S8 Ep547: SHOW SCHEDULE 3-6-2026 APRIL 30, 1789 NEW YORK INAUGURATION

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Good evening.

The show begins tonight with a conversation about the Pacific coastline.

Jeff Bliss is Pacific watch, and he's traveled recently up and down the coast from Southern California his home

to Reno, Nevada, Portland.

He also checked in on Seattle thanks to his colleagues and back down through Sacramento on the way to LA.

The report is various, as you would expect from that amount of landscape.

But Las Vegas is the star performer out west, rebuilding itself even as we speak, perhaps rebuilding the rebuilding.

Out in the desert, you can see the outline of what will be a railroad station, a bright line station running in two hours from Los Angeles neighborhood to Las Vegas,

delivering you to a train station that I'm presuming will have a connection to the boring companies underground tunnel that now connects the airport to the Las Vegas downtown or the strip.

That's Elon Musk's ability to tunnel under an eth and avoid traffic.

I'm told what you do is you get into a Tesla without a driver, and it takes you through the tunnel in 12 minutes to your destination.

Downtown or centerpiece of Las Vegas.

I've never ridden it, so I'm not sure what it looks like, but it certainly beats a traffic jam.

The building trades are doing very well in Las Vegas.

Other cities report different challenges.

The one that struck me most heartily was Sacramento.

Jeff sent me a picture of three very damaged human beings in twisted, twisted kelp body features lying on the ground.

Apparently asleep, you could have believed they were dead as well.

Fentanyl, Jeff said, is a likely suspect for having done that to their bodies, twisted arms that don't seem to mind as a sleeper dozer in some fashion or insensate.

What was striking most about the picture was that they were lying on or near a gutter with trash all around.

And it clearly was a good neighborhood with lots of housing.

And the distance was the state capital.

You could see it about a half a mile away, walking distance.

That's a state capital that spent billions and billions, so much so unhomeless, so much so that they can't find all the money Jeff tells me.

Then Seattle, the report there is that major pieces of the back office, that is corporate headquarters, are leaving Seattle, Washington, Starbucks, leaving Seattle for Tennessee,

and the tax base is lighter I can imagine.

These are well-paid executives.

This isn't a simple matter of just losing a few rich people, or this is losing people with six figures.

Lots of them leading a global chain and Washington state, what are they doing about it?

Letting them go, is there no mitigation whatsoever?

Seattle was the home of the founding of Starbucks.

This is a dream come true, all those people live there.

They're proud of living through Washington's winters and the rain.

Well, Seattle's moving.

Jeff and I also talked about the candidacy of Gavin Newsom, the governor for President in 28, and he's doing a national tour.

He's very charming and convincing and humble when he speaks to his interviewers.

I saw one with, I believe it was, yes, Katie Korak.

So the Pacific watch is made up of very promising presidential campaigns and very discouraging facts on the ground.

Gavin Newsom didn't do this.

He certainly didn't undo it either in his time in office.

They've spent lots of money on homeless.

I can imagine he could make the argument, it would be worse if we hadn't spent billions and billions, but to allow people to lie in the gutter.

I mean, that's first responder stuff, but I guess it's two commonplace, all the tent cities and encampments up and down the coast.

California has great weather all the time and it might be the burden.

Moving to a story that is everywhere, which is the price of gasoline.

I check in with Lancaster counties.

Jim McTague, he reports that week ago, or several days ago,

he was at Costco where Costco sells discounted gasoline.

He bought gasoline for $289 a gallon.

On the Costco site today, it's $315 a gallon, so a rise of what is at 26 cents in a matter of hours.

Maybe it'll go higher, maybe that's where it stops, but the news out of the Middle East with the Iran War

is that a barrel of Brent crude, that's the way they measured in Asia.

And a barrel of West Texas, that's the way we measured in America, are now above $90.

Natural gas is also climbing and cost so much so that there may be a shortage of it.

I can't tell.

I quit by natural gas coming out of the Gulf, mostly goes to Asia.

Some percentage of it goes to the Europeans.

It's an energy crisis caused by the war fighting.

This story also contains the other side of this, which is the economy in America and around the world.

How long can this last?

I've been told four to five weeks, but I don't know if the economy can handle four to five weeks without major intervention by the central banking.

Don't know. Right now there are reports that there could be talks.

There are other reports that suggest that talks are not imminent.

I leave that alone. I had to, ah, some good news.

Lorenzo Fiori reports.

Lorenzo and I begin our reports of where to go in Italy that is not overwhelmingly dominated by tourism.

What the Italians call overtourism, damaging their treasured sights and their churches and their ruins from the Roman time, all the period of time, last 2000 years plus.

And today we featured in the very, you know, the Italian boot.

Well, the heel of the boot, a city called Lecce, which is built with stone that Lorenzo tells me, sparkles at night.

It catches the sunlight and is radiant.

And then from Lecce, we went south to Otranto on the coastline.

So much on the coastline that it was overwhelmed.

I think in the 13th and 14th century by the Ottomans, there was always a tangled battle between the Ottoman Empire, the Venetian Empire, and shipping in and around Italy.

Anyway, Otranto on the sea coast and Lecce up a little bit about 40 kilometers inland, two cities that Lorenzo recommends where you will not be trampled and run down and have no rooms in crowded restaurants.

And he did say that Otranto and Lecce are places where Italians go in August, so maybe you want to book ahead if you're planning to be there in August.

I asked about the heat, yes, but not humidity.

It's not that wind that comes from North Africa that hits Sicily.

It's, in fact, a night breeze that comes through from the Balkans tells Lorenzo tells me.

Then a lengthy conversation with my friend Henry Sikowski about the non-proliferation policy, the non-proliferation treaty that's up for review in April.

That is at the heart of the Iran War.

Iran is a signatory of the NPT.

It was initiated in 1970, but has not kept the bargain is the report.

And the NPT might be troubled to continue.

Can't tell.

Henry and I talk about that and about the loss of the new start treaty, which is gone.

And the insistence of the defense department that if they're going to start a new start or any treaty again, they have to include China's arsenal as well.

It is discouraging what non-proliferation has led to what everybody would easily call an ambition to proliferate.

The conversation also with Grant Newsham, United States Marine Corps retired his book is when China attacks about how Taiwan is watching the war in Iran.

And asking itself, were we wise to give up our nuclear weapon back in the 20th century?

The White House insisted and they gave up their nukes.

But Grant tells me they don't want nukes back.

Maybe Japan's debating it, but Taiwan's not.

They do very much count on the protection and overlord ship of the US nukes.

In addition to that, they're learning the lesson everyone's learning that it's a drone kind of war that will be fought in the future.

Not really airplanes, but drone airplanes.

Many sizes, many costs.

Then the second hour of my conversation with the other Dennis Sewell about the 17th century in America and Britain.

This is the English Civil Wars and the story of George Downing who was a super spy, a super agent working for both sides of the street.

You work for Cromwell and you work for Charles II in the Restoration.

In the first class from Harvard College, so he came from the New World.

There's a colonial move from England to New England and then came back to England.

I believe he spent the bulk of his life in England after Charles's Restoration.

It's a romantic tale, quite fantastic.

George Downing is his name.

Downing.

Ten Downing Street, same one, same family.

He's the one who purchased that house and renovated it and today I don't know you couldn't say it had the original.

A couturements because it's been several hundred years with lots of addition like central heating and plumbing.

But in any event, he is Downing Street, George Downing, an American in the 17th century.

And then a conversation with Bob Zimmerman about some surprisingly positive developments in Low Earth orbit.

Space stations.

There are private space stations under construction now.

The last is in a leadership, Bob tells me.

V-A-S-T.

And this will be a tourism spot in the near future.

European Space Agency has also come up with the idea of building a space station's a good idea.

Although Bob tells me it'll take him a long time.

It's much more to the show.

I hope you enjoy it.

And I'm looking forward to announcing that the war has reached the cease fire by market opening on Monday morning.

Thank you for listening.

Good night.