Speaker 1: What's going on. Thank you so much for listening to
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your support. So I have some news I want to
let you know about because I've read a story yesterday
and I'm considering now a career path change. I haven't
even told the boss yet, haven't told the producers. I'm
thinking I'm gonna get out. I think I'm going to
go be a locksmith in California. I feel like there
is a real opportunity if I head west. I mean,
I first have to learn how to be a locksmith,
but I feel like I could probably, you know, learn
that maybe on the road trip out there. I haven't
even told Christy this yet either. I'm sure she'll be
fine with it, but we just load up the car
to have her drive, and I will just watch YouTube
videos on how to be a locksmith, and then I
will arrive probably somewhere in the vicinity, if not right
up on the edge of Yosemite National Park, because according
to this story, there are no locksmiths in this area,
and we're talking an area that's like the size of
Rhode Island, and like I smell a really good, you know,
undersupplied demand opportunity. So although, to be fair, one minor
flaw in the plan here, I mean, besides not knowing
how to be a locksmith, but they you know, but again,
YouTube videos to take care of that, I think. But
the other part is that I think because of this story,
now other people might recognize that there's a real opportunity,
and you know, some of them may actually have Locke
smith ory and so, you know, expertise, and so they
will probably beat me to Okay, so I'm gonna stay
never mind, I'm not going to do it. It's just
it's too much risk because by the time I get
across country, watch all the youtubes and get there, there's
probably gonna be somebody and they probably left from like
Nevada or something, or maybe even like in some neighboring
state of California. They just like drove across the border,
and now they're going to you know, corner the entire
market on all of the locksmithing needs for Yosemite National Park.
Because that's the big news that i'd the buried lead
if you will, you know, that's what we say in
the biz when you bury the lead. You know, the
lead is And I don't know why they spell it
L E D. I guess because like there's no other
way to pronounce that, because it's a made up word
for journalisming, and you know, like it's your lead sentence,
it's your lead story. It's like the top it's the
most important thing. And so the way it was covered
by the Washington Post, which was then you know, picked
up and carried in all sorts of other publications around
the country. This was in the Seattle Times, for example,
see right there. See so there's probably some locksmiths in
Seattle that they're already they're already making the bee line
down to Yosemite, you know, to corner the market of
locksmithing because California is Yosemite National Park. Here's their lead,
the Washington Post lead at the park. The Trump administration
fired the only locksmith on staff, the only locksmith on staff.
First off, I didn't even know that we hire locksmith's
at national parks. Did you know this, like you have
to have a lock Like did you know you needed
a locksmith on payroll at a national park? I don't know.
Maybe people in that go to Yosemite, like these are
people that lock themselves in facilities all the time. Did
they have like a higher rate of lock ins or
something going on in Yosemite. I don't know, but they
felt the need to put this guy on staff, but
only one a single locksmith who apparently also is the
key master, Like he not only can open the lock doors,
he can make keys for you too. Oh and he
has the key for all of the buildings, which makes
some bit of sense. Although if he is a locksmith,
does he even really need the keys really because he
could just pick his way into any lock. But whatever,
he's the he's the key holder. So he's the key
master and the key holder, and he is the guy
that I guess walks around with like a hula hoop
filled with keys to this area the size of Rhode Island,
going around unlocking all of the facilities where people lock
themselves in. And he got fired. Curse you, Elon Musk.
He was the sole employee with the keys and the
institutional knowledge needed to rescue visitors from locked restrooms. The
only guy this is the only guy that knows how
to kick in a door. Apparently, I right. The buried
lead here is that a there is a locksmith on payroll,
and b that they haven't given anybody else copies of
the keys so they can unlock the doors. Why I
don't understand. Are there is there not a key on
the outside of these bathroom doors that you can use
the key to open them up? Guys, have you heard
of labeling? I recommend it? Or even better, how about
like key fobs, Like there are companies they'll come in
and they'll they'll wire everything up and so you just
got a little boop poop and they'll just open up
the doors. They're pretty common actually nowadays. The weight. Oh
so that was the first part of this story. Washington
Post really blowing the lid off of stuff here. Also
at the Grand Canyon National Park, Arizona's Grand Canyon National Park,
it took longer than usual to get in, not because
there were doors locked. No, I don't know if they
fired their locksmith. Maybe that's why everybody could still get in.
It just took longer. It was the line to enter.
The wait to enter the park was twice as long
as usual. After the administration let go four employees who
worked at the South entrance, where roughly ninety percent of
the park's five million annual visitors passed through. And apparently,
if you work for the National Park Service, you are
unaware of how to reallocate personnel. So four people got
let go, and the National Park Service response is to
not reassign anybody to cover their duties. Do you guys
realize you're actually making the case for the cuts when
you do these types of stories? Am I to Here's
another idea? How about how about like the parking deck tickets.
How about a system like that to enter right you
roll up, there's a little arm that comes down, and
or how about this easy pass you could do like
an easy pass kind of thing. Here's a you know,
here's some little code thing. You throw it on your
dashboard and now you've you know, you've paid for your entry.
Right you can pay ahead of time, they'll mail you something.
Or you get a little like decal, you know, a
little static cling sticker with a bar code or something,
or you just do like a printed paper ticket, like
at every parking deck, right, you roll in, you punch
the little ticket, and then you got to pay, and
now you have the ticket, and that little ticket can
be scanned, and so then that's scanning will allow you
to get in wherever you need to get in in
the National Park right, if you want to go into
the canyon, right, I think they you know, they put
a little bar code reader there and you swipe your
bar code and now you're allowed to look at the canyon,
like whatever. There are lots of applications here. I'm not
really sure why exactly if you let go four people
out of this particular division of the Park Service, and
just by coincidence, I guess they were all at the
South entry. But maybe that was, you know, a decision
made by the supervisors at the location. They're like, you
know what, we know ninety percent of everybody that comes
to visit this park comes in at the South entrance,
So we're going to fire the people at the South entrance.
Or I don't know, maybe Elon Musk and his doge
musketeers and they looked at the National Park Service budget
and they were like South Entrance. Yeah, let's cripple that.
I mean, that's possible. Maybe they directed the exact people
to let go. But even if that were the case,
why wouldn't you then reallocate your personnel. Why wouldn't you
move them around and say, hey, we need more people
over here, you know, because we're not going to get
the parking ticket system in place or the keyfob system
in place, we still need people to stand there and
collect money or whatever it is. I know, this to
me is not the This is not the slam on
Trump and Musk and Doge as I think the Washington
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and make memories that'll last a lifetime. On Twitter, Laurentius Maximus,
in a pete tweet, says, just leave the gate up, right?
Why not? Just why not leave the gate up unless
you're charging money and scan people's UH license plate and
send them a bill. Right? Don't we have the ability
to do this? We do it with easy Pass. How
is it I know it's government, but but government's doing
the easy Well that's probably is easy pass a private
company subcontracted or something. I don't know. Come on. Sigurd Torsten,
in another Pete tweet, says it's malicious compliance. They're making
the case for more cuts, and that is correct. Malicious
compliance is the phrase of the day. Don't call it's
not a contest, but like that is the term to
describe what we are seeing. Yet again, the media goes
out and covers these stories. They find people. Here's another
one that the Democrat senator from Where's she from? Tina Smith, Minnesota. Eh.
She sent out a tweet with a picture of some
woman named Kate. We're in a park ranger outfit and
in near the water, and says Kate is a park
ranger at Voyages National Park. I don't know if I'm
pronouncing that right. It looks kind of frenchy. It's a
remote area near the Canadian border. Her job was to
protect boaters, campers and hikers who want to experience some
of the most beautiful parts of our state. Musk and
Trump fired her on Friday, to which a veteran replied, well,
there were army rangers Navy seals and Green Berets with
multiple combat deployments and valor rewards who were kicked out
of the military because of Biden's vaccine mandates. Do you
have any any posts on that in your timeline? No,
of course not right. Look, as one who has been riffed,
it's a reduction in force, or as one one corporate
radio leader described the mass firings of which I was
a part, this was twenty twenty. Yeah, right before COVID hit.
So I didn't even get the sweet sweet COVID you
got fired money. I mean, I got the other COVID
money like everybody else did, but I didn't get the
sweet sweet COVID you got fired money. Anyway. He called
it a dislocation employee dislocation, like it's, oh, we'll just
pop it right back. You know. I have been let
go from two different jobs. One was actually right here
at WBT back in twenty eleven when new ownership bought it.
They since gone. I think they're actually out of business now.
They fired a bunch of people. And then I was
at iHeartRadio in Ashville and I was part of a
firing there. I know what this feels like. It stinks.
It's awful. You think your whole world is over, your
life is over. It's never going to get any better.
This I mean because the times I got like oh
those are both and as is this right now my
dream job, like this is what I want to do,
and you get let go and then it's like, well
I was doing what I wanted to do and you
can't think outside of that. It stinks. I get it.
I have sympathy for people that are going through this,
but the company you work for, this case, gov Co,
is going bankrupt and it cannot sustain the expenses any longer.
And I'm not going to be manipulated by this kind
of coverage. And I'm damn sure not going to get
manipulated by malicious compliance. All Right, I hope you had
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got a message from Melissa regarding the easy Pass Is
it private or not? Is it a subcontractor or something?
And she says yes and no. The park System, though
could easily become part of the easy Pass coalition, it's
not a private company. It's an interagency group created and
run by thirty eight member agencies in operation with sixteen states.
The easy Pass trademark belongs to the Port Authority of
New York and New Jersey. But the system involves multiple
governmental agencies and private companies that provide electronic tolling capabilities. Right,
so if you got an easy pass, because what is
easy pass? Do you have an easy pass? I have
an easy pass? All the cool kids do. No, we
don't use it very often. Just basically every time I
go to Union County, you know, if I'm going down
to Monroe, I'll jump in. That easy passlane came in
very handy actually when we went up to New York,
because I think they've told like literally every road on
the way, like through DC and into New York. But
it's it's just a it's just like an ar FID
chip and it just reads the thing and then it
takes money from an account that you have that you
put money into. That's it. It's like PayPal. It's very simple,
very simple technology, right. I mean I say that I
couldn't build it, but it's very simple. Why couldn't you
do something like that to scan p and it catches
your license plate? So if you don't have the easy
pass box in your you know, on your windshield, and
it doesn't read it, then it takes a picture of
your license plate and then you get a bill in
the mail. So the technology is there, why not implement that?
I mean, I wouldn't consider this even outside the box,
thinking this is already in the box, squarely in the box.
So the Washington Post also has the tale of Woe
from Gettysburg National Military Park in Pennsylvania, which, by the way,
I did that, and it's like an app. You just
drive around and you listen to the app on your phone.
But okay. Last week's widespread layoffs gutted the team that
managed reservations for renting historic farmhouses. Visitors receive notifications that
their reservations had been canceled indefinitely. Well, why would you
do that? Why would you can't they already had the reservation,
so why would you cancel the reservation the people that
manage like that doesn't seem wise, right, you already had
them booked. So the managing the reservation, unless you're saying
like this is the team that cleans the farmhouses or something,
it's not clear. So they canceled everything. Again, malicious compliance.
They're going to make people hurt. That's the goal is
to you know, do some sort of draconian me to
make the public hurt, so then they apply pressure to
their elected officials to get a change in policy, which
is basically terrorism. I mean that's the definition of terrorism,
I mean minus the murdering and such. But like, that's
what you're doing. You're holding the public hostage, You're trying
to hurt them. This is the same thing we saw
when they blocked off the World War II memorial, so
the World War Two vets couldn't look at what is
essentially a sidewalk. I mean, it's a memorial for World
War Two veterans, but it's just an open air memorial.
It's just concrete on the ground with some statues. You
don't need Park Service representatives there. You spent more money
putting up all the barricades. This is what the Obama
administration did when the government shut down. We didn't have
the money, and so they were like, you know, throwing
throwing blankets and tarps over monuments. So don't look at that, dude,
not look at that. Remember, they put up like a
rope line or something around Old Faithful the guys are,
you know, don't look at the don't look at the
guyser everybody. That would be what illegal or something. It's
not illegal. You're you're just trying to hurt people that
don't need you. I don't need you to go look
at a plume of water coming out of the ground
every seven minutes or whatever it is. I don't need
the I don't need you. No, but people, people might
get too close. Let them get too close, they get scalded,
they get burned. They'll never do that again, right, Oh
my gosh. And remember they closed off a side of
the road so people couldn't take pictures of Mount Rushmore.
This is the kind of thing that these people do.
Malicious compliance, Like oh yeah, you're you're saying no more DEI. Okay,
well then we're not going to have the history of
the Tuskegee Airmen is part of our curriculum. Like, well,
that's not that's not the DEI Like, that's that's just history,
good lord, as part of a director. Oh and by
the way, the purpose is to hurt people and get
media coverage, so then people get outraged and then they're like,
you need to restore the funding for the parks. As
part of a directive to fire most trial and probationary
staff across the federal government, the Park Service terminated about
one thousand probationary employees in what some are calling the
Valentine's Day massacre. We are governed by theater kids, I
swear Okay. Nate Vince, Yosemite National Parks fired locksmith. His
name is Nate Vince said that he found out about
his termination three weeks before the end of his probationary period.
The forty two year old said he worries about not
only his career prospects, Well, why would that be the case?
I'm pretty sure. I mean, it seems like locksmith ory is.
It's probably a pretty recession proof industry, but I don't know.
He also worries about the safety and security of park
visitors and workers. Right, play the safety card always. Yosemite,
which is roughly the size of Rhode Island, has hundreds
of locked buildings and gates, and we're gonna be able
to get into the building there Again, what's the key?
I don't know how to use a key. Guys, I'm
not sure you realize this, but this story is indicative
of some high degree of incompetence. One person has the keys,
just one person has all the keys for all the
buildings and nobody else knows how to work a key lock?
Is that what you want me to believe? Nobody at
the National Park Service knows how to open a locked
door with a key. I think you might need to
reassess your hiring protocols, like name, date of birth. Can
you open this lock? Just like, give them a key,
have them over to a door, and if they can
open the door, good. All right, we move on in
the next phase of the interview. Look, I'm just spitballing here.
I'm all about solutions. You know me? All right? If
you're listening to this show, you know I try to
keep up with all sorts of current events, and I
know you do too. And you've probably heard me say
get your news from multiple sources. Why Well, because it's
how you detect media bias, which is why I've been
so impressed with ground News. It's an app and it's
a website, and it combines news from around the world
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my podcast, but it also supports Ground News as they
make the media landscape more transparent. I have some messages.
Let's go to the inbox. Here's a message from Dave
years ago during another government downsizing, when people were up
in arms about it. I remember hearing the phrase the
government is not here to provide jobs for people. Absolutely true.
I think for the most part that is a liberal
slash Democrat point of view. At least a private company
is here to make a profit and they need employees
to do so, but will fire or let go as
needed to make the profit. But the government is not
here to make a profit. Correct. Jonathan, echoing that sentiment,
says federal gov co is is not a national jobs
program full stop. Here's one from James. He says, since
no government employees are ever fired, maybe a couple of
the parking attendants from the now lightly used stagecoach lot
could be repurposed to that south entrance of the Grand Canyon.
That's yes, and it's a shame that the key master
was let go because skeleton keys are not scheduled to
be phased out by the government until twenty forty five.
It's yeah, right, it's not like. Have you ever been
to the Biltmore estate and you can see like they
have like these I'm gonna call it a keyboard, but
it's not like a computer keyboard, but it's like a
it's like a box or something in the wall. And
the security guards would walk patrols throughout the estate and
as they would pass by one of these boxes, they
would take their key, put it in, turn it and
it would indicate that they have made that round. Right.
They still use this system at the sheriff's off or
in the jail. I should say, well intermittently, that's what
gets them in trouble. But they have the same kind
of a system. It's electronic. Now, John says, I thought
Zor was the key master. Also, don't cross the streams.
It would be big. So I have heard, so I
have heard, and Kevin says I was let go in
twenty eleven in order to save the company I worked
for money. I had worked there for ten years, was
extremely loyal and would have never left on my own.
I found out later that the new owners just went
through and fired those that were making the most money. Anyway,
this was one of the best things that ever happened
to me, been working for myself for the past fourteen years,
living the dream, loving it, and making four times what
I was making there. No one seems to realize these
government workers, especially with specialized skills, who are diligent workers,
are going to make a ton more money in the
private sector and not be stuck like they were in
a government job. I would bet the Libs won't do
a story on this though, right You never hear the
story of how I got fired and why it was
the best thing that ever happened to me. And I
could tell them a story because it was for me,
like both of the times I got fired turned into
better opportunities and growth for me personally. When you stop
looking at it as the end of all of the
things that you know, and more like the beginning of
the next chapter. It's way more liberating, way more exciting. Now,
maybe there are people that just aren't built that way,
and I get it, but I can tell you like
getting let go up in Ashville and that's when I
launched the podcast, went into business for myself. That's how
I ended up back here. And look, this job too
shall end. Every job has a shelf life, they all do,
and so but you don't know when that expiration data
is going to come. But you're just there holding that
job for somebody else. Right, you're doing that job for
somebody else. It's their job. It's that business's job. It's
not yours. And in the case of Gov. Co right,
it's not your job. It's the taxpayer's job. And if
the taxpayers don't have the money to pay you, then
the job goes away. That's how that works. And you know,
maybe the people that have been entrusted by the voters
to provide oversight on the spending, maybe had they done
a better job doing their jobs, you'd still have yours. Right,
But no, you're going to blame the people that came
in and are telling you the truth. To paraphrase Chris Christy,
former governor of New Jersey, You know, he said to
that crowd of people that were all mad about the
firings he was doing up in Jersey. He's like, he says,
I understand you're angry, but why are you gonna get
angry at the first guy that comes in and tells
you the truth? And the truth is we don't have
the money for you. That's the truth. And we're running deficits.
We're gonna go bankrupt, and then no one's gonna have
a job. That's the truth. All Right. That'll do it
for this episode. Thank you so much for listening. I
could not do the show without your support and the
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if you'd like, please support them too and tell them
you heard it here. You can also become a patron
at my Patreon page or go to thepetekallanershow dot com. Again,
thank you so much for listening, and don't break anything
while I'm gone.