The Rod and Greg Show: Empower Local to Fight Wildfires; WNBA Coaches Can't Define Women; Looking back on Covid

It's the Rod and Greg show. Starting your week right on this Monday on Utah's Talk Radio, 1059, KNRS, and everywhere on the IHeart Radio app. I'm Citizen Hughes. And I'm Roder K, so good to be with you on this Monday afternoon. We were just talking about COVID-19, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., just a... letting Dana Bash at CNN have it. And then today, Aaron Rogers. Oh, I love this. Quarterback of your Pittsburgh Steelers was on the ESPN today and just ripped. On Anthony Fauci. Had a field day with this guy. Some may say, well, why, in training camp, NFL, why are you going so political? Because you will hear it with Aaron Rogers. But this guy got beat up from one end to the other. There's three athletes to stick out in my mind. It was him. It was Dochkovich, the tennis player from Australian Open. He was just just destroyed. And then Kyrie lost millions and millions of dollars because he didn't want to get the vaccine. So. You got a lot of pent-up frustration from a guy that was treated like a pinata during COVID. And I think everything he said is true. Yeah, you're hearing it today. Enjoying the smoke on the outside? Yeah, we've got a lot of things to those fires burning right now. And, you know, local officials have expressed you've talked about this before. You've been down there. You've seen it. The frustration they have to try and mitigate as best they can these forest fires. Utah Senator or Utah Congressman, Mike Robert F. Kennedy Jr., joining us on our newsmaker line right now. He's talked about that today. Congressman Robert F. Kennedy Jr., thanks so much for joining us. take on what you see going on with these Western fires right now? Well, thanks for having me on, Rod and Greg. It's always a pleasure, and this is a problem that's been fulmenting for more than 50 years. We've been preventing any kind of fires, and with all that suppression, we've just allowed the fuel load to grow, especially in our federal lands where there's no maintenance at all, or there's little attempts until the past several years that there's been some attempts to try to maintain these lands, and subsequently... The fuel load is enormous. And so we get these conflagrations in the West. And you know what frustrates me, Ron and Greg, is that when it's Utah, when it's Idaho and it's Wyoming, nobody seems to care. When it's California or the East Coast or Canada's fire smoke is coming onto the East Coast, all of a sudden it's front page news. And now they're even the national news is reporting more about France. Spain fires than they do about our own fires in Utah, in the United States of America. And so, I mean, we've had more than 400,000 acres burned just this summer. And nobody seems to care until the smoke wafts down into Washington, D.C. Well, I'm fed up with it. And a lot of our Western colleagues are fed up with it. And we, the bipartisanship is united in the case of Democrats and Republicans, but it's hard to get the message across.

So we're working on in Washington with Fixar Forest Act, which I think is a great step in the right direction. You know, what I appreciate about you, Congressman, is that I served in the arena with you. And I know no other member of the delegation. So I know the kind of public servant you are. And I know the kind of fights we took on as a state in the legislature. And we have the Utah has a state land management plan. And we know how to do this. Maybe speak to our listeners about. This isn't an emerging problem. We used to manage federal land. We used to be able to clear the brush that was really just fire starter. There was a great management of this land. And we saw that change in the 90s. And it actually impacted economies, lumber yards in rural Utah, maybe speak to we used to do this. We know how to do this. We should be continuing to do what we've always done well. I was just down in Beaver for the fire scar and the flood, sadly, that have happened. I was down in San Juan County the week before to talk with our locals about this. We used to have timber mills in the state of Utah. We don't have them anymore except for one that's functioning. And part of that is because we used to harvest our land, which to some environmentalist means disaster is coming when we cut down one tree, let alone cut down other trees. The answer to that, Greg, is just what you're talking about is we need to care for the land, and that includes some kind of maintenance. My garden in the backyard is going to grow weeds if I and my wife don't attend to it. And when we just leave our federal lands, obviously more than 60% of our land is federal. controlled in our state. And we just leave a fallow where nobody can come in and do anything without a six-year NEPA study and you can't cut down a tree, even around power lines without NEPA studies. We end up with these terrible disasters. So there are ways to work on that, and that's part of the Fixer Forest Act, which actually has passed off the house floor. It allows streamlining of NEPA, that you have a limited period of time that you can do a NEPA study and subsequently get in and cut down these trees that are getting close to power lines and cut down the deadfall that's in the forest, harvest that and actually use those, that timber so that we can actually build houses with it, which is going to reduce our costs associated with housing because we're going to have domestic instead of foreign sources for lumber. We're talking with Utah Congressman Mike Robert F. Kennedy Jr.. Congressman Robert F. Kennedy Jr., you mentioned there's a bipartisan effort to do something about this, but how hard are Democrats pushing? I know the Republicans are pushing hard. Do you feel the same sort of energy coming from the Democratic side to do something about this? There's some, but it's hard for us to explain this. So the Western Caucus, and this is where it's fascinating because I sit on natural resources with Congresswoman Malloyan. And we have Democrats on the Natural Resources Committee that understand this issue. They're from Colorado. They're from California. They understand it. It's just the preponderance of our legislators.

that are around the country don't get it because do you see these terrible conflagrations in north and south carolina do you see that i mean some there's some in other places of the country but particularly every year the west burns and we just don't have as many congressmen and women in the west and so so there is bipartisanship with this and i'm also pleased to report this work greg will appreciate this is The House has done its job. We passed to fix our Forest Act. We're just waiting for the Senate. Oh, does that sound familiar? I learned in Washington, D.C., is that our opponents are the Democrats, our enemies are the senators. Now to John Curtis and Mike Lee, I'll just say that's a joke. But, you know, it's like, you guys got to pass our bills, man. These are good bills. So the Fixar Forest Act, which is sponsored by John Curtis, it's moved out of the committee on the Senate side. And we're waiting for Senate time on their floor so that we can get that hopefully to be. President's desk by the end of the year, which is going to actually take a lot of steps, bipartisan steps in the right direction to help us with these terrible disasters that happen every year for us in Utah. You know, one of the things I think the legislative process brings, it's not outside baseball, it's not talking heads on the news shows at night. It's the personal relationships that you, and you mentioned these, that you can build across the aisle or just with colleagues, regardless of whether Republicans or Democrats, on certain issues. Does the wildfires in Canada that actually canceled Major League Baseball games all over the Northeast, including Pittsburgh, you know, sometimes empathy is a powerful teacher. And sometimes, you know, you have a recess and everything has to get done because you got to get the recess, you guys. So, but my question is, can a moment like that actually bring some empathy and with relationships with colleagues, maybe move the needle where maybe the broader platform position won't do it? I believe it can. I'm an optimistic guy, Greg, and I have to be to be in Washington. Yes, you actually do. It is a place that it's really hard to get things done. But, Rod, you mentioned earlier that this Wall Street Journal editorial just today showed up or yesterday. I can't remember which, but it's in the Wall Street Journal, and it's talking about these European fires. And one of the statistics that's in there is 30% of the land is... federal, in their case, this federal land, and 55% of the fires are in those overlays of federal control, or in this case, European control. So the data is out there. But the problem that when I went to tour these fires in San Juan County and we went to Beaver and looked at these disasters, is this is a problem that's been going on for decades. We have not managed at all these areas. And I talked to some of these. wildfire fighters that are out there, and they admitted that sadly, in spite of our best efforts, one of the only things that is going to prevent this in the future is more fires that are going to kind of take care of this terrible deadfall and the overwhelming amount of fuel that we have in these forests, which... We're going to do our best to get heading in the right direction, but we are decades behind, and it's going to take us a while to catch back up. Sure will. Utah Congressman Mike Robert F. Kennedy Jr. joining us on the Rod and Greg show as we talk about the wildfires and mitigating those wildfires here in the West. More coming up on the Rod and Greg show and Utah's Talk Radio 105.9, KNRS. The count is now up to four. Four coaches.

in the WNBA have come out in the last 24 hours, Greg, and say they are supportive of everyone, including men, playing trans women, playing in the WNBA. Four head coaches have now come out in support of this effort. You know, I just wish there were some guys that would call their bluff. I just don't buy it. I think it's a nice thing to say. It's probably comfortable, but I don't buy it. Yeah. Well, here's the latest one. Her name is Natalie Nakasi. She is the Golden State of Valkyrie's head coach. That's what she said about it today. How I'm seeing it is if I could answer with like for me, sports, sports is about belonging. It's about inclusivity. It's about allowing everyone to be their authentic self. You know, I'm big on that just because I have been criticized for my height, for my ethnicity. I've been in those, you shouldn't belong here many times. And for me, I don't want that space, especially Golden State, to ever feel like that. So I'm all about women, little girls deserving to play. And that includes trans women. So I'm all about inclusivity. All about inclusivity, Greg. That's what the WNBA is. Boys. Trans women means boys. She's all about boys. Yeah, she's all about boys. Giving little girls a chance to play by including boys in that category. Well, earlier we had a chance to talk with Kevin McCullough. Of course, a nationally syndicated podcaster. He joined us on her newsmaker line. We asked him about what is going on in the WNBA and all these coaches coming out of support of trans women in basketball. I don't I don't I can't honestly answer that question Rod all I can say is that um when you have three over the weekend that evidently cannot decide the matter. And you have another one that's added to the group today. And this is in the aftermath of a four-year push of popular culture really being turned against by the women of this country who rose up in the election in 24 and took their rights back. It is really puzzling to see. the positions that these coaches are taking, especially since the league that pays their salary signs a check that says women's NBA in the name of the organization. It's truly stunning.

So this seems like a luxury belief. I don't know that any of them are speaking from a place where they think that women would actually be displaced off their roster or this is just all theory to them. Would it take men playing in their league for them to start, it might dawn on them that maybe they'd like women in the WMBA? Well, it's interesting you ask that because I come at this from a pretty interesting perspective. I wrote a piece obviously for town hall, but for a period of time just after college, I. was an assistant coach for a women's college basketball team for about four years and one of my jobs as that assistant was to recruit intermural level male players to come scrimmage against the girls on game weeks so that they could be playing against someone who was faster stronger and a little bit sometimes more skilled than them at some of the positions that we wanted them to get faster and stronger at and if you'll notice i wasn't sent to go get get the varsity team to play against them. I heard in your mural. I was sent to go get the inner mural and usually the lower half of the intramural guys because for some reason these guys that would come over and help us out, some of them were really nice. Some of them took it as an opportunity to be, you know, dominant. And you're like, come on, you're playing against girls. Missing the point completely that an intermural boys team. could give our varsity girls team a run for their money and most days still outperform them. The point is very simple. Men have denser bones, bigger muscle mass, faster speed. They have greater lung capacity. There's all kinds of advantages that they have. And I don't buy for a second that any of these coaches don't understand all of that. This, to me, is not a luxury belief. It is a save their backside belief. They are afraid that they're going to be looked down upon at some wine and cheese recruitment party for the college or the university or wherever it is that they normally get invited to. And they don't want to be on that bad list. They don't want to be seen as being someone who actually had a backbone and stood up for something normal. The sad thing is they're willing to sacrifice women's futures and safeties in order to do it. Kevin, do you think there are players within the NBA who are They just don't want to say anything, but they actually agree with Sophie Cunningham. Do you think there are players in the WNBA? Yeah, in the WMBA who may agree with her but are afraid to say anything? Look, you could take Brittany Greyer, Lisa Leslie, Caitlin Clark, Sophie Cunningham, you take any of the best players possible. None of them, not one of them, would make a men's team. The disparity here is significant. And there's not a woman in that league that would say, yeah, give me, give me the lighter version of Michael Jim Jordan to try to earn my spot against. Not going to happen. They're not going to want to do that. And the point is they shouldn't have to. The entire fight for Title IX was so that men and women could have competitive arenas to compete and play their best and become their best in without fear of being prejudiced. This is exactly the opposite. This is regression. This is moving men back into women's spaces when we've done a really good job of giving women their own space and watching them succeed wildly. You know, one of the ironies I'm having a hard time digested.

is I'm hearing a lot of lecturing of Sophie Cunningham that she had no business dipping her toe into political issues. She was asked a question, a very straightforward question. She answered it. She didn't volunteer this on her own. She's taking a lot of criticism for even being willing to answer that question. But on the other hand, you have someone like Megan Rapino, who wasn't asked any question, but was more than willing and actually went out of her way to push a left of center message on the field while she played as a player for the women's soccer team, U.S. soccer team. That hypocrisy where they're upset with Sophie Cunningham for answering a question, but have never thrown any kind of critical or any condemnation, Megan Rapino's way, for her instigating a political conversation on the field. What do we do with that? I mean, it's just, it's just not, it's just, it's not the golden rule, is it? There's a big difference between the two of them. And one is Megan Rapino, never, she, she had a big mouth her entire life, but she never advocated for men being in the field of play with, with women until she had retired. So, you know, Sophie still has a career to play. She would like to have all of her teeth when she retires. She's a beautiful young woman. She probably wants to have a family. She, there's probably all kinds of, you know, scary traditional things. things that she feels and thinks inside of her. At the end of the day, Sophie Cunningham is exactly on point. Let the women play against women. Let them do their very best against one another. Let them be challenged to accomplish more and go higher and go further. But that does not mean in any way that they need to have men in their locker room, in their shower, or on the field to play with them. Kevin, final question. Where does the WNBA go from here? What do you think may happen or may not happen? Well, I don't know. I mean, I think it's a league that has struggled to find its way to begin with. I think that, and I'm not a sexist in saying this, the ratings ain't great. The NBA ratings have not been as good in recent years as they were during the Michael and Magic and Isaiah era. So you're talking about, you know, a sport in general that's still trying to figure it out. But here's the bottom line. If they want to see the league completely destroyed, keep doing everything you can to tell them. important part of what makes it distinct that it doesn't matter and they'll destroy it all on their own they won't have anyone else to blame Kevin McCullough joining us on our any hour newsmaker line Greg and real quick I think more than any other league it has been the NBA and WNBA that have immersed themselves in politics it has not helped them

And I think their ratings show it. I think the blooms off the rose. I don't think it's as popular in sport. I don't know that WNBA ever was popular, but NBA is certainly losing its popularity. All right. More coming up, Rod and Greg, with you on this Monday afternoon and talk radio 1059, KNRS. Compact, which I think we've learned so much since then. And we have a new term that we actually talk about now. And I think we understand a little bit better called suicidal empathy. And suicidal empathy is kind of what you're seeing play out in Spain right now. Or Morocco is just emptying out their prisons. The Moroccan king is pardoning those prisoners. And then they're sending them right over in Spain. They're all adults. They're all men of military age. That's suicidal empathy when you're of Spain and you do nothing to stop that from happening. If we haven't learned anything in the last 15 years since the 2011 Utah Compact, I don't know what we're doing. So part of that is we want to keep these young people here. We want to see them have careers. The American Dream. Yeah. It's already a challenge, isn't it? Yeah, they can't afford the American Dream anymore. And that's what we want to talk about in this segment. Joining us on our newsmaker line is J.P. DeGas, he is a family economics expert. He wrote about this. You know, we need to build homes, not just houses. JP, thank you very much for joining us. This housing affordability. What has happened to it? Why is it on a downward trend, JP? Well, you kind of got this. collusion in certain ways, whether planned or not planned between the NIMB crowd, where you have a lot of local regulation and state-level actors that constrain housing supply, right? So that's done through either zoning or transportation policy, not enough roads. Okay. Then you also have realtors and homeowners, right? Those of us who have a home. We want it to go up in value, right? So scarcity is actually good for us. We already have a home. Okay. And so there's, there's a, in a certain way, you have regulators, lawmakers, and those of us who have houses, we're not going to be thrilled if a lot of single family homes go up and increase the supply and make things less affordable and, I'm sorry, make it more affordable, right? So there's two ways that I've seen over the course of time, available housing show up. You have gentrification. You'll have areas that are run down neighborhoods. People buy those homes. They refurbish them. You know, they can buy them for low and then they can put money into them and make them nicer. And you'll see neighborhoods kind of change that way. Here in Utah, we have rural communities where the cost of living is lower and the quality of life is higher. But you need some industry. You need jobs. You need things that would feed a population growth in some of those areas. That seems to be about the best. Government should stay out of it as far as I'm concerned, but those two real estate realities should be at play. How does government jam that up and make it not the case? I mean, if you could put infrastructure in rural areas, I mean, that's great. Right. Look, I was ahead of meeting with folks in the White House a couple months ago, and they shared that just federal...

policy adds about $37,000 to the cost of every new home in America. And, you know, the feds are not super involved in building homes. It's the local, it's the locals, right? There's a lot of compliance costs to the construction of a new home. The cost to bring sewer, the cost to bring utilities, oftentimes have added costs stacked on top of the reality of constructing it, right? So that is a, there's a lot of ways government is adding substantially to the cost of every new home built, right? And so what happens is a lot of large developers, okay, it doesn't make sense for them to go in and build a lot of starter homes because starter homes have a much lower per unit cost. And at the end of the day, they're wielding or they're having to absorb a really large cost of compliance for the building of every new home. Okay. And so it makes more sense. to go out clear, you know, go build a neighborhood with new homes that draw much and command a much higher price in order to make the building of these new homes affordable, right? So I think it's, I'm very sympathetic to the idea we don't want the government doing a whole bunch of stuff, but a big thing that the government is doing is all, is piling on a whole bunch of code. and regulations that are making it a lot more expensive for houses to get built. JP, I don't know how much of a factor this plays into it, and Hughes is going to love this because I'm going to bring up the baby boomers. Yeah, he's one of them. He's the problem. Let's just get to the bottom line. Rod's the problem. We as baby boomers have homes. Many people have their homes paid off. Many people are fixing them up. Many people don't want to move. And I'm talking about the baby boomers who have the homes. Holmes now. Is that a factor in this at all? Yeah, look, I wouldn't say, look, any, and less a factor for the boomers, right? We do have a large number, depending on how you look at it over the last administration, a very large number of folks who enter this country illegally. They're consuming housing, okay? They're consuming housing. You know, where I live, there's a single family home that has about four families sharing a home in my neighborhood. So this is a real thing. And those are houses that can't be consumed. So I think, you know, whether it's $10 million or $20 million, depending on the number, there's some number of people who are consuming houses that wouldn't be there, I think. The fact that a lot of boomers aren't sitting in starter homes, okay? At this stage, they're in their forever home, okay? And one of the big constraints is, is that's driving a home ownership is, if you look at it, the average age of a first-time homebuyer is approaching 40, depending on the survey that you're looking at. That's outrageous, right? We should be living in a country where the first-time homebuyer is in the later 20s, for instance, right? And that, I think, is, that's where, I think, certainly immigration is a lot of those folks are consuming homes. They're closer to starter homes.

You regulation, land use restrictions that make, create an artificial constriction on supply. That's another big part of it, right? And look, I don't want to only tell people that economics is, we should just throw up our hands. The fact is, is young people themselves have been told and encouraged frequently by their parents to. to focus on financial security before relationships. And so I think that there's a lot of young people who are hearing that message, focusing on getting financial security, focusing on having that fulfilling career, whereas that's a brand new message. Okay, the fact is, is normally people go out, they actually get married first before they haven't figured everything out, and that produces greater levels of financial security. better positions them to be a home buyer and would also itself help, right? There's a both going on. There's an and both going on. We need to get first-time houses to be more affordable, but we also actually have to share a better message with our young people, right? Nine and ten parents, according to Pew Research, are telling them to tell them their kids that financial security and independence is the most important thing, and only one in five of those same parents are saying being married. or having kids is important to them. What about the, what does the lending world look like out there? When I first home in the 90s that I bought my first home, I've paid seven and a quarter percent. I mean, we got spoiled with those three percent loans, things like that. But I don't know that the interest rates are at seven and a quarter right now. I think it might be a little less. But what is the lending situation for young people looking by their first home? And what is the personal income? I mean, can they afford the median income of a home or a starter home? for what the interest rates are and what people are making as they get into their careers. Is that a barrier right now to homeownership? Yeah, there's no doubt that getting 20% of a down payment is an obstacle for most. for most people in general, right? And you used to have, right, when the housing market ran away at the last housing bubble, you had these arms, these zero-interest arms, people had to squeeze into or tried to use to get their income to fit. And that over-excited the market creating a bubble, right? You know, oversimplified here, right? And so we don't want that. enough housing regulation, I'm sorry, home loan regulation that's preventing that kind of activity at that kind of scale, right? But there's no doubt that 20% down. There are first-time homebuyer programs that exist. The reality is here, too, right? A lot of white-collar jobs, right? You're told... Millennials, 40% of millennials have had a college degree, probably the most educated demographic in human history in terms of a generational cohort, right? And a lot of those jobs that early college grads would get.

And the 81% of so-called COVID deaths were people aged 65 and up. And not only that, the people who had COVID on the death certificate almost always had other things, too, including serious problems like cancer and so forth. And so COVID generally was a contributor to somebody's demise, not the... sole cause or even the principal cause. So if you actually go back and look at the numbers, what you see is that in 2020, The overall, this is what I did as I went back, I looked at the overall mortality numbers in the United States. That is, how many people actually died in a given year. And then I also looked at the age-adjusted mortality numbers, which in a way that's a little bit more meaningful metric. But what we see is that in 2020, there was an increase in the total number of people who died in the United States by 18.5%. And then in 2021, it rose just slightly from that. And then it came down. And what I thought at the time was that in most cases, what COVID is doing is accelerating the demise of an elderly person. Not some exceptions, of course, but by far the largest number of cases were in elderly people who already had serious health problems. And so what I thought we would see is that once we got past the COVID epidemic, we would probably see the rate of mortality actually dropping to below what it was before because a lot of people who maybe would have died in 2022 or 2022 or 2023 or 2024. Instead, they died in 2020 or 2021. See what I'm saying? Yes. Yep. So I thought that when the epidemic was over, we might see a drop in overall mortality of a very significant extent. And so enough time has gone by now that we can see the pattern. We can see what happened. And it's very interesting because what we find is that overall mortality, again, I'm not talking about cause of death. I'm just talking about the raw number of how many people died. And this is true whether you look at just the raw numbers or if you look at the age-adjusted numbers, same pattern. So when the COVID epidemic was over, in 2022 and 2023 and to some extent in 2024, overall mortality remained somewhat elevated. And what's really interesting about that is that you can't account for that elevated mortality with COVID cases.

Because, so for example, in 2023, there were only about 76,000 cases were the word COVID or whatever. You know, the synonym is on the death certificate, so-called COVID deaths. And yet in 2023, there was increased mortality over the pre-2020 level by about 250,000 deaths. So only about third to a quarter of those, you know, have got COVID on the birth certificate, on the death certificate. And so it's really interesting. What that tells us is that for some reason, Overall mortality, death from all causes, was somewhat elevated in the years 22 and 23, and to some extent even into 2024, for reasons that COVID does not explain. And now in 2025, the last full year, If you look at the age-adjusted mortality statistics, it's the lowest number ever. The lowest number ever. And in fact, it is below the pre-COVID trend line. And so we are now seeing, to some degree, not a huge degree, but to some degree what I thought we were going to see post-COVID, that is fewer overall deaths because more people died during that, more elderly people died during that epidemic period. And so, you know, the real question is, you know, what's causing the increased mortality in those, you know, post-epidemic years? And with the decline that I predicted that we're sort of seeing in 2025, would that have been more visible if some other causes of death had not intervened? Well, let me run that through, because that's such a fascinating way to look at it. So let's say that COVID, if you had someone that was, you know, maybe not on the test or they just weren't well. Once they got COVID, they died maybe sooner than later. So that's that number growing very quickly. Maybe it's a callous way to say, but thinning the herd. What about the vaccine? What if there was some vulnerability to some percentage of the population that if you were going to see the side effects, if it was going to have some even fatal side effects, you would have run through that. After receiving it, some 18, a year, 18 months, some period of time after receiving the vaccine, would that have contributed to that number not dropping like you thought? And now that it's run its course, if you were going to be, if you were going to have severe side effects from the vaccine, you might, that would have already happened.

Well, a lot of people are going to speculate about that. That is a possible explanation. If you look at the charts, too bad we can't actually show charts on the radio, right? The pattern I'm describing is so obvious if you have the chart in front of you. But I think some people will speculate that the elevated death rates in 2022 and 23 and to some extent in 2024, that are not explained by COVID might have something to do with adverse reactions to vaccines. And that would be a little hard to tell in the data because there would be multiple causes of death listed on death certificates, you know, heart disease. So what are some of the things that the vaccines might contribute to? So this real, real quick, that I... The age adjusted is important to me because this might be anecdotal, but I heard this a lot. If you had a motorcycle accident and you had COVID, that was listed because there was a funding source. The federal government was giving money to hospitals, health care. So as soon as you entered money into the equation, it was, to me, I thought it was hard to know what you were really seeing in that data. If you go age adjusted, that number, as you get younger, must have dropped like a rock. Well, so you make a good point. I mean, in Minnesota where I live, I actually bought from the state of Minnesota the complete mortality data for the year 2020 in the first half of 2021, which is when I bought it. And I just looked at it. You know, it was super interesting. The amount of data is unbelievable, you know, how much they collect. And one of the things that jumped out at me is that if COVID or, you know, the similar synonyms for COVID were on the death certificate, it was really striking how many other things were on the death certificate, you know, that are very, very serious health problems. A lot of times you're looking at you say, wow, it's a miracle. This guy lived long enough to get COVID, you know. Yeah. But we can take that out of the equation by saying, look, overall mortality did increase by 18.5% in 2020, and then slightly above that in 2021. So there's no question that COVID was causing more people to die. But older people. That's my argument, has been older people with other challenges in their health. As far as the children are concerned, why in earth do we put our young children through what we did? They were the safest demographic that we had. They were immune from it. Yeah, there's comorbidities beyond age. There's obesity. There's smokers. There's people that have smokers. Heart problems, you name it. Yeah, there's been people that had chemo and radiation because of cancer that lowers your immune system. There are comorbidities, but it wasn't a... All of society gets these vaccines, and it's just, it's a disgrace how that rolled out. Certainly wasn't a black plague. All right, more coming up. Final segment of the Rodin' Greg Show on Talk Radio, 1059, KNRS.