Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
The Mandy Connell Show is sponsored by Belle and Pollock
Accident and Injury Lawyers.
Speaker 2 (00:05):
No, it's Mandy Connell, Andy Condo, KOA.
Speaker 1 (00:13):
Ninetyma got Way.
Speaker 3 (00:17):
Study the nicety through three, Andy Connell keeping a sad baboo.
Speaker 1 (00:35):
Sorry about that, guys. Welcome, Welcome, Welcome to a Tuesday
edition of the show.
Speaker 4 (00:41):
I took an extra day yesterday in beautiful Ohio, and
just because of that, I got Grant Smith, a product
of Ohio. I wanted to keep the Ohio vibes going today.
That's so I got grant. Actually, a Rod's on vacation and.
Speaker 1 (00:54):
They give me grant.
Speaker 4 (00:55):
Now, Woo woo, yaya, Ohio. It was beautiful. You ever
heard of Tip City, Ohio?
Speaker 1 (01:03):
I don't think so.
Speaker 4 (01:04):
Right outside Dayton I No, I don't want to talk
about it because everybody will move there.
Speaker 5 (01:08):
Never mind.
Speaker 4 (01:08):
Forget I said anything. Never mind forget about it. You
heard nothing. Grant got a big show. We have lots
of just I mean, you guys, so many.
Speaker 1 (01:19):
Horrible stories to talk about today.
Speaker 4 (01:21):
And it's just I'm doing the blog today and I'm
looking at things and I'm trying to find, you know,
hopeful stuff. It's just it's all negative Nelly's stuff today,
and I apologize for being a Debbie Downer. I'm gonna
try and present it in the best way possible. But
there's just some terrible stories that we have to talk
about and we're gonna get into it.
Speaker 1 (01:43):
Let's do this.
Speaker 4 (01:43):
Let's start with the blog. Find the blog by going
to mandy'sblog dot com. That's mandy'sblog dot com. Then look
for the latest post section, and then look for the
headline that says seven eight twenty five blog the future
of building cities and the roll board needs help.
Speaker 1 (02:01):
Click on that and here are the headlines you will
find within.
Speaker 6 (02:04):
I didn't be with someone who office South American arm
with ships and cuipments and say that's going to.
Speaker 7 (02:08):
Press plant.
Speaker 4 (02:10):
Today on the blog can AI Save Cities nine news
as Chris vanderben is on our prole board at Q thirty,
a GOP lawmaker is accused of gross remarks heck and
to get should step aside. This Texas flood is a nightmare.
Please wear life jacket people. A child falls out of
the homeless hotel. Our children are fat and unhealthy. Pot
(02:34):
loving regent gets rebuked. Denver made the list of best
cities about the Epstein files. Why would we expect candy
companies to care about public health? Why is socialism on
the rise? What is the National Education Association focused on
this year? It seems they ruined Superman. Yes, Ai will
(02:54):
probably be the end of humanity. Hama says they've lost
control in Gaza. Five habits, people not like you, and
now dogs meeting newborns for the first time. Those are
the headlines on the blog at mandy'sblog dot com and
just as a little palate cleanser, I put the video
of dogs meeting newborns and oh, oh my heart, we
(03:18):
don't deserve dogs. Dogs are just They're truly the best.
They truly truly are the best. So got a lot
of stuff on the blog today. Obviously, the biggest story
nationally is the floods in Texas, which have claimed at
least one hundred lives, many of them children from a
summer camp. I cannot imagine a bigger nightmare than this.
(03:41):
You send your kid off to summer camp where they're
supposed to have a wonderful time. I loved summer camp
as a kid. I went to a camp called Campdovewood.
It is an Evangelical Christian camp in Florida run and
founded by a woman named Roberta Richmond, who is one
of the best human beings I have ever in my
life had the pleasure of knowing. And summer Camp for
(04:03):
me was glorious. It was an all girls camp, so
you didn't have any boy pressure or anything like that.
But the girls were from all over Florida and Georgia,
and you got to sing songs and do campfires and
go canoeing and learn how to.
Speaker 1 (04:19):
Do archery and swim and it just was glorious. And
that's what summer camp should be.
Speaker 4 (04:26):
And yet for some of these kids who survived, and
you know, thank God they survived, what a nightmare this
is going to be for the.
Speaker 1 (04:32):
Rest of their lives.
Speaker 4 (04:34):
I I can't even imagine the parents and I can't
I just I can't imagine what they're going through right now.
Is they still try to recover from this and what's
been entirely predictable and still gross. Nonetheless, are the people
who are looking to try and use this as an
(04:55):
attack on FEMA. I've said this before and I'll say
it again right now. I think that we do not
need and a federal Emergency Management administration as we have
it now. They should never provide boots on the ground, period,
full stop.
Speaker 1 (05:09):
They just shouldn't. They should provide money.
Speaker 4 (05:14):
Any state or group of states that's going through a
natural disaster of any kind should be the ones to say, look,
here's what we need. We need X amount of bulldozers,
we need x amount of rescuing, and we need x
amount of this. Here's how much we think it's going
to cost. In the federal government should say we're going
to write you check. We're just gonna write you check.
(05:34):
So yeah, yeah, anyway, Instead, we have people trying to
use this to bludgeon the Trump administration administration. The worst
of the worst have been people who have taken a
social media.
Speaker 7 (05:53):
To make.
Speaker 4 (05:55):
Nasty comments about the people that died because they were
in Trump or tried to score political points because Noah
was defunded in this giant bill. By the way, none
of those budget cuts take place until October, so that's
really kind of a false accusation. And it just things
(06:18):
like this bring out the best in people, and those
are the people that are in Texas right now, digging
through muck looking for people, hoping to find survivors, knowing
they probably won't the ones who are going to be
there trying to help these people recover from a flood
that has left many people with nothing, and those are
(06:39):
the heroes. And then on the other side of it,
you have people who want to politicize everything. And this
is not strictly a democratic perspective, but.
Speaker 1 (06:48):
I I'm just going to say it.
Speaker 4 (06:51):
I'm sure that there are people on the right who
say things like, well, this is God's will, which I
also think is ridiculous to presume, what you know, what
God's will is, I just and that absolutely absurd. But
I don't and maybe I'm just not seeing them. The
level of nasty that we're seeing right now is just
really really awful. Because you disagree with someone politically, think
(07:16):
about that for a second. These are people's children, these
are people's lives, these are people's you know, families, they're homes,
They're absolutely destroyed, and you're gonna use it to just
score cheap political points.
Speaker 1 (07:32):
It's just sad.
Speaker 4 (07:33):
I feel sad for those people that are so devoid
of any joy in their life or any perspective in
their life that they have to take something like this
and make it into.
Speaker 1 (07:43):
Something horrible, even worse. I just I'm sad about that. Mandy.
Speaker 4 (07:49):
The government that is thirty eight trillion in the red
should write a check.
Speaker 1 (07:54):
Come on, man, let me just say this.
Speaker 4 (07:56):
I think that there are things that the federal government
should be responsible for. I think they should be responsible
for keeping roadways nice and easy to travel in the
United States of America, something they fail at on a
regular basis.
Speaker 1 (08:09):
I think that they should be.
Speaker 4 (08:10):
Responsible for security, you know, in our cities and our towns.
To a certain extent, all of that should be handled locally,
but the federal government has a role in making sure that, say,
I don't know, criminals don't walk across the southern border.
And in a situation like this where you have a
natural disaster, this isn't a disaster of the state's creation.
Speaker 1 (08:32):
Right, it is a natural disaster.
Speaker 4 (08:35):
That is one of those times where the federal government
should step up and say, hey.
Speaker 1 (08:39):
You know, we're going to help you out.
Speaker 7 (08:43):
Now.
Speaker 4 (08:44):
When it comes to replacing people's homes and things of that,
that's not the federal government's responsibility.
Speaker 1 (08:48):
That's why you have insurance.
Speaker 4 (08:50):
Unfortunately, insurance is now being hit, you know, with so
many property damage losses that insurance is getting more expensive
and people are going to have to come to terms
with that, because if you want your insurance company to
be solvent when claims are made, then you are going
to have to pay what the insurance company needs. That's
just the reality of it, Mandy. The point is there's
(09:13):
no money in the account.
Speaker 1 (09:14):
I know that you know that. We get it. You
get it, Mandy.
Speaker 4 (09:18):
Not criticizing, but how can the people who've run the
camp not been more prepared? The river's flooded before, no
weather alert radio. I am not going to judge anyone
until we know more about the situation.
Speaker 1 (09:30):
And I'm not saying that.
Speaker 4 (09:30):
You're not wrong, that you are wrong, right, I'm not
saying that what you're saying is not a great point. However,
right now, people are still looking for bodies, and I
think we can hold our fire for just a minute
until we have a clearer picture of what the camp
did or did not do. Again, I just think it's
(09:53):
premature to be asking those questions while we're still looking
for bodies.
Speaker 1 (09:58):
Give it a couple of weeks and hopefully we will
know more.
Speaker 4 (10:02):
Hi, Andy, we moved to Ohio when I was in
high school. My sister still lives there. I've been to
Tip City many times. Tip City's very nice. My mom's
concierge doctors in Tip City. There's indeed a lot of
people move into that area.
Speaker 1 (10:14):
Shut up, to shut up, Shut up, Mandy.
Speaker 4 (10:21):
Maybe some of these people need to think that many
of these children that died, their parents were on both
sides of the aisle.
Speaker 1 (10:26):
Yep, yep.
Speaker 4 (10:28):
Indeed, my spouse says, this Texter was telling me about
a Houston mayor or someone saying that they were making
comments about flooding victims being white people and that's why
they were getting attention or something like that.
Speaker 1 (10:40):
That kind of racist garbage is just that garbage.
Speaker 4 (10:45):
It all started after Katrina, right, Katrina, the town led
by mostly black people who decided not to evacuate the
city in any meaningful way, then decided to say it
was racism that we didn't pay enough to attend you
to Katrina.
Speaker 1 (11:01):
Are you kidding me?
Speaker 4 (11:03):
If the mayor of Houston said that, and I have
not seen it, so I will not condemn the Mayor
of Houston with all the fire I feel about it.
But if anyone said that, stop being an ignorant. It
just an ignorant fool. But I guess that's redundant ignorant fool. Yeah,
maybe maybe, Mandy, you didn't stay at Ohio for the
(11:25):
Giant country concert in Fort Laramie, just forty minutes from
Tip City.
Speaker 1 (11:29):
We're driving to Ohio. Now, you know what, I love, Branton.
Speaker 4 (11:33):
You'll appreciate this because you go home and probably see
the same thing. Everything is so green, there's flowers everywhere. Golly,
it's beautiful. It really is very humid. Yep, it was humid.
My hair looked like crap the entire time, the entire time.
Speaker 1 (11:49):
But that's okay. I don't care. My grandkids don't care
if my hair looks like crap. They just are unbothered
by my crappiness of my hair looking thing. Yeah, anyway,
so I did put a link today to Samaritans Purse.
There are many different ways to support the.
Speaker 4 (12:08):
People in Texas, but I am most impressed with the
organization called Samaritans.
Speaker 1 (12:14):
Purse for a reason.
Speaker 4 (12:15):
They're not just there during the first few days of
the emergency, which the Red Cross will show up.
Speaker 1 (12:21):
They'll be there for a week to ten days.
Speaker 4 (12:22):
They'll kind of get everything stabilized, and then the Red
Cross is gone, Samaritans Purse will stay and they will
stay as long as they are needed.
Speaker 1 (12:33):
And they bring in these big, you know, laundry facilities
so people can come wash stuff.
Speaker 4 (12:38):
They volunteer to feed people, They feed all the first responders,
they feed anybody that needs help. They help homeowners with
cleanouts to get the mud out, whatever's left, and they
stay there as long as they're needed. So if you
want to donate money, I would strongly recommend that you
donate it to Samaritans Purse, and only because I know
(13:01):
that your money will go to exactly what you want
it to go to, and that is helping these people
in this absolutely horrific, horrific time of disaster.
Speaker 1 (13:11):
I just I cannot even Okay, can we talk.
Speaker 4 (13:13):
About the Epstein files for just a moment, and this
is we're going to talk about this because I wish
I were surprised. I truly wish I were surprised, President Trump.
This is from an article from Axios. President Trump's Justice
(13:34):
Department and FBI have concluded they have no evidence that
convicted sex offender and disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein blackmailed powerful
figures kept a client list or was murdered, according to
an MO detailing the findings. The administration is releasing a
video in both raw and enhanced versions that it says
indicates no one entered the area of the Manhattan prison
(13:56):
where Epstein was held the night before he died in
twenty nine. The video supports the medical examiners finding that
Epstein committed suicide, according.
Speaker 1 (14:06):
To the memo. But that's not the worst part.
Speaker 4 (14:10):
The worst part is is they're basically saying there's no
evidence that all these famous rich people were on any
kind of tapes, or or there's any kind of client list,
or there's any of that. If there isn't, then why
is Elaine Maxwell in prison? Wasn't she in prison for
(14:35):
enticing young girls to come and be victimized? By whom
were they victimized? This is the most disappointing thing in
the world. A former CIA agent said he believes that
the deep state got rid of everything, got rid of
all the evidence of the rich and powerful men. Michael Schellenberger,
(14:58):
who writes at Public News Public dot News, Michael Schellenberger
is the guy who used to be a left winger
and then he started digging into San Francisco and the
problems there. And he wrote a book called San Francico,
which is phenomenal. And now he has a news outlet
called Public News, and I subscribe to Public News.
Speaker 1 (15:22):
They have done stories, and I mean done stories about
this as a matter of fact.
Speaker 4 (15:29):
Let me scroll down and find their entire list. Let's
see strong evidence suggest Epstein was part of a sex
blackmail operation tied to intelligence agencies. Visitor logs show that
William Burns, who served as CIA director under President Biden,
visited Epstein's New York townhouse multiple times. The Wall Street
(15:50):
Journal reported those visits in twenty twenty three, based on
Epstein's private calendar. In twenty seventeen, Alex Acosta, the Justice
Department official who gave Epstein his two thousand and eight
plea deal, told Trump transition officials that he was told
to back off Epstein.
Speaker 1 (16:07):
Because quote, he belonged to intelligence.
Speaker 4 (16:10):
The Justice Department later admitted that all eleven months of
Acosta's emails from.
Speaker 1 (16:15):
That period had disappeared. That's not all, though.
Speaker 4 (16:23):
They go on and I want to find this one. Okay,
here we go, here we go. This is why Michael
Schellenberger is so mad.
Speaker 1 (16:31):
About this.
Speaker 4 (16:32):
Few independent journalists have done more than we have to
defend Donald Trump and the MAGA movement against weaponization of
the intelligence community and deep state agencies. Over the past
two and a half years, we published hundreds of investigative
articles and testified before Congress about unconstitutional abuses of power
by the CIA, FBI, DHS and their proxies. We exposed
(16:56):
we exposed efforts to censor Trump and his supporters through
a sprawling censorship industrial complex, documented the manipulation of the
justice system to prosecute Trump on politicized grounds, and revealed
how US and foreign agencies coordinated mass surveillance of speech.
We defended Trump from false and malicious claims, showed that
(17:18):
his administration obeyed court orders, and disproved the narrative that
he violated democratic norms more than democrats. We were the
first to report new evidence that President Obama's CIA director
ordered spying on Trump campaign officials to justify surveillance and
interfere in the twenty sixteen election. After Trump's reelection, we
published investigations revealing abuses of power by USAID and the
(17:42):
Department of Education. We editorialized in supportive as lawful executive
orders ending DEI and gender affirming procedures for minors. We
exposed the CIA and USAID's role in supporting the twenty
nineteen impeachment effort and their connection to the Russian collusion hoax.
In all this, we have consistently made the case that
(18:03):
Trump's victory was not just political, it was moral. And
then they go on to say, guess what, kids, We're
going to keep doing the same now even if he's
in power.
Speaker 5 (18:15):
And I'm glad.
Speaker 1 (18:17):
I'm glad. I don't care who's in power.
Speaker 4 (18:20):
What I care is that once again we have a
two tiered system of justice. The elites they don't have
to pay for their crimes. They can abuse children, they
can have thousands and thousands of hours of child pornography,
which apparently Jeffrey Epstein had thousands and thousands of hours.
And yet none of the people who went to his
(18:41):
island that was called Lolita Island.
Speaker 1 (18:46):
On the Lolita Express, all of the people.
Speaker 4 (18:51):
That were in his townhouse, a townhouse which by the way,
had cameras in every single room, none of those people
are going to be held to account. This is the
kind of stuff that begins a revolution. You know, I
have a really good video on the blog today of
Constantine Kissen. I love his work talking about why young
people are being swayed by the nonsensical socialism crap being
(19:11):
spewed by the New York.
Speaker 1 (19:12):
City mayoral candidate. When we get back, I want to
dip into some of that because it's worth hearing.
Speaker 4 (19:19):
If you want to know why revolutions start, they never
start because the people are happy, right.
Speaker 1 (19:24):
Nobody's content, nobody's getting what they need.
Speaker 4 (19:29):
And if we expect today's young people to be interested
in conserving the things about the United States of America
that are good and worthy of fighting for, we have
to make sure this country is working for them the
way it worked for us to and telling them to
give up avocado toast so they can buy a house
just isn't going to get it done. We'll dip into
that next after the news, traffic, and weather. Keep it
(19:51):
right here on KOA. Some really foul things to say
about the camp. It was not the mayor of Houston,
it was a mayor appointee. What got super awkward is
this After this woman, Sadie Perkins, took to social media
and made some of the nastiest, most vile comments about
(20:13):
this being a white's only camp and nobody would care
if this was I mean, just really awful, funny story.
Her boyfriend is the reverend of the first Unitarian Universalist
Church of Houston, and he took to the pulpit to say,
my partner, Sadie Perkins, has made comments on social media
regarding the horrific flooding that devastated Camp Mystic. I want
to be clear that I disavow her comments. Now it'll
(20:37):
be up to her to decide if that's because he's white,
and if he's racist too, her boyfriend. Anyway, you know,
those people are gonna have to deal with the the
the fallout there. I want to play a little bit.
We were talking about how how do people still get
sucked in by the promises of socialism which have been
(21:00):
broken over and over and over and over and over.
Speaker 1 (21:02):
And over again.
Speaker 4 (21:03):
You can never have socialism until you deal with ego,
because ego makes us want nice stuff, Ego makes us
want our own stuff.
Speaker 1 (21:14):
And as diverse culturally as.
Speaker 4 (21:17):
We are in the United States of America, we don't
have a solid foundation on which socialism can be built.
Speaker 1 (21:23):
We just don't. You know, Israel is a socialist nation.
In large extent, they.
Speaker 4 (21:30):
Have kibbutzs where people live together in a socialist fashion.
Everybody works on the kibbutz. They take care of business together,
they work on things together, they.
Speaker 1 (21:38):
Do all of that stuff.
Speaker 4 (21:40):
But even Israel has a capitalist economy for a very
good reason, because it's the best kind of economy, and
the kibitz is in Israel work whereas other communes have
failed because they have a religious foundation, and people that
move to the kbbuzz are very they're completely bought into
(22:03):
the notion that everybody can work together collectively. So it's
a closed circuit in a way because everyone shares Judaism
as the foundation. So why is socialism so appealing to
young people today? Constantine Kissen is a younger man. He's
(22:23):
in his forties. He was born in Russia, that is
now he lives. He's lived in the UK for a
very long time. Very smart dude, but he understands these things.
And I want you to just listen to what he
has to say. I'm starting in the middle because I
didn't chew it up to the right place, but just
listen to what he has to say about why young
(22:44):
people are being sucked in now more than.
Speaker 1 (22:47):
Ever acted as welcome.
Speaker 8 (22:48):
Adrasa's is sufficient to prime young people for receptivity to socialism,
but he does not explain why the ideas are landing
as hot as they are.
Speaker 1 (22:57):
So why is socialism becoming popular?
Speaker 8 (23:00):
I tried to remind my conservative friends of this at
the end of my speech at the first OUR conference,
when I said, many of you here are conservatives.
Speaker 3 (23:09):
I'm not.
Speaker 8 (23:09):
I look terrible in tweed. That's why I identify as
politically non binary. But I can tell you conservatives something.
You will never get young people to want to conservative
society and an economy that is not working for them.
We will not overcome woke nihilism as long as young
(23:31):
people are locked out of the housing market, unable to
pair up, unable to have kids, unable to plan for
the future. Born in nineteen eighty two, I am what
you might call a geriatric millennial. I entered the workforce
in two thousand and three and work solidly for over
a decade, making a good income as a translator and
(23:51):
then as a circuit comedian. Together with my wife's modest
income as an artist, we earned a little above the
median household income in Britain. We bought off a property,
a tiny apartment at the age of thirty five. Far
from being unusual, this is becoming normal. In London, the
average age of a first time buyer is thirty five.
In New York it's now thirty seven. The counter often
(24:14):
wheeled out against this argument is that while certain aspects
of life have become more challenging, young people now enjoy
access to an immense array of consumer goods electronics, food variety,
and so on. But the problem is that some things
matter more than others. Housing is one of them. Most people,
for example, would not want to have children until they
(24:34):
have a place of their own, and as any parent
will tell you, having kids changes everything. If you can't
afford to buy around place and settle down, you're stuck
in a permanent adolescent limbo in which making the right
decisions no longer makes sense. I know many people of
my generation and younger, who, it could be said, waste
lots of money on coffees, eating out and so on,
(24:57):
while paying rent instead of saving up for the are
on place. The problem is, though, the saving two hundred
pounds a month towards a deposit on your first property
makes very little sense when the price of that property
grows by tens of thousands every year. This sense that
the things you actually want deep down are speeding away
from you on a train you'll never catch is the
(25:18):
real driving force behind the popularity of politicians like Mam Danny.
Young people are open to socialist demogogues not because they've
sat down and done the sums on their policies. They're
open to them because they're desperate and see.
Speaker 1 (25:31):
No way out.
Speaker 8 (25:32):
This, by the way, is always how radical and unworkable
ideas become popular. The rise of communism and fascism in
the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was the direct
result of the excessors of the Industrial Revolution. During that period,
human wealth shot up, but so did wealth inequality, with
the people at the top accumulating most of the gains.
(25:54):
By the middle of the nineteenth century, the top one
percent of people in Britain owned fifty to sixty percent
of the way wealth.
Speaker 1 (26:00):
Sound familiar.
Speaker 8 (26:01):
The rise of socialist politicians and the popularity of left
wing commentators like Garry's economics are not the problem. They
are a symptom, and until the real problems are addressed,
it's Mom Danny's all the way down, and.
Speaker 4 (26:14):
That, my friends, is probably the most accurate description I've
heard for what is going on with this youth dabbling
with socialism. They haven't done any of the cost benefit analysis.
They haven't done any historical analysis because we gutted civics
and the basic understanding of these isms in school. And
I think that's by design one hundred percent the issue
(26:39):
that we're having now where people and I'm going to
use like the Denver metro as an example, everything government
has done on affordable housing has made it more expensive.
Speaker 1 (26:48):
Do you guys realize this?
Speaker 4 (26:51):
Every government intervention makes housing more expensive in Argentina.
Speaker 1 (26:56):
Let me pull this up very quickly.
Speaker 4 (26:57):
I didn't put it on the blog today, but I
want to dup it down into it very quickly. They
did a quick check to see how Javier Malay is
doing in Argentina. You may recall he was elected president
with a chainsaw to cut spending and after years of
out of control inflation, guess what's happening in Argentina. For
(27:19):
the first time in eight years, inflation is two percent
two percent. In an open letter published ahead of Argentina's
crunch nineteen November election, Economist a group of one hundred.
Leading economist said they understood the deep seated desire for
economic stability among voters, but they said it was going
(27:42):
to be an abject disaster. They said it would create
further economic devastation and social chaos. However, they were wrong,
a complete and total misfire. Argentina just announced an astonishing
seven point six percent year over year GDP growth for
(28:04):
quarter two, seven point six percent. He did away with
rent control.
Speaker 1 (28:11):
You know what happened.
Speaker 4 (28:13):
Supply has increased three hundred percent. Rents have dropped forty
percent when they did away with rent control. The more
we allow government to interfere with our economy, the worse
it is for young people. But we've distorted capitalism right
now into crony capitalism that you can hardly recommend. You
(28:34):
just can't even recognize it anymore. Right, free markets are
not that free anymore because certain companies have protections that
prevent them from having to be held accountable when they
sell a product to people that then harms them.
Speaker 1 (28:47):
Anyway, just something to think about.
Speaker 4 (28:51):
I don't have the answers, but what I do know
is that the more the government tries to fix.
Speaker 1 (28:55):
The problem, the worse the problem.
Speaker 4 (28:58):
Becomes, So why don't we start by having government not
try to fix as much? That would be great. No
critics were allowed to screen the new Superman movie. It
comes out in three days, and Grant, are you a
superhero guy? Obviously a rod is our token superhero guy
(29:18):
on the show.
Speaker 1 (29:19):
Can you step into that role even on a temporary basis?
Speaker 6 (29:23):
No?
Speaker 1 (29:23):
Okay, good, It's nice to know your limitations. Yeah, I
watched them, but I don't know enough of the details.
Speaker 4 (29:29):
Well, and you know, I was really excited about this
because the trailer looked really cool and I've always loved
the story of Superman because Superman with Christopher Reeves was
the rebirth of superhero movies back in the late nineteen seventies,
really was. And it seems that they've made.
Speaker 1 (29:45):
This a political movie.
Speaker 3 (29:49):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (29:50):
James Gunn, the guy who directed the film, a great director.
I don't have any issue with James Gunn.
Speaker 4 (29:58):
Movies are exciting, there, action packed, they're just you know,
he does a genre and he does it well. But
it came out was like Superman is an immigrant story
and it kind of is like he didn't need to
lose me there, right, you don't need to lose me
with a Superman is an immigrant story, because yes, indeed,
he is an immigrant.
Speaker 1 (30:17):
To this planet.
Speaker 7 (30:19):
But then.
Speaker 4 (30:23):
Then Sean Dunn, his brother, who apparently can't get a
work unless his brother makes a movie, he took to
the red carpet and had and had this to say,
give me my audio real quick, grant, I cannot get
to the little clicker.
Speaker 1 (30:39):
There, there we go, your boss, your brother talked about
Superman being an immigrant, and now Maga has already upset
that he's called.
Speaker 5 (30:50):
Superman an immigrant. I wanted to get your reaction.
Speaker 9 (30:53):
Uh, you know, my reaction to that is that it
is exactly what the movie is about. I think that, like,
we support our people, you know, we love our immigrants,
we love Yes, Superman is an immigrant, and yes the
people that we support in this country are immigrants. And
(31:18):
if you don't like that, then you're not American.
Speaker 4 (31:21):
So I'm gonna let him stop there, because once again,
the clever little feature of conflating illegal immigrants with legal
immigrants is the tool that he has used to make
his point. Absolutely, they do it every time. It's so
entirely predictable. So they've taken a movie which should have
been amazing. One critic wrote a review of the new
(31:45):
Superman movie, and let me just read you the headline.
Speaker 1 (31:50):
Okay, terrible news.
Speaker 4 (31:53):
Superman is final nail in superheroes Cinema coffin, The seemingly
indestructible Man of Steel is fatally weakened by kryptonite. So
too is the one unbeatable superhero genre, gravely threatened by
audience fatigue. And then it goes on to talk about
(32:15):
how the movie doesn't really do It doesn't have a plot,
it doesn't do anything. I have a question for Sean Dunn,
James Gunn's brother, who can't get a job unless's brother's
directing a movie.
Speaker 1 (32:26):
And that is were we as welcoming to zod. I
don't think we were, sir. I don't think they were,
because they were here to exploit.
Speaker 4 (32:36):
Our world, to take it over, to walk around and
plant their own flag, to march through the streets and
demand people bow to them. Sound familiar. We don't welcome
all immigrants. All we're asking, at least, all I'm asking
is that people do it the legal way. All I'm
(32:58):
asking is that Congress get a of their heads out
of their collective. You know what, Now we've got some
money for border security in the Big Beautiful Bill. Let's
talk about real immigration reform to allow people who want
to come here and work and make money and send
it back home to their families to be able to
do so, and be able to do so legally with
(33:19):
their own taxpayer ID number, not somebody else's Social Security number.
It's not crazy to expect a country to have borders.
It's not crazy at all. And that they act like
somehow it is, Well, what is an American if we
don't have borders?
Speaker 1 (33:38):
What does that even mean?
Speaker 4 (33:40):
How can you say if you don't support immigrants, you're
not American? Well, what is America without our borders? No difference.
We'll see how Superman plays out. I again so disappointed
between this and the second Mission Impossible movie.
Speaker 7 (34:01):
Ugh, ugh, so bad.
Speaker 1 (34:07):
What are they doing?
Speaker 4 (34:09):
I did watch an interesting movie on the plane, Grant.
Do you hear about the Last Show Girl with Pam Anderson.
Speaker 1 (34:15):
I have heard of that, and I heard it's really good.
I gotta tell you, she.
Speaker 4 (34:19):
Was shockingly good at playing a character that's really not likable.
In the grand scheme of things, her character is not
a likable person, and Jamie Lee Curtis killed it and
it's short. It's only an hour and twenty minutes of
your life. So if it sucks, you know, you're an
hour and twenty minutes out. When we get back, our
favorite futurist joins us. Thomas Frye has a fascinating idea
(34:43):
about how to reinvigorate cities from the inside out. And
it doesn't have to do with wooing business. It has
to do with building business. We'll talk about that next.
Thomas Frye, he's the guy that just spends a lot
of time thinking about stuff in the future and where
it's going.
Speaker 1 (35:02):
Thomas, let me ask you a question.
Speaker 4 (35:03):
When do you do your thinking on stuff like you're mulling?
When when you tell me about that process when you're
mulling trying to figure out the future.
Speaker 10 (35:12):
Oh, usually it's at night, But a lot of times
some of the best ideas just pop into your head.
Speaker 5 (35:21):
Just at some random moment in time, so it's hard
to predict.
Speaker 4 (35:25):
I actually do most of my thinking my thinking time
in the car. I drive in silence for that reason.
And I told another friend of mine to this today
and he's like, I don't know if I've ever driven
in silence. I'm like, well, when's your thinking time, you know,
you're really thinking.
Speaker 1 (35:39):
You got to think.
Speaker 4 (35:39):
So he said, I don't do that, and I was like, oh, okay,
well then that makes me special. Thomas has a very
interesting concept. Are you going to write a blog post
on this that I can share as well because you
send it to me?
Speaker 5 (35:51):
But yes, we'll have it posted in a week or two.
Speaker 4 (35:54):
Okay, because I think it's very interesting. But it's a
pretty complex topic of discuss and I want to make
sure that people are interested in this. Could go back
and find more information about it later. Let's talk about
is it Neyman engines? Neuman engines?
Speaker 5 (36:09):
Yeah, named after John von Neuman kind of.
Speaker 10 (36:13):
He was a contemporary of valunteering, helped invent modern computing.
He's one of the sharpest guys of all times. But
it's a whole different concept. Kind of the way cities
have been reviving themselves is through economic development. In these
(36:35):
economic development operations are failing big time right now because
things have changed so much. So if you move a
company into your area, you're probably not going to get
all the employees, or if you get a few employees, that's.
Speaker 5 (36:52):
All you're going to get.
Speaker 10 (36:53):
So economic development there's still some things happening in that space.
But but the true, the true engine of economic activity
should actually be in the startup space. Because with with AI,
we're going to be creating more startups than ever before
in history. And I think this becomes our biggest job
(37:18):
engine ever created. So the way the Noyman engine works
is you start with a venture studio. A venture studio
is different than than like an accelerator or an incubator.
A venture studios where you have a group of savvy
entrepreneurs that actually start all the businesses, and you bring
(37:39):
this into a community that is struggling or failing. Now,
the communities are having problems filling office space, or having
problems filling shops on main street.
Speaker 5 (37:52):
They're just struggling economically. So when you when you start
this Neuman engine.
Speaker 10 (37:58):
Then you have the opportunity not to just create jobs,
but to create prime jobs. Now, a prime job is
different than just creating a job. See, if you create
a coffee shop, what you're doing is you're just recirculating
the money in the community. If you create a prime job,
then you're bringing money from outside of the community into
it and that has multiple effects then and so that
(38:24):
changes the way communities operate.
Speaker 4 (38:26):
Well, let me stop there. Let's start at phase one.
We'll call it phase one of the operation, and that
is the not incubator. And for people who don't know
what an incubator is, there are a lot of different organizations,
a lot of venture capitalists have incubators where you can
as an entrepreneur, you already have an idea, you've already
started the plan, you've already started the.
Speaker 1 (38:45):
Ball rolling on your business.
Speaker 4 (38:46):
You may move into an incubator to take advantage of
their expertise to give more business help, to get support
as you begin to grow this business that you've already created.
Speaker 1 (38:56):
So the other thing that the first.
Speaker 4 (38:58):
Stage of the normans is actually a space where ideas
are pulled out of thin air.
Speaker 1 (39:05):
Is that the best way for me to dune this down?
Speaker 10 (39:08):
Yeah, but there's more more logic to that than being
pulled out of thin air.
Speaker 5 (39:13):
But you're using kind of the talent in the area.
Speaker 10 (39:19):
So if you have a community that's in the oil
and gas industry, then you can use that startups in
that space. If you have a community that's in let's say,
making movies, then you work with talent in that space,
and so on. So you kind of build on what's
already there, but then you can you can veer off
(39:43):
in different directions as well. So the idea is to
first set up and establish a space. It'll be like
a co working space that is a combination co working
space with actually a theater for having shows, having classes,
(40:03):
helping people, doing meetups there, coaching people. So that was
the kind of the heart of the whole Norman engine
is this startup space, and then you get people coming
in there, and so the venture studio will then start
(40:25):
creating these prime businesses. In a prime business would be
like if you wanted to start a distillery, distillery selling
all over the country. If you're starting there's something that
has a food industry, frozen food or something like that,
that's money coming from all over the country. Health camps,
(40:48):
there's lots of different kinds of health camps that you
can establish and that brings in money from all over
as well. And so when you start going down the list,
and I have quite a few different possibilities, but these
these can actually there's probably hundreds and hundreds of different
startup possibilities for a community.
Speaker 5 (41:09):
So then you have you have the people that are
starting things you.
Speaker 10 (41:14):
Have there, there's something that I call how to school.
How to school is something as purposely local as just
telling you how to do things like how to start
how to start vibe coding, or how to do AI
marketing for your business and that sort of thing.
Speaker 4 (41:36):
So, how do you use the AI tools that you
are because Thomas, I don't you and I haven't spoken
about this. I have a friend that has worked in
the internet marketing field for a very long time, since
the internet marketing field just started, He's started and launched
multiple companies, right, so he has employed people, he has
he's had staffs. He said, Well, he just launched a
(41:58):
new company that is more marketing to a very specific
kind of business, and he's focused on that like a laser.
He has not had to hire anyone to scale his
business because he's using AI for everything, which for him
is outstanding, Right, But I'm worried about AI sort of
(42:18):
leading us with new customers to buy the products kind.
Speaker 1 (42:21):
Of thing, you know what I mean.
Speaker 4 (42:22):
It's like, if AI is so efficient and AI is
capable of helping people build new businesses, which it is,
what does the landscape look like when we don't have
to hire people anymore.
Speaker 10 (42:38):
Yeah, there's going to be a lot of solo businesses,
but those people will still be buying products for themselves
and their family. So if we have ten thousand solo
businesses in a community, that's still a thriving economy, right.
So the kind of the landscape is going to changed
(43:00):
dramatically as to how these businesses are function and operate.
There will still be a lot of people who choose
to hire people to do different things, Like, even though
you can run a solo business, you probably still want
somebody to mow your lawn or to do your dry
cleaning things like that. So so anyway, this is going
(43:25):
to employ a lot of people. And I think with
all the sort of businesses that we're going to be
creating out of thin air here, that this is actually
going to give us with more employment than we've ever
had ever in all history.
Speaker 4 (43:41):
I look at this and I think to myself, it
sounds like a great idea, and I wonder how it
can be done on a more micro level and specifically
thinking about you know, you have a list of cities
that you have is like right for this kind of development?
And I'm going to use date no harm because I
was literally just date. No, how over the weekend, They've
(44:01):
got right Patterson Air Force Base, They've got an aerospace
industry there. So you're saying, look, you lean into that, Well,
how can this be applied to a suffering, a socioeconomically
devastated community right where you don't necessarily have a super
highly educated workforce, You're not necessarily going to have a
(44:23):
lot of college grads. Could this be used to help
create an economy within one of those lower socioeconomic neighborhoods
in the same way, you know, because what you're talking
about is educated people using AI to do to do
things that will attach to other highly educated industries. Well,
what about using this in a community that is, you know,
(44:44):
the average home or the average person doesn't own their
own home and they're living on the margins.
Speaker 1 (44:49):
Is this something that could be used on that scale?
Speaker 4 (44:52):
Do you think to reinvigorate even individual neighborhoods, forget cities,
just smaller things than that.
Speaker 10 (45:01):
Yeah, when when you have a venture studio, you have
savvy entrepreneurs that are going to start creating things, and
they're going to be creating businesses that they will coach
along until a point where they can have another set
of entrepreneurs take them over, so the business gets off
the ground and operating and they have a handoff to
(45:22):
a local group of entrepreneurs that can run it from there.
So this is kind of a training operation at the
same time, so you're training training the next generation of
business operators.
Speaker 5 (45:37):
So I think this creates a lot of excitement in
the community.
Speaker 10 (45:42):
Lots of people then change their their their path, change
their thinking and say, oh, I want to be part
of that.
Speaker 5 (45:49):
And so going to going to a few.
Speaker 10 (45:52):
Sessions at the at the how to school and you're
learning a few things, you don't quite learn enough, so
then you sign up for the local media group and
then you start hanging out with other people, other like
minded people.
Speaker 5 (46:05):
And that's the key.
Speaker 10 (46:06):
When you get that mindset in a community that you
can take it from here, you can do it on
your own, that changes a lot of things. That changes
the perspective of virtually everybody in the community.
Speaker 1 (46:19):
Oh, I agree wholeheartedly.
Speaker 4 (46:20):
I mean, it's the difference between you know, going to
Haiti and building a school and going to Haiti and
teaching people how to do construction right. I mean, I
had an interviewed some many years ago now with a woman,
a Haitian woman in Haiti who was begging mission trips
to stop coming to Haiti and building things or doing things.
They're like, bring people down and teach people how to
(46:42):
do this stuff, because what you've done is create a
whole group of people waiting for another set of missionaries
to show up and build them another thing. And this
is kind of what you're talking about, like teach people
along the way. This is interesting, Thomas, because my former
father in law actually wasn't banking for a very long
time and one of his pet projects that he was
never able to quite get off the ground because of money.
(47:04):
And I want to ask you about that next is
he wanted to go in and create exactly what you're
talking about. Invite people from a community to come in
and say, what's your idea for a business? Who would
it serve, how would it work in your mind? You know,
and let's see if we can flesh this out and
then do exactly what you're talking about. Handhold people through
the process, teach them how to do accounting, teach them
how to you know, advertise their but like teach them
(47:26):
what they need to know.
Speaker 1 (47:28):
And he got close a few.
Speaker 4 (47:29):
Times, but It always came down to you're asking for
a big investment for what, maybe initially for many years,
a low return situation.
Speaker 1 (47:39):
So who funds this? How do you get the money
to do this? And what might it cost?
Speaker 5 (47:46):
Yeah, the yeah, the kind of the low end.
Speaker 10 (47:49):
We're thinking roughly it's around ten million dollars over five years, right,
so a lot of cities can afford that. They're spending
a lot of that money on economic development right now.
They can use municipal bonds. This gets paid back by
all the businesses that get started. This is an investment
(48:10):
in their own community. I'm not going to say that
you can do it on a bootstrap it or do
it on a shoestring. I think you need to make
a serious commitment in your community and then just go
for it.
Speaker 4 (48:25):
I agree, and I think that you need to pay
people to be full time employees that have knowledge and
skill set to do the things that need to be done.
You know, I'm actually thinking, have you ever heard of
the organization's score It's the Society.
Speaker 1 (48:39):
Of I can't remember.
Speaker 4 (48:41):
It's like retired corporate executives and it's a volunteer organization.
And if you start a business, you can go to
score and they will give you good business advice.
Speaker 1 (48:49):
It sounds like something.
Speaker 4 (48:50):
If I feel like all of the pieces for this
already exist, we just need to put them all together
in one place.
Speaker 10 (48:57):
Yeah, except the pieces are changing with AI. I mean
this idea of being able to do vibe coding as
an example.
Speaker 1 (49:07):
I don't even know what that is, Thomas, where is that?
Speaker 5 (49:10):
Talk to talk to.
Speaker 10 (49:11):
Your computer and it will actually build your website or
it'll do the software coding for you. That's that's something
that's new and different. It's something that has come out
within the last six months, so not everybody knows about it.
So that's one of the pieces that's changing.
Speaker 1 (49:32):
No, I agree, and I do think that.
Speaker 4 (49:35):
I think that in the next before AI becomes super
intelligent decides we're no longer worth it and wipes us
off the face of the earth in one night by
cutting all of our gas lines, I'm sure that won't
happen for a while, so let's just enjoy the run
while we can. I do think that our economy is
going to be divided into people who learn to use AI.
Speaker 1 (49:54):
And people who don't.
Speaker 4 (49:56):
I really think the divide is going to be significant,
and I think that people who learn to use AI
effectively and learn to use the tools that are available
to them via AI, are going to excel in the
economy no matter what field they're in. I think they're
going to be the ones that excel. And I think
anything that we can do to sort of inspire the
next generation to really take these tools seriously. But man,
(50:19):
there's so many of them coming out every day it's
hard to keep up. So this would be this would
be a way to do that.
Speaker 10 (50:24):
At a lot of the AI agents right now can
work as a personal coach for you.
Speaker 5 (50:30):
Let's say you want to write a book.
Speaker 10 (50:32):
You can have this personal coach that's sitting on your
shoulder telling you, coaching you on how to how to
put together the characters, how to create the story arc,
how to create a good ending, and then put all
the pieces together, and by the time you're all done,
then you have something that you've accomplished. It's an accomplishment
(50:55):
form of education, and this is new and different because
most of the stuff that's being taught in schools today,
you accomplish virtually nothing that you're proud of that you
want to show your friends, right right, If as an example,
you want to become a gamer a game designer, and
you want to design video games, you could actually have
(51:18):
a coach that actually coaches you through that whole process,
teaching you different ways of putting this techniques together and
kind of creating the storyline for that game that you
want to play. And by the time you're done and
you have something that you want to that you're proud of,
that you want to show your friends. This is another
accomplishment form of education. I find that to be quite fascinating.
Speaker 1 (51:43):
I agree, my I don't know.
Speaker 4 (51:46):
I'm afraid and and maybe this is just an unnecessary
thing to be worried about. I'm afraid that there. What
you're saying for cities makes a lot of sense. It
would for Denver. I mean, if you if you really
concentrated your efforts on creating new industry in Denver rather
than trying to drag other industries here to your point
(52:07):
where you may or may not get all their employees.
Speaker 1 (52:10):
I think that's a better way to go.
Speaker 4 (52:11):
And I actually think Governor Jared polis It would agree
with everything you just said. He's very attuned to bringing
in tech and you know, and trying to nurture startups
so I think that for Denver it would be a
really interesting proposition. But again, you know, I'm I'm looking
to try and figure out how to help people who
(52:31):
are not well versed in computers, who are not well
versed and for AI may seem so overwhelming for them.
How do we make that more accessible? Maybe we need
an AI for that.
Speaker 5 (52:44):
Yeah, just uh, there's there's a lot of.
Speaker 10 (52:49):
People are living in isolation, and I think that's that's
kind of the wrong way to do it. If you
can find a group of friends that are actually doing
something similar and you can hang out with them, and
you go to this certain place every day, and you
go there and you have coffee, and you strike up
discussions with what if you accomplished day, what if I
(53:11):
accomplished today? And suddenly you start learning about things you
never knew about before, and and so then you can
have friends that kind of coach you through it as well.
This is we're quickly losing this human camaraderie and I
think it's really important.
Speaker 1 (53:32):
Excuse me, sorry about that.
Speaker 4 (53:36):
The next time you're on, I want to talk about
the new wave memorials and cemeteries, but we're at a
time this time because talking about human connection. I have
an article on the blog today interactive Cemeteries. Well you'll
be able to go and have a conversation with your
loved one. I want to know this real quick and
we'll dive into this deep next time. But can I
(53:57):
plug in things that my dad would say, so my
dad the hologram or whatever would say them back to me,
because that would be really cool.
Speaker 5 (54:07):
We're getting very close to that. Yeah.
Speaker 10 (54:10):
I went over to Copernicus University last year in in Warsaw, Poland,
and they had they had robots of Copernicus there that
would would talk to you and answer any of your
questions that you had. So doing that for average people
on the street, I think we're real close to that.
Speaker 4 (54:31):
All right, he's our futurist. He's Thomas Frye. Find him
the Futurist speaker dot com. I put a link to
that on the blog as well.
Speaker 1 (54:38):
Thomas.
Speaker 4 (54:38):
Fascinating conversation as always, and it's given me a lot
more ideas that I can think about, never do anything about.
So thanks for that, all right, Thomas, all right, all right,
have a good one. That of course is Thomas Rye
will be right back after this. Great did you do
fireworks this Fourth of July weekend? Did you partake in
any of that?
Speaker 6 (54:59):
No?
Speaker 1 (54:59):
But did so we got to see plenty. There you go,
and they're still going on. I no, No, the weekend's
over every night.
Speaker 7 (55:08):
No.
Speaker 4 (55:10):
So I don't know if you knew this about me, Grant,
but I am on record on this program and saying
I do not like fireworks. So I went because we
were with the kids and the grandkids. And can I
just say this, if you're a parent of a teenager
and you don't have grandkids yet, grandkids are the reward
for the teen years. Okay, that's just the reality. Grandkids
(55:34):
are awesome. I highly recommend them. Not that my children
aren't great whatever, blah blah blah, it's fine, but grandkids
super duper. So we're with the grandkids in Ohio and
they're like, oh, let's walk down and we'll go see
the the you know, the big fireworks display for their town.
And I was like, let's okay, you know what, I
don't like fire Maybe I just haven't tried them recently, right,
(55:56):
maybe it's time to dip my toe back in the fireworks,
you know. Pool see what's going on? Well, I have
an update. I still don't like fireworks. I don't like
the noise. They're not pretty enough to like impress me.
I then all the smoke just settles in and it
just sits on you, because when you're in a humid
(56:17):
climate and they're firing off all the fireworks, the smoke
doesn't dissipate.
Speaker 1 (56:21):
Like it does here.
Speaker 4 (56:22):
No, it just hangs like a cloud right over the ground.
So we went and you know, my husband, God love him,
he loves fireworks. So I'm standing there and I'm watching
the fireworks, and then I just said I am probably
the worst person to watch fireworks with because where.
Speaker 1 (56:39):
He's like, ooh wow, look, and I'm like, nope, don't care.
I don't know what it is. Now it has me
wondering like maybe in a past life I was killed
by a firework. I don't know, because I really don't.
It's beyond being.
Speaker 4 (56:55):
Indifferent to them. I was just like, I kept I
was like, how long do fireworks last? As soon as
they started, I.
Speaker 1 (57:01):
Was like, oh God, how long does this thing go?
So like, even when the finale hits.
Speaker 4 (57:08):
The only way I could remotely see myself enjoying fireworks
if is if I was at a big like the
Boston Pop celebration with music and everything to distract me
from the actual fireworks. But I wanted to know, does
anybody else like, do you find yourself in the situation
that I'm And I'm not talking about I hate fireworks
because my dog freaks out. Like I get that, I
(57:29):
understand that, but that's not what I'm talking about. I'm
talking about do you just look at fireworks and think
to yourself, I don't understand it.
Speaker 1 (57:39):
I don't get it.
Speaker 4 (57:40):
I'm now putting fireworks in the same category as slot machines.
Every time I walk past people playing slot machines, right,
and if you go up to the casinos in Central City,
you'll see the exact same thing. And by the way,
some of the casinos have amazing spas. So I will
go to the casino, I just don't camble. Right that
being said, I will past people on the slot machines.
(58:01):
None of them look like they're having fun. There's not
a laughing you see them in the commercials laughing and smile.
There's no laughing and smiling going on. They're just hitting
the buttons. Even the people who are winning are like, oh,
I'll just wait for this to go and then I'll.
Speaker 1 (58:12):
Hit more buttons. I just I don't get it.
Speaker 4 (58:14):
And then I start to think to myself what is
wrong with me? Because I look out at this huge
field We're standing in, this huge cround. It's crowded with
people and they're all like ooh on, they're clapping and
it's going, oh yay, everybody's having a great time. And
I'm standing there going how long is this thing going
to go on? So then you start to think, what
is wrong with me? What gene am I missing that?
(58:36):
I don't like fireworks, And before you tell me, Mandy,
it's just maybe your adverse to loud noises.
Speaker 1 (58:41):
I like shooting guns. I like shooting sporting clays.
Speaker 4 (58:46):
And you know why because when you shoot a sporting clay,
if you shoot it just right, it's made out of clay.
It's not really a pigeon. They call it a pigeon,
but it's really clay pigeon. It explodes into a million pieces.
That's kind of firework I can get behind. But blowing
stuff up to blowing stuff up sake, I don't know.
Speaker 1 (59:05):
I just I'm I'm not getting it.
Speaker 4 (59:08):
And then you're stuck in traffic for god knows how
long afterward, trying to get away from the fireworks that
you didn't even enjoy in the first place. So I
told Chuck, I said, you know what, this is my
last fireworks demonstration, last one, last one I feel compelled
to go to.
Speaker 1 (59:24):
I must go.
Speaker 4 (59:26):
I'm done with the going to the fireworks, and i
just want to know that I'm not alone and that
I'm not some sort of freak show that is the
only American that doesn't love fireworks. And by the way,
I'm not telling you you can't have your fireworks. You
can go and have a wonderful time. I like all
the little festivals and stuff that happened before the fireworks,
(59:46):
Like I would go to that, I would just leave
before the fireworks started.
Speaker 1 (59:50):
Then you beat the crowd exactly exactly, Mandy.
Speaker 4 (59:56):
I'm thinking that you've never been to Chorusfield for the
fireworks display. That would wow even you, O contreire, dear Texter.
I have not only been to the Course Field fireworks display.
I've been more than once. I've been to the largest
fireworks display in the eastern part of the United States.
It's called Thunder over Louisville, and it happens two weeks
(01:00:17):
before the Kentucky Derby as part of the Kentucky Derby
Festival leading up to the races, and it is massive.
They shut down an entire bridge over the Ohio River
and at one point they have this waterfall effect of
all of these fireworks just pouring over the edge of
the bridge.
Speaker 1 (01:00:35):
Into the river below. And you know what I felt
like when I saw that, I was like, Eh, okay, whatever.
And then I'm ten minutes into the.
Speaker 4 (01:00:46):
Fireworks display, which by the way, blissfully got done in
exactly twenty minutes. I know because I was timing them
on my watch. At the end of it, all I
could think of was, Wow, I wonder how much CO
two we released in the atmosphere just tonight on fourth
of July, just from fireworks.
Speaker 1 (01:01:02):
I'm just curious, what's that number? Mandy? All fireworks are
the same? Yay, Mandy.
Speaker 4 (01:01:12):
You're not alone, not at all, thank you, Mandy. Is
it possibly just old age as to why you don't
like fireworks? I have never liked fireworks, even when I
was a little kid.
Speaker 1 (01:01:22):
We go down in my hometown.
Speaker 4 (01:01:25):
It was a small town and the town square kind
of looks like the town square in back to the future,
you know, with the clock tower on one part. We
have a town square that kind of looks like that,
and right behind the big courthouse which would have the
you know, the clock on it if it was back
to the future, there's a lake and so they shoot
the fireworks over the lake. That's where they shoot the
(01:01:46):
fireworks off in my hometown. I don't know if they
still do. That's when I was a kid and we
would go down there, and I would always go back
into my dad's office, which is right in that vicinity,
to watch the fireworks from inside my dad's office because
it was air conditioned. I mean, even as a kid,
I've never liked fireworks. I don't know, just I don't
get it. I don't get it, Mandy. Once you've been
(01:02:08):
through a mad minute or a night, no fireworks display
comes what what.
Speaker 7 (01:02:15):
What?
Speaker 4 (01:02:17):
I don't know, Mandy. You don't like soccer, so yeah,
it's you, okay, Mandy. Have you ever mixed your fireworks
with some psilocybin mushrooms. You might gain a whole new
appreciation for fireworks, or maybe I'll just realize I don't
like fireworks and it's okay, Mandy. How about the new
(01:02:37):
drone shows that have replaced the fireworks displays. They're impressive.
Here's the thing about drone shows. I don't want to
take away fireworks from fireworks people, right. I don't want
to be the reason we don't have fireworks now if
everything is going to catch on fire in Colorado like
it is often in July.
Speaker 1 (01:02:53):
I love a drone show. I think they're really really cool.
Speaker 4 (01:02:56):
They're really neat, but they're not gonna replace the fireworks
show for people who love fireworks. They're just different, Mandy,
I'm in different to most fireworks shows except for the
Rockies game. You would have to pay me somewhere in
the low five figures to go deal with that mess.
Ever again, agree, I agree, Mandy. You need to be
(01:03:16):
the one setting them off, lighting the fuse, because then
you're the one blowing stuff up. You'd enjoy it again, people,
I like your optimism. But when I was a kid,
we used to have bottle rocket fights at each other.
I mean, you know, you have a bottle rocket. You're
supposed to hold a bottle or a PVC pipe or whatever.
You put it in there, you light it and it
takes off. No bottle rocket fight. You just hold the
stick and aim it at whoever you want to blow
(01:03:38):
up like the fact that all of my friends are
walking and talking with all of our fingers and eyeballs
is remarkable to me on many levels, not the least
of it those bottle rocket fights.
Speaker 1 (01:03:51):
Mandy, I'm with you. I don't like fireworks either. It's
a waste of money.
Speaker 4 (01:03:56):
Sorry, Mandy, but not liking fireworks is as dumb as
Ross not eating blue cheese. Well, I do like blue cheese,
although I have Ross's back on green peppers because they
repeat on me something fierce.
Speaker 1 (01:04:06):
Mandy.
Speaker 4 (01:04:07):
I used to love doing fireworks, especially with the grandkids,
but I don't do them anymore because it's extremely tough
on my dogs. So I'm kind of with Okay, you
guys made me feel much better, Mandy, admit it, you're
an amazing alien.
Speaker 1 (01:04:20):
Well, if I was, you'd have to call me Elon Musk.
Speaker 5 (01:04:25):
We all know he is.
Speaker 1 (01:04:27):
Mandy. I do wish fireworks were legal and cheaper.
Speaker 4 (01:04:30):
Anyway, I climb my roof of the two story house
and could see eleven plus official fireworks shows plus all
the individual shows other than those in the neighborhood.
Speaker 1 (01:04:39):
Didn't get the noise, but got to see them. Here's
the thing.
Speaker 4 (01:04:42):
When I was a flight attendant, I always flew on
July fourth, the evening of July fourth. I was always
in the air. And if you just look out the
window of an airplane and you can see the fireworks
popping up, they look like bubbles in a witch's cauldron.
Speaker 1 (01:04:58):
That's the only way I can describe it. But it's
that's actually really cool.
Speaker 4 (01:05:01):
But I am not hearing them, nor am I deering
with their traffic In that case, Mandy, it's fine to
hate fireworks. We were just at the Rapids game with
beautiful fireworks, but only one patriotic song, and that's always
been my favorite part. You know what, same Texter, give
me a little John Phillips Sussa in the background and.
Speaker 1 (01:05:18):
Maybe then we can talk. But just fireworks, not for me.
Speaker 4 (01:05:23):
Our pal Jimmy Singenberger has quite the telling of the
recent we'll call.
Speaker 1 (01:05:29):
It Crackback on the Sea Regent.
Speaker 4 (01:05:32):
See Regent Wanda James, who also happens to make her
living selling the Devil's Lettuce the Hippie Flower Maria Jawanna.
She is a minority owner of a pot store. Now Wanda,
as we talked about previously was not happy when CU's
(01:05:53):
Public School of Health started its te on THHC campaign.
What is the Ta on TA Public Health campaign? It
was funded by marijuana taxes and created by the legislature.
It is a public service initiative that educates the public
on the risks of high POTENCYC. It targets youth under
(01:06:14):
twenty five and pregnant women, and it draws from sixty
six thousand scientific articles. It's a collaboration between the Colorado
School of Public Health and Public Benefit Corporation INITIAM Health. Well,
when the campaign came out, Wanda James, a Democrat, lost
(01:06:37):
her poop, lost her mind. She demanded the campaign's website
be taken down immediately over racist illustrations of black children
in utero and older. Now, the problem with that is
that there were identical images of white children on the
website as well, And the reason that they included white
(01:06:59):
and black and brown children and women is that there
is a growing consensus that says we need more diversity
in medical illustrations. So they simply lived up to this
bar and said, hey, you know what, we want to
make sure that people can see themselves in this campaign
to educate Colorado's on powerful THHC and how it can.
Speaker 1 (01:07:21):
Affect the brain in the mind. Well, she did not
like that.
Speaker 4 (01:07:25):
Then she went on a rant and said they have
to be taken down. Well, the images were removed by
the CU School of Public Health and the school apologized.
Stop apologizing, and rather than be satisfied there, James showed
her true colors. They had nothing to do with racist portrayals.
(01:07:46):
It had everything to do with perhaps telling people not
to buy her product when they were pregnant or they
are children.
Speaker 1 (01:07:54):
Two days after the.
Speaker 4 (01:07:55):
Apology wanted James spoke with Police's cannabis advisor. The very
next day, his budget director asked lawmakers to strip the
campaign's funding.
Speaker 1 (01:08:06):
She wanted the funds to.
Speaker 4 (01:08:07):
Be redirected towards minority owned pot shops with so called
social equity licenses.
Speaker 1 (01:08:15):
Of which she is won.
Speaker 4 (01:08:16):
So she wanted the money to be taken away from
a public health campaign and put into her pockets. In March,
James sent an email to r Pel Jimmy Singen Murger
saying this was a Republican led smear campaign and a
desperate attempt to silence black leadership for standing up against racism.
Speaker 1 (01:08:34):
But the problem was is.
Speaker 4 (01:08:36):
She was advocating against the University of Colorado, of which
she is a regent. She was recently censured by the
CU Board of Regents for her actions. Now before the vote,
she made another melodramatic stand. Today is not about sent
(01:09:00):
she declared, It's about censure and retaliation. I'm being targeted
for raising my voice against.
Speaker 1 (01:09:06):
A campaign that demean dehumanized and harmed the black community.
Really because the science is not on her side, not
even a little bit.
Speaker 4 (01:09:18):
If she really wants to advocate for marijuana, and she
really wants CU to do away with their CU School
of Public Health and their science on the use of marijuana,
especially in young people and pregnant women, then she should
step down from the Board of Regents and do it
that way. She absolutely, as a member of the CU
(01:09:39):
Board of Regents, has no business doing this in her
own personal gain, and that's exactly what she is. By
the way, at large democrat Elliot Hood who said, look
I like Wanda James, but his frustrations came out when
he had managed fellow regent Wanda James by saying, you
(01:10:02):
chose to go further In the days and weeks after
the images had been removed, and after the programs had
taken full responsibility for those images, you continued to publicly
attack the program and to discredit the integrity of its research.
And for an academic institution, that is the greatest sin.
(01:10:23):
James called the programs scientifically dishonest and claimed it pushed
dangerous information with a shocking lack of scientific integrity. When
asked to present her own scientific fact, though she didn't
have anything to say. So she's been censured. It doesn't
mean anything. In reality, what she should do is be
bounced off the CU Board of Regents at the next opportunity.
(01:10:46):
So if you're in her district, pay attention, and if
you go to see you, pay attention, because this is
not the woman you want on your Board of Regents
in any way.
Speaker 1 (01:10:55):
Shape or form. Let her go back to selling the
devil's lettuce. She seems to lack that better anyway.
Speaker 4 (01:11:02):
The Mandy Connell Show is sponsored by Belle and Pollock
Accident and injury lawyers.
Speaker 2 (01:11:06):
Well, no, it's Mandy Connell, Andy Condall, ka.
Speaker 1 (01:11:15):
Ninetema got way.
Speaker 3 (01:11:20):
Nice through three Andy Connell, keeping sad thing well Buffle.
Speaker 4 (01:11:29):
Welcome to the third hour of the show, coming up
at about half an hour, we're going to have nine
News is Chris Vandervein joined me to talk about issues
with the information that the parole Board has given about
potential paroles and what has ended up happening is some
people have been paroled that have almost very very quickly
(01:11:50):
turned around and committed terrible other crimes. The latest that
Chris focused on in his reporting, and we're going to
talk with him a little bit later, is indicative of
a big problems. But his name is Ricky Roybal Smith.
After he was arrested on January of twenty first of
this year, excuse me, after he was paroled again after
(01:12:12):
a few serious crimes. He was paroled on January twenty first.
He was driving a car near ninth and galop Ago.
He hit two people walking across the road. They felt
like they had been targeted. The guy was high when
they picked him up, and they booked him in a
number of charges in the downtown Denver jail. And while
in jail, his first night in jail, Denver deputies found
(01:12:34):
a man dead in his cell. They now believe he
strangled the man. And joining me now on the phone
is that man's uncle, Troy Troy First of all, welcome
to the show under such terrible circumstances.
Speaker 1 (01:12:47):
I'm very sorry about your loss.
Speaker 6 (01:12:49):
Yeah, thanks for having me on, Mandy, longtime listener.
Speaker 4 (01:12:52):
Well, what happened here? What has your family been told?
What do you guys know about this situation?
Speaker 6 (01:12:58):
So the situation, Mandy is they contacted us.
Speaker 7 (01:13:02):
We were there that day.
Speaker 6 (01:13:04):
My nephew was released, supposed to be released on On Sunday,
we got a text saying he was released from the
Denver County jail and we we never heard nothing from him.
He never showed up, nothing. And then Monday we get
a phone call saying that Vincent choked to death in
his cell. Now, now let me make it clear. Denver
(01:13:27):
Police Department is saying that he choked on an apple.
And yes, and this is coming from the detective that
called us and told us that unfortunate circumstances that he
choked on an apple. And I woke up Sunday, man
need to see that. Unfortunately, two people who were stabbed
to death in Aurora. Ye, and then I wake up
(01:13:51):
Monday and said they say that he was caught, but unfortunately,
for somehow, some reason, he was picked up on a
dui or he was picked up somehow, and they never
put him in the detox and they threw them in
the cell with my nephew.
Speaker 7 (01:14:07):
And this is the whole confusion.
Speaker 6 (01:14:08):
We have no idea what was going on. We still
haven't heard from Denver. They haven't released his body, but
the detectives we're trying to say that he choked on
an apple.
Speaker 4 (01:14:18):
So are they are Have they closed the investigation to
your knowledge or are they?
Speaker 7 (01:14:23):
Okay, No, it's still it's still open.
Speaker 6 (01:14:26):
And and Aurora is the only county that has says
they have linked the two stabbings at Aurora to him
choking Vincent. Denver hasn't come out and said nothing yet.
And we're still waiting to see for them to release
his body, so we could we could bury him.
Speaker 4 (01:14:42):
And do what we have to do, right, Yes, I mean,
if he choked on an apple and they've already done,
you know, an autopsy, why wouldn't they release the body.
It seems to me that maybe that was their initial
thought and and but they're continuing to investigate that. That
(01:15:03):
seems a little suspect to me. Oh my gosh, I
just feel terrible for your family.
Speaker 7 (01:15:07):
Not oh this is all and the bad thing is man, is.
Speaker 6 (01:15:12):
They have performed the autopsy. No one, I mean, Vincent's
a Christian man. They never gave authority. We never gave
authority for anybody to do an autopsy of them. They
did an autopsy within hours of this happening. So we're
still up in the air of what's going on here?
Speaker 1 (01:15:28):
That is that is so terrible. Is this your brother
or sister's son. Did this happen to you?
Speaker 6 (01:15:34):
This this is my wife's nephew, which which I've known.
I've been with my wife for thirty three years. And
Vincent he's a baby when I got with my wife.
Very love, very loving kid, very caring kid. And just
unfortunately he was in the Dever County for for traffic
violations and this happened to him. And now now we're
(01:15:56):
trying to get justice for Vincent, and and we we
just on what's going on.
Speaker 4 (01:16:01):
Well, somebody just hit the text line and said Denver
saying he choked on an apple, because that's what the
perpetrator said. And if that's the case, then they must
continue the investigation into this. I mean, this guy obviously
not a good dude, right, I mean, he's accused of
targeting people and running them over. He's accused potentially. There
seems to be connections, as you mentioned, to two people
(01:16:23):
in Aurora that were stabbed to death overnight. This is heartbreaking, Troy.
I'm just I don't know what to say other than
I'm so incredibly sorry.
Speaker 7 (01:16:34):
His rap sheet is like twelve pages long right now.
How is he out there.
Speaker 6 (01:16:38):
Running the streets?
Speaker 4 (01:16:39):
That is the question we're trying to get answers to,
and that is why I'm going to be talking to
Chris Vanderveen about it at two thirty.
Speaker 1 (01:16:45):
It seems though that the people.
Speaker 4 (01:16:48):
The parole officers who are doing the evaluations, are doing
a bad job on whether or not they are providing
enough information to the parole board. And we'll let Chris
get into this a little bit more. But yeah, oh,
this texture just said he choked on an apple my
you know what? So I hope that this investigation continues.
Will you keep me posted, Troy on what you guys
(01:17:10):
know and when you know it, because this is not
the first time I've heard of someone killing someone who
was in a cell with him. I've talked about this
horrible man that I went to his final sentencing. He
was actually sentenced to death over that killing. But apparently
this is kind of common. This is not unusual, you know, nationwide.
(01:17:30):
It doesn't happen all the time in the Denver jail.
But it would probably make sense that the Denver jail
told you that initially, so your family would have some
sort of you know, idea of what went wrong. I
hope they continue to investigate, but let me know what
happens next, because I would very much like to know,
and please extend my deepest condolences to your wife and
her family. What a horrible thing to be in jail
(01:17:53):
over traffic stuff and then end up getting murdered by
someone who really deserved to be in jail in the
first place.
Speaker 6 (01:17:59):
Yes, we just want to I just want to say,
Mandy that we have a Facebook page called Legends Member Die,
and we're trying to raise awareness and money foot to
Barry Benson then have a benefit.
Speaker 1 (01:18:11):
So we're just we're just Troy.
Speaker 4 (01:18:13):
If you can, if you can email me some of
that stuff, I'll share it on tomorrow's blog. And that's
just Mandy Connell at iHeartMedia dot com.
Speaker 7 (01:18:22):
I will definitely thank you so much, Mandy.
Speaker 4 (01:18:24):
Thanks so much, Troy. I appreciate you and just devastated
for your family. I'm sorry about that. That is just
can you imagine being in jail for traffic tickets and
they put some jacked up lunatic high on drugs in
your cell and that's what you get to deal with.
Speaker 1 (01:18:39):
Good Lord.
Speaker 4 (01:18:41):
Wasn't there an autopsy or coroner's report? I don't think
they've released it. That's the problem this. Guys in my
in my radio career, have been doing this with my
own show since two thousand and five. Some of the
most heartbreaking things that I've ever heard have been victims'
families reaching out to.
Speaker 1 (01:19:02):
Me as a talk show host to see if.
Speaker 4 (01:19:04):
I can, you know, shake the law enforcement tree to
find out something, because they're just they're left in the
dark about what's happening next and how it's happening and
where if there's an investigation, if the investigation is over,
can we see the autopsy report? Can we see the
coroner's report? I just absolutely terrible, Mandy. If autopsy done
(01:19:28):
right after, which would have to be done since it's
a possible crime, that it should be easily detected by
an apple in the system, Yeah, I mean, does it
stand a reason if someone's choking in a cell, maybe
someone should call for help, maybe someone Maybe people in
jail don't do that.
Speaker 1 (01:19:47):
As someone who's never been in jail, grant you ever
been in jail?
Speaker 6 (01:19:50):
Nope?
Speaker 4 (01:19:51):
Okay, so we've got no experience whatsoever here. Terrible, absolutely terrible.
We're going to talk with As I said, nine News
is Chris Vanderveen at two thirty about the bigger conversation,
which is where's the information for the parole board coming from?
Speaker 1 (01:20:05):
And how accurate is it right now?
Speaker 4 (01:20:09):
Big problem, Mandy, they should have violent and nonviolent sections. Well,
I mean that sounds good, but I'm not sure it's
actually doable for a whole bunch of reasons. Yeah, I'm
not sure you could even do that. I mean, you
(01:20:29):
have the federal jail, which is just you know, Martha
Stewart went there, and then you have the Pound meet nevermind.
According to a probable Clause statement for the rest of
the man, Rick Roebl Smith said he was sharing a
cell with Victor shakoone, who is the dead man that
we're talking that I just talked to his uncle. It
(01:20:51):
states the Deputy sheriff was alerted by Roybal Smith that
Shakhan was choking on an apple and needed help. Officers
informed mister Roebel Smith that they would be able to
provide him with water after they apply evidence collection gloves
on his hands, at which time mister Royblesmith became upset
and abruptly stated, I did it.
Speaker 1 (01:21:09):
You might as well kill me now. So I don't
know about this choked on the apple business. So we'll
just let that.
Speaker 4 (01:21:18):
All play out. But what a horrible story, absolutely horrible. Hey,
got an update from Mamas that you might want to hear.
This is super fun. A senior officer in Hamas's security
forces has told the BBC the Palestinian Armed Group has
lost about eighty percent of its control over the Gaza
Strip and that armed clans are filling the void. The
(01:21:39):
lieutenant colonel said amasa's command the control system had collapsed
due to months of Israeli strikes that have devastated the
group's political, military and security leadership. The officer was wounded
in the first week of the war and has since
stepped away from his duties for health reasons.
Speaker 1 (01:21:57):
Mainly, he wanted to stay alive. That was his health reason.
Speaker 4 (01:22:00):
He shared several voice messages with the BBC, and in
the messages, the officer painted a picture of hamas's internal
disintegration and the near total collapse of security across Gaza,
which the group had governed before.
Speaker 1 (01:22:14):
At the conflict.
Speaker 4 (01:22:16):
He said, let's be realistic here. There's barely anything left
of the security structure. Most leadership, about ninety five percent,
are now dead. The active figures have all been killed.
So really, what's stopping Israel from continuing this war?
Speaker 1 (01:22:29):
You have the hostages, you dumbass. That's why. Oh that
gets even better though.
Speaker 4 (01:22:37):
Now they're saying because the MAAS is in such disarray,
they may not even know where the bodies or the
hostages are.
Speaker 1 (01:22:43):
They have no idea, no clue. And this is really funny.
The officer sent.
Speaker 4 (01:22:48):
A consequence of the security vacuum was gangs or armed
clans were everywhere.
Speaker 1 (01:22:54):
They could stop you, kill you. No one would intervene.
Speaker 4 (01:22:57):
Anyone who tried to act on their own, like organizing
resistance against thieves was bobbed by Israel within an hour.
Speaker 1 (01:23:04):
So the security situation is zero.
Speaker 4 (01:23:07):
Hamasa's control is zero, Okay, I'm perfectly fine with that.
I also have an article linked from the Wall Street Journal,
a new Palestinian offer for peace with Israel. Sheikh Wadi
al Jabari, also known as Abu Snod, from his ceremonial
tent in Hebron, the West Bank's largest city located south
(01:23:29):
of Jerusalem, he said, we want coexistence. The leader of
Hebron's most influential clan has said things before, as did
his father, but this time is different. Sheik Jabbari and
four other leading Hebron sheikhs have signed a letter pledging
peace and full recognition.
Speaker 1 (01:23:46):
Of Israel as a Jewish state.
Speaker 4 (01:23:49):
Their plan for Hebron is to break out of the
Palestinian authority, establish an emirate of its own, and.
Speaker 1 (01:23:56):
Join the Abraham Accords.
Speaker 4 (01:24:00):
Things are changing, things are shifting, and as long as
the West doesn't try and inflict our standards on them,
let them sort it out, Let the.
Speaker 1 (01:24:13):
Clans carve it up.
Speaker 4 (01:24:15):
And as long as they're willing to say we want
to coexist with Israel and Israel has a right to exist,
that puts them head and shoulders above the Palestinian leadership
of the last fifty years. They're tired of fighting, so
let's let them make peace. Wouldn't that be nice? When
we get back Nine News is Chris Vanderveen did a
great series, and he has a bunch of I linked
(01:24:37):
to some stories and some tweets that he's done about
the parole board releasing people who have turned out to
be very, very dangerous. But Chris wanted me to clarify
that this is not necessarily about the board itself, but
about the parole officers responsible for coming up with these
assessments about how dangerous these criminals are.
Speaker 1 (01:24:57):
We're going to talk to him next.
Speaker 4 (01:25:00):
One of nine News's crack reporters, Chris Vandervena, waits because
last week, before the holiday weekend, he did a story
that alarmed me, just just straight up alarmed me, and
I thought it would be useful to have him come
on and talk about the nuts and bolts of it.
Speaker 1 (01:25:14):
First of all, Chris, welcome to the show.
Speaker 7 (01:25:17):
Thanks for having me.
Speaker 1 (01:25:18):
Mandy, good to talk to you. So I got to
ask you, like what this story is not new?
Speaker 7 (01:25:22):
Right?
Speaker 4 (01:25:23):
You guys have kind of been following some bad guys
who were put out on parole only to reoffend like
this is This is kind of a long arcing story
in a bit, isn't it?
Speaker 7 (01:25:35):
Yeah? Sureious. Since twenty twenty three, we've been tracking parolis
that have gone on to reoffend, most notably what happened
in twenty twenty three that there was a man by
the name of Vincenzo Moscoso got a lot of attention
at the time. He was on parole at the time
and has alleged by Dever police he stabbed and killed
two people at random over on Federal in northwest Denver
(01:25:56):
over a period of a couple hours. Right He's now
continuing to go through the courses and there's compacy issues.
But ever since then, we here at nine News have
gotten the habit of asking for how are these people
being assessed while they're on parole and what is the
state doing to sort of make sure that they're sort
of keeping tabs of people. And I think what we've
(01:26:17):
been able to find through now this year and a
half of work is that the state's not doing a
very good job of keeping tabs of people on parol.
There's roughly eight thousand people that are currently on parole
in the state of Colorado. They're supposed to each one
of them are supposed to go through something simple called
the risk assessment. It's exactly what you think it is
it's determining their level of risks. We can determine their
level of supervision, we can determine their level of care,
(01:26:40):
what they might need while they're out on parole, and
it goes from low to very high. We know for
sure when Vincenzo Muscos was assessed that the State of
Colorado now says for the Apartment of Corrections that there
were six errors on this assessment. And that alone may
not seem like a big deal, but what we found
is that there's a continued pattern of problems with how
(01:27:02):
people are being assessed, and this leads us up to
what happened in the last week and a half. We're
a guy by the name of Ricky Lee Royball Smith.
He's the individual that was arrested about a week and
a half ago because two people turned up dead on
Colfax near Peoria, one on Peoria and Callfax, one near
Malin in Callfax over the spirit of just a couple
(01:27:22):
of a period of a couple hours. Both people stabbed
to death, both people repeatedly stabbed. And then a guy
shows up in the Denver jail wanted on a vehicular
a dui case where he was alleged to have run
into two people over at nine in Galapaga. What turns
out that guy's name, as alleged by the Denver Police Departments,
a guy by the name of Ricky Lee roy Ball
(01:27:42):
Smith who just so happens to be on parole. It's
a very It has huge similarities to what happened in
twenty twenty three with Gonters of must Go. So now
we have another instance where guy aul On Barol is
accused of very serious crimes and we've now found errors
on assessments of dozens of people. And what it tells
(01:28:03):
me is that there's a systemic problem in terms of
how Colorado's assessing people on parole. And it absolutely is
a public safety concern.
Speaker 4 (01:28:11):
Can you walk me through what these assessments look like?
And I mean it would be an error if it
was hey, you know, he doesn't sleep well, instead of
hey has murderous intent?
Speaker 1 (01:28:21):
Like what are some of the is what we're assessing?
Are we assessing the right.
Speaker 4 (01:28:26):
Things or is it a failure of the people assessing
to properly take some things into consideration?
Speaker 1 (01:28:31):
So what's on this assessment overall?
Speaker 7 (01:28:34):
I think it's the latter, And these assessments are Basically,
it's I'll get a little bit technical here, but not
too technical. They're run put out by the University of Cincinnati.
It's an assessment that's used in states around the country.
Colorado is one of the states that uses them. And
in Colorado, when somebody's on parole, they now give somebody
something called a CST, which is a community supervision tool.
(01:28:56):
It's just a series of about thirty five questions that
can be simple about did you finish high school? Get
your ged, how many crimes have you been accused of
committing before, have you ever absconded while on parole? Those
types of things, And then there's some more subjective questions
about do you believe it's okay to lie? Do you
(01:29:16):
do you believe and do under others as they would
do unto you, kind of mentality, And you add up
the points. It's not terribly complicated. You have the points,
and the higher points the more risk level that you have,
and consequently the more supervision that is generally assigned to
you through the Colorado Division of Parole. Keeping in mind
(01:29:36):
that parole in the state of Colorado was run by
the Colorado Department of Correction. So these are parole officers
that are giving these assessments to These are assessments by
they're given by parole officers to the people on parole.
And what we found is sometimes very simple errors. I meaning,
for years, somebody was determined that they were they had
(01:29:58):
problems using drugs, and then all of a sudden, magically,
one year it says they've never had problems using drugs,
and so you asked, well, what changed, Well, it's a
scoring year and taken by itself. If this was just
a one off on Vincenzo Moscoso's case, for example, the
guy who was the legs to stab a couple of
people on federal you can sort of excuse it as well,
(01:30:20):
that's a one off. But I think what we've been
able to identify is that this is a systemic problem.
We have looked at roughly, you know, forty forty five
assessments and there are significant errors on at least half
of them. And now we've not been prived, we were
not access to all of the assessment scores. This is
(01:30:40):
a laborious process. A year and a half when we
ask for these assessment scores, it sometimes takes a week
and a half to get After every case. It costs
money those types of things. So the legislators keep trying
to get involved now and I think rightfully so, but
this is a you know, how we keep tabs of
an at risk population in Keep in mind, people on paroles,
(01:31:02):
they've already gone to prison, they have done their time,
they've been they have been convicted of felonies, and now
parole is in serious designed to be the sort of
transition period to go out into society what we need.
We've also recognized me to watch them like, we need
to keep post tabs on them because they are essentially
more vulnerable to repeat a hunding and when somebody goes
(01:31:23):
out and repeat offense in such a soorizic way as
has been alleged in a in a number of cases
that we've looked at. Now we're talking murders, sex assaults,
attended murders, assaults, all sorts of things. And when you
find out that the parole system isn't keeping the tabs
of these people, yeah, I think Colorado we got a problem.
Speaker 4 (01:31:45):
So let's ask like, and I'm not asking you to
solve the problem here on the you know, on the radio,
but if you as a reporter Do you think it
is a matter of people being sloppy? Do you think
it's a matter of people being over work?
Speaker 1 (01:31:57):
Do we have enough parole officers to make these assessments.
Speaker 4 (01:32:00):
Have we've got eight thousand people, you know, out on
parole or up for parole?
Speaker 7 (01:32:05):
What did you see?
Speaker 4 (01:32:06):
Did anything jump out at you as easily identifiable and
therefore perhaps easier to address than than not.
Speaker 7 (01:32:16):
I think there is sloppiness that is involved here, and
I think a number of parle officers we've spoken to
will tell you that they continue to feel overworked. And
they also look this dependulum swings in this in the state,
from left to right and back and forth and right now,
as you know, Democrats run this state, and so there
(01:32:37):
has been a prevailing thought, right or wrong, in the
state of Caller to try to keep people out of prison,
and that comes with a cost, potentially in some instances,
as in this case. And parole officers will tell you
that they feel like people are getting into trouble. The
number of people that we've looked at that they get
into trouble when they're on parole. I mean, I think
(01:32:58):
some people would expect, like if you use mess for example,
or cocaine while you're out on parole. That would automatically
qualify you to go back to jail. In prison right
not in State of Colorado, you oftentimes will get a
slap on the wrist. And it is trying to identify
that sending people back to prison isn't always the best idea,
and there's a philosophical debate on whether that's right or wrong,
(01:33:20):
and I don't want to get into that, but I
think there has been that pendulum shift that I think
parole officers feel like they're not being listened to as
well when it comes to hey, these guys are getting
into trouble. A number of people that we've looked at
inclining attentive ask so including another guy that went on
to eight days after he was assessed and was given
(01:33:41):
a glowing score by his assessment. He went on to
be accused of the murder here in Denver. I think
that it had a very very low score. I think
the issue is is that the scores don't reflect where
the person is at all the time, and I think
that comes from a combination overworked. Maybe I think some
of them would say underappreciated. Also in the system that
(01:34:02):
is designed to try to keep people out of prison.
Speaker 1 (01:34:05):
And you know what, I'm I probably am not as
as hard knows. I believe in rehabilitation in prison.
Speaker 7 (01:34:14):
I really do.
Speaker 4 (01:34:14):
I think that we are not serving the community if
we're just taking people who've committed crimes, holding them in
a pen, and then releasing them back out with the
same set of skills and issues that they.
Speaker 1 (01:34:24):
Had when they went in.
Speaker 4 (01:34:26):
So it's distressing to me to hear that someone and
it seems like this Royal guy, I mean, he didn't
do anything positive or to give them the impression that
he was going to come out and be a better
human being. At two o'clock, I actually spoke to the
uncle of the victim may be a victim, maybe not
(01:34:46):
of his cellmate that was found dead, and his family's
been told, oh, he choked on an apple, but yet
there's still a homicide investigation going on.
Speaker 1 (01:34:54):
Do you guys know anything more about that?
Speaker 7 (01:34:57):
Yeah? I mean that's sort of an interesting dynam of
the roy Ball case, is that so he's a So
what happens is that the two murders happen on a
Sunday in June twenty ninth, and they have an early
in Aurora, and they don't have a suspect in that case.
But sometime that afternoon, a guy, Ricky roy Ballsmith is
alleged by the Denver Police Department, gets involved in basically
(01:35:19):
a traffic accident where he hits a couple of pedestrians
at ninth and Galipego. So he goes to jail, and
through court documents seems pretty clear at that point, Aurora says, huh, hey,
the guy you've got into Denver jail on that on
that suspected dy case in ninth of Galipego, we believe
that's the guy that we're looking for in the Stambing case.
(01:35:40):
But they keep him in the jail overnight and that
night his cellmate dies. And so the question is the
autopsy I think is a bit of the problem here,
because the autopsy so far is inconclusive into terms in
terms of how that inmate dots. You know, you're either
looking at a heck of a coincidence here, right, an
inmate who is amate them guy now suspected a double
(01:36:03):
homicide just magically dies of choking on something, which I
suspect is possible, but it's a heck of a coincidence,
or that or it's a homicide. I think the official
line is that case has been closed, but I don't
think it's closed forever. And the impression that I get
is that it's still being actively worked by investigators, and
(01:36:24):
I would not be surprised to see that case come back.
Speaker 4 (01:36:27):
I mean it, it is a stunning coincidence, you know,
I mean, it does stretch the bounds of reason, just
to hair. One of my texters asked a really good
question about this. The assessments that we're using here in Colorado.
Are other states using those same assessments? Are they having
similar issues? Is this unique to Colorado? And perhaps do
(01:36:48):
we need to make a different assessment.
Speaker 7 (01:36:52):
Well, I think those are excellent questions. Well, here's what
I'd say is that I think there's a number of
different assessments that used by states, and I think that
you know, there was what happened years decades ago is
that we went by the gut level instinct of parole
officers in terms of whether this person was high risk
or low risk. And I think we started to identify
(01:37:13):
that maybe there were some problems in that, so that
we went with these written assessments. I think when they're
done correctly, if they're scored correctly, that there aren't problems
with the scoring, obvious problems with the scoring. I think
they can have value. I think what I think we're
looking for at nine News, and I think what I'm
looking for personally as a reporter on this investigation is
(01:37:34):
for something in the state to care a little bit
more than what we're seeing right now. The legislature have
asked for a couple of months ago now for the
Department of Corrects and seventy more assessments that they could
look at people that were suspective being involved in homicides
in over one year period. There were seventy more names
on that list. There were people who were on parole,
(01:37:55):
and so we could take a look at a larger sample,
because what we're looking at right now is a relatively
small sample, forty five out of eight thousand. I think
we've identified a problem, But my gut tells me that
this is a problem with scoring, not necessarily with the
assessment itself, and there's just obvious errors. We showed. We
(01:38:17):
showed the scores to a woman whose brother was was
shot and wounded by Lakewood police by officers in Lakewood
earlier in the year and he survived. But in the
arrest report on that case, he'd been arrested in charge
nearly sixty one times in the course of his life,
(01:38:40):
and on his assessment it said his criminal attitudes and
behaviors was zero. So think about that, where a guy
who's been in and out of I mean, I don't
think he's the world's worst guy. I also think he's
had some significant problems with incarceration and getting in trouble
with the law. When you score some any like that
(01:39:00):
is zero in terms of criminal behaviors and attitudes, that's
a problem. And we showed the scurse to his sister,
his sister who loves it very much, and she said,
this is a joke. This is not right. And I
think that's what we continue to find.
Speaker 1 (01:39:13):
Last question, we got about a minute left, Chris.
Speaker 4 (01:39:16):
Do you see what is the parole board members said,
Because they're the face of parole, right, so they get
to blame when somebody gets out on parole and goes
and murders someone. What is their response to your reporting?
Speaker 7 (01:39:28):
Then it is amazing the Department of the Department Corrections,
as well as the Parole Board is silent on all
of this.
Speaker 1 (01:39:36):
We've reached out to the Parole.
Speaker 7 (01:39:38):
Board repeatedly on this. We've reached out to the Apartment
of Corrections repeatedly on this. We've reached out to the
Governor's office repeatedly on this. No one wants to go
on camera with us. Doesn't mean we're giving up. We're
dob should get somebody on camera, whether they like it
or not. But like there, there has been dead silence
from the Parole Board, and I think that's you know,
(01:39:59):
what you've noticed is that we have a Department of
Corrections and Parole Aboard that does not talk to the
public at all. Don't just take my word for it.
Google how many times rollboard members have done the interviews.
Almost never, and sometimes that's on purpose. But it's now
led to a system that is not transparent and is
(01:40:19):
not being held to account for what's going on right now.
Speaker 1 (01:40:23):
Well, Chris, I.
Speaker 4 (01:40:23):
Appreciate your reporting and if you get anything new, please
feel free to let me know so we can make
sure that we report it to our listeners. This is
a huge issue. Wait, one last last question, and this
is a quick one. Do you know if parole officers
are incentivized in any way to get these people out
of prison.
Speaker 7 (01:40:42):
That's an excellent question. We've found no evidence of that.
I can understand why people would feel that way. And
if anybody knows and listening to the show right now,
want to talk to me. Chris at ninnews dot com.
Always happy to take tips.
Speaker 4 (01:40:55):
Chris Vanderben, thanks for your time today, great reporting on
this and keep up the good work. Thanks all right,
thank you, and joining me now our crack news man Rob.
Speaker 1 (01:41:06):
Dowson, Mister Dawson as I now call him now that
he's the news director upon Kathy Walker's retirement. He only
walks around with his pinky out. Now you need him,
he'll have his pinky out somewhere else. Not Now, it's
time for the most exciting segment on the radio of
its kind in the world. You're the only one that
(01:41:29):
makes it sound like a ship's horn.
Speaker 6 (01:41:31):
At the end.
Speaker 1 (01:41:33):
Anyway, moving on, what is our dad joke of the day,
please grant in honor of Wimbledon happening right now.
Speaker 11 (01:41:39):
Yes, my wife said, I can think of fourteen reasons
to leave you, plus your obsession with tennis.
Speaker 1 (01:41:44):
I replied, that's fifteen.
Speaker 7 (01:41:46):
Love.
Speaker 1 (01:41:47):
Wow, I like that one. Good tennis joke. Well done, anyway,
what's today's word of the day.
Speaker 11 (01:41:53):
Please grant word of the day today is exemplary, exact,
perfect or very good?
Speaker 1 (01:41:59):
Thanks extremely good outstead. That's exactly how. This is an
easy one for me. I don't know if you too,
lungheads are going to get this. I'm well read. Who
wrote the beloved nineteen o children's book The Tale of
Peter Rabbit. I'm just kidding. Oh goodness, I could see
that now, and I can't.
Speaker 7 (01:42:20):
You know her?
Speaker 1 (01:42:21):
It's a woman, Lucille Bundle. I don't know how.
Speaker 4 (01:42:27):
About Beatrix Potter. Okay, Lucille whatever did not write it.
She also wrote books called The Tale of Squirrel Nutkin
and the Tale of Tom Kitten.
Speaker 1 (01:42:38):
Not quite as big as that, that is, Peter Rabbit.
Speaker 4 (01:42:42):
Beta Rabbit was the big money maker for her cotton
tail exactly.
Speaker 1 (01:42:46):
You know it, you know it, all about it?
Speaker 4 (01:42:50):
Anyway, let's talk about by the way, I'm sorry, anyway,
go ahead.
Speaker 1 (01:42:57):
What is our Jeopardy category for the day. I wondered
where you were.
Speaker 11 (01:43:00):
Go on there, jefpary category for today? Similar brand names Okay, singular,
it's a Burger king staple. Plural, it's a brand possessive
it's a pizza brand, not possessive. It's a sugar brand.
Speaker 1 (01:43:20):
Mandy. What is Domino's? Correct?
Speaker 6 (01:43:23):
Rob?
Speaker 1 (01:43:23):
You glad you came into play.
Speaker 10 (01:43:25):
Yeah?
Speaker 1 (01:43:26):
This Greek letter is an airline, faucet maker and dental
and stilta Correct.
Speaker 11 (01:43:35):
This Greek woman is a charming jewelry company or a
streaming man Pandora. Wow, coming back strike. When you eat
this brand's bars, make sure they're the chocolate.
Speaker 1 (01:43:48):
Ones, Rob, you just jumped it too soon.
Speaker 11 (01:43:57):
Correct This edds bars, make sure they're the chocolate ones,
not the moisturizing ones.
Speaker 1 (01:44:04):
Mandy? What is dove.
Speaker 7 (01:44:07):
Tweet?
Speaker 1 (01:44:07):
There you go?
Speaker 11 (01:44:08):
There you go?
Speaker 5 (01:44:09):
All right?
Speaker 1 (01:44:11):
Yeah, well you had to. I was I was being aggressive.
You had no choice, Rob, no choice. That might be
my favorite category ever.
Speaker 4 (01:44:21):
Yeah, and just lets me know, I'm too much of
a consumer that I knew every single one of those
brands wasn't even close.
Speaker 1 (01:44:28):
Good gravy. All right, you guys.
Speaker 4 (01:44:30):
Tomorrow, Grant Simmun be with us again as a Rod
continues his adventures in Las Vegas. But We've got some
good stuff planned for you, and I'm pulling up my
calendar right this second.
Speaker 1 (01:44:39):
To tell you what it is. While you're looking.
Speaker 11 (01:44:41):
PJ Locke Broncos Safety going to be joining KOA Sports
at three thirty.
Speaker 1 (01:44:45):
Oh very nice, along with Susie Warchenen Studio. Oh excellent.
So who's in today?
Speaker 7 (01:44:49):
Is it?
Speaker 1 (01:44:49):
Dave, Susie and Ryan? Perfect?
Speaker 4 (01:44:52):
Perfect, great group. We've got an hour of Ask the
Attorney with Ellen Paul tomorrow.
Speaker 1 (01:44:58):
I love that. I love it when people calling with
their legal questions. I just want to know all about
your business, Okay, So.
Speaker 4 (01:45:04):
If you especially if you have some kind of injury issue,
nursing home stuff like, I can't wait to get into
it tomorrow. It makes me very unreasonably happy to hear
about other people's problems. So all that's coming up tomorrow.
And in the meantime, there was something else I wanted
to remind. Oh guys, there's so much stuff on the
blog that we didn't get to today, and some of
it's really really good. I mean, you know, the blog's
(01:45:25):
always good, but today mandy'sblog dot com make it happen.
You'll be a lot smarter for it. We'll be back tomorrow.
Speaker 1 (01:45:31):
Keep it right here on Koa
The Mandy Connell Show is sponsored by Belle and Pollock
Accident and Injury Lawyers.
Speaker 2 (00:05):
No, it's Mandy Connell, Andy Condo, KOA.
Speaker 1 (00:13):
Ninetyma got Way.
Speaker 3 (00:17):
Study the nicety through three, Andy Connell keeping a sad baboo.
Speaker 1 (00:35):
Sorry about that, guys. Welcome, Welcome, Welcome to a Tuesday
edition of the show.
Speaker 4 (00:41):
I took an extra day yesterday in beautiful Ohio, and
just because of that, I got Grant Smith, a product
of Ohio. I wanted to keep the Ohio vibes going today.
That's so I got grant. Actually, a Rod's on vacation and.
Speaker 1 (00:54):
They give me grant.
Speaker 4 (00:55):
Now, Woo woo, yaya, Ohio. It was beautiful. You ever
heard of Tip City, Ohio?
Speaker 1 (01:03):
I don't think so.
Speaker 4 (01:04):
Right outside Dayton I No, I don't want to talk
about it because everybody will move there.
Speaker 5 (01:08):
Never mind.
Speaker 4 (01:08):
Forget I said anything. Never mind forget about it. You
heard nothing. Grant got a big show. We have lots
of just I mean, you guys, so many.
Speaker 1 (01:19):
Horrible stories to talk about today.
Speaker 4 (01:21):
And it's just I'm doing the blog today and I'm
looking at things and I'm trying to find, you know,
hopeful stuff. It's just it's all negative Nelly's stuff today,
and I apologize for being a Debbie Downer. I'm gonna
try and present it in the best way possible. But
there's just some terrible stories that we have to talk
about and we're gonna get into it.
Speaker 1 (01:43):
Let's do this.
Speaker 4 (01:43):
Let's start with the blog. Find the blog by going
to mandy'sblog dot com. That's mandy'sblog dot com. Then look
for the latest post section, and then look for the
headline that says seven eight twenty five blog the future
of building cities and the roll board needs help.
Speaker 1 (02:01):
Click on that and here are the headlines you will
find within.
Speaker 6 (02:04):
I didn't be with someone who office South American arm
with ships and cuipments and say that's going to.
Speaker 7 (02:08):
Press plant.
Speaker 4 (02:10):
Today on the blog can AI Save Cities nine news
as Chris vanderben is on our prole board at Q thirty,
a GOP lawmaker is accused of gross remarks heck and
to get should step aside. This Texas flood is a nightmare.
Please wear life jacket people. A child falls out of
the homeless hotel. Our children are fat and unhealthy. Pot
(02:34):
loving regent gets rebuked. Denver made the list of best
cities about the Epstein files. Why would we expect candy
companies to care about public health? Why is socialism on
the rise? What is the National Education Association focused on
this year? It seems they ruined Superman. Yes, Ai will
(02:54):
probably be the end of humanity. Hama says they've lost
control in Gaza. Five habits, people not like you, and
now dogs meeting newborns for the first time. Those are
the headlines on the blog at mandy'sblog dot com and
just as a little palate cleanser, I put the video
of dogs meeting newborns and oh, oh my heart, we
(03:18):
don't deserve dogs. Dogs are just They're truly the best.
They truly truly are the best. So got a lot
of stuff on the blog today. Obviously, the biggest story
nationally is the floods in Texas, which have claimed at
least one hundred lives, many of them children from a
summer camp. I cannot imagine a bigger nightmare than this.
(03:41):
You send your kid off to summer camp where they're
supposed to have a wonderful time. I loved summer camp
as a kid. I went to a camp called Campdovewood.
It is an Evangelical Christian camp in Florida run and
founded by a woman named Roberta Richmond, who is one
of the best human beings I have ever in my
life had the pleasure of knowing. And summer Camp for
(04:03):
me was glorious. It was an all girls camp, so
you didn't have any boy pressure or anything like that.
But the girls were from all over Florida and Georgia,
and you got to sing songs and do campfires and
go canoeing and learn how to.
Speaker 1 (04:19):
Do archery and swim and it just was glorious. And
that's what summer camp should be.
Speaker 4 (04:26):
And yet for some of these kids who survived, and
you know, thank God they survived, what a nightmare this
is going to be for the.
Speaker 1 (04:32):
Rest of their lives.
Speaker 4 (04:34):
I I can't even imagine the parents and I can't
I just I can't imagine what they're going through right now.
Is they still try to recover from this and what's
been entirely predictable and still gross. Nonetheless, are the people
who are looking to try and use this as an
(04:55):
attack on FEMA. I've said this before and I'll say
it again right now. I think that we do not
need and a federal Emergency Management administration as we have
it now. They should never provide boots on the ground, period,
full stop.
Speaker 1 (05:09):
They just shouldn't. They should provide money.
Speaker 4 (05:14):
Any state or group of states that's going through a
natural disaster of any kind should be the ones to say, look,
here's what we need. We need X amount of bulldozers,
we need x amount of rescuing, and we need x
amount of this. Here's how much we think it's going
to cost. In the federal government should say we're going
to write you check. We're just gonna write you check.
(05:34):
So yeah, yeah, anyway, Instead, we have people trying to
use this to bludgeon the Trump administration administration. The worst
of the worst have been people who have taken a
social media.
Speaker 7 (05:53):
To make.
Speaker 4 (05:55):
Nasty comments about the people that died because they were
in Trump or tried to score political points because Noah
was defunded in this giant bill. By the way, none
of those budget cuts take place until October, so that's
really kind of a false accusation. And it just things
(06:18):
like this bring out the best in people, and those
are the people that are in Texas right now, digging
through muck looking for people, hoping to find survivors, knowing
they probably won't the ones who are going to be
there trying to help these people recover from a flood
that has left many people with nothing, and those are
(06:39):
the heroes. And then on the other side of it,
you have people who want to politicize everything. And this
is not strictly a democratic perspective, but.
Speaker 1 (06:48):
I I'm just going to say it.
Speaker 4 (06:51):
I'm sure that there are people on the right who
say things like, well, this is God's will, which I
also think is ridiculous to presume, what you know, what
God's will is, I just and that absolutely absurd. But
I don't and maybe I'm just not seeing them. The
level of nasty that we're seeing right now is just
really really awful. Because you disagree with someone politically, think
(07:16):
about that for a second. These are people's children, these
are people's lives, these are people's you know, families, they're homes,
They're absolutely destroyed, and you're gonna use it to just
score cheap political points.
Speaker 1 (07:32):
It's just sad.
Speaker 4 (07:33):
I feel sad for those people that are so devoid
of any joy in their life or any perspective in
their life that they have to take something like this
and make it into.
Speaker 1 (07:43):
Something horrible, even worse. I just I'm sad about that. Mandy.
Speaker 4 (07:49):
The government that is thirty eight trillion in the red
should write a check.
Speaker 1 (07:54):
Come on, man, let me just say this.
Speaker 4 (07:56):
I think that there are things that the federal government
should be responsible for. I think they should be responsible
for keeping roadways nice and easy to travel in the
United States of America, something they fail at on a
regular basis.
Speaker 1 (08:09):
I think that they should be.
Speaker 4 (08:10):
Responsible for security, you know, in our cities and our towns.
To a certain extent, all of that should be handled locally,
but the federal government has a role in making sure that, say,
I don't know, criminals don't walk across the southern border.
And in a situation like this where you have a
natural disaster, this isn't a disaster of the state's creation.
Speaker 1 (08:32):
Right, it is a natural disaster.
Speaker 4 (08:35):
That is one of those times where the federal government
should step up and say, hey.
Speaker 1 (08:39):
You know, we're going to help you out.
Speaker 7 (08:43):
Now.
Speaker 4 (08:44):
When it comes to replacing people's homes and things of that,
that's not the federal government's responsibility.
Speaker 1 (08:48):
That's why you have insurance.
Speaker 4 (08:50):
Unfortunately, insurance is now being hit, you know, with so
many property damage losses that insurance is getting more expensive
and people are going to have to come to terms
with that, because if you want your insurance company to
be solvent when claims are made, then you are going
to have to pay what the insurance company needs. That's
just the reality of it, Mandy. The point is there's
(09:13):
no money in the account.
Speaker 1 (09:14):
I know that you know that. We get it. You
get it, Mandy.
Speaker 4 (09:18):
Not criticizing, but how can the people who've run the
camp not been more prepared? The river's flooded before, no
weather alert radio. I am not going to judge anyone
until we know more about the situation.
Speaker 1 (09:30):
And I'm not saying that.
Speaker 4 (09:30):
You're not wrong, that you are wrong, right, I'm not
saying that what you're saying is not a great point. However,
right now, people are still looking for bodies, and I
think we can hold our fire for just a minute
until we have a clearer picture of what the camp
did or did not do. Again, I just think it's
(09:53):
premature to be asking those questions while we're still looking
for bodies.
Speaker 1 (09:58):
Give it a couple of weeks and hopefully we will
know more.
Speaker 4 (10:02):
Hi, Andy, we moved to Ohio when I was in
high school. My sister still lives there. I've been to
Tip City many times. Tip City's very nice. My mom's
concierge doctors in Tip City. There's indeed a lot of
people move into that area.
Speaker 1 (10:14):
Shut up, to shut up, Shut up, Mandy.
Speaker 4 (10:21):
Maybe some of these people need to think that many
of these children that died, their parents were on both
sides of the aisle.
Speaker 1 (10:26):
Yep, yep.
Speaker 4 (10:28):
Indeed, my spouse says, this Texter was telling me about
a Houston mayor or someone saying that they were making
comments about flooding victims being white people and that's why
they were getting attention or something like that.
Speaker 1 (10:40):
That kind of racist garbage is just that garbage.
Speaker 4 (10:45):
It all started after Katrina, right, Katrina, the town led
by mostly black people who decided not to evacuate the
city in any meaningful way, then decided to say it
was racism that we didn't pay enough to attend you
to Katrina.
Speaker 1 (11:01):
Are you kidding me?
Speaker 4 (11:03):
If the mayor of Houston said that, and I have
not seen it, so I will not condemn the Mayor
of Houston with all the fire I feel about it.
But if anyone said that, stop being an ignorant. It
just an ignorant fool. But I guess that's redundant ignorant fool. Yeah,
maybe maybe, Mandy, you didn't stay at Ohio for the
(11:25):
Giant country concert in Fort Laramie, just forty minutes from
Tip City.
Speaker 1 (11:29):
We're driving to Ohio. Now, you know what, I love, Branton.
Speaker 4 (11:33):
You'll appreciate this because you go home and probably see
the same thing. Everything is so green, there's flowers everywhere. Golly,
it's beautiful. It really is very humid. Yep, it was humid.
My hair looked like crap the entire time, the entire time.
Speaker 1 (11:49):
But that's okay. I don't care. My grandkids don't care
if my hair looks like crap. They just are unbothered
by my crappiness of my hair looking thing. Yeah, anyway,
so I did put a link today to Samaritans Purse.
There are many different ways to support the.
Speaker 4 (12:08):
People in Texas, but I am most impressed with the
organization called Samaritans.
Speaker 1 (12:14):
Purse for a reason.
Speaker 4 (12:15):
They're not just there during the first few days of
the emergency, which the Red Cross will show up.
Speaker 1 (12:21):
They'll be there for a week to ten days.
Speaker 4 (12:22):
They'll kind of get everything stabilized, and then the Red
Cross is gone, Samaritans Purse will stay and they will
stay as long as they are needed.
Speaker 1 (12:33):
And they bring in these big, you know, laundry facilities
so people can come wash stuff.
Speaker 4 (12:38):
They volunteer to feed people, They feed all the first responders,
they feed anybody that needs help. They help homeowners with
cleanouts to get the mud out, whatever's left, and they
stay there as long as they're needed. So if you
want to donate money, I would strongly recommend that you
donate it to Samaritans Purse, and only because I know
(13:01):
that your money will go to exactly what you want
it to go to, and that is helping these people
in this absolutely horrific, horrific time of disaster.
Speaker 1 (13:11):
I just I cannot even Okay, can we talk.
Speaker 4 (13:13):
About the Epstein files for just a moment, and this
is we're going to talk about this because I wish
I were surprised. I truly wish I were surprised, President Trump.
This is from an article from Axios. President Trump's Justice
(13:34):
Department and FBI have concluded they have no evidence that
convicted sex offender and disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein blackmailed powerful
figures kept a client list or was murdered, according to
an MO detailing the findings. The administration is releasing a
video in both raw and enhanced versions that it says
indicates no one entered the area of the Manhattan prison
(13:56):
where Epstein was held the night before he died in
twenty nine. The video supports the medical examiners finding that
Epstein committed suicide, according.
Speaker 1 (14:06):
To the memo. But that's not the worst part.
Speaker 4 (14:10):
The worst part is is they're basically saying there's no
evidence that all these famous rich people were on any
kind of tapes, or or there's any kind of client list,
or there's any of that. If there isn't, then why
is Elaine Maxwell in prison? Wasn't she in prison for
(14:35):
enticing young girls to come and be victimized? By whom
were they victimized? This is the most disappointing thing in
the world. A former CIA agent said he believes that
the deep state got rid of everything, got rid of
all the evidence of the rich and powerful men. Michael Schellenberger,
(14:58):
who writes at Public News Public dot News, Michael Schellenberger
is the guy who used to be a left winger
and then he started digging into San Francisco and the
problems there. And he wrote a book called San Francico,
which is phenomenal. And now he has a news outlet
called Public News, and I subscribe to Public News.
Speaker 1 (15:22):
They have done stories, and I mean done stories about
this as a matter of fact.
Speaker 4 (15:29):
Let me scroll down and find their entire list. Let's
see strong evidence suggest Epstein was part of a sex
blackmail operation tied to intelligence agencies. Visitor logs show that
William Burns, who served as CIA director under President Biden,
visited Epstein's New York townhouse multiple times. The Wall Street
(15:50):
Journal reported those visits in twenty twenty three, based on
Epstein's private calendar. In twenty seventeen, Alex Acosta, the Justice
Department official who gave Epstein his two thousand and eight
plea deal, told Trump transition officials that he was told
to back off Epstein.
Speaker 1 (16:07):
Because quote, he belonged to intelligence.
Speaker 4 (16:10):
The Justice Department later admitted that all eleven months of
Acosta's emails from.
Speaker 1 (16:15):
That period had disappeared. That's not all, though.
Speaker 4 (16:23):
They go on and I want to find this one. Okay,
here we go, here we go. This is why Michael
Schellenberger is so mad.
Speaker 1 (16:31):
About this.
Speaker 4 (16:32):
Few independent journalists have done more than we have to
defend Donald Trump and the MAGA movement against weaponization of
the intelligence community and deep state agencies. Over the past
two and a half years, we published hundreds of investigative
articles and testified before Congress about unconstitutional abuses of power
by the CIA, FBI, DHS and their proxies. We exposed
(16:56):
we exposed efforts to censor Trump and his supporters through
a sprawling censorship industrial complex, documented the manipulation of the
justice system to prosecute Trump on politicized grounds, and revealed
how US and foreign agencies coordinated mass surveillance of speech.
We defended Trump from false and malicious claims, showed that
(17:18):
his administration obeyed court orders, and disproved the narrative that
he violated democratic norms more than democrats. We were the
first to report new evidence that President Obama's CIA director
ordered spying on Trump campaign officials to justify surveillance and
interfere in the twenty sixteen election. After Trump's reelection, we
published investigations revealing abuses of power by USAID and the
(17:42):
Department of Education. We editorialized in supportive as lawful executive
orders ending DEI and gender affirming procedures for minors. We
exposed the CIA and USAID's role in supporting the twenty
nineteen impeachment effort and their connection to the Russian collusion hoax.
In all this, we have consistently made the case that
(18:03):
Trump's victory was not just political, it was moral. And
then they go on to say, guess what, kids, We're
going to keep doing the same now even if he's
in power.
Speaker 5 (18:15):
And I'm glad.
Speaker 1 (18:17):
I'm glad. I don't care who's in power.
Speaker 4 (18:20):
What I care is that once again we have a
two tiered system of justice. The elites they don't have
to pay for their crimes. They can abuse children, they
can have thousands and thousands of hours of child pornography,
which apparently Jeffrey Epstein had thousands and thousands of hours.
And yet none of the people who went to his
(18:41):
island that was called Lolita Island.
Speaker 1 (18:46):
On the Lolita Express, all of the people.
Speaker 4 (18:51):
That were in his townhouse, a townhouse which by the way,
had cameras in every single room, none of those people
are going to be held to account. This is the
kind of stuff that begins a revolution. You know, I
have a really good video on the blog today of
Constantine Kissen. I love his work talking about why young
people are being swayed by the nonsensical socialism crap being
(19:11):
spewed by the New York.
Speaker 1 (19:12):
City mayoral candidate. When we get back, I want to
dip into some of that because it's worth hearing.
Speaker 4 (19:19):
If you want to know why revolutions start, they never
start because the people are happy, right.
Speaker 1 (19:24):
Nobody's content, nobody's getting what they need.
Speaker 4 (19:29):
And if we expect today's young people to be interested
in conserving the things about the United States of America
that are good and worthy of fighting for, we have
to make sure this country is working for them the
way it worked for us to and telling them to
give up avocado toast so they can buy a house
just isn't going to get it done. We'll dip into
that next after the news, traffic, and weather. Keep it
(19:51):
right here on KOA. Some really foul things to say
about the camp. It was not the mayor of Houston,
it was a mayor appointee. What got super awkward is
this After this woman, Sadie Perkins, took to social media
and made some of the nastiest, most vile comments about
(20:13):
this being a white's only camp and nobody would care
if this was I mean, just really awful, funny story.
Her boyfriend is the reverend of the first Unitarian Universalist
Church of Houston, and he took to the pulpit to say,
my partner, Sadie Perkins, has made comments on social media
regarding the horrific flooding that devastated Camp Mystic. I want
to be clear that I disavow her comments. Now it'll
(20:37):
be up to her to decide if that's because he's white,
and if he's racist too, her boyfriend. Anyway, you know,
those people are gonna have to deal with the the
the fallout there. I want to play a little bit.
We were talking about how how do people still get
sucked in by the promises of socialism which have been
(21:00):
broken over and over and over and over and over.
Speaker 1 (21:02):
And over again.
Speaker 4 (21:03):
You can never have socialism until you deal with ego,
because ego makes us want nice stuff, Ego makes us
want our own stuff.
Speaker 1 (21:14):
And as diverse culturally as.
Speaker 4 (21:17):
We are in the United States of America, we don't
have a solid foundation on which socialism can be built.
Speaker 1 (21:23):
We just don't. You know, Israel is a socialist nation.
In large extent, they.
Speaker 4 (21:30):
Have kibbutzs where people live together in a socialist fashion.
Everybody works on the kibbutz. They take care of business together,
they work on things together, they.
Speaker 1 (21:38):
Do all of that stuff.
Speaker 4 (21:40):
But even Israel has a capitalist economy for a very
good reason, because it's the best kind of economy, and
the kibitz is in Israel work whereas other communes have
failed because they have a religious foundation, and people that
move to the kbbuzz are very they're completely bought into
(22:03):
the notion that everybody can work together collectively. So it's
a closed circuit in a way because everyone shares Judaism
as the foundation. So why is socialism so appealing to
young people today? Constantine Kissen is a younger man. He's
(22:23):
in his forties. He was born in Russia, that is
now he lives. He's lived in the UK for a
very long time. Very smart dude, but he understands these things.
And I want you to just listen to what he
has to say. I'm starting in the middle because I
didn't chew it up to the right place, but just
listen to what he has to say about why young
(22:44):
people are being sucked in now more than.
Speaker 1 (22:47):
Ever acted as welcome.
Speaker 8 (22:48):
Adrasa's is sufficient to prime young people for receptivity to socialism,
but he does not explain why the ideas are landing
as hot as they are.
Speaker 1 (22:57):
So why is socialism becoming popular?
Speaker 8 (23:00):
I tried to remind my conservative friends of this at
the end of my speech at the first OUR conference,
when I said, many of you here are conservatives.
Speaker 3 (23:09):
I'm not.
Speaker 8 (23:09):
I look terrible in tweed. That's why I identify as
politically non binary. But I can tell you conservatives something.
You will never get young people to want to conservative
society and an economy that is not working for them.
We will not overcome woke nihilism as long as young
(23:31):
people are locked out of the housing market, unable to
pair up, unable to have kids, unable to plan for
the future. Born in nineteen eighty two, I am what
you might call a geriatric millennial. I entered the workforce
in two thousand and three and work solidly for over
a decade, making a good income as a translator and
(23:51):
then as a circuit comedian. Together with my wife's modest
income as an artist, we earned a little above the
median household income in Britain. We bought off a property,
a tiny apartment at the age of thirty five. Far
from being unusual, this is becoming normal. In London, the
average age of a first time buyer is thirty five.
In New York it's now thirty seven. The counter often
(24:14):
wheeled out against this argument is that while certain aspects
of life have become more challenging, young people now enjoy
access to an immense array of consumer goods electronics, food variety,
and so on. But the problem is that some things
matter more than others. Housing is one of them. Most people,
for example, would not want to have children until they
(24:34):
have a place of their own, and as any parent
will tell you, having kids changes everything. If you can't
afford to buy around place and settle down, you're stuck
in a permanent adolescent limbo in which making the right
decisions no longer makes sense. I know many people of
my generation and younger, who, it could be said, waste
lots of money on coffees, eating out and so on,
(24:57):
while paying rent instead of saving up for the are
on place. The problem is, though, the saving two hundred
pounds a month towards a deposit on your first property
makes very little sense when the price of that property
grows by tens of thousands every year. This sense that
the things you actually want deep down are speeding away
from you on a train you'll never catch is the
(25:18):
real driving force behind the popularity of politicians like Mam Danny.
Young people are open to socialist demogogues not because they've
sat down and done the sums on their policies. They're
open to them because they're desperate and see.
Speaker 1 (25:31):
No way out.
Speaker 8 (25:32):
This, by the way, is always how radical and unworkable
ideas become popular. The rise of communism and fascism in
the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was the direct
result of the excessors of the Industrial Revolution. During that period,
human wealth shot up, but so did wealth inequality, with
the people at the top accumulating most of the gains.
(25:54):
By the middle of the nineteenth century, the top one
percent of people in Britain owned fifty to sixty percent
of the way wealth.
Speaker 1 (26:00):
Sound familiar.
Speaker 8 (26:01):
The rise of socialist politicians and the popularity of left
wing commentators like Garry's economics are not the problem. They
are a symptom, and until the real problems are addressed,
it's Mom Danny's all the way down, and.
Speaker 4 (26:14):
That, my friends, is probably the most accurate description I've
heard for what is going on with this youth dabbling
with socialism. They haven't done any of the cost benefit analysis.
They haven't done any historical analysis because we gutted civics
and the basic understanding of these isms in school. And
I think that's by design one hundred percent the issue
(26:39):
that we're having now where people and I'm going to
use like the Denver metro as an example, everything government
has done on affordable housing has made it more expensive.
Speaker 1 (26:48):
Do you guys realize this?
Speaker 4 (26:51):
Every government intervention makes housing more expensive in Argentina.
Speaker 1 (26:56):
Let me pull this up very quickly.
Speaker 4 (26:57):
I didn't put it on the blog today, but I
want to dup it down into it very quickly. They
did a quick check to see how Javier Malay is
doing in Argentina. You may recall he was elected president
with a chainsaw to cut spending and after years of
out of control inflation, guess what's happening in Argentina. For
(27:19):
the first time in eight years, inflation is two percent
two percent. In an open letter published ahead of Argentina's
crunch nineteen November election, Economist a group of one hundred.
Leading economist said they understood the deep seated desire for
economic stability among voters, but they said it was going
(27:42):
to be an abject disaster. They said it would create
further economic devastation and social chaos. However, they were wrong,
a complete and total misfire. Argentina just announced an astonishing
seven point six percent year over year GDP growth for
(28:04):
quarter two, seven point six percent. He did away with
rent control.
Speaker 1 (28:11):
You know what happened.
Speaker 4 (28:13):
Supply has increased three hundred percent. Rents have dropped forty
percent when they did away with rent control. The more
we allow government to interfere with our economy, the worse
it is for young people. But we've distorted capitalism right
now into crony capitalism that you can hardly recommend. You
(28:34):
just can't even recognize it anymore. Right, free markets are
not that free anymore because certain companies have protections that
prevent them from having to be held accountable when they
sell a product to people that then harms them.
Speaker 1 (28:47):
Anyway, just something to think about.
Speaker 4 (28:51):
I don't have the answers, but what I do know
is that the more the government tries to fix.
Speaker 1 (28:55):
The problem, the worse the problem.
Speaker 4 (28:58):
Becomes, So why don't we start by having government not
try to fix as much? That would be great. No
critics were allowed to screen the new Superman movie. It
comes out in three days, and Grant, are you a
superhero guy? Obviously a rod is our token superhero guy
(29:18):
on the show.
Speaker 1 (29:19):
Can you step into that role even on a temporary basis?
Speaker 6 (29:23):
No?
Speaker 1 (29:23):
Okay, good, It's nice to know your limitations. Yeah, I
watched them, but I don't know enough of the details.
Speaker 4 (29:29):
Well, and you know, I was really excited about this
because the trailer looked really cool and I've always loved
the story of Superman because Superman with Christopher Reeves was
the rebirth of superhero movies back in the late nineteen seventies,
really was. And it seems that they've made.
Speaker 1 (29:45):
This a political movie.
Speaker 3 (29:49):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (29:50):
James Gunn, the guy who directed the film, a great director.
I don't have any issue with James Gunn.
Speaker 4 (29:58):
Movies are exciting, there, action packed, they're just you know,
he does a genre and he does it well. But
it came out was like Superman is an immigrant story
and it kind of is like he didn't need to
lose me there, right, you don't need to lose me
with a Superman is an immigrant story, because yes, indeed,
he is an immigrant.
Speaker 1 (30:17):
To this planet.
Speaker 7 (30:19):
But then.
Speaker 4 (30:23):
Then Sean Dunn, his brother, who apparently can't get a
work unless his brother makes a movie, he took to
the red carpet and had and had this to say,
give me my audio real quick, grant, I cannot get
to the little clicker.
Speaker 1 (30:39):
There, there we go, your boss, your brother talked about
Superman being an immigrant, and now Maga has already upset
that he's called.
Speaker 5 (30:50):
Superman an immigrant. I wanted to get your reaction.
Speaker 9 (30:53):
Uh, you know, my reaction to that is that it
is exactly what the movie is about. I think that, like,
we support our people, you know, we love our immigrants,
we love Yes, Superman is an immigrant, and yes the
people that we support in this country are immigrants. And
(31:18):
if you don't like that, then you're not American.
Speaker 4 (31:21):
So I'm gonna let him stop there, because once again,
the clever little feature of conflating illegal immigrants with legal
immigrants is the tool that he has used to make
his point. Absolutely, they do it every time. It's so
entirely predictable. So they've taken a movie which should have
been amazing. One critic wrote a review of the new
(31:45):
Superman movie, and let me just read you the headline.
Speaker 1 (31:50):
Okay, terrible news.
Speaker 4 (31:53):
Superman is final nail in superheroes Cinema coffin, The seemingly
indestructible Man of Steel is fatally weakened by kryptonite. So
too is the one unbeatable superhero genre, gravely threatened by
audience fatigue. And then it goes on to talk about
(32:15):
how the movie doesn't really do It doesn't have a plot,
it doesn't do anything. I have a question for Sean Dunn,
James Gunn's brother, who can't get a job unless's brother's
directing a movie.
Speaker 1 (32:26):
And that is were we as welcoming to zod. I
don't think we were, sir. I don't think they were,
because they were here to exploit.
Speaker 4 (32:36):
Our world, to take it over, to walk around and
plant their own flag, to march through the streets and
demand people bow to them. Sound familiar. We don't welcome
all immigrants. All we're asking, at least, all I'm asking
is that people do it the legal way. All I'm
(32:58):
asking is that Congress get a of their heads out
of their collective. You know what, Now we've got some
money for border security in the Big Beautiful Bill. Let's
talk about real immigration reform to allow people who want
to come here and work and make money and send
it back home to their families to be able to
do so, and be able to do so legally with
(33:19):
their own taxpayer ID number, not somebody else's Social Security number.
It's not crazy to expect a country to have borders.
It's not crazy at all. And that they act like
somehow it is, Well, what is an American if we
don't have borders?
Speaker 1 (33:38):
What does that even mean?
Speaker 4 (33:40):
How can you say if you don't support immigrants, you're
not American? Well, what is America without our borders? No difference.
We'll see how Superman plays out. I again so disappointed
between this and the second Mission Impossible movie.
Speaker 7 (34:01):
Ugh, ugh, so bad.
Speaker 1 (34:07):
What are they doing?
Speaker 4 (34:09):
I did watch an interesting movie on the plane, Grant.
Do you hear about the Last Show Girl with Pam Anderson.
Speaker 1 (34:15):
I have heard of that, and I heard it's really good.
I gotta tell you, she.
Speaker 4 (34:19):
Was shockingly good at playing a character that's really not likable.
In the grand scheme of things, her character is not
a likable person, and Jamie Lee Curtis killed it and
it's short. It's only an hour and twenty minutes of
your life. So if it sucks, you know, you're an
hour and twenty minutes out. When we get back, our
favorite futurist joins us. Thomas Frye has a fascinating idea
(34:43):
about how to reinvigorate cities from the inside out. And
it doesn't have to do with wooing business. It has
to do with building business. We'll talk about that next.
Thomas Frye, he's the guy that just spends a lot
of time thinking about stuff in the future and where
it's going.
Speaker 1 (35:02):
Thomas, let me ask you a question.
Speaker 4 (35:03):
When do you do your thinking on stuff like you're mulling?
When when you tell me about that process when you're
mulling trying to figure out the future.
Speaker 10 (35:12):
Oh, usually it's at night, But a lot of times
some of the best ideas just pop into your head.
Speaker 5 (35:21):
Just at some random moment in time, so it's hard
to predict.
Speaker 4 (35:25):
I actually do most of my thinking my thinking time
in the car. I drive in silence for that reason.
And I told another friend of mine to this today
and he's like, I don't know if I've ever driven
in silence. I'm like, well, when's your thinking time, you know,
you're really thinking.
Speaker 1 (35:39):
You got to think.
Speaker 4 (35:39):
So he said, I don't do that, and I was like, oh, okay,
well then that makes me special. Thomas has a very
interesting concept. Are you going to write a blog post
on this that I can share as well because you
send it to me?
Speaker 5 (35:51):
But yes, we'll have it posted in a week or two.
Speaker 4 (35:54):
Okay, because I think it's very interesting. But it's a
pretty complex topic of discuss and I want to make
sure that people are interested in this. Could go back
and find more information about it later. Let's talk about
is it Neyman engines? Neuman engines?
Speaker 5 (36:09):
Yeah, named after John von Neuman kind of.
Speaker 10 (36:13):
He was a contemporary of valunteering, helped invent modern computing.
He's one of the sharpest guys of all times. But
it's a whole different concept. Kind of the way cities
have been reviving themselves is through economic development. In these
(36:35):
economic development operations are failing big time right now because
things have changed so much. So if you move a
company into your area, you're probably not going to get
all the employees, or if you get a few employees, that's.
Speaker 5 (36:52):
All you're going to get.
Speaker 10 (36:53):
So economic development there's still some things happening in that space.
But but the true, the true engine of economic activity
should actually be in the startup space. Because with with AI,
we're going to be creating more startups than ever before
in history. And I think this becomes our biggest job
(37:18):
engine ever created. So the way the Noyman engine works
is you start with a venture studio. A venture studio
is different than than like an accelerator or an incubator.
A venture studios where you have a group of savvy
entrepreneurs that actually start all the businesses, and you bring
(37:39):
this into a community that is struggling or failing. Now,
the communities are having problems filling office space, or having
problems filling shops on main street.
Speaker 5 (37:52):
They're just struggling economically. So when you when you start
this Neuman engine.
Speaker 10 (37:58):
Then you have the opportunity not to just create jobs,
but to create prime jobs. Now, a prime job is
different than just creating a job. See, if you create
a coffee shop, what you're doing is you're just recirculating
the money in the community. If you create a prime job,
then you're bringing money from outside of the community into
it and that has multiple effects then and so that
(38:24):
changes the way communities operate.
Speaker 4 (38:26):
Well, let me stop there. Let's start at phase one.
We'll call it phase one of the operation, and that
is the not incubator. And for people who don't know
what an incubator is, there are a lot of different organizations,
a lot of venture capitalists have incubators where you can
as an entrepreneur, you already have an idea, you've already
started the plan, you've already started the.
Speaker 1 (38:45):
Ball rolling on your business.
Speaker 4 (38:46):
You may move into an incubator to take advantage of
their expertise to give more business help, to get support
as you begin to grow this business that you've already created.
Speaker 1 (38:56):
So the other thing that the first.
Speaker 4 (38:58):
Stage of the normans is actually a space where ideas
are pulled out of thin air.
Speaker 1 (39:05):
Is that the best way for me to dune this down?
Speaker 10 (39:08):
Yeah, but there's more more logic to that than being
pulled out of thin air.
Speaker 5 (39:13):
But you're using kind of the talent in the area.
Speaker 10 (39:19):
So if you have a community that's in the oil
and gas industry, then you can use that startups in
that space. If you have a community that's in let's say,
making movies, then you work with talent in that space,
and so on. So you kind of build on what's
already there, but then you can you can veer off
(39:43):
in different directions as well. So the idea is to
first set up and establish a space. It'll be like
a co working space that is a combination co working
space with actually a theater for having shows, having classes,
(40:03):
helping people, doing meetups there, coaching people. So that was
the kind of the heart of the whole Norman engine
is this startup space, and then you get people coming
in there, and so the venture studio will then start
(40:25):
creating these prime businesses. In a prime business would be
like if you wanted to start a distillery, distillery selling
all over the country. If you're starting there's something that
has a food industry, frozen food or something like that,
that's money coming from all over the country. Health camps,
(40:48):
there's lots of different kinds of health camps that you
can establish and that brings in money from all over
as well. And so when you start going down the list,
and I have quite a few different possibilities, but these
these can actually there's probably hundreds and hundreds of different
startup possibilities for a community.
Speaker 5 (41:09):
So then you have you have the people that are
starting things you.
Speaker 10 (41:14):
Have there, there's something that I call how to school.
How to school is something as purposely local as just
telling you how to do things like how to start
how to start vibe coding, or how to do AI
marketing for your business and that sort of thing.
Speaker 4 (41:36):
So, how do you use the AI tools that you
are because Thomas, I don't you and I haven't spoken
about this. I have a friend that has worked in
the internet marketing field for a very long time, since
the internet marketing field just started, He's started and launched
multiple companies, right, so he has employed people, he has
he's had staffs. He said, Well, he just launched a
(41:58):
new company that is more marketing to a very specific
kind of business, and he's focused on that like a laser.
He has not had to hire anyone to scale his
business because he's using AI for everything, which for him
is outstanding, Right, But I'm worried about AI sort of
(42:18):
leading us with new customers to buy the products kind.
Speaker 1 (42:21):
Of thing, you know what I mean.
Speaker 4 (42:22):
It's like, if AI is so efficient and AI is
capable of helping people build new businesses, which it is,
what does the landscape look like when we don't have
to hire people anymore.
Speaker 10 (42:38):
Yeah, there's going to be a lot of solo businesses,
but those people will still be buying products for themselves
and their family. So if we have ten thousand solo
businesses in a community, that's still a thriving economy, right.
So the kind of the landscape is going to changed
(43:00):
dramatically as to how these businesses are function and operate.
There will still be a lot of people who choose
to hire people to do different things, Like, even though
you can run a solo business, you probably still want
somebody to mow your lawn or to do your dry
cleaning things like that. So so anyway, this is going
(43:25):
to employ a lot of people. And I think with
all the sort of businesses that we're going to be
creating out of thin air here, that this is actually
going to give us with more employment than we've ever
had ever in all history.
Speaker 4 (43:41):
I look at this and I think to myself, it
sounds like a great idea, and I wonder how it
can be done on a more micro level and specifically
thinking about you know, you have a list of cities
that you have is like right for this kind of development?
And I'm going to use date no harm because I
was literally just date. No, how over the weekend, They've
(44:01):
got right Patterson Air Force Base, They've got an aerospace
industry there. So you're saying, look, you lean into that, Well,
how can this be applied to a suffering, a socioeconomically
devastated community right where you don't necessarily have a super
highly educated workforce, You're not necessarily going to have a
(44:23):
lot of college grads. Could this be used to help
create an economy within one of those lower socioeconomic neighborhoods
in the same way, you know, because what you're talking
about is educated people using AI to do to do
things that will attach to other highly educated industries. Well,
what about using this in a community that is, you know,
(44:44):
the average home or the average person doesn't own their
own home and they're living on the margins.
Speaker 1 (44:49):
Is this something that could be used on that scale?
Speaker 4 (44:52):
Do you think to reinvigorate even individual neighborhoods, forget cities,
just smaller things than that.
Speaker 10 (45:01):
Yeah, when when you have a venture studio, you have
savvy entrepreneurs that are going to start creating things, and
they're going to be creating businesses that they will coach
along until a point where they can have another set
of entrepreneurs take them over, so the business gets off
the ground and operating and they have a handoff to
(45:22):
a local group of entrepreneurs that can run it from there.
So this is kind of a training operation at the
same time, so you're training training the next generation of
business operators.
Speaker 5 (45:37):
So I think this creates a lot of excitement in
the community.
Speaker 10 (45:42):
Lots of people then change their their their path, change
their thinking and say, oh, I want to be part
of that.
Speaker 5 (45:49):
And so going to going to a few.
Speaker 10 (45:52):
Sessions at the at the how to school and you're
learning a few things, you don't quite learn enough, so
then you sign up for the local media group and
then you start hanging out with other people, other like
minded people.
Speaker 5 (46:05):
And that's the key.
Speaker 10 (46:06):
When you get that mindset in a community that you
can take it from here, you can do it on
your own, that changes a lot of things. That changes
the perspective of virtually everybody in the community.
Speaker 1 (46:19):
Oh, I agree wholeheartedly.
Speaker 4 (46:20):
I mean, it's the difference between you know, going to
Haiti and building a school and going to Haiti and
teaching people how to do construction right. I mean, I
had an interviewed some many years ago now with a woman,
a Haitian woman in Haiti who was begging mission trips
to stop coming to Haiti and building things or doing things.
They're like, bring people down and teach people how to
(46:42):
do this stuff, because what you've done is create a
whole group of people waiting for another set of missionaries
to show up and build them another thing. And this
is kind of what you're talking about, like teach people
along the way. This is interesting, Thomas, because my former
father in law actually wasn't banking for a very long
time and one of his pet projects that he was
never able to quite get off the ground because of money.
(47:04):
And I want to ask you about that next is
he wanted to go in and create exactly what you're
talking about. Invite people from a community to come in
and say, what's your idea for a business? Who would
it serve, how would it work in your mind? You know,
and let's see if we can flesh this out and
then do exactly what you're talking about. Handhold people through
the process, teach them how to do accounting, teach them
how to you know, advertise their but like teach them
(47:26):
what they need to know.
Speaker 1 (47:28):
And he got close a few.
Speaker 4 (47:29):
Times, but It always came down to you're asking for
a big investment for what, maybe initially for many years,
a low return situation.
Speaker 1 (47:39):
So who funds this? How do you get the money
to do this? And what might it cost?
Speaker 5 (47:46):
Yeah, the yeah, the kind of the low end.
Speaker 10 (47:49):
We're thinking roughly it's around ten million dollars over five years, right,
so a lot of cities can afford that. They're spending
a lot of that money on economic development right now.
They can use municipal bonds. This gets paid back by
all the businesses that get started. This is an investment
(48:10):
in their own community. I'm not going to say that
you can do it on a bootstrap it or do
it on a shoestring. I think you need to make
a serious commitment in your community and then just go
for it.
Speaker 4 (48:25):
I agree, and I think that you need to pay
people to be full time employees that have knowledge and
skill set to do the things that need to be done.
You know, I'm actually thinking, have you ever heard of
the organization's score It's the Society.
Speaker 1 (48:39):
Of I can't remember.
Speaker 4 (48:41):
It's like retired corporate executives and it's a volunteer organization.
And if you start a business, you can go to
score and they will give you good business advice.
Speaker 1 (48:49):
It sounds like something.
Speaker 4 (48:50):
If I feel like all of the pieces for this
already exist, we just need to put them all together
in one place.
Speaker 10 (48:57):
Yeah, except the pieces are changing with AI. I mean
this idea of being able to do vibe coding as
an example.
Speaker 1 (49:07):
I don't even know what that is, Thomas, where is that?
Speaker 5 (49:10):
Talk to talk to.
Speaker 10 (49:11):
Your computer and it will actually build your website or
it'll do the software coding for you. That's that's something
that's new and different. It's something that has come out
within the last six months, so not everybody knows about it.
So that's one of the pieces that's changing.
Speaker 1 (49:32):
No, I agree, and I do think that.
Speaker 4 (49:35):
I think that in the next before AI becomes super
intelligent decides we're no longer worth it and wipes us
off the face of the earth in one night by
cutting all of our gas lines, I'm sure that won't
happen for a while, so let's just enjoy the run
while we can. I do think that our economy is
going to be divided into people who learn to use AI.
Speaker 1 (49:54):
And people who don't.
Speaker 4 (49:56):
I really think the divide is going to be significant,
and I think that people who learn to use AI
effectively and learn to use the tools that are available
to them via AI, are going to excel in the
economy no matter what field they're in. I think they're
going to be the ones that excel. And I think
anything that we can do to sort of inspire the
next generation to really take these tools seriously. But man,
(50:19):
there's so many of them coming out every day it's
hard to keep up. So this would be this would
be a way to do that.
Speaker 10 (50:24):
At a lot of the AI agents right now can
work as a personal coach for you.
Speaker 5 (50:30):
Let's say you want to write a book.
Speaker 10 (50:32):
You can have this personal coach that's sitting on your
shoulder telling you, coaching you on how to how to
put together the characters, how to create the story arc,
how to create a good ending, and then put all
the pieces together, and by the time you're all done,
then you have something that you've accomplished. It's an accomplishment
(50:55):
form of education, and this is new and different because
most of the stuff that's being taught in schools today,
you accomplish virtually nothing that you're proud of that you
want to show your friends, right right, If as an example,
you want to become a gamer a game designer, and
you want to design video games, you could actually have
(51:18):
a coach that actually coaches you through that whole process,
teaching you different ways of putting this techniques together and
kind of creating the storyline for that game that you
want to play. And by the time you're done and
you have something that you want to that you're proud of,
that you want to show your friends. This is another
accomplishment form of education. I find that to be quite fascinating.
Speaker 1 (51:43):
I agree, my I don't know.
Speaker 4 (51:46):
I'm afraid and and maybe this is just an unnecessary
thing to be worried about. I'm afraid that there. What
you're saying for cities makes a lot of sense. It
would for Denver. I mean, if you if you really
concentrated your efforts on creating new industry in Denver rather
than trying to drag other industries here to your point
(52:07):
where you may or may not get all their employees.
Speaker 1 (52:10):
I think that's a better way to go.
Speaker 4 (52:11):
And I actually think Governor Jared polis It would agree
with everything you just said. He's very attuned to bringing
in tech and you know, and trying to nurture startups
so I think that for Denver it would be a
really interesting proposition. But again, you know, I'm I'm looking
to try and figure out how to help people who
(52:31):
are not well versed in computers, who are not well
versed and for AI may seem so overwhelming for them.
How do we make that more accessible? Maybe we need
an AI for that.
Speaker 5 (52:44):
Yeah, just uh, there's there's a lot of.
Speaker 10 (52:49):
People are living in isolation, and I think that's that's
kind of the wrong way to do it. If you
can find a group of friends that are actually doing
something similar and you can hang out with them, and
you go to this certain place every day, and you
go there and you have coffee, and you strike up
discussions with what if you accomplished day, what if I
(53:11):
accomplished today? And suddenly you start learning about things you
never knew about before, and and so then you can
have friends that kind of coach you through it as well.
This is we're quickly losing this human camaraderie and I
think it's really important.
Speaker 1 (53:32):
Excuse me, sorry about that.
Speaker 4 (53:36):
The next time you're on, I want to talk about
the new wave memorials and cemeteries, but we're at a
time this time because talking about human connection. I have
an article on the blog today interactive Cemeteries. Well you'll
be able to go and have a conversation with your
loved one. I want to know this real quick and
we'll dive into this deep next time. But can I
(53:57):
plug in things that my dad would say, so my
dad the hologram or whatever would say them back to me,
because that would be really cool.
Speaker 5 (54:07):
We're getting very close to that. Yeah.
Speaker 10 (54:10):
I went over to Copernicus University last year in in Warsaw, Poland,
and they had they had robots of Copernicus there that
would would talk to you and answer any of your
questions that you had. So doing that for average people
on the street, I think we're real close to that.
Speaker 4 (54:31):
All right, he's our futurist. He's Thomas Frye. Find him
the Futurist speaker dot com. I put a link to
that on the blog as well.
Speaker 1 (54:38):
Thomas.
Speaker 4 (54:38):
Fascinating conversation as always, and it's given me a lot
more ideas that I can think about, never do anything about.
So thanks for that, all right, Thomas, all right, all right,
have a good one. That of course is Thomas Rye
will be right back after this. Great did you do
fireworks this Fourth of July weekend? Did you partake in
any of that?
Speaker 6 (54:59):
No?
Speaker 1 (54:59):
But did so we got to see plenty. There you go,
and they're still going on. I no, No, the weekend's
over every night.
Speaker 7 (55:08):
No.
Speaker 4 (55:10):
So I don't know if you knew this about me, Grant,
but I am on record on this program and saying
I do not like fireworks. So I went because we
were with the kids and the grandkids. And can I
just say this, if you're a parent of a teenager
and you don't have grandkids yet, grandkids are the reward
for the teen years. Okay, that's just the reality. Grandkids
(55:34):
are awesome. I highly recommend them. Not that my children
aren't great whatever, blah blah blah, it's fine, but grandkids
super duper. So we're with the grandkids in Ohio and
they're like, oh, let's walk down and we'll go see
the the you know, the big fireworks display for their town.
And I was like, let's okay, you know what, I
don't like fire Maybe I just haven't tried them recently, right,
(55:56):
maybe it's time to dip my toe back in the fireworks,
you know. Pool see what's going on? Well, I have
an update. I still don't like fireworks. I don't like
the noise. They're not pretty enough to like impress me.
I then all the smoke just settles in and it
just sits on you, because when you're in a humid
(56:17):
climate and they're firing off all the fireworks, the smoke
doesn't dissipate.
Speaker 1 (56:21):
Like it does here.
Speaker 4 (56:22):
No, it just hangs like a cloud right over the ground.
So we went and you know, my husband, God love him,
he loves fireworks. So I'm standing there and I'm watching
the fireworks, and then I just said I am probably
the worst person to watch fireworks with because where.
Speaker 1 (56:39):
He's like, ooh wow, look, and I'm like, nope, don't care.
I don't know what it is. Now it has me
wondering like maybe in a past life I was killed
by a firework. I don't know, because I really don't.
It's beyond being.
Speaker 4 (56:55):
Indifferent to them. I was just like, I kept I
was like, how long do fireworks last? As soon as
they started, I.
Speaker 1 (57:01):
Was like, oh God, how long does this thing go?
So like, even when the finale hits.
Speaker 4 (57:08):
The only way I could remotely see myself enjoying fireworks
if is if I was at a big like the
Boston Pop celebration with music and everything to distract me
from the actual fireworks. But I wanted to know, does
anybody else like, do you find yourself in the situation
that I'm And I'm not talking about I hate fireworks
because my dog freaks out. Like I get that, I
(57:29):
understand that, but that's not what I'm talking about. I'm
talking about do you just look at fireworks and think
to yourself, I don't understand it.
Speaker 1 (57:39):
I don't get it.
Speaker 4 (57:40):
I'm now putting fireworks in the same category as slot machines.
Every time I walk past people playing slot machines, right,
and if you go up to the casinos in Central City,
you'll see the exact same thing. And by the way,
some of the casinos have amazing spas. So I will
go to the casino, I just don't camble. Right that
being said, I will past people on the slot machines.
(58:01):
None of them look like they're having fun. There's not
a laughing you see them in the commercials laughing and smile.
There's no laughing and smiling going on. They're just hitting
the buttons. Even the people who are winning are like, oh,
I'll just wait for this to go and then I'll.
Speaker 1 (58:12):
Hit more buttons. I just I don't get it.
Speaker 4 (58:14):
And then I start to think to myself what is
wrong with me? Because I look out at this huge
field We're standing in, this huge cround. It's crowded with
people and they're all like ooh on, they're clapping and
it's going, oh yay, everybody's having a great time. And
I'm standing there going how long is this thing going
to go on? So then you start to think, what
is wrong with me? What gene am I missing that?
(58:36):
I don't like fireworks, And before you tell me, Mandy,
it's just maybe your adverse to loud noises.
Speaker 1 (58:41):
I like shooting guns. I like shooting sporting clays.
Speaker 4 (58:46):
And you know why because when you shoot a sporting clay,
if you shoot it just right, it's made out of clay.
It's not really a pigeon. They call it a pigeon,
but it's really clay pigeon. It explodes into a million pieces.
That's kind of firework I can get behind. But blowing
stuff up to blowing stuff up sake, I don't know.
Speaker 1 (59:05):
I just I'm I'm not getting it.
Speaker 4 (59:08):
And then you're stuck in traffic for god knows how
long afterward, trying to get away from the fireworks that
you didn't even enjoy in the first place. So I
told Chuck, I said, you know what, this is my
last fireworks demonstration, last one, last one I feel compelled
to go to.
Speaker 1 (59:24):
I must go.
Speaker 4 (59:26):
I'm done with the going to the fireworks, and i
just want to know that I'm not alone and that
I'm not some sort of freak show that is the
only American that doesn't love fireworks. And by the way,
I'm not telling you you can't have your fireworks. You
can go and have a wonderful time. I like all
the little festivals and stuff that happened before the fireworks,
(59:46):
Like I would go to that, I would just leave
before the fireworks started.
Speaker 1 (59:50):
Then you beat the crowd exactly exactly, Mandy.
Speaker 4 (59:56):
I'm thinking that you've never been to Chorusfield for the
fireworks display. That would wow even you, O contreire, dear Texter.
I have not only been to the Course Field fireworks display.
I've been more than once. I've been to the largest
fireworks display in the eastern part of the United States.
It's called Thunder over Louisville, and it happens two weeks
(01:00:17):
before the Kentucky Derby as part of the Kentucky Derby
Festival leading up to the races, and it is massive.
They shut down an entire bridge over the Ohio River
and at one point they have this waterfall effect of
all of these fireworks just pouring over the edge of
the bridge.
Speaker 1 (01:00:35):
Into the river below. And you know what I felt
like when I saw that, I was like, Eh, okay, whatever.
And then I'm ten minutes into the.
Speaker 4 (01:00:46):
Fireworks display, which by the way, blissfully got done in
exactly twenty minutes. I know because I was timing them
on my watch. At the end of it, all I
could think of was, Wow, I wonder how much CO
two we released in the atmosphere just tonight on fourth
of July, just from fireworks.
Speaker 1 (01:01:02):
I'm just curious, what's that number? Mandy? All fireworks are
the same? Yay, Mandy.
Speaker 4 (01:01:12):
You're not alone, not at all, thank you, Mandy. Is
it possibly just old age as to why you don't
like fireworks? I have never liked fireworks, even when I
was a little kid.
Speaker 1 (01:01:22):
We go down in my hometown.
Speaker 4 (01:01:25):
It was a small town and the town square kind
of looks like the town square in back to the future,
you know, with the clock tower on one part. We
have a town square that kind of looks like that,
and right behind the big courthouse which would have the
you know, the clock on it if it was back
to the future, there's a lake and so they shoot
the fireworks over the lake. That's where they shoot the
(01:01:46):
fireworks off in my hometown. I don't know if they
still do. That's when I was a kid and we
would go down there, and I would always go back
into my dad's office, which is right in that vicinity,
to watch the fireworks from inside my dad's office because
it was air conditioned. I mean, even as a kid,
I've never liked fireworks. I don't know, just I don't
get it. I don't get it, Mandy. Once you've been
(01:02:08):
through a mad minute or a night, no fireworks display
comes what what.
Speaker 7 (01:02:15):
What?
Speaker 4 (01:02:17):
I don't know, Mandy. You don't like soccer, so yeah,
it's you, okay, Mandy. Have you ever mixed your fireworks
with some psilocybin mushrooms. You might gain a whole new
appreciation for fireworks, or maybe I'll just realize I don't
like fireworks and it's okay, Mandy. How about the new
(01:02:37):
drone shows that have replaced the fireworks displays. They're impressive.
Here's the thing about drone shows. I don't want to
take away fireworks from fireworks people, right. I don't want
to be the reason we don't have fireworks now if
everything is going to catch on fire in Colorado like
it is often in July.
Speaker 1 (01:02:53):
I love a drone show. I think they're really really cool.
Speaker 4 (01:02:56):
They're really neat, but they're not gonna replace the fireworks
show for people who love fireworks. They're just different, Mandy,
I'm in different to most fireworks shows except for the
Rockies game. You would have to pay me somewhere in
the low five figures to go deal with that mess.
Ever again, agree, I agree, Mandy. You need to be
(01:03:16):
the one setting them off, lighting the fuse, because then
you're the one blowing stuff up. You'd enjoy it again, people,
I like your optimism. But when I was a kid,
we used to have bottle rocket fights at each other.
I mean, you know, you have a bottle rocket. You're
supposed to hold a bottle or a PVC pipe or whatever.
You put it in there, you light it and it
takes off. No bottle rocket fight. You just hold the
stick and aim it at whoever you want to blow
(01:03:38):
up like the fact that all of my friends are
walking and talking with all of our fingers and eyeballs
is remarkable to me on many levels, not the least
of it those bottle rocket fights.
Speaker 1 (01:03:51):
Mandy, I'm with you. I don't like fireworks either. It's
a waste of money.
Speaker 4 (01:03:56):
Sorry, Mandy, but not liking fireworks is as dumb as
Ross not eating blue cheese. Well, I do like blue cheese,
although I have Ross's back on green peppers because they
repeat on me something fierce.
Speaker 1 (01:04:06):
Mandy.
Speaker 4 (01:04:07):
I used to love doing fireworks, especially with the grandkids,
but I don't do them anymore because it's extremely tough
on my dogs. So I'm kind of with Okay, you
guys made me feel much better, Mandy, admit it, you're
an amazing alien.
Speaker 1 (01:04:20):
Well, if I was, you'd have to call me Elon Musk.
Speaker 5 (01:04:25):
We all know he is.
Speaker 1 (01:04:27):
Mandy. I do wish fireworks were legal and cheaper.
Speaker 4 (01:04:30):
Anyway, I climb my roof of the two story house
and could see eleven plus official fireworks shows plus all
the individual shows other than those in the neighborhood.
Speaker 1 (01:04:39):
Didn't get the noise, but got to see them. Here's
the thing.
Speaker 4 (01:04:42):
When I was a flight attendant, I always flew on
July fourth, the evening of July fourth. I was always
in the air. And if you just look out the
window of an airplane and you can see the fireworks
popping up, they look like bubbles in a witch's cauldron.
Speaker 1 (01:04:58):
That's the only way I can describe it. But it's
that's actually really cool.
Speaker 4 (01:05:01):
But I am not hearing them, nor am I deering
with their traffic In that case, Mandy, it's fine to
hate fireworks. We were just at the Rapids game with
beautiful fireworks, but only one patriotic song, and that's always
been my favorite part. You know what, same Texter, give
me a little John Phillips Sussa in the background and.
Speaker 1 (01:05:18):
Maybe then we can talk. But just fireworks, not for me.
Speaker 4 (01:05:23):
Our pal Jimmy Singenberger has quite the telling of the
recent we'll call.
Speaker 1 (01:05:29):
It Crackback on the Sea Regent.
Speaker 4 (01:05:32):
See Regent Wanda James, who also happens to make her
living selling the Devil's Lettuce the Hippie Flower Maria Jawanna.
She is a minority owner of a pot store. Now Wanda,
as we talked about previously was not happy when CU's
(01:05:53):
Public School of Health started its te on THHC campaign.
What is the Ta on TA Public Health campaign? It
was funded by marijuana taxes and created by the legislature.
It is a public service initiative that educates the public
on the risks of high POTENCYC. It targets youth under
(01:06:14):
twenty five and pregnant women, and it draws from sixty
six thousand scientific articles. It's a collaboration between the Colorado
School of Public Health and Public Benefit Corporation INITIAM Health. Well,
when the campaign came out, Wanda James, a Democrat, lost
(01:06:37):
her poop, lost her mind. She demanded the campaign's website
be taken down immediately over racist illustrations of black children
in utero and older. Now, the problem with that is
that there were identical images of white children on the
website as well, And the reason that they included white
(01:06:59):
and black and brown children and women is that there
is a growing consensus that says we need more diversity
in medical illustrations. So they simply lived up to this
bar and said, hey, you know what, we want to
make sure that people can see themselves in this campaign
to educate Colorado's on powerful THHC and how it can.
Speaker 1 (01:07:21):
Affect the brain in the mind. Well, she did not
like that.
Speaker 4 (01:07:25):
Then she went on a rant and said they have
to be taken down. Well, the images were removed by
the CU School of Public Health and the school apologized.
Stop apologizing, and rather than be satisfied there, James showed
her true colors. They had nothing to do with racist portrayals.
(01:07:46):
It had everything to do with perhaps telling people not
to buy her product when they were pregnant or they
are children.
Speaker 1 (01:07:54):
Two days after the.
Speaker 4 (01:07:55):
Apology wanted James spoke with Police's cannabis advisor. The very
next day, his budget director asked lawmakers to strip the
campaign's funding.
Speaker 1 (01:08:06):
She wanted the funds to.
Speaker 4 (01:08:07):
Be redirected towards minority owned pot shops with so called
social equity licenses.
Speaker 1 (01:08:15):
Of which she is won.
Speaker 4 (01:08:16):
So she wanted the money to be taken away from
a public health campaign and put into her pockets. In March,
James sent an email to r Pel Jimmy Singen Murger
saying this was a Republican led smear campaign and a
desperate attempt to silence black leadership for standing up against racism.
Speaker 1 (01:08:34):
But the problem was is.
Speaker 4 (01:08:36):
She was advocating against the University of Colorado, of which
she is a regent. She was recently censured by the
CU Board of Regents for her actions. Now before the vote,
she made another melodramatic stand. Today is not about sent
(01:09:00):
she declared, It's about censure and retaliation. I'm being targeted
for raising my voice against.
Speaker 1 (01:09:06):
A campaign that demean dehumanized and harmed the black community.
Really because the science is not on her side, not
even a little bit.
Speaker 4 (01:09:18):
If she really wants to advocate for marijuana, and she
really wants CU to do away with their CU School
of Public Health and their science on the use of marijuana,
especially in young people and pregnant women, then she should
step down from the Board of Regents and do it
that way. She absolutely, as a member of the CU
(01:09:39):
Board of Regents, has no business doing this in her
own personal gain, and that's exactly what she is. By
the way, at large democrat Elliot Hood who said, look
I like Wanda James, but his frustrations came out when
he had managed fellow regent Wanda James by saying, you
(01:10:02):
chose to go further In the days and weeks after
the images had been removed, and after the programs had
taken full responsibility for those images, you continued to publicly
attack the program and to discredit the integrity of its research.
And for an academic institution, that is the greatest sin.
(01:10:23):
James called the programs scientifically dishonest and claimed it pushed
dangerous information with a shocking lack of scientific integrity. When
asked to present her own scientific fact, though she didn't
have anything to say. So she's been censured. It doesn't
mean anything. In reality, what she should do is be
bounced off the CU Board of Regents at the next opportunity.
(01:10:46):
So if you're in her district, pay attention, and if
you go to see you, pay attention, because this is
not the woman you want on your Board of Regents
in any way.
Speaker 1 (01:10:55):
Shape or form. Let her go back to selling the
devil's lettuce. She seems to lack that better anyway.
Speaker 4 (01:11:02):
The Mandy Connell Show is sponsored by Belle and Pollock
Accident and injury lawyers.
Speaker 2 (01:11:06):
Well, no, it's Mandy Connell, Andy Condall, ka.
Speaker 1 (01:11:15):
Ninetema got way.
Speaker 3 (01:11:20):
Nice through three Andy Connell, keeping sad thing well Buffle.
Speaker 4 (01:11:29):
Welcome to the third hour of the show, coming up
at about half an hour, we're going to have nine
News is Chris Vandervein joined me to talk about issues
with the information that the parole Board has given about
potential paroles and what has ended up happening is some
people have been paroled that have almost very very quickly
(01:11:50):
turned around and committed terrible other crimes. The latest that
Chris focused on in his reporting, and we're going to
talk with him a little bit later, is indicative of
a big problems. But his name is Ricky Roybal Smith.
After he was arrested on January of twenty first of
this year, excuse me, after he was paroled again after
(01:12:12):
a few serious crimes. He was paroled on January twenty first.
He was driving a car near ninth and galop Ago.
He hit two people walking across the road. They felt
like they had been targeted. The guy was high when
they picked him up, and they booked him in a
number of charges in the downtown Denver jail. And while
in jail, his first night in jail, Denver deputies found
(01:12:34):
a man dead in his cell. They now believe he
strangled the man. And joining me now on the phone
is that man's uncle, Troy Troy First of all, welcome
to the show under such terrible circumstances.
Speaker 1 (01:12:47):
I'm very sorry about your loss.
Speaker 6 (01:12:49):
Yeah, thanks for having me on, Mandy, longtime listener.
Speaker 4 (01:12:52):
Well, what happened here? What has your family been told?
What do you guys know about this situation?
Speaker 6 (01:12:58):
So the situation, Mandy is they contacted us.
Speaker 7 (01:13:02):
We were there that day.
Speaker 6 (01:13:04):
My nephew was released, supposed to be released on On Sunday,
we got a text saying he was released from the
Denver County jail and we we never heard nothing from him.
He never showed up, nothing. And then Monday we get
a phone call saying that Vincent choked to death in
his cell. Now, now let me make it clear. Denver
(01:13:27):
Police Department is saying that he choked on an apple.
And yes, and this is coming from the detective that
called us and told us that unfortunate circumstances that he
choked on an apple. And I woke up Sunday, man
need to see that. Unfortunately, two people who were stabbed
to death in Aurora. Ye, and then I wake up
(01:13:51):
Monday and said they say that he was caught, but unfortunately,
for somehow, some reason, he was picked up on a
dui or he was picked up somehow, and they never
put him in the detox and they threw them in
the cell with my nephew.
Speaker 7 (01:14:07):
And this is the whole confusion.
Speaker 6 (01:14:08):
We have no idea what was going on. We still
haven't heard from Denver. They haven't released his body, but
the detectives we're trying to say that he choked on
an apple.
Speaker 4 (01:14:18):
So are they are Have they closed the investigation to
your knowledge or are they?
Speaker 7 (01:14:23):
Okay, No, it's still it's still open.
Speaker 6 (01:14:26):
And and Aurora is the only county that has says
they have linked the two stabbings at Aurora to him
choking Vincent. Denver hasn't come out and said nothing yet.
And we're still waiting to see for them to release
his body, so we could we could bury him.
Speaker 4 (01:14:42):
And do what we have to do, right, Yes, I mean,
if he choked on an apple and they've already done,
you know, an autopsy, why wouldn't they release the body.
It seems to me that maybe that was their initial
thought and and but they're continuing to investigate that. That
(01:15:03):
seems a little suspect to me. Oh my gosh, I
just feel terrible for your family.
Speaker 7 (01:15:07):
Not oh this is all and the bad thing is man, is.
Speaker 6 (01:15:12):
They have performed the autopsy. No one, I mean, Vincent's
a Christian man. They never gave authority. We never gave
authority for anybody to do an autopsy of them. They
did an autopsy within hours of this happening. So we're
still up in the air of what's going on here?
Speaker 1 (01:15:28):
That is that is so terrible. Is this your brother
or sister's son. Did this happen to you?
Speaker 6 (01:15:34):
This this is my wife's nephew, which which I've known.
I've been with my wife for thirty three years. And
Vincent he's a baby when I got with my wife.
Very love, very loving kid, very caring kid. And just
unfortunately he was in the Dever County for for traffic
violations and this happened to him. And now now we're
(01:15:56):
trying to get justice for Vincent, and and we we
just on what's going on.
Speaker 4 (01:16:01):
Well, somebody just hit the text line and said Denver
saying he choked on an apple, because that's what the
perpetrator said. And if that's the case, then they must
continue the investigation into this. I mean, this guy obviously
not a good dude, right, I mean, he's accused of
targeting people and running them over. He's accused potentially. There
seems to be connections, as you mentioned, to two people
(01:16:23):
in Aurora that were stabbed to death overnight. This is heartbreaking, Troy.
I'm just I don't know what to say other than
I'm so incredibly sorry.
Speaker 7 (01:16:34):
His rap sheet is like twelve pages long right now.
How is he out there.
Speaker 6 (01:16:38):
Running the streets?
Speaker 4 (01:16:39):
That is the question we're trying to get answers to,
and that is why I'm going to be talking to
Chris Vanderveen about it at two thirty.
Speaker 1 (01:16:45):
It seems though that the people.
Speaker 4 (01:16:48):
The parole officers who are doing the evaluations, are doing
a bad job on whether or not they are providing
enough information to the parole board. And we'll let Chris
get into this a little bit more. But yeah, oh,
this texture just said he choked on an apple my
you know what? So I hope that this investigation continues.
Will you keep me posted, Troy on what you guys
(01:17:10):
know and when you know it, because this is not
the first time I've heard of someone killing someone who
was in a cell with him. I've talked about this
horrible man that I went to his final sentencing. He
was actually sentenced to death over that killing. But apparently
this is kind of common. This is not unusual, you know, nationwide.
(01:17:30):
It doesn't happen all the time in the Denver jail.
But it would probably make sense that the Denver jail
told you that initially, so your family would have some
sort of you know, idea of what went wrong. I
hope they continue to investigate, but let me know what
happens next, because I would very much like to know,
and please extend my deepest condolences to your wife and
her family. What a horrible thing to be in jail
(01:17:53):
over traffic stuff and then end up getting murdered by
someone who really deserved to be in jail in the
first place.
Speaker 6 (01:17:59):
Yes, we just want to I just want to say,
Mandy that we have a Facebook page called Legends Member Die,
and we're trying to raise awareness and money foot to
Barry Benson then have a benefit.
Speaker 1 (01:18:11):
So we're just we're just Troy.
Speaker 4 (01:18:13):
If you can, if you can email me some of
that stuff, I'll share it on tomorrow's blog. And that's
just Mandy Connell at iHeartMedia dot com.
Speaker 7 (01:18:22):
I will definitely thank you so much, Mandy.
Speaker 4 (01:18:24):
Thanks so much, Troy. I appreciate you and just devastated
for your family. I'm sorry about that. That is just
can you imagine being in jail for traffic tickets and
they put some jacked up lunatic high on drugs in
your cell and that's what you get to deal with.
Speaker 1 (01:18:39):
Good Lord.
Speaker 4 (01:18:41):
Wasn't there an autopsy or coroner's report? I don't think
they've released it. That's the problem this. Guys in my
in my radio career, have been doing this with my
own show since two thousand and five. Some of the
most heartbreaking things that I've ever heard have been victims'
families reaching out to.
Speaker 1 (01:19:02):
Me as a talk show host to see if.
Speaker 4 (01:19:04):
I can, you know, shake the law enforcement tree to
find out something, because they're just they're left in the
dark about what's happening next and how it's happening and
where if there's an investigation, if the investigation is over,
can we see the autopsy report? Can we see the
coroner's report? I just absolutely terrible, Mandy. If autopsy done
(01:19:28):
right after, which would have to be done since it's
a possible crime, that it should be easily detected by
an apple in the system, Yeah, I mean, does it
stand a reason if someone's choking in a cell, maybe
someone should call for help, maybe someone Maybe people in
jail don't do that.
Speaker 1 (01:19:47):
As someone who's never been in jail, grant you ever
been in jail?
Speaker 6 (01:19:50):
Nope?
Speaker 4 (01:19:51):
Okay, so we've got no experience whatsoever here. Terrible, absolutely terrible.
We're going to talk with As I said, nine News
is Chris Vanderveen at two thirty about the bigger conversation,
which is where's the information for the parole board coming from?
Speaker 1 (01:20:05):
And how accurate is it right now?
Speaker 4 (01:20:09):
Big problem, Mandy, they should have violent and nonviolent sections. Well,
I mean that sounds good, but I'm not sure it's
actually doable for a whole bunch of reasons. Yeah, I'm
not sure you could even do that. I mean, you
(01:20:29):
have the federal jail, which is just you know, Martha
Stewart went there, and then you have the Pound meet nevermind.
According to a probable Clause statement for the rest of
the man, Rick Roebl Smith said he was sharing a
cell with Victor shakoone, who is the dead man that
we're talking that I just talked to his uncle. It
(01:20:51):
states the Deputy sheriff was alerted by Roybal Smith that
Shakhan was choking on an apple and needed help. Officers
informed mister Roebel Smith that they would be able to
provide him with water after they apply evidence collection gloves
on his hands, at which time mister Royblesmith became upset
and abruptly stated, I did it.
Speaker 1 (01:21:09):
You might as well kill me now. So I don't
know about this choked on the apple business. So we'll
just let that.
Speaker 4 (01:21:18):
All play out. But what a horrible story, absolutely horrible. Hey,
got an update from Mamas that you might want to hear.
This is super fun. A senior officer in Hamas's security
forces has told the BBC the Palestinian Armed Group has
lost about eighty percent of its control over the Gaza
Strip and that armed clans are filling the void. The
(01:21:39):
lieutenant colonel said amasa's command the control system had collapsed
due to months of Israeli strikes that have devastated the
group's political, military and security leadership. The officer was wounded
in the first week of the war and has since
stepped away from his duties for health reasons.
Speaker 1 (01:21:57):
Mainly, he wanted to stay alive. That was his health reason.
Speaker 4 (01:22:00):
He shared several voice messages with the BBC, and in
the messages, the officer painted a picture of hamas's internal
disintegration and the near total collapse of security across Gaza,
which the group had governed before.
Speaker 1 (01:22:14):
At the conflict.
Speaker 4 (01:22:16):
He said, let's be realistic here. There's barely anything left
of the security structure. Most leadership, about ninety five percent,
are now dead. The active figures have all been killed.
So really, what's stopping Israel from continuing this war?
Speaker 1 (01:22:29):
You have the hostages, you dumbass. That's why. Oh that
gets even better though.
Speaker 4 (01:22:37):
Now they're saying because the MAAS is in such disarray,
they may not even know where the bodies or the
hostages are.
Speaker 1 (01:22:43):
They have no idea, no clue. And this is really funny.
The officer sent.
Speaker 4 (01:22:48):
A consequence of the security vacuum was gangs or armed
clans were everywhere.
Speaker 1 (01:22:54):
They could stop you, kill you. No one would intervene.
Speaker 4 (01:22:57):
Anyone who tried to act on their own, like organizing
resistance against thieves was bobbed by Israel within an hour.
Speaker 1 (01:23:04):
So the security situation is zero.
Speaker 4 (01:23:07):
Hamasa's control is zero, Okay, I'm perfectly fine with that.
I also have an article linked from the Wall Street Journal,
a new Palestinian offer for peace with Israel. Sheikh Wadi
al Jabari, also known as Abu Snod, from his ceremonial
tent in Hebron, the West Bank's largest city located south
(01:23:29):
of Jerusalem, he said, we want coexistence. The leader of
Hebron's most influential clan has said things before, as did
his father, but this time is different. Sheik Jabbari and
four other leading Hebron sheikhs have signed a letter pledging
peace and full recognition.
Speaker 1 (01:23:46):
Of Israel as a Jewish state.
Speaker 4 (01:23:49):
Their plan for Hebron is to break out of the
Palestinian authority, establish an emirate of its own, and.
Speaker 1 (01:23:56):
Join the Abraham Accords.
Speaker 4 (01:24:00):
Things are changing, things are shifting, and as long as
the West doesn't try and inflict our standards on them,
let them sort it out, Let the.
Speaker 1 (01:24:13):
Clans carve it up.
Speaker 4 (01:24:15):
And as long as they're willing to say we want
to coexist with Israel and Israel has a right to exist,
that puts them head and shoulders above the Palestinian leadership
of the last fifty years. They're tired of fighting, so
let's let them make peace. Wouldn't that be nice? When
we get back Nine News is Chris Vanderveen did a
great series, and he has a bunch of I linked
(01:24:37):
to some stories and some tweets that he's done about
the parole board releasing people who have turned out to
be very, very dangerous. But Chris wanted me to clarify
that this is not necessarily about the board itself, but
about the parole officers responsible for coming up with these
assessments about how dangerous these criminals are.
Speaker 1 (01:24:57):
We're going to talk to him next.
Speaker 4 (01:25:00):
One of nine News's crack reporters, Chris Vandervena, waits because
last week, before the holiday weekend, he did a story
that alarmed me, just just straight up alarmed me, and
I thought it would be useful to have him come
on and talk about the nuts and bolts of it.
Speaker 1 (01:25:14):
First of all, Chris, welcome to the show.
Speaker 7 (01:25:17):
Thanks for having me.
Speaker 1 (01:25:18):
Mandy, good to talk to you. So I got to
ask you, like what this story is not new?
Speaker 7 (01:25:22):
Right?
Speaker 4 (01:25:23):
You guys have kind of been following some bad guys
who were put out on parole only to reoffend like
this is This is kind of a long arcing story
in a bit, isn't it?
Speaker 7 (01:25:35):
Yeah? Sureious. Since twenty twenty three, we've been tracking parolis
that have gone on to reoffend, most notably what happened
in twenty twenty three that there was a man by
the name of Vincenzo Moscoso got a lot of attention
at the time. He was on parole at the time
and has alleged by Dever police he stabbed and killed
two people at random over on Federal in northwest Denver
(01:25:56):
over a period of a couple hours. Right He's now
continuing to go through the courses and there's compacy issues.
But ever since then, we here at nine News have
gotten the habit of asking for how are these people
being assessed while they're on parole and what is the
state doing to sort of make sure that they're sort
of keeping tabs of people. And I think what we've
(01:26:17):
been able to find through now this year and a
half of work is that the state's not doing a
very good job of keeping tabs of people on parol.
There's roughly eight thousand people that are currently on parole
in the state of Colorado. They're supposed to each one
of them are supposed to go through something simple called
the risk assessment. It's exactly what you think it is
it's determining their level of risks. We can determine their
level of supervision, we can determine their level of care,
(01:26:40):
what they might need while they're out on parole, and
it goes from low to very high. We know for
sure when Vincenzo Muscos was assessed that the State of
Colorado now says for the Apartment of Corrections that there
were six errors on this assessment. And that alone may
not seem like a big deal, but what we found
is that there's a continued pattern of problems with how
(01:27:02):
people are being assessed, and this leads us up to
what happened in the last week and a half. We're
a guy by the name of Ricky Lee Royball Smith.
He's the individual that was arrested about a week and
a half ago because two people turned up dead on
Colfax near Peoria, one on Peoria and Callfax, one near
Malin in Callfax over the spirit of just a couple
(01:27:22):
of a period of a couple hours. Both people stabbed
to death, both people repeatedly stabbed. And then a guy
shows up in the Denver jail wanted on a vehicular
a dui case where he was alleged to have run
into two people over at nine in Galapaga. What turns
out that guy's name, as alleged by the Denver Police Departments,
a guy by the name of Ricky Lee roy Ball
(01:27:42):
Smith who just so happens to be on parole. It's
a very It has huge similarities to what happened in
twenty twenty three with Gonters of must Go. So now
we have another instance where guy aul On Barol is
accused of very serious crimes and we've now found errors
on assessments of dozens of people. And what it tells
(01:28:03):
me is that there's a systemic problem in terms of
how Colorado's assessing people on parole. And it absolutely is
a public safety concern.
Speaker 4 (01:28:11):
Can you walk me through what these assessments look like?
And I mean it would be an error if it
was hey, you know, he doesn't sleep well, instead of
hey has murderous intent?
Speaker 1 (01:28:21):
Like what are some of the is what we're assessing?
Are we assessing the right.
Speaker 4 (01:28:26):
Things or is it a failure of the people assessing
to properly take some things into consideration?
Speaker 1 (01:28:31):
So what's on this assessment overall?
Speaker 7 (01:28:34):
I think it's the latter, And these assessments are Basically,
it's I'll get a little bit technical here, but not
too technical. They're run put out by the University of Cincinnati.
It's an assessment that's used in states around the country.
Colorado is one of the states that uses them. And
in Colorado, when somebody's on parole, they now give somebody
something called a CST, which is a community supervision tool.
(01:28:56):
It's just a series of about thirty five questions that
can be simple about did you finish high school? Get
your ged, how many crimes have you been accused of
committing before, have you ever absconded while on parole? Those
types of things, And then there's some more subjective questions
about do you believe it's okay to lie? Do you
(01:29:16):
do you believe and do under others as they would
do unto you, kind of mentality, And you add up
the points. It's not terribly complicated. You have the points,
and the higher points the more risk level that you have,
and consequently the more supervision that is generally assigned to
you through the Colorado Division of Parole. Keeping in mind
(01:29:36):
that parole in the state of Colorado was run by
the Colorado Department of Correction. So these are parole officers
that are giving these assessments to These are assessments by
they're given by parole officers to the people on parole.
And what we found is sometimes very simple errors. I meaning,
for years, somebody was determined that they were they had
(01:29:58):
problems using drugs, and then all of a sudden, magically,
one year it says they've never had problems using drugs,
and so you asked, well, what changed, Well, it's a
scoring year and taken by itself. If this was just
a one off on Vincenzo Moscoso's case, for example, the
guy who was the legs to stab a couple of
people on federal you can sort of excuse it as well,
(01:30:20):
that's a one off. But I think what we've been
able to identify is that this is a systemic problem.
We have looked at roughly, you know, forty forty five
assessments and there are significant errors on at least half
of them. And now we've not been prived, we were
not access to all of the assessment scores. This is
(01:30:40):
a laborious process. A year and a half when we
ask for these assessment scores, it sometimes takes a week
and a half to get After every case. It costs
money those types of things. So the legislators keep trying
to get involved now and I think rightfully so, but
this is a you know, how we keep tabs of
an at risk population in Keep in mind, people on paroles,
(01:31:02):
they've already gone to prison, they have done their time,
they've been they have been convicted of felonies, and now
parole is in serious designed to be the sort of
transition period to go out into society what we need.
We've also recognized me to watch them like, we need
to keep post tabs on them because they are essentially
more vulnerable to repeat a hunding and when somebody goes
(01:31:23):
out and repeat offense in such a soorizic way as
has been alleged in a in a number of cases
that we've looked at. Now we're talking murders, sex assaults,
attended murders, assaults, all sorts of things. And when you
find out that the parole system isn't keeping the tabs
of these people, yeah, I think Colorado we got a problem.
Speaker 4 (01:31:45):
So let's ask like, and I'm not asking you to
solve the problem here on the you know, on the radio,
but if you as a reporter Do you think it
is a matter of people being sloppy? Do you think
it's a matter of people being over work?
Speaker 1 (01:31:57):
Do we have enough parole officers to make these assessments.
Speaker 4 (01:32:00):
Have we've got eight thousand people, you know, out on
parole or up for parole?
Speaker 7 (01:32:05):
What did you see?
Speaker 4 (01:32:06):
Did anything jump out at you as easily identifiable and
therefore perhaps easier to address than than not.
Speaker 7 (01:32:16):
I think there is sloppiness that is involved here, and
I think a number of parle officers we've spoken to
will tell you that they continue to feel overworked. And
they also look this dependulum swings in this in the state,
from left to right and back and forth and right now,
as you know, Democrats run this state, and so there
(01:32:37):
has been a prevailing thought, right or wrong, in the
state of Caller to try to keep people out of prison,
and that comes with a cost, potentially in some instances,
as in this case. And parole officers will tell you
that they feel like people are getting into trouble. The
number of people that we've looked at that they get
into trouble when they're on parole. I mean, I think
(01:32:58):
some people would expect, like if you use mess for example,
or cocaine while you're out on parole. That would automatically
qualify you to go back to jail. In prison right
not in State of Colorado, you oftentimes will get a
slap on the wrist. And it is trying to identify
that sending people back to prison isn't always the best idea,
and there's a philosophical debate on whether that's right or wrong,
(01:33:20):
and I don't want to get into that, but I
think there has been that pendulum shift that I think
parole officers feel like they're not being listened to as
well when it comes to hey, these guys are getting
into trouble. A number of people that we've looked at
inclining attentive ask so including another guy that went on
to eight days after he was assessed and was given
(01:33:41):
a glowing score by his assessment. He went on to
be accused of the murder here in Denver. I think
that it had a very very low score. I think
the issue is is that the scores don't reflect where
the person is at all the time, and I think
that comes from a combination overworked. Maybe I think some
of them would say underappreciated. Also in the system that
(01:34:02):
is designed to try to keep people out of prison.
Speaker 1 (01:34:05):
And you know what, I'm I probably am not as
as hard knows. I believe in rehabilitation in prison.
Speaker 7 (01:34:14):
I really do.
Speaker 4 (01:34:14):
I think that we are not serving the community if
we're just taking people who've committed crimes, holding them in
a pen, and then releasing them back out with the
same set of skills and issues that they.
Speaker 1 (01:34:24):
Had when they went in.
Speaker 4 (01:34:26):
So it's distressing to me to hear that someone and
it seems like this Royal guy, I mean, he didn't
do anything positive or to give them the impression that
he was going to come out and be a better
human being. At two o'clock, I actually spoke to the
uncle of the victim may be a victim, maybe not
(01:34:46):
of his cellmate that was found dead, and his family's
been told, oh, he choked on an apple, but yet
there's still a homicide investigation going on.
Speaker 1 (01:34:54):
Do you guys know anything more about that?
Speaker 7 (01:34:57):
Yeah? I mean that's sort of an interesting dynam of
the roy Ball case, is that so he's a So
what happens is that the two murders happen on a
Sunday in June twenty ninth, and they have an early
in Aurora, and they don't have a suspect in that case.
But sometime that afternoon, a guy, Ricky roy Ballsmith is
alleged by the Denver Police Department, gets involved in basically
(01:35:19):
a traffic accident where he hits a couple of pedestrians
at ninth and Galipego. So he goes to jail, and
through court documents seems pretty clear at that point, Aurora says, huh, hey,
the guy you've got into Denver jail on that on
that suspected dy case in ninth of Galipego, we believe
that's the guy that we're looking for in the Stambing case.
(01:35:40):
But they keep him in the jail overnight and that
night his cellmate dies. And so the question is the
autopsy I think is a bit of the problem here,
because the autopsy so far is inconclusive into terms in
terms of how that inmate dots. You know, you're either
looking at a heck of a coincidence here, right, an
inmate who is amate them guy now suspected a double
(01:36:03):
homicide just magically dies of choking on something, which I
suspect is possible, but it's a heck of a coincidence,
or that or it's a homicide. I think the official
line is that case has been closed, but I don't
think it's closed forever. And the impression that I get
is that it's still being actively worked by investigators, and
(01:36:24):
I would not be surprised to see that case come back.
Speaker 4 (01:36:27):
I mean it, it is a stunning coincidence, you know,
I mean, it does stretch the bounds of reason, just
to hair. One of my texters asked a really good
question about this. The assessments that we're using here in Colorado.
Are other states using those same assessments? Are they having
similar issues? Is this unique to Colorado? And perhaps do
(01:36:48):
we need to make a different assessment.
Speaker 7 (01:36:52):
Well, I think those are excellent questions. Well, here's what
I'd say is that I think there's a number of
different assessments that used by states, and I think that
you know, there was what happened years decades ago is
that we went by the gut level instinct of parole
officers in terms of whether this person was high risk
or low risk. And I think we started to identify
(01:37:13):
that maybe there were some problems in that, so that
we went with these written assessments. I think when they're
done correctly, if they're scored correctly, that there aren't problems
with the scoring, obvious problems with the scoring. I think
they can have value. I think what I think we're
looking for at nine News, and I think what I'm
looking for personally as a reporter on this investigation is
(01:37:34):
for something in the state to care a little bit
more than what we're seeing right now. The legislature have
asked for a couple of months ago now for the
Department of Corrects and seventy more assessments that they could
look at people that were suspective being involved in homicides
in over one year period. There were seventy more names
on that list. There were people who were on parole,
(01:37:55):
and so we could take a look at a larger sample,
because what we're looking at right now is a relatively
small sample, forty five out of eight thousand. I think
we've identified a problem, But my gut tells me that
this is a problem with scoring, not necessarily with the
assessment itself, and there's just obvious errors. We showed. We
(01:38:17):
showed the scores to a woman whose brother was was
shot and wounded by Lakewood police by officers in Lakewood
earlier in the year and he survived. But in the
arrest report on that case, he'd been arrested in charge
nearly sixty one times in the course of his life,
(01:38:40):
and on his assessment it said his criminal attitudes and
behaviors was zero. So think about that, where a guy
who's been in and out of I mean, I don't
think he's the world's worst guy. I also think he's
had some significant problems with incarceration and getting in trouble
with the law. When you score some any like that
(01:39:00):
is zero in terms of criminal behaviors and attitudes, that's
a problem. And we showed the scurse to his sister,
his sister who loves it very much, and she said,
this is a joke. This is not right. And I
think that's what we continue to find.
Speaker 1 (01:39:13):
Last question, we got about a minute left, Chris.
Speaker 4 (01:39:16):
Do you see what is the parole board members said,
Because they're the face of parole, right, so they get
to blame when somebody gets out on parole and goes
and murders someone. What is their response to your reporting?
Speaker 7 (01:39:28):
Then it is amazing the Department of the Department Corrections,
as well as the Parole Board is silent on all
of this.
Speaker 1 (01:39:36):
We've reached out to the Parole.
Speaker 7 (01:39:38):
Board repeatedly on this. We've reached out to the Apartment
of Corrections repeatedly on this. We've reached out to the
Governor's office repeatedly on this. No one wants to go
on camera with us. Doesn't mean we're giving up. We're
dob should get somebody on camera, whether they like it
or not. But like there, there has been dead silence
from the Parole Board, and I think that's you know,
(01:39:59):
what you've noticed is that we have a Department of
Corrections and Parole Aboard that does not talk to the
public at all. Don't just take my word for it.
Google how many times rollboard members have done the interviews.
Almost never, and sometimes that's on purpose. But it's now
led to a system that is not transparent and is
(01:40:19):
not being held to account for what's going on right now.
Speaker 1 (01:40:23):
Well, Chris, I.
Speaker 4 (01:40:23):
Appreciate your reporting and if you get anything new, please
feel free to let me know so we can make
sure that we report it to our listeners. This is
a huge issue. Wait, one last last question, and this
is a quick one. Do you know if parole officers
are incentivized in any way to get these people out
of prison.
Speaker 7 (01:40:42):
That's an excellent question. We've found no evidence of that.
I can understand why people would feel that way. And
if anybody knows and listening to the show right now,
want to talk to me. Chris at ninnews dot com.
Always happy to take tips.
Speaker 4 (01:40:55):
Chris Vanderben, thanks for your time today, great reporting on
this and keep up the good work. Thanks all right,
thank you, and joining me now our crack news man Rob.
Speaker 1 (01:41:06):
Dowson, Mister Dawson as I now call him now that
he's the news director upon Kathy Walker's retirement. He only
walks around with his pinky out. Now you need him,
he'll have his pinky out somewhere else. Not Now, it's
time for the most exciting segment on the radio of
its kind in the world. You're the only one that
(01:41:29):
makes it sound like a ship's horn.
Speaker 6 (01:41:31):
At the end.
Speaker 1 (01:41:33):
Anyway, moving on, what is our dad joke of the day,
please grant in honor of Wimbledon happening right now.
Speaker 11 (01:41:39):
Yes, my wife said, I can think of fourteen reasons
to leave you, plus your obsession with tennis.
Speaker 1 (01:41:44):
I replied, that's fifteen.
Speaker 7 (01:41:46):
Love.
Speaker 1 (01:41:47):
Wow, I like that one. Good tennis joke. Well done, anyway,
what's today's word of the day.
Speaker 11 (01:41:53):
Please grant word of the day today is exemplary, exact,
perfect or very good?
Speaker 1 (01:41:59):
Thanks extremely good outstead. That's exactly how. This is an
easy one for me. I don't know if you too,
lungheads are going to get this. I'm well read. Who
wrote the beloved nineteen o children's book The Tale of
Peter Rabbit. I'm just kidding. Oh goodness, I could see
that now, and I can't.
Speaker 7 (01:42:20):
You know her?
Speaker 1 (01:42:21):
It's a woman, Lucille Bundle. I don't know how.
Speaker 4 (01:42:27):
About Beatrix Potter. Okay, Lucille whatever did not write it.
She also wrote books called The Tale of Squirrel Nutkin
and the Tale of Tom Kitten.
Speaker 1 (01:42:38):
Not quite as big as that, that is, Peter Rabbit.
Speaker 4 (01:42:42):
Beta Rabbit was the big money maker for her cotton
tail exactly.
Speaker 1 (01:42:46):
You know it, you know it, all about it?
Speaker 4 (01:42:50):
Anyway, let's talk about by the way, I'm sorry, anyway,
go ahead.
Speaker 1 (01:42:57):
What is our Jeopardy category for the day. I wondered
where you were.
Speaker 11 (01:43:00):
Go on there, jefpary category for today? Similar brand names Okay, singular,
it's a Burger king staple. Plural, it's a brand possessive
it's a pizza brand, not possessive. It's a sugar brand.
Speaker 1 (01:43:20):
Mandy. What is Domino's? Correct?
Speaker 6 (01:43:23):
Rob?
Speaker 1 (01:43:23):
You glad you came into play.
Speaker 10 (01:43:25):
Yeah?
Speaker 1 (01:43:26):
This Greek letter is an airline, faucet maker and dental
and stilta Correct.
Speaker 11 (01:43:35):
This Greek woman is a charming jewelry company or a
streaming man Pandora. Wow, coming back strike. When you eat
this brand's bars, make sure they're the chocolate.
Speaker 1 (01:43:48):
Ones, Rob, you just jumped it too soon.
Speaker 11 (01:43:57):
Correct This edds bars, make sure they're the chocolate ones,
not the moisturizing ones.
Speaker 1 (01:44:04):
Mandy? What is dove.
Speaker 7 (01:44:07):
Tweet?
Speaker 1 (01:44:07):
There you go?
Speaker 11 (01:44:08):
There you go?
Speaker 5 (01:44:09):
All right?
Speaker 1 (01:44:11):
Yeah, well you had to. I was I was being aggressive.
You had no choice, Rob, no choice. That might be
my favorite category ever.
Speaker 4 (01:44:21):
Yeah, and just lets me know, I'm too much of
a consumer that I knew every single one of those
brands wasn't even close.
Speaker 1 (01:44:28):
Good gravy. All right, you guys.
Speaker 4 (01:44:30):
Tomorrow, Grant Simmun be with us again as a Rod
continues his adventures in Las Vegas. But We've got some
good stuff planned for you, and I'm pulling up my
calendar right this second.
Speaker 1 (01:44:39):
To tell you what it is. While you're looking.
Speaker 11 (01:44:41):
PJ Locke Broncos Safety going to be joining KOA Sports
at three thirty.
Speaker 1 (01:44:45):
Oh very nice, along with Susie Warchenen Studio. Oh excellent.
So who's in today?
Speaker 7 (01:44:49):
Is it?
Speaker 1 (01:44:49):
Dave, Susie and Ryan? Perfect?
Speaker 4 (01:44:52):
Perfect, great group. We've got an hour of Ask the
Attorney with Ellen Paul tomorrow.
Speaker 1 (01:44:58):
I love that. I love it when people calling with
their legal questions. I just want to know all about
your business, Okay, So.
Speaker 4 (01:45:04):
If you especially if you have some kind of injury issue,
nursing home stuff like, I can't wait to get into
it tomorrow. It makes me very unreasonably happy to hear
about other people's problems. So all that's coming up tomorrow.
And in the meantime, there was something else I wanted
to remind. Oh guys, there's so much stuff on the
blog that we didn't get to today, and some of
it's really really good. I mean, you know, the blog's
(01:45:25):
always good, but today mandy'sblog dot com make it happen.
You'll be a lot smarter for it. We'll be back tomorrow.
Speaker 1 (01:45:31):
Keep it right here on Koa
The Mandy Connell Podcast News
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