Trump’s $5,000 Promise, AI Fears & Milwaukee’s Pothole Problem

0:00Broadcasting live from the Annex Wealth Management Studios at the Avenue. It's time for Point Take-A. Here's Kristen Brie and in for Steve's graffiti. Here's Todd Alba. One more day Todd. One more day. Oh, I didn't get to look good. Good tone. I don't know. You can kind of say. I- What? She is spicy today. If you're just joining us, Point Take and Last Day Filled In for the Great Steve's graffiti. Kristen Brie is spicy. I was in a lot of musicals. I was in a lot of dancing. I was in a lot of musicals, but I was in the ensemble in high school because I couldn't be the- I haven't been on stage singing quite a while, but I- I did okay. I could hold my own on stage singing. What's your go-to karaoke song? See, I don't really do karaoke because I'm too afraid I'll bearist myself. I mean, that is kind of the point of karaoke. I know. I am bearist myself naturally every day. Fair. As we found in the pre-game show today, putting the show together, Kristen loves to laugh at my old man things, which is fine.

1:00It greatly entertains me. I also laugh at Steve's old man things, and it makes you feel any better. Yeah, I appreciate that. Yeah. It's the form of love. How are you? By the way, I have the long story short. I found myself with Ampham Field last night again. I know. Another Brewer's game. Big Game Lots of Runs. Sprote almost messed it up in the- in the ninth, but the Brewer's got through. Sweep the Cubs. Big, big series, and magic number continues to fall. So how about you? I'm doing well. You know, it was a short week. Ready for Friday? Big Show tomorrow with Joe and Bill. At a big show today. So this Jeremy Janine will be here in the second hour. But I guess the top story of the day, I would say, is an offer you can't refuse. I want to make a monoframe game refuse. Nicely done, Andrew. Yes. So $5,000. You know, in this economy, how could you turn that down? You know, between the $5,000 dividend if Republicans win

2:04on top of the $5,000 dose checks that are probably coming any day now and the $2,000 tariff rebate, you know, that's like $12,000. Which is going to wait. This is like just raining money. In case you haven't heard, don't over talking about the Republican midterm convention, which again, I've had involved in politics since 1980. I've never heard of something like this, but they had this convention or still having it down in Dallas. President of the United States, Donald J. Trump spoke for two hours last night, Kristen. Well, beating his record at the RNC right here in the morning. Painful. Painful, I would think, for those in attendance. But yeah, so the president last night, promised every voter $5,000 if only if only Republicans maintain control of Congress. Both the House and the Senate and the other stipulation was that the money has to be spent in the United States, which I don't know how you, I don't know how you do any of this, quite honestly. And so my thing is, all right, so like I said, as a joke, so we have the $5,000 stimulus checks for Joe Doge.

3:08We had the $2,000 stimulus checks for the tariff dividend. We had $1,000 plus checks from savings, from expiring ACA subsidies. And now we have a promise of $5,000 dividend if Republicans win the midterms. No checks have been cut. And so my question is, how many people are going to fall for this? Right? You throw it out there and, you know, I don't know, I'd maybe, I would be interested to know if this was on the teleprompter, if this was just like part of his weave. And it was just something that popped into his head. But as far as outside of the people who are already going to vote, Republican, no matter what, like who are the people that he is targeting with with this promise of money that's like, you fully once, you fully twice. I throw back to storage, stuffy, and flush. You know what I mean? Like, who is this for? I don't you think it's somewhat targeted to the people going all the way back to 2016

4:08that folks who are barely getting by who are working two or three jobs. And they can't get ahead and they think, you know, but this guy is, tells me he'll help me, but to your point, like, how many times can you be fooled? I don't know. But the only reason I push back on that is, I would imagine that person you just described. Well, many of those people exist. They're also not paying attention to the news every single day, right? And so are they going to campaign on this $5,000 promise? Like, how do you, is this message going to be repeated again and again? But also like, is this legal? Because the fact of better, not that he's going to be prosecuted, but WEC with Elon Musk two years ago. No, not even two years ago. When he promised a million dollars for people registering to vote, like the Wisconsin Election Commission said, like, this is illegal. And it was left up to the DA, whether or not he wanted to prosecute, and he decided not to, which is a whole other topic, as far as, like,

5:09oh, it's just another example of like, very wealthy, powerful people being able to break the law. And there's no consequences. Meanwhile, people who like accidentally vote, it years in prison for voter fraud. And it's just like, that is wildly frustrating. But the promise of paying people for an outcome, like, that is illegal. And I ask you for anyone who's actually kind of like, ears perked up about this. What if Tony Evers promised this if David Crowley wins? Would you be okay with that? I'm guessing not. All right, let's take a break. We'll be talking more about this after this. I will issue a dividend to every adult citizen in the United States of America for $5,000. Do you think we hear about this again? Do you think this, like, do you think it's a one and done, or do you think he repeats this for the remainder of the campaign? Cheer up. Point for the break. Derek Van Orten from Wisconsin's third congressional district was there last night,

6:09giving us space, spoke last night. Yeah. It'll be interesting to see. Van Orten come back and campaign on this in Wisconsin, like vote for me and he get $5,000. Well, we'll see. As a former Republican who left the party in 2011 was involved for 30 years, both at the federal and state level here in Wisconsin. Here's my question to conservative or Trump listeners is that this is is this truly fiscally conservative because last time I checked, my former party was against giving taxpayer money for people to just stay home and do nothing. And so are you okay with your tax dollars being given to back to you and others just for voting for someone? It doesn't seem really, I think I saw the rough estimate was well over a trillion dollars. What a $23 trillion. Yeah. That's the way it would cost. Is that fiscally conservative? I mean, last time I checked my old party, it would not be.

7:10I mean, it's, but that's not been the ethos of the party for a while now. No, but if you're going to run it for the public and the last 10 years, it hasn't really been about fiscal responsibility. No, it hasn't. Scott Walker was not a fiscal conservative. I was there. I was in the building. Donald Trump has not been a fiscal conservative, but it's a guy who spent 30 years helping get Republicans elected. This is what ticks me off. And I think it's, I don't want to speak for CVS not here today. I know this is a business. I know my old boss Dale Schultz who still calls himself Republican. This is the kind of stuff that annoys him. He says, they're not Republicans. I was a Republican legislator. I voted for fiscally conservative state budgets. And this is not this type of behavior is simply not fiscally conservative nor Republican. But it's also just not real, right? Like even if even in some scenario, which is looking less and less likely, as far as the Republicans holding onto the House, Senates will see. But largely, I think,

8:11betting markets, polls, whatever. Like, it's going to be hard for Republicans to hold onto the House. Say they did. These checks are never coming. Like this is just a blatant lie because everything else, we have multiple examples of Trump promising money. And the money never comes. And so it's, it's kind of a moot point as far as it's not fiscally conservative. Yeah, for sure. But he's also just says stuff all the time. Is he like, does this throw, is he, is he, is he going to a constant state of the brainstorming stage where any creative, like if you ever read the artist's way and they tell you just to do your morning pages and you're just anything that pops in your brain, you're putting it out so you can like clear the junk out so you can be creative for the day. Like he's in a constant state of brainstorming while on a hot mic. And it's just like, I don't know, I said it. And we just go on. We just keep moving. I still maintain this is a diversion to get people like us to talk about this rather than the fact that oil is over a hundred dollars a barrel now. Gas prices continue to climb.

9:12Cost to living continues to climb. And they don't want to talk about that. All right. Yeah, one more day. There's midterm. You won't be here to talk about it. I guess there's more midterm convention tonight. But when we come back, I questioned yesterday of Jacob Cox and was real. Well, a certain CNN reporter found him. So we'll talk about that after this. Welcome back to Pointeck and I'm Kristen Brey along with Todd Alba, who is in for Steve who will be back tomorrow. All right. So yesterday, I don't, I'm not usually a very conspired conspiracy theory person. But it was weird to me as we talked about this viral tweet on X. Whatever you want to call it now. Uh, whatever the the now and it is of what you post on X. Something size says tweet. And I was just skeptical the fact that this Jacob Coxon, who had worked for both OpenAI and Anthropic, had only one post ever on Twitter and like a zero digital footprint whatsoever,

10:13which seemed weird in this day and age, especially for someone who works in technology. But I will admit when I'm wrong. Anderson Cooper found him and he was on AC 360 on CNN last night to explain a little bit further on what he means when he says that we are marching like people are concerned who work on AI that in a short period of time, it could kill the entire human race. So let's hear a little bit about it from his interview. That AI could kill us all by the end of the decade. How would that happen? Like what would that actually look like? So the precise scenario sounds a little bit like science fiction. It sounds like something that's not real, but I think it is frightening real and it's it's easiest to understand it if you think about real things that happened two months ago. So two months ago, OpenAI agents, AI's hacked into third-party infrastructure entirely at their own accord and this was like a concentrated hacking spree that they carried out of their own

11:15volition. And I think that if you extrapolate into the future the level of capabilities of these AI's with the same independent volition they could cause extreme havoc. For example, hacking critical infrastructure, building extension level bio weapons, there's a lot of ways that the AI could actuate itself in the world. So what I heard is basically like because we were talking about this yesterday, what does this look like? And also the people who are like, can't we just turn off the electricity? And what it, I think what I'm hearing is basically AI could end up creating biological weapons and hacking systems independently of humans giving it any direction. As of where we're at right now, AI is trained by humans, but soon like we're marching at a rapid pace towards AI being able to be trained, like train itself without human intervention at all. And then like with the the improvement at this rate, it's basically like we will lose control

12:19over it. Correct. And the thing is when you go back to the idea of well can't you just turn off the electricity? Just think about how many things like think about how many things appliances in your house now that are connected to the internet. Yeah, you're washing machine, you're refrigerator, you're Alexa, you're your stove. Think about, I mean, this was the scene. Why do I always forget the name of this movie with the Julia Roberts and Netflix and the world? I love doing help right now. I was going to look up a commercial break and then I got distracted. But there's a scene in it where all of the Teslas and all of the cars are self-driving and they block the exit to get off of I think they're on Long Island, but basically like the one road to get out of where they were trapped gets like logged by jammed with all of these cars that are piling up on each other, but no one's actually driving the cars because the cars are driving themselves from a remote location. And so as we march towards so many things being connected to the internet

13:21and thus the ability to hack them, like major things could go down. And so my take from this that feels like circular logic though is the like foreign adversary part of this, right? Is the conversation it seems like this like circle that like a set circular logic. It's like people working on this in America saying we have to slow down like asking for guardrails, but then also saying in the same breath, we can't really slow down unless China slows down and China won't slow down and we couldn't even verify if they were slowing down if we like even if they promised to, we like we couldn't we couldn't verify if they were not. So therefore we cannot slow down and thus ensuring you know doom no matter what. And like that's the thing. It's like do we know for sure that China's doing this and is there not any kind of diplomatic response as far as like for the sake of the human race to be talking about this at a global level.

14:22Kristen and her lovely husband Mike were kind of in a philope crash with their spare bedroom last night and your husband put on what wasn't the movie. It was black. It was an episode of Black Miriam Black Miriam. Yes, the scene our conversation yesterday that you were afraid of a dog. A science fiction, you know movie as a robotic dog. So I slept real well. But the series part of it to to your point. I saw another clip from someone else who said that they've already seen this where AI has taught another AI. I made a brand new language that only these AI is can understand. The humans can't even know what they're saying to each other and they learn from that. And I think that's the serious concern is that when AI goes above and beyond what humans can control or understand and then to your point other countries having it. And I would go back and say this is why allies and foreign diplomacy is so important. People think foreign diplomacy is about trade and awards, which it is. But it's also a lot of this economic and technology stuff that you're bringing

15:25up. And you have to have you have to have the ability to have real discussions even with your adversaries and say it's not unlike nuclear weapons. I was just thinking it's like it's just feels like watching Oppenheimer in real time. Yeah, right. And it's the old mad thing. All right, leave the world behind. That was the Netflix movie. It's really good. It's a little depressing and scary, but good. All right, news is next. Welcome back to Pointegan. I am Kristen Brite. Todd Alba is with me. The rest of the show Jeremy Janine will be here around 1105. Steve will be back tomorrow. And I had not seen this. You saw this Todd as far as this is not the first time James Telleriko has been relegated to an online only interview. This happened once before when Stephen Colbert still had his show. But apparently now he also can't be on prime time with Jimmy Kimmel. People know me. I'm a big

16:26kind of sewer, big affectionate, not of late night television going all the way back to Johnny Carson and well, I've studied before. I just like the genre. I'm entertained by it. And Jimmy Kimmel last night came out in his monologue and said that he was going to be interviewing James Telleriko. Of course, the Democratic Senate candidate in Texas tonight, however, his viewers would not be able to see it. And there was a reason why I think we got the clip cut up. So Andrew here's Jimmy Kimmel on Jimmy Kimmel live on ABC last night. That's them there tomorrow night. I'll be interviewing James Telleriko tomorrow night under unusual circumstances. You know, for a lot of years, for the whole 20 plus of year of our show, in fact, I've been interviewing Americans who are running for office with no problem at all, just like Letterman did, Leno did, Arsenio, etc, etc. I've interviewed a lot of political candidates from Hillary Clinton to Ted Cruz to Donald Trump himself. I interviewed Donald Trump when he was running for president in 2015. And at that time when he was on sitting next to me,

17:26he seemed to have no problem with the idea of talk show host interviewing candidates. Now that he's president, his FCC threatened me, threatened our show, threatened our network ABC, our affiliates, our local stations based on simple traditional editorial decisions, guest bookings. It would seem they don't like. And so out of consideration for our local stations, especially our ABC affiliates in Texas who would have to deal with this nonsense. My interview tomorrow with James Telleriko will not air on television. It will be posted on YouTube. And so it's interesting. One, most of these shows, I see like get most of their viewership from online anyways. I know this is not the point. Says the 40 year old compared to the 56 year old. I think if you compare numbers of who's watching the show live versus the clips that get shared afterwards. So like it's more about the principle of the matter rather than the impact on if people want to watch that interview, they're going to be able to watch the interview. But also I find interesting about this is the specific

18:30candidate of this happening twice to James Telleriko and an indicator of how afraid they are of him. 100% because it's not like every Democratic candidate is not being is being said you can't air this live. But specifically with him, it's happened twice. Texas has always been for the last at least 20 years, plus a sure red state, a sure Senate vote out of Texas for Republicans. And for the first time in a very long time, they have a James Telleriko, the Democrats also combine that with a really bad candidate in Ken Paxton on on the Republican side of Texas. There's a real shot that James Telleriko could pull this off. That would be catastrophic for Republicans taking over in the US or hanging on to the US Senate. And so this is a big deal to prevent Telleriko from from winning to your point. But what disturbs me about this is really something that's foundational to this country, which is free speech and freedom of the press.

19:31And the fact that one administration, one guy, Donald Trump along with the FCC chairman, Car is threatening Disney, the owner of ABC, ABC, Kimmel himself, the show, and affiliates like WISN, the ABC affiliate here in Milwaukee, that if you run this, we are going to come after your license and say, how can we do that? There's something called equal time clause, meaning that within a certain window in an election, if you have one candidate on, you have to have the other candidate on for equal time. That is applicable to news though. But is it you have to be invited? Yeah, you have to be invited because somebody was people can say no, you can still air the other. You have to at least give the opportunity. However, forever, forever, day since God was a boy, it has been kind of assumed long time. This is an old phrase of a long time. Is he a boy? All right, don't get, don't get, geez, I tell you, she's spicy today. The point now, the point is that that it's been assumed that late night is quote, unquote entertainment,

20:33not news. Things like the view on daytime television are entertainment, not hard news. So the equal time clause has been just assumed that and taken for granted a precedent that you don't have to do that in late night or daytime until Trump 2.0, the second term, when they've really come down on this and you say, well, okay, an ABC, by the way, is in the middle of a lawsuit over some of this stuff right now with Trump administration. But it's the local affiliates who can't afford to go after on Trump and take it away. They're licenses. This is, and I don't care whether it's Republican or Democrat who is in office. This is an absolute assault on the first amendment, the Constitution, free with the press. And this is the stuff that we as American citizens should be worried about, because this is authoritarianism, one on one. It's taking away our speech. It's attacking the free press. And that is when bad information gets disseminated and people don't know what the hell the

21:35truth is. Where's our ding? And well, you want to talk about this on the part, the FCC and car. It goes on for, it's a related but separate thing. FCC, Chairman, car, Brendan Carr, yesterday, according to a Scott McFarlane, Scott McFarlane reports, subscribe on Substack if you don't, that now car is saying they may go after broadcast stations, both radio like this station and television that report quote unquote fake polling numbers. In other words, in other words, polling that they disagree with and say, well, that's that's putting out this information. So we'll come after your license if we put on a poll that you don't like. So is it that they they are because media organizations like the New York Times and CNN, etc. have their own polling arm. Is that there is it that they would report on a poll or is that they produced a poll without the results of the quote. News coverage of a poll that doesn't favor a political party is not a

22:39license to metal in an election through intimidation. That was that that was a response. It's a car said that the agency may issue guidance on broadcasters reporting on political polls after Donald Trump called this poll fake on Fox News. Cars said the quote, there's a lot of interest right now in big polls. They're not there. And so the FCC may put guidance out soon to remind broadcasters about their obligation with respect to not airing fake polls, particularly if they're done to suppress people heading into the fall. Unquote again, right back to the mob of the godfather, you know, we may have to put on some guidance there. You know what I mean? There's some guidance. Don't do it, Tommy. It's a good one. Jody Potchardotchil says, you know, all right. What do we come back? Let's, I mean, this, it's been basically a year since the last time Jimmy Kimmel had kind of a sparring with the FCC and Brendan Carr and his ABC affiliates. And that was over now. We heard about the year

23:40anniversary of Charlie Kirk's murder. So we're going to talk a little bit about that after this. Welcome back to point take and I am Kristen Brigh. He is Todd Alba. And obviously tomorrow is a very big anniversary, 25th anniversary of 9 11. But today is, you know, I think culturally a big anniversary as well because a year ago Charlie Kirk was murdered. And if you want to debate over how big of a deal and the impact he had during his life, that's separate. But I think it is objective and non-debatable. What a storm his death created in the culture, in the discourse, in how people saw him both positively and negatively. And like I, I myself got caught up at it like a year ago. I wasn't on air. I think I'd taken the week off just to, because I had the vacation time. And I just been not shocking to anyone who's listening. Didn't agree with Charlie

24:43Kirk on much. But when I was at home and it came across my, across my screen like everyone else, like it hit me. Like, seeing someone get murdered on your phone like that is intense. And yet there was absolutely no attempt to throttle that video anywhere. I've been doing this documentary on Gen Z. And that was one of the questions we've talked about as far as like this person who most of his advocacy and, you know, he was targeting and trying to reach younger people. And so there's a lot of people who had feelings about him both positive and negative in the people we've interviewed. But they all just saw it on their phone. Like they were at school and it just came across their phone like that. And for me, like I put a video out saying how I was upset despite not liking this guy and not liking the things that he said, because I think of what the actual message should be. Like political violence is wrong no matter what. And the fact that someone who talks about politics

25:43for a living was murdered in front of hundreds of people as someone who talks about politics for a living, obviously on a much smaller scale. Like that is a terrifying thing to think about. And somehow even even addressing it a year ago, even when you were trying to have nuance in the conversation, I had a lot of people mad at me for the way I talked about it. And it's I think it's I don't know how long it will last. Like I don't know if 25 years from now we will still be talking about Charlie Kirk's death. But at least in a year, I don't think you can avoid the fact that like that was a cultural phenomenon of what happened with his murder a year ago. Let me start where you kind of ended up and just reiterate, it is a sad but good reminder that political, all political violence is wrong. All violence is wrong period full stop. And the rhetoric in this country at times from both political sides, if you will, is not healthy and is not helpful and it can result

26:49in things that we saw a year ago, Charlie Kirk. I was on the air at my old gig at my old network live and ended up anchoring. We kind of went into news mode and did about almost three hours of live coverage. Our former colleague Dan Schaefer came on the air with me as well at one point. And you try to work through this as best you can and give out truthful and factual, factual information as it comes in. I think it's just a, again, a sad reminder in this country that words do, it's so right, but it's so true. Words have consequences. And when you gin people up into this frenzy and we, and we start talking about political sides or parties as quote, unquote, the enemy in people who are perhaps have mental health issues, that could trigger, that could do something. And it's just, it's so sad and so unhealthy. I also think there's a lesson to be taken away to your earlier point as well. And that is, I, whether you agree to disagree

27:55to Charlie Kirk politically, I certainly did not. But I respect the fact that he engaged people. I respect the fact that he was able to, that he went and had conversations like a lot of our elected officials today, Derek van Orten, for instance, and through a congressional district, doesn't want to do town halls with his own people. Maybe there's Democrats and do want, don't do that as well. But Charlie Kirk went out with the people. He debated. You can make the argument a, a crash person that it was kind of a grift and for show and, quote, unquote, entertainment. But hey, there are people, all political stripes that can be guilty of that, I think. But I respect Charlie Kirk's ability to connect with people and inspire particularly young people, whether it was for the right political reasons or whether it was factual information. To me, that's a different debate. But remember that he was able to engage people and he certainly should not have been murdered for his political beliefs. Well, and I also think a year out,

28:57it speaks to the power of what he was able to do. Because turning point USA is definitely less powerful than it was a year ago, I would say, as far. And it speaks to how much it was, he was the driving force of that organization and the power he had of debating people and, and creating the viral moments and all of that. Because I would say, despite the attempt to keep the organization running, I wouldn't be surprised if they have a much smaller impact on the midterms than they did on the presidential election in 2024. All right, we'll take one more break and then we'll come back and finish up the first hour. 11 o'clock on a Thursday means it's time for a full hour of city stories with urban Milwaukee president Jeremy Janine on point taken. We were a little worried. You came in hot Jeremy. I came in hot because I was at the debate about the topic we're about to talk about. I had to run out of city hall. People were very confused why I

29:59was leaving the building because at city hall, I just come with the building at this point. So here I am happy to be here. All right. So what did you find out? Well, I found out that Peter Brugelis was making an introduction, but we're talking about the pain and everyone's existence in Milwaukee, which is potholes. Hot hole. There are a lot of them. There have been a lot of them. The reason why one, obviously, Milwaukee is an aging roadway network. Some 1800 miles of city streets. Idiots like near dumb enough to attempt to run all of them. There is more than one of me. But you have this crumbling decades old infrastructure. And then when you get bad weather and what bad weather is for a road is a lot of rain in April around the freeze thaw cycle. So you get a lot of road heaving up and down with water gets underneath it. The city has never recovered from that delusion of storms. We got in April. They've got something like 24,000 requests to fill potholes. There's probably plenty that are unreported. They've managed to fill already in at the end of August. So eight months they filled over 16,000. They're 12 month record before in 2014 was 16,000. So they

31:06are clipping well ahead of the pace. But if you do the math real quick, there's still 50% short of that record pace. They have 8,000 potholes to go, including many on my street. So the 24,000, when they the way they count that is individual potholes themselves, not just because I don't imagine there's like multiple requests for the same pothole. So they track it differently. There's no exact precision there because you can pull out the app on my phone for the video listeners online, what YouTube watchers get the MKE called that click to action app. You can take the picture of the pothole, but you can report three at a time. You can report some duplicates so that that all kind of washes out to there's 8,000 service requests. Okay. And so you now have some frustration. Robert Bauman from this internal email I obtained from DPW his response was, well, I can see that this isn't getting fixed by winter. And why that matters is when the temperatures start to dip, the wasps will die off and we'll all be very happy about that. But the asphalt plants shut down. And what that means is you got to use this cold patch stuff that

32:09doesn't last as long. That's the kind of debris you see every spring all over the roadway because it breaks. Yeah. So that's if it's city doesn't catch up in about a month, they're probably going to have a lot of trouble there. So what was the debate today? The debate today was Peter Bergellis, Alderman for the Southwest side has introduced a proposal that okay, DPW, we hear you that you're out there doing your best. We want to buy you help. Let's go try and find private contractors. Now the question that he was as I was leaving the room and meeting up front is historically the answer has been private contractors don't want to work in a public road with cars whizzing by. DPW workers are a different breed. They're clearly just tougher people. They're out there fixing your street lights in the rain and in the snow, private contractors that get that cushy job, they don't apparently don't want that. DPW's response and email in advance of this meeting was were interested in trying to find someone to do this. Yeah. But is that help out there? And for a lot of the city workers, it's just general laborers that are maybe getting pulled out of a trash

33:13duty sometimes if the city went from as they did in the spring from nine to 12 crews, they were doing all kinds of overtime asphalt plants at that point were only open six days a week so they were limited on how much overtime they can do. This is a big problem and it's one we're going to be talking about for a long time. I know earlier was earlier this year where the brewers helping to fund a little patch that's put the brewers logo on this or is that still going on because the Miz just set the record for a thousand pitches over a hundred never been done before. You know, now the public works had a record for a number of times you can have some synergy here. The Miz can be out there stamping some paddles. There have been a couple things and reason he is that are supposed to help, but if the problem continues to get worse, like your help is it's helping, but it's not moving the needle because the rainstorms and everything are making worse. The brewers bought technology that the city can make its own hot patch asphalt and they can do that on its own later in the season in this essentially that that they have a 30 fifths in capital. That'll help make some longer repairs over the winter when you can't buy private hot asphalt from a private contractor. That'll

34:17help a little bit. The city's bought some new equipment so it needs less personnel to fill paddles. That helps a little bit. That's a long term solution makes it essentially cheaper to fill paddles. The other thing is there we talked in the spring about AI detection of paddles. Well, you don't need AI detection if you just go look at any street that isn't brand new and be like paddle, paddle, paddle. So eventually all those things will add up and help right now you're in a bind. All right, we're just getting started with Jeremy Janine. Todd Alba is here. I am Kristen Brie and this is Pointtaken. Welcome back to Pointtaken. I am Kristen Brie. Todd Alba is here for the rest of the day before Steve gets back tomorrow and it's Thursday. So Jeremy Janine is here and more flock information. What the flock is this segment? This issue is moving so fast in the state of Wisconsin. What we talked about last week is almost irrelevant at this point. We've published three different stories on flock, including one this morning. All are fairly substantial changes on their own. I'll start with the one unfortunately. I spent the most amount of time on that seems

35:20the least substantial, which is that both attorney general candidates, Eric Tony and incumbent Josh the Republican and the Democrat have both come out and expressed concerns about flock and support for communities that have canceled flock, but also as a prosecutor and fond of like county as Eric Tony is and the states attorney general Josh call have also given their support for flock has proven very useful in certain situations. But what we saw last week was the revelation. I think it was last Friday. It all happened. The discovery that flock safety, the company that owns the flock is anonymizing that data and then selling it to third party companies as traffic data. So they can't tell Kristen Brie is driving past all these cameras all the time, but they can't tell there's ex-monic cars. Well, that was news to a lot of law enforcement agencies that have signed up for flock. We heard the city of Milwaukee said they've never tried to sell us this data, but it is known that it's out there that they're trying to sell it to someone private companies. It's not clear exactly what details are in there, but it's said to be anonymized, but that caused the Fondelaque County Sheriff's

36:24Office and a number of Fondelaque County communities to cancel their flock contracts or to cover their cameras or to do whatever step they could to walk away from flock. So that prompted Josh call and Eric Tony to weigh it. Then what you had yesterday is David Crowley announcing that in later this month, he has to propose the 2027 Milwaukee County budget that he's not likely not to include money for renewing the county's flock contract that it's due to expire. The devil's in the details there. One, he said he's likely. He hasn't done it yet. Two, where is the flock contract? What's happening at the city of Milwaukee right now is the flock contract is entirely within the police department, which under state law gives police chief Jeff Norman the final say on if the money is expended. The council just essentially throws the money over the wall. He gets to spend it as he sees fit. The county has that same situation with the independently elected sheriff and to need a ball. That's something that's out there could be an issue if she's supported the guard rails that David

37:25Crowley and Mayor Cavaliere Johnson announced more than a week ago now, but will she support canceling the contract? Open question something we'll watch. The third thing that just happened is will the Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty a conservative law firm filed a lawsuit on behalf of a walkershot county resident against 11 walkershot county communities and walkershot county for several dozen flock cameras that they claim are being used without a search warrant and that violates not a lawyer. Please let me get the right amendment. The fourth amendment protections that a search warrant should be used to conduct that kind of search. Fascinating. It's an interesting the double whammy of data centers and flock. As far as just having growing bipartisan support among voters. Like this seems like something that both people who typically vote Republican or typically vote Democrat have increasing amounts of worry over similar to the data center situation as well as far as like everyone being like, I don't know if we like all this technology. They just seem like there's like a

38:27growing revolt of the common person against all of this technology that is taking over every corner of our culture. It's certainly seen in one of the things that's interesting. I tallied up the list and it's more than 30 communities in Wisconsin now and that includes Sheriff's Department cities. Oddly enough, Washington Island in the tip of door county. Yeah, where you can take bittershots. At the very dock, they had one flock camera there. They've now dropped it. The number of communities that have dropped flock and what seems to not be a follow the leader situation, but each for their own reason coming to a conclusion that we want out of flock. Fondelite County. Here's the data being sold. We want out the donor pulls out of Washington Island. They want out. Sheboygan pulls out because there's some misrepresentation during a public meeting. Like the house of cards that we seem to be seeing here fall over is just amazing how fast it's happening. What do we know about flock as a company? Like is it private? Is it public? Is it owned by a bigger company? I guess I don't know. It's a company is actually called flock safety. It is obviously a private company. I don't know if it's

39:29publicly traded. I don't believe so. I don't think it is private. The cameras themselves are actually relatively inexpensive right now. I think you could think of it as probably a razor blade model where they're trying to get you hooked on using the product and they've actually threatened litigation. We do know against people that have tried to opt out of their contracts early. But yes or no, one of the big overarching themes of this are biggest concerns I have with a lot of people have the lack of transparency upfront even with the municipalities and the law enforcement that use it. Just tell us everything. This thing does aware this information is going up front and let us decide rather than inching a little by little into Kristen's point, kind of the same thing as data centers. Either tell us everything up front so we can make decisions or don't absolutely one thing I didn't mention about Fondela County another revelation in out of state law enforcement agency in a public records request ended up exposing somehow a Fondela County investigation that because the network nature of these cameras it's not just one camera one search. It's you search across the entire flock network. So again, to your point

40:31taught about one and know everything up front. It's really hard to know everything because they're everywhere. All right, when we come back, how much is a quadrillion? Sounds like a lot. All right, if you ever wondered how many zeros are in a quadrillion? How many zeros are literally Kristen? 15. Three more than a trillion. So if you wondered what's after, once Elon Musk becomes a quadrillionaire, we'll know that it's 15 zeros. All right, Jeremy. Jeremy, this is regarding UWM. Yeah, why are we talking about quadrillion? Because that's how far Panther Pride now extends that many miles. And that's also the location of the closest known black hole to earth. Guy of black hole one, which a UWM professor, Philip Chang had a role in 2022 in discovering. And now the university yesterday designated it. Guy of black hole one as the UWM star. It's just a proclamation. It doesn't actually rename the star. It just makes it known at UWM as the UWM star.

41:36A fun lighthearted thing. I thought it was a bit silly, which then caused me to go on this rabbit hole. UW Madison, they're probably in on this too. Turns out they have named a number of things. And they've actually named them. The world knows them now as there's a minor planet in an asteroid. Sorry, don't know the names in front of me. But if you are into astronomy, there's some news out of UWM. Milwaukee Panther Pride, not just the 96 square miles of Milwaukee, but nine quadrillion miles, which is much easier known as 1500 light years, 1500 and 60 light years out into the sky. Nice. Are you a space nerd? No. You're a star. Where is the star track? You're a star track guy. But my godson is, you know, he's an aerospace and stuff. So yeah, I like astronomy. That could still a little astrology. No, let's try to make it. Stronomers. But a great reminder, though, of the great research. A lot of people don't know this. UWM is a research university. They do things beyond just the liberal arts. It's an important university in the system. Also, I hit that you unknown fact. I did my show there at UWM one time, a whole show got to interview pounds the Panther. Wow. It was a great show. There you go.

42:40All right. Since we have three minutes before break, we wanted to give Todd an opportunity to tell us his scooter story. Oh, yes. All right. So was my friends building carry a couple of nights ago, which that big brewer win on the way home, they live up in Shorewood. I think don't crucify me, but I think it's is it Maryland Street or Avenue? Yeah. You know, you know, you know, you're M and out from the darkness in the middle of dark and a rain storm comes a herd, like deer of college girls of these scooters that go right in front of our car. They don't go over to the side like a bike or whatever it'll lay. They just are going like 10, 15 miles an hour, like I heard a deer backing up traffic. What up with that? So are you anti scooter? I'm not, I'm fine. Just stay literally staying your lane. Just don't mess things up. It doesn't give you also it. They're not wearing helmets. They got dark clothes on. It's dangerous. Well, that is a safety risk within itself. I will as the bike bicyclists in the room that gets honked at a lot. State law does allow you if there's no bike lane present, you can take and this applies to scooters.

43:44You are allowed in the lane. Now, whether you can pull out and do that a 15 miles power and whether that's nice and morally sound. And it is different than the law. Yes. And NC, I've all four bikes. For bikes, it's fine. Stay at being the motor vehicle lane. If you want to, I got no problem with that. Here's why I do have a problem. Bikers think, oh, I don't want to stop. I mean, because they blow through stop signs. They don't follow the laws that motor vehicles do. And then when a car hits them, it's like, oh my god, the motor vehicle people are at fault. We have to protect the bikers. No, just follow the damn rules. Well, as we can talk about Milwaukee, you mentioned that motor vehicle drivers follow the law. That's a question. My follow Christian to work today. I can attempt to that. See? What did I do? I don't know. You're kind of swarvey and the guy almost hit you one point. That wasn't my fault. That was his fault. All right, fine. But you broke some news on on bicycle bike paths. Or maybe we'll come back. We'll talk about that. Well, we still have a minute. Oh, T's it. Well, with T's it, yeah, Todd wanted people to go faster. Milwaukee County wants

44:47them to go slower. Okay. We still have another minute. Oh, really? Well, one stretch in for five right now. The planetary exploration was not enough for a full segment. It was not a full segment. What? Chachkey shop. Yeah, where's the Chachkey shop? Chachkey shop. Urban Milwaukee, the store 755 North Milwaukee Street. And online at urbanmovackey.hthustor.com. Yes, callers. We do now have cheesets. How often do you get new products? Oh, at least once a month. Okay. So how do you decide which new products you want? What shiny thing is presented in front of my face? And I say yes to. Like tell me a little bit more about the business. Like who are the businesses that are pitching you to hold their products in the store? So one thing that's been really great that's happened in the past decade is this in touch. A maker's has grown up. There's also a couple business platforms now that they can sell much easier to stores. So we get some pitches through that. We also just encounter people at farmers markets, craft fairs, that type of stuff. Hey, do you have a business card? I want to look at do you have wholesale? One of the new things we got is a plush Wisconsin state shape thing from a national vendor. Like a plushie like a. Yes, like

45:51Frankie would love it. It's seven inches tall. Wonderful. That's which cheese colored. And then the other thing we do is. Yeah, we're going Neil Doyle. Welcome back to pointake and I'm Kristen Brite. Todd Alba is here. Here's your knee is here. And your tease for this next story here, me. I can't say on air. But it is an f up. Todd, have you ever someone's made a mistake and you've come in and try and fix it and you've made it worse? Is that ever happened in your life? Yes, I'm sure it had. Has that put taxpayers at risk of spending $1.4 million? No, it has. Okay, so that's the difference between Todd's life and this story right here is that compounding issues with the City Attorney's office, which is a team of it's the elected City Attorney Evan Goiky and then a team of about three dozen thirty five or so attorneys. The assistant city attorney, so the lowest ranking

46:57person in the tier structure, the other pyramid that is the City Attorney's office Kyle Bailey. The city was sued over an assessment for the regal Rex Nord corporate headquarters, which I can point there right out the window here. Kyle Bailey for a reason he blames on technology fails to respond, which then when you sue someone, they get an X amount of days to respond and then you have an initial hearing that's essentially what just happened with Josh Jacobs. So that's criminal court. This is civil court. Kyle fails to respond fails to appear. So the judges enters a default judgment, which means, okay, you're suing. We accept your claims. It's true. City of Milwaukee, you're on the hook for $700,000. Well, that that becomes known. It's an issue. The city's trying to untangle that and his boss Naomi Sanders then enters the picture for another lawsuit, which was already a delayed response. This was over Schlitz Park's assessment, which another $700,000 or so, and that these are fairly standard cases for big property owners. The city sees this every year. People contest their

48:00assessments. You as the homeowner don't hire a law firm to go represent you. You just go to the border review. You as a property owner that owns a $50 million property and you have a difference of $10 million in what you believe it's worth that puts several hundred thousand dollars on the table and the difference. You hire a law firm to go represent you. That played out again for Schlitz Park. There was not a response in time. Naomi Sanders again, Kyle Bailey's boss, deputy one of four deputies at the department. She's the head was the head of litigation. She comes in and says, okay, I'm going to represent them, but she misses that there was a hearing in the case for the Schlitz Park case, the second case. She then goes on a trip out of the country, doesn't have access to all of her records, but understands that there's what she thought was a document due date at the end of the day was a hearing in the morning. So she was working with and there's all kinds of evidence of this, a whole team of people, the assessor's office, other city attorneys to resolve this issue and submit these records. Well, that doesn't quite happen as expected. And in the process, she also

49:03misses that morning hearing. So second case, different judge says, okay, default judgment, city of Milwaukee, you lose that causes a complete panic. Both Kyle Bailey and Naomi Sanders are put in leave, administrative leave. They ultimately both resign in lieu of termination city attorney, Evan Goiky and a filing with the court called the work of those two inattentive and careless. But he says, I hold this office myself, including to a high standard and I take it seriously when we fall short and have made a leadership change overseeing our litigation section. That's what he told me. But in a filing with the court, he goes on to say, okay, the punishment, though, for us screwing up isn't to punish the taxpayers with $1.4 million in fines or not fines, but payouts for property tax refunds, essentially. And we now have we're awaiting a ruling in the Schillitz Park case, the newer of the two cases. In the first case, the judge said, nope, too bad. So sad.

50:04And the city has now had to take it to the court of appeals. We're awaiting a ruling there as well. It's a high-stake situation because $1.4 million would fill a lot of puddles. Yes. Is this in the time that you've been reporting Wisconsin, Milwaukee, typical? No, I've never seen this like specific to these two people that as I was like, there was just a lapse in judgment or incompetence or like what? Because I mean, not being a lawyer. I don't like, does this happen very often or like, how does this actually happen? So Kyle Bailey was a relatively new person. He had been there only a couple of years. He claims they switched from one case management system to another. It was supposed to automatically put the hearings and dates on his calendar. He claims that didn't happen and blamed it on technology. We do have a sworn statement from I believe it's a paralegal, but some type of administrator, non-atternity in the office, saying that we know that multiple people have had this issue. Her Naomi Sanders, I don't understand what happened. She was well regarded within City Hall. She was one of these boomerang people that she wasn't assistant city

51:06attorney. Then, Tierman Spencer came in. She was one of the women that filed a complaint against him. She goes to the Fire and Police Commission. Evan Goiky wins election. She comes back and along the way gets a promotion. She ends up being the deputy one of the top people. I don't know what happened there. Just the case of I'm going on vacation and not paying attention to details or the same technology issue is a real technology issue. I'm tired of City Attorney's Office needs to own that. I was a city-altered and much smaller municipality dealt with public employees. Most of which are great, great people. I'm a former US House and state senate staffer and public service and worked with a lot of great state agencies. Most of these people, 95% of them are wonderful, dedicated people, but this kind of crap just can't happen. This is taxpayer money. It's inexcusable and there's got to be better. You go on vacation, you miss something. There's got to be better systems in place. Is it a lack? Here's the question. Is it a lack of funding for staff? Are staff overworked? Do we have more funds to help these people and more people

52:09will watch over this? No one's attempted to make that argument yet. The fingers have been pointed towards this technology system, but why that isn't a failure for all of the city cases then has not been explained. As I said in an earlier segment, not an attorney. I cover a fair amount of court proceedings where it's dizzying to keep track of all the cases. I've always wondered how to actually do that. This affidavit's layout that this case management system is supposed to do it for us. The question there is, okay, do we need to then audit everything, which I expect is happening right now. Let's not miss anything else because heads are going to roll at the already have, but this issue can't get bigger than it is. All right, when we come back, a new announcement for a new system for the transportation. All right, welcome back to pointake, and I'm Kristen Todd Alba's here, Jeremy Jeanine is here, and MCTS is announcing public meetings for a system redesign. So we're a couple steps away from an actual redesign.

53:13For the first time, they're addressing what transportation planner, Jared Walker, and someone asked this, no relation to Scott Walker, based out of Portland, internationally renowned transportation planner. He's one real claim to fame that I can come up with out top of my head is in Houston, he redesigned their bus system and figured out that there was a lot of untapped ridership on the weekend that the Houston bus system was just ignoring. So he's well regarded MCTS, walking county transit system has retained him, and he's asking a fundamental question, and I'll ask both of you, what do you think, and Milwaukee County needs to make this decision should a bus system prioritize ridership or coverage and demographic coverage? What do you mean? So like how many like optimize for how many people would be getting on and off at any given stop, or how far you can get by taking the bus? Yes, how many total rides you could provide, or how far you can take any bus in the system? I would say ridership. And that's so that'll be that that is the question with

54:14Milwaukee County is faced declining revenue or rise costs outpacing revenue growth, but really they're declining revenue. So the system for almost 20 years now is faced cut after cut after cut. Jared Walker, his consulting practice says that the communities that have successful transit systems and especially working through these conditions, they successfully answer that question in a way that they're all going the same direction. If you prioritize coverage, if you want to be able to go end and end Milwaukee County in any area, you're going to know you're going to have less frequent buses on your busiest routes down Wisconsin Avenue, you have fewer buses. If you prioritize ridership to quote Alderman Bauman, well basically all the rides are east of 35th Street. That's not a hard and fast fact, but the densest areas of the city are essentially east of American family field. You would have more service there, some more frequent service likely at the expense of running or stopping running less frequent buses that go out to there used to be a bus that went to

55:14community re-incration center to fire Northwest Milwaukee County towards 124th Street, towards old Creek, you would cut those lines in favor of more frequent service. That is what the the heart of the question MCTS is attempted to answer at its new redesign meetings. I mean, is there an option where you prioritize one in the hopes of stabilizing the system to then reprioritize the other eventually? Yeah, so his belief is if you make that decision, you can then build from that point forward. If I get, if I prioritize ridership, I know I design my system for that, and then when I get more ridership, I just pick the service change that I think will get me the next most incremental amount of ridership. So you would rebuild it as you get more funding. Because I do think there's obviously this is the back to the high speed rail conversation as far as just transit in general for someone who does not have a car and the limited options if you, the example that stood out to me is if you live on the north side of Milwaukee and you need to get to like a connoble walk because that's the only doctor who's like, well, that treats

56:17whatever ailment that you are dealing with, but you can't get to a connoble walk. Like that's a failure of the transit system, right? And so there is certain things as far as how people move to get to work or jobs they can't take if they don't have a car because we don't have a system that actually can get them from the north side of Milwaukee to Oak Creek or something like that. So like, I think both are a problem, but as far as becoming, like revenue streams, it seems like you have to go with the one that's actually going to stabilize first. And Jared Walker's argument is either can stabilize you just need to pick which one it is and then build on that principle. Add it. So if you want to know what not to do, go to Madison, where I'm at, I mean, Mayor Saturow's Conway all into this bus rapid transit system. It's been a lot of one-time COVID money, millions of dollars built up this all electric bus focusing on expanding the map. And it is already financially in the whole the projections are is only going to get worse because she used one time money for all these electric buses in about eight years, they all have to be

57:17replaced. There's going to be nobody to do it. So Milwaukee, go to Madison, learn what not to do, but I agree that that yeah, you got to do one or the other. I agree with Kristen though, to make it financially viable because if an A financially viable is not going to be around for anybody, you got to focus on that. All right. We got one more second with Jeremy. There was a story they broke. We'll get to that after this. All right. We only got two minutes left, Jeremy. What do we need to know? Well, I can't explain to you all the levels of different e-bikes at that point, but I can tell you that Milwaukee County wants them to slow down on county trails. Primarily the Oakleaf Trail, which the heaviest use part is through the east side and heading up into shorewood and where all those scooter riders should have been. And I'm an assaplod. I'm standing up for those watching the stream because I've been on trails on hiking trails and these motorized things come out and it's a little jit is dangerous. How fast can they go? So that's where the different classes. So the e-bike I ride, class one, e-bike go up to 20 miles per hour and I have

58:20to pedal the whole time. There are class three bikes, which are essentially electric motorcycles that can go up to 28 miles per hour. I went time and so we had some friends that built their own e-bikes and they were like, oops, it can go like 30 something because there's no regulator. So there's a wide spectrum and the bad actors appear to be about to ruin it for everyone. So what is the actual proposal? Yeah. So the this is where I say they're going to ruin it. The proposal is 15 miles per hour. Okay. Well, if you're on the Oakleaf Trail one, it's really hard to judge. The difference between like 15 and 22. I say that as a runner and as someone who's biking and gets passed by some like, oh, they're clearly going that you get passed by people on really nice road bikes who can go faster than that. The two of America's Dairyland. I mean, those are the professionals. They're going 35 miles per hour on a non e-bike. So 15 miles per hour seems too low. Again, the whole issue is like, who's going to enforce this? There's not going to be a county sheriff sitting down on the Oakleaf Trail riding speeding tickets. But common courtesy goes a long way passing on the left and then actually pass on the left at a horror story from a friend of someone

59:23said, I'm on the left and then passed on the right and hit their daughter. So not good there. Just use common courtesy. This is it's the same thing with the e-scooters. It's just like it's human air. It's human air of why these things get ruined for everyone. It's not because the mode of transportation itself is bad. All right, with that, German gene. As always, so fun to have you here. We'll see you next Thursday. Todd Alba. As always, it's been fun three days. Thank you for you, Steve WTMJ. Appreciate the opportunity. I'm leaving $25 in the taxpayer coffers. I got a parking ticket last night. So thank you. I don't think that was I don't think that's legit. All right, we'll see you next time. Steve goes on vacation. Steve will be back tomorrow as will Joe and Bill. News is next.