrington Declaration, all these
did you feel like you were taking a risk? Did
you feel like it took courage. I'm not asking you

(50:21):
to praise yourself in that sense.

Speaker 2 (50:23):
I'm a brave guy.

Speaker 1 (50:23):
But did you feel like you were taking a risk
or did you just think, Oh, I'm a doctor and
any economist and I'm just saying the truth and not
thinking about risk.

Speaker 5 (50:34):
I mean, at first it felt like that, it felt
like I was just saying what I saw. Like in
March of twenty twenty, I wrote not Bad for the
first time in my life. Actually usually just published scientific
papers before that, and it just felt like I had
to say it because that's what I saw. I was
I had this idea that the disease was more widespread
than people realized, and I was calling for a study,
and that was just normal science, it seemed to me.

(50:57):
But almost immediately there were attacks on my family. There
were vicious slander in the press against me. There was
with my own university, there were a tacks on me.
At one point, I was afraid to walk around the
university because there were these poster campaigns targeting me, and
there was a you know, actually coordinated, devastating takedown of me.
And my colleagues wrote a great panting decoration by the

(51:19):
federal government, by members of the federal government, and so
and so. It really did feel like I was doing
something transgressive ross and I don't know, it's just it's not.

Speaker 6 (51:28):
It's very strange to say.

Speaker 5 (51:29):
I thought I had a thick skin before the pandemic,
but I didn't realize what having a thick skin really
meant until the pandemic sort of heated up.

Speaker 1 (51:37):
Okay, I imagine with all your answers, there's gonna be
lots of stuff I'm gonna want to follow up on.
So I'm gonna just try to remember what you said
and come back to certain things. For folks who don't know,
please describe the Great Barrington Declaration, which I will note
to folks has over nine hundred and forty thousand signatures
so far.

Speaker 2 (51:56):
Yeah.

Speaker 5 (51:56):
So, the Great Panting Dequation was a very short document
written by me Martin Kuldorf of Harvard and Sinetra Gupta
of Oxyford University in October twenty twenty. It called for
lifting lockdowns, opening schools, letting younger people and low risk
people more or less go along with their lives as
best they can, while protecting vulnerable older people from the virus.

(52:18):
It was a very different strategy than the lockdowns. The
idea was, let's use our resources to think creatively how
to protect vulnerable older people, and let's not harm children,
working class people, and the poor via these lockdowns that
were devastating them.

Speaker 1 (52:32):
Okay, so I think what's so crazy about the Great
Barrington Declaration is that.

Speaker 2 (52:41):
It's so freaking rational. Every part of that makes sense, right.

Speaker 1 (52:46):
In short, protect the people who need to be protected,
and don't ruin the lives.

Speaker 2 (52:52):
Of people who are at very very little risk.

Speaker 1 (52:55):
And yet I mean you talk about how it felt transgressive.
I kind of watched from a distance what happened to
you with the Great Barrington Declaration. Can you describe, because
you mentioned specifically the federal government came after.

Speaker 2 (53:08):
You with this, Can you talk about that a little bit?

Speaker 6 (53:12):
Sure?

Speaker 5 (53:12):
So the it is, by the way, it's it's the
least original thing I've ever written in my life.

Speaker 2 (53:18):
Ross it was.

Speaker 5 (53:19):
It's basically old pandemic plan is complete. It's just the
it's just common sense. Right, there's nothing And you say
I didn't. If I'd written it a year before, there
would have there would have been no controversy. Would Yet
there were people and yeah, in February they were writing
people people like you know, we're basically embracing it.

Speaker 6 (53:39):
In February twenty twenty.

Speaker 5 (53:42):
Four, days after we wrote the declaration, the head of
the National Institutive Health, Francis Collins, were an email to
Tony Fauci calling for a devastating takedown of the premise
of the declaration, calling me Martin and seinetra fringe epty miologies,
essentially declaring open season on us. And what happened next
was just a media storm trying to under my knee
and my reputation, the reputation of Martin sat or anyone

(54:03):
who signed it. People who signed it, that some of
them lost their jobs, many of them lost their opportunities
for grants. And certainly, I mean I was NIH funded
and so I'm to some to a small degree before
the pandemic, I was quite successful in NH funding for
for a health economists. And I'm not sure how I'm
ever going to forget to get another AH grant. I mean,
it's it's not it's it's one of these things where

(54:24):
like the federal government should not be telling scientists what
they should or should not be thinking, right, And essentially
that's what the top of the head of the NIH
this Francis Collins and Tony Fauci did. They conspired to
make make the idea of the Great Branded Declaration and
a focused protection anathema so that no one would want
to even come near it.

Speaker 1 (54:46):
Well, we're talking with doctor j Botcharia. If you want
to meet Jay in person, hear him talk in person,
get a chance to ask him a question yourself. You're
gonna want to sign up for the Steamboat Institute Freedom Conference,
which is coming up actually two weeks from today. It's
called the Steamboat Institute, but they've moved the Freedom Conference

(55:08):
for the last couple of years to Beaver Creek at
the Park Hyatt. If you go to Steamboat Institute dot
org click on events, you'll see the link for the
Freedom Conference and you can register and you can go
and hang out with great people and meet Jay and
some other fantastic speakers this year. So I'll probably come

(55:29):
back to something you mentioned there, But you've been You've
been critical about both President Trump and President Biden in
their responses to COVID. With Trump, you were critical of
the lockdowns and some other things. I want to talk
about your specific criticism you made of Biden regarding his

(55:49):
apparent assumption, which I think a lot of people believed
at the beginning, that the COVID vaccine would prevent transmission
and not just serious injury or death. And so I
want to ask, how did you think about that at
the beginning? Did you originally believe believe the hype, if

(56:10):
you would, that the vaccine would prevent transmission, And maybe
it did with the first variant, but not after that,
because a vaccine that prevents transmission, and you're the experts,
you tell me if I'm wrong, poses a very different
public policy question. And then a vaccine that prevents death
but does not prevent transmission.

Speaker 6 (56:32):
That's absolutely true.

Speaker 5 (56:33):
So the randomized trials of the vaccines, the CODE vaccines
in twenty twenty did not ask the question whether it
prevented transmission.

Speaker 6 (56:41):
It could have, but they didn't.

Speaker 5 (56:42):
And so when I read those trials, I was actually
in a conundrus, like, Okay, I don't know for certain
that it prevents transmission.

Speaker 6 (56:49):
In fact, I would hope it, but I don't know it.

Speaker 5 (56:53):
And to me, you don't make public policy on the
basis of hoping everything goes right. Make robust public policies
that succeed even when the things that you hope will
right don't go right. And so I recommended, and I
think it was a December twenty twenty in Wall Street Journal,
I wrote that we should use the vaccines for focused

(57:13):
protection of vulnerable older people, just like the Great Parenting
Declaration suggested, rather than on this hope that would stop transmission.
And you know the idea that it stops transmission very quickly.
I think, let's say, by March April twenty twenty one,
it was clear from other countries that that wasn't going

(57:36):
to work, that you know, some of the other COVID
vaccines that weren't using the mRNA technology, that they had
failed to prevent transmission in places like the hl Islands
and elsewhere, and then Israel that we should vaccinate this
population very rapidly, very large factions of population saw massive
outbreaks in early twenty twenty one. In twenty twenty one,

(57:56):
and so I thought, so it was very clear it
doesn't stop transmission. And now it may prevented for a
couple of months, but then it drops off. And for
something like what if you want to use this to
eradicate a disease, it needs to be basically stop it.

Speaker 6 (58:11):
It needs to be one hundred percent.

Speaker 5 (58:13):
And so as what you said to us is exactly right,
you have to have some the public policy implications are
very very important. Even a vaccine doesn't stop transmission, it
makes no sense to require.

Speaker 6 (58:24):
People to take the vaccine.

Speaker 5 (58:26):
It should be a medical choice that people make on
their own, not something that has consequence that that's seen
as if you don't do it, you're being an irresponsible person,
that you're harming other people because you can take the
vaccine still get the disease and still spread the disease
if and I thought, no, sorry, good.

Speaker 1 (58:43):
It's sort of a philosophical or ethical question for you.
And I don't know your your politics, and I don't
think i've ever really heard you talk about your politics.
You strike me as at least a little bit libertarian,
but I don't know. I am if if you knew
to a metaphysical certainty that the vaccine stopped transmission, would

(59:06):
you support a government policy that required the vaccine?

Speaker 6 (59:12):
So first of all, let me do the flip side
of that.

Speaker 5 (59:15):
If a vaccine doesn't stop transmission, then you don't meet
the necessary condition for that mandate. I think that that's necessary,
but not a sufficient condition to support a mandate right.
So in this case, we didn't need to go to
that ethical question in the context of COVID. But let's
go to that ethical question. I think, to me, it's

(59:37):
a pragmatic question. I do believe that there are people
have medical autonomy rights. But I'll tell you, like the
Swedish health authorities without mandating the vaccine had much higher
uptake of it than the United States did. If you
have a trustworthy public health authority says, look, this is
good for you and your children and for the people
you love. And they're trustworthy and they're actually reflecting on

(59:59):
a science. You don't need coercion, you just need persuasion.
And I think that the fact that American public he'll
jump to coercions so quickly, it more indicated how untrustworthy
they had become, that the public didn't believe what they
were saying. And I have to say, ross they earned

(01:00:20):
that lack of trust that they currently have.

Speaker 2 (01:00:23):
They certainly did. They certainly did.

Speaker 1 (01:00:25):
We're talking with doctor j Boticharia, MD, PhD from Stanford.
So when these folks came down on you, did the
mandate other kinds of suppression? And we're going to talk
about free speech in a minute. I guess I might
ask you to play mind reader a little bit. But

(01:00:45):
do you think that they came from a position of saying,
do what we say because we're trying to keep you healthy.
Or do you think it was do what we say
because we're smarter and better than you and we just
insist that you listen to us.

Speaker 5 (01:01:02):
I think, uh, you know, it's a mix, and with
any with every human, there's like always a mix of
things like that. People will tell your tell themselves that
they're doing it because they want they you know, love
the love their neighbor and want to like good for
their neighbor. But in fact, a lot of times it's
it is, you know, hubris. And I think if you
want to the one single word to characterize American public
Heut's responds to COVID, it is hubris. It is that

(01:01:24):
relatively small set of people knew better than all the
rest of us how we should behave, and that they
wanted then they then they were going to make sure
that we behave the way they wanted us to behave, right.
Tony Fauci famously said, uh, you know, in an interview
and in effect that if you criticize me, you're not
simply criticizing a man, you're criticizing science itself. I mean
that is that, that's hubris on stilts. I mean, you

(01:01:46):
just and that is I think the fundamental sin of
American public health during the pandemic. It was unwilling to
listen to outside voices because it thought it knew best.
Even as you know, as children were being harmed, even
as or people were being harmed, as a working class
was being harmed, it didn't matter they They only thought was, well,
we need to stop the spread of COVID with tools

(01:02:09):
that didn't actually stop the spread of COVID. And they
had and they and they refused to listen to outside
experts and on regular people saying this is not working,
this is hurting us.

Speaker 1 (01:02:19):
Anybody could make a mistake in terms of a calculation
or guessing wrong about a particular path of something, And
I'm unaware of any important error that you made during COVID.
I'm wondering, as you look back on your thinking about COVID,
was there anything that you would say about yourself where

(01:02:39):
you would say I thought about that wrong. Not I
guessed wrong about you know, like who is gonna win
the football game? Not that kind of error. But as
you look back on something, do you think you personally
ever took the wrong intellectual approach on anything that you
would do differently the next time, if hopefully there won't be,
but if there were a next time.

Speaker 5 (01:03:01):
I mean, I think I probably the biggest mistake I
made was that I thought in March or twenty twenty
that would be impossible to get a vaccine so quickly,
and so I hadn't thought through the implications of what
that meant that we could get one so quickly, right, So,
I mean, my my, if I if I had realized
that it was possible, I guess I would have pushed

(01:03:22):
much harder for the vaccine trials to be better aligned
with the decisions that needed to get made about the vaccines.
Like so, for instance, the vaccine trials didn't check, as
I said earlier, whether there's these stops, whether they stopped
or stopped or prevented you from getting COVID or spreading COVID,
I would have pushed much harder to make I would

(01:03:43):
have pushed hard to make sure that those trials did
have that kind of element in it, because it would
have been easy to put in the trials. That was
an essential piece of information that had we had it,
I think would have resolved a lot, would prevent a
lot of really bad.

Speaker 6 (01:03:57):
Decisions in twenty twenty one.

Speaker 5 (01:04:00):
I mean there's lots of I mean, it's not possible
to get everything right ross in the middle of the pandemic.
So I can talk about other things, but like substantively,
that I think is the most important one.

Speaker 1 (01:04:09):
All right, And again, I don't know anybody who got
more things and more important things right than you did.
All right, we got a little over four minutes here.
I want to do two more things with you. You
basically beat the federal government on issues of censorship in
federal court, and then it got to the Supreme Court,
and it seemed to me like the Supreme Court kinda

(01:04:30):
waved it off and said, well, that was naughty, but
we're not going to really punish you or say you
can't do it again. What do you think is the
likelihood of future malign influence of the federal government on
social media companies and promoting censorship the way they did
against you.

Speaker 5 (01:04:48):
Yeah, So the lower court essentially said that that the
federal government should not be allowed to go tell social
media companies who want want to censor. But when it
reaches in court, what they ruled is that I and
my fellow plaintiffs did not have standing to sue, meaning
that they didn't they we didn't have an email from
the federal government to the social media companies saying censor j.

Speaker 6 (01:05:12):
Now they did. They explicitly didn't rule on the substance
of the case.

Speaker 5 (01:05:16):
They didn't say it was okay for the federal government
to do this, which is which is a good thing.
It's not going to go back down to the lower
courts and we're going to fight on standing again. But
the thing, the keyth it point I want to make
here is that as things stand, if this federal government
says to the social media companies censor these ideas and

(01:05:36):
don't name people, no one will ever have standing. And
that means that they that First Amendment is a dead letter.

Speaker 6 (01:05:42):
They don't. We don't.

Speaker 5 (01:05:42):
We no longer actually have an enforceable First Amendment. So
I think what's going to need to happen is either
Supreme Court's going to need to revisit this standing thing,
or there needs to be legislation or both, or the
First Amendment or for free speech rights to be stored
in this country.

Speaker 2 (01:05:56):
I couldn't agree with you more. I was pretty disappointed
in that ruling.

Speaker 1 (01:05:59):
There's been actually there were several big cases in the
recent term that turned on standing, which can be frustrating
from time to time, even though I understand it.

Speaker 2 (01:06:08):
All right, let's do one more thing.

Speaker 1 (01:06:12):
There has been a long time in psychology, in particular,
a problem of replication where people would write these scientific
papers claiming something causes something else or whatever, and then
their peer reviewed papers and then people read them and
say that seems a little weird. I'm gonna try that

(01:06:33):
same experiment, and then they can't duplicate it. It's called
a replication crisis. But it's been through this peer review process.
And so I've got sort of a two part question
for you. Is there the same problem in what we
would typically call medicine? And if so, what good is
peer review?

Speaker 5 (01:06:53):
So the answer to the part A is absolutely yes,
it's the same problem in medicine as as in psychology
and other sciences, and and and so.

Speaker 6 (01:07:03):
Is the second part is peer of you.

Speaker 5 (01:07:05):
People often conflate the idea peer of you and the
fact that a paper has been previewed as as giving
the paper a a premature of truth, when in fact
it doesn't deserve that. Truth comes from science by replication,
by other people looking and trying to the same thing,
independent entities trying the same thing, sciences trying the same

(01:07:27):
thing and finding the same thing.

Speaker 6 (01:07:28):
It emerges over time.

Speaker 5 (01:07:30):
It doesn't come from a single peer of view, and
a process that often politicized that that doesn't. It's it's
I mean, peer is necessary in science, but again it's
not sufficient to establish truth and I think a lot
of non scientists and certainly the media, conflate the peer
reviewing of a paper or idea with this is a
true idea.

Speaker 6 (01:07:49):
Those are not the same thing.

Speaker 1 (01:07:50):
Yeah, that makes sense, And and sometimes there are papers where,
even if you were an expert, unless you.

Speaker 2 (01:07:57):
Tried the experiment yourself, you would believe it.

Speaker 1 (01:08:01):
Every once in a while there are papers where a
careful reader would find an obvious error, and those get
through too. Those are two different, different kinds of mistakes.
But I think Jay's main point that folks need to
understand don't assume that just because something is peer reviewed means.

Speaker 2 (01:08:18):
It's true, because it might not be.

Speaker 1 (01:08:19):
I'll give you the last seventeen seconds to say anything
you want, Jay.

Speaker 6 (01:08:24):
Ross, thank you so much.

Speaker 5 (01:08:25):
I think this has been a traumatic era for science
for people, but if we learn the right lessons, things
can be better going forward. That's I think what the
spirit which we need to approach the post COVID era.

Speaker 1 (01:08:37):
Doctor j Bodicharia from Stanford. We'll be speaking at the
Steamboat Institute's Freedom Conference, which starts two weeks from today.
It's a two day event August twenty third and twenty fourth.
It's actually going to be in Beaver Creek, even though
it's the Steamboat Institute. Go to Steamboat Institute dot org.
Go over to the events tab and click on the
Freedom Conference and hit register.

Speaker 2 (01:08:58):
Now. I'm not sure yet whether I'm I'm gonna be there.

Speaker 1 (01:09:00):
I might In any case, it's a wonderful event with
great people and great speakers like Jay. Thank you so
much for making time for us. I wanted to talk
to you for quite a long time. It's an honor,
and I hope we get to talk again.

Speaker 6 (01:09:14):
Likewise, Ross, thank you.

Speaker 2 (01:09:16):
All right, we're gonna take a quick break and we'll
be right back on KOA.

Speaker 1 (01:09:20):
I would like to give a big thank you to
a person you may know whose name is Randy Cromwell
Mandy Connell for ruining my show for a full three
hours yesterday, and then I got to ruin her show
for half an hour. I would have ruined her show
for longer, but there was a Rockies game, so I
only had the opportunity. But seriously, Mandy and I did

(01:09:43):
the show together from Broncos training camp yesterday. Always so
much fun to do anything with Mandy, you know, have
a drink or do a show or whatever.

Speaker 2 (01:09:52):
She's just one of my favorite people.

Speaker 1 (01:09:54):
And after the show, we hung out for a little
while and we got an opportunity to talk, just briefly,
but we got an opportunity to talk with a Denver
Broncos player.

Speaker 2 (01:10:06):
I was like talking.

Speaker 1 (01:10:06):
I'm a huge Broncos fan, NFL fan. We got a
chance to have a chat with Justin Sternad. Strnad quite
an interesting last name. He is a linebacker for the
Broncos and.

Speaker 2 (01:10:22):
Very well spoken guy. Enjoyed talking to him.

Speaker 1 (01:10:24):
It was a fairly short conversation if you want to
watch all of it, I mean all of it is
only I think four minutes or something, but it's up
on my.

Speaker 2 (01:10:31):
Blog at Ross Kaminski dot com.

Speaker 1 (01:10:33):
I just want to share two short clips with you.
One is a question that Mandy asked, and then the
next one will be a question from me. This first
question is in the context of Justinternat apparently having received
a contract offer from I think it was the Carolina
Panthers during the last offseason, and it seemed like he

(01:10:55):
was going there, and then I guess he changed his
mind and stayed with the Broncos.

Speaker 7 (01:11:00):
We are here with Justin Sernaud. He is back We're
happy to have you. In March, we looked like we
were going to lose you to the Panthers. What was
the kind of deciding factor that brought you back to
the Broncos.

Speaker 8 (01:11:11):
Yeah, just wanting to win at the place that I
started at Sean and the coaching staff is building something
special here and just wanting to be part of it.
Wanting to help this team win. Enjoyed last year, but
wanted to get to the playoffs. Wanted to continue to
take this organization to higher heights and that's our goals
this year.

Speaker 2 (01:11:30):
I like that answer.

Speaker 1 (01:11:32):
Actually, I don't know how much Carolina was offering him.
I don't know that Denver offered him more. It wouldn't
surprise me if Carolina offered him more. But I liked
the idea that he had that level of commitment to
wanting to keep it going into place that he started
and maybe believe and not maybe he said he believes

(01:11:52):
that the coaching staff is working towards something good here.
I hope that he's right, But I like that answer.
I think that answer showed something good about his character.
So I really like that answer. So you know that
when I interview people, whether athletes or anybody I like

(01:12:13):
to work in some questions that are not necessarily entirely
about what they you know, what they do for a living.
I did not get a chance to ask Sockshew yesterday
of justins or not. I did do sockshow one up
in a previous year with the Broncos player and got
a great answer out of that.

Speaker 2 (01:12:33):
But I asked him something else, a little of a
get to know you a question. Watching the Olympics right now?
What's your favorite thing to watch? And which Olympic sport
would you like to compete in?

Speaker 8 (01:12:43):
Okay, so his favorite to watch would be the one
hundred and two hundred meters We just we were just
in there watching Noah Lyles actually got third in the
two hundred. Yeah, we just watched it before coming out here.
And then favorite to compete in. I'm gonna say it'd
be nice to be on the USA basketball team with
Lebron And hey, they're playing Yokich today later today, so

(01:13:06):
that'd be exciting for me.

Speaker 9 (01:13:07):
It's discus.

Speaker 7 (01:13:08):
I didn't know that was a thing earlier, but I
feel like for some reason I could have excelled in that.
Do you have an irrational feel that you could just
excel in something randomly.

Speaker 8 (01:13:16):
I come here in the mornings and I see sports
I didn't even know existed half today, so so it's awesome.

Speaker 1 (01:13:21):
Yeah, we will have Olympic breakdancing starting tonight, right, so.

Speaker 8 (01:13:26):
I don't make I'm the most talid of breakdancer, but
I'll give it a try, all right.

Speaker 1 (01:13:29):
I like that, And I think I think I was
wrong about the breakdancing. I think it starts tonight rather
than I did said that yesterday, so I think it
starts tonight rather.

Speaker 2 (01:13:37):
Than rather than last night.

Speaker 1 (01:13:38):
But anyway, good conversation with Justin Sterna, and I'll just
I'll just back off for a second for a macro thing.
I find normally football players, so they're very generally nice
and friendly, but the answers can be a little generic.

Speaker 2 (01:13:56):
And the same way with coaches too, Right.

Speaker 1 (01:13:58):
You can you can usually anticipate what a coach will
answer about a particular question, right, They just kind of
say the same thing over and over, and they you know,
they praise the opponent who just lost for like playing hard,
and our team this and our team that and was
a team effort and it's not even all this stuff.
So I like it. When you get to questions that

(01:14:21):
get a little bit more personal about the player and
get a little more detail. And you know, Mandy's question
about why did you stay in Denver got to some
of that, and my question about the Olympics got to
some of that.

Speaker 2 (01:14:31):
So anyway, I was fun.

Speaker 1 (01:14:33):
And if I have it right, I think I'm going
to be at training camp two more times. I think,
oh wait, no, is this the third week of training
camp already? So yeah, so I'll be there one more time.
I'll be there. I'll be there one more time. So yeah.
I love being out there. I love watching the players,
I love watching the practice.

Speaker 2 (01:14:53):
I just love it all.

Speaker 1 (01:14:54):
All right, let me give you two short stories today.
This is of interesting just because we're in a very
political time right now. But fifty years ago today, the
headline of the New York Times, the top headline and
massive whatever whatever point font was, Nixon resigns, first ever

(01:15:21):
in American history a president, a president resigning. Nixon resigns,
and then the subhead, still in very big, very big funt,
he urges a time of healing.

Speaker 2 (01:15:32):
Ford will take office today. That was the cover of
the New York Times.

Speaker 1 (01:15:37):
Fifty years ago today, August ninth, nineteen seventy four.

Speaker 2 (01:15:42):
Pretty cool. All right, let me do one other thing.

Speaker 1 (01:15:45):
And I'm not going to offer a lot of analysis
here because I'm not really qualified to, but I just
wanted you to be aware of this. We haven't heard
a lot about the Ukraine Russia war lately, but there's
been an interesting thing that starts earlier this week. So
so prior to this week, for the previous two or
three weeks, there's been a lot of talk about Russia

(01:16:08):
making progress, about the Ukraine kind of running short of
soldiers and maybe running short of material because the US
has been slowed to deliver certain things, and there's going
to be a few F sixteen's at some point, But
most of the chatter has been kind of Russia is
making gains and Ukraine is falling back a little bit.

(01:16:30):
So earlier this week, Ukraine started an incursion invasion, small
invasion into Russian territory, and this is from the Associated Press.
Russian troops are battling the push back Ukrainian forces from
the Kurskon region on the third day of one of

(01:16:52):
the largest cross cross.

Speaker 2 (01:16:54):
Border incursions of the war.

Speaker 1 (01:16:55):
The Russian Defense Defense Ministry said yesterday they said the
Russian military and border guards have blocked Ukrainian forces from
pushing deeper into the region in southwestern Russia. Had added
that the army is attacking Ukrainian fighters trying to advance
into the area from Ukraine's Sumi region. And so I
think there's two things going on here, I said, I
wasn't going to give you analysis, but I'll give you

(01:17:16):
just a little bit. I think there's two things going
on here. I think that obviously, you always want to
improve your position if you could take some Russian territory,
and I kind of doubt the Ukrainians could take it
and hold it, but that certainly improves your position if
you're ever going to get into a peace talk, like okay,
you give back some of our land.

Speaker 2 (01:17:33):
And we'll give back some of your land. That's one thing.

Speaker 1 (01:17:36):
The other thing that might be going on is that
Ukraine might be trying to draw Russian defensive forces away
from areas where Russians are in Ukraine, hoping.

Speaker 2 (01:17:50):
That if they can draw Russians to go.

Speaker 1 (01:17:52):
Defend Russian territory, there will be fewer Russians in the
Ukrainian territory and maybe they can mount another effort to
take back Ukrainian territory. In any case, you know, Ukrainian
troops had gotten as much as about nine miles into
Russian territory. And it might not sound like a lot,
but in this war it is. But it's a big thing.

(01:18:12):
So I mean, it's m's spend a few more minutes
on it right now, repeat a couple of things I
said at the beginning of the show, and then add
a thing or two. So Donald Trump yesterday agreed to
a debate with Kamala Harris on September tenth on ABC.
He had been saying before that he wouldn't agree to
that debate anymore because it was something he had agreed
to with Joe Biden, who wasn't the nominee anymore. But

(01:18:33):
the problem for Donald Trump is that he's not winning
anymore by most measures. At this point, you'd have to
say he's behind by a little bit, but in national
polling he's behind. On some swing state polling, he's behind.
And now on all the betting sites he is at
best tied, but on most of them he's behind. And

(01:18:53):
I will say, and my Trump supporting friends won't love this,
but it takes a special kind of person to go
from being up thirty points in betting odds and surviving
an assassination attempt to somehow squander all that in a
matter of a few weeks and be behind. And unfortunately,

(01:19:15):
Donald Trump's just not a very good candidate. And I've
said that forever. He's just not a very good candidate.
The problem with all this is that Kamala Harris and
Tim Waltz represent, in my opinion, a really significant threat
to the United States of America. And a lot of
people think Donald Trump represents a threat too, and I
think he does in a different way. I think I'm

(01:19:38):
more afraid of Harrison Waltz than I am afraid of Trump.

Speaker 2 (01:19:42):
The problem is that Trump is just he's not very good.
So that's why we are where we are.

Speaker 1 (01:19:47):
That's why we're in a situation where Republicans should have
every advantage, and yet the Republican candidate is a little
bit behind the same Republican candidate who lost to a
guy who campaigned from his basement, right because it's because
it's the same Republican candidate and he's a bad candidate.

Speaker 2 (01:20:06):
So that's where we are. Now.

Speaker 1 (01:20:08):
Another thing that's going on is this conversation about Tim
Waltz's military service. So I just want to go through
a couple things quickly, because I think there's a lot
of stuff out there that people have heard that they
think they understand, but they don't understand. And I'm not
going to say I have this one hundred percent right,
but I've done a lot of reading on it, so
i have reasonable confidence in what I'm about to say,
and I'll just kind of go through this in some

(01:20:29):
quick bullet points and we'll only do like ninety seconds
on it, and then we'll move on.

Speaker 2 (01:20:33):
So, first of all, Tim Waltz did get.

Speaker 1 (01:20:36):
The rank of command sergeant major while he was in
the reserves, and he did have that rank.

Speaker 2 (01:20:42):
In order to keep that rank, there's a bunch of stuff.

Speaker 1 (01:20:45):
You need to do, some various kinds of training, and
I don't know all the details. He didn't finish all
of that. Now, you were allowed to have the rank
and be the rank without finishing.

Speaker 2 (01:20:54):
All that stuff, you have time to finish it.

Speaker 1 (01:20:56):
But he did not finish all that stuff by the
time he retired. So while he was command sergeant major
while he was in the reserves, he did not retire
with that rank. He retired one rank lower than that.
And I'm not very good on Army enlisted ranks. I
want to say was I want to say it was
staff sergeant, but I could be wrong.

Speaker 2 (01:21:14):
Don't quote me on that.

Speaker 1 (01:21:15):
But he retired at one rank below sergeant major. But
he was sergeant major while he was in Okay, what else?
He put his retirement papers in before his unit got
notification that it might deploy a couple months before, and

(01:21:38):
then a couple months after that the unit was actually deployed.
But the guy had decided well before all this to
run for Congress, and he decided to run for Congress,
he put in his retirement papers. Then at some point
after he's going through all this, right, they say, okay,
your unit might deploy, and then at some point after.

Speaker 2 (01:21:58):
That his unit does deploy.

Speaker 1 (01:22:01):
And of course I understand you could say, well, if
it had been I, I would have rescinded my retirement
papers and gone to war with with the people I've
been serving with. But it's not the same as what
he's being accused of, which is like bailing out because
he knew that they were going to get deployed.

Speaker 2 (01:22:22):
That's simply not true.

Speaker 1 (01:22:24):
He had already put his retirement papers in, and you know,
then there's all this stuff. Well, maybe there was a
rumor they would deploy later. Look, the dude had decided
to run for Congress. And I don't know if I
were in that situation and I had said I'm going
to run for Congress, and then suddenly the unit that
I already said I'm retiring from, and I've already served

(01:22:45):
honorably over twenty years in the military is going to
get deployed. Would I feel compelled to deploy with them?

Speaker 2 (01:22:51):
Maybe?

Speaker 1 (01:22:52):
I don't know, But I don't think it's some kind
of evil thing to say I've made my decision, I'm
running for Congress, I put my retire papers in, and.

Speaker 2 (01:23:01):
I'm sticking with that decision. I don't think that's inherently wrong, right.

Speaker 1 (01:23:06):
There might have been something more valorous about saying, all right,
I'm gonna go.

Speaker 2 (01:23:10):
You know, I'm gonna go.

Speaker 1 (01:23:11):
All right, So Bill says, sergeant major was the rank
that he retired at, one below command sergeant major.

Speaker 2 (01:23:16):
Thank you, Bill. So, I don't think he did anything
wrong there.

Speaker 1 (01:23:23):
I think other people might have made a different choice,
But I don't think he did anything legally wrong ethically, wrong,
morally wrong by sticking with his decision to retire to
run for Congress.

Speaker 2 (01:23:33):
Where I think.

Speaker 1 (01:23:34):
He has a problem, although I don't think he'll be
a big factor in the election, is I think he
has said and done some things that might be technically right,
but we're misleading. So when he's doing the stuff about
gun control, and he talks about wanting to ban you know,
a kind of rifle or kind of gun. Whenever he
word he used that I carried in war, it certainly

(01:23:57):
makes it sound to an ordinary person like he saw
combat and he carried a firearm in combat, but he
never saw combat. He did deploy, and it was in
support of Operation Enduring Freedom. It was technically part of
Operation and During Freedom, but it wasn't to Afghanistan. It
was to Italy. And maybe he carried a rifle when

(01:24:17):
he was in Italy. He probably did during some kind
of training while he was in Italy. Wouldn't surprise me
at all. So technically you would say the US is
at war, he's in the army, he's in Italy, so
kind of sort of technically he's.

Speaker 2 (01:24:33):
At war or in war, but normal people aren't gonna
hear it that way.

Speaker 1 (01:24:37):
The normal person hears someone say I carried a rifle
in war, They're gonna hear it as I was in
combat carry I fought with that rifle and he never did.

Speaker 2 (01:24:48):
So.

Speaker 1 (01:24:49):
Bottom line for me is I think most of the
criticisms about Tim Waltz's military service are wrong, but I
think some of them could stick, and he should come
out and clear it all up, just to make it
go away. That's what I would do if I were
Tim Waald, even though I think that most of the
stuff being leveled against him is not true. But remember,

(01:25:14):
politics isn't about truth, It's about winning, all right.

Speaker 2 (01:25:17):
What do I want to do here?

Speaker 4 (01:25:19):
Oh?

Speaker 1 (01:25:19):
I want to let you know sometime in this segment,
in addition to Dragon having named that tune this week,
I will be giving Way Today's entry into our big
drawing that will occur.

Speaker 2 (01:25:30):
So basically, you win an entry.

Speaker 1 (01:25:32):
Into the big drawing that will happen early next month
for a pair of Broncos season tickets tickets to every
Broncos home game.

Speaker 2 (01:25:38):
And we're going to do it during this segment of
the show.

Speaker 3 (01:25:41):
Dragon, what text or do I need to be well?

Speaker 2 (01:25:43):
And when No, we're not going to do that yet.

Speaker 1 (01:25:46):
I'll tell you in a little bit, but I want
to text in no, but not yet, and you work here,
so you're not allowed to seriously.

Speaker 2 (01:25:52):
Yeah, that's not cool. I know, I know it's not
I can't win either.

Speaker 3 (01:25:56):
I mean, they get something that we can't.

Speaker 1 (01:25:58):
Have exactly that usually has happens with concert tickets too.

Speaker 2 (01:26:02):
I mean, it's kind of nuts.

Speaker 1 (01:26:04):
I'm going to do like two more minutes of politics
because there are a couple of things I didn't get to.

Speaker 2 (01:26:10):
So one.

Speaker 1 (01:26:11):
Kamala Harris did agree to a debate, or rather, Donald
Trump agreed to a debate with Kamala Harris in September
that Harris had already said she's just gonna stick with
the ABC debate September tenth. And now Trump has gone
along with that. But a lot of folks on the right,
and now a few folks in the mainstream media are

(01:26:31):
starting to get a little peeved with Kamala Harris about
not showing up for an interview and answering questions and
so on. She stepped off an airplane in Detroit and
answered reporters questions in Detroit yesterday for seventy seven seconds.

Speaker 2 (01:26:43):
Seventy seven seconds.

Speaker 3 (01:26:45):
And she eternity try and hold your breath for seventy
seven seconds.

Speaker 2 (01:26:49):
I can do that. I mean, I won't do it
right now, be very boring, but I have done that.

Speaker 1 (01:26:53):
But she said in one of the things she said
to the reporters who wanted to talk more, she said,
my team, we have agreed that we want to set
up an interview by the end of the month.

Speaker 2 (01:27:06):
The end of the month. Yesterday was the eighth.

Speaker 1 (01:27:09):
They are thirty one days in August, right, so that's
more than three weeks, like, and I'm not saying it'll
end up being the last day of the month, but
potentially more than three weeks.

Speaker 2 (01:27:22):
There are eighty seven days.

Speaker 1 (01:27:25):
Until the election, right, well, we'll call it. We'll call
it what twelve twelve and a half weeks until the election?
And so she's basically willing to wait like another quarter
of the time until the election before sitting down for
one interview. Since it became clear that she was a nominee,
she hasn't even spoken to the press for more than

(01:27:46):
that seventy seven seconds Yesterday's she's doing what my wife
calls the mobile equivalent of Joe Biden's basement campaign.

Speaker 2 (01:27:56):
It's just Kamala's basement is moving.

Speaker 1 (01:27:58):
Around with her, but she's just is walled off from everybody.

Speaker 2 (01:28:02):
So anyway, we'll see.

Speaker 1 (01:28:03):
She says she wants to sit down for an interview
by the end of the month. Oh how courageous of her.
But of course, you know, when you're this is an
old Napoleon. I think it's a Napoleon thing. You know,
when you find your enemy making big mistakes or defeating themselves,
don't interrupt them. And so Kamala kind of feels like
Trump is destroying himself every time he opens his mouth,

(01:28:23):
so why interrupt him?

Speaker 2 (01:28:24):
Let him keep talking.

Speaker 1 (01:28:26):
And it's you know, it's not a bad concept as
far as it goes, but I don't know how far
it'll go.

Speaker 2 (01:28:32):
One other thing I want to mention.

Speaker 1 (01:28:33):
So we spent some time in the last segment talking
about Tim Waltz's military service, and I said that most
of the complaints about his military service are wrong. He
still has a pr problem there. Most of the complaints
are wrong. But here's my bigger issue about it. There
are a few people who may hear that Tim Waltz
said something incorrect about his military service, and they might

(01:28:55):
not like that, and maybe their veterans and maybe that'll
be their reason to vote for Donald Trump, let's say,
or not at least not vote for the Democrat.

Speaker 2 (01:29:04):
That's possible.

Speaker 1 (01:29:06):
I don't think that'll be a large number of people
once they hear that the accusations aren't true. But there
may be people who never hear that the accusations aren't true.

Speaker 2 (01:29:16):
They'll just hear the accusations.

Speaker 1 (01:29:18):
So the Republicans are spending some time kind of throwing
this stuff.

Speaker 2 (01:29:21):
At the wall and and see what sticks.

Speaker 1 (01:29:24):
And again, it's politics, and politics ain't being bag and
politics aren't really about the truth. Although if you lie
a lot and you get caught at it, it'll hurt you.
So there is some benefit towards telling the truth when
you can.

Speaker 2 (01:29:36):
Here's my problem with spending as much.

Speaker 1 (01:29:38):
Time as conservatives are spending on this military stuff. And
I don't just mean Trump advance, right, I mean conservatives
on Twitter are wasting an immense amount of you know,
finger clicks on their keyboard on Waltz's military service, when
they should instead be talking about things like this. This
is a piece from the Washington Times. While other governors

(01:30:01):
were lowering taxes, walt socked Minnesotan's with a slew of
tax hikes.

Speaker 2 (01:30:05):
And there are two things I want to just share
with you about this.

Speaker 1 (01:30:09):
One is what he did, and then the other is,
as I'm reading this, I note that a lot of
the same stuff is going on in Colorado, which says
terrible things about Colorado and just how wildly leftist Colorado
has become.

Speaker 2 (01:30:24):
But again, so this is the Washington Times.

Speaker 1 (01:30:26):
And if those of you don't know the Washington Times,
it's a conservative leaning newspaper. It is one of the
few overtly conservative newspapers in the country, more conservative, I
would say, than the Wall Street Journal, which is sort
of a mainstream business.

Speaker 2 (01:30:41):
Type of conservative. This more conservative.

Speaker 1 (01:30:44):
During Tim Waltz's tenure, he approved as governor, he approved
more than ten billion dollars in tax hikes, imposing new
taxes on everything from retail deliveries we got that in
Colorado to workers earnings, overseeing one of the most dramatic
shifts toward higher taxes.

Speaker 2 (01:30:59):
In the country.

Speaker 1 (01:31:00):
His big spending, high tax policies led to an anemic
economy in Minnesota, which is lagged behind the rest of
the nation in economic growth.

Speaker 2 (01:31:07):
Average weekly wages rank among the lowest.

Speaker 1 (01:31:09):
In the country, and population growth has stalled as high
income households flee the state. The tax and spends spree
makes mister Walls an outlier at a time when governors
at both parties are slashing state taxes. It also foreshadows
the direction that Kamala Harris plans to take the country
if she.

Speaker 2 (01:31:26):
Were to win. So that's pretty interesting, right.

Speaker 1 (01:31:29):
So to hear a couple things seven tenths of a
percent payroll tax on employers half of mitch which may
be passed on to the employee, make it making it
among a handful of states with a payroll tax.

Speaker 2 (01:31:39):
Well, Colorado is one of them.

Speaker 1 (01:31:41):
Colorado is one of the handful of states with a
state level payroll tax because we actually that well, if
I remember right, that was done as part of the
paid leave thing, which was so far to the left
that even Jared Polus wouldn't go along with it. So
it got put on the ballot and our idiot voters
from mostly from California now passed it.

Speaker 2 (01:32:01):
So we have a state payroll tax in California.

Speaker 1 (01:32:03):
From California, in Colorado, a fifty cent tax on all
retail deliveries in the state over one hundred dollars except
for food. Colorado was the only other state with a
retail delivery tax.

Speaker 2 (01:32:13):
That's in the article.

Speaker 1 (01:32:14):
Colorado is the only other state with a retail delivery tax.
An increased motor vehicle sales tax six point eight seventy
five percent, among the highest in the country. A one
percent sales tax in seven counties in the Minneapolis metropolitan area,
bringing the sales tax in those counties to more than
eight percent and nine percent in Minneapolis. So again, I mean,

(01:32:36):
that's like in a arrange with Denver, but that's much
higher than the rest of the country. And again, so
this guy is doing terrible things to Minnesota, and it
happens that these are the things that being done.

Speaker 2 (01:32:46):
Are being done to Colorado, right I.

Speaker 1 (01:32:48):
Think I think one more limited tax deductions on families
within comes over two hundred and twenty thousand dollars a year.
We just did the same thing here. I think it
was a different number. It might have been three hundred
thousand dollars a year, but we're richer state in Minnesota,
so we have the same thing going on here.

Speaker 2 (01:33:03):
So I took two things away from this.

Speaker 1 (01:33:05):
Number. One is that Tim Walls is a true died
in the wall far left big spending tax hike nightmare.
And second, which is not something I was thinking I
was going to gonna come to mind when I was
reading about Tim Walls. But so much of this terrible
stuff that he did is actually already policy here in

(01:33:29):
Colorado that, my friends, is not good, not good at all.
All right, So let's do this Broncos thing. So here's
how here's how this works. Beginning of next month, We're
gonna do a drawing and the people who are in
the drawing will have a chance to win a pair
of season tickets, in other words, tickets to every home
every Broncos home game. You need to win your entry

(01:33:52):
into that drawing, and I'm going to give away.

Speaker 2 (01:33:57):
An entry into that drawing during each show.

Speaker 1 (01:34:00):
If you don't win with me right now, your next
chance will be with Mandy between noon and twelve thirty.
And she's sitting here now laughing at something.

Speaker 2 (01:34:08):
Yes, are you gonna tell you? Did you bring hello?
Did you bring enough for everybody?

Speaker 4 (01:34:12):
No?

Speaker 9 (01:34:13):
My daughter just sent me a text.

Speaker 7 (01:34:14):
She had to take a quiz of personality quiz in
one of her classes, and it came back as she
was lance sweets from bones. And we've just started watching
Bones and it's a really funny and accurate comparison in
many ways, and so I was laughing at her comparison. There,
that's what that's I'm sorry, did I interrupt things?

Speaker 5 (01:34:35):
No?

Speaker 2 (01:34:36):
No, sorry that that was very apology.

Speaker 7 (01:34:38):
Super fun yesterday, especially with you doing all the heavy lifting.

Speaker 2 (01:34:41):
Thanks for leaving me with all the work.

Speaker 9 (01:34:43):
The post is awesome.

Speaker 1 (01:34:45):
I had no idea think how much more think so
much more work Johnny Carson did than Ed McMahon was like.

Speaker 2 (01:34:51):
That job, Ross, You're awesome, Ross, love it.

Speaker 9 (01:34:56):
Yeah, I could do this for a living.

Speaker 2 (01:34:57):
Okay, So here's what we're gonna do, Dragon, text he number?

Speaker 4 (01:35:00):
What for?

Speaker 2 (01:35:01):
Text again?

Speaker 1 (01:35:02):
And I'm gonna do I've been doing either my show
related stuff to prove you've been listening, or football related stuff.

Speaker 2 (01:35:09):
I'm gonna do neither.

Speaker 1 (01:35:10):
I'm gonna do just a tribute question that doesn't have
anything to do with sports. And so texter number four
at what time?

Speaker 6 (01:35:16):
Dragon?

Speaker 2 (01:35:17):
Forty eight eighteen? That's probably not enough time for the streamers.

Speaker 1 (01:35:21):
Go a little later forty nine eighteen, okay, Text number
four eleven forty nine eighteen, Text number four if five
sixty six nine zero and your text needs to include
your name, your email address, and some kind of answer.
I don't need an exact wording, but some kind of
answer to this question.

Speaker 2 (01:35:40):
Mandy and I are jen X, my kids are gen z.

Speaker 1 (01:35:46):
Why is there no gen Why any any reasonably close
answer to why is there to gen? Y?

Speaker 2 (01:35:56):
Will will win.

Speaker 1 (01:35:58):
Textra number four I, five, six, six, nine, zero, eleven,
forty eight and eighteen seconds.

Speaker 2 (01:36:02):
Don't answer to the question, Mandy, you look like you're.

Speaker 7 (01:36:05):
Thinking that, you know, why is like the first truly
buy you know, synonym or what not, consonant or vowel.
It's it's like a it's you know, it's both what
depending on where why is and how are you using it?

Speaker 9 (01:36:17):
It could be a vowel or it could be a consonant.

Speaker 7 (01:36:19):
So it's the it's yeah, so it's by way, I'm
just saying it is a cubit. It could be or
one or both.

Speaker 2 (01:36:27):
At the same time. It can be both at the
same time.

Speaker 9 (01:36:30):
Or neither at all.

Speaker 2 (01:36:30):
Oh my gosh, this is what.

Speaker 9 (01:36:32):
Happened to me yesterday during an interview.

Speaker 1 (01:36:34):
Yeah maybe, and I interviewed a physicist about quantum error
correction and we're both still made my brain hurt A
little bit of the day, A.

Speaker 2 (01:36:42):
Little bit lost, a little bit lost.

Speaker 1 (01:36:46):
Quickly, I want to just do a just a really
random topic for like two minutes, and then we're gonna
do Dragons Name that tune, and I need Mandy's participation. Here.

Speaker 2 (01:36:55):
This is the headline from the New York Post.

Speaker 1 (01:36:57):
This common item is the top thing Americans forget to
pack before trips. Uh so before man, do you before
you tell me your answer or what you think?

Speaker 2 (01:37:07):
The answer to this poll is either way.

Speaker 1 (01:37:09):
Listeners text us at five six six nine zero and
tell me the last thing you remember having forgotten when
you went on a trip, not with your guess is
to what other people forget? What's the last thing you
remember that you forgot on a trip five six six
nine zero.

Speaker 2 (01:37:22):
What about you?

Speaker 9 (01:37:23):
What a poopery you travel with that get a hotel room?

Speaker 8 (01:37:28):
Uh?

Speaker 9 (01:37:28):
Yeah, in a hotel room on a cruise ship.

Speaker 7 (01:37:32):
These are two places where poop Perrie is the greatest
thing in the history of the world. And there have
been times when we get somewhere and I have that
moment where all of a sudden I'm like, oh my God,
I left the pooperri at home, and we all stand
and gasp in horror, because we know bad things are
gonna happen at some point.

Speaker 1 (01:37:48):
So somebody has a bad reaction to Taco Night on
the cruise ship, Yeah, is that more likely to be
you or Chuck reaction to that?

Speaker 7 (01:37:56):
You know, I don't want to give out my family's
medical history, but totally Chuck, totally Chuck. Okay, he was
given a lot of different meds in the military that
really did a number on his stomach.

Speaker 1 (01:38:04):
Okay, So if if you bring poopery and it's sitting
on the toilet tank or wherever you might have it sitting,
and if Chuck has a bad reaction to Taco night,
will he use.

Speaker 2 (01:38:14):
The poop arie?

Speaker 7 (01:38:15):
He's very considerate in that extremely considerate. I have no
I don't have a gross husband in that particular.

Speaker 1 (01:38:22):
If you were traveling for will will you bring the
poop pery no matter how long the trip is, even
if it's just like a night or two or only
on long trip.

Speaker 7 (01:38:31):
Absolutely it is in my toiletries bag all the time
normally except the last time.

Speaker 2 (01:38:36):
But then you forgot it.

Speaker 1 (01:38:37):
Because what you finished one and forgot to buy another
one and put it.

Speaker 2 (01:38:40):
In your toiletry Actually, right there, was no.

Speaker 7 (01:38:42):
Yeah, well we had a spare bottle, but there was
none left at the end of the trip, right.

Speaker 2 (01:38:47):
Yeah, So I just didn't think about putting.

Speaker 7 (01:38:49):
The next one into my Toiletrys bag when I got
home and disaster ensued.

Speaker 6 (01:38:53):
Did it?

Speaker 2 (01:38:53):
How long were you away without it?

Speaker 4 (01:38:54):
No?

Speaker 9 (01:38:55):
I we were on it. It was the Norway trip.

Speaker 7 (01:38:57):
Oh my gosh, I'm a lobby bathroom and was kind
you send him to a different send him.

Speaker 9 (01:39:02):
I'm telling you, he is very considerate about it.

Speaker 1 (01:39:03):
So when he realized there was no POOPERI to be had,
he said, I will go use a different restaurant.

Speaker 9 (01:39:08):
But I did too, just to be curty, really, yeah,
just to be courteous.

Speaker 2 (01:39:11):
Normally it's only me who goes.

Speaker 1 (01:39:13):
To use the other restroom if I think there's gonna
be that kind of problem.

Speaker 2 (01:39:15):
Christen just uses.

Speaker 9 (01:39:16):
Yeah, she's a wild woman, your wife dragon.

Speaker 2 (01:39:19):
Is there something you have forgotten on a trip recently?
Hairbrush constantly?

Speaker 7 (01:39:24):
I don't know.

Speaker 2 (01:39:27):
I think everybody will guess that.

Speaker 1 (01:39:29):
The most common thing that people forget charger.

Speaker 9 (01:39:32):
Oh you're charging.

Speaker 2 (01:39:35):
Yeah, charger, But my back toilet trees and tooth and beauty.

Speaker 1 (01:39:39):
Products is right up there with it. And then sunscreen,
medication sucks, underwear, water bottles in their wallet.

Speaker 2 (01:39:48):
Underwear.

Speaker 7 (01:39:48):
Nobody else said underwear, No, just me, You're so glad
I waited.

Speaker 1 (01:39:56):
Hey, folks, if you're listening on the podcast right now,
that's the end of today's show.

Speaker 2 (01:40:01):
Thank you so much for listening.

Speaker 1 (01:40:03):
Don't forget you can catch us every day on the
podcast as you are right now, on your smart speaker,
on your iHeartRadio app, even on the computer at Koa, Colorado,
and the good old fashioned way on your radio.

Speaker 2 (01:40:15):
Thanks so much for listening to the show.