St. Louis Radio Host on Viral Police Car Incident, Media Distortion, and Pandemic Theater

Mark Reardon [00:00:00] I have a lot of, a lot of optimism about the economy, but I think that the economy is gonna rapidly, it already is, it's rapidly changing. You know, I think last time you and I talked a little bit about commercial real estate, that's a bit of an untold story right now. What's gonna happen with all this commercial real estate? You have a lot of workers that probably won't be back in offices. What is that gonna mean? This is Michael Ring. I'm a cattle and crop farmer from Northern Illinois, and you're listening to the Vance Crow podcast.

Vance Crowe [00:00:30] Welcome back to the podcast. I'm glad you're here today. Mark Reardon Returns longtime podcast listeners will recognize Mark Reardon as the voice of KMOX radio, which is an am station here in the St. Louis region that was known all around the country because it had such a long reach and so many people heard Cardinals games from it. Well, since then, Mark's changed Jobs and he's actually on FM radio. So we sat down in the studio to talk about what's going on in St. Louis as far as crime and some of these crazy things that are happening with young people jumping on tops of police cars. Now, as you listen to this, you might think, ah, well I'm not from St. Louis. This isn't really all that relevant to me. But the conversation that Mark and I are having is really a conversation that's probably happening in every major city in America right now. So it really is a way to look really up close with the specifics of our city, but really how it's impacting the larger world. We also talked about what it's like to be the fathers of a daughter. We both are, have little girls, and we then start talking about the sort of innovations that a city can create in order to generate the jobs and stimulate the sort of growth that all cities want to have. But it's been so difficult in this modern age. So we're gonna get to that interview in just a moment. But one of the things you've heard me talk about on this podcast is private interviews that I do. If you have a special someone, maybe an aunt or an uncle or a grandparent or even a child, and you've always wanted to record them talking about their experiences in the world, their values, what's important to them, then I highly recommend you check out store dot Articulate Ventures where you can purchase this.

Vance Crowe [00:02:10] If you're local, I'll do these interviews in person where you can sit down in our studio and we'll talk for about an hour about these things. Or if you're from far away, we've done many, many over Zoom and they have turned out to be delightful conversations. And really it's a way for me to help you open up a person that you love and get them to tell stories. Just recently, I had a person reach out and suggest that they wanted to do it with their father. And so we started making plans and in between the time when we were making plans and now their father actually fell deeply ill and wasn't able to sit down and do the interview, I got a really nice email from that person and you could ex, you could tell that they had expressed a little bit of regret for not starting it earlier. If this is something you've thought about, just recognize that doing the effort to make it happen to, to really prompting the person to sit down and do this is one of those gifts that will last a lifetime, and it will be something you can have for a lifetime. So if you're interested in me doing a private interview with a loved one, go to store dot Articulate Ventures. Alright, now on to a crowd favorite, my man, Mark Reardon. Mark Reardon. Welcome back to the podcast

Mark Reardon [00:03:20] Vance Crowe. It's, it's good to be back. And we, we did one previous, but it was on the Zoom thing, wasn't it?

Vance Crowe [00:03:24] Yeah. And I remember when we were doing that interview, you actually didn't know you were gonna be on video, so there was one point when you were like,

Mark Reardon [00:03:30] I did

Vance Crowe [00:03:30] Talking to me while carrying your, your computer around. And I was like, this guy's the man he can walk and talk.

Mark Reardon [00:03:36] Oh, that's right. Yeah. Well, I can't, something was happening upstairs and I, I wanted to, there might've been some noise or things along those lines. So I went upstairs and I just kept talking and yeah, I didn't realize until after the fact I thought, well, that's not gonna be a big deal because I can walk and talk at the same time. But then I found out that my video tour, I hope my house looked good that day because we did take a little trip around the, around the house, which was okay. That was fine.

Vance Crowe [00:03:57] Yeah, you had some interesting architectural features, including a, like a pointed vaulted ceiling. I liked it quite a

Mark Reardon [00:04:03] Bit there. There is a nice big vault, which means I will not paint that room ever there. There are professionals that paint that room for sure. So

Vance Crowe [00:04:09] Since we last spoke, you were on KMOX and now you're in a totally different time slot and doing something different, but with the same family, right?

Mark Reardon [00:04:19] Yeah, it's interesting because, just to offer a little perspective, because you have listeners all across the globe, Vance Crow, cam X is a legendary Heritage radio station, as we refer to them AM Radio Station 1120 on the Dial Clear channel, which means no other radio station in the entire country is on that signal at 1120. So because of that, and because it's an AM signal 50,000 watts, because of the way the Ionosphere works, and I can't explain this at all, the signal booms throughout much of the country, the mountains certainly interferes. So came, wax has this huge reputation throughout the, the Midwest and the Southeast, I would say, because it gets into all these states. So with the Cardinals affiliation, been the Cardinals flagship station for many years. There was a period in the mid two thousands where they left for a little bit. The station has this huge reputation, and I had done afternoon drive on Wick since 2008. I came back from Milwaukee in 2006. I was working for another Heritage radio station up there and needed to get down here for family reasons. That's another story with a divorce. But I had been on KX for all these years, new and afternoon drive two to five, and I got a call about two and a half months ago, and it was, my boss had texted me the night before and said, Hey, can we touch base tomorrow morning? I said, on what? Ah, just a few updates.

Vance Crowe [00:05:31] Yeah. Is that a flag now? Is that a flag?

Mark Reardon [00:05:33] Something that's important to, to recognize here is that Rush Limbaugh passed away. And that's an important component in this story because Rush had been the host on KMOX in his syndicated format for decades now, from 11:00 AM to 2:00 PM So he was my lead in, which was a pretty good lead in to have

Vance Crowe [00:05:50] For, for a long time.

Mark Reardon [00:05:52] And when Rush died, that meant that there was a slot on the station that was open between 11 and two, two, could have been syndicated, could have been local, and they decided to go local. And there was an opportunity to get all the partisan political people like me off the radio station. I guess. So can I do other radio? I, I can, I've done a lot of different radio. In fact, my show, and you know, this fans, I don't just talk about politics, I talk about a lot of things, but they, they saw it as an opportunity to move me from one station in Odyssey, that's the name of our company, used to be Intercom to another station, 9 7 1 KFTK, which has been a very successful FM talk station in this market. And I was thrilled. I really was. It was a complete surprise. They flipped the show that was on that station with my show. And I, I, you know, I started on FM radio. I started music radio in the eighties, so maybe I'm coming full circle. I'm 56 years old. All right. How old are you, Vince?

Vance Crowe [00:06:43] 39.

Mark Reardon [00:06:43] Yeah, people your age and, and certainly younger, but also older between, I'd say my wife's 42, you know, the 40 to 50 year olds, they don't know that AM radio exists now. In fairness, I don't think FM radio is too far behind because these types of things, podcasts, streaming is taking over. That's a big portion of my show though, because we know that a lot of the audience does come from streaming. They're not listening to it live. So yeah, a bit of an adjustment in for

Vance Crowe [00:07:09] The,

Mark Reardon [00:07:10] My last 10 years of my career, but it's been a great change

Vance Crowe [00:07:13] For the host. Is there something different about being on fm? Do you have to change anything about what you're doing by moving from AM to fm?

Mark Reardon [00:07:21] You know, it's a, it's a really good question because there's almost a different feel to it and what we call it a clock. So what we're doing here, we have no clock. We don't have to take a commercial break, we're just gonna talk nonstop. Well, we have commercial breaks. That's how I get paid at the radio station. And because Camx has this history and reputation, and it's a news station, there were things that you just didn't say or do or veer off into, maybe. So Moic takes or things along those lines, or say words that might be allowed on the radio, but maybe not appropriate for a certain audience. We call that community standards. So is there really anything different? No, you know, it's just another radio station, but I guess when you think about you break it down, there are differences and, and a couple of things. It's a much looser format. The the audience is, you know, we, we, we know the audience a little bit because of the politics, and it was very successful, certainly in the past five years because of Donald Trump. That's changing a little bit. You know, we're seeing, I saw something even this week, CNN's audience is down 70%, 65, that's, they're purging.

Vance Crowe [00:08:27] Yeah, that's a huge drop.

Mark Reardon [00:08:28] So I guess the answer to that question would be, it, it, it, there is a different feel, there's a lot more looseness on the show. I have more players on the show, so I've always done solo talk show. This is more of an ensemble and we're still kind of, you know, evolving along those lines. I do a lot with music. I'm a big music guy. Musical guests are gonna sound fantastic on the fm. I had Neil Salsa in, he's a guy that has a band here in St. Louis called The Mighty Pines. They're fantastic. And he came in, did a couple of songs before a show at the beautiful Fox Theater. So, yeah, I mean, realistically, it's just another signal. It's just an FM station. But there is a different vibe to it, if you will.

Vance Crowe [00:09:05] You know, I think there's something really important about radio that people don't realize we're giving up when you switch to podcasts. Because when you have a podcast, you have to know what you're looking for. It's very hard for you to just be like, oh, I'm gonna randomly flip this thing on and experience somebody new and different. Whereas with radio, you're kind of like dancing along the dial. You're in your car, you're like, Hey, what's gonna be the most interesting thing that I can encounter? And so it's like being a part of a community. You don't always know what you're going to get. You aren't choosing it. And so I think that there's, there is some blending of importance with how do you have that level of novelty that comes from turning on the radio? 'cause you just don't get it with podcasts.

Mark Reardon [00:09:44] Yeah, and you know what, what, what you just described is something that sometimes happens, certainly in this era, very fast. In other words, and I've kind of joked about this over the years, but when my show, my show starts at three o'clock right now. So let's use an example of today as we're recording this in the midday and my show's a little later, I have a certain amount of things that I know I'm gonna talk about today. We have the show formatted out, I have a few guests, but it, it wouldn't take a whole lot for something to happen at one o'clock, two o'clock, 2 45, and in the era of Trump, things would happen all the time right before the show started. So you had to shift gears. I'm constantly shifting gears and there are things that I planned on doing that I won't do, and maybe it gets delayed a day or two. Maybe we just sort of move on from that topic because it doesn't come as timely. But that, that's one of the things that I've always been attracted to with radio, is that newness and that freshness. And, you know, when I did morning radio, it was fun because you're telling people things that they hadn't heard for the first time, especially when I did morning radio, you know, two decades ago because you didn't have your phone to look at, right? So we couldn't look at Twitter in the morning and say, okay, here are the stories of the day, here's what I missed. You had to turn on the radio when you went to work in the morning and in the afternoon. It's a little bit of a different approach where, you know, now I have stories that people have heard from the day before. I'm looking at stories that people are gonna be talking about tomorrow, right? So if, if the topics that I choose, I don't know that I, I don't make these decisions this way, but I'm always kind of happy if Hannity or Tucker Carlson or someone on CNN or M-S-N-B-C, if they're hitting that topic that night, well then that kind of becomes the morning topic, right?

Mark Reardon [00:11:18] For, for everyone that does talk shows and things along those lines, I, I try to stay ahead of the curve on that and find out what's going on. Things change all the time, as you know. I mean, I could be doing the show today at four o'clock, four 30, boom, there's another story. And then we jump on that. And that, that's something that radio can do, that television can't do. Television can do it with, with pictures, you know, you got a fire or something like that. Television does a much better job. But radio can be right on top of something very quickly. And I like that. And you're right, podcasts can't really do that. They can analyze after the fact, which I do like the longer format.

Vance Crowe [00:11:47] Well, and you can have local or specific podcasts, but they don't have the same salience as the speed with which what you're talking about. Right? And like, this has actually changed, I think our culture in our American society is that so few people have access to regular local news that you think of ourselves as one giant country. And so we're paying attention to one national story. Whereas you're like, Hey, I've, I also have to include things that are going on, you know, down the street from the, from the studio. Well,

Mark Reardon [00:12:17] That, that's one of the things that, that local radio does. And that's what I, I do because I do obviously handle a lot of national topics, but we have the local spin on them. So it, it's, it's interesting. But what you just described, I think is also just gonna keep getting worse because local journalism and real journalism is just disappearing because of budgets and the way everything's changing. So I, I don't know how that kind of works itself out, because we're gonna really miss stories in the future that people should know locally of abuse, corruption, e even positive stories that won't be told because you don't have enough good journalists out there. You have all these formats that are spread out, but local newspapers are dying to a certain extent. Local radio stations don't have the audience that they used to. So it's problematic, I think.

Vance Crowe [00:13:02] So let's talk about local stories, because I had gone a little time and thought, Hey, St. Louis is getting better. We aren't having all these problems. The other day I flip on Twitter and I see people standing on top of cop cars that have their lights running, jumping up and down, taking photographs, screaming, hitting that thing. What in the hell is going on in St. Louis?

Mark Reardon [00:13:23] Well, so what you're describing happened this most recent weekend here in St. Louis, and I had a conversation a couple of days ago with John Hayden, who's the police chief of the city of St. Louis. And he wanted to talk about this. And, and there was, you know, there was an energy to his discussion about it for a couple of different reasons. First of all, that should have been a story that went national. It did not, it would've gone national if something bad had happened and something bad could have happened. And Chief Hayden's point was, so you have all these people, Washington Avenue is a very popular spot in St. Louis nightclub spot people. And and it's been known even during the pandemic for some issues, you know, with people partying late at night. And when we had restrictions,

Vance Crowe [00:14:00] Drag racing was going on. Yeah, right.

Mark Reardon [00:14:01] Well, all that stuff downtown. Yeah. We, we, our solution to stop drag racing in downtown St. Louis during the pandemic was to put up barriers because no one else was downtown. So that's the solution they came up with. I'm telling you, th this is, it's frightening what happens. So you had all these kids emptying outta the bar. There was a cop down there, one cop in a car, and people start jumping on top of the car. They're twerking, they're dancing, they're breaking the windshield. This police officer uses an amazing amount of restraint. You know, we talk about these cops have to make snap decisions, and they do. But this cop could have done something that would've maybe been really bad for the people involved, for him himself. If he could outta car at the

Vance Crowe [00:14:40] Wrong time, somebody, he could be in prison

Mark Reardon [00:14:41] Or he could be dead. I mean, there's all kinds of things that could have happened here, and they didn't. But what, what makes us think that that somehow acceptable behavior And you know, it was almost tough for our mayor, deShar Jones, the new mayor of St. Louis, to criticize. She's very, very critical of the police to criticize the people who were protesting. She did, she said, there have to be consequences. Not protesting, I'm sorry, jumping on the car and destroyed the car was totaled, by the way. So she was critical of that, saying they have to face consequences. But it was almost like if you heard her, you know, respond to that, she was pained to have to say that in, in a strange way. It's bizarre. And that's where we are, sadly, in the city of St. Louis, on a regular basis, what's

Vance Crowe [00:15:25] Going on with the psychology of a community that that doesn't say these behaviors are not acceptable and we're just gonna clear 'em off. Is it because the only way to clear 'em off is to use force? And force is now looked poorly upon. I mean, I just can't understand. Yeah. Why does a community, 'cause I look at that and I feel I have to temper my sense of anger because I think these people are out of control. They've proven that they're out of control. Yes. And the only way to stop that is to literally force them to be in control. But I don't think that makes it any better.

Mark Reardon [00:15:56] Well, I, and I think that your anger is, my anger is most people's anger, including people who live in the city, including Americans who see this, and they're horrified as well. But this goes back to, to the media right now and the way, and people tell me, well, you're the media. Well, I'm a talk show host, alright? And I've done this for a long time. I used to be in, you know, more directly in the news business. In other words, I was a news anchor or a news director. But we're, we're afraid. The media, the mainstream media's afraid to show things like that to a certain extent. Because that, that, you know, if you show a clip like what happened in St. Louis on CNN or other outlets, then that's going to appear like it's racist to a certain extent. And they don't want to trigger people that way. So I, I think there's a lot of anger with defund the police. You talk to people in these communities that are affected. They don't want to defund the police. If you talk to progressive activists and the mayor of St. Louis and Cory Bush, the new congresswoman from the city of St. Louis, that not only wants to defund the police, but wants to defund the Pentagon, those are the people giving, you know, giving that movement the momentum. It's not regular people who live in houses where crime is riddling their neighborhoods. And I don't know how you change that. I really don't. Because it's a frightening time right now where the narrative, and, and this happens, I guess it's happened over time, where the minority sometimes gets that voice on the media because they're better organized. They have a PR firm or they have connections with the media. So most normal voices do get drowned out a little bit in a lot of different discussions.

Mark Reardon [00:17:29] But on this one, with crime in particular, I, I don't know how we have a discussion that solves problems and reduces violent crime because there's unequal treatment in the media of these stories. And the police are often blamed, right? It's not in the city of St. Louis fans where we have George Floyd, and you have the situation from Columbus, Ohio and North Carolina. I, I can't find a story from the period where Mike Brown was shot to today, where there was an unarmed person in the city of St. Louis that was killed by a white police officer because he's racist. That hasn't existed. But if you listen to the media coverage, if you listen to Sharra Jones, if you watch 60 Minutes, and Bill Whitaker who swoops into town and does a piece a few weeks ago, that makes St. Louis out to be the biggest problem in St. Louis, according to 60 Minutes, is white cops shooting black teenagers or black people, which is not happening. But you are led with that impression because 60 Minutes comes in completely ignores what's really happening in St. Louis makes Kim Gardner, our circuit attorney, out to be the victim. And, and the one thing that I would say, and I, you know, I've said it on my show, there are people who are Democrats, people I know, moderate Democrats in this part of the country, they're outraged by this. They were critical of the 60 Minutes story, but their voices are drowned out to a certain extent.

Vance Crowe [00:18:47] I have a buddy in the county prosecutor's office, and he said, you know, one of the things people don't talk about is there used to be McDonald Douglas in St. Louis. Right? Right. So what turned into Boeing, but when they left, there was a huge component of manufacturing that left that were just middle class solid jobs. And as soon as that happened, a place like Ferguson went from having every house filled with working class people that had a job that were there doing things. Now it's gone. And the people that could leave did leave. And so now you have a whole bunch of people that don't have, there's not manufacturing jobs, they're just lying around. I mean, there are jobs out there, but they're not the same. No,

Mark Reardon [00:19:25] No, I, I understand exactly what you mean. And that's such a complicated issue because how do you fix that moving forward? I would suggest that simply talking about defunding the police and all these other things that appear in the news isn't making anyone's lives better in those communities at all. So I I, I think it's a, it's a big challenge and it's real easy to, you know, put a soundbite on television and for a guy like me to break it down and come out with, you know, with a stance. But where are we actually helping people? And I would point this question toward, you know, public officials who, who down both sides, you, you know, who want to drift toward the easy topics and not talk about solutions, unfortunately.

Vance Crowe [00:20:02] So is defund the police as a, that term, is that like trying to go too far so that you hope, like what you ever actually land at is kind of the golden

Mark Reardon [00:20:11] Mean? I think, think so. I think maybe that would be what they would say, because to a certain extent, I'm not opposed to police reform. I, I think a lot of people on the right are not opposed to police reform. I'm not a big fan of no-knock warrants. The court addressed that recently. I'm, I'm not a fan of a lot of things that police are allowed to do, but I don't think that all police are racist. And I think they're up against really, really bad people on a regular basis. And they have to see things and confront things and contend with things that none of us would ever, ever have to do. Just to think of rolling up on a crime scene when there's a murder, a kid that's been shot, any of these things, sex crimes, things along those lines. So I I I understand that. I guess the point on that would be Vance that yes, because there are reforms that are needed when it comes to social workers or whatever other approach. Drug crimes is something that I, I would certainly be, be very much a fan of, backing off of more intense policing, because I think we've made a lot of mistakes. But because we have to reform the police with whatever social worker or taking a look at these things in a different way, that doesn't mean you, you take police away from the ability to crack down on violent criminals and people that are breaking law and stealing things. Did you hear this story, by the way? One of the guys that's running for the mayor of Atlanta, who wants to defund the police in broad daylight yesterday, some kids roll up on him, take his car, he, he gets dragged for like a city block. This guy wants to defund the police. So he

Vance Crowe [00:21:37] Got drug

Mark Reardon [00:21:38] Yeah. For like a block.

Vance Crowe [00:21:40] Oh man.

Mark Reardon [00:21:41] And he, and he, so he wants to defund the, I maybe he's just counting on a great insurance that it's just about the insurance settlement at this point. You don't have to worry about cracking out on criminals.

Vance Crowe [00:21:50] You know, people don't actually realize this, 'cause it's not a part of American culture that we've had to worry about in a long time. But when I lived in Kenya, one of the most dangerous things that happened was street kids. So there'd be a group of kids, they're 14 to 17 years old, particularly guys. They've got a bunch of testosterone. They're trying to prove who they are. And the one way you keep them cleaned up is that you've got a beat cop around. You've got people out there looking around being like, Hey, knock it off. Right,

Mark Reardon [00:22:15] Right, right. And

Vance Crowe [00:22:15] Once that spins outta control where, where young kids realize like, Hey, we can do what we want here. Nothing, nothing negative is gonna happen if we go steal or we go cause some ruckus and, and like, once that spins outta control, getting it back contained. I don't, I don't have any idea how you do that. Well,

Mark Reardon [00:22:32] You, you, you're, you're exactly describing what happened in St. Louis last weekend with the kids on the cop cars, right? Yeah.

Vance Crowe [00:22:38] That's, there are

Mark Reardon [00:22:38] No, now, you know, I said, the mayor says there should be consequences. Will there be, first of all, just even finding the people that were involved, you can match up video and pictures, but there won't be any consequences for, and and a lot of them, some of them looked underage to me, which is another interesting question. But no, there won't be consequences. And they know that there's no shock. Why are nobody should be surprised that crime is spiraling outta control. Violent crime in particular in cities across the country. Look, we, we had, even this week, I highlighted our mayor who somebody tweeted out because Fox News did a story on the record, high murder rate that we're having here in St. Louis. I did something last year, Vince, lemme back up a little bit. It was at this point last year where our mayor, former mayor Le Cruzen was warning people about COVID. We had this big outdoor party at the lake of the Ozark. You remember that? Oh yeah. It went natural. So a bunch of people went to a pool, how dare they outdoors during a pandemic. And it was deemed one of the most offensive events that you could have ever seen with the mayor of St. Louis cracking down saying, if you were at that damn pool, if you come back to my city where people are dropping like flies from gunfire every flipping day, that's my words. Not her. She should have thrown that in. If you come into my city, you're gonna quarantine for 14 days and you wetter better wear a damn mask. Give me a break. Okay? You're not talking about the real issues that St. Louis is confronting. So what I did, and, and I did it for a reason, and I think I made a point, is there was a, there was a long time during last summer Vance, where the number of people who were dying from COVID was eclipsed by

Vance Crowe [00:24:20] Oh, the people dying about, right? We talked this, yeah.

Mark Reardon [00:24:21] So when that happened at the Lake of the Ozarks, I made a prediction. I said, I'm gonna predict right now that the number of people who die from COVID is gonna be less than the number of people who die from gunfire. It was very close, and I don't have the numbers at the top of my head, but it was all the way until December where this was decided. Now that's horrifying. Now people can say, well, that's a false equivalence you're comparing to. Yeah, I I get it. I know, but I was trying to make a point because all I heard from Lido cruzin on Twitter and wear a mask, wear a mask, wear a mask that wasn't helping people wearing a mask when they were getting hit and riddled with bullets. And when kids are sitting around in North St. Louis, just one kid a couple years ago just got hit, you know, in, in Xavier saga's 7-year-old kid who still, the, the gunman has not been prosecuted by Kim Gardner, our circuit attorney. We may have even talked about that last time. So there are all these things that, that happened. And throughout the course of the year, the violence kept building, the violence kept building. So now you have Fox that did his story just this week about all the violence in St. Louis, somebody tweets out that, oh, you know, you, you know, you've made it, if, if you're on Fox News to Shara Jones because they did a story about her, she tweets it out and says something like, oh, I've made it with the, you know, the teary smiley emoji. What do you even call that guy laughing emoji. You know what I

Vance Crowe [00:25:37] Mean? Yeah.

Mark Reardon [00:25:37] So think about what she did. She thinks it's comical that I don't care if it's Fox or see, I think it's because it's fox, right? Because they're evil right? Wingers, they do a story about crime that is riddling this community. The number one issue that we face in this region is crime. We know that, you know that everybody here knows that. But she thinks it's funny because she's on Fox News and she's the mayor of the city of St. Louis. And she just, no criticism for that except from a guy like me. I mean, that's, that's baffling. I

Vance Crowe [00:26:10] Don't think that your thing was false equivalency. Because if you look at, if you say the death rate is comparable, then what the hell? We are spending what, three quarters of a billion dollars in the city of St. Louis alone on, on COVID and COVID protection measures. We would never, no, nobody's saying let's add $750 million to the police budget to try and, you know, clean up this crime problem. But like the entire region will, will suffer for a generation if you don't figure this out. Like, you know, you know, I have a new daughter, I want to take her to Cardinals games, but I'm not gonna take her down there if there's a light chance of gunshots on the way. Well,

Mark Reardon [00:26:49] Beyond that though, you know, I want to go back to something you said about the teenagers and everything, and, and I've, for the most part, I have felt safe in downtown St. Louis, but there have been things certainly that have happened since Mike Brown, since Ferguson, where I think the, you know, the emotions are running hotter where I have been, where, where I live. You've been to the building, I'm sorry, where I work downtown St. Louis, not too far from Enterprise center where the blues play, there's a lot of concerts. Oh yeah. So one night, my wife and I, I would do this a lot. I did this for Cardinals games too. Park at the building. It's about a 15 minute walk to Bush Stadium, five minutes to Enterprise Center, walking across this little park next to my building, a bunch of teenagers that are heading my way. We're just walking, we, we end up going single file because they look like they're taking up a bunch of the spaces on the, on the pathway, you know, the concrete pathway. And I, I walk by these kids and this girl, she's probably 15, 16 years old. She, she shoulder bumps me. She gives me a, a little shoulder check and I, I look back at her and I wanted to say something, but I did not, because I didn't wanna start anything. I don't know if someone else is armed. I did not have, you know, a handgun on me at the time. Not that that, not that I would be opposed to that, but it, it was frightening. So yeah, you wanna take your daughter, it's not just gunfire, it's other things that might make you feel unsafe in St. Louis. And we have not solved that one, one idea, this is crazy. Just think about this. What if we had a few more police officers that are on the street when we have events? Well, we're down 150 officers in the city of St. Louis, and

Vance Crowe [00:28:16] Describe that. 'cause people don't know what that means.

Mark Reardon [00:28:17] Well, it, it's a combination. So you can't, they've never really fulfilled the positions that are open and because

Vance Crowe [00:28:23] Who would wanna be a cop? Right now,

Mark Reardon [00:28:24] That's part of it. But also, don't, don't forget you have people retiring, which is also part of what you just said because people are like, look, I've ha these cops are like, I've had it, I'm getting outta here. So now you have, even when you fill some of the openings, you have more openings because of the retirements. But at any given time, this is stunning too. I don't wanna misquote this because I just talked about it on the radio, but the amount of officers on the street, in the city of St. Louis at any given time is not a lot. And a lot of these officers are in single cars. Unfortunately, even what happened with the car that was destroyed over the weekend on Wash Avenue, that police officer was in that car by himself. Why is that? That's not a good idea either. So yeah, we have, we have issues with even getting enough cops on the street. But who would wanna do this job at this point? I, I don't know.

Vance Crowe [00:29:09] I mean, I I did not have a great relationship with cops growing up. I got in trouble. Cops were always, you know, poking me and watching me, and I felt unfair to me at different times. I'd had guys be like, over haughty, you know, like, oh, you know, we're gonna try and push this guy around. So I don't have like, some deep passionate love Yeah. For the police, but I don't know what the answer is. If, if the direction we go in is we can't fill these slots. We're telling everybody that they should be defunded. Let's just imagine that it's not just the summer of 2021. What does this look like when you do this for five years? Where are we in 20 20, 26? You know, what does the, the, not just the St. Louis downtown, but what are relations between different parts of the city? People will begin to hate the downtown area. Well,

Mark Reardon [00:29:57] And this, this whole situation with cops is complicated from this standpoint too, because where I don't want to defund the police, I wanna support law enforcement, enforcement. There's still a lot of bad behavior that goes on out there. And I'll offer a couple of examples here, personal examples. So one of my producers was just pulled over in front of our building by a cop a few weeks ago because he had an expired tag. Now, mind you, the tag was expired on his car for a long time. But this cop was super aggressive, super aggressive, more so than he should have been. Two weeks after that, I was heading down from St. Louis to play golf in Louisville, and I'm in southern Indiana and I'm just rolling right along and have a couple of friends in the car. And I notice it in, at this point, it's in a construction zone, which plays into the story. I noticed there's a cop that's pulled over, his lights are on at the time. So I, I'm in the left hand lane, I'm passing a couple of semis. He kind of goes behind me, he comes behind me, I get into the right hand lane behind a truck and, and now he's behind me. I'm thinking, in my mind, van, there's no way he's pulling me over. I've done nothing wrong. My car is registered properly. So I actually made the mistake. I go back into the left hand lane because I think he's going after the truck. Well, well, he is not, he's coming after me. So he pulls me over and he comes in Hot Officer Villanueva, Indiana State Highway Patrol. He's pretty aggressive. And you know, he is asking for my license and registration. I said, I said, look, we, this is always something that, that is weird to me. Maybe people around the country can't relate to this, but whenever they ask for that on TV license, we don't have that in Missouri. We have no registration. We do, but it's on your license plate.

Mark Reardon [00:31:28] Yeah.

Vance Crowe [00:31:29] So

Mark Reardon [00:31:29] Theres not anything in my, in my glove box that I can hand the cop that says registration. So I'm explaining that to him. I'm like, dude, we don't have registration. Okay? So at, at, at this point, you know, he's still pretty aggressive. And I said to him, I, every once in a while I'll pull the radio card. I say, I gotta tell you something, I do a talk show in St. Louis, and I talk about law enforcement all the time, and I'm on your side. I'm defending law enforcement all the time because I know what you guys are up against, but you're pretty aggressive here and I really don't understand why. And you know, I'm just answering your questions. And he goes, yeah, yeah, he kind of, he's chest is popped up and he, he backs off to a certain extent a little bit. And he goes, all right, you have your license. And I give my license. And he goes back to the car and he's there for a while. He had, he had also asked me about my driving record. I said, look, I've only had two tickets in the last, you know, 20 years. So he goes back, he writes me a warning, he comes back, he apologizes, he apologizes for being wow

Vance Crowe [00:32:22] So

Mark Reardon [00:32:22] Aggressive. He says, look, you know, construction zone, the ticket was gonna be a thousand dollars, by the way.

Vance Crowe [00:32:28] And

Mark Reardon [00:32:29] I get it, you know, people, construction workers are in danger. I understand all that. I didn't feel, and I should have gone slower. I was going 70 in a 55. It was 55 because of the construction zone. Interestingly enough, maybe this is important to the story, never saw any construction, okay? And I, and I kept going through these zones and there was never any construction. Like not one, I'm not exaggerating, there's not one construction worker at any of these places at this point in southern Indiana. But I bring the story up because I think we do have to sit back. I've never been pulled over because of the color of my skin. I've had some bad encounters with cops, I've had plenty of good encounters with cops as well. But you, you have a situation where we've completely, and I don't know how we get back to this, but when, when Mike Brown was, was killed, I, I do think a lot of people felt that that was the moment to seize the day. African Americans in particular and say, look, this is our moment to make our voices heard about the way that police are treating people in the African American community. The problem was, is Mike Brown is not a good poster child for that. And the evidence of that case does not warrant anything that should open that discussion up. But it did. And then you have two discussions, one about police shootings and white cops killing, you know, black men, which is a total red herring because more white people are killed than black people. Overwhelmingly, overwhelmingly, the people who were shot and killed by police, when I say overwhelmingly, we're in the 90 percentile, if not higher.

Mark Reardon [00:34:01] They're armed with a gun, with a knife, with something else that can be deemed a weapon with a car that could be used as a weapon. So all these things in the Washington Post has this database. I encourage you to look at it, even though it's slightly misleading, because they will tell you what happened in these situations where people were armed and, and they were going after the police. And the police had to defend themselves. Now, having said that, that's a far different discussion than police being too aggressive against African Americans or anyone else. And that is a problem. And that is something that should be addressed. But it gets kind of convoluted with that other topic, which really isn't something that is a major issue in this country. Black people being shot by police officers. You would think it's the number one issue. It's not, it really shouldn't have been ranked that high. I get it. When you see videos of things that look disturbing, Tim Fitch, who used to be the St. Louis County police chief calls it awful, but lawful, the situation from Columbus, Ohio would be a good example of this. You have 9 1 1 called Grandma's about to get stabbed. There's all these young girls, the cop rolls up, he doesn't know what's going on. He draws his weapon. There's a girl that lunges at another girl with a knife, he shoots that girl, right? That's awful that that girl had to be shot, but he was protecting someone else. So in many of these cases, the law does protect the officers and it should. But I do think that those are separate issues from just overall police treatment and how police have reacted in African American communities. Those are real issues that I can't relate with, that I haven't seen on a daily basis.

Mark Reardon [00:35:34] But we can't have an honest discussion about that because all this other stuff gets thrown into the mix.

Vance Crowe [00:35:40] So for all the people that are sitting around feeling like St. Louis is, you know, a mad max, you know, war zone. This is actually a great city to do all kinds of cool, fun things. And you know, you and I talked about on your radio show about different experiences that I'm doing with my daughter, but you have a daughter here. What are, what is the way that you like to spend time with her here in the city?

Mark Reardon [00:36:02] Well, I, I, anything, anything that I can do with my daughter, because we just have so much fun, and I wanna back up a little bit and tell you the story of how Alexa Lynn Reardon came to be. There's some biology involved here, but it goes a little beyond that. And there's a lesson here for, for your daughter Vance, for my daughter, for anyone who has a teenage daughter or older, really anyone who has a daughter. So my daughter just turned six, and I'll answer your question in a roundabout way. I'll get back to that. Don't

Vance Crowe [00:36:28] Let me forget. Go whoever you want. So

Mark Reardon [00:36:30] My daughter just turned six on March 8th. We are recording this late May, 2021. I, I wanna give the date because this thing's gonna live in infamy. And there's gonna be someone listening to this in like 2051 Vance. And they're gonna say, wow, it was way back 30 years ago in 2021. So right around this time, seven years ago, we, we had a home, different home that we're in right now. We had some neighbors across the street that were selling a house. They had this little furry, fluffy dog. We had three dogs. My neighbor next door, there was a fence yard. They had two dogs. So the neighbor across the street, I promise you this is going somewhere, bear with me. Neighbor across the street's got a showing for their home. It's on the market. Hey, can we come over? People coming over to see the house? Yeah, come on over. All the dogs are running around. My wife reaches over the fence and we knew these, these dogs acro, you know, next to us, the, the one dog bit. Her hand when she reached over the fence, just got a little excited, a little too aggressive, whatever may have happened there. You know, the dog wasn't, wasn't aggressive, but it just, it made a mistake. Whatever, not, not real serious, but we thought, well, let's get it. It was a pretty good puncture. Wound, blood on the fence, all kinds of things. So we go to urgent care and she, they put her on antibiotics just to be safe. mid-July, seven years ago, my wife comes home from, from a run, it was a hot day here we get, it gets hot here in St. Louis, right? So it's like a hundred degrees with humidity. And just speaking candidly here, her boobs are pretty big on this particular day.

Mark Reardon [00:38:03] And she wasn't feeling well that week either. And there was a time where I asked the question, I said, Hey, what's going on? She would drink wine after dinner. She wasn't really doing that. I thought, what's going on? You, you okay? I'm not feeling too well. My stomach's bothering me next time my stomach's kind of bothering me. And, and at this point, with the big boobs involved and things, I said, are you pregnant? And her response was, well, I sure hope not now. My wife and I have been together since the early two thousands. I have kids that are now 24 and 21. She'd helped me raise my boys. We had talked about having children. We never had, well we, she had decided to focus on the career. She was fine without it. I never had the surgery though. Okay. So that's an important component as well. So she, she says, I hope not. I'm panicking. I'm 49 years old, 49 years old, about to turn 50 in the next spring. And I'm thinking, oh good lord. There might've been some words with f involved what's going So,

Vance Crowe [00:38:59] Because you know what's involved in raising kids, this

Mark Reardon [00:39:02] Is not like some mystery to you. Yes. Now can you put the pieces together? Do you, do you recognize why the dog bite story is relevant here? Ask this question. Some people listening have maybe put it together. Have you,

Vance Crowe [00:39:13] Did you have to get a tetanus shot or something? A rabies shot?

Mark Reardon [00:39:15] The antibiotics that they put her on zapped the birth control.

Vance Crowe [00:39:21] Oh, so yes. Ah, because

Mark Reardon [00:39:24] I did not have the surgery because she was on birth control. And because the, the

Vance Crowe [00:39:29] In particular, 'cause it zapped it right then

Mark Reardon [00:39:30] The fine print, it doesn't do it, I don't think medically, I'm not a doctor, nor do I play one on a podcast. I don't think it automatically ensures that it's gonna zap your birth control. But it's in the fine print. And having that experience and sharing it with other people, I, I will tell you that it's not uncommon. Usually the people who it happens to are very unaware that that's a consequence or potential consequence. So, you know, here I was in the, the summer of whatever year that was, 2014, I guess thinking man, like, and you know, we're, we're in this country. We have choices when it comes to pregnancy, I suppose, but we never really went in that direction. We, we had to confront it. My wife was living in denial. She didn't even take a test for like two or three weeks. I think

Vance Crowe [00:40:12] We both were.

Mark Reardon [00:40:13] And then you embrace it. You start telling people, Hey, this is going to happen. And Vance it. People say this, I've heard this over the years. I remember when I was younger, ah, having kids the best thing, no, it's not all the time. It is not the best damn thing in the world. And it sucks a lot of times too. But with this little girl and I, I think it's maybe because I had boys previously, it, it's an amazing bond and we do absolutely everything. She loves music. We obviously, we go to great locations here, like the zoo. I have a place out where I live in St. Louis County, Loke Park. Have you ever been to L Elk Park?

Vance Crowe [00:40:45] Yes. That's beautiful.

Mark Reardon [00:40:46] It's great. It's a little hidden resource. You can drive through. You can see elk and buffalo and deer and you know, there's a

Vance Crowe [00:40:52] Great, it's a great thing to do in the wintertime. There's nothing else going on. You just hop in the car

Mark Reardon [00:40:55] And drive the car through,

Vance Crowe [00:40:55] Right. Drive and you're like, oh. And there there's some bison. Yeah.

Mark Reardon [00:40:58] Yeah. And there's bird

Vance Crowe [00:40:59] Sanctuary.

Mark Reardon [00:40:59] There's, so we've been taking, you know, throughout the course of the pandemic, there are hikes. She's become a big swimmer. So really there's, there's nothing that I can't do with her. And one of the approaches that I've always had, my wife has worked out of town two different times for long stretches during the course of this little girl growing up. So I've been, you know, daddy daycare, everything just solo. I have all kinds of respect for single parents after this, not that I didn't beforehand, but handling a, an infant, a toddler all throughout, you know, up to this age. It's tough when you're doing it on your own. I've done it, it on my own. Luckily I've just done it for weeks and months, had a

Vance Crowe [00:41:35] Stretch. So I would say the most angry I've ever made Twitter was one time I wrote a tweet that was basically like, I don't understand how anyone does single parent. You know, like if, if I had been raised that way, I'd have been a mess. Right? Right. Somehow this got misconstrued that I was saying single parents are bad or wrong. And it just went, oh,

Mark Reardon [00:41:55] Totally

Vance Crowe [00:41:55] Chaotic. But my my point was, your point was, was my point, right? There's very few people in the world that have enough patience to be able to handle the emotional storm that is an infant that is just like, they don't even know why they're unhappy. They're just expressing that something is not correct and they don't even know what it is. So you're trying to figure this all out, and if you're doing it over and over and over and over again, I don't understand how single parents do it at all.

Mark Reardon [00:42:22] Well, and let me, let me reflect on that for a moment because there's no way to fix this, mind you, unless you all do what I did and have babies when you're in your fifties. But we almost get it backwards because when I'm in my, now, I didn't have kids till I was in my thirties, like 30, I think I was 32 or so. But you don't have any money, you know, you're stressed. You, you have, you go to Target every time you get diapers or whatever. It's a hundred bucks plus. And it, it's tough. And now I get into my fifties. I'm very fortunate in a much better financial position. I'm more relaxed. I don't, you know, I just approached it psychologically from a different standpoint. Maybe a good portion of that is just due to maturity and, and just, you know, getting older. But the relationship that we've had has been awesome because of that. And I'm not telling you, I don't get impatient, I don't yell or things like that, but I don't do that very often. Not, not as much. And I feel badly that I did it with my, with my younger kids, but I've never treated her like a kid. And, and I'll explain it this way, whenever we've had discussions, I don't baby talk to her, not even when she was little. I've just talked to her. I've talked to her like a, like a regular person and I've explained things to her and we have this bond that, you know, really is cool. And I get what the girl dad thing is all about

Vance Crowe [00:43:35] And I love it. What do you see about the world now that you've had a daughter that's yours that you didn't see before you had a daughter?

Mark Reardon [00:43:41] That's an interesting question. I don't know if I, if I see the world differently because of that, but maybe I'm just a little more afraid of the world than I used to be in the sense that this could be sexist in the sense that with, with my boys, not that I don't worry about them and I still do, I I think they can, this is gonna sound terrible. It's gonna come out the wrong way. It's not that I think they can handle that in, there's a

Vance Crowe [00:44:07] Difference between boys and girls.

Mark Reardon [00:44:08] It's just that,

Vance Crowe [00:44:08] And anybody that's denying it is just, they're wrong.

Mark Reardon [00:44:10] I just have this, this emotional fear of protection from my daughter, maybe more than I thought that I would just because I know of all the dangers. I don't think I approach the world any differently. I approach the world in a fashion. I guess this is, for me, it's changed just my, my approach to make sure that in the pandemic is a good lesson. You don't know how much time you have left. I get into this, this weird dark place. It doesn't happen often, but something will, I'll see something on TV or a, a show or something about a child who dies or anything along those lines. And I just get horrified. What if, and I get into this period, like I, you know, when when I first started telling people about Alexa coming along, people would say, do you know how old you're gonna be when she graduates from high school? And I would say, you don't f-ing think I did the math on that,

Vance Crowe [00:45:01] Like

Mark Reardon [00:45:01] Right away. But you know, that, that makes me sad because then I think, am I gonna miss a lot of things in the future's? A total wrong approach. But your brain does that every once in a while.

Vance Crowe [00:45:10] For me, there was, I had understood all the hero stories and what like a, a man should aspire to, you know, you read Louis Lamore books and you're, you're kind of imagining what an adventurer's life is. And it had never dawned on me that maybe the hero's stories for my daughter will be different than what they were for me. And maybe they will and maybe they won't. I don't know. But it wasn't until the moment I found out we were having a girl that I was like, oh shit. I, yeah,

Mark Reardon [00:45:39] I

Vance Crowe [00:45:40] Had a really good vision for how I raised a son and I really don't know what, 'cause I've got a good idea on what I needed to do to have knocked into me the sense that I needed to have the, the, you know, courage and the temperament that I needed to develop. I don't know if that's the same for

Mark Reardon [00:45:56] Girls. Oh, I think it's, I think it's gonna be great for girls and, and this is the best time for girls moving forward. I really think that, and, and I'm excited because I think the opportunities are more than ever before. So I, I wouldn't have those worries at all. I'm, I'm excited about, you know, seeing her get into different things. And one of the things that I can't wait to do with my daughter now that she's seven and she's so into music, is I wanna take her to a concert, like a real concert. We've never done that. She's been to a music festival in Columbia, Missouri, but now she likes Ka Perry and Taylor Swift and Proud Parenting Moment. I just have to share this. And by the way, I like Katy Perry and Taylor Swift too, but I'm a classic rock guy, so about a month ago, and, and I have a little playlist on, on title, which is the music service that I use. That's for Alexa. And there's a, lemme just check it here, Vance, we'll run down the playlist right now for you.

Vance Crowe [00:46:41] Yeah, that sounds good.

Mark Reardon [00:46:41] Just to keep this real. So, Alexis playlist right now includes, and this will kinda wind me into the story that I was gonna tell the Proud Parenting moment, the new Katy Perry Electric, which is a good song Drunk by L King. I don't know if the words to that song, L King and Miranda Lambert are, I, I, I am drunk and I don't want to go home. She does sing along to that bad parenting. If the world was ending, Julia Michaels, but this is the one that I was real proud of. She was humming it in the backseat and I noticed it, but I didn't wanna make a big deal of it. And then she said, daddy, can you play Ghosts? Ghosts is one of the songs from the new Bruce Springsteen album. Letter to you. Hey. And at that moment when my daughter at the age of seven years old, six years old, I'm already

Vance Crowe [00:47:21] Going

Mark Reardon [00:47:21] Forward, six years old, said, daddy, will you play Bruce Springsteen? I'm done. My parenting work is finished. I have accomplished all that I need to. But on a serious note, she loves music so much and I just can't wait to expose her to those things. And Dad has a few connections in the music industry and things along those lines. So there might be some, some fun opportunities moving forward too.

Vance Crowe [00:47:42] It is interesting to see, to watch a child engage with art because you now see it through a different set of eyes. You know, I, I often talk about my mentor. When I was dating my wife, he pulled me aside. He was this 99-year-old guy and he was absolutely insistent that I take her to this art show up in New York City. So I was kinda like, all right Pete, well let's go. Right?

Mark Reardon [00:48:03] And

Vance Crowe [00:48:04] Right before we left, he pulled me aside and he was like, okay, now when you go, don't you look at the art, look at her looking at the art. It's those eyes that she's going to see you through. So you should understand how she sees art. And that was always a quintessential story

Mark Reardon [00:48:18] For me. Yeah, that's interesting

Vance Crowe [00:48:19] About love with my wife. But now that I've got this newborn baby, you know, nine months old, watching the world through her eyes, like what is she attracted to? Why, what is it that makes her like clap her hands? Yeah. And get excited about whether it's at the zoo or it's looking at art or even playing music. This to me seems like it will be an intoxicants that will last our entire relationship.

Mark Reardon [00:48:41] It, it will, but it also changes very quickly. You know, you'll see things that they are super interested in and then all of a sudden, eh, that's over. We've, we've moved on. I think we all do that to a certain extent, but yeah, it's gonna be, it's, it's a journey. It is definitely an adventure. And I'm, I'm having a blast with it and I've kind of joked it's gotten me through the pandemic, you know, I think it would've survived the pandemic. But having her around for some entertainment and, and just doing more things when you couldn't be around a lot of people was, was great.

Vance Crowe [00:49:07] So speaking of the pandemic, and we're coming out of it, everybody is, if I, you know, when I look at my podcast audiences, they love talking about economics. And everybody right now has an idea about where the economy is going. It's gonna go up because we got our vaccines before all the other countries. So we're gonna be able to manufacture our way outta this. Oh, it's gonna go down because inflation's gonna get wild. And you know, now all of a sudden your money's not gonna be worth anything. Do you have any speculation on where the economy is headed right now?

Mark Reardon [00:49:37] Well, any, any kind of speculation I would have was, is gonna be totally off target. But I will take you back a year to where my speculation was. And I think it was along a lot of people, it was complete and total panic because I'm thinking the stock market is just going to, the bottom's gonna drop out. And it did. But luckily temporarily, I'm, I'm thinking the housing market's just gonna be, you know, a disaster. What's this gonna do to housing prices? Well, look what it's done to housing prices. So I have a lot of, a lot of optimism about the economy, but I think that the economy is gonna rapidly, it already is, it's rapidly changing. You know, I think last time you and I talked a little bit about commercial real estate, that's a bit of an untold story. Right now, what's gonna happen with all this commercial real estate? You have a lot of workers that probably won't be back in offices. What is that gonna mean? I do have a lot of inflation concerns because I think that it's very real. However, there are indications from just economists that I would trust to indicate that that might be somewhat temporary, not as a big a concern moving forward. I'm not convinced of that. I'm just saying that those are some of the things that I've read from people that I trust. So overall, I think they're amazing opportunities. And one of the things that's very interesting, and I know a guy like you would appreciate this is everything that happened where these opportunities were created over the pandemic. And you know, we, you have this as humans, we have this instinct, right? We, we have to survive. And that survival instinct kicked in with business owners who had to shift gears into areas that they never thought were possible. And now they're having success. People found little niche markets for things that are now popular.

Mark Reardon [00:51:13] So I, I think that the opportunity that the pandemic created for, for different unique things in the economy also is gonna be a big benefit. So there's a mixed bag there.

Vance Crowe [00:51:23] To me, the big opportunity is if there's kind of a fraught, we don't know what's going on, this is a chance for people. We talked about the Peter Teel paradoxes the last time you were on the podcast. Like, why don't you try and do something that no other city is doing? 'cause people are moving, they're leaving cities, they're trying new things. So one of my ideas, I don't know that I've ever told you this one, I think that because we are the center of ag tech and because we, we have so many areas that are low population density, even though you're in an urban area, right? St. Louis is kind of hollowed out in some ways. What I think we should do is try to become the drone capital of the world and put yourself up that say, if you come to St. Louis, we're gonna work with the airport and the F-F-F-A-A and we're gonna make it so the drones can fly here. And not only would you be able to do it for things like Amazon delivery, where you'd be able to really ratchet that up in a whole new way and be able to lower your traffic problems. But you also have this huge agricultural market here. And people don't realize that the innovation in, in biotech is not happening like it did when Monsanto was running full steam. You have the, the companies here and they're trying to do innovation, but a lot of that stuff is tedious and it's incredibly regulated. So it's gonna take forever for any one of those interesting innovations. Interesting.

Mark Reardon [00:52:36] Yeah.

Vance Crowe [00:52:36] To actually enter the market and make an impact the way that Roundup made an impact on St. Louis. So what I think we should do is try and draw the world's drone experts into the St. Louis region and use it as a way to both do delivery and agriculture and really set ourselves apart. We would bring in some of the hottest tech talent probably in the world, and it'd be a cool place to be.

Mark Reardon [00:52:57] I, I love that idea. And, and I don't know, you know, I don't know enough about all the airspace and what would have to be changed when it comes to the laws, but I do think that in this has happened with you and I before, I love the creativity that you have with some of these ideas because there's no way we can continue to have an economy that moves forward, especially here in St. Louis, without that type of creativity, if we don't have ideas and you're, you're gonna swing the bat, you know, this whole notion of the, what do they call the thing between Kansas City and St. Louis? The, the training. Oh,

Vance Crowe [00:53:28] The Hyperloop

Mark Reardon [00:53:29] Thing. The hyperloop. I, I have no idea if that's feasible or not, but you know what, I wanna look at it. I think it's worth investigating. And if we don't start thinking about things out of the box as cliche, moving forward, we're just gonna shrivel up here in St. Louis, when it comes to the economy. And now where I live out in the Fenton area in St. Louis County, we have big, where the Chrysler plant used to be, we used to have a thriving, you know, economy with, with blue collar workers. They're building a, a, a bunch of Amazon facilities. So there are opportunities moving forward with drones that will be a big part of our life. The, the resistance would come from people saying, ah, that's a privacy thing. We don't want a bunch of drones flying around St. Louis, believe me, that would be a big part of the component if that ever happened. But why not talk about stuff like that? Right. Well,

Vance Crowe [00:54:11] And I think that the biggest move that any city could do, it's why I was actually excited about Kara Spencer Pot potentially becoming mayor. 'cause she was very open to playing with ideas. And to me, look at the only manufacturing business that's come to St. Louis or the Missouri area in the last 10 years. It is from the deregulation of marijuana. So the only increase that we have in, in manufacturing comes from the decreasing of a law. That's

Mark Reardon [00:54:37] Interesting point. Yeah. And that's very true, right?

Vance Crowe [00:54:39] And so why don't we look at what are the laws that if we took them off and we were the first one to do it, you give people a reason to come here because there's a freedom here that isn't somewhere else. And that opens things up. It doesn't cost you a single dollar in tax incentives. You don't have to get every, all you have to do is say, Hey everybody, we're gonna just try this thing, right? We're gonna do it as a temporary thing. We're gonna do it in this area. And the more freedom we have, the more you're gonna see innovation happening here as opposed to somewhere else.

Mark Reardon [00:55:07] I love it. I, I, I think, you know, just coming up with a bunch of ideas like that and, and seeing what might stick or where you can get, you know, some outside help or, or influence, I think it's worth, worth trying. But we need, you know, we don't have, we're not really stock full of local politicians full of ideas. Vance, I dunno if you've noticed that

Vance Crowe [00:55:25] This, I it's a really painful thing to go to a local, anything local county meeting a local town, because you're right, it's a bunch of people that have the tedious time to sit there and argue about bullshit, about just total nonsense.

Mark Reardon [00:55:40] Yeah, it's disappointing. You know, e even when I put my faith in someone that I think is gonna come forward with ideas, the problem is the consultants, the political consultants get involved. And I think even when you have people that are willing to think outside of the mainstream a little bit, the consultants say, oh, don't do that. You know, we have to be careful or we have to talk about this because this is gonna raise more money. That's where we are with politics.

Vance Crowe [00:56:01] You know, I think that that actually goes, it's not just politics, it's corporate culture too. People have no idea how much public relations companies control what's going on in the United States.

Mark Reardon [00:56:11] Yeah, I I do. And you're right about that. People don't have any clue.

Vance Crowe [00:56:15] The, like, what you don't realize is if you're running a large biotech company, you're running Monsanto back when it was here, right? You're an executive. You are running through thousands of decisions. You're overseeing huge numbers of people. And then you've also gotta relate with the public, right? And so, like, if you're not selling anything to the public, like Monsano wasn't, they don't really know very much. So they think, well, well we'll just outsource this and we'll have a PR firm. But that PR firm is filled with people that have a different way of thinking about the world, then all of your employees. And if you're an ag company, then all the people you are selling to. And so now you have the person that is setting up the platform for what is our political position, which is exactly why Coca-Cola, American Airlines, and these companies are coming out with these in like absurd political statements. And it's not them, it's, I mean, it is them. 'cause they put the final say on

Mark Reardon [00:57:04] It. No, it's it's their pr it's their first. You're right. Right. Exactly. And I, you know, I guess they're not willing to push back and say, wait a second, maybe we shouldn't do this. Because they trust that the PR firms are making the, the decisions for them. And they have, you know, look in, in those situations, they're, they're worried about the shareholders. And I get that. But I think you should be worried about the shareholders from a couple of different perspectives.

Vance Crowe [00:57:25] Yeah, that's right. And I think a lot of times the people that are inside of a PR firm, they're not giving bad advice because they're sitting in there being like, ah, these are my machinations. They've been told since they went to college and they were studying graphic design or account management that like, this is the way you, you assert goodness into the world, right? You make these political pronouncements, you make these decisions about how race is or, or isn't or whatever that is. And so you're watching the fact that our colleges were pumping students out in this way come back into the world through the world of, of PR is

Mark Reardon [00:58:00] My

Vance Crowe [00:58:00] Opinion.

Mark Reardon [00:58:00] Yeah. Not, not shocking when you think about it that way, right?

Vance Crowe [00:58:03] Not at all. So Mark, what else is going on in St. Louis that you think people should be paying attention to that they're not right now? Well,

Mark Reardon [00:58:11] I, you know, I don't know if I have anything in particular just outside of the overall climate moving forward. I, you know, I think we're in this period right now with the pandemic in particular where I've said this for certainly a month now, the last couple weeks where it's go time in this country. I mean, we're ready to start moving forward and start living our lives against. So what I wanna see happen is more things opening up for people to participate in indoor concerts. We got baseball games going to full capacity. The the thing that, the number one thing that I think people should be focused on right now is living their lives and moving forward and recognizing that we lost a year and you don't know if you're gonna lose another year moving forward. I think we're all desperate to get out. I can't wait for that big, I went to a concert not too long ago at the pageant, which is a really cool smaller music venue here, but it was, you know, 40% capacity and you couldn't feel any energy. But I, I want to get in that crowd with people and, you know, cheer on some, some music and things along those lines, or at a big sporting event. I went to a Cardinals game, but sat, how

Vance Crowe [00:59:11] Was it?

Mark Reardon [00:59:11] You know, it was, it was okay. It was on my birthday, it was in April, and you didn't have a full stadium. I want a full stadium. I, I want Nolan Ado, which a big star came to St. Louis from the, the Colorado Rockies has been killing it. One of the best players in major league baseball. We've yet to have 42,000 people cheer for a home run for Nolan Ado. That needs to happen. He needs to feel that energy. St. Louis needs to feel that energy. I saw some video even last night. I'm not a big NBA game, but there was a full house in New York, or maybe it was Jersey for one of the NBA games. And just to see that, just to see people yelling and screaming about sports again, getting together on the same page and not talking about race and politics and MAGA and all this other stuff. That's what we need. That's the therapy that I'm looking for. As much as I talk about politics and all those things, we, we gotta pop the bubble on that, I think to a certain extent.

Vance Crowe [01:00:01] Are you willing to be the guy that walks into the grocery store not knowing if people are wearing their masks or not and not wear your mask?

Mark Reardon [01:00:07] Oh my God, I've done it already. Look, I, I have no fear whatsoever. This is what one of the things that concerns me about everything. I guess I can bring up climate change because I am what I would describe as a, a Luke warmer. Okay? I believe that the climate is changing has changed. I don't know how much certainly we are causing it. I think there's some good questions about that and more important than that, I don't think there's a whole lot we can do to fix it outside of adaptation. So I've always felt that philosophically about climate change. And I guess I, I'm a little bit more realistic about some of these things along those lines when it comes to the pandemic. In other words, I've said for more than a year, this is my definitive statement, okay? Nobody on the planet has gotten this damn thing from a surface. Okay. And what do you still see? You see people sanitizing rubbing down, spraying it is a waste of time and money. It's not just because I think it's a waste of time and money. The flippant science tells you that definitively, well wait a second, mark. There was that story last year about the virus living on a subway car for three days. That's fine. I don't deny that. That could ha that's a completely different story as far as whether that virus can jump into me if I'm on that subway car. So we know it's indoor transmission. We know that it's, it's airborne, but the outdoor transmission is very interesting to me. And we've been lied to so many times from health officials about this stuff. We've known for a long time now, certainly for two months. But longer than that, that outdoor transmission is just not happening. It's now below 0.1%. And there's a guy at the New York Times of all places, David Lenhardt, who's been really on top of this because Rochelle Wilensky at the CDC has misled people about this.

Mark Reardon [01:01:44] You have people living in fear. I went to Menards the Sunday after I was in Louisville, okay? The CDC on Thursday makes this decision that we, we should have done weeks ago dropping the mask mandates outdoors and, and you know, allowing people who are vaccinated to not have masks. So I'm in Louisville and it's like the world has opened up, first of all, it's a little different in southern Indiana, Northern Kentucky anyway, as you might imagine. So I don't even wear a mask for three days. I go to Churchill Downs. I am having a great time. I'm doubled Xed, okay? I feel very comfortable. I come back here and we go to Menards on that Sunday, this is a couple weeks ago. And I'm like, I told my wife, I said, I don't even have a mask. I haven't had a mask for three days. I don't have one with me. So let's go in. If they tell us to wear a mask, we'll wear a mask or you, you know, I'll see what happens. Nobody says anything. Everybody's wearing masks. All right? And I think a couple of the stores had not dropped it. Men Menards has since, since dropped it, but at that point they hadn't. So we go through the line, and I don't really want to get into, into a confrontation, but there's a woman who's checking us out who has two masks on, okay? And then I saw her the next week. Same woman, two masks on. She's living in fear for no reason. There's no no reason, zero reason that she should be wearing one mask, let alone two masks at this point. And the other thing about masks, and this'll sound terrible with the, because I, I got so sick of people saying Wear your damn mask. What is Vance? You tell me what is the the best case mask efficacy, if you will, reducing the percentage chance. Oh

Vance Crowe [01:03:08] Yeah. If you had what in 95, if you have it fit well then it's 95% efficient. But these paper masks that people are putting on nowhere close to

Mark Reardon [01:03:16] That 17%. Yeah, 20%. Let's say it's 20. And I would, I would challenge you on the N95. I don't know that it would be that high, but let's say with the cloth masks and everything, 17 20%, well, you know what the vaccine is, the vaccine is 90%. Okay, so low low ball, it's 65%. So the reason that we're moving forward is the vaccine. There are all kinds of studies coming out right now that basically show, now look, I get, we didn't know the answers to all these questions, but whether you were a, a, a mask, you know, enforcer or, or not, it, it probably didn't matter in the end because the studies show that this thing took off just as much in places where we had the strict mask mandates and the restrictions as it didn't. And that's because everybody was virtue signaling wearing their mask when no one was getting this thing at the grocery store outside anyway, then they go inside with their friends or in their tight quarter apartment building in an elevator and that's how they were spreading it. What

Vance Crowe [01:04:08] People don't understand about the virtue signaling that goes on is there's another layer before virtue signaling that we are not talking about, and it's called the intransigent minority. So the intransigent minority is a small group of people that they have a story in their head that this is the way things ought to be. I, I believe that if you don't wear masks, then you're gonna kill my grandmother. Yes.

Mark Reardon [01:04:28] And so

Vance Crowe [01:04:28] If you don't wear, and those people have that story and they make it so much trouble to push back on them that people are like, you know what if I, if I just can run into CV s I'm just gonna throw on my mask, right? So I don't have to worry about it. The only way to stop the intransigent minority is to tell 'em to fuck off. Yeah.

Mark Reardon [01:04:44] Right. And like,

Vance Crowe [01:04:45] It's sucks, right? It sucks that you have to do that. But if you don't not wear ma, if you don't take off the masks now you could be in them forever. So there's the, the whole virtue signaling thing that's gone on, fine, maybe we had to do that to have some sort of cohesive civilization while we're going through the pandemic. But you're not doing the intransigent minority or society as a whole any favors if you keep capitulating to the demands.

Mark Reardon [01:05:10] But let me, let me go back to the, the, the climate change thing because here we we're preached by the mainstream media time and time again about climate change, settled science, you're just an idiot if you challenge any of this. But on, on this particular topic, the science is not even disputable at this point. It's overwhelming when it comes to mask wearing efficacy and indoor transmission versus outdoor transmission and all these things. But nobody wants to talk about, like the New York Times has this guy David Lenhardt, who wants to explain why isn't it a lead story on the front page that will take the fear away. We went through this period a couple of months ago where the number one story should have been not that the j and j vaccine was causing blood clots in a handful of people, but that millions of people are getting this vaccine that was created in record time and they're not in the hospital and they're not getting sick. And if they are getting COVID, which some are on a breakthrough infection, they're fine. Right?

Vance Crowe [01:06:06] They're

Mark Reardon [01:06:06] Perfectly fine. The Yankees example, great example, the vaccine worked the way that it should. Are you going to have exceptions? Yes. That's why you don't have a hundred percent efficacy. But we are living in fear based on the, the, the mask thing is great and, and I wanna offer this, I wish I could quote this exactly, but there's a Harvard epidemiologist that said, telling people to wear masks outdoors so that they will wear mask indoors is basically like having people telling people to wear a condom when they're masturbating so that they'll wear a condom when they have sex. I thought that that was brilliant. And it's exactly right. And she's an epidemiologist, she said that months ago. Months ago, well before we started talking about taking masks. And I always thought wearing a mask outside was idiotic anyway, I really did. So, you know, bill Maher went on this rant a couple of months ago. Why do you think Texas had so much success? They were outdoors, right? Right. So Florida, they were outdoors, California was outdoors, but they, no

Vance Crowe [01:07:08] They weren't. They were in lockdown. Okay,

Mark Reardon [01:07:09] But that they were

Vance Crowe [01:07:10] In lockdown.

Mark Reardon [01:07:10] That's exactly, they remember the sites, if we would've just let people in California go outside to the beaches or to the parks or to Venice Beach, they would've had far fewer problems. But instead they said, no, you have to be at home. So what did people do? They gathered in their pods and their pods were still going to work and they were getting it maybe at work and they were bringing it back and it was spreading like wildfire. So we made so many mistakes. Even on the restaurant thing, I don't think that there's an ample amount of evidence to show that this thing was outta control because of indoor dining. But lemme just point something out. We told people that you had to wear your mask in some cases outdoors, and then you had to wear your mask when you got into the restaurant, till you sat down at your table and then, oh, let's just take off our mask. That's the opposite of what really? Realistically, that's the opposite of what the science shows,

Vance Crowe [01:07:58] Right? 'cause now you are actually sitting in a contained space without firm. You know, this reminds me of a concept for global warming. You know, I was kinda like, I don't know what to believe. I don't, you know, let's think about this. And then I encountered this, this guy named Matt Ridley, he's a member of the House of Lords. He's a ornithologist. He's, he actually is one of the first people that put out the Wuhan lab theory and he points out with climate change this concept called global greening. Have we talked about this before? No,

Mark Reardon [01:08:24] I don't think so.

Vance Crowe [01:08:24] So this is a fascinating concept. He says, okay, let's look at all the models that everybody built about where climate change is going. And now let's see, did they predict that the amount of carbon in the air was actually going to increase the density of foliage in the African continent and actually all through equatorial Africa because the carbon collects in an area and trees turn carbon into leaves and branches. And, and so it's, he said none of the models accounted for global greening. And so how can you say that your models are gonna be correct if you did not consider that there's going to be hundreds of percent of growth in

Mark Reardon [01:09:01] This effort? You can't answer that. So I have a guy named Dr. Roy Spencer. He's got a great website. Dr. Roy spencer.com used to work at nasa. He's a climatologist. He's not a kook, he's not a climate change denier. But he'll tell you the same thing. You, you have to look, it's CO2 is not by its very nature bad. And there are areas that will green because of that. And that is a good thing. The other point that he makes on that front, which I, I think should be part of the equation, do you know how much poverty we have across the globe because they don't have access to energy that people could be helped, their lives can be saved if they have electricity. Oh, I lived, they literally, you know this probably better than a lot of people.

Vance Crowe [01:09:36] Literally they're taking charcoal inside of their house and light putting a little bit of kerosene on it and lighting it on fire to be able to cook their food. Now, if you had clean natural gas running there or a stove top, you would not have all these people burning the least, the least efficient form of energy that you have. Homemade charcoal.

Mark Reardon [01:09:56] Well, and it's be, it's beyond the least efficient. It's just giving people the ability to have, you know, things that we all take for granted, you know, lights in, in our studio here or water,

Vance Crowe [01:10:06] Running water is the thing that, to me, people should have to just haul around five gallons of water for one mile. Just, just do it for one day. How many trips do you have to make in order to make up the water that your family uses? And you realize we are literally living in heaven in the fact that you can turn on the tap and have as many gallons of water as

Mark Reardon [01:10:26] You want. We don't get it. I, I've seen it in Honduras. So the only real exposure I had is I went to Honduras about nine, 10 years ago and I saw these families living on this mountain village, by the way. And you probably saw this in Kenny, the happiest damn kids on the planet. And they, they don't know freedom, what they're missing, right? They

Vance Crowe [01:10:40] Have freedom is what they have. Yeah.

Mark Reardon [01:10:41] And, and, and it's just a very interesting experience. But they don't, they don't have a lot. So all these things are, are very complicated. You know, even all these debates that we're having on race right now, there's a lot of nuance and the nuance just doesn't get discussed enough. That's just one of the things I like about doing a talk show is that I get to talk about things that, you know, maybe a different side of a story that people might be missing out on.

Vance Crowe [01:11:04] Well, mark, I know from the first time we did an interview, people loved it and they wanted to know where they could hear you at. So now you've changed stations. Where can people find you if they want to tune into what you're talking about every day? Yeah,

Mark Reardon [01:11:14] So I guess my company would want me to promote the Odyssey app. A-U-D-A-C-Y. That's the name of the company. It used to be Intercom. We used to have radio.com app. So it's Odyssey app. You can stream the show 97 1 Kft K in St. Louis, you can go to the website as well. But that's basically how you would find me right now if you wanna stream or listen live every day from 3:00 PM until 6:00 PM

Vance Crowe [01:11:36] Well I can tell you that from whatever app you guys were using before to the, you know, you had me on the show Better

Mark Reardon [01:11:41] App now.

Vance Crowe [01:11:41] Oh man.

Mark Reardon [01:11:42] Yeah.

Vance Crowe [01:11:42] It's actually, it's one, probably one of the first radio apps that I've seen. Oh

Mark Reardon [01:11:46] Good. Well

Vance Crowe [01:11:47] That's good to hear. 'cause normally they're like, you're choking on ads and things to sound doesn't sound right. I think they did a good job.

Mark Reardon [01:11:53] Well, and I've had those complaints for years, so I'm, I'm very encouraged to hear that because this kind of brings us full circle, but that's sort of where this is going to go with, with more on demand. But as you said, you know, live radio and things, when they're changing you, you sort of have to tune in at the same time when those stories are developing. And that's one of the things I love about my job.

Vance Crowe [01:12:12] And finally, your Twitter handle,

Mark Reardon [01:12:13] It's at Mark Reardon, M-A-R-K-R-E-A-R-D-O-N Kft K at Mark Reardon Kft. KI switched it, it used to be at Mark Reardon, KOX and I switched it with the, with the call letters. So, and Twitter still left me with my coveted blue check. I was afraid that they were gonna rob me of that, but I, I maintained my

Vance Crowe [01:12:31] Credibility. Yeah, the conservative with the blue check.

Mark Reardon [01:12:33] No, there's plenty of us out there. We get de platformed and, and taken down every once in a while, but we come back.

Vance Crowe [01:12:39] Mark Reardon, thank you so much for coming on My man Vance.

Mark Reardon [01:12:42] Thank you so much. It's fun to have these conversations. I appreciate it.