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.
There is an issue bubbling up locally that Robert Carvallo, LAUSD superintendent right now is speaking on. He says that federal officials showed up at two LA unified elementary schools this week. This would be the first reported instance, they said, of federal authorities trying to enter an LA public school.
We haven't heard from the federal government exactly who they were or what they were doing, but an LAUSD spokesperson has confirmed that these two people showed up to Lillian Street Elementary School's main office and identified themselves as representatives of a federal agency. They also went to Russell Elementary School. The LAUSD says they were investigators from the Homeland Security Investigations Unit that's within Department of Homeland Security, but that
they were not agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement. So a spokesperson for DHS, of course, hasn't commented specifically on what's going on.
Again.
Carvallo says there's no reason why a first grader or a sixth grader would call it, would pose the threats to national security, So he's questioning why they were there. We simply don't know in terms of what Department of Homeland Security hasn't explained yet.
In nineteen forty four, a middle school girl gave one of her girlfriends a card for her fourteenth birthday, and then when the girl's birthday came around, the friend sent this same card back to her. Kind of an odd move. Right now, neither friend can remember.
It's also nineteen forty four, and I don't know if that if.
They're not, wasn't that long ago.
I know what.
I'm just saying, they're not so rich they can't go out and buy another card. Are you saying it's weird to send the card back?
Yeah? I mean why would you have that?
I mean maybe it's a funny thing, like I'm sending you back the card.
My grandma used to rip the cards in half.
You'd have funny or nice picture on the front or something like that, and then when you open it, on the right hand side is whatever the printed poem or the happy birthday to you or whatever, and you sign it. She would rip the card in half so that it was like a postcard, where on the one side you still had the nice funny drawing of a monkey blowing out a birthday cake candle. But on the inside, what was the inside now is just the other side of
the car. It was blank, so then you could write something. You could write your own note on there, and then that became the birthday card. What would she do with the other side? Did you throw it away? It's no good, it's already been used. But you basically get two full greetings out of one card.
I have a question. Did she take cards that she had already gotten? That's what I mean. Oh, she had received a card. She didn't go get a perfectly known card. So if she received a card, she would tear the part off. I think. I think that's a brilliant idea. That's that's why she lived to be a ninety something. That's a great idea way to cut down on waste. Dixie. Yeah, he's ahead of her time in this case.
Seriously, I mean, that's a really smart move because first of all, cards have you gotten a card recently?
It's like seven dollars big card industries. I'm going to start drawing my cards again like I did as a youth. My son's day mean he's twenty five and he still does.
Yeah, I'm gonna start doing that because they're so stupid too, Like who writes this crap?
Like whoever used to write that? Is it just me? Or of greeting cards gone to hell? They used to be a little clever.
Maybe there's just more of them, better selection, maybe because people were sending them more. But it was before email and all the things, and this is what you had to send there was. It's just more variety and just say we're better written now it's just really bottom of the barrel stuff. In fact, if I'm going to go get my husband a card, who's the only person to really get cards for anymore.
I'll try to.
Find the worst one, and she gives funny no, just to be like look at.
This, because I don't. I'll write my own.
Sure, that's what I do too, but like I'll find like a really bad one, just to show, like, this is what we're dealing with now.
You know, Pat and Mary sent back and forth the same card to each other on their birthdays. They would sign their names and they would date it each time. Dreamer opens it every year on her birthday, which is April first. Then she signs it mails it off back to Mary so that she can open it on her birthday, which is in May.
Here's the funny part. So what's on this card?
Well, on this card is a cartoon dog wearing a large red polka dot bow tie, and it reads, here's wishing you a birthday.
That is really colossal.
You open up the card and it says, because it's gonna be a long long time before you're and old fossil. Now, they started exchanging this card when they're fourteen. They're now one hundred, which makes the card even that much more prescient.
Well, she Pat is now ninety five. Mary is just turned ninety four. Their families, of course, got into all of this. Their families got friendly. Pat apparently has been married three times and lost all three of her husband's to cancer. She got seven kids, Mary's got five.
They've written all over the card, as you can imagine, all over the envelope, all over the dog. They've also included separate notes and birthday wishes to another inside the card, you know what I mean, like a like a slip of paper that they put inside the cards. So they also have an oversized envelope along with the original envelope and a replacement one as well.
In after sixty years.
So just just right after the turn of the century, Pat's daughter in law applied for the Guinness World Record for the longest birthday card exchange, which they got. They were Eventually they got the title, though it was overtaken by a couple of women in Australia who had them beaten by about a year. Now I believe that those women in Australia have since kicked the bucket and gone
to the Great card Store in the Sky. So now they're hoping that Pat and Mary can regain the title, but they haven't yet heard back from Guinness.
So we talked about the city hall fight over the budget and how the dire straits down there. How are they going to balance a billion dollar budget?
Mess?
Oh easy, They're going to pass it on to you. Well, now we're learning how they're going to pass it on to you, Los Angeles.
We'll tell you when we come back.
You're listening to Gary and Shannon on demand from KFI AM six.
Forty Cabinet meeting continues at least the portion with reporters and cameras on it right now in the White House and We were kind of laughing about the lighting. It's now in the cabinet room where it's all lit from above, very similar to what the Apprentice was lit that the boardroom scene in The Apprentice, and there are portions of the table that you can't even see, like Tulsi Gabbard, the Director of National Intelligence, is sitting down at one
end of the table. You can barely see her face because the a lighting is so weird.
Like, look at I just pulled up a picture. This is from the New York Times from the apprentent. Okay, so that's not coming up. It's just the smaller but it's exact same lighting that was in the boardroom. Like you say, when they had their elimination ceremonies on The Apprentice, it is the same thing, but it is a cabinet meeting in the White House.
Yeah, it's very very funny.
We were talking about the fun story of the day. These two women in their nineties now who have been sending the same birthday card back and forth for decades.
Hey, Garan Shanning, this is Rick and Tennessee. Hey we do that. So my wife and I, with her sister and our brother in law, we send them a card. It's how it started. And then they sent it back on one of our birthdays, and then we send it back to them on one of their birthdays. And we just do that four times a year. We write stupid things, that hilarious kind of card. You can barely read any of it now, it's like, but we do it four times a year and it's.
Awesome, Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants. But it's a birthday card.
That's you know what. That is exactly what I was thinking, Hey, Gary.
And Shannon Lisa here. So I recycle cards too, especially from Papyrus, because I always have that liner in the middle, So I usually tear it out the liner and becomes a brand new card because the back inside right is blank. So I just to use it because they're so.
I was gonna say, if you're getting.
High five her, have a great day, guys.
Five degree totally.
Dixie is a we're big fans of Dixie on this show.
She comes up quite a bit.
But Papyrus, man, that's a that's a car payment. You buy a card from Papyrus.
We had a Papyrus store in Petaluma when I was growing up, and if you got somebody a card from Papyrus.
Yeah, that was serious.
It was very serious, because you on a high school salary, you could not afford that.
Oh my gosh.
I always get my husband one that's like, it's Spanish or something, and we don't speak Spanish, and we've established that you are not, in fact married to a Hispanic guy, and so he probably doesn't speak Spanish either, although I'm Hispanic and I still don't speak Spanish.
But whatever, have a great day. Yeah, I've done that many times.
He'll speak Spanish perfectly if you give him a couple a shot a tequila. Who my husband, Oh really? Oh yeah, it's it's a fun party trick.
My wife has been very deep into duo lingo and Spanish. Yeah, and every once in a while she'll throw a word. I haven't taken Spanish class since high school. Yeah, but I remember a lot of it. And I mean, living here, it's not like there are plenty of places where you can practice.
Spanish, right right.
I just feel so not confident doing so. I feel so insecure and so not confident. And I also feel like Whitey mcwhiderson trying to speak Spanish, and I just look stupid and then I sound like I'm trying to speak Spanish, like I just hate everything about trying to learn. I've tried it. It's like quitting smoking. Trying to learn Spanish. For me, I've tried so many times and I like get into it and then I just feel stupid and
then that's not the smoking thing. But you know what I mean, and you just give up and then you try again and one day it'll take.
One day usually after some sort of a head trauma is when it started. Is that right?
We're too old for this. Language centers in our rain don't work the way they used to.
I was never good at learning languages, and I don't know if you did.
I loved it.
I didn't retain as much as I wanted, but it came. It came to well, especially like when the kids were going through. My son took Spanish in high school and then transferred to sign language and but I but the summer before he started Spanish, we went through and did We bought a couple of goofy like learn Spanish on your own books, and he and I would go through
that and it was super fun. It was refreshing, like to get all that stuff back you know, blow the dust off the old Espanol, and but I don't retain it the way.
Yeah, I just feel like I've got it in my head.
You'll never learn to speak conversational Spanish, like you You're just never going to learn that because you don't have the confidence to do it and also don't have people to talk to that will talk to you conversationally and not like your dumb white girl trying to learn.
So but if you immersed in it, like if you probably Spange.
Yeah, at least you'd be able to piece it together.
But now if I speak Spanish to somebody who speak Spanish, they look at me like I'm a complete moron, and I am.
Well, so I've seen I've.
Seen people take pity on you when you try to exactly, and that's not what I'm looking for. I'm not looking for that feeling of where people pity me. It's an awful feeling. They say things like all I don't even know what you're trying to say?
Is what they say? The dog is blue?
Is that what you're trying to say, because that's what you're saying, all right, trash money when we come back, trash money for listen, if you work in the government in city, county, state, federal government. It's not your money. You might as well play with it like it's not your money. That's just exactly what they do.
That's the way.
That gratitude that you have, you might as well do it that way.
And here's the latest example of that.
When we come back, you're listening to Gary and Shannon on demand from KFI AM six forty.
The Dow Jones Industrial Average, the Nasdaq, the S and P five hundred, all down between four and five percent, because today it looks for a lot of people, it looks dangerous. There's talk of the stock market being oversold right now. We're actually going to be talking with Trader Merlin.
Coming up at the top of the we get into swamp Watch a little bit more about what personal investors can do and things that we should since we're not necessarily trading on the industrial level, what we should be keeping our eyes on, or what we should not be paying attention to, Things that are going to sway your decisions that probably don't need to be paid attention to.
We mentioned this when the news hit there is a billion dollar budget shortfall at La City Hall because they don't know how to manage money, asked an answered, We've known this for a long time, but a billion dollars is quite the number that is insurmountable. I think you could say this is the result of mismanagement for quite some time, and it's coming to a head. So yesterday two city council committees got together to figure out what
to do. One focused on public works, the other specializes in environmental issues, and the two came up with the idea, Oh, we know what we'll do. We'll just pass on the cost to the people who live here in the form of trash fees. They are going to raise trash fees fifty four percent in the next fifty four percent. So if you're spending thirty six dollars for the City of Vli to pick up your trash a month, you'll be spending fifty six dollars because they can't get their act together.
Part of what I've never understood about government is the idea of not attaching city service or county service fees to inflation. And part of what I guess, part of what the plan would be is we're going to set it at thirty six dollars a month, so you know, what you're paying for the for the foreseeable future, even if that handcuffs that municipal government from balancing its budget.
For example, the Bureau of Sanitation in LA says, the cost of trash collection is going to increase to more than five hundred and fifty million dollars, So they've got to be able to catch up with and stay on top of how much it costs to provide the service.
In the first world, that's one issue.
If it's going to cost more to collect the trash, then that's an issue on its own. That's separate from the balancing the billion dollar budget shortfall.
I mean, I can understand that both can.
Be true, right But I mean, if I'm working on city hall pr and optics, I'm saying, well, this was already something that happened.
I would separate these things.
If trash is getting more expensive to pick up because of inflation or what have you, then then the rates are going to have to go up.
That's natural, it's understandable, right.
Well, My point is, then apply a simple formula of the cost of living. Raise it with the cost of living, raise it with the cost of inflation. Because everybody basically, you know, the tide is going to rise, raise all boats. There's you know, you can't simply lock something in and expect there to be a good.
End to that.
You know, we we all understand that the costs do go up when it comes to providing city services. The I think the other thing about this in terms of the mentality of people who spend other people's money, because that's exactly what government does. They do it many times on valuable services for the rest of us. It's that there's not what you don't see here is the headline from the La Times. Faced with a billion dollar budget crunch, LA seeks major trash fee increases. Where's the same headline,
Where's the same story? The flip side of it, Faced with a billion dollar budget crunch, the City of La cuts a bunch of crappy services that no one uses or no one wants, or has some accounting for the billions of dollars that have been spent on homelessness, or.
Cuts down on bureaucracy.
You know, I really I feel for the people in the federal government who have lost their jobs or who are in danger of losing their jobs. And I get it on like a person a person basis that sucks. But what also can be true is that the government has taken advantage of the fact that it gets to be bloated and everybody looks the other way.
Both can be true.
You think there's not bloat at La City Hall and positions that don't need to be there, and I know that's awful. It means jobs lost and it means people's families and I get that that sucks, but that doesn't that doesn't mean that the government is.
Is not bloated, right, you know what I mean?
Both can be true that you have excessive growth and red tape and bureaucracy, and that it's going to be painful to cut it.
Now.
The last time the La City Council, and this will go to a vote tomorrow, the last time the council hiked trash fees was seventeen years ago. But at the time, and I remember this, Antonio Viragosa was mayor, and it was because he wanted to hire more police officers. He wanted to get the LAPD back to that ten thousand threshold, which it's probably so far below that now, but at the time, that was the goal. Let's make the city say, let's get to ten thousand police officers.
Let's have more visibility. Bill Bratton was here.
It was all about broken windows and making sure that people know that we are there and we're developing the relationships and the communities and that people feel safe talking to the officers. And we were all for it at the time because because you'd get something for it. Right here, you're not getting anything for your trash fees. Get what you're getting is realizing that the people in charge of your money are doing a bad job being in charge of it.
Well.
And the thing that's endemic to government is the knee jerk reaction whenever you're hit with a budget crunch is how do we generate revenue?
How do we generate revenue?
Well, either you sell off a portion of the city or you take it from the taxpayers. And that's I mean, this is exactly what they're doing, is they're they're simply adding more fees as opposed to spending the time cutting things that need to be cut or that are unsustainable. Just because you paid for it once doesn't mean you need to get to continue to pay for it in perpetuity. We've been talking about cards. The birthday cards were sent back and forth Chan.
Not only do I do that for birthday cards, I do it for Christmas cards and save the pretty side, cut them up and make name tags for my gifts.
Oh brilliant, that is hell, Yeah, that's brilliant. You're just getting all kinds of ideas.
I sure, I am. Well, I feel bad after every Christmas when I'm throwing away pictures of people's families and their babies, just right into the trash you go, or the recycled bin. Your family got all dressed up, probably an acrimonious morning of fighting in tears, and you got that beautiful picture out of it, and here I am
recycling it about a month after you sent it. Now, if I cut up the pictures of your beautiful children and I use them as tags on gifts the following year, it made me feel better.
No, you're not going to use someone else's kids, well the back of the card, right tape.
My grandmother did the same thing with birthday cards.
Did she also wrap your presence in the comic strips?
Yes?
In fact, I started doing that when I was in high school and college. Whatever that was my go to was was pulling the Sunday comics because they were in color.
And using that as wrapping paper. Yeah, that's a cool move.
I love that move as an adult, when people use newspaper to wrap gifts, I love that really hell yeah sorry, stand by, Yeah, I love it. Note to syl because not only are you creative take newspaper, but you're smart because you're not buying wrapping paper out of bird cage.
Well not used Fagarian Channon.
My mother and I used to, oh for probably four or five years, exchange the same birthday card.
So it does happen, and I love it. I think that we should start doing this, you and I.
I don't know, Maybe not you and I. That's silly, but maybe, I don't know. Maybe with somebody who sends us a card, we'll send it back. I just saw a nightmare on the television on the NBC News Jenna Hagger Bush Show. Yeah, and the headline.
Was that Jellies are back. What is that?
Jellies the shoes? Do you remember the jellies the shoes? I remember them from my youth. All I see are pain and more pain when I look at the Apparently they've made a comeback. Old Navy is selling the jellies the shoes, and you know what I'm talking about. Right, they're like the plastic and it's like webbing, almost like the crisscross and it's like.
The worst version of crocs. Oh my gosh.
Well they're so cute, but they're so painful. And when you have fat feet like these.
Oh my, I know, are you bread? What imagine? Find any one of these with jelly shoes. It's so painful. It's like you're walking on marshalls.
It's awful, like blocks, like two big blocks.
You're listening to Gary and Shannon on demand from KFI AM six forty.
Stocks have surrendered most of their big gains from yesterday, the S and P five hundred, Dow, Jones, NASDAK, they're all down about five percent right now. The White House clarified the Chinese imports are going to be tariffed at one hundred and forty five percent, not the one hundred and twenty five percent that Trump had written earlier about on truth social not even better than expected report on inflation could help stocks today.
We'll keep an eye on those things.
At the top of the hour, we're going to get more into sort of the personal finance aspect of whatever's going on in the world. Of tariffs and what you can look for with our friend Trader Merlin coming up at eleven.
Saw this article in the San Francisco earlier this week about a teenager's college essay that went viral.
It went viral.
Because it was rejected by Stanford, Harvard, Yale, among many other prestigious universities. But a lot of essays, a lot of applications are rejected by those places, right, But the reason this is going viral is because of what this eighteen year old has already been able to accomplish. And the takeaway here is, oh my gosh, I can't believe they'd turn this kid away. What is wrong with the system? And for once, I'm kind of proud of the collegiate system.
I mean for once recently, in recent days, I am proud that they're like, you know what, you have the wrong attitude. His name is zach Is Zach Yadegari. He's eighteen year old. He's an eighteen year old, and he has already started a found up, started a found up, founded a startup.
Look at me? He gained school? Did you go to exactly public schools?
I was also rejected from Stanford, Harvard and yelle, what is wrong with my mind? Am I having a stroke? Oh my god, it's like that woman Serene Branson.
That is not true. That's just what happened. Go on, Okay, mean, I wasn't trying to be mean.
That's literally what happened when she was misgetting words in her See, it's still happening.
It's a real thing.
Beant a rundown and get that automatic external defibrillator.
That's not no you're doing You're not a doctor. Okay.
So Zach has a perfect four point zero GPA. He has a super strong act score of thirty four, and he was rejected by fifteen of the eighteen colleges he applied to. Very great schools should be said. He founded cal Ai. It's a calorie tracking app that allows users to log their food intake by taking photos.
Brilliant. The problem is with Zach's attitude here.
His essay was kind of all about well, I'll just read from part of it. In his essay, he reflected on his initial reluctance to attend college. He noted that venture capitalists and mentors encouraged him that it was an unnecessary step, but he wanted the valuable life experience. He wrote in my rejection of the collegiate path, I had unwittingly bound myself to another framework of expectations. Instead of school teachers, it was vcs and mentorsdeering me toward a
direction that was still not my own. His essay explained he had come to view college as more than just an academic pursuit.
I realized, he wrote.
That my life was not just about financial success. It's about relationships and being a part of a larger community. All true, but he went on to say, I can't believe that these colleges would reject me.
Here is his quote that really sold it for me.
Even if okay, because there was a lot of backlash saying, well, he's a high probability of being a dropout, he's already financially successful, he wants a college experience.
And then he's out right, and.
He wrote this, even if there's a one percent chance I continue my rate of success, wouldn't they want to take the risk of being able to use my name in the future.
Yeah, they'd be lucky to have me attitude. You're eighteen, Zach, Well, why what I would ask is what do you gain from going to Harvard? Or Yale or Princeton or Mit or Stanford. And I mean he's trying to lay it out there. He's talking about relationships, part of a larger community, things that maybe he doesn't feel he has right now. Join a club, right, No, I mean your league softball team. But I get it.
My dad was a big proponent of this, of going to college just for the relationships, and they experience the personal you know, and the friendships that you build and the connections that you make networking and things like that. Being part of a larger community. That's all very very appealing and very fun and important at that age to learn how to meet people from other backgrounds, from other places that you didn't grow up and that's very essential and very key. And I like that he sees the
value in that. But the attitude of I've already I don't need the academics, I've already achieved the more than anyone's ever achieved. I get my advice from VCS. Yeah, it's just kind of like, eh, all right, then go do that.
There is another guy, a nineteen year old from Palo al To, who is suing UC system saying that he was discriminated against because of practices where they discriminated against highly qualified Asian American applicants. Stanley Jong is his name, four point four to two GPA, a near perfect SAT of fifteen ninety, job offers from Google.
That's where it's dad works anyway.
But he said he received rejection letters from sixteen of the eighteen colleges he applied to, including rejections from MIT and Stanford, despite his I mean immaculate academic record.
Yeah, I mean it happens to where these schools are getting everybody with perfect GPAs and great act scores and extracurriculars and all of that, and they're picking. They can be they can be choosy, they can be picky, but they can't discriminate based on race or anything. Yeah, but they can be picky, of course, they're discriminating based on race and everything. Like, you can't tell what race somebody
is from their essay. You can't tell what somebody's socioeconomic situation is from their essay.
You can't tell. You can tell a lot of things, you can. The more I think about what a waste of money that is, though, what.
Higher education, Yeah, it's.
Not the thing it used to be, had to have.
It yeah, it had to be for everybody. Like the assumption was that you would go.
But there was a there was a window where you had to go. It was like our.
Window, right, it wasn't as essential. I don't feel like in the seventies where it's like you have to go to college. Where are you going to college? Put your list together?
What have you done? Your site visit? Like that wasn't a thing.
And not to tie it to the biggest story of the day being tariffs, but the economy change from the sixties seventies, we were still producing things.
We in the United States.
Still there were still manufacturing jobs that could you could make a good. You could try a house working in a factory. Right now, we've changed the way that we do thinks. I mean just the basic structure of the economies changed so that we provide services, but we don't provide the goods.
No, we just provide the bureaucracy.
You get a fancy degree, fall in line for the government, they'll take you. They're ready to get even more bloated. That's what we've been doing for thirty years. True, do we have any more good stuff like that? But not all day.
But man, we're gonna have to find something. Well.
I do like I do like the payphone story. Oh, that's a good one. Good, that's a fun that's coming up. We'll talk a little bit more about tarrifs. This cabinet meeting is still going on, by the way, at the White House. We'll talk about that as well.
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 app.