This is Gary and Shannon, and you're listening to KFI AM six forty, the Gary and Shannon Show on demand on the iHeartRadio app. Turns out, Josh Shapiro was an early fan of Barack Obama when every other Democrat pretty much was in camp Hillary. It was two thousand and seven. He was a state representative there in Pennsylvania, and he broke with much of the Democratic establishment to back this
first term senator from Illinois. He lost Pennsylvania's primary and O eight to Hillary, and he won the presidency and never forgot the support from Josh Shapiro. They've become very close. They say they've developed a connection that's closer than is commonly understood, according to interviews with people who knew them both.
I don't know if I would want that description of me and someone else. That seems a little too intimit intimate. Well, you don't know why, but I just mean that that's an odd way to describe a relationship between two people.
I'm sorry that you don't have friends. Okay, we should work on that.
I'll take it. I'll take it.
Big Lots is going to be closing up to three hundred and fifteen stores across multiple states. Because of growing financial woes, The discount homeware chain has identified some locations in Connecticut, Massachusetts, Michigan, New Hampshire, Vermont which are due to close. They haven't officially put out an entire list, but stores that are going out of business the Big Lots stores will be displaying a closing this location banner on their website along with the twenty percent off promotion.
I don't think I've ever been to a Big Lots.
I have a huge Speaking of Big Lots, I have a huge Yes.
Burning Man update.
Oh I can't wait. Your face is saying that's not true.
Your face is making it sound like you can wait.
So I'm an adult person. I don't like going to entertain myself in dirt or those showers.
Are implementing an unprecedented move to sell tickets less than three weeks before the start of Burning Man.
They call you a burner.
You could still buy tickets on demand through the OMG ticket Sale, even if the EU didn't pre register. Traditionally, tickets wouldn't be available this close to the event, which begins August twenty fifth, But it just put a ballpark on what you think a.
Ticket to Burning Man would.
Cost one hundred and twenty five and seventy five dollars stop.
It is where they set.
So it's rich people that go out there and play in the dirt.
Yeah, and last year, remember how it rained and it was muddy and it was awful. I can't imagine.
My cousin Danny would go because he's an artist and he would put up the installations. And that's why he would go, is because he loves that kind of stuff. But other than that, and he's in his fifties probably no, he's not. He's a younger. He's probably close to fifty this year.
But I remember thinking, there's just no allure to that for me, right, nothing about that is alluring.
Yeah, well, I was calling you at a time like this.
It could be anybody, probably my wife or my dog or my daughter.
Well you have a leak in your home, my son, or you don't have color I d well, I'm not going.
To tell you who it is.
Why, because because you don't have everything, you don't share why.
That's why this is case in point.
Last night's earthquake. Oh, I was going to show this to you. I know that you puppooed the earthquake.
But look at this map of the area where the earthquake hit. Well, yeah, I mean dozens of earthquakes and after shocks that hit after that big five point two from last year.
They said it was connected to the time of day.
Which which is why why it was so white.
Was able to just cover the basin with some sort of movement.
It was also because your basin is most likely either sitting or lying down at nine oh nine pm. That's why that's true. That's why we felt it. At my house, My daughter and I were both sitting there watching TV. My wife was in doing a puzzle because she's smarter than all of us, and we all felt it and it was I mean, it was a good one. It was all it lasted, and we're like, it still feels like it's still going. And my phone went off at the exact moment that I felt the earthquake. My phone
had gone off with an alert. A lot of people got those alerts. I did not get an alert. Yeah, if you're you make a good point. We all felt it because we're all probably winding down for the day. My mom didn't feel the Loma Prieta earthquake because she was driving in eighty nine. Yeah, she did not feel that. I know a couple of people.
She came home and I said, there was an earthquake, and I'm terrified and I'm home alone, and she says, what are you talking about. I'm going upstairs, see you later. And the carpool lady came busting through the front door, saying, are you okay? Oh, I guess there was an earthquake last night.
There were actually some boulders that fell where I five goes down the grapevine. There were some boulders that crossed the road and they had to shut down some of the lanes.
Last night. And then that's pretty strong.
Boulders come down that far right, I mean they're three or four feet across. A Qt's plant in Bakersfield was also evacuated last night after the earthquake.
We've all driven by that QTS plant, haven't we.
Yeah, the massive SI huge.
And it says QUTIES on the whole side of the building.
They said that immediately after the earth well, immediately about five minutes after the earthquake, they had a strong smell of ammonia in the plant, so they evacuated the plant as a precaution. They at least as the story that I saw. They hadn't figured out if in fact there was a leak, but they did it as a precaution. And then I have a nephew who lives in Bakersfield, and he said his entire apartment was making noises. Oh wow, that's the weirdest. When you hear your home creaking. That's
always rather unsettling. Not that you know, earthquakes themselves are not unsettling, it's by definition.
Well from One of the biggest falls I think from Grace that I've ever seen was the fall of Tom Girardi, a legal titan that was connected to all of California. To get on the bench, you had to have his blessing. Pretty much. He is the Aaron Brockovich attorney that that movie was based off. And now he is eighty five, wearing secondhand clothes and in a court room that he once ruled, being prosecuted for stealing from clients, clients who people in plane crashes or had injuries where they will
never walk again. He stole from those people. Why to fund his Hollywood wife's entertainment career in her forties. Story has everything.
I will come back and do that just a quick update. Gary, I'm not sure you realize what you said.
You referred to it as.
A little speed bump.
I thought that was funny.
Have a good day, guys. Miss Patricia caught that too. I did not you refer to yourself and your underwear and then then yeah, a little speed bump. Hey, we don't have to know everything, Garyan, Listen, you don't need to explain it. I'm not I'm not. I'm not going.
To knock the bar off in the Olympics vault competition.
Gary.
I love the show, Shannon.
I want to apologize for you yesterday, telling you you were from a little, small puntry town and didn't understand things. I don't think you guys understand how intertwined you guys are in my life.
I listen to you every day. Love the show.
Have a great day, Shannon. We all have our days.
I apologize, heyday. Once in a while, friends have to have harsh words. Yes, I love an apology and I but I understood your sentiment yesterday, and I do love the apology. We're all good, and I'd like to talk to you about your attitude. My attitude.
Oh never mind, Hey.
Guys, great show, as usual, Shannon Farren.
I know you don't have an allure to go to Bernie Man, but imagine all the cocaine you can.
You could probably move that seventy pounds.
In a couple of days there. So be a little bit more open minded and check it out.
Have a good day, guys. Yeah you too, a little open mind? Yeah, maybe a money making guys.
I ever thought of myself as closed minded.
Just get a basic ticket, the five seventy five. You could easily make that back with seventy pounds. Don't have the coke. That was a hypothetical situation.
Oh that's right, I forgot. Yeah.
Don't do drugs, kids, You can't do drugs anymore.
Tom Girardi. Tom Girardi one of the most powerful lawyers in a southern California definitely all of California, likely for a certain amount of time the.
Way the La Times writes it, And maybe Girardi's checks are still clearing over at the La Times. He was really one to pepper his money across the country. But the headline reads Tom Girardi's fraud trial begins a liar who stole millions or the victim of a thieving CFO. It's like, come on, La times. You know this guy's guilty as the day is long. But the way the article begins is this Tom Girardi was on a first name basis with senators from CA California to North Carolina
governor on speed dry speed dial. He would have local officials lined up for his boozy parties in Beverly Hills, Vegas and elsewhere. Probably the most connected person that I've ever met. I never met him, but I did interview him a couple times on the Sunday Show. I don't remember what they were with regard to but he's so affable.
He's just kind of an aw shuckskuy, but has such gravitas.
And there was something that rubbed me the wrong way. But most people who are.
Rich do because you don't get to be that powerful and rich without having some compromises that you have made without having some bodies in the closet, right, skeletons in the closet. So yesterday he showed up in a federal courthouse downtown Los Angeles. The jury was seated and his criminal trial began.
Dan's accused of four counts of wire fraud for allegedly looting fifteen million from clients over a decade. Clients that had turned to him in moments of tragedy, a burn victim, a widow whose husband died in a boating accident, a woman injured from a medical device, a woman injured in an auto accident, people that lost the ability to walk ever again, he won them settlements and then stole their money.
Yeah, and this is.
From the highest heights in terms of that notoriety and the power that he had to the lowest of lows in these last couple of years.
I mean.
And the thing is, had he not been married to Erica Jane and that very public divorce that played out in was it Season eleven of The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills, I don't think this gets the same noteariety because it now has even more people who know who this guy is.
The money belonged to those defendants and in one case, playing crash victims and their family members. But what he would do is he would keep it after it was awarded. It should have been promptly paid to the victims, but he would keep the money and use it for funding his wife's entertainment singing career. Lip singing career. In her forties, he had two private jets we're talking jewelry, country club fees and mansion in Pasadena, a home in Palm Springs.
Twenty million from the firm's bank account went into the entertainment career of Erica Girardi. All the while, these people are waiting for their money to get medical care, to get wheelchairs, to bury their loved ones. All of this.
The downfall of Tom Girardi started when he started working with Edelson PC, a Chicago law firm in Illinois, and Jay Edelson, one of the other plaintiffs. Lawyers had previously developed a reputation as going after Silicon Valley class action lawsuits against big tech companies because of privacy, but Edison said they became aware of unusual delays in dispersing the
sums that Boeing. Remember he was representing plane crash the families of plane crash victims, the delays in the payments that Boeing was making to Girardi and keys the law firm. Over the next several days, Debbie projected to linger along the southeast US coast and will produce significant flooding, gusty winds,
prolonged coastal inundation. Some meteorologists that ACU Weathers say there's a growing threat of relentless rainfall and flooding impacts as this storm slowly tracks from northern Florida to parallel with the Georgia and Carolina coastlines.
The Harris and Trump campaigns both holding events in key swing states this week.
JD.
Vance met with law enforcement officials in Shelby Township, Michigan, today, slamming Kamala Harris's record on crime and immigration. Vance will then stop in Wisconsin later in the day. Harris and Walls are said to hold events in Wisconsin this afternoon and another in Detroit in the evening. What a stark contrast to what Biden was doing.
Oh yeah, could.
You imagine keeping this schedule and this enthusiasm. I mean, it was just so flat lined. It was a flatline campaign.
And that's that was showing in the polls. That was showing in the concern that Democrats had about that.
And where is he? Where where is he? And what's that going to look like when he speaks at the convention.
I know they announced that. I'm you think he does a video message? That's the Kosi. I think that's what they have to do. That's kind of the They might do the old two hologram thing with Biden on Monday night at the case.
Oh boy, all right, So we are talking about the Tom Girardi fraud trial, and he is accused of lying and stealing millions upon millions of settlement dollars from clients.
Officially four counts of wire fraud for allegedly looting the fifteen million dollars from different clients over the course of a decade.
His defense team has dismissed the prosecutor's account as a fictional Hollywood plot line in accurately casting his client as the villain. Samuel Cross is the deputy federal public defender. The fact that Tom Girardi has a public defender is rich too. He said he to the jury, this is my client. He is a once mighty lawyer, now his later years marred by progression, progressive dementia, disorganized organization in his law firm Gariti Keyse and large scale theft by
the CFO Christopher Cayman. They said it was him Girardi who is the victim in all of this. He was the one who was defrauded, that his CFO pocketed more than fifty million from his boss or a variety of schemes, trans transactions, checks to sham companies, things like that.
Well, that's also possible, but isn't it can't both things happen? That Tom Girardi was taking money and this guy was taking advantage of the guy who was taking money.
He says, he will prove that Girardi had to pour eighty million of his own money into the firm that he tried to keep the firm afloat. Why is the firm sinking because the CFO, Chris Cayman, is stealing the money.
So I mentioned Jay Edison.
Edison was another lawyer that came out of Chicago, and when he was working with Tom Girardi on a different case, he got a little suspicious because there were some weird things, weird delays when it came to one of the one of the defendants, Boeing in this case, paying money to the families of victims of Boeing playing crashes, and Jay Addilson said, I noticed that there was something weird that was antiquated about the way these payments were being dispersed.
And he says So this is a guy who made hundreds of millions of dollars in his career, so the idea that he would steal a few million million dollars from widows and orphans didn't add up. And he said when he met Tom Girardi for the first time, he recalled Girardi handing out signed pictures of Erica Jane and talking about his Morton's steakhouse expenditures, and he said, the big aha moment was when I read in whatever stupid gossip mag I came across that Erica Jane had filed
for divorce. And he said, at that point, I said the money might actually be gone. He was stealing too make up for the money that was lost.
Apparently the prosecutor is stipulating that the CFO did steal money from the firm, but that it's a fraction of what Girardi stole, right, So everyone has their hands in the pot.
Yeah, And I wonder if that guy is going to end up testifying against Tom Girardi the CFO. I don't know where he is, or they say, actually, this is not going to take along a long time, to eight days or something like that, that's not a very long considering it's weird.
To all this stuff they have to lay out in terms of the financial statements and things like that, and you would think the victims would testify and all of that.
You're could get some some forensic economists in there.
I would sure to talk about that. But if it's just wire fraud and.
It's it's a criminal case as opposed to a civil case, that's truckle. Aren't you know they're not suing him for the money. I guess they could, but they're not at this point. One of the questionnaires, by the way, for the perspective juror did ask whether prospective jurors watched The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills or any other Bravo shows.
His defense attorneys were concerned that if jurors did see him on those shows that it would color their perceptions of him because he was just this I she made it sound like she was a victim in these shows.
By the way, he's got a case in Chicago that's pending, and that's where the CFO is going to go to trial for what he did in terms of thievery. A federal judge has set March third, twenty twenty five trial date for Christopher Cayman. Another one of his attorneys will also go to trial, David Lera and then Girardi. Once this resolves, he'll have to go face trial in Chicago as well.
Well, we have advocated for something like this, and I had not heard about this program before the America Exchange Project.
I think it's pretty cool.
It's a really great idea. Yes, we'll talk about that. What it is? Maybe how to get your kids signed up for that? When we come.
Back, Gary and channor or your co host, Maybe I send you somewhere strange for a while and you come back with a fresh set of eyes.
Where would you send me?
I would send you many places, really anywhere. Okay, just kidding. That was that was just a joke, just to get me out of here. Yeah, I was just a little joke. Gary and channawall came by yourself. Now, I don't want to be by myself, don't go. Does the name Kai Sinnat mean anything to you?
Yeah?
Why?
Kai Sinat is a popular twitch streamer. Oh yeah, and he has waded into the Harris campaign. Apparently, the Harris campaign is yet to respond as this popular twitch streamer, Kai Sinat claims he's getting calls about a possible collaboration with the Vice president. They call him an Internet sensation from New York City. He claims the Secret Service has reached out to him several times about getting the Vice
President on his live stream. This is a guy who streams out of a U haul from an undisclosed location in Manhattan.
Can I say that the Secret Service would never contact him to do that.
He admitted to his nearly thirteen million followers that he knows nothing about politics and is not really interested in the matter. He gained notoriety last year after his giveaway at Union Square turned into a riot and he was paid thousands of dollars in restitution. That entire story that I just read makes me want to go get China and bring them here myself and just say, wipe us out, invite them over, come over, and just take it. Just take it. We are such a weird society. Not that
it's probably much better in China. I think we're globally more stupid than we used to be.
But what.
Well, that's how we're going to get votes. Let's not talk about things that actually matter. I'm speaking of Harris and Minnesota Governor Tim Walls, her running mate, spending their first full day as running mates in Wisconsin and Michigan. They said yesterday, sorry, they said today the campaign that they'd raised thirty six million dollars in the first twenty
four hours after the vice presidential announcement. And I'm starting to get to the point where the announcements of the money that you've raised are now just self aggrandizing, like totally self love, self love than self love. It's just we'll call it couch time because listen you oh we won't. No, it's because it's just, Okay, you made millions of dollars, so did the other team. The other team made millions of dollars as well. It's just fake money at this point.
Okay. So there is a program I did not know about. It's called the American Exchange Prime and it is fascinating story in the La Times about it today. This summer, a group of high school students brought a whole new meaning to foreign exchange programs right here in this country of the United States. Wendy Rojas of Koreatown immersed herself in South Dakota, expecting to see Mount Rushmore. Instead, she had to set the record straight about her hometown of La.
No.
She explained to the people her neighborhood is not overrun with gangs and rife with gunfire like they'd seen in the movies Maggie and Kilgore, Texas. Had to convince her visitors from La that Texans don't get around on horseback.
This came This American Exchange Project came out of a trip from David McCullough third, the founder of the organization, from about eight years ago cross country trip. He was twenty two years old at the time, a Yale student working on a research project, talking to students and teachers
in different poor areas of the country. And it was all during the breaking of politics in our country, the twenty sixteen race between Trump and Clinton, and said he expected to face some animosities, wary of the fact that some of the people from different parts of the country might not welcome him, especially if he says he's a Yale student or whatever, and.
That wasn't the case. They accepted him warmly. And I love this idea of adults and kids alike getting out of their bubble, getting out of their echo chamber, getting out of their hometown and going and seeing how other people live that the more we do this, the better off we are altogether and make better community members and everything.
If you're interested by it, it's Americanexchange Project dot org is the website and the way that you sign up. Any current senior at a partner high school to the American Exchange Project on track to graduate would be eligible
to participate. They get you some basic information about your interests, the hometown, your plan for the future, what your availability is in terms of travel, and then the placement team there will use the information to pair you up with the town and the group that you'll be working with, and if students have to consult with the student's exchange
manager before signing up and then picking your destination. In all of the partner schools, March first is AEP day, so in the springtime, all the students go to their exchange manager's classroom where they find an EA sorry AEP bag with their name on it. The bag will be a letter revealing which town in this faraway part of America that they'd be traveling to. The dates of the travel, the hosting experience would all be revealed, and that's the day that the whole thing becomes very real.
This is a very I.
Obviously everybody has exchange students in their high schools or you know somebody who was in exchange and you go whatever, Japan, Land, France, something like that, and those were always the very exotic, felt very I was jealous of them because they got to live in a different culture for a long time and learn the language.
I never had the balls to do.
You couldn't wrap your head around that. Yeah, it just seems so foreign. But then you go to this literally, then you go to these places and you meet people and it it's obvious how much alike we all are globally, and that we're not so different. And and you know what, you don't talk about You don't talk about politics. You just talk about each other. And I'm you know what we should do.
We should talk to this.
We should get an exchange student for the show.
Oh, I think I said, we should interview David mccullo about his experience and why he started the program.
That's probably a more realistic scenario.
I'm getting an exchange student.
Well, this is why you should have let me foster the duck, so that we don't we don't move into people into human traffick.
Got it.
McCullough said this, and I think it's a very important takeaway from it. He says, we're defining people by fractions of who they are. Yes, and we're pretending that because we know one of their views, we know all of their views.
I love that attitude.
I mean, just the idea, and that's quite a condemnation of all of us who, once we learn one specific thing about that person, we think.
Oh, oh profile, profile, Yes, I know.
Everything, all right.
Coming up next, we've got some new polling, We've got a packed schedule, by the way till, by the way holes, and how the campaign is defining Tim Walls. We'll get into all of that coming up next.
You've been listening to The Gary and Shannon Show.
You can always hear us live on KFI AM six forty nine am to one pm every Monday through Friday, and anytime on demand on the iHeartRadio Lap