Wednesday 3/19/25 | Col William Dunn | Sen Robb Myers

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Live around the world on the internet at MichaelDukeShow.com and across the state of Alaska on this, your favorite radio station and or FM translator. Good morning, my friends, and welcome to the program for Hump Day. Wednesday, middle of the week, downhill slide. We can see Firearms Friday from here. That's right. We're going to be diving into it for Firearms Friday. We're excited about that. But today, the story is all about...

The cuts, the loss of money, the potential downside to what's going on. There's a lot of discussion. There's a lot of caterwauling. There's a lot of, you know. worry about who's going to get hurt by what in terms of cuts at the federal level, in terms of cuts at the state level, and the lack of money that we have going on at both levels as well.

And as I've said and been saying for quite a while, the problem is somebody is going to get hurt one way or the other. We are going to be hurt one way or the other. Either we're going to be hurt through the cuts and we're all going to feel the pain through some sort of austerity measure or something else.

Or when the wheels finally come off the bus because we don't have money in the state and we're out of funds, which is where we're at right now with a 1.5. billion deficit for next year, or at the national level with $34 trillion in debt and deficit spending.

Somewhere along the lines, we've got to do something. Now, we've got to do it properly. We've got to do it right. We're going to talk about that today. In our two on the program, State Senator Rob Myers is going to be joining us to talk about some of his new bills and the fiscal state. of the state of alaska and what we uh you know what we're facing and more but in hour one we got a little bit of a different twist for you here today um

I saw this. I saw the information on this guest and I thought, you know, this is an interesting take. Marine Corps Colonel William Dunn. has spent a lot of his life flying combat missions across, you know, the world, the Middle East. He's been advising private sector clients on security and logistics. He's got an unparalleled vision and peek behind the scenes, so to speak, on military strategy and operational impacts of different things.

And recently, the president had made a controversial comment amongst some folks, especially those with a military background, that wasn't really picked up much about by the press corps. And that was the idea of military budget cuts. At a meeting with, he said one of the first meetings that he wanted to have was with President Xi of China and Putin of Russia. Of course, he talked to Putin yesterday for over an hour on the red phone there.

And he said, let's cut our military budget in half. Now, we all know that Trump is a high handed negotiator and he walks into a room and. when he wants a bicycle he runs into a room and screams at the top of his lungs that he wants a motorcycle right because that's how he works he he started the he's a maximalist in that regard so did he really mean it that he wants to cut the military in half i don't know

I don't think so, but Colonel Dunn has got a unique perspective on this, and I thought we'd bring him on to talk about it here this morning. So let's jump right over to him. He's hanging out, waiting in the green room. He's a lean green fighting machine, so he doesn't eat all the virtual donuts that we usually leave there in the waiting room. So he's here to join us. Colonel William Dunn, U.S. Marine Corps.

good morning my friend how are you hey i'm doing great sir good morning thanks for having me well i appreciate you coming on board and talking with us today uh about this because of course this has been all over the this has been all over the air this is all anybody's talking about The president's shock and awe campaign since taking office of basically moving faster than even the news cycle can pick up. He's a guy that came in, obviously had a plan, has been executing that plan. And I think.

executing the vision that most americans elected him for because these are the things he was talking about as he was running for election you know bringing the size and scope of government down cutting waste, fraud, and abuse, the whole Doge thing, protecting our borders, all these things. Now, nowhere in there was it really ever reported that he wanted to cut the military, but these comments came out.

And obviously, he's got some people nervous. But as I said, he's a guy that screams motorcycle when he wants a bicycle. So it's a maximalist position. What's your take on what's going on with this and the effects and maybe the danger or potential dangers for the U.S. military and for our national defense in this work? Well, you know, that's a great question.

You know, step one, the budget was recently passed. It looks like it'll increase defense spending by about $6 billion. So I think what the president's doing is building a campaign plan for the future. we've got to do something with this budget we've got to cut spending somewhere probably a little bit of everywhere now when you look at our peer competitors of russia china and i wouldn't necessarily put iran as a peer competitor but they are a huge threat

we have got to remain the dominant force across all the world. To do that, we don't necessarily have to just spend and spend and spend, but what we have to do is outspend. And we have to out R&D. We have to increase our capabilities, whether it's getting to a 5th, 6th, or 7th gen fighter or weapon, faster than our opponents do. Ideally, if we had Nirvana...

everybody would cut their defense spending and we would still stay there. So based on what I've heard the president say over and over again, that he will force and make sure that we are the strongest nation in the world. I think everybody needs to look at that statement first. We're going to stay the strongest. We're going to stay the best. We're going to stay the fastest. Now, how do we do that? You know, there's many ways, but maybe it's becoming more efficient.

with the money that we're spending if we think about cutting dollars what i believe is if we cut dollars out of a program such as we've heard the president talk about dei programs and other such programs that DOD was forced to comply with. Maybe there's a couple billion dollars there. We shift those dollars and we shift those into weapons procurement, weapons development, or other capabilities. It's interesting because I'm in general agreement with you on this. We need to be strong.

We need to spend as much as we need to to remain dominant in those areas. But we all know, and I think anybody, even probably most of the men on the street, if you did men on the street interview, understand that we have so many. inefficiencies in government and specifically of course we've talked about the grace report in the past i mean ronald reagan the 600 hammers and the golden toilet golden toilet seats etc etc we know

That there's problems. I mean, the Pentagon has I mean, the audited budget, they haven't passed an audit in years. So we really need to get a handle on this so that when we are trying to be dominant and trying to spend the money correctly.

We're not wasting it because right now it seems like we're wasting a lot of money. And it's not just in the defense or DOD. It's it's in every branch of government. But it becomes especially egregious when this is one of the big constitutionally mandated things is national defense. And so how do we go about that? How do we go about pairing away? uh the waste fraud and abuse while still maintaining dominance and keeping the focus on war fighters and uh you know and our strategic edge

It's a balance. And the first thing we have to do, we have to maintain very strong on the Intel level across the planet. We have got to have the best Intel driving. information to our planners, to our executors, so that we can remain the premier force. When we look at what's going on with the United States Navy, I was a MU commander, a Marine Expeditionary Unit commander in the Marine Corps.

And we used to put them out what we called a 2.0 mu presence. Well, now we're down to maybe a 1.0 mu presence because we don't have the Navy shipping to put the mu's out. One of the mu's on the East Coast. is not even going to go out as a marine expeditionary unit it's going to go out as a special purpose magdaf and it will do great things for our country but that was a presence mission that we we used all the time and when i was a young marine

Each Mew would do two in a cycle. And about every six to eight months, we were putting these Mews out. And we have seven of them. There's three on the West Coast, three on the East Coast, and one in Japan. and we would plop these mews out and put them in a crisis area all the time and they're very flexible they can break the ships up in different methodologies and they can go all over the world we have had to cut that down because of our navy ships

So we've got to focus, and is the Navy ship going to become the way of the future? If it's not, then we need to take the money that we're spending on shipping and put it to another asset. The Joint Strike Fighter. The Joint Strike Fighter is, I would argue, one of the, if not the most capable platforms we now have in the inventory. You can do with one or two of those aircraft, which you used to do with multiple aircraft.

So is that become does that become a solution? We get more joint strike fighters and now we need less aircraft carriers potentially. Or do we need more? You know, it's a balance that we have to figure out. And it takes so long. to do these maneuvers if you are going to build a ship right you know you're talking decades potentially right right that's what we need to solve no i mean and look i agree i mean especially when we look at uh i mean our

You know, not to put too fine a point on it, but our main adversary in the world is China and China has increased their shipbuilding capacity. They've increased their. uh r&d and tech or they've stolen r&d and tech uh from a lot of things to build their own uh their own fifth generation fighter and everything else and this is who we're we're pushing against and we need to plan

around that kind of capability as well and maintain our edge. But the flexibility that you talk about, especially with projecting power and the ability to project power, if that starts to fall off.

it makes it very difficult for us to maintain the presence and dominance in the world that i think that we need for our national protection well absolutely we have got to stay ahead of china now here's something to think about when you take the most likely course of action and then you look at the most dangerous course of action and you know military planners think of this all the time

But usually they think of that when they're going and looking at one adversary. Now think of the world. What is our most likely issue that we're going to have? I think in the next five to 10 years, our most likely issue is going to be Iran. Our most dangerous issue, I would have said, you know, three years ago, Russia. I don't consider them a most dangerous course of action any longer. But the most dangerous course of action is going to be certainly China.

They're doing everything they can, and they have a 500-year plan, most likely, to become a world-dominant. And they have this plan, and to them, cycling through and doing little small things that are going to lead up. 100 years from now is how they look at the world. We typically look at the world 10, maybe 10 years in advance. So we have to stay strong in both areas. And that's my point here is you have to be ready for the most likely.

Because that's probably going to happen. The most dangerous may never happen or it may happen in 30 years. You have to be ready for that. But you have to determine where you're going to put your money. If I put all my money in the most dangerous COA. and i focus solely on china what happens when i have a somalia in iraq in afghanistan pop up and you know what's the next one of those right we see all the turmoil in the middle east it's not stopping

No, again, we need to maintain the flexibility. That's the importance. You can't be so rigidly focused on one single target, you have to maintain the flexibility so that you can respond to things that pop up and come up, as you said, and be able to move at a moment's notice. And I think sometimes we've gotten so cumbersome. in our, you know, in...

even in the military and kind of the bureaucratic process, or like you said, steering the ship, it's like trying to turn an aircraft carrier. It doesn't happen on a dime. You've got to get started on it soon so that you can make those turns. And if we're not nimble enough, it's going to affect us. in the long run. Colonel William Dunn is our guest.

He's the author of the book Gunfighter's Rules, and we're going to talk with him about his experiences and where he came from. We'll talk about the book a bit and also get his take on overall where he thinks we're going. as far as these cuts? And is it going to make us better? Or is it going to make us worse? Or what's the alternative? We continue. Again, Colonel William Dunn, our guest. Hour two.

We've got State Senator Rob Myers coming in. All good stuff all day long. The Michael Duke Show. Common Sense. Liberty-based. Free-thinking radio. Back with more right after this. Running on 100% pure beard power. Oh, also some coffee. We dip our beard in coffee. Ha, nice beard. The Michael Duke Show.

Okay, we're in the commercial break right now. Our guest is Colonel William Dunn, author of Gunfighter's Rule, and we're going to... continue our conversation i want to get into a bit of the background of the colonel and stuff when we return to the radio colonel i i don't like to repeat ourselves for the podcast since we podcast this and Folks like to watch it on YouTube and Facebook and everything in the repeat. So let's just kind of expand on where you were going.

The Mew, I mean, I'm interested in hearing more about your experience with the Mews and their function in the world. The Marine Corps has always been my favorite branch of the services. I think the best. But, you know, it's just it's just where I come from. And I've always been fascinated with this idea about how the the you know, it's the flexibility we were just talking about. That's really what their core is known for. Right. I mean, they are.

They're deployed to every hotspot in the world immediately. They have the flexibility and the nimbleness to be able to go anywhere at any time to do anything that's needed. And the Mew is an integral component of that. Can you explain that to us? Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. And believe me, I agree with you 100 percent. The best service is the Marine Corps. I love them all.

I love them all. Right. But, you know, but I really love the Marine Corps. That's right. So I've been on four news. I went on my first one as a brand new young first lieutenant. I was a Cobra pod in the Marine Corps, which is what the book talks. pretty much all about uh being a cobra pilot uh hence the name gunfighters rule as a squadron i had in iraq but what happens every day

is you'll have a marine expeditionary unit that's either getting ready to deploy or deploying. And as I mentioned earlier, they used to go all the time. And it was, you know, if you weren't on the Mew, you weren't doing your job as a Marine. That's what a lot of people felt. and you would deploy and deploy and deploy a typical mu deployment was six months long so you do a six-month workup and in the mu you'll have an infantry battalion

You'll have an aviation squadron that's been reinforced. Back in the day, they had CH-46s. Now they have MB-22s, Cobras, Hueys, Harriers, CH-53s. And then you'll have some attachments that will meet you overseas, KC-130s for refueling. And then you'll have a logistics element. And surrounding all of that is commanded by your command element, which is about 300 Marines and sailors.

Total package, you know, it's always going to vary, but it's about 2,200 Marines and sailors. That's tied to normally three Navy ships, a large amphibious ship and then two smaller support ships. that you can put aircraft on and operate aircraft from and that it's called an rmu the amphibious ready group and the marine expedition unit they'll deploy together and they can go anywhere in the world when we

I did four. My last one I did as the MU commander of the 22nd Marine Expedition Unit in 2013 to 2015. And at the same time, we had people in Yemen, Libya, Iraq, Kuwait. and then several other training countries in between. And that is what the Marine Expedition Unit gives to the United States. And so when we cut funding and we think about cutting funding for ships, that concerns most Marines.

Because the Marines are almost always going to get to the fight via Navy shipping. Right. So, yeah, go ahead. Kind of hard to haul 2,200 people and all the logistics and equipment around in a galaxy, right? I mean, you can... You can do some for small forces, but when you're talking 2,000 people and all their gear and everything else, you can't airlift it in. You need a ship.

And we got about a minute here before we rejoin the radio, Colonel. But the problem is right now is that we're just slacking on the shipping, the creating the shipping, new ships, updating, maintaining the ships we have. Is that the biggest part of the problem? Yes, in the time. It takes so long to do a rework of a ship. You know, a ship can go in and plan for six months. It may be there for three years. It just takes forever.

Well, I know that is the way we do the contracting. Yeah. And Charlie, Charlie in the chat room says wimpy leaders thought the op tempo was too high, made people feel bad. But I mean, that's what Marines do, right? I mean, that's the op tempo is this. That's that's how you roll. And sometimes you wear out equipment and you got to keep up with the equipment. You can't drop the off tempo. You've got to go ahead and update and speed up the.

the regeneration process on the equipment and everything. All right. Absolutely. Colonel William Dunn is our guest. We're going to continue with him here. The Michael Duke Show. Common Sense, Liberty Base, Free Thinking Radio. Like, share, subscribe, ring the bell. Let's do this thing. Here we go. The Michael Duke Show. Not your daddy. Wait, sorry. Not your daddy? Ooh, not your daddy's talk radio. Whew, I was scared for a second.

Thought we were going down. Here's Michael Dukes and the show. That's right. Not your daddy, nor do I play one on TV. Although my daddy is in the chat room, which is kind of, that's kind of. Awesome. Welcome back to the program. It is the Michael Duke Show, Common Sense Radio. Joining us this morning, Colonel William Dunn, USMC. He's here joining us today to talk about the potential cuts and the tempo.

that we need to be setting here as the world-dominant force and what we should be doing. He's also the author of the book Gunfighters Rule. which talks about his service in the USMC and what happened, and we're going to talk about that here in just a bit. But I want to talk a little bit about... The overall push, because part of the...

Part of the information that I said about the colonel to begin with all dealt with the fact that here we are cutting. We're cutting, we're cutting, we're cutting. And this potential, the president making an offhand comment about cutting the military in half. But as I said. President Trump is one of those guys who walks into a room as a negotiator and he always takes the maximum position. Right. So, you know, if he wants 50 percent, he comes in screaming that he wants 150 percent. Right.

So, you know, Colonel, do you really think that that's what the president? wants or what his voters would want would be a full reduction, a 50% reduction in strategic spending on the military? Or is it a bargaining position from him? What's your true take on that? I think it's a bargaining position. What I think he's trying to do is he's trying to see the cards that China and Russia are holding in their hands. Russia has been obliterated, basically, even though the war is still going on.

We always studied the Russian tactics, Russian weapons, and we had a concern. We had a very big concern in the U.S. Marine Corps, at least, if we had to go fight Russia on how we would be able to achieve success. After what I witnessed there... that I've seen on TV, of course, I have not been over in Ukraine or Russia, but what I've witnessed on TV and what I've witnessed on a lot of videos that I've seen, they were a paper tiger and we would have destroyed, we would have smoke checked them.

i'm very current very very positive of that china on the other hand we don't know so we need to find out what's what kind of cards they're holding what's their plan i don't think we will ever see and this is my personal belief a reduction in military that does not allow us to be the dominant force in the world. Not as long as President Trump's president, or, you know, that the, I will say it this way, that the...

The team in the White House and running everything is concerned about the survival of the United States. I don't think we'll ever see that. We cannot afford to ever be number two, period. There are too many people that will... If we're number two, they're going to act on that. We have got to maintain peace through strength. And I think we will.

That's my personal belief. That's the old T-shirt we used to wear back in the 80s. It said peace through superior firepower, right? I mean, that was the thing. Colonel, but as I mentioned earlier, I mean, we obviously have problems and I'm not talking about, you know, militarily. We're still obviously the dominant force, but we've got problems with the spending. We've got problems with waste, fraud and abuse. So as someone who is in the.

in the chain, in the chain of command, probably saw tons of waste, fraud, and abuse and everything else. What is your suggestion now as an outsider looking in going, okay, we need to remain dominant? We need to remain number one. We need to focus what we need to do. But we've also got billions of dollars that are being wasted in this bureaucratic system and everything.

If you were king for a day, what would your magic wand, what would you do with that? And how would you fix the problems that are going on? You know, I mentioned it earlier, the Pentagon hasn't passed an audit in... seven, eight, nine years now? We've got to do something. Well, I've lived through sequestration in the Marine Corps years back when they cut all the budgets, cut all the spending.

When I was a young officer in the Marine Corps, and this is not an exaggeration, there was no money for things like toiletries. So we would, the officers often in the senior Marines, senior staff NCOs would bring toilet paper and soap. into the squadron because there was no money. Now, where was that money going? I don't know, but I know we did it. If you wanted to paint your office, you would go out, you'd go to the store and you'd buy paint.

and paint a marine on a marine corps base you paint your own office we do not want to go back to that uh it's difficult you're not equipped uh and some of my marine brethren from back in the day will remember when we didn't have ammunition to train with we were not a fightable force right as a cobra pilot

we would get ammunition, but it was never what we ever felt like as Cobra pilots enough to train. And when OIF, when the second Iraq, OIF and OEF, Afghanistan kicked off, we were... dangerous when i say dangerous we could fight we got all the ammo we needed we got all the weapons we needed to train with before we went into combat and we were putting out across every service an incredible fighting force

Now, right now, we're running out of marine sailors, soldiers and airmen that have combat experience because all of the people that fought the first 20 years, when Iraq and Afghanistan ended, a lot of them are out. And now the people that are still in are very, very senior. So that becomes a whole different problem. Right. You have to spend money on training so you don't lose in warfare. Right.

That said, we've got to be efficient. Our company worked a project for the Department of Veterans Affairs a few years ago, and what we do is a thing called category management. If I was king for a day, The Marine Corps, the Navy, the Air Force, everybody would do category management. And that's, in essence, a way to ensure everything you're currently doing is efficient. We help the VA save.

and this is their numbers not mine 2.4 billion dollars in less than three years and at the time we were about a 20 person company we had four or five people working on that contract And so if I were king for a day, I'd bring out the scalpel, not the grenade. You know, we're doing some grenade style cuts, which are needed because, you know, God, God bless with President Trump.

and elon musk and everybody's going through right now trying to save this country eventually we run out of money so we've got to do it i just would like to see it a little more surgical take Small companies that can do category management, analyze every bit of the contracting systems that the military is using DOD. And like what we did for the VA, we just.

in essence imagine this scenario this is what they told us a thousand va hospitals and i'm somewhat exaggerating but not a lot we're buying the same stuff from the same suppliers all with a different contract all paying a different price Now, take that across the entire institution, an entire enterprise. What our team did, and we had some help, we didn't do it alone, but it was a very small team, analyzed every contract.

categorized them and made them efficient. And then the VA came up and said, hey, you know what? You guys have saved us $2.4 billion. Our company's doing that for HHS right now on a smaller scale. But that could be done across the board and should be done. We can take that money. You don't have to give it back necessarily, but put it to weapons.

put it to bullets right well i mean and again you're right i mean this isn't just you know this is like ramping to the to the 10th power right because you've got bureaucracies in every thing that are protecting their own little fiefdoms and i'll do my own contract

And I'll do all this over this. And I've got to I've got to prove that my job is necessary. So they continue to, you know, make things more difficult and throw stumbling blocks. And this is the nature of bureaucracy. And this is what we've got today, like you said, where. We can't get bullets to people who need bullets to train, who need real ammunition to go train.

And and it's a prioritization, like you said, categorization and prioritization problem. And of course, this is what happens when you get politics involved. This is, again, part of the whole problem with. You know, congressional critters who are in there, you know, crying about, you know, making sure that they get their piece of the pie. It may not be as efficient, but it's the politics of concession. You know, oh, if you want this bill, then you've got to.

bring part of it over here. And it causes these baked in inefficiencies that are part of the major problem, right? Well, it is. The people that are serving our country, the men and women, you know what they really want to do? They want to train. They want to train. They want to go out. They want to shoot their weapons. They want to maintain their vehicles. They want to fly their airplanes. If we focus.

money on that, and we focus money on war fighting, which Secretary of Defense Hagsath, as well as President Trump has stated over and over again, then what's going to happen is we're out of the years where nobody was coming in the military, right? Now people are coming in because we've got a strong leadership. Now we need to put those individuals in, get them trained up, and they're ready to go. That will scare our adversaries, and in the end, we're saving money.

Well, and what happens when we lose one ship. Right. Well, and we're focusing on, again, like you said earlier, we're focusing on the warfighting. There's no more. Well, I'm sure it's still going to happen, but there's a lessening in politicization. You know, you get the DEI, the inclusive stuff, all the cultural things that they were trying to force into the military, which, of course, again, caused the enlistment to decline.

Nobody wanted to make a mess of that kind of stuff. And the same thing happened, by the way. When I was getting out of high school, I was considering the military and considering the Corps at that time and other things. And my father, who was... military veteran, we had a discussion about what was going on at the time with the White House. And it was like, this was not a good time to join. This is not a good time to join the military because there was no support.

And that's not what people wanted. It's one of the reasons why I chose not to do it. And that's kind of the same thing. People were in a down cycle. Now they see strong leadership, whether you agree with the president or not. It is strong. Pete Hegseth has got his number one goal. supporting warfighting, being number one, again, talking about looking for efficiencies and cutting the waste, fraud, and abuse.

This resonates with Americans, and I think that's the important part, maintaining our dominance while doing it in the most cost-effective way. We have to cut out some of the bureaucracy in that regard to make that whole system efficient. Absolutely. And just on a thought on the DEI piece, and I want to be very clear on this. Every mother and father that has a child, son, daughter, or husband or wife.

that joins the military should demand that only the highest and best qualified people are their leaders, are flying their airplanes, are driving their tanks, are training them. Only the best. I know when all the time that I spent in the Marine Corps, I can tell in my personal belief, I have never seen anyone.

on the Marine Corps side that I did not think earned everything by themselves. Not because of their race, not because of their gender, and not because of their ideology. They earned it because they were the best.

And that's how we have to be. No man or woman who gets promoted should ever be looked at and be thought of it, well, they got that because they're a lady or they got that because... you know they're asian or white or whatever it should only because of their performance and every american should demand that not just in the military but at every job you're not gonna i don't care the the surgeon that

is working on me where they came from i don't care if they're a man a woman white black asian i don't care as long as they're the best right it's irrelevant to me as long as they're the best but what i don't want to do is have surgery by someone that says well you know i got picked to be a surgeon only because i'm this right not because i'm great right i'm ex demand that

Right. Well, and that's the benefits of a meritocracy is you're always guaranteeing that you're working with the best in the long run. Because that's what it's about. It's not about just checking a box or filling a quota or doing whatever. And I mean, it's the old Marine Corps saying that there is no black, there is no white. Everything is... Amphibious Green. That's what it is. So we're going to continue here. We're talking with Colonel William Dunn.

author of the book Gunfighter's Rule. We're going to talk about the book here in just a moment. When we return, Don't Go Anywhere, The Michael Duke Show. Common Sense, Liberty-based, free-thinking radio. We'll be back with more in just a moment. Don't forget, you can always check us out on Facebook, facebook.com slash MichaelDukeShow.

slash live if you want to join us in the chat room right now just you me and 80 of our closest friends talking to colonel dunn during the break we'll be back common sense liberty based free thinking radio We're broadcasting live through a series of tubes. Allowing all of these entities to provide streaming stuff going on the internet. Well, it's kind of hard to explain. Sorry. Streaming live every weekday morning on Facebook Live and MichaelDukesShow.com.

All right. Back in the break now. Colonel Dunn is our guest. You know, I get some heat sometimes, Colonel, because I'm a libertarian, right? so people on the left hate me people on the right hate me for certain positions it's just the way it is but one of the few things that i um i i

What I wholeheartedly agree with is that one of the things that's provided for, and in fact, one of the main mandates of the Constitution is national defense. And it's something that we should be spending on. But again, the main caveat to that is we have to be spending on it.

efficiently. And that's where we've kind of fallen astray is that, you know, we're, we're again, the grace report back, you know, this is Ronald Reagan days. This is back in my high school days. They were talking about $600 hammers and golden toilet seats. And so this. This has been going on for a long time, and I don't know how we cut it out. You talked about the hand grenade versus the scalpel kind of thing. I don't know how we cut it out.

With a scalpel to begin, I think the grenade has to go in first as a clearing method so that we can then go in with the scalpel and cut out the remainder pieces. But it's got to be a bit of shock and awe at the beginning, doesn't it? I mean, really? Well, it does. The grenade needs to be thrown at anything that looks like it's fraud, waste, and abuse. Throw the grenade there. Figure that out. We've all lived in the military.

where you can't get a part. We used to not be able to get a part, a little tiny part shipped to us. It would cost thousands of dollars. And then probably in the Gulf War area, people started using UPS and DHL. to ship stuff. And someone was like, well, you just shipped a part via DHS or DHL? And they're like, yeah. And it was literally like an epiphany, right? Because we would wait for all the parts, you ship them all over, it would take forever.

And I don't know when that became officially commonplace, but think of the savings that took in the speed, because I've had to wait for parts that were sitting in a room in North Carolina. for 30 days because I couldn't get them shipped.

Now, it doesn't happen often. Right. Well, because of the bureaucracy, right? I mean, you've got to have a form filled out in triplicate with 16 triple F's and somebody else has got to sign off on whether or not it needs to be shipped and everything. And yet somebody discovered, hey. Get the FedEx guy will be by to pick it up in five minutes. Right. And then they'll ship it and they discovered the efficiencies. I mean.

That's the kind of that's I mean, that's where you need a logistician or, you know, supply quartermaster who could really knows the behind thing. Right. Those are the guys you grease the palms up. Hey, I need this right away. They know all the tricks, but that's the kind of stuff that should be commonplace. That would help tremendously in that efficiency. Yeah, and I think we're there for shipping things. We've solved that. For the most part, we've solved that.

But everything needs to be looked at. You know, it's shocking to me. When I was a young lieutenant, we would fly no less than 30 hours every month. Period. We knew we were flying about 10 times greater than our adversaries on purpose. Because we know how much they fly. And we can't, I can't explain. I can't explain any more than that, but we know how much they fly. Right. So our goal was always to fly about 10 times more than them. And we were better pilots, safer pilots.

You know, when I left the fleet one time when I was a captain, they had gone from 30 hours a month to about five. And we lost a lot of Marines during that two or three year period. We cut flying back. We lost a lot of people because they crashed. Right, because they didn't have the experience. That's the problem by cutting too much. Yeah.

No, and I think it's imperative. I mean, some people look at it as waste when you're like, oh, you're spending bullets, you're burning fuel, you're doing. But I mean, if your one point is to be there in case there is something important that happens and you have to go to.

war, whether it's a real war or just some kind of action, you've got to have the training and the expertise. I mean, we talk about this all the times in firearms training. You have to have the training. You have to have the muscle memory. You have to have the... You have to know what the recoil feels like. You have to know all those things. You can't just buy a gun, slip it into your belt, and be like, I'm ready. You have to know.

You have to have the training. You have to understand that. And the same thing goes, of course, for our military as well. And it's a frustrating thing to see that this is where we're at. And especially, again, since we know that this... Waste, fraud and abuse has been going on for so long for most of my adult life. We've known about it. And yet we're still struggling with it. And it and I don't know.

I mean, like I said, I was not a fan of the president's. I did vote for him because the other option was not appealing. But at the same time. You know, he's done some amazing, I mean, I've been amazed, you know, the speed at which he's moved here. And sometimes I think it takes that shock and awe to basically rattle the cages of the bureaucracy.

and maybe get something done. We've got about 40 seconds here before we rejoin. Yeah, he knows what he's doing. He's hurting some feelings, but like you say, we have to. Think about the border. and all the people they're ejecting out of the country right now that were criminals and people are trying to stop that yeah

Yeah, it's crazy stuff. We're talking with Colonel William Dunn, author of the book Gunfighter's Rule. We're going to talk about the book now here in the next segment, and we will continue. Please like and share.

If you're on YouTube, you can subscribe and ring the bell, but you can share it from any platform, whether you're on YouTube or Facebook or Rumble. Just click share and we'll get more folks involved in the conversation. Let's get to it. Here we go. The Michael Duke Show, Common Sense Radio. Public Anima number one. Oh wait, sorry.

uh enemy public enemy number one which makes more sense on the other hand he's a little bit of a pain in the uh michael duke show i am uh i'm not i'm an angel absolute angel that's all there is to it just ask my mom she'll tell you all about it all right welcome back to the program it is the michael duke show joining us this morning is colonel william dunn usmc He is the president of Strategic Resilience Group and author of the book Gunfighters Rule.

And he's been talking with us this morning about the state of our military, the state of cuts, the budgets, his insights into what could be done to curb some of the waste, fraud and abuse in the military. some of the things that he's talked about but i want to talk about his book um which uh is uh is out and available right now um so colonel

What was the genesis of writing this book? What triggered you to write this book? What was the aha moment where you said, I got to put pen to, I mean, I'm a Marine. I eat crayons and everything else. I didn't realize I was supposed to write with them, right? I mean, so what do we do here? What was the first? point that made you say, I got to write a book. So I was a, I was a forward air controller during Operation Iraqi Freedom. And so I was in a school in Quantico, Virginia.

which out of the war, I'm not making it to the war because the war is kicking off and I'm in school. And I decided to find a way to get into the fight. So next thing you know, I'm a relatively senior Marine. I ended up being a forward air controller. The listeners that may not know what that is, I was controlling Cobras, Hueys, jets to drop bombs on the bad guys. So during that time frame, I joined up with an infantry.

Battalion, Lima, and I was with Lima Company 3-7, 3rd Battalion, 7th Marines, out of 29 Palms, California. I met them over in Iraq, and we went to war. And so I had been a student. About three weeks later, I was fighting in Iraq. We talked about being always ready. We have to be always ready. So I stayed with that battalion and I kept a journal in all of our fights and all of our battles we were going through.

Some were very significant. Others were relatively benign. And all the Marines in the track kept telling me, hey, sir, you need to write a book. You need to write a book. So fast forward a few years, I became a squadron commander of the gunfighters. HMLA 369 out of Camp Pendleton, California. I end up back in Iraq. And a lot of stuff happened during that tour. I was able to bring every Marine and Sailor back home and all of our aircraft back home.

But we fought, we fought hard and we took the fight to the enemy. A lot of things happened in my 33 year career. A lot of personal things happened to me. And then one day after I returned from Iraq for the, I don't know, the fourth time, I guess, third or fourth time. I started writing, and it was a very stressful book to write. It takes me from the time when I was a little kid, my father died. I really had no direction, and the Marine Corps gave me direction.

I joined up when I was 17 and that the book starts, I guess the book starts when I was about 10 years old and takes you all the way through my command in Iraq. And the book obviously chronicles your whole career coming through. I'm assuming it's a memoir, right? Stories of what took place, what happened, life lessons learned. What can what can people expect to to pull out of the book other than obviously your full story?

Are there lessons to be learned here? Do you pontificate on things that could be done, things that could be done better, what we've learned and what we could do more of? I do. I do. And I think my wife and daughters both read the book. They're both in the book. And they'll tell you this is about resiliency and determination. You know, as a young lad, I had a bunch of stuff happen to me and I had to make a decision. Was I going to be a success or a failure?

And then when I joined the Marine Corps, I love the Marine Corps. You know, the Marine Corps, I won't say the word, but the Marine Corps is a fickle lady. And sometimes the Marine Corps and Marines in the Marine Corps don't do things that you expect. And believe it or not, when I was in Iraq, we would take the fight to the enemy and my Marines did some very amazing heroic things. People did not like that.

Some of my leaders were pissed off that some of my Marines saved some soldiers one day because the method they saved their life. They were mad. And so one thing I talk about the book is I was almost fired as a squadron commander, probably. probably three times seriously almost fired, about six times that there was the talk about it. And as a commander in combat, you're dealing with that.

while you're fighting your squad, you know, making sure all your Marines and sailors stay alive. So it's a very stressful book. What I would tell the readers, if you want to pick up a copy, it's stressful. My daughters have read it. They'll they'll read it. They'll laugh and then they're crying and then they're appalled all within a couple of chapters. But I just warn you out. It's stressful.

Yeah. Even when I read it, I get stressed out. Yeah. Cause you're reliving it. I mean, that's the thing. You have a mission, you have something you're supposed to do. And then when you do it and you do it well, and somebody says, well, I. I didn't like the way you did it. You did it. You accomplished the mission and hit the goal. But at the same time, I didn't like the way you did it. And so now you're I mean, again, this goes back to that.

Ramping in the bureaucracy and everything else of armchair generals who are in the background with the political consent. This has always been the problem, right? It's always the political considerations are taking a precedent over the actual material. and realistic things that are going on out in the field, so to speak. Well, that's right. In commanders, every commander knows this. You are responsible for everything.

Period. You can share some responsibility. You can share some decision making, but you can't share responsibility. You are responsible for everything. and when things go well you don't necessarily expect to get a pat on the back you want your marines to get a pat on the back but you as the commander you don't need it right because when you see your marines doing well that's what you want

When someone comes up and tells you that your Marines just did something great and they don't like what your Marines did, that will piss you off as a commander. And that will, in some cases, I've seen commanders get enraged over it, rightfully so, because... People that are at the tip of the spear are fighting and fighting, and those are the ones that oftentimes get questioned on their decisions.

Right. Yeah. You know, again, the bureaucrats and there are bureaucrats, even in the core, in the hierarchy and everything. They're not they're not out there under life and death decisions making, you know, having to make those calls and make those decisions. And to have those second guests by some guy who's sitting behind a desk at the Pentagon has got to be.

I mean, I can't imagine. One of the most infuriating things ever, I would imagine. Like I say, it worked out great. I was, you know, spoiler alert, I was not relieved. Or else I probably wouldn't be having this conversation. Right, right, right. But, but yeah, there was some times I would, I would, you know, email and call my wife and say, I think I'm coming home. I think I'm coming home tomorrow. So, yeah. Well, you know.

I've been married to her for, heck, my entire time in the Marine Corps I've been married to her, so she's used to it. Yeah, she's used to it now. Well, and again, something that I didn't mention earlier, I mean, you're a Mustang, so you came up from the... You came up from PFC all the way up to Colonel. I mean, that's not the normal path for most officers. And so you've seen it at every level. You've got a unique perspective. And, you know, you obviously don't have any quid in you.

It's, you know, it's hard, especially, again, when somebody from, you know, who's a ring knocker from somewhere who doesn't understand it down in the trenches. uh criticizes you on that i could see as how that would be kind of uh horrific overall but again you made it through and now you got the book i guess you got the last laugh right in that in that regard What I loved about being a prior enlisted guy, and I was a knucklehead, like a lot of young enlisted guys can be at times.

I'd be talking to these Marines when I was an officer, and they would be giving me an excuse about something. And I would tell them, I said, hey, man, I wrote that. I did that exact excuse. Right. And they're like, oh, okay. I was part of the E4 mafia. I know exactly what's going on here. Yeah, I know exactly what you're talking about. Right. I loved it. I still love the Marine Corps. Our company works for the Marine Corps right now.

uh we're working every day for them we're supporting them a lot of other dod agencies and uh it's it's been a great career i i still love the marine corps and one of my favorite things to do every day is when I get to sit in a room with Marines, soldiers, sailors, or airmen, active duty men and women, I get to do that very often. And every time I do it, I walk out of that meeting, I got a huge smile on my face and it's like a refresher. So I love it.

Yeah. Colonel William Dunn, our guest, author of the book Gunfighters Rule. Colonel, where can they find the book and anything else that you're doing, any writings or anything else? Where do they go? Yeah, so they can go to Amazon.com and any other place you can buy a book. I'll have a website up specifically for that book. And then I'm about done with my second book. It's called Linebacker Six.

And that, when I gave up command, I later became a Marine aircraft group commander. And then I became a new commander. And so I talk about that. Went back into combat in Iraq. Was almost in combat. I can't say where. But our mag was almost in combat. We were setting a stage for General Mattis. We talk about that in the book. And then we talk a little bit about some of the issues, if you will, out at US Stratcom, which I had a tour out there.

all right uh amazon or wherever you find books colonel william dunn author of gunfighters rule thank you so much my friend semper fi thank you for coming on board Yes, sir. Thank you so much for having me and hope everybody has a wonderful rest of the week. Hoorah. Out of time. Back with more. Hour two dead ahead. Hold on, Colonel. All right. We're in the break.

I always like to give the guests after we finish for the radio, just one more bat at the apple. Any, you know, two minutes or whatever, anything, any final thoughts on this? It's been a fun and. It's been a fun discussion this morning. I really appreciated it. So any final thoughts from you here before I let you go? Yeah. The men and women that are out there doing the do right now for this country.

are the best of the best. And I don't think any of them want anything given to them. They want to earn it. Obviously, there's some that probably do. Some people will join the military, want a free ride, if you will. But I think the men and women that are coming in are just as tough as we were and will take the fight to the enemy when they're asked to do so. And I'm not worried about our military. I'm not. I think they can kick everybody's butt.

I agree. I mean, you mentioned earlier the whole Russian paper tiger thing, because we've been worried about that for decades, right? We've been worried about the red machine. You know, we thought that...

They were going to grind us up. And there was a lot of – and I followed this. We don't normally do national politics on this show. Usually it's state politics. But I've been following the war with Ukraine since the very beginning. And every analysis, every strategic – a military planner that I've watched or read or listened to, and they've all been shocked at how much Russian...

They had been overhyped. I mean, it had just been overhyped that they thought it was going to be and they were being stopped by, you know, civilians with with with semi-automatic rifles at times and drones and all these other kind of things. And so I agree. We we are probably still the best trained, best honed.

most motivated fighting force in the world. And we've got to stay there if we want to maintain our dominance, not in a bad way, but again, peace through superior firepower. A hundred percent. We cannot. The moment we become second place, we're going to be in a war. And that has got to be what everybody thinks about. The moment we're number two, we're in a war.

Because we're no longer the biggest kid on the block and someone's going to take a swing at us. That's when it gets expensive. Yeah. Well, that's, again, we're the dominant force, but we're the dominant force for peace. And there are others who, well, I mean, Tiananmen Square. writ large, I think at that point is what it would look like.

Well, Colonel, I'd love to invite you back on the program to when Linebacker 6 comes out. I'd love to talk to you about that as well. And anything else that you have, feel free to email me or let me know if you've got something else you want to talk about. This has been a great... This has been a great conversation. And, I mean, like I said, since my love for the Corps probably colors it, but that's how it works. So I appreciate you coming on board this morning, Colonel.

Well, no, thanks for having me. What's your email? It's me at michaeldukeshow.com. M-E at michaeldukeshow.com. Two S's in there. So me at michaeldukeshow.com. Okay. All right. I'll shoot you a note, sir. Yeah, drop me an email and I'll reply back and we'll stay in contact. I'd love to have you back on. When is the book supposed to be out, you know? I'm not sure. I'm just finishing it up. Okay. All right. It's still got to go to publishers and all that, but yeah.

I've already done four trips to Alaska, and I'll be doing another one at some point. I love it. Reach out. I live down in the paradise. I live in the Riviera of Alaska, as some people are calling it now, down in Homer. the cosmic oh yeah you know the kilchers oh yeah yeah no no

You know that Katkin was a Marine, right? Yeah. Oh, yeah. No, I'm getting to know all the folks down here. I've just moved here recently, but I've been in Alaska my entire life. But, yeah, learning all the folks down here. It's a small town. It's a small town. You get to meet everybody at least once. So, all right. Well, Colonel, thank you so much for coming on board. It's always great to talk to you. And again, separate by my friend. Thank you. Yes, sir. Thanks. Thank you. Have a great day.

Colonel William Dunn, our guest here on the program. And that brings us up to State Senator Rob Myers, who joins us this morning, who's ready, been waiting in the wings. Hello, my friend. How are you? I'm doing all right. Trouble, how about yourself? You know, just another beautiful day in paradise, my friend. I was going to talk about all this other stuff, and I remembered at the last minute that Colonel Dunn was coming in, so I was like...

I had all the, I had myself all psyched up. I got up early this morning. I was reading all this backstory stuff and everything else. And then I was like, wait a minute, I've got to get, I, now I'm all agitated about all these things and I can't talk about it because. I got gas. Anyway, we're going to talk about some of your bills that are coming out and some of the discussions surrounding them. And I just wanted to say hi. You ready to tackle this?

we're ready to go when you are okay all right um well then we will uh we'll get into this here and uh jump back into it i'll i'll plop rob back into the green room don't eat all the donuts man don't don't eat all the donuts Um, they're virtual, so there are no calories, but you know, it's one of those things.

All right. Lots of comments in the chat room, guys. There's no way I'm going to be able to get through an hour's worth of comments in the next 90 seconds. But thank you for that. I did see some of them. I saw Brian mention a chunk of the $600 toilet seats is the complete. Compliance cost to prove this project was 25% recycle. Compliance with BAA not made from slave laborers from a minority. Yeah, I mean, that's part of the problem for sure. You know, that is part of the problem there as well.

I mean, Harold is just going mad out there. He's frothing at the mouth today, so we'll see what's going on. Miguel says, we need to show the world we will not be taken advantage of. We are America. Military, trade, or whatever, for those that have been to multiple wars, understand some sacrifices must be made first for the good.

will come quicker than anybody knows it, et cetera, et cetera. There's lots of good comments in here. You should just go back and scroll back and read some of the comments. It's good stuff. So let's get to it. Let's just do that. I'm not going to mess around with the rest of it. Let's go to The Michael Duke Show. Common Sense. Liberty-based. Everything in radio. Hour 2 is right now. Welcome to the party, pal.

The greed and the entitlement is astounding to me. This is a dumpster fire. That was just BS. Time to get a new perspective. We know just what you need and we've got just the cure. Open wide and prepare for steaming hot cup of freedom. I just don't fathom it. The Michael Dukes Show, streaming live across the world. Live around the world on the Internet at MichaelDukesShow.com and across the state of Alaska on this, your favorite radio station and or FM translator. Hello, my friends.

And welcome back to Wednesday's fastest tour. We just, we flew through the first hour. Our guest in hour one was Colonel William Dunn at USMC. talking about the waste, fraud and abuse and the military spending and what we need to do. He's an old-time warfighter and some great perspectives, and it was a good conversation. If you missed it, you can go back and catch it on the podcast, wherever you find podcasts, or...

You can go watch it on Facebook or YouTube or Rumble later today, whatever you want to do. Just go back and check it out. Not right now, because we're about to be jumping into hour two with our guest, State Senator Rob Myers, who is... Uh, get a talk with us about some of his bills and the state of the state and so much more. It's just another long form conversation with Rob, uh, that are always so enjoyable. And, uh, so I hope you, uh, hope you stick around.

for that let's uh let's just go ahead and get to it since we're already here we're already ready to go And Senator Myers is waiting in the wings. Let's get started. State Senator Rob Myers, our guest here this morning. Hello, sir. How's life in Juneau, the big city down there? It's good. This is a very busy week for us down here for a couple of reasons. One is we have three joint sessions in a row this week, which is kind of unprecedented. We had Senator Murkowski talk to us yesterday.

Senator Sullivan's going to talk to us tomorrow. And then today is the big vote on the Department of Agriculture executive order. And so we'll see how long the debate goes on that. I could see that potentially last in a while. And then on top of that, in the Senate, at least, it feels like it's Minority Bill Week. Of the six of us, I think we've got seven bills up for hearings this week. I've got the most. I've got three.

And then Senator Hughes has two. Senator Kaufman has one. And I think I'm forgetting one somewhere. But yeah, we've got quite a few up. You know, it's nice to see that we're getting some... some important things out on the table uh senator kaufman especially he's got his executive budget act rewrite uh up for hearing i believe that was yesterday afternoon i haven't seen how it went uh senator hughes has her sunset commission up

uh this week you know so maybe we can actually talk a little bit about you know how we fix this this problem that we're in right unfortunately we don't have hearings up on the spending cap yet that'd be that'd be nice too uh or on the push to constitutionalize the pfd um you know but uh hey we're heading in the right direction at least uh for myself like i said i got three bills up um nothing quite as

as big as, you know, a spending cap or something like that. But, you know, got some interesting ones up. I had one up on Monday. that was doing a little bit of occupational license reform, trying to make it easier to get a license to be what's called a conservator in this state.

If you happen to find yourself in a life state, usually for older folks, but occasionally for others as well, where the court judges, you can't handle your own money. They appoint somebody called a conservator to take care of that for you. And we've got a little bill to try to make it a little easier to get that license. Currently, to be a conservator, you have to get a license or a certification from this National Guardianship Group.

and the funny thing is that a lot of that stuff or that guardianship group it pertains to being a guardian which is when you take over somebody's whole life basically so you're not only handling finances but you're handling housing and you're handling all the medical decisions

This is just about financial decisions. And so the idea is instead of having to get that national certification, it's we'll let you get a conservator license if you already have your CPA license, because there's already a lot of overlap there. Right, right. So this would allow for CPAs, certified public accountants, for those of you who...

Keeping up at home to become the private professional conservators. And again, the difference between a conservator and a guardian is that conservator just handles their money, helps them manage their money and pay their bills and do that kind of stuff. Right.

correct correct yep it's just the financial side um you know uh you know we've we've got an aging population in this state and we know that there's going to be uh you know there's already a crisis in the guardianship side um and our hope here is that if we create a can can create a few more conservators that'll

open up a little bit more time for the folks that are doing the full guardianship because they don't have to handle the conservatorship side. You know, because we've got, like I said, we've got an aging population in the state. We're going to be needing more of both in the future. So this is one small way to help. So beyond that, I got two more bills up tomorrow.

The first one is one of your favorite topics. It's my resolution asking for an LNG Jones Act exemption. Right. Well, we talked a little bit about this and I got to be honest. Who do we talk to? We just talked to somebody about this. Oh, we were talking to JD2 Chili from Reason Magazine here recently. And I think I put...

Did I send you this information? I was supposed to send you his information, wasn't I? Because he's written pretty extensively about this. And actually, I turned him on to the story here in Alaska, and he wrote about it for Reason Magazine. after that because it is such a problem. But, yeah, this is this is a huge deal. And I would love to see some more in-depth discussions about this. What's the response on this bill been so far?

Well, you know, we'll see how the hearing goes tomorrow. So far, as we've been shopping and amongst our colleagues, people are intrigued. They're very interested, honestly, because...

You know, obviously, you know, what's taken up most of the news on the LNG front is we're talking about the gas line. And of course, that's best case scenario. We get the gas line built and, you know, we build a spur to Fairbanks and, you know, life is golden from... from here on out, you know, we build a full export plant and, you know, our gas costs drop, you know, significantly for both Anchorage and for South Central.

and uh and and life is golden we you know we're drilling we got a bunch more jobs up on the slope where our electricity costs are going to drop because we can use natural gas for electricity uh you can use natural gas instead of heating oil for our homes uh from the interior etc etc

And life is golden. But there's a lot of skepticism around the building as to whether or not that gas line is going to get built. We'll find out more, I think, this fall as they go through the feed study and they update the... the cost estimate because the last time they updated that was 2016. And, you know, we're hearing that there's potentially some interest from the Japanese that they

May or may not want to build our pipeline, but they still do want our gas. And so they're talking about direct shipment off the slope in icebreaking tankers. The Russians have been doing it since 2017. Russians even shipped one ship from that port on the... on the arctic coast over to boston in 2018 right they went over the top right they went over the top of canada and came back down on the east coast i mean and this is all great and well and good to have a pipeline and everything else but

Again, that's a 10-year fix. That's 10 years down the road. I mean, I know we said, hey, we built the pipeline in three years. Why can't we build? Well, because have you seen what it's like to try and build something these days? Hell, during World War II, we were building, I mean, one airport. Every, you know, six months they were building a new airport or doing something. And now try and get an airport built. It's a 20 year project. Right. So it's.

You know, this is that's a 10 year solution for an immediate problem. You know, having the long, the large diameter or even small diameter gas line built. We need you know, we need something. And a Jones Act waiver would allow us.

access our own gas not just for our own use but for export to other countries correct correct you know and and uh i was talking with uh one of the guys that's that's working on a project for direct export uh last week and uh they actually came and uh and uh presented to senate resources and It looks like we'll still have a little bit of a gap there because he said that it looks like the direct export probably still wouldn't be ready to go until about 2030. So we're going to have about it.

two or so year gap where we may need to import some gas from Canada or somewhere else. But it's going to get built faster than the gas pipeline. And, you know, it may have a little better chance at financing because it's a smaller investment.

It's smaller and lower risk investment. Right. Well, and Harvest is picking up. I mean, Harvest is doing all the work right now, right? I mean, there was an opinion piece from the leaders at Chugach Electric yesterday, the day before, where they were talking about this is happening, right?

And Harvest is fronting up all the monies. It's not costing the consumers or the electrical customers anything right now. They're already partnered. They're ready to go. They're doing feed. Most of the work has been done, as you mentioned already, on the plant down there, the Marathon plant. They just have to get the final certifications and final licensing and things like that. So, I mean, that's a problem. It will be online before running out in 2020 doesn't help.

hea or some of the other ones that just you know their contract runs out in a week but i mean it's it's going to be you know there are some solutions but getting that jones act waiver will open up the door for other options because then if we could get a tanker uh an ice breaking tanker or otherwise or a tanker with ice breakers and accompaniment they could um you know pull that gas from the north slope i mean there'd have to be some build out up there as well but

they could do that and ship it down and we'd be set until the gas line does or does not materialize. Correct. You know, we already know that we're going to be building an import plant somewhere in a cook-in that most likely, you know, might. my assumption is most likely they're going to be converting that marathon plant so that's that's point a there is a good chance that we will be building export plant on the slope probably somewhere around point thompson area so that's point b

So all this resolution is saying, please, Congress, let us connect point A and point B. That's what we're asking for here. We haven't built an LNG tanker in this country in... 50 years? Ever? I don't know. Have we ever built an American flagged LNG tanker? I, you know.

Technically, we did a long time ago. So when you first had LNG tankers taking LNG out of Cook Inlet in the 60s over to Japan, because we were one of the first in the world, those were actually American-built LNG tankers. But those tankers were... were i mean they were built in the 60s and they were retired i believe in the 2000s somewhere around there and so we we haven't built one since basically right

There isn't an LNG flag tank or an American built LNG tanker anywhere in the world right now. And there hasn't been for, you know. 15 years. And this is our problem is they are not Jones Act compliant. And so, you know, we could potentially be in a situation where we are watching our own gas.

heading down the coast over there you know around gnome and we are prohibited by federal law from accessing it right and so and the tankers we had were not the big tankers that with modern technology and i mean the tankers today probably hold five six eight ten times the gas that the smaller that the old ones did um and and your waiver is very specific it would only waive it until the time that the first american-made tanker hits the water and at that point

then the waiver would then expire and we'd be ready to go. But the problem would be solved at that point because then we would have already built out. And it's going to require, like you said, they have to build an export facility at Point Thompson. I'm sure they probably have to dredge up. I don't know where they'd put it, if it's a floating dock on the water.

floating lines out to wherever they're at. I don't know what the process is, but I imagine there'd be a lot of work that have to be done on the slope to be able to pull a big tanker in there and to fill it on the spot. So this is not an overnight fix. No, this is a four or five-year construction project. The dredging actually wouldn't be too bad. You've got a couple of spots, one near Point Thompson, another one out near, kind of between Eliktok Point and Milne Point.

where you really wouldn't have to do much dredging because they do have stuff close enough to the shore that's deep enough to put in a port large enough to accommodate these ships. But yeah, you'd have to build out the... the pipelines you got to build out the liquefaction plant you'd have to build out the dock and things like that and so yeah this is this is a few year construction project

So it's going to be a little while before it's completed, but it's going to be interesting to watch over the next couple of years to see which of these two projects is the one that does get the investment decision. You know, it's easier to ship gas out of Cook Inlet than it is off of the slope. You don't need as specialized ships and things like that.

But at the same time, it's a lot larger capital investment. So which direction are the national markets, the international markets going to want to go? Well, the big problem that we've always had the gas line is who's going to invest in it? Who's going to provide cash? And so that is what we're sitting on here now is, okay, we've got two potential viable projects. Which one are the financiers going to gravitate towards?

right and of course they're probably more likely to gravitate towards the liquefaction because i mean that could then be used later on to fill a pipeline i'm assuming not just fill a tanker but fill a pipeline on the way south if that's what was needed. It'll be interesting to watch. We're out of time for this segment. I do want to ask about...

Since the congressional delegation came in to speak, I wanted to know if you've talked to them about this as well. But we're going to continue in just a moment. Rob Myers is our guest. The Michael Duke Show. Common Sense, Liberty-Based, Free Thinking Radio. We will continue with more here in just a moment. Don't forget, come out and join us on Facebook if you'd like to be part of the conversation there. Facebook.com slash MichaelDukeShow slash...

Back with more right after this. If you missed the show, you can listen to it on your time with Dukes On Demand. Oh, and it's free. Like America used to be. Streaming live every weekday morning on Facebook Live and MichaelDukesShow.com. All right. In the break right now, Rob Myers is our guest. And. Sorry, I'm just reading some of the comments in the chat room. Never read the chat room while you're, excuse me, doing your thing. Whoa, good thing I had a sneeze button there. Rob Myers.

I guess I'll ask you in the break because I mean, congressional delegation was down there yesterday. Did you get a chance to talk to anybody about to talk to anybody about this, Lisa or whoever? about this jones act waiver or have you had any discussions with the congressional delegation what's uh what's that what's that like so i've been in contact with our congressional delegation since mid-january when we started putting this together and

The reception has actually been fairly interesting. We've heard that actually the Jones Act in general is getting some renewed attention, some renewed scrutiny because, you know, there's... uh more interest in uh uh you know kind of going along with the tariffs and everything else there's more interest in trying to buy things by american you know in effect and you know

As crazy as it sounds, the Jones Act actually gets in the way of that. Kind of what we've heard is there is probably not the appetite for a full-on Jones Act appeal. But there may be kind of some cracks for some more limited exemptions. And this one in particular is an interesting one because we know that President Trump is interested in Alaska. He recognizes our strategic location.

He has had some executive orders specifically trying to benefit us, removing a lot of Biden's executive orders, things like that. He wants us to be able to use our energy here. You know, our oil and gas is key part of what he wants to do nationally. And so, you know, trying to say, hey, can we use our own gas too, please? You know, that may strike a chord.

you know i think people are kind of holding off a little bit right now saying okay let's give it a year and see what happens with this feed study with the gas line and see where the where the investors start to flow But, you know, I think people are a lot more open to the concept than they have been in the past, is what I'm hearing from the congressional level. Well, I mean...

That's good. I mean, the momentum of this law that's 100 years old is just so astonishing. There's so many fingers in the pie and so many people are benefiting from various aspects of it that nobody wants it to go away. Although I think overall. it is I mean it hurts us it's so many different levels it's just but because somebody's getting paid somewhere in some way or benefiting somewhere in some way from it

They they don't want to lose their this is it's a it's a it's a snapshot of the problem with everything that's going on in government. I think the Jones Act is it really is because it's a law that should be repealed. Yeah, and the LNG thing to me in particular is interesting because it's like, okay, you can make an argument on, I don't know, container ships or oil tankers or some other.

types of ships about protecting American business and things like that. I'm sitting here thinking to myself, we don't have any LNG tankers. Who are we protecting? There's nobody that we're protecting here because there isn't one on the market um so it just seems you know incredibly redundant incredibly pointless uh to to have that

Well, they're stopping us from using our own materials. It's punitive at that point. It really becomes punitive. I mean, you you made the point, you know, at the beginning that the Jones Act was specifically aimed at Alaska to begin with. And so we've been punished for this for years. And of course, everybody else is being punished as well. Like you said, this idea that the tariffs are driving a return to made in the USA and everything else, it makes it very difficult if you can't find.

cargo ships or ways to move manufactured goods from one side of the country to the other if you have to do it all by rail or by truck and the cheapest way is over the water but you can't find the american-made you know, cargo ships or whatever to do it. I mean, again, it just penalizes Americans, which again is counterintuitive and punitive. And I just, I find it fascinating that this is where we're at on this. All right.

We'll continue. Rob Myers is our guest. We've talked about the first two bills. I think we've talked the Jones Act one through. Somebody had a question about conservatorship that I thought was interesting as well, but maybe we'll get back to that in the next break. But we'll come on to his other bills here in just a second. The Michael Duke Show, common sense, liberty based. free thank and radio like subscribe ring the bell do all the stuff and things here we go the michael duke show

Proudly splitting the left versus right dichotomy. Yeah, I had to look that word up too. I don't think it means what he thinks it means. There he is though, that guy, Michael Dukes, the one with the show. Yep, the one with the show. I mean, it's just self-gratification at this point. You know, that's all it says. Welcome back to the program, The Michael Duke Show.

Senator Rob Myers is our guest. We're talking about the bills that he has up for discussion this week. We've talked about the conservatorship bill. We've talked about the, which is SB 99. We've talked about the Jones Act waiver. for LNG ships. It's very specific. You should go read it. You should be watching it. That's SJR 11. And then the next bill that's up for reading and hearing this week is SB 25 talking about

judicial retention. Rob, what exactly does this cover? Okay, so those of you that have been voting in our general elections for a while, and are have been paying attention you notice that at the bottom of the ballot every year there's a number of judges that are up for what we call retention elections which is basically okay did you think this job this judge did a good enough job that they should hold on to it and um

It's just a yes or no, up or down vote on a judge. You know, there's no competition. Nobody's running campaigns, things like that. And, you know, and I don't know about you, but most of the time when I go to look at.

those judges i look at these names and you know unless it's somebody i know personally which i think there's one in the entire state uh i look at these guys and i go who's this um and you know there's there's a uh an election pamphlet that comes out every year uh the state mails it out in uh i think september every year and you know it goes through all the candidates for you know president vice president uh you know senate house

uh you know governor if we've got that up uh you know house and senate uh for at the state level and then at the very back it's also got information on the judges well the information on the judges is pretty bland there's there's there's very little of it And what you find out is if you go to the excuse me, Alaska Judicial Council, who screens these guys before they can get picked to be a judge by the governor, what they do is.

they actually collect a lot of information on these judges, on their personal and professional history and, you know, some various things they've done in the past. And we looked at that and we said, okay, no problem. let's just take all this in you know a bunch of this information that they already collect and let's put that out in the election pamphlet you know there's a there's a couple of pages on each judge in there right now um and

Pretty much the only thing that's kind of useful in there at the moment is the Judicial Council does surveys of folks that have dealt with each judge and said, OK, how do you think things went? You know, they survey.

the prosecutors and the defend the defense attorneys and jurors and i think one other group and say you know how do you think that it went and uh you know they then they recommend gay or nay and they almost always recommend yes retain them uh because you know hey we're the judicial council we thought we did a good job when we picked him anyway um they haven't had a a recommendation of a no since i think the 90s

but you know for us we want to be informed voters and what we have seen over the years uh especially the last about 15 or 20 years is that a lot of people are starting to just be very um kind of distrusting of the institution. They're starting to vote no across the board. And so if you look at the no votes, they've been trending upwards. Everybody is still being retained, but at a much, much lower level.

If you go up in the interior, the judges there are getting retained in the mid-50s, mid to upper 50s level, as opposed to 20 years ago when people were retained at the 70% level. Right. Well, it's because we don't have enough information. I mean, I've said it on this program. I have voted no for every judicial retention my entire adult voting life. Why?

There's not enough information. There's not enough. No, we don't know. You're asking me to vote on something to retain somebody that I don't. I'm not just going to go along to get along. I'm going to vote no because there's not enough information. They haven't given it out. They don't make it available. It's not.

like you know they have a public platform or they're you know they have a website i can go to to grade their you know that's part of the problem this whole retention system is stupid quite honestly um and i'm not saying that we should the judges, but there should be more to it than just should we retain them? Yes, no. I mean, that's all the information we've ever gotten. I've always voted no for that reason.

Well, you know, the funny thing is they actually do have a website and you can go find the information, but it takes a while to dig. And the weird part about the website to me, I just had a conversation with somebody from the Judicial Council about this about a month ago, is that...

you know, if you go to the legislature's website, it ends in .gov because, you know, government websites end in .gov, right? If you go to any of the executive branch websites, you know, DOT, the troopers, you know, DEC. you know department of education pick one it all ends in dot gov and so you know to me it's like oh okay well it's the official website's going to end in dot gov the judicial council website where they maintain some of this information

It's not a .gov website. They've got their website hosted elsewhere, and it's like a .us or something. And, you know, I look at that and I say, okay, this isn't the Judicial Council, then this must be somebody writing about the Judicial Council. And so I think that's going to throw some people off, too. So, yeah, you know, this is this is a transparency issue. This is we have some public servants in this state and, you know, it's our job as informed voters to go out there and.

and vote yes or no according to what we think about these guys. We put a check in our constitution to make them accountable to the electorate, but you can't have people accountable to the electorate when the electorate doesn't know what they're voting on.

So what is your bill? What is your bill change? I guess is what we should we should get to that part of this whole thing. So what exact I mean, those are all the problems. And I agree that this has been a problem for a long time. Like I said, for my entire adult life, I've been voting.

no because of the lack of information and everything else but what so what does your bill do what is this what is this judicial retention reform do so it it requires uh both the judge and the judicial council to put some more information into that election pamphlet to put some information that is actually going to be useful for us so for example

information regarding the professional activities of the justice or judge, including public outreach and administrative activities. So they have different committees and stuff inside the judiciary that do certain things. So what committees are they serving on? What are they doing there? you know, information reg

What kind of things did you do as a lawyer before you became a judge? What kind of clients did you serve? Were you a defense attorney? Were you a public interest attorney? Were you a prosecutor? Some things like this. you know, how how often any of your rulings have been overturned by a higher level court. You know, let's see. We still keep the ratings in there from law enforcement officers, attorneys, court system, employees and jurors. You know.

We're a description of any public disciplinary proceedings against the judge because those do happen, but they don't usually make the news unless they're really bad. Right.

so uh you know these are the and and then you know a couple of pieces from the judge asking them uh about you know kind of a self-assessment and and you know kind of how they view their role as a judge and uh you know this is know it's like guys let's just put a let's just put a little information out here if we want people to um if we want people to vote on these judges you know and that's what our constitution says we're going to do then let's

Let's give us an opportunity to have informed voters. We don't want judges going out and running campaigns because that just invites corruption. That's what places that elect judges straight up have discovered.

You know, we want to have informed voters. We want to have some transparency in our judiciary, in the process. You know, I mentioned... we we're having some distrust in the system in alaska we're having some distrust in the judicial system nationwide right right it's been been growing for the last few years and so you know this is i think part of a nationwide push let's uh

make things a little bit more transparent. And, you know, this is how you restore trust in a system is you make it more transparent and accessible to the folks that have to deal with that system. What about changing the way that the, I think part of the problem. that I personally have is part of the appointment process because it's kind of one of those self-licking ice cream cones where you've got lawyers and judges picking judges instead of, you know, instead of it being a broader base.

You know, it's the Judicial Council nominations, right, who are that are that are bringing these these potential judges to put them on the bench. And it's essentially I mean, well, historically, it's been a lifetime appointment at that point, you know, until they're ready to retire.

And so what about changing the process for there? Because there are other states do things. Some do the elected thing. And I'm not saying that that's a good idea, but there are other ways to appoint these judges and other ways for the nominations of these judges.

Are we looking at that or is that something down the road that you think would would make sense to look at? So the governor actually has a constitutional amendment he just put out, I think, last week on this. And what it does is it changes. Excuse me, it changes it slightly so that instead of the Judicial Council screening all of the applicants and then forwarding names to the governor.

what they would do is they would simply review the applicants and the governor can pick from anybody that applies. So that's an interesting. an interesting twist on it uh mike shower had a bill out a few years ago that would have altered it because what he noticed is that constitutionally we have two levels of judges there's the supreme court and there's the superior court

Statutorily, we've got three other levels of judges. There's magistrates, district court, and court of appeals. And constitutionally, only the superior Court and the Supreme Court have to be appointed through the Judicial Council. And so he had a bill that took those other three and said, all right, you guys are going to get appointed by the governor, but then you're going to get confirmed by the legislature.

and to create some more transparency there and give some folks a different look. That's an interesting way of going about it. His bill didn't pass. we'll see what happens with the governor's constitutional amendment constitutional amendments are you know generally you know pretty high bar um and i think that you know the folks that are in charge of the uh committees in both the house and the senate right now are

relatively favorable to the court system and so i question you know how far if it's going to go you know if it's even going to make it to the floor right for that two-thirds vote But it's good to keep the conversation going to help keep people aware of how the system works.

and you know what the potential pitfalls are all right these three bills are up for this week so tell us when and where we can hear them and if we can comment on them etc etc give us that here we've got about a minute and a half here so tell us the three bills where they're at where do we go etc etc before we go to break so the conservatorship bill uh got heard monday uh we have not had public testimony yet on it but you're welcome to

uh send in your uh your emails to either myself or to send it to the labor and commerce committee uh sgr 11 the jones act waiver goes up for hearing tomorrow in senate transportation It's not public testimony just yet, but again, you're welcome to send in your emails. The SB25, the judicial retention election information, is up for public testimony tomorrow. in Senate State Affairs at 3.30.

And so you're welcome to call in. Again, you can send in email testimony to either myself and we'll get it to the committee or send it to the Senate State Affairs Committee directly. And that's where we sit with those three right now. Senator Rob Myers is our guest. We're going to continue with him here in just a moment. We're going to talk about the state of the state, maybe the state of the nation, the fiscal issues that are facing us, and more. Our favorite topic.

So don't go anywhere. Come back in just a moment for State Senator Rob Myers, The Michael Duke Show. Common Sense, Liberty-based, free thinking radio. If you missed the show, you can listen to it on your time with Duke's On Demand. Oh, and it's free. Like America used to be. Streaming live every weekly morning on Facebook Live and MichaelDukesShow.com. Okay, in the break.

state senator rob myers you had a couple other bills that are already up and they they're going through the process as well right rob yep um i had uh one bill uh that would i actually got kicked out of committee uh last week we got uh We were waiting to hold a hearing on it in the next committee soon. So that's SB 9 having to do with infant safety devices or what some people call baby boxes. We've got what's called a safe surrender law in this state. Every state does, which says.

Basically, if you don't want your infant, and in Alaska that's defined as 21 days and younger, you can take your baby and surrender it to a doctor, a nurse, a firefighter, police officer, somebody like that. and you won't be held accountable for it. They take the baby, they send it over to OCS, they put them up for adoption. What this bill would do is it expands it to what 22 other states are doing, which is you put this.

little climate controlled box in the wall at a hospital or a fire station or place like that to let somebody surrender their infant anonymously because what we're finding is that some people don't want to surrender They may not want their baby, but they don't want to surrender directly to a person. And so this provides another opportunity for that, because even though we've had the safe surrender law around since 2008, we've actually found three babies on the side of the road.

two of them deceased, one more that was fortunately found alive and saved, two in Anchorage, one in Fairbanks in the last few years. So that's what we're trying to prevent. We're just trying to save lives here a little bit. The other one that we had a hearing on last week, no, excuse me, two weeks ago, but hasn't been kicked out, it's also in Senate State Affairs, is our prisoner tablet bill.

There are a number of states that are starting to use tablets inside of penitentiaries, and what they are finding is that they can actually increase security because you can start to do some things like... telehealth and mail and things like that you can do them remotely rather than through uh through the you know having people having to go through prison gates

And that increases security, cuts down on contraband, actually makes things a little cheaper because, you know, let's say you want to take a guy, a prisoner to a doctor's office. You don't have to have two guards and a van to take him. You can... potentially do it over telehealth instead. And then it also lets them get their GED or run through some other classes that generally help lower recidivism rates.

And, you know, save us money that way because we're not letting these guys go and then arresting them again in a year and putting them back in prison. So I imagine you're getting some pushback from that one on the law and order crowd because criminals don't need iPad.

Right. I mean, I'm hearing that a lot, but I mean, there are advantages to it. But at the same time, it feels like it's club med sometimes where you hear some of the things that are going on in there. But what's the response on that bill, Ben? You're right. You know, we've had both some support and some pushback. You know, my theory on this is, no, we're not trying to coddle everybody. You know, the things that they're going to be letting them do is fairly limited.

you know the tablets are locked down it's not like these guys are going to be you know getting this tablet and you know spending all day on facebook or anything like that you know because we all know that you know we we don't want them interacting with the public that's the whole point of prison right um So they're really locked down on the software and what they actually have access to and on the hardware side. And they're not giving them and said, okay, this is yours until you're gone.

uh no you're giving them for certain periods of time for certain you know for certain activities specifically and if you misbehave you lose it um And but, you know, again, this is about, OK, how can we increase security? How can we decrease costs? How can we and especially about. how can we help people re-enter society once they're out of prison? Because, let's face it, 95% of the guys that are in jail are going to get out and going to have to reintegrate back into society at some point.

And we have to be prepared for that. And we have to, in a lot of ways, prepare them for that because a lot of these guys are in prison because they didn't finish high school. They didn't do some of the things or... that, you know, helped you and I and others become productive members of society, and we're going to have to get them there. Otherwise, you know, let's just be honest about what we're doing and just hand out everybody a life sentence and, you know, well then...

Well, there's no, you know, there's no, no need to go to reducto ridiculous. Right. But I mean, you know, should we be offering pickleball lessons for inmates and, you know, all this other kind of, you know. I mean, there comes a point, there's a balance, right, between preventing recidivism and, you know, and bettering these guys so that when they come out, they're productive members of societies.

just coddling them and giving them experience that they're like we love this kind of thing you know what i mean there's there's got to be a balance there somewhere there absolutely does have to be and and i agree with that and you know i'm uh i i think part of the reason that that folks have come with these you know

then started doing these tablets in a number of other states because you know we started to realize maybe we swung a little too far the other way you know we took the hard-on crime thing and we made hardened criminals So, you know, maybe that's the situation that we're in. So no pink panties and green bologna for us is what you're saying is the, you know.

You know, we're not trying to coddle these guys. We're just trying to give them some skills so that they don't reoffend when they get back out. All right. Rob Myers, our guest. We're ready to jump back into it. The Michael Duke Show, Common Sense, Liberty Bay, Free Thicket Radio. The Michael Duke Show. Seriously humorous with a pinch of intellect. Pinch of intellect. Sorry. That is humorous. Here's Michael Dukes. Okay. State Senator Rob Myers is our guest.

The Michael Duke show. Even the headline in the ADN grabbed my attention this morning. In regards to the address to the legislature from Senator Murkowski, where she talked about she criticized the traumatizing mass federal fire firings, although. It was pointed out that the fact that the number of losses in the state federal workforce was 0.7% in the number of positions like in the U.S. Forestry Service, et cetera, et cetera.

But we've been talking about this a lot, Rob, that as you cut things and whether it's doge at the national level or whether it's us here in the state trying to go through. and find efficiencies in a state where we're running a massive hundreds of millions of dollars in deficit. As we find ways to trim back, although... There's no political will to trim to the level that I think needs to be done and that many of the listeners think need to be done. Any cuts?

are going to have effects they're going to have impacts somebody's going to we're all going to feel the pain right it's austerity measures With austerity measures, everyone's going to feel the pain. People are going to lose their jobs. Programs are going to lose their funding. Constituencies are going to stop receiving monies that they've received in the past. Maybe they've depended on, et cetera, et cetera.

But the bottom line is, again, to go back to the medical analogy, it's much better to get sick from the cure than it is to die from the disease. And that's really kind of where we're at. Right. I mean, it's tough to lose a limb to gangrene, but it'd be tougher if you died. Right. I mean, there are there is some pain. There is some things that need to happen.

And and that's what I think we're facing right now at both a national and a state level. Nobody's willing to. Everybody wants to say it's a chicken in every pot and everybody's going to be fine and don't worry about it. The problem is, is that if we don't do something. It will be worse for either everyone feels a little bit of the pain now or it'll be worse for everyone when the wheels come off the bus, when we drive over that fiscal cliff, right?

No, that's 100% accurate. You know, what I've been telling people for a few years now is that what we're doing at the state level with the permanent fund, the feds have been doing for years now with debt. And the difference between those two is the permanent fund can go away and be gone, and then we're stuck. Debt, at least in theory, is infinite, right? Now, we all know that it causes problems, and we found that out in the last few years because...

The massive increase in federal spending and federal deficit spending causing a huge ton of inflation. We actually had some interesting testimony in the transportation committees here in Juneau a couple of weeks ago that touched on that. The Department of Transportation commissioner was giving an update on infrastructure projects, highway projects, things like that to the transportation committees. And he said something very interesting to me.

he said that we had uh all this infrastructure money come through from ija and a couple of other bills about one of those passed around 21 22. And that money has been flowing into the states, not just Alaska, but around the country. And we all thought, oh, great, we're going to get all this money. We're going to build a bunch of stuff. We're going to put people to work in the construction industry.

We're going to really upgrade our infrastructure, get rid of some of the deferred maintenance backlog, things like that. And what we found out is that by the time we actually went to build these things, the inflation. had cut the buying power of that money so much that we were effectively back to before the bills were passed.

And we're back to square one here. And so this is indicative to me of what is going to happen to us if the feds don't get their house in order is they can send us all the money in the world, whether it's, you know. money that goes to the state for us to put out on highway projects or to pay for Medicaid or what have you.

or go out to direct spending in terms of the military or other federal employees or federal grants to nonprofits around the state, something like that. But if the feds don't get their house in order, They are going to cause so much inflation that it doesn't matter how much money is coming out.

It's all going to get eaten up by the inflation. And, you know, there's a self-licking ice cream cone for you. You know, well, we have to send out more money because it's getting eaten up by inflation. But then we cause more inflation. So we have to send out more money.

You know, there's there's the snowball effect and it's pointless. You know, at what point do you say, all right, guys, we have to stop because this is, you know, the only thing that is changing is the number of zeros in the in the.

ledger sheet here we're not actually making a difference in people's lives anymore because we're undercutting our own efforts well i mean i i i would agree i mean that's part of the problem is again that inflationary measure is eating it up but the root cause of all this as you and I have talked about so many times, is the spending versus revenue, right? I mean, that's the problem, is the spending versus revenue. And that's...

I mean, that's a huge, huge problem at the national level, obviously. And that's where a lot of this inflationary pressure is coming from. But we're playing into it here as well in the state of Alaska, where we continue to overspend. As you talked about, we spent down the CBR. We did not curtail our appetite for spending even when we knew that there was no money to replace it or potentially. I mean, maybe we didn't know.

But, you know, the heydays, the bumper crops of the 2007-2008s, that doesn't happen. That's like a once-in-a-lifetime bump where oil goes up to $150 a barrel. I mean, that happens, you know, in a 50-year cycle. maybe so we knew it wasn't coming tomorrow we weren't going to be able to replenish that yet we didn't slow down uh we didn't slow down in in our in our spending and this is where we're at now and so now it's a struggle to

I mean, obviously, nobody wants to cut the spend. Like I said, nobody wants to be the bad guy to say we've got to live within our means. But if we don't do something and getting new revenue. we'll fix the problem in the short term. But if the spending component continues, we'll outstrip that as well.

Correct. You know, as you mentioned, you know, we didn't really cut down our spending. We spent down the CBR and then we switched over to spending from the permanent fund. Now we're discovering that the permanent fund is not earning as fast as we had hoped. And so that our spending is outstripping.

our ability to spend from the permanent fund as well um then you you know now we're talking about new taxes here and an interesting piece is uh you know this popped up recently is the business community is complaining about our our taxes because for an interesting reason, not just because it's new taxes, but because we seem to have crafted these new taxes to cover exactly the hole that we have right now, which means we're not.

saying, OK, taxing our tax structure is not working. Let's restructure and figure out what to do. We're saying, how do we get exactly how much we need right now? And so the threat is. We'll find a way in a couple more years after spending has gone up again, we'll get exactly what we need again. And we keep going back to that well. And then as I think you and I mentioned this last time around that I was on the show.

Is that these taxes that we're talking about down here seem to be crafted in such a way as to, again, hide the taxes from the average Alaskan to minimize the pushback on the. spending side, you know, because that's what has happened for 50 years ever since oil became our dominant.

our dominant source of revenue is we hid the true cost of government from the average citizen. And so the average citizen has an incentive to call government and say, please spend more. They don't have an incentive to call government and say. Hey, that's my tax money. You better spend it wisely. And oh, yeah, spend a little less while you're at it. And so the taxes that have been introduced are crafted in such a way.

as to continue that so they're they're not crafted in such a way as to to you know try to get us to to spend better to spend they're crafted in such a way as to increase the spending and find more constituencies and, you know, and effectively buy votes with our budget. Right. And that's a tough situation that we're in. Well, and I think your point is well made when they say that the hole that they're filling, that what they're doing right now would basically just fill the current hole.

There's no scaling. There's no plan for the future. There's nothing else that goes on about that. And that is part of our problem. We have got... to grab a hold of this and have a long-term fiscal plan and unfortunately there there's nothing like that in sight and as you said if we if we filled up the hole now

as spending continues to increase in another three four five years we'll have the same hole again and then so what we'll do is we'll just we'll increase it or we'll create another new rep and that that leads to that potential like we talk about the doom loop of, you know, people will start to move out because of the aggressiveness of that kind of revenue generation, that kind of taxation. They'll move out and then they'll...

it'll be spread to a smaller contingent. And that starts that downward cycle. We've got less than a minute here, Rob. Final thoughts. Yeah, you know, this, this all it does is it highlights the whole point of a spending cap and a full fiscal plan, not just a tax and spend plan, but an actual fiscal plan, because what we have to do is we have to

send the message to private business in this state that we're not just going to come back to you and come back to that well again every time we want to spend more money. We have to be sending the message that we can be good partners in business otherwise. we're not going to have any private economy left in this state. And what's the point of government services if you don't have any people left in the curve?

we didn't even get into the public versus private question all right rob myers our guest folks we're out of time we'll see you tomorrow be kind love one another live well the michael duke show Yeah, I mean, Rob, we didn't even get into the whole public versus private economy thing, but that's a huge component of it. We are so disconnected from this whole thing that...

It's ludicrous. I mean, I'm really almost speechless as we look at this because they it doesn't matter what the private economy is doing. As long as the government money is rolling in, as long as they have the permanent fund and the oil revenues, they're OK.

And, oh, now we've got a whole. So now we'll tap the private economy. We really don't care what happens. We'll just tax them. And then when we need more, we'll go back and tap the barrel again and we'll just keep tap. And again, that will lead to a downward spiral that. nobody seems to be acknowledging at this point no and i think the education debate you know really sums that up well because you know we can you know we can

spend more money on edu know, we can we can start taxing p into education. We can It really doesn't matter how much money you spend. What matters is the outcome, right? It matters if kids are actually learning. Number two, what's the point of having a gold-plated education system if we've got no jobs available for them in this?

because we have chased out every private business through the unstable business climate that we have created in this state. And all we're going to be doing then is we're going to be you know, taxing businesses in this state to pay for educating Washington's workforce because they're all, you know, there's going to be nowhere for them to stay once they're, they've graduated high school. They're all going to have to leave and go somewhere else to go find a job and make a living.

Right. The spending is the problem. And I know that you're in a minority of people who understand that and who have talked about it. And even some of your colleagues in both in both chambers seem to be. They seem to have given up. on the fact that they're you know we're not trying it's not just that we don't have the political will to make the cuts necessary and the austerity measures necessary to bring it under control it's that they seem to have just given up to see to even want to discuss it

Am I wrong? No, I think you're right. You know, we've been having, excuse me, you know, I mean, you see some of this in legislature, you see some of it in the public. We're, you know, we've been fighting this same battle for 10 years. And we've been I mean, let's let's be honest. You know, we on our side have been slowly losing, even though we have had a ton of turnover in those in those 10 years. You know, you've only got.

five or six people that are maybe eight or 10 people that were here in 2014 that are still here. But, you know, it's tough to keep fighting that same battle and it feels like we're, you know, kind of on the losing side of that. And at what point does, you know, does things stop? You know, we thought that

you know, there was going to be a huge outcry when Governor Walker cut the permanent cut the dividend. And then we thought that there was going to be a huge cry in 2018 when they started taking the actually spending the permanent fund on. on government. Then we thought maybe there would be a bit of a reckoning in 2020 when oil actually went negative for two days.

And then, you know, we thought, okay, maybe we, you know, in 22, when oil prices shot through the roof, okay, maybe we've got a little bit of cash here to give us a cushion to make some of these tough decisions. You know, no, everything has been, you know, we've lost nearly every battle, unfortunately. And, you know, you got me and, you know, Mike Schauer and a few others that are out here still beating the drum going, guys, we got a problem.

You know, we're hitting that cliff. And unfortunately, it's not really... The message doesn't seem to be getting through to some folks. And if anything, it might be getting a little worse, given who's gotten elected the last couple of cycles. Yeah, exactly. Well, that's the thing. It's not just convincing your colleagues. It's educating the public.

The public seems to have no connection between the two. They're like, oh, yeah, it's fine. Don't worry about it. I just want my schools. Just give them all the money. And it's like, from where? You know, nobody is. And just recently, the news media has really started to pick up on this whole deficit thing. Right. I mean, it's been we've been warning about it on the program for the last three years because we could we were reading the 10 year forecast and everything else.

And nobody has made a mention of it until just recently. This session, all of a sudden the news media is saying, well, because we have a deficit and it's shocking. Shocking, I say. And I'm like, where?

We've been talking about this for a while. This is not new stuff. But even the public is so disconnected. And part of that is, again, the disconnect between the public and the private economy, because people don't understand how government receives its money in the state. They just they don't see it.

It doesn't come out of their pocket directly. They don't see it. And so, I mean, is that what we have to do? Do we have to tax Alaskans so that they understand? Or is there, I mean, is it like you said, it seems to be getting worse. You know, and again, that is the question, is what is going to trigger change in this state? You know, when you hit rock bottom, you know, you can only go up. Well, I don't know if we've hit rock bottom yet.

We're heading that direction fairly quickly, but what defines rock bottom? I was mentioning those different milestones. You would have potentially thought each of those could have been a place where we said, okay, this is rock bottom. you know we we're going to admit we have a problem and you know slowly work to change you know to to use the aa language there but um

At what point do we finally realize we hit rock bottom? Is it going to be when we institute new taxes? Is it going to be once the permanent fund is actually spent down? uh you know because we're spending faster than we're earning where where does rock bottom right hit you know i i don't know at this point um you know i can see that the the upcoming milestones uh you know you can't

necessarily put an exact time on each of them, but you can see those different milestones coming and what's going to happen? It's hard to say. Well, when you hit rock bottom, there's nowhere else to go. That's the thing. There is only one direction to go. And we, but the problem we do, we're trying to prevent running off the end of the tracks into the chasm, into the ravine, right? Because we know the bridge is out and that's the thing they're acting like.

Bridge is fine. Just give it enough gas. It'll jump the gap. Don't worry about it. I mean, that seems to be the reaction. The problem is, is that we'll all be laying in broken heaps at the bottom of the ravine together if we don't fix it now. And train.

trains don't jump very well no they got the glide characteristics of a brick so i mean just to figure out that it's not going to make it's not good no matter how much coal you put into it even if it's a bullet train you're not going to jump the gap there's no way to do it it'll just make

the crash that much more spectacular at the other end and somebody somebody actually said that the other day well just spend it all then spend it all get it done now get it done early so that we can start picking up the pieces and at some point i have to start to think That might be a viable. I mean, at least if we do it faster, we may have something left over to rebuild with at this point. I mean, that sounds a little caustic and cynical, but.

Maybe that's since nothing else is working, maybe that's the answer. Maybe I should embrace every piece of spending that they have out there. Well, you know, I mean, if if if we believe that we're not if the goal is to turn the ship around.

and we believe we're not going to turn around until we hit rock bottom that starts to make you question okay it should the immediate you should the short-term goal be to soften the landing or short term goal be to hit rock bottom as fast as possible so we can turn around as fast as possible.

That's a tough call. Those are two horrible options, and I don't know which one of those is better or worse. Right. Well, I mean, that's the thing, because it is. It's two bad options. Would you like a diarrhea milkshake or a poop sandwich?

Is there a third choice? I don't want either one of those, but that's kind of the point that we're at right now. Well, I mean, the third choice is, you know, at least for us as individuals, and some people have already done this, the third choice is you leave state.

yeah and unfortunately we're seeing a lot of that and you know that should be the canary in the coal mine to us that hey we got a problem here you know and and you know up until you know the last couple of months at least the folks leaving state have primarily been private sector workers

right um you know so we uh you know that that should have been the canary in the coal mine and unfortunately that doesn't again because of our disconnect between the public and the private economy that's not really ringing true here in

the legislature right because again they're not affected by people moving out of the state they don't they don't care what's the tax base get smaller they don't care because there is no tax on the tax base i mean except for the permanent fund but they're still taking the same percentage from the main fund anyway so it doesn't matter

Rick said Rick says they'll wait till they are out of money and then they'll try and figure out what to do. They'll just see. I think he made a mistake there because I said they'll wait until they're out of money. They won't try and figure out what to do. They will just leave the state. That's what will happen. I mean, you'll have legislators or luminaries who are like, and then they'll just.

But we've seen that in the past. Legislators who went in there with all these big spending ideas and people said, well, that's going to be. And then they're like, oh, no, it'll be fine. And then the next year after they get out of the legislature, they retire and go south. So they have no skin in the game in that regard. They just don't care. I think that's the bottom line. All right. Rob Myers.

I need to have a happy show is what I need to have. I need to have a happy show. Well, no, it's not just you. I mean, it's Brad, it's Mike, it's everybody that we have on. We have these conversations. Quite honestly, Rob, I've been having this same conversation. This is like Groundhog's Day, it feels like sometimes. This same conversation for 25 years in one form or another.

You know, from the very beginning, I was talking about this on my show back when I was in I was in my early 20s and I was having this conversation about we can't spend more than we take in. If we do, it's going to. And here we are today.

And it's the same thing. And it is mind-boggling that we're not seeing it, that there's so many people in the... in the legislature and in the wheels of power that are just like la la la la it's all going to be fine chicken in every pot and everything else and we'll spend whatever we need maybe it is better for the wheels to come off the bus

I don't know. I'm slowly coming around to that point of view. Unfortunately, I'm starting to I mean, I would never have given that credence a year ago or two years ago. Now, today, I'm starting to think maybe that is the best way to make it because at least we would be able to start to recover and do it right. We would hope. But I guess there's no guarantees there either. Right. All right. Anything else, Rob?

Oh, you got me talked out, Mike. I guess the only thing I got left is to say hi to my kids that are watching on the TV on YouTube at home. So hi, kids. I'll see you in a few weeks when I come home for Easter. Dad loves you. That's right. All right. Well, Rob. Thanks for what you do. Thanks for standing strong. Thanks for being one of those few that actually says, hey, we've got a spending problem. I wish that you and I could...

Wave our magic wands and fix it. But unfortunately, here's where we're at. So thank you so much for being part of it. We'll talk to you later. Catch you later, Michael. We'll see you later again. All right, folks, we are out of time.

We've got... I don't know. I was going to try and do some... But you know what? I might need a fun show tomorrow. I might see if I can get some... Because, I mean, I really am coming around more to this idea that... maybe it's just better to auger this thing into the ground and get started kim just said crash and get it over with i mean i'm hearing that more and more from various people out there

I don't know. I just, like I said, I feel like I'm trapped in Groundhog's Day in a lot of ways. Because this is the same. You could have gone back to a show. Five years ago, 10 years ago, 15 years ago, and we'd be talking about the same things. We make a little difference here and there. But if we're dealing with the same main issues after 15, 20 years.

Maybe we should just talk about pop culture and technology and movies. Maybe that would be better. Maybe I just need a show for that. One day show for that. All right, we got to go. Thanks, my friend. Be kind. Love one another. Live well. The Michael Duke Show. lizard internet people.