Talk Radio Host Opens Up About Crippling Anxiety, Cancel Culture, and Industry Secrets

Mark Reardon [00:00:00] And it wasn't the rebuke that pissed me off. It was that when he did the rebuke, he co, I worked for CVS at the time, right? So he copied my company. Oh. And he put an at reply. I'm like, what the fuck? I, I couldn't believe that that happened. I'm Nicholas Barlett, co-owner of the World's first Popcorn Board game Cafe, living in Fulton, Missouri. And you're listening to the Vance Crow podcast. Welcome

Vance Crowe [00:00:29] Back to the podcast. I'm glad you're here. Today, we interview Mark Reardon. Mark, as longtime listeners will know, is one of the most famous talk show hosts in the St. Louis region. He has his own show on FM radio, and he's really the only radio or mass media that I listen to at all. If I'm driving down the road to go home or to the grocery store, I'll flip on the radio and hear my friend talking about his expertise, which is the news of the day. What is going on? What are people paying attention to? So you will hear us have a conversation that's a little bit different than some of the deep dives that we have with scientists or other experts in their domains. In this conversation, we talk about some pretty hair raising concepts. Mark talks about his views on some of the trans issues that have been popular in the media and what he thinks it means for society. We go into a really personal look at people facing anxiety and the medications they have to take. Mark ends up sharing some really pretty personal things that he said multiple times during the show he's never talked about on the radio before. And then we talk about the changes to COVI and how now, the news of the day is saying, really, it's not that big of a deal, and it's really more your independent choice, how you handle it. This is a rip roaring conversation, and I'm excited to be bringing it to you. Before we get to that, I want to talk about the Legacy Interviews that we are doing in this studio right here. If you've never listened to the podcast before, you may not know that we offer a very specialized service where I sit down with your loved one to record their life stories and wisdom so that it can be passed down to future generations.

Vance Crowe [00:02:08] I'll sit and ask them questions that range from their childhood to their career, the marriage that they had, the parenting that they did, and the legacy that they wanna leave behind. These interviews are a profound experience, and really, it's a gift that gives itself three times. First, the interview itself comes off as either a meditative experience. People come in a little bit nervous, a little bit wondering how is this gonna go? And they leave being either I'm really centered and this was a wonderful experience. Or with their hair blown back, describing it like they were skydiving. So you have the experience itself. That feels great. Then people get to share these videos with their families. Oftentimes, we hear that guests get together with their whole family and watch it, and it's a really fun experience. I get letters from the children of the people that recorded an interview often saying how much they learned about their parents, or how grateful they are that they've captured those stories. And then third, once you have this legacy interview, you know that you have this recording of your loved one in. It is preserved for as long as you have the, the recording. I know if you're like me, I have a few people in my life, my father, my mentor, my wife, who I always leave an extra voicemail on the phone. I just don't wanna let it go. I wanna make sure that if something were to happen to them, I could still hear their voice. And that's one of those things that these Legacy Interviews will give you a chance to capture the voice, the laughter, the way they tell a story, and really do it in a meaningful and considered way.

Vance Crowe [00:03:45] So if you've been thinking about doing a legacy interview, I highly encourage you to do it now, because as crazy as it sounds, we are gonna fill up before the holidays. And so I'd love to be serving people that are listening to the podcast. So if you're interested in having me record something with your loved one, go to Legacy Interviews dot com to find out more. All right, without further ado, let's head to an interview with my man, mark Rear. Mark Reardon, welcome back to the podcast.

Mark Reardon [00:04:15] How are you?

Vance Crowe [00:04:16] I'm great. You know this, we are in the new studio. This

Mark Reardon [00:04:19] Is the first time I've done it. Yeah, it's, it's impressive.

Vance Crowe [00:04:21] Well, thank you. I, we, we planned for a long time, thought about this a long time, how to get in here. We do 'em for the Legacy Interviews. But then came time to like, all right, we're gonna return to doing in-person podcasts. Who is the guest I want to have on? And

Mark Reardon [00:04:36] Everyone turned you down Up until

Vance Crowe [00:04:37] This appointment,

Mark Reardon [00:04:38] It

Vance Crowe [00:04:38] Was 100%. You like, the listeners wouldn't know this, but a few months ago I was like, Hey, mark, we're trying to get everything set up. I'm trying to learn about this. And you're like, come down to the studio, right? And you let me bring Violet down. And it really meant a lot to me. And so I thought, first podcast, let's have the numero uno number one

Mark Reardon [00:04:55] Guy I in. Well, I appreci it. This is, this is cool. And you know, I come from the terrestrial radio world, so podcasts are not always my friend, because I feel like it's strong competition to what we do in radio. But look, it's, it's the way of the world. I get streaming and, and this is pretty cool. And, you know, I learned my lesson as you, you might realize, because, well, the first one we did, I was in my house walking around in my jammies, probably. But then the next one, I don't think I realized that there was gonna be a video component. So I wore my, you know, my Lululemon stupid workout stuff. I dress it up just a little bit today, just a little bit for you today. So,

Vance Crowe [00:05:30] Well, it's, it's a, it's a nice thing because we were in my basement studio, which I was proud of, right? It was something to build.

Mark Reardon [00:05:36] Sure, that was awesome.

Vance Crowe [00:05:36] Build from zero. But like, to be able to move into a studio and be like, Hey, we are actually investing into this. And then you start thinking about like, all right, how do I make the time with the guests better? Because like, you know, you're, you're now actually paying someone to let you use their space to, well, to make this happen.

Mark Reardon [00:05:54] You know, what I would say too, here's an interesting observation from a radio guy who sits behind a board and, and not all radio people run their own controls, but I, I do. 'cause I'm a control freak and, you know, I go back to music radio and doing all that. But, you know, I'm doing interviews across a control panel and board, and this is so comfortable to sit on a chair. And, you know, this would be a model. If, if we ever redid a radio studio, I'd say, Hey, let's do something like that. Because I think it makes people more comfortable too. But Howard Stern does that, like, he's got people on the couch, but he's backed off in his little world in his studio.

Vance Crowe [00:06:26] I spent months looking into like, what's the right feel? Right? Like, is it good? Should we keep having the table between us? Yeah.

Mark Reardon [00:06:33] Like

Vance Crowe [00:06:34] Is it good to be able to lean on that Howard Stern, or you have a couple of these shows where the, the host is slightly higher than the guest, right?

Mark Reardon [00:06:41] Right.

Vance Crowe [00:06:41] Something about that feels not very good to me. But there's something really that feels really official about being in your studio, right? Because you, you do have a control panel. Yeah. Everybody is there. You've like, pushed

Mark Reardon [00:06:54] More people together. Well, there's, you know, there's five microphones too, and, and then six including mine. So yeah, it's, and as you know, I do this political round table on Friday on my show, and, you know, it's a packed studio. So we got a lot of people and a lot of interaction.

Vance Crowe [00:07:06] You know, the, you added a new thing that, like, I want, I really want to give you a thumbs up on this, was that you're now streaming your show on Twitter. Yeah. And like I, yours is literally the only radio show that I listen to, but I, now that you've put it on Twitter, I like will be driving and be like, oh, you can see this studio this. Right. And I can, and now I can play it. I don't even have to be watching it, but I don't have to like, hit it on my radio. Yeah. Like it's, that is for me, and I may be a viewer of one, but it was like a big deal to move that in.

Mark Reardon [00:07:38] It's, it's not a viewer of one. I, you know, to me, all that stuff is part of the evolution of where we are. Because now you can do that and it's easier for people. It's, it's weird. Now, I've done a lot of TV work over my, you know, career, but I've never had really cameras just eyeballing me in the studio. So I, I joked about this on the air on election night in August, you know, early August. I went to home after working on the air, and I'd been on all afternoon and then that evening, and I wanted to see, I was watching some of the results still coming in, but I also just wanted to see the reaction on Twitter, because I'd been tweeting a lot. And I made the mistake of clicking on that video and watching what I looked like on there and how I have my, you know, I have this rule typically with, and I left them over there, my reading glasses, and I look old with my reading glasses Vance. So I was like upset about that. But it's weird because, you know, during the breaks, I don't know what people are watching. I get that. It's interesting for the, for the listener, but it's still something that I'm not completely comfortable with. It's funny because I, I joke about my reading glasses and years ago when we had the Mike Brown situation here in St. Louis and Ferguson, the Today Show came in on my show with a, it was just a, a camera person, right. It was just a videographer. And they took video of me taking calls about that. Right. And I joked with the guy when he came in, I said, you know, hey, just know no shots of me with my reading glasses on. Right. The dude was in my studio for 45 minutes shooting video of the board, of the callers of me. The Today Show starts the next morning, the first three seconds, it probably was 1.5, was

Vance Crowe [00:09:09] Me in

Mark Reardon [00:09:10] My reading glasses at the beginning. That was it. That's all I got. I'm like,

Vance Crowe [00:09:14] Well, I mean, that seems like the nature of media, right? Like, it seems like the one thing you don't want them to bring up, they'll do.

Mark Reardon [00:09:19] They'll do. Right. Right.

Vance Crowe [00:09:20] So, let's talk a little bit about radio. How, like you're broadcasting out into the airwaves. How do you know you're successful? How do you know people are listening to you?

Mark Reardon [00:09:31] You know, that's a bit of a complicated question because, and I don't wanna get too far into the weeds here with radio ratings, but I'll explain it just just a little bit. Back in the day, years and years ago, and I don't remember when this all changed, but there's been this digital evolution. People would get sent these little diaries from Arbitron that was the rating service. And that, that's been, now I could get some of this wrong, but Nielsen, which is the TV rating service, purchased Arbitron. So it's different, but still under the, you know, the same company. So you'd get this, this thing that you were, I, you know, I've seen them over the years, but you, you were supposed to write down what you listened to, you listen to, you know, came OX my former station, legendary station here in St. Louis, you say, I listen to 'em from eight until, you know, 10, you listen to Khi, a big rock station. I listen to 'em. So people, you have to trust people to write accurately. Well, big stations like the two I just mentioned, KHI, huge station here in St. Louis, they're still number one, by the way. And Cam Wax, they get something called Phantom qm. And let me explain how the ratings work from that perspective. So there's two ways ratings work in radio. You, you probably see your clicks on your podcast, right? So for us, we are rated on the total number of people who listen. Right? So on a station like Kam, OX that has the Cardinals, that's, that's a huge number. You're bringing in a lot of people to the radio station, but it's also time spent listening. TSL So for my show, now, I have a smaller overall audience because it's not the big behemoth, and we don't have the cardinals, but they're loyal and they, they stick with it, right?

Mark Reardon [00:11:06] The other component of that is, is really it's money. You know, how do you measure success if you're, if you're making money with advertising? And that's, that's been tough, you know, it's been tough, I think for everyone. There's so many different ways you can go. And my level of success, Vance, if you want make it about me, and let's be clear, I always make it about me, okay? About me is I've survived in this business. You know, I'm 57 years old. I started when I was 15, you know, doing music radio here in St. Louis at this little station. And I don't know how I've done it, but I've somehow been able to survive. So I, I guess I feel like I've succeeded just because of that, because I'm still doing this at this point in my life, when a lot of people, and a lot of friends of mine that have been in this business for a long time are not, you know, we, we look, we're, there's cut cutbacks are happening right now in, in, I think we're in a recession, right? Hopefully not a deep recession, different type of recession. But my company's had cutbacks even this week. So it's, it's tough. But the measure of success with all that is, is a little hard to pin down. Because I think back years ago, Vance, when I would be sitting, this is, goes back when I was in Milwaukee at WTMJ, another legendary radio station. When I first started doing talk on that station, I remember looking at my, my board where my phone calls would come in. And I think I measured success at that point, whether people were calling my show. Here's the little secret about people that call radio shows. They're not normal people. Yeah.

Vance Crowe [00:12:29] Okay. They call in all the time.

Mark Reardon [00:12:30] No. So, so you can't gauge it because most people driving around in their car or listening at home, they hear me give the phone lines out. And I don't even take that many calls doing my show these days. You probably know that, but you're not getting a good representation of the people who are listening to you. You're getting a sample of the people who really, I mean, I'm not saying that you not, you're not getting good calls. You would, but you have to measure it from a variety of different things.

Vance Crowe [00:12:52] Well, you know, one of the things, different

Mark Reardon [00:12:54] Ways

Vance Crowe [00:12:54] That, that strikes me is I don't see advertisements ever. And the only way some advertiser in St. Louis could reach me would be through you. Yeah.

Mark Reardon [00:13:05] Look, radio, that this is what I would say about radio. And I think that the radio industry tries to promote this. That there, there's, I think there's two really effective ways right now of advertising, especially if you're trying to get repetition with a message. Live TV sports. Okay? Sports, not, not where we're zipping through our DVRs and live radio. The problem is, is that, you know, you gotta make sure that people are listening to live radio. So we still get great response from, from sponsors, and that's why they stick with us, because it

Vance Crowe [00:13:32] Works. Yeah. Because at the end of the day, you could have way lower numbers, but if the people that are listening, like, I vividly remember the carpet ad that you did yesterday, right? Like the, Hey, you wanna do this, and, you know, some of the chemicals you put in there, you know, cause chem, you know? Right,

Mark Reardon [00:13:48] Right. Dirt

Vance Crowe [00:13:48] Or, so I like, there's something really personal about a radio ad, and I've always talked about it. So I started in radio, back in public radio. Yeah.

Mark Reardon [00:13:58] And

Vance Crowe [00:13:58] One of the things that you come to realize is you're whispering right into people's ears. Right. Like, when somebody can hear you, it is a really personal thing. And I think that's why it's so much stickier. You know, you could show me a hundred ads on Facebook Yeah.

Mark Reardon [00:14:14] And

Vance Crowe [00:14:14] I just blow right by them. But if a person that I'm listening to that I trust is sitting there telling

Mark Reardon [00:14:19] Me, okay, well, that you said the word, that's the word. Trust people, for some reason, they do trust me. And look, I, I'm not going to sell my soul and tell you to get something that, you know, is not something I believe in. So I do have personal connections with my sponsors, but it is weird even doing radio for decades, right. Doing talk radio, working with sponsors, it's sometimes a little bizarre. The the response that you get from listeners, I'll give you a couple examples. I have a, a great sponsor that I work with because I love cars too. Master Cars in Granite City, and they're used cars, but New Car caliber, right? MasterCard inc.com. But I gotta throw the sponsor in there. There was a guy that came in one time, they specialize in Corvettes. Guy comes in, talks to Alex, who's father son team, and he wants to buy a Corvette, used Corvette. No. 60, $70,000 car, right? Comes in. It's in the showroom. You wanna drive it? Alex, do you want No, he goes, he walks out, he turns around, he goes, I heard Mark Reardon talking about you guys. He goes, if it's good enough for him, I trust you. I'm like, wow, that, that, you know, I, I guess I know that that exists. Now, the flip side of that is I have people, there's, there's a couple of retail outlets that I have, and people will come in sometimes and they'll say they don't think I'm real, which is bizarre. Oh, he really shops here. Yeah, I do. I mean, I, I'm a real person. But, so that, that kind of stuff is very surreal to me. Especially because I'm at, if you wanna look at the celebrity, you know, totem pole, I'm, I'm way down here. When you have people in TV that are recognizable, that have a lot different reactions, they can't go out in public and everything like that.

Mark Reardon [00:15:55] But there are unusual relax, you know, reactions from listeners sometimes that still even strike me as odd. The

Vance Crowe [00:16:01] Thing that struck me as odd, we were talking about the person that calls in to a radio show.

Mark Reardon [00:16:05] Yeah.

Vance Crowe [00:16:06] It, when I was doing public radio, one of the things I was, I grabbed the responsibility to do was to change the way they did pledge drive. And I remember when I first started asking for, for, Hey, call in and send money to this radio station. Yeah.

Mark Reardon [00:16:20] They,

Vance Crowe [00:16:20] You don't have to. Right. And you know, they, they run them the moniker, like, we don't run ads, but that's total bullshit. Right, exactly. They have underwriters

Mark Reardon [00:16:28] And that those

Vance Crowe [00:16:28] Are totally ads. Right.

Mark Reardon [00:16:30] Right.

Vance Crowe [00:16:30] But they have this like, we need your support because we don't have advertisers. And this is a special thing I would never call to donate. Right. But people do.

Mark Reardon [00:16:42] Right.

Vance Crowe [00:16:42] And you, you like, it was very difficult for me to psychologically get to the place where I understood that if you lay out a case in this way Right. And you have built up a long relationship Yeah. And you are whispering, essentially into people's ears over time, they'll

Mark Reardon [00:16:59] Respond. They'll

Vance Crowe [00:16:59] Respond. But it blew my mind.

Mark Reardon [00:17:02] Yeah. And it, and it's bizarre too, because you get responses on stuff that you don't expect. You know, if I'm, if I'm laying my, my chips down on the table on topic, sometimes I, I would've pushed a lot in on something that I believed in. And I'm hammering pretty hard, serious topic or whatever, and I look and there's no response. I'm like, okay, that didn't connect. And then all of a sudden you do a topic about wrestling or you know, your first concert or something like that. And then you get people like, oh yeah. Because some of it's just the, the relatability. And, and I've told people this even recently as, as much as I've been in news radio for the most part, you know, news talk radio, dealing with some of those stories. But the, the, the things that people remember are the goofy things that you talk about relating to Thanksgiving dinner, or I talk about my daughter a lot and, and that's, that's kind of what people remember. But there is that connection that existed with radio that drew me into this business. You know, I, I was, I guess 10, 11, 12 years old, right in that area, 19 76, 77, listening to these amazing disc jockeys on WLS in Chicago. And that was my inspiration. Larry Lujack, Bob ot, Fred Winston. And I started putting my headphones on in my basement at my house with records and acting like I was a disc jockey.

Vance Crowe [00:18:15] And

Mark Reardon [00:18:16] When I, when I found out my high school in the Chicagoland area had a radio station, and I was thrilled. I'm like, I'm gonna work at that radio station. Then my dad comes home and says, we're moving to St. Louis. I was devastated. I'm like, wait a second. It's my dream of radio what happens. And lo and behold, there's this little dinky 10 watt radio station next to my high school here in St. Louis Parkway West, that gave me, you know, an opportunity to get on the air and start this whole crazy thing, which is kind of interesting.

Vance Crowe [00:18:40] Yeah. The, the idea of knowing when you're a kid that you wanna be on the radio, it's

Mark Reardon [00:18:46] Kinda rare. Right.

Vance Crowe [00:18:46] Well, it's you, I it's, it's interesting because you're, if you think about just not that long ago, a king, you know, the most powerful person in an entire region, the most people that could hear him would be a thousand,

Mark Reardon [00:19:03] Yeah.

Vance Crowe [00:19:03] 2000. Right. That's, you know, the, so as much as he wants to put a proclamation out, but if, if you're a kid on a 10 watt radio station, you suddenly have in some ways more power than a king did. Well,

Mark Reardon [00:19:17] Not on that radio station, but when I, when I finally got into the first, you know, commercial jobs, and then in the heyday of radio, like when I was at WTMJ and then early on in KMOX, you know, these legendary stations, just because of the competition, don't have the amount of listeners. But you're talking hundreds of thousands of people that come in on a weekly basis to, you know, to check out what, what you're doing. So sometimes the numbers have been impressive over the years. There's no doubt about that. And you do, you know, when there's, we always, I think that that television does things well, I think we've talked about this before. You know, you got a flood, tornado, fire, a lot of different things are great on television, radio can really work through issues, have conversations. We don't have to rush through it. So that's one of the things I love about, you know, doing what I do, just to have those conversations.

Vance Crowe [00:20:00] Well, so speaking of like what's going on in the world, one of the things I was thinking about this morning as I was getting ready for this interview was the song We didn't start the fire,

Mark Reardon [00:20:09] Right?

Vance Crowe [00:20:09] Yeah. So

Mark Reardon [00:20:10] Joel,

Vance Crowe [00:20:10] Yeah. 40 years he covers and he covers I think like 180 topics, something like that. In

Mark Reardon [00:20:17] That song.

Vance Crowe [00:20:17] It's basically like three per year. Yeah. Is, is what it counts to. You start thinking about all the things that are going on in the world right now, you know, Trump with Mar-a-Lago, COVID, war, vaccines, war war, all these things, right? But let's, like, fast forward 40 years the next, we didn't start, the fire gets rolled out. What if what's going on right now gets rolled into the, the new we didn't start the fire.

Mark Reardon [00:20:45] That's a great question. Right. Well, Trump's gonna be in there, you know, Putin's gonna be in there, COVID is gonna be in there. I think when we talk about things, it'll be interesting to see what people remember. I think we're in a very interesting period. Maybe what would be discussed is just the deep divisions that we have in this country and how people, you know, can't get along and how people might, well, they don't, might they judge you just because of who you might have voted for and you know, what position you take on a certain issue. It's, it is stunning to me. This doesn't really address the question, but it's stunning to me how much of that has happened, especially in the last couple years with people who had pretty good relationships. Right. And friends that are not talking to one another. So, gosh, I, I wish a lot of those things in that Billy Joe song are, may be some things that are, are sad and, and some are positive, but I think there's a lot of sadness that would be in that song moving forward. Then again, we'd have EVs that are referenced. We'd have a lot of music that's referenced. We'd have cell phones, iPhones. Right. All those things that have happened.

Vance Crowe [00:21:46] Yeah. You know, you think about, like, that song is deeply a distillation of what was going on, because Sure. There's a bunch of stuff in there that I'm like, I don't know. I mouthed the words. I don't even know. I have to actually, well, you don't remember a lot of that stuff. Right? Right.

Mark Reardon [00:21:59] I remember all of it. All

Vance Crowe [00:22:00] The whole thing.

Mark Reardon [00:22:01] Well, some of the stuff that, that might be early in history. I certainly remember learning about it. You know, I was born in 1965, so most of the things that he talked about there, I certainly recognize.

Vance Crowe [00:22:11] So I agree with you on the sense of like, you'd be one word things right. Trump COVID, but what else? Right. Would, would trans issues make it in?

Mark Reardon [00:22:22] Well, probably not, because you'd get canceled at that point. Right? It should, because that's part of where we, that that's the whole, maybe if you were to ask me what's the biggest thing that confuses you right now, it's a, that issue in, in everything with gender, because it's, it's bizarre. I don't exactly know how this got to the point that it is. I think that we've reached a turning point. I really do. I think we've reached a turning point. I'm hopeful in, you know, wokeness overall, I think it's peak woke because I'm seeing some people kind of, you know, push back on some of this stuff. And I've seen some of the legacy media, Washington Post, you know, LA times, C-B-S-C-N-N sort of push back on, on some of these things in a way that they haven't or they've been afraid to. So I'm at least hopeful

Vance Crowe [00:23:03] There. Oh, that's interest, because that is not my perception at all. Right? Like, and I mean, part of it is because brand new father, right? I've got these perfect daughters. There's, there's nothing they could do that would make them not perfect right now. And the thought that there was somebody that would come along and be able to convince them of, Hey, there's something deeply wrong with you and, you know, you need to reverse the polarity on who you are.

Mark Reardon [00:23:28] 'cause you want to be a girl because you wanna act like a girl. Right? Absolutely. You know, there's nothing in my mind that blows up this entire gender nonsense than Demi Lovato. Okay. Demi Lovato comes out and singer, performer, whatever people don't know, comes out and she changes her pronouns. Right? She doesn't feel feminine. So she, she changes her pronouns. Well, then she changed them back because now she feels more feminine, which is exactly the point she feels. She, she's a woman, okay. She does not have a penis. And, but because she felt in a certain way, she decided to change pronouns. The whole pronoun thing is utterly ridiculous. And I've already made the case that sadly, if my company starts making me put, you know, pronouns, I'm gonna probably look for something because I'm hearing this happen more and more often. And if you're gonna send me an email that has pronouns, you're gonna lose me at the pronouns. And it's not because I want to discriminate. I just think it's a bunch of complete nonsense. And here's what also is interesting about this, and I made this point a lot, and this is very true. And I think that hopefully you're gonna hear more and more people speaking out. There is a huge, and I mean major CVAs difference between the L-G-P-L-G-B part of that equation and the T-Q-I-A-M-N-O-P element, because gay people in this country, older gay people in particular, they reject this stuff as much as we do. And I can give you an example of that. I have a gay friend in Las Vegas, one of my best friends on the planet.

Mark Reardon [00:24:59] He's got a partner, and the partner works at a store, it's store at Caesar shops in Vegas, and they have multiple locations. And there was a person who transferred from one store to another, and they were told, boy, you gotta be careful. You have to use pronouns. And you know, my friend's partner was a little thrown off by that as a gay guy. Right? He, he was confused by it. And then the person comes over and transfers, and there's a, there's a redneck couple that comes in from one of the flyover states, Kansas. And the trans person, person who considers themselves trans says, wow, I bet they've never, you know, I bet they've never encountered or had to deal with a queer person before. Queer was the, was the word that was used. Because that, this confuses people too. There are people certainly in my generation that would say, wait a second, queer, we, we got rid of that a long time ago. You can't say that. That's bigoted, that's discriminatory. Right? But the reaction from my friend's partner was, wait a second, I'm not queer, I'm gay. And you have all these issues with whether we refer to you as a he, she, they them all this. Well, you don't care how you refer to other people. So that's an interesting dynamic because I think a lot of people in this country, and a lot of 'em won't speak out, but they recognize that some of this stuff is lunacy. And I wanna say this, I do think that there are some people that have true gender dysphoria, right? It's not as prevalent as we're led to believe. I you would, you would think that half the country is trans based on the coverage right now.

Vance Crowe [00:26:27] Yeah. There's something about the ideology that strikes me as like, trying to change some fundamental thing about the way we get along, or the way we understand one another. Like I don't think it's an accident. And I, I like, it always boggled my mind why in the Bible, when you would read that, it would start off and it would say, God made one man and one woman. There's actually two stories

Mark Reardon [00:26:50] In there

Vance Crowe [00:26:50] Yeah. About how man and woman came about. Right? And so I was always like, isn't it obvious there's men and there's women, but for some reason it was really important that, that be canonized in, in these stories. And really, you go to all faiths and they have this, this is where men came from and women. Right. And how they're distinguished. So to me, the, the pronouns in, in an email seem like putting a religious symbol in there the same way somebody might put a cross or might write, you know?

Mark Reardon [00:27:21] Well, it, it has become, that's an interesting analogy, but it has become certainly like that, right?

Vance Crowe [00:27:27] Absolutely. Yeah. And, and people fight for it in a, in a way that is not about, I'll let you think what you wanna think. And I'll think what I want to think they fight in the way that new believers in a religion fight, right? Like, you know, you've met the person that was an alcoholic or, you know, cheated on their spouse, but then they found God, and now they no longer just want to celebrate God in themselves. They're going around and converting other people about this, or they're proselytizing. And that's, it feels so much like a religious fervor that in some ways I pity them because I'm like, one of the reasons I think you push your religion on other people is because it's a way to say like, I'm really going all in on this. Yeah. I'm really going all do you, do you see it then, you know. 'cause if I get you to see it, then it confirms what I am going all in on.

Mark Reardon [00:28:17] Yeah. I that, like I said, I think that's an interesting analogy. I, I'm confused by so much of it because I was even, and I've talked about this on my radio show a little bit. I haven't gone into great detail, but I have, well, you know, I have three children. I have two older children who are 22 and 25. And I said something, I think it was in the aftermath of the, the Dobbs decision, because that's a women's rights issue, right? I said, well, and it was a smart ass comment on Twitter about, well, I don't know. We, we don't, you know, can you say it's a women's rights issue? That sounds bigoted to me. Something along those lines. So I was told by my 22-year-old who never sends me messages on Twitter, right. He sends like a, a dm I'm transphobic because of because of that. And he's uncomfortable because I

Vance Crowe [00:29:01] Oh, he was accusing you of being transphobic. Oh, of course. I see. Okay.

Mark Reardon [00:29:04] Yeah. I'm trans. I just want to make sure that people know that's according to my son. So I didn't engage a whole lot, and we really haven't talked about it. My one comment was, I need you to watch the, the closer, the Chappelle special, and then we'll talk about some of this stuff. Because here's what I reject, and, and this pisses me off. It really does. I'm a guy that in high school here in St. Louis, when I was 17, 16, 17, 18 years old, I had two mentors that were adults who were gay. I knew they were gay. I didn't care. They never did anything inappropriate with me. I had two gay roommates, great roommates, by the way, friends to this day. And I, I talked about my dear friend, my best friend on the planet. I was for gay marriage long before Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama. Right? I've always had these positions publicly and privately. I've said, I've never hid my positions about that on the air. And one of the points I used to make about gay marriage is because the argument was, this is bad for the family and all this stuff. I'm like, look, I was divorced. I'm a divorced man. I, it's completely

Vance Crowe [00:30:15] Hypocritical for

Mark Reardon [00:30:16] Me.

Vance Crowe [00:30:16] You

Mark Reardon [00:30:17] Know, let's look at a problem that's much more prevalent than that. Right. Which is divorce in this country. But all of that and everything I've done publicly, privately, never treated anyone differently. Have many gay friends and love them dearly. But I'm bigoted and transphobic because I see the difference between someone who has a penis and someone who has a vagina that's lunacy. It's utter lunacy. That's what I want to tell my son. And I think at some point I will. But that makes me so angry. It really does. Well,

Vance Crowe [00:30:52] 'cause it also goes in, into the line. Like it's, it's one thing if you say somebody has a phobia that's in your rational fear. Right?

Mark Reardon [00:30:59] Well,

Vance Crowe [00:30:59] But, but you,

Mark Reardon [00:31:00] It's completely misnamed first. Yeah. It's ridiculous. But

Vance Crowe [00:31:03] I i it's

Mark Reardon [00:31:04] Not a phobia

Vance Crowe [00:31:05] And like, that's, that's the part of it that's, you know, grading on me. Like, you are allowed to not like things. Right? Yeah. Like, even if it's things that everyone else likes and you don't like. Right. It's not healthy for you to have a fear, an irrational fear of something. But if, if you're like, ah, you know, this sort of behavior, this sort of lifestyle, this sort of, and that could be anything. That could be, it could be anything. I don't like the way people drive their cars or how they, if they have, you know, when I, I grew up in a small town where the religion didn't allow people that of probably 60% of the population didn't allow people to have TVs in their house. Right. Really?

Mark Reardon [00:31:45] And,

Vance Crowe [00:31:45] And so it was a very religious group of people. They were fine. But they said, not only do we not wanna have TVs in our house, but if you have a TV in your house and we have children the same age, they're just not gonna spend the night. Right. 'cause we don't, we don't wanna expose 'em to that right now. I don't like that. Right. That's not something I wanted at the time. But for me to be like, you're a bigot because you won't let kids come over because we have the tv. Right. That you don't want. Like, that's not right. And for us to, like, for anybody that hijacks the conversation by saying that you have an irrational fear and therefore you are bad.

Mark Reardon [00:32:21] Yeah.

Vance Crowe [00:32:21] It's, it's like, it's a total hijacking. There's no logic being used. No,

Mark Reardon [00:32:25] Not at all. And it, it frustrates me. And you know, I, I lost a, I lost a dear friend a bit over this issue because of something I said on Twitter years ago. And this was someone who I was very close with for years, went to journalism school with, worked for CBS. Still does. And you know, this is, I don't, like, I've had people drop me as friends in the last few years Right. Because of politics and race issues. I'm not one who does that. I may have a disagreement with you, but I I'm not just gonna not deal with you as a friend or especially if I have that relationship with you. Right. But I guess it happens differently with some people. So I said something along the lines of what I said earlier about men being different than women because of their, their parts and was harshly rebuked on Twitter by this person who has been friends with me for decades. And it wasn't the rebuke that pissed me off, it was that when he did the rebuke, he co I worked for CBS at the time. Right. So he copied my company. Oh. And he put an ant reply. I'm like, what the fuck? I, I couldn't believe that that happened. So that severed the relationship right there. I thought that that was so outrageous that that happened, especially over something that really, let's face it, you can't argue with biology even though people want to. So that's sad to me. It really is. And I even reached out to that friend at one point after that, even though I was pissed off to try to at least smooth it over. No. So at that point, I think you have to move on, but I think it's sad.

Vance Crowe [00:33:52] Well, and you're like, what you're getting at is that people feel justified to do things. That if you were looking at some other issue, that they would be totally agreed and with you that like, no, you don't write somebody's boss. You don't like drag their professional career into it. I don't know if you've heard of this guy, I'm a little nervous about bringing this up, but there's a guy named Billboard Chris have, have

Mark Reardon [00:34:12] You heard? Yeah, I have not, I'm not familiar with him.

Vance Crowe [00:34:14] So he ha he, I don't know his backstory. I tried to look it up and it doesn't, he all it says is he's a dad. Yeah.

Mark Reardon [00:34:20] And

Vance Crowe [00:34:20] He is concerned about some of the surgeries and the chemical, like the chemistry being introduced to these kids. So he wears a sandwich board and he shows up at places and says, I don't think children should have their genitals removed.

Mark Reardon [00:34:35] Right.

Vance Crowe [00:34:36] Well, last night in, I think it was Montreal, he had some people that looked like they were dressed in all black. They had masks came up and hit him to the degree that his arm was broken. He put up the, on Twitter, Twitter, the, the x-ray of it. Right. And his response, which was, you know, fascinating. He said, you know, broken bones will heal, but remove genitals won't. And so he was being very, like, I would like to find the name of the person because without a name, the police won't do an investigation despite the fact that they have a video of it. And it's like, clearly a group of people coming and like, you see these things and you think, what must be driving a person to wear a mask and strike another person for wearing a sandwich board? What, what could you possibly write on a sandwich

Mark Reardon [00:35:26] Board? Yeah. I don't know that

Vance Crowe [00:35:27] Would make that same thing happen.

Mark Reardon [00:35:29] I I have no idea. That's why these things are so confusing at this point. And, you know, there's, there's probably no better example of some of this stuff than just the, the T word, which is not transitioning. It's Trump. And, you know, the, the way that people make judgment calls over whether or not you voted a certain way in an election. I think there's some parallels there because you're immediately, if you are not on board, I say that this is true with a lot of progressives on climate change. If you're not on board, well, race is a better example perhaps because it's no longer good enough to not be racist. Right. That that doesn't do it if, if I'm not racist. First of all, no one believes you. Right. You have to be anti-racist. Right. That's the requirement these days. You have to go a step further. And I, I don't know how much more I can take of all this stuff at this point. I really, it, it's just weighing me down. It's wearing me out. And I think, I think we amplify the voices that are in the minorities too. Maybe the media does that, because I do think that more people are on my side, your, of this issue, all these issues then we're led on to believe, because I think most of the country is sort of center, center, right. Center left. So there are a lot of people, I i he praise sometimes on my democrat friends on my show, on the gender issue because they're, they're on the same page. They think a lot of this is, is ridiculous as well. So there are a lot of people that are not those voices that get shouted out on Twitter that are probably more sane.

Mark Reardon [00:37:02] At least I hope so. And there's more voices talking about some of this stuff and how it shouldn't happen. People who have transitioned and said, wait a second, you know, I, I I made a mistake. You need to know this. Doctors who have been involved in those procedures Right. Who have said, wait a second, we may have gone too far. So there are voices like that out there. And I, I hope it continues. Look, I had a a, an acquaintance from the radio station who reached out when I started talking about this stuff earlier this year. I've been talking about the gender stuff more than this year. But earlier I was talking about it and he said he had a 13-year-old daughter who during the pandemic got lost and decided that she was a boy. And, you know, it was tough. Had tried, I think there were suicide attempts. Oh no, it wasn't, it was cutting. So she was cutting. It was a nightmare. A nightmare. Right. And a lot of this is what's happening on social media with the influence. Well now five months later, you got a, you know, a message. She's back to being a girl. Right. She was, she, she doesn't know what she was doing. So I think that the influence that some of these people have on younger people in particular, maybe the people who are influencing them truly do have gender dysphoria. But not all these kids do. You have teachers that say that they have half their class identifying as trans. Come on. Really? Yeah.

Vance Crowe [00:38:19] I mean that's, and it definitely, I have a friend that teaches at a, at a unique kind of high school Montessori school. And he said one of the ways that kids figured out they could protect themselves from accusations of, of the whatever the fad of the day is, was if they declared that they were also trans. Yeah.

Mark Reardon [00:38:37] Now

Vance Crowe [00:38:37] They're a part of a group that they can now have somebody do something.

Mark Reardon [00:38:41] Right. You

Vance Crowe [00:38:42] Know, unfair to them. And so that, that, that he thought that a lot of the, the people from the wings, he was like, yeah. They're just the ones that are like, look, I just wanna be a zebra. I just want to get in. And if me declaring myself in this way does that, then, then

Mark Reardon [00:38:58] That's what I'm gonna do. Yeah. You know, and, and I, I think you're right about that. And I have a a, I go back about seven, six or seven years when there was a friend of mine whose daughter was maybe sort of in that mix where she didn't know which way to go with a circle of friends. You know, I was somebody in high school where at least back in the eighties, you had the burnouts, you had the SOAs, you know, the preppy people and all that. Yeah. I was able to kind of connect with a lot of those different groups, which I think has served me well on the radio as well. But I get that there's, you know, high school's a tough place to be and I wouldn't wanna be back there. That would be the last place I would wanna be. But was talking to my friend and asking about his daughter and, you know, boyfriend girlfriend? Well, she, she's, she's identified as queer. Okay. She's decided she's about as heterosexual as they come. We'll probably get married here soon. Have kids with a straight heterosexual white male. The worst thing you could be on the planet. But so was there confusion? She wasn't queer. She, she identified as queer. Right. What does that even mean? Demi Lovato. Right. It, it, it's just a bunch of nonsense.

Vance Crowe [00:40:04] A big thing that's happened in the world, particularly it's in the news right now, is about anxiety. And there's all these kids that talk about having social anxiety. There was the gymnast that came out, there was Jonah, what's his name? Jonah Hill.

Mark Reardon [00:40:19] Jonah Hill, yeah. Yeah.

Vance Crowe [00:40:20] Came out and said he's no longer doing press releases. And I gotta tell you, I first hear that and I, my immediate reaction is to scoff. Yeah,

Mark Reardon [00:40:29] Yeah. I get that. But the

Vance Crowe [00:40:29] Way that I heard about it

Mark Reardon [00:40:31] Yeah.

Vance Crowe [00:40:31] Was that I was listening to your show and right after you explained that Jonah Hill said he was gonna do this, you were like, but I get it. Yeah.

Mark Reardon [00:40:38] I

Vance Crowe [00:40:38] Had crippling anxiety. I,

Mark Reardon [00:40:40] Well, so I, my reaction would

Vance Crowe [00:40:42] Be, what is anxiety? First of all,

Mark Reardon [00:40:43] Let me just address one of the things you said, because my initial reaction on a lot of these things is to say, give me a flip and break on the other hand, because I've had so much experience with intense anxiety, I relate. So I'll take you back. Good lord. 30. What was 1988? 89. How many years ago was that? It was a long time ago. Right. Like 35 years ago. Something like that. And I remember, this is maybe the first memory of, of something like this happening. I remember being in my studio. I was doing FM radio at the time. It was a news sidekick. And we have something at the University of Missouri Mizzou called the Golden Girls. The golden Girls are like the dance troupe, you know, not the cheerleaders, but not the older

Vance Crowe [00:41:26] Women

Mark Reardon [00:41:26] Who did the TV show.

Vance Crowe [00:41:27] It's not really a sexy name.

Mark Reardon [00:41:28] No it's not. But they wear gold, you know, mizzou's black and gold and all that. And I remember there was a golden girl in the studio, and I was so nervous. I, I basically had a panic attack and, and couldn't get the words out on the air. And that's a little bit of performance anxiety, if you will, because, and, and I've experienced that even when I was younger, doing some reporting and anchoring. You know, I used to anchor newscasts when I was like 19 or 20 years old. So you would get nervous. But I'd never had something like that where I was, I couldn't get the words out. Okay. So that was weird at the time. And then it manifested itself into the nineties, into some paralyzing episodes. Most of which would happen when newness was around. So if I would switch jobs or I'd be in a different situation or something like that. And when I moved here to St. Louis in 1997, I took a radio job and it was different than a small market. I was intimidated, you know, I didn't have a lot of experience at that time. And I was anxious all the time. And when I talk about anxiety that way, it's an overwhelming feeling. Heart palpitations all of this stuff. And then for me, because I was on the radio, I would be really nervous. I would take, back then I started taking beta blockers and Xanax musicians, I think golfers take these things. They're not drug tested. Okay. Beta blocker will slow the heart rate down. So I would take maybe a, a half a beta blocker, half a Xanax. Some of that was psychological, just to say, okay, I know I'm gonna be okay.

Mark Reardon [00:43:02] But there were moments over the course of my career, and this happened in the nineties. It happened again in the early two thousands. And then seven or eight years ago, it happened worse than it ever happened before. And it was mixed with depression. And I had never really been depressed before. Like, true depression. Maybe people listening don't even have a concept of that. I don't know that I did. But I knew anxiety. Right. And those two things combined, I didn't see the light at the end of the tunnel. I didn't think I was gonna make it. I'm not gonna tell you that there was a, a hose and a car in my garage door closed. But I was thinking about scenarios. 'cause I didn't think I was gonna survive. It was torturous. Every day was torturous. I'd get up. I didn't know if I could do my job. I felt it's a really difficult feeling to, to explain it really is. Because it's not like you're being nervous when you're, you know, going to something that happens too. Because the anxiety is the fear. The fear, right. So most of what I've gone through has just been anticipation, being afraid to do that thing in public. And I will tell you right now, if I were to do this seven or eight years ago, I don't think I could have done it here without swallowing and getting the word out. You know, trying to get the words out. I would pull into ka Exxon days. My show started at two. I'd get in, I'd sit in my car. I wouldn't know if I could do it. I'd be sweating. My hands would be cold and sweating. I would have to go into the bathroom and, and take paper towels. These are all things I've never talked about on the radio, by the way. I'm getting there.

Mark Reardon [00:44:33] But it was awful. And I've said over the time, people won't like this. But I'll tell you right now, I can't imagine this is, my feeling could be wrong. I can't imagine that someone that has cancer and is going through, you know, even chemo is tortured more than I was now, I wasn't physically tortured, but it was, well, to a certain extent, it is physical because of the feeling. You don't wanna do anything that you there.

Vance Crowe [00:44:58] It was a, so I have the, my experience with panic attacks and anxiety is that I, in graduate school, it was an international program. Yeah.

Mark Reardon [00:45:06] I

Vance Crowe [00:45:06] Met this guy from Afghanistan. His IQ was off the charts. You don't get to be the guy that comes to diplomacy school in the United States from Afghanistan unless you are really

Mark Reardon [00:45:16] Smart. Right,

Vance Crowe [00:45:17] Right, right. And he was tough. And he had been through war zones. He'd had all these things go on. We get to the second year where when we finish, people are going wherever they're gonna go. You know, I was going onto the World Bank, he was going back to Afghanistan. Yeah.

Mark Reardon [00:45:31] If he

Vance Crowe [00:45:31] Couldn't get a job, and he started to, we would go to the library and he would start breathing really heavy. Yeah. And

Mark Reardon [00:45:38] Then it

Vance Crowe [00:45:39] Would get ragged, and then he would start sweating, and I would be looking at him. We'd be this far apart. Right. And he would like pass out and slide down in his chair. Oh,

Mark Reardon [00:45:47] Wow.

Vance Crowe [00:45:48] And so the ambulance would've to get called. I thought he was having a heart attack.

Mark Reardon [00:45:51] Right. Yeah. Yeah.

Vance Crowe [00:45:52] And so there was no way that he was faking this. Right. Yeah. It was, there's, you could not possibly, you know, I took him to the hospital one time and you're watching on the screen right. That, that his heart rate is way up. Yeah. So this, it was beyond, but it was very, very difficult for me to wrap my mind around like, Hey man, there's nothing there. Right? Yeah. You've got six months around this. And then he would have these crushing experiences of depression where he just wouldn't get outta bed. He wouldn't exercise. Yeah. He wouldn't do anything. And that severed our relationship because it made it so it was like, look, I'm not your mother. Right, right. I'm your graduate school roommate here. And so I can still tangibly understand that. And then I look at a guy like Jonah Hill. Yeah. Or I look at a guy like you, and I think just top of the world. Yeah.

Mark Reardon [00:46:43] How,

Vance Crowe [00:46:43] Well

Mark Reardon [00:46:43] Look,

Vance Crowe [00:46:43] How could this be hap how could this even be real?

Mark Reardon [00:46:45] Nobody, no one. If, if you would go back and, and there were different signs. I think that my producers here, here's one of the trick I used. Okay. I'm just gonna tell you what happened. And by the way, I never really had, I've never really experienced the true panic attacks outside of that time that I told you. I got all shaky on the air. But I've just had these experiences where, man, I start thinking about it. And when I start thinking about it, I'm like, am I gonna be able to get the words out? Am I going to be able to do my job? So for me, the anxiety was twofold. It was this awful feeling that I had throughout the rest of the day. Then it made it so difficult for me to do my job because I didn't know if I could get the words out. So if you would listen to my show back in, you know, that era when I was really suffering seven, eight years ago, every time I did the show, at the beginning of the show, there'd be a lot of audio. I would go and I use audio a lot because I'm a radio guy. But audio would be like sound bites of someone. Right. I'd have a ton of audio ready because if I didn't think I was gonna be able to swallow through the words like that. Right. I needed some relief. I used to do this at newscast, at WTMJ, every one of my newscasts, every one of my newscasts when I was doing a solo newscast, because for whatever reason that was weird for me, would start with audio. And then if I could get through that first minute, then my mind would settle down and I was, okay, this went on for years. And, and it's hard for me to believe that I was even able to do my job. This is where I have empathy for Jonah Hill, because if Jonah Hill has anything like I did, if he's going into a press junket where he's doing interviews with people like me, it is super uncomfortable to the point where it's torturous.

Mark Reardon [00:48:18] So I don't know if that's really what happens to him, but I get it from a certain perspective. Look, mental illness is, is tough to get your arms around overall. I remember there was a case from the eighties where a woman and I used to scoff at the notion of depression and anxiety. I really did. There was a woman, what was her name? Susan something who drowned her two babies. Oh man.

Vance Crowe [00:48:38] Her two

Mark Reardon [00:48:39] Kids. Right. And you, you see situations like that. And that was one of those things that, that got looped in with postpartum depression. And I'm a young, you know, big mouth guy on the radio and I'm thinking, postpartum depression, what the f is that? Come on, suck it up buttercup. Right. Well, I was so stupid and naive and, and that, that's a different level of weird and maybe evil involved as well. When you do that to your children, I don't think that many of us can get our arms wrapped around or our heads wrapped around that. On the other hand, the depression, the hopelessness that goes along with, with all that, the no light at the end of the tunnel. I, I, I understand that because I've been there and I, and I see it.

Vance Crowe [00:49:22] Yeah. That the, it's interesting when you start thinking about how much of your life, you know, you, you feel like, this morning I got a one month old, I got a 2-year-old. I gotta move everybody. I gotta get things going. I got work to do. And so to me, everything around the world is chaos, right? Yeah. So it is like people are driving horribly and just things aren't right. And really, that's just all in my head. Yeah. But that's the only perception I have.

Mark Reardon [00:49:49] Well, it doesn't matter. 'cause that's all the stuff that, that's whizzing around in there. I do have one funny story that I have to tell you about anxiety though, that I thought of because I, I have a friend who had, and he was, we were just on vacation together, and he was sort of going back to the origins of this, but he was on an airplane one time years ago, this is a couple decades ago. Never had anything like this happen. And he, he started having a panic attack to the point where he had to go back. He was talking to the flight attendant and he's at the back of the plane. He wanted outta that plane, like, can you land the plane? No, sir. We cannot do that right now.

Vance Crowe [00:50:22] So

Mark Reardon [00:50:23] The flight attendant says, do you drink? Yes ma'am. I do start slipping him some, you know, some alcohol to, to calm him down a little bit. Gets through it, right? Well, when you have something like that, that happens to you, and I can relate with this, you don't ever want to have something like that happen to you again. Right. So he starts taking Xanax before his flights. Oh. And, and that's what calms him down. So we're going to a football game up in Green Bay years ago. And I mentioned that I, you know, I've taken, now I don't even think I have any Xanax in, in my possession. I did for years in beta blockers. I don't have any of that. I I don't have to take it ever anymore. And that includes in public, you know, appearances. Now, follow up on that, because I have a, a theory

Vance Crowe [00:51:06] I'll, I wanna ask, I want, I

Mark Reardon [00:51:08] Want you to

Vance Crowe [00:51:08] Ask

Mark Reardon [00:51:08] Me what has changed in the past five years, but with this particular friend, he told me like, he takes a full Xanax. This is an early morning flight before he leaves, and then he drinks at the airport, and then he takes another one. And that's what calms him down, right? So we get on the airplane, he's sitting next to me, he's shuffling around. He goes, I can't find my Xanax. I'm like, just here, take mine. Right? So I give him a, a Xanax, I think I broke federal law, but we'll edit this part out. About 20 minutes after that, I look at him and he's just like, he's slumping over, right? I'm like, oh, fuck. Did I give him an Ambien and not a Xanax?

Vance Crowe [00:51:50] I sure did.

Mark Reardon [00:51:51] And so I, I, I basically dosed my friend when that happened. And he, you know, it was actually pretty funny in retrospect, but that was, that was dangerous. Alright. Here's what helps me with anxiety. You can have different opinions about this. My wife happens to be in the industry, THC. Now, this is a topic that I haven't really discussed much on the year when I was in the eighties. I quit drinking in 1990. Okay. The eighties were a lot of fun. Don't remember much of them, but they were a lot of fun. At least I'm told that by friends. And I did pretty much everything on the planet. I never did psych psychedelics. All right? So, LSD was off the, off the table, but semis, psychedelics certainly, and things along those lines, quit drinking, had an epiphany. We could spend a whole nother podcast on, on that part of my life, right? Smoked a lot of weed back then. A lot of weed, right? Liked it quite a bit. Always said over the decades, that's what I miss. I don't miss the alcohol. So maybe five years ago, this was a couple years after I got help, and I should maybe go over that. When I was in my deepest throngs of depression and anxiety, I called, it's hard to get appointments. You can't get appointments with people. But I used privilege and I called someone that I knew that was a physician and said, I, I gotta see someone. I found a good shrink here in St. Louis. And we, it took months. We tried a couple of different things. I got on some medication that was finally even in me off, and I take something called Lamictal, which is used for epileptic seizures, I think. And one of the bad side effects is really bad rashes and burns.

Mark Reardon [00:53:22] So the, the doctor said, look, you know, if you're gonna, if you're gonna take this, you need to know. But I was at the point in my life, I had to

Vance Crowe [00:53:30] Where you'd accept rashes and burns over.

Mark Reardon [00:53:32] I had to, I, there was, I didn't have another choice. I didn't know what else I could do. Right? So then a few years after that, I don't even know what really made me do this, but I started experimenting with weed a little bit again. And I feel like I'm to the point now where I could probably ditch those medications, but I don't think it's worth the risk, because I don't want to go back to the way that I felt before. But I do think that the THC now, maybe this is a bit of a rationalization. I'm not gonna tell you that I don't like it, you know, because it's a relaxing feeling, a mood elevator. But I do think that that's helped me quite a bit because even in the aftermath of the, the medicine that I was taking, I would still have an excess amount of anxiety. I just, even if we were doing this, I would have anxiety. Don't have any, you know, at, at this point in my life, I really don't have any at all. I can go in front of a group of hundreds of people I feel like right now, and not worry about it. Now, some of that might be because my brain has settled down, and I'm not worried about the fear. I don't have fear of the fear, if that makes sense. So, because your mind, it's just a rabbit hole that your brain goes into when you're thinking about things that you, you know, you might have a panic

Vance Crowe [00:54:44] Attacking. So how far, how far into your day do you get before you, you take THC

Mark Reardon [00:54:50] I'm super stoned right now. I smoke.

Vance Crowe [00:54:52] No, I'm just kidding.

Mark Reardon [00:54:53] My, my day, it's in the evening, right? I'm not, I'm not doing anything. I'm not taking any edibles or anything like during the day. So it's not like I take it to get through my day, but I use it in the evenings. Mainly. It helps me sleep. I don't, I used to take Ambien all the time too, and I don't have to do that. But I feel like there's no other explanation that makes me feel different than I did seven years ago outside of the medication than the THC. Unless it's just my brain is more, I don't know. I mean, I can't sit here and tell you for sure, but I can tell you I feel a lot better overall because

Vance Crowe [00:55:26] Of that. Well, I mean, it's, it's telling in and of itself that even experimenting like you, like, you're like, Hey, I've figured out how to be level right.

Mark Reardon [00:55:34] And

Vance Crowe [00:55:35] I don't want go back. Yeah. So, so like, the, the non desire to experiment, to figure out is right. That, that's telling of, of something I think really important. You know, you, speaking of Xanax, I, I have a, a pet theory. I've been working on it. And I think there's a big part of our culture that is really unacknowledged right now, and that is that empty nest syndrome when people, they, they've raised children because you have to change your entire life to be able to handle those kids when they're infants. And then, you know, managing everything when those kids go off to school, you know, we think of it as like, ah, you know, it's freedom. But I think in reality, you now have to go into a new phase of life. Sure. And what I see in suburban St. Louis, is a whole lot of adults that are in their forties, may maybe more like fifties, sixties, right.

Mark Reardon [00:56:27] That

Vance Crowe [00:56:28] I think are dealing with the,

Mark Reardon [00:56:31] Well, that's like categor

Vance Crowe [00:56:32] Of

Mark Reardon [00:56:32] A separation. Yeah. Yeah.

Vance Crowe [00:56:33] I, I think that that's a big reason why there's a bunch of psych meds in, in that age group of people. How does that sit with you? Well,

Mark Reardon [00:56:41] I, I will tell you that I have a great solution for that. It's an easy fix. And that's having another baby at age 50, because that's what I did right before I was gonna become a, an empty nester. I, I think, I think there's a couple of different categories of this stuff, really, overall, because I do think that we've gone a little overboard with the medication and all these things that have happened, and you have half the country hopped up on, you know, anti-anxiety and, and depression. So I don't know that, that any, everybody needs those things because I'm a, I'm a firm believer in, and I should cover this because I think this is important exercise, okay. Healthy living. These are also things that have helped me with my anxiety. There's no

Vance Crowe [00:57:18] Doubt you're a big cyclist, right?

Mark Reardon [00:57:19] I was, okay, now I, now I lose golf balls. But yes.

Vance Crowe [00:57:22] Okay.

Mark Reardon [00:57:22] But when I was going through the, the worst part of the anxiety and depression, that was the one thing that really made me feel better. And not just when I was on the bike, but the intense exercise helped me quite a bit. And look, there's research that shows this. This is good. So I think a lot of people could get through their level of depression and anxiety if they, if they did a little work on their own. I get that some people need help. I'm an example of that, so I don't wanna discount that. But I do think a lot of people are lost because that, that's exacerbated by everything else that's going on in the country. You know, you, you have that different part of your life and maybe you're trying to find out what that next step is, and then you have all the politics and you have, you know, a pandemic and all of that. So I do think that that, that's an interesting observation as well, which is one of the reasons I like you. 'cause you make interesting observations, but I'm not sure how to pin that one down.

Vance Crowe [00:58:11] I, I just spend time, you know, where I live and, and just the people I interact with. I didn't realize until a friend of mine pointed out how hard it was on her parents. Right? And then in my own neighborhood, you know, we had this infant, and I see how these parents, particularly these

Mark Reardon [00:58:27] Women,

Vance Crowe [00:58:27] They're, you know, mid fifties, early sixties, right?

Mark Reardon [00:58:30] They're

Vance Crowe [00:58:31] Literally saying, I will come watch that child any time. Right? It's, you know, I, I'll, I'll stop either. Hey,

Mark Reardon [00:58:38] Can, can you give them my number by any chance?

Vance Crowe [00:58:40] Well, they wanna hold little babies, right? Like, but there's something too. And that's gotten me thinking about, you know, what would your life be like if you had, you just spent the last 20 years doing something and now that's gone. That's

Mark Reardon [00:58:53] Big shift. There's no doubt about that.

Vance Crowe [00:58:55] I'm grateful that you talk about this, because I know that when I went through my wife and I struggling to get pregnant, and, you know, we had to do IVF and it was really, really difficult. Yeah. I talked about it on the podcast because no one ever told me that this could happen, right? Right. So when this was happening to me, I thought, I am literally the only person in the world, and you can talk to the doctor and they'd be like, oh no, people are in here all the time like this. So I am really, I'm grateful that you're on here talking about it, because I guarantee there's somebody in a harvester right now, or washing dishes right now that is like, I am struggling with these things. I may be the only one.

Mark Reardon [00:59:32] And I, I think you, you have great examples of people who are now coming forward. I can't remember. There's a, there's a big country artist that's been very vocal about it. And when I've heard him tell the story, I'm like, that, that's my story. Right? I don't think we, we think about the effect that this might have on people that we know on an everyday basis who are celebrities. For example, we wonder why baseball and football players are sometimes pretty crappy. Right? I think that we don't allow for the fact that some of these people have anxiety and depression. I really do. And, you know, they don't wanna talk about it. And it's still a bit of a stigma. But, you know, everyone that is a professional athlete also has families, and they have wives and kids and things that get in the way, and they have things that are overwhelming, right? So I think this is, it's widespread, but again, I wanna draw the distinction. I think there's a difference. Some people need help, some people need medication. I was certainly in that category. There are other ways to at least treat mild depression, mild anxiety that I think are helpful as well. But it's something that I'm gonna do more of pushing forward, because I'm comfortable with it. Look back when I was, I couldn't do this when I was anxious because be too anxious to talk about it. So now I have a, you know, a bit of a better understanding of it, I think just even for the way it affected myself.

Vance Crowe [01:00:50] So, speaking of better understanding, just yesterday I saw an article, actually, you tweeted it, I th I think with NPR being like, Hey, things have changed about COVID. Yeah.

Mark Reardon [01:01:04] And

Vance Crowe [01:01:04] We are, we are now backing off and people should take individual responsibility for their own, what

Mark Reardon [01:01:10] A novel idea. Right?

Vance Crowe [01:01:11] It was, I mean, it seemed like gall to me that they would come out and say that, right? Where people that had said, you know, I, I think that the lockdowns are insane. If somebody's sick, just choose to stay home and let's trust in,

Mark Reardon [01:01:25] You know,

Vance Crowe [01:01:25] Each other. Right.

Mark Reardon [01:01:26] They became pariahs, like

Vance Crowe [01:01:27] Pariahs considered evil people. Yes. People said things to me that I couldn't, like, you know, I'm not a warrior out on Twitter. I don't, I don't go out and

Mark Reardon [01:01:35] Fight with

Vance Crowe [01:01:35] People, but I would put things out about like, Hey, I, I think that, like, we just literally got put in jail by our county executive. In fact, when Jane Duker. So, so for people that aren't from St. Louis Mark has a woman named Jane Duker come on the show every Friday. She's a Democrat.

Mark Reardon [01:01:51] She's on my political round table that

Vance Crowe [01:01:53] I do. And she came on, she came out and said, I'm gonna run against county Executive Sam page. And I, I saw her the day that she announced, and she said, do I have your vote? And I said, are you gonna lock me in my house? Yeah.

Mark Reardon [01:02:04] Right.

Vance Crowe [01:02:04] And she said, no. And I was like, I'll vote for anyone that says that they won't do this. And like, because he in effect put everyone in prison.

Mark Reardon [01:02:14] Yeah.

Vance Crowe [01:02:16] And, and, and so

Mark Reardon [01:02:17] We've made so many mistakes.

Vance Crowe [01:02:18] And people, when they, when they saw me saying, I didn't think we should put people in jail.

Mark Reardon [01:02:22] Yeah.

Vance Crowe [01:02:23] They treated it as though I were like a, a deeply bad, flawed,

Mark Reardon [01:02:27] Right.

Vance Crowe [01:02:28] Terrible person.

Mark Reardon [01:02:30] It, the psychology of COVID though will be books written about this. Because I'll give you an example of something that I said last year that I thought was definitive. And I, you know, I question a lot of the things that I said in the early days of the pandemic. At this point, I was always one who, who took it very seriously. Okay. But I also knew that there were some parameters that maybe we should operate within. And when May of last year, that would've been May of 2021. I remember I was coming back from a golf trip in Louisville, and that was when the masking was finally going away. And we were starting to get to a period that, you know, we had freedom. This was coming after, you know, the, the first year, and then the wave of omicron. And then finally we're getting to the point the vaccines are out, right? So I make this declaration very confidently and arrogantly, which is something I do. The arrogant part. This is, this is a pandemic of the unvaccinated. You unvaccinated people out there, the problem, right? Those of us who've got the vaccination and the booster we're good. The rest of you f off. Right? Deal with it. Well, that was ridiculously embarrassing in retrospect for me to say, because it wasn't a pandemic of the unvaccinated. In fact, we learned that the unvaccinated and the vaccinated were pretty much getting this thing at the same rate. Now, do I think that the vaccination helped severe illness and death for a lot of people? I do. I mean, maybe I'm wrong about that at this point. I actually have to allow for the fact that maybe the numbers are gonna tell me something differently. But there were so many stupid things that we did.

Mark Reardon [01:04:01] We had people in this country that didn't want people outside on beaches, or they're masking outdoors when they're running. There's a woman here in Baldwin, which is a suburb of St. Louis. And I go to one of my great sponsors, pet Supplies Plus, because I have a lot of animals in my house, the three cats and two dogs. And for weeks I would see her, I wouldn't go every day, but obviously once a week I'd probably go over there and I'd see her running down new Baldwin Road with a mask on. And honestly, I wanted to stop. I wanted to stop several people. And to be clear, if you feel like you have a comorbidity and you wanna wear a mask, go for it. If you feel like you're in a clo but outdoors, then you're kind of crazy because there's no justification, there's no science that tells you, certainly there's no science that tells you to wear that outdoors when no one is around you. But going back to the psychology, I honestly think, I have to think at this point that there are people that truly believe that this thing is floating around out there. And if you don't have a mask on, you're gonna be attacked by it. Because people like Sam Page and others have essentially told people that they've scared the living daylights out of them. So that's horrific that that's happened when

Vance Crowe [01:05:05] I, when the mask mandate started coming up. Right. And I was one of those people, like, I don't really mind disagreeing with people. It's totally fine with me,

Mark Reardon [01:05:13] Right?

Vance Crowe [01:05:13] Like, if I'm out, somebody wants to disagree with me, like, doesn't phase me at all at all,

Mark Reardon [01:05:17] Right?

Vance Crowe [01:05:17] But I don't like going and looking for confrontation. Yeah. But when the mask thing came out, I was like, I'm not doing it. Right. Yeah. Like, you're gonna, you are going to the same, have to be very comfortable with confrontation to confront me about it.

Mark Reardon [01:05:27] Look, you, you're talking to the guy who before this went away on airplanes, and we, we got rid of Ma I I'm in the airports and I don't have a mask on. Okay. Sorry. I wore it on the airplane because I was forced to wear it on the airplane. And by the way, on the masking front, you, you can make a, I I felt like it was ridiculous from the beginning. But here's what I will admit. I think we have evidence that if you wore one of those tight N95 masks on your face, you probably did get some benefit. But you're only getting benefit from that, honestly. Here, one thing I will tell you, I think I might have mentioned this on a previous podcast, there was a guy, I think it was the mayor of Miami at one point during the early days of the pandemic, maybe in the first six months, that said, and he was encouraging people to wear their masks in their apartments, in their homes. Now, that sounds crazy, right? What are, you talk, but realistically, when you go back, we weren't getting this thing at the grocery store, Walmart, right? It was people, they were going out, they were getting it. And then you probably would've gotten benefit in your home if you would've wore a tight N95 mask. But the cloth masks weren't doing you any good anyway. And how many times did we see people on the airplane or wherever wearing it underneath their news, we nose, is we force these kids to wear masks in

Vance Crowe [01:06:35] School? Well, the kids is where I was going with this.

Mark Reardon [01:06:37] Is it is it absolutely never, ever should have happened.

Vance Crowe [01:06:40] My, when, you know, we had a brand new daughter, you know, when COVID is going on, and people would come over, whether it was a workman or some, somebody would come over and they'd be like, do you need me to wear a mask? And we'd be like, no, actually we would prefer if you didn't.

Mark Reardon [01:06:51] Yeah. Because

Vance Crowe [01:06:53] I had noticed when I would take Violet to the grocery store, or we would go to places in public, if somebody were wearing a mask, she wouldn't look at them. And so I made this observation

Mark Reardon [01:07:01] Yeah. And

Vance Crowe [01:07:01] Talked about it on, on Twitter and on the podcast saying like, I think you're actually causing untold amounts of damage to children if they don't learn from the earliest age how to read somebody's face, especially a little girl. Right?

Mark Reardon [01:07:15] Yeah. There's no doubt.

Vance Crowe [01:07:16] Little girl has to be able to look at you and say, Hey, are you safe? Are you somebody I should trust? Are you somebody that's gonna harm?

Mark Reardon [01:07:23] Absolutely. Right. Absolutely.

Vance Crowe [01:07:24] They're learning that language way before they're learning words.

Mark Reardon [01:07:28] Sure. And

Vance Crowe [01:07:29] So we didn't do it. Well, just the other day, I was talking with a, a group of, of speech pathologists. There was a group of four of them, and they said the biggest challenge they have now is getting children to make eye contact with them, which is the first step towards Yes. Getting them to learn to, to say words properly.

Mark Reardon [01:07:46] Well, it's a great observation because it's true. And the depths of the damage, we don't know yet. We, we, I, I felt very, very fortunate that my daughter was only in kindergarten when this happened, because she did the zoom classes for six weeks that, that I helped with and my wife helped with. But after that it was mass, but it was in person. But she was at a, I think a pretty good age for all this and understood it. And she, if she was three or four, I think it would've been different. She was five into six now. Six into seven, A little better understanding of it. But the, the issue with reading in, in speech and all of that development, and some of us are very lucky because we have our kids in good schools, and we've had our kids in good daycares. A lot of people in this country don't have that. And now this will be suffering for, for how long to come and why the people on, I don't get, there's a lot of things that I don't understand. And I guess I'm never, I don't understand the, the brains on the far left that argue for all this science and then don't understand the other implications of what we're doing to people by locking 'em down. And we got off easy in this country. You look at Australia and some of the other stuff, stuff that

Vance Crowe [01:08:49] Happened around the world mean Yeah. The, that like, people didn't talk anywhere nearly enough about like what that trucker convoy came down to in Canada. But that unveiled

Mark Reardon [01:08:59] Right.

Vance Crowe [01:09:00] That your, the government both in Canada and in the United States will shut off your money. Yeah. If you do something they don't, like, if you talk about things that they don't like, look

Mark Reardon [01:09:09] This. And, you know, I had someone, when I sent that thing out on Twitter from NPR, it was something that basically, like you said, Vance that sort of redid the CDC guidelines, say, this thing is over, you don't have to do this quarantine, all that. And someone said, well, you're lucky that you didn't have someone who was on a ventilator and died who was close to you. And I, I have empathy for that, and I don't have anyone super close to me that died. But what I guess I would say, and I think I did say this on Twitter, and yet all of those things that we did didn't help that person. And, and, but did it help? Did it help some people? It might have, but my, my personal view of this thing is you can't outrun it. You, you simply can't outrun it. You're going to get it. Should you take precautions? Should you be someone who maybe wants to limit the viral load because you're wearing a mask, whatever, that, that would be maybe a smart thing to do for some people, but it's just impossible to outrun it. And those early strains were, were different. And I get that we were in a territory that was very unknown, but we did get into that known territory relatively quickly, and we didn't adjust properly. And a lot of that was just because of our leadership, which has been poor on both sides. I would say

Vance Crowe [01:10:21] It. You know, the other thing that coincided with COVID and, and all this like, Hey, we've gotta shut everything down, was not just that people couldn't do their businesses, but that people all of a sudden had money being injected into the economy at a scale that we literally cannot count. Right. When you understand, you know, for anybody that doesn't understand how the monetary system works, not only did we inject that money, and now people put it into their banks, but a bank is pressured to then loan that money out. Right. If they have that money on their book and they have to give a, an interest rate, they have, they, it is every amount of pressure the government, the Federal Reserve, can possibly put on those banks to loan it out. Soon as you loan it out, then those people get that money and they put it back in a bank and it gets loaned out again. So this M two money where you're, where it's been loaned out, has made that $6 trillion be so much larger that we literally don't know how much money we created. And

Mark Reardon [01:11:17] The best way to solve that is to spend another $800 billion with the inflation reduction act. Which is weird for me because I thought it was over, I was told that it was over. And we do have to mention that Republicans played a role in all that spending as well, which is disappointing. We, we are really good at overreacting in this country. And I don't know, you know, this level of inflation, I'm, you know, I've established my age. I, I don't remember the late seventies affecting me as much because I was 14 years old. But I've never experienced anything like this in my adult life where two years ago, a year and a half ago, I could have gone to the grocery store and spent 50 or $60 on the same amount. I'm spending 90 now. You know? And that's not an exaggeration. That's, and and I, we, I talk about this with friends all the time. I'm very lucky can absorb this, but a lot of people can't. They just can't. Well,

Vance Crowe [01:12:05] It's, it's an, an insane tax because everybody pays it. And the people that are hurt the most are the masses. And, and you know, like we talk about, you know, I, I live in an orbit where there's very few people that I know that have to take the bus to work, but there are a lot of people that have to take the bus to work there. There are a lot more people that rent apartments. Right. That are, you know, just just being able to have a, a room and a, or a couple bedrooms. Then there are people that own houses and multiple cars. Yeah.

Mark Reardon [01:12:34] Sometimes we forget about that

Vance Crowe [01:12:35] We do because we're in this world. And then you start seeing like, hey, gas going down to three 70, maybe like, oh, right now it doesn't cost me $110. Now it cost me $70 to fill my, my tank or whatever. But for a lot of people it's still,

Mark Reardon [01:12:51] Yeah. You

Vance Crowe [01:12:51] Know, their, their wages came nowhere close to it. And I think the inflation, I keep hearing people say, well, you know, hopefully it doesn't last, you know, more than six or nine months. I, I think we are in this for much, much longer

Mark Reardon [01:13:06] Than that. Yeah. I am, I'm worried about that too. And let me, let me put my concern on the other side of the demographic spectrum, because I think that, and I'm thinking about this a lot more now, but I think retirees are, are really gonna hit, get hit hard, because these are people that save money for all this time. And if you, even if you have a million dollars, let's say you have a million dollars in your 401k and you decide to retire, well that's, that's only 800,000 compared to what it was two years ago or whatever the numbers may be. You're, it's a wealth tax inflation. And then not to mention the rest of the taxes. So it's a concern because I think we're gonna get to the point in this country where, and I think it's gonna happen when I'm getting into that retirement age in about 10 years, where people are not going to have enough money to get through retirement because they didn't, you know, maybe, maybe they saved, but the money's not worth as much and lifespans are longer. I I really think this might be a big issue in the future.

Vance Crowe [01:13:58] Well, I asked a question on Twitter the other day and it was surprising where it went. I asked the question, is it wise to teach your children to open the savings account?

Mark Reardon [01:14:08] Yeah.

Vance Crowe [01:14:09] Because no banker thinks that you should park a bunch of money in your savings account if your inflation rate is 9% or 12%. Right. What are you teaching that child save your money and then have its value be worth 12%? Well,

Mark Reardon [01:14:22] That's a good, I understand your point on that, but I do think that the, the saving money principle, which is something I was never good at, and I'm not good at it today, is still a good principle. But I think that, you know, along those lines, we've done a terrible job in this country. I think we still do when it comes to financial education, you know, and just under understanding interest rates and loans and buying cars and houses. You know, if you're 17, 18 years old, especially been locked in your house for two years, you get out into the real world, even if you graduate from college, that's still very foreign to people.

Vance Crowe [01:14:53] But this, this, like in your savings, in your financial literacy class, would you teach kids to open a savings account? Well,

Mark Reardon [01:15:01] You shouldn't probably. Right? Because

Vance Crowe [01:15:02] I mean, like that wisdom that was true even when I was a kid. Right? It's okay to go put your money in the savings account Yeah. Because maybe you lose 2%, but you're getting 3% or something like that. So you know, it's probably going to hold somewhat of its value.

Mark Reardon [01:15:16] Yeah.

Vance Crowe [01:15:17] That's gone.

Mark Reardon [01:15:18] Well, we're getting to the level of interest rates where maybe you get to seven or 8% and it's worth it. Right.

Vance Crowe [01:15:22] Wouldn't that be awesome if, for people that are saving to actually be able to retain their value

Mark Reardon [01:15:28] Used to happen. Right. It used to buy, you know, you know, CDs for two years and make a fair amount of interest on it. Right.

Vance Crowe [01:15:35] Do you think that it will happen in our lifetime that putting money in a savings account will be a smart idea?

Mark Reardon [01:15:40] No. For the long term? No, I don't

Vance Crowe [01:15:43] What does that, what does that say?

Mark Reardon [01:15:46] Well, well, I still believe in, in the market, you know, so I think that over the course of time, you're, you know, your money's still going to double every 10 years to a certain, if you're, if you're averaging 10%, we've had some great times. So I think the concept of, of putting money away, my advice to my kids, you know, I, I I started saving money when I was first in the workforce, got wiped out with my divorce, had to start saving money again.

Vance Crowe [01:16:10] Wouldn't have a lot more money if

Mark Reardon [01:16:11] I didn't have to pay the lawyers 20 years ago. Right.

Vance Crowe [01:16:12] Yeah.

Mark Reardon [01:16:13] But you know, it's interesting because I, I, when I was 57 years ago, had my daughter in my mind, well, the line that people had, because I was so old when I was having this baby, was, do you know how old she's gonna be when you know you retire? And I said, you don't fucking think I did the math on that. Like right outta

Vance Crowe [01:16:32] The ch

Mark Reardon [01:16:33] But I never really thought about retirement was way in the distance. 17 years, 50 years old. Now it's a little closer and you start thinking about whether or not that money is going to last. So I, you know, I'm having a different approach right now and I think people are gonna find, especially younger people, look at social security changes. It will have to change, especially with the level of retirees, especially now look at all these people that are gonna decide in their sixties, their 62, they may not take social security right away, but they're done with work. They're gonna be tapping into it soon. So all this is, is really, I think, complicated. But I'm a person, this might come back to haunt me. I kind of wanna live in the moment a little bit too, where, you know, you, you have a certain lifestyle and I wanna enjoy that right now when I get to be, if I live till I'm 80 am I'm gonna be living in a shack, working at the convenience store. I don't know, you know, who knows at that point so much potentially can happen.

Vance Crowe [01:17:27] What are your thoughts on Bitcoin?

Mark Reardon [01:17:30] I don't have a lot of thoughts on Bitcoin. I really don't understand it very much. I think you and I have talked about it a little bit. I've seen some instances where people have done very well and then recently not done very well. It's, it's really kind of one of those things that it's, it's difficult for me to get my my head around. Maybe it shouldn't be, but I don't, I don't get it that much right now.

Vance Crowe [01:17:48] Yeah. You know, it's been interesting what people observe about Bitcoin. Like, you know, first there were, they were, you know, oh, it's a wild currency thing. And then people say, oh, it's not the value of the Bitcoin, it's the blockchain and blockchain's gonna change all these things. And now you start to wonder, because when I was first introduced to it, I remember talking with people about the devaluation of the currency and you're living in the United States, which had

Mark Reardon [01:18:13] Yeah. Which

Vance Crowe [01:18:14] Still continues, even despite 9% inflation to have the most stable currency. But like, they couldn't wrap their mind around how could you have a currency that is not inflated, right. Where the government can't just turn on a printer. Right. And that now all of a sudden starts to turn the lights on in some people's brains where they're like, there will only ever be 21 million Bitcoin and something like 19 million of them are already distributed. Yeah. So there's only so many left that are, that are gonna come out. Yeah.

Mark Reardon [01:18:44] That's interesting. That's one of those reasons where, again, it's hard for me to, to even comprehend all that because it's so different and foreign to me.

Vance Crowe [01:18:51] Right. And I think, like, I think that that will be the biggest outcome of all of this inflation is that people that didn't have to think about something that is complicated, it is scary, right? Yeah. Because you're like, you know, I figured out how to be successful in the system that is, and now you're telling me there's gonna be some other system.

Mark Reardon [01:19:12] Yeah.

Vance Crowe [01:19:13] I don't want that. Right. Right. Like, I don't wanna change from a Mac to a pc, not because the PC might not be better, but I don't wanna have to try and figure that out.

Mark Reardon [01:19:21] Right. We don't, we don't like that. Most people don't like that. I'm like that as well.

Vance Crowe [01:19:25] So you like mentioned exercise when you were talking about depression and things like this, you stay really pretty healthy. What do you, how do you think

Mark Reardon [01:19:34] About

Vance Crowe [01:19:34] Eating? How do you think

Mark Reardon [01:19:36] About

Vance Crowe [01:19:36] Well,

Mark Reardon [01:19:36] It's, I don't wanna offer any kind of diet tips here because my eating habits are very, very weird. I'll run you through my day. This is a typical day. Two powdered sugar donuts in the morning, two chocolate donuts. I don't like the double chocolate as much. The regular chocolate. This morning I had four powdered, right. Just the mini ones. Donuts, not the, the other brands. I don't like those. And I'll have a small lunch, maybe, maybe nothing. I might just have a banana and peanut butter. And then I like to eat dinner. I stay relatively lean because I'm vain and I worry about it. When I was in high school, I weighed 208 pounds when I was a senior. And I, I never, you know, when I, I think I told you this story before. I got to the point where I was going to college and I was envisioning a life where I would never have sex because I was fat. Never had a girlfriend in college, or No, you never told me this story. No. So I, I lost a lot of weight in the summer. In 1983, I went to Spain, came back, I lived with a family over there. It was a short stint, but I lost maybe 10 pounds when I was in Spain. And I sort of used that as momentum. So I've always felt like I don't wanna get back to a size 36 waist that's never gotten there, drifted to a 34. But I, I tend to worry from a vanity perspective, not a health perspective, how I look. That's just being honest. I'm nothing if not, but honest, right. Self-aware as well. But I also don't eat a lot of, I don't eat fast food. I don't eat a lot of fried food. I eat, it's moderation for me. It always has been moderation, you know.

Vance Crowe [01:21:02] So let's say you, you go to a party at, at work, right? There's food, there's trays of things around there.

Mark Reardon [01:21:08] I don't touch it,

Vance Crowe [01:21:09] Is it,

Mark Reardon [01:21:10] I don't touch it. And here's this is, this is something that will tie in with the rest of the conversation. It's my anxiety. So when I am at an event like that, and this still kind of happens, my appetite is, is zapped my appetite. Like I've gone down to the point, I think I weigh 1 67 right now. I was down below one 60 when the anxiety was happening, like 1 58. And that was not a healthy period for me to be in. But I, I, I go out like in social situations, I just don't eat a lot because I'm not hungry. It's weird. My wife yells at me all the time about this. Now I eat plenty when I'm, you know, when I come home and I eat dinner and things along those lines. But I don't, I don't exercise as much as I used to, which is kind of sad because I used to really be on the bike a lot. I decided to play golf about five or six years ago. Again, that was a terrible, terrible decision. I do walk the golf course a lot, so I get some exercise there, but the intense exercise is, is missing a little bit. So I, I probably need to go back to that. The terrible thing is like, I'm an all in or an all out guy and if I'm out on something, it's hard for me to, you know, get back in or for you to reel me back in.

Vance Crowe [01:22:17] Yeah. People talk about the intermittent fasting, right? Yes. And I, I think of this as like a fancy way to describe, you know, I just don't eat breakfast, but like,

Mark Reardon [01:22:25] It kind of is, I mean, I guess I do that intermittent fasting to a certain extent because there are days that I go, I will go for hours without eating at all.

Vance Crowe [01:22:33] But like to me, it's easy for me to be like, I'm not having anything, right? Yeah. Than it is for me to be like, you know, let's imagine there's some candy outside chocolate or something. If it's in the other room, then my brain will be sitting here talking with you being like, whoa, that candy, that'll be pretty good here pretty soon.

Mark Reardon [01:22:50] You know? And I don't have the cravings that I used to. I, I will say this, I don't know this independently, but I also have to believe that some of my, my desire for food and hunger might be affected by some of the, you know, medication that I'm taking for anxiety. Although the THC certainly counters that at about 10 30 when I have a big

Vance Crowe [01:23:08] Bowl of ice cream,

Mark Reardon [01:23:09] You'd be amazed at how much sugar I really eat. And that's not good. But I, I do like sugar quite a bit. That's my thing. It's not like the fried food or the fast food or chips. I mean, I like all those things, but for me it's sugar.

Vance Crowe [01:23:19] So for me it's, it's basically all food. And like I, I did a, a good thing and a terrible thing in that I learned how to cook and like,

Mark Reardon [01:23:27] Oh yeah,

Vance Crowe [01:23:27] Once you start learning like, oh, I can mix this fat with this acid, who is be,

Mark Reardon [01:23:31] And it takes so much better than, right? This is,

Vance Crowe [01:23:33] And I just, God, I like, for me, that is one of the biggest challenges that I have is figuring out how to balance those things. Yeah, I can get myself on a diet and stay on that diet, but if I get off it, we're all the way off. Maybe

Mark Reardon [01:23:46] That's my key, because I'm, we don't, we don't cook much in the mean, we make food. We don't really, you know, make food that tastes great. I wish I had that skill, but then again, that might pack the pounds on. So I understand that point.

Vance Crowe [01:23:58] So golfing this, you, you say it with like the, the kind of, oh man, I, I, it's, it's, it's that dastardly sports got me again. It's

Mark Reardon [01:24:08] A tough game. And, you know, for people who don't play, it's probably very difficult to relate. I don't know if there's anything that I can compare this to. But when you play golf, it's, it's such a hard game and the swing is so specific. Everyone has different swings, but there's a correct way and an incorrect way to hit the ball. And I guess I can explain it from this perspective, the golf swing just quickly is a, is a clockwise, not a counterclockwise movement. In other words, you bring the club back, most people who are amateurs bring the club back and then that club travels on one path, and then on the other path, you come down and hit the ball. That's the wrong path. So that's the kind of envision this, the club is coming back, you're coming back and then you're going this way. That's counterclockwise, right?

Vance Crowe [01:24:50] That's

Mark Reardon [01:24:51] What most people do. But it's really clockwise. You bring the club back and you come from the inside, right? Well, most 90% of golfers can't do that. Amateur golfers. So it's the never ending hunt to try to hit the ball the right way. You get more distance and all that. So for me, I've been obsessed because I felt like I was playing the game pretty well a few years ago. Went and looked, you know, all the technology is so crazy in everything. And you can look at launch monitors, the angle of attack, the way that your club's coming in. And I looked at video, I'm like, my, my instructor, my coach Adam Bets, who has a great place called family golf here is like, well, here's what's going on. So then I become obsessed with trying to get better. And, and I, I don't wanna say I'm striving for perfection, but it's been a goal of mine to hit the freaking golf ball the right way. So in my basement, I have two mirrors. I have, this is how fancy my golf studio is. I have a net, I have a little mat that I can hit balls on. And then I have my four cat boxes, because that's where my cats go to the, to the restroom, if you will. And I've just, I get down in my, this started during COVID a little bit. I get down there, I work, I work, it's so difficult. And your brain is very powerful. This ties in with the anxiety. Your brain is so powerful. And when you have that muscle memory, it's hard to break it. So I've gone through this period now for the year and a half where I'm really trying to create a different swing, and I'm finally, finally seeing success. And it's been a slog. It really has. And for me, it's just been kind of a personal mission or goal. But I have to tell you this funny story because I, I take golf, I don't take many lessons anymore because I know I could probably teach people how to play golf.

Mark Reardon [01:26:26] I can't, because I know everything about the golf swing. I know exactly what I'm doing wrong. I just can't implement it. It's a very, you know, you have to blend things. It's timing and all that. So I'll go to my golf coach, I go to the range, you know, you hit balls and then you play golf and you find out you can't translate it. But there's a bunch of, you know, YouTube instructors out there. That's one thing about social media and all this new media that's really fascinating. You have a lot of really good golf people out there that give free instruction online. And then, you know, they wanna hook you in to get paid, which I completely understand as a capitalist. So I, I, I get that. But much of my day, mainly because I don't work for a living, if we're, if we're being honest, is focused on golf, man, I hope my boss isn't watching. Most of my day is focused on work, but there's a little portion where I practice my golf game and I sit around and I watch videos and I try to improve my swing. So my daughter, my lovely 7-year-old daughter is, she's awesome. She really has changed my life for the better. We have so much fun together. And she plays baseball and she's played a little field hockey and soccer, and I want her to play golf. I really do. She's not quite ready. I think I'll get her in a camp when she's ready. She's swung the club a little bit, but she's always wa she has now for years, seen me. I do stupid things. Like I had one of my producers walk into my office at work and I was literally like, this, you know, no, no golf. And she looks at me, I'm like, practice, this is five minutes before my show. This is what I do. So we have a, a awesome kid next door, 13 years old, her name is Amanda. And she has been great with Alexa teaching her baseball swing and, and all this.

Mark Reardon [01:27:58] I wish dad had more influence, but you know, kids don't always wanna listen to their parents, right? So she's been a great influence. So my wife, we, we wanna thank her all the time and we're very appreciative. So my wife takes her to get frozen custard on Sunday this week with my daughter Frozen Custard Fritz's, which is one of my sponsors too, man, I've gotten three sponsors in here.

Vance Crowe [01:28:18] Keep killing it, babe. You

Mark Reardon [01:28:18] Better invoice these

Vance Crowe [01:28:19] Clients

Mark Reardon [01:28:19] Because

Vance Crowe [01:28:20] You got,

Mark Reardon [01:28:21] Right. So they're in the car. Now, bear with me on this story. This is gonna sound a little creepy at first, I'll tell you. So they're talking about stuff and golf comes up and my daughter says, my daddy watches a lot of golf videos and sometimes he watches with his privates. So my wife comes back, she's got this look of horror, and she's like, this is awkward. Here's what was said

Vance Crowe [01:28:49] In the car.

Mark Reardon [01:28:50] And she's looking at me and what's the assumption? Let's be honest, what the assumption is that I'm, you know, watching something inappropriate. And my daughter busts

Vance Crowe [01:28:59] In on me. So

Mark Reardon [01:29:00] She says to me, did she wa I'm like, no. Well, you're gonna say no no matter what. So it's that feeling you have when you tell the truth. But you know that no one believes you. Right? And it really, it kind of bothered me. I'm like, what in the world is she talking about? So I had to get to the bottom of it. So we went and walked one of our dogs and we're on the dock walk. And I said, Alexa, I said, babe, mommy said, you said something in the car with Amanda. I'm kind of confused by it. You said that, you know, I watch a lot of golf videos and, and I sometimes do them with my privates. And she goes, yeah, remember? And I'm like, no, I do not remember. Can you please refresh my memory? And she says, the, but, and then it dawned on me, I was in, my people aren't gonna believe me, right? You're, you're not gonna believe me. I'm in my kitchen. And I was watching a golf video from, ironically, it's one of the instructors that I like quite a bit, Christina Ricci, who is super hot if we're being honest. But the title of the golf video was Engage the Butt, right? Do the butt, move the Glutes Engage In, because the golf swing, you're doing a lot of different things and your legs and your butt played an important role. And that was what I was doing and that's what she was referring to. But how potentially creepy is that?

Vance Crowe [01:30:18] Oh yeah. Oh God. And you,

Mark Reardon [01:30:20] I can see the look on your face. You still don't believe me that I'm telling the truth about the golf videos. But that was just a funny story from this

Vance Crowe [01:30:25] Week. I mean, it would be a nightmare. Like I know the conversations my wife and I have, we've, we've lived together, we've been married for 10 years. Yeah. And now we have this little one in there that we hear her, he like, listen to what we're saying and then repeat it back. And we're like, no, no, no, no, no. That's not what we're saying. Oh.

Mark Reardon [01:30:41] And that, you know, and my daughter has the, here here's the thing that I would say about that. First of all, they're always listening, right? But the one thing that my wife and I have said about Alexa is that she's never wrong. If she says something like, mommy, there's, there is no school tomorrow. It's, it's an extra day. We're like, yeah, there's school tomorrow. That's maybe an extreme example, but when she says stuff, there's always truth to it. Right? So when she said that there was truth to it, right?

Vance Crowe [01:31:07] It

Mark Reardon [01:31:07] Was just not the

Vance Crowe [01:31:08] Truth that

Mark Reardon [01:31:09] Was apparent. But we knew, you know, I told Beck, I'm like, you knew that she was talking about something that was accurate. But it's crazy the stuff that they, that they do absorb and feedback and they're listening a lot more than we think. And I think we did that too when we were kids, right?

Vance Crowe [01:31:22] Well, I was the middle of seven, so by the time I rolled around, like I was,

Mark Reardon [01:31:26] That's the parents were

Vance Crowe [01:31:28] Old. Hats crazy. Yeah.

Mark Reardon [01:31:28] Yeah, man.

Vance Crowe [01:31:29] Well, Mark Reardon, man, if, if I was gonna do a first per podcast with somebody, you were the right man to do it with. So thank you so much for coming

Mark Reardon [01:31:36] By here today. Well I appreciate it. I mean, I don't know that I have a whole lot to offer, but I'm a fan of yours and we've had some great exchanges on my show and I love to, you know, this does give me the opportunity to, to maybe speak a little bit more freely about some of those topics that I haven't, you know, completely explored on the radio. Plus I can say fuck. And I'm a big fan of that if

Vance Crowe [01:31:55] You're being

Mark Reardon [01:31:56] Honest. I'm fond of profanity.

Vance Crowe [01:31:57] And if people wanted to follow you on Twitter, listen to you on your

Mark Reardon [01:32:00] Video show. Yes. Well, and you mentioned we do stream the show every day on Twitter now it's at Mark Reardon Kft K at Mark Reardon, KFT k I'm on Instagram at Mark talk. But mainly you're just gonna see cute videos and, and my daughter on there, my dogs and cats. So.

Vance Crowe [01:32:14] Alright man. Well thanks for coming on. Thank

Mark Reardon [01:32:16] You Vance. It was awesome.