Carolyn Goodman

Hello and welcome to another episode of No Gods, No Mayors.

I am your mayor for this episode, Mayor November Kelly.

I am joined by my co-friends, co-mayors and co-hosts, Ryan Quinn and Matthew Lubchansky.

And today,

every single thing has gone wrong.

It's just

you encounter me in the midst of like this swarming cloud of problems.

I should never have changed that kid's grade on the physics midterm.

I shouldn't have done it.

I knew it was wrong.

And now we have to persevere in the doomed world we've created.

Thank you so much for joining us.

Yeah.

November, would you describe yourself as embattled?

I am so embastled right now.

Thankfully, my wife is standing by me.

And, you know, together we're going to make it through the embaslement.

But yeah, I'm feeling embasled.

Yeah.

But so if you remember the last episode, the last mainline episode I did, we talked about Oscar Goodman,

the mayor of Las Vegas from 1999 to 2011.

And I left you in that episode with the news that after he was term limited out, he um that he sort of promised all of his cronies, oh, it's fine.

I'll get out of the way.

You can run, You can run.

And then the day before the filing deadline, his wife, Carolyn Goodman, entered the race.

She is our.

My God.

And just to remind you, this is the same woman who I'm reading here from an article about Oscar.

At Carolyn Goodman's election night party, Oscar yelled at her, if you don't be quiet, I'll have you whacked when she failed to stop talking for an announcement he wanted to make.

Seems like a cool guy.

Yeah, I'm excited for our, this is the people's two-parter.

It's all free.

And it's, it's, it's, it's all free, and it's two mes.

So you're not getting short-changed in the least.

Not at all.

We would never short-change you, the listener.

So the year.

Long-change you.

That's right.

The year is 2011.

Oscar Goodman has just been term-limited out of the Las Vegas mayoral throne, which he also had in his office.

The main problem with researching an episode about Carolyn Goodman is you keep finding out more details about Oscar Goodman, and you go, that would have been really helpful

like a week ago.

Oh well.

Well, the thing about Oscar Goodman is he is a man of so many details.

He's one of the most detailed men to ever walk the earth.

He's a man of constant details.

Yeah, it's like, you know, like in old movies when they would make miniatures and there's a, there's a process called greebling, which is when they put a little like scuffs and like little knobs.

What does the fuck with greebling?

Yeah.

To make the to make the spaceships look real.

Yeah.

This man, this Oscar Goodman is greebled.

If you get up, like, he looks realistic.

I think it's called alcoholism when the pause are kind of like that.

But yeah, no.

So

he's out of the throne.

And at the last moment, his wife has decided to run.

She will win.

She will serve three terms, the same as him.

That is a quarter of a century of Goodman rule in Vegas.

And the thing I teased it with last time is in a lot of ways, she's worse.

So I hope you're excited to hear all about it.

But first, it's called

municipal roundup.

She got it, folks.

Yeah.

Let's go.

One thing goes right today.

Your hit rate on municipal roundup is, I think, still slightly better than mine, which is approaching zero.

Painting a little mayo sash on the side of my jet for all the times I've nailed it.

Yeah, I've got the numbers of that guy that shot free throws underhand.

Like I'm hitting like 99.9%.

Yeah, it's a little roundups.

Everyone, it's like, if you want to bet on this, and I do, is you could, is like the odds on Maddie getting municipal roundup right is like really good, and the bet barely pays.

And also, she doesn't look really cool doing it, but like it is a great way to get points.

We've

got a pod book, like a sports book.

Yeah, yeah, it's great for a parlay to get that in there.

Yeah,

whereas I, I'm showboating.

I think I'm a Harlem globetrotter.

I'm like drinking a glass of water while talking.

I'm spinning in my chair, and then I'm saying something like, you know, mayoral information corner, and it's just totally wrong.

All right.

So on mayoral information corner.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Items.

I'm calling for items.

Items, items, items.

Okay.

So item.

So the New York primary is going to be happening two days after this episode comes out.

Oh, you should register for that unless you're too late.

Yeah.

So a message to my, a message to myself, either I'm giving myself, I'm raising my hand up now to complete the high five I'm giving myself for if things go well.

And then the other thing is after this, I'll be recording a video to be played at my funeral

just in case.

Yeah, things are either good or bad.

Do what you will.

It's true.

So

yes, often.

You could bet on that too.

It's like roulette.

Like things being neutral is the zero.

I just put my entire life savings on more bad stuff happening and no bad stuff happens.

So I'm not sure how to feel about that.

I will say, yeah,

I watched a bunch of the mayoral debate here in New York.

The last debate was last night.

We recorded this on the 13th.

And Zoron Mamdati basically beheaded Andrew Cuo on live television in front of everybody and waved his and waved his head around swinging it over his head like a fucking

koosh ball and threw it into the crowd.

And

there was one bit where he just completely unloads on him and the crowd goes crazy.

Was this the was this the I'm not you bit?

Yeah, the I'm not you, Mr.

mayor after after cuomo had been i think deliberately mispronouncing zoron's last name for many months and also this happened i received this mailer uh cuomo the other day sent out a mailer that like artificially darkened and lengthened uh zoron's beard and like darkened his eyebrows and made him look a little more like i don't know like an ayatollah poster and it was just like this is like deeply deeply deeply deeply racist and horrible and of course brought to you by the guy who allegedly brought you cuomon vote for cuomo not the Homo for his dad's campaign when he was working for it, when he was running against Ed Koch.

Anyways, so I think, I think Zoron was just ready to fucking unload on this guy.

And I was just so riled up by this clip that I think I'm going to take Zoron and the points.

Hell yeah.

And if you're listening to this and he's already lost, I don't know.

Come to my house and kill me with a knife.

I don't care.

The thing is, the thing is, if he loses, he will not have put a foot wrong.

Like, as of at the time of recording, he will have done everything right.

And to my mind, as well as it could have been done by anyone.

Yeah, yeah.

And

like,

this is the thing.

Like, it's incredible that, like, a like of like a socialist, a democratic socialist, someone with like a DSA endorsement has been able to like close that gap on Cuomo.

Uh, and it's even better that he's been able to do that by going up there and more or less outing him as a rapist.

Yeah.

So, yeah, it's satisfying at least.

Yeah.

I welcome Governor Mayor Cuomo's shock troopers to to my home yeah with open arms and some freshly baked bread yeah well hey you know what i hope you get to complete that high five uh also interestingly uh uh eric adams if not endorsing zorhan does seem to be complimenting him because he's a confusing person well this is yeah well crucially if you are the mayor of new york city The person you hate more than anyone else in the world, regardless of anything else, is the governor of New York State.

Like these two, because capital of the state is so far from New York City, and it's like one of those dumb arrangements.

We're like, well, we can't have where everyone lives be the capital because that would make too much sense.

So like, that'd be too, that'd be very European, which is we all know is gay.

So so to avoid being gay, the governor of New York has to be a bumpkin or pretend to like bumpkins

instead of like where all the money and people are, which is down here.

And New York is an insanely stupid arrangement where the state runs the transit authority

and no one ever wants to give any money to the state or into the city because they're like, well, that's raising the taxes on all the precious bumpkins who, of course, come to New York City constantly and need the transport.

But like, so like, if you are, so Adams just probably hates Cuomo from when he was the governor.

Yeah.

It's all petty grievances all the way down as mayor.

Very, very cool to be endorsed by the DSA and kind of Eric Adams.

Item.

Item.

Item.

I have another item.

So I love when listeners send in mayors on the Blue Sky DMs.

I opened the DMs and I never have any account with open DMs.

I always close mine because I just, I'm an anxious person.

However, I've opened the No Gods, No Mayors once, and I'm happy I did because we get so many great items through there.

Sometimes it's just going to be little, if people are reading a book and it mentions that the mayor of some, of the Indianapolis in the 19th century said something weird, they will send it in and then I'll read it and I'll be like, that's a weird thing the mayor of Indianapolis said in 1859.

And then I share it with you and the rest of everyone.

So to the person who sent in this little little quote about Samuel Dunn Maxwell, the nephew of the guy who founded like Indianapolis, the main university in Indiana,

Uncle Indianapolis himself.

Old Uncle Indianapolis.

Go fighting Maxwell's.

Maxwell founded the fire department in Indianapolis in 1859, with his grandson joining him as a firefighter in 1880.

So this is the quote.

Then in 1959 came the fully paid fire force in Indianapolis, IFD, by the guidance and authority of Mayor Samuel Dunn Maxwell, going so far as to ban volunteer departments from the city.

As a proud Norse Celt, he vowed, quote, Indianapolis will only accept aggressive paid firemen possessing the bravery and strength of a Highland warrior and the dedication to battle of a Viking.

Oh, yeah.

We're doing deadliest warrior, man versus fire.

Yeah.

Indianapolis versus fire.

I just, I love like, yeah, American 19th century, American 19th century racism where you're like, the only white people that exist can come from us, not all of the British Isles and then a little bit of Northwest Europe.

And you're just like, well, we need the brave Viking spirit to be embodied in our paid fire department, which volunteer firefighters,

I must insist, do not have.

Launching a bold tradition of firefighter racism that continues to this day.

Sliding down the fireman's pole and grabbing my gear, which is a kilt and a Viking's helmet.

And then getting in my longboat to paddle down the Indianapolis canals to the fire.

Yeah.

I also saw as a proud Norse Celtic.

Of course, from like the Highlands and

Scandinavia, your sort of like natural enemy is fire because of the cold.

Yeah, you love the cold.

Another item.

Another item.

Another listener sends this in.

It's the alien versus predator of municipal politics, the battle between the mayor and the landlord.

So basically, this is Troy, New York, which is a city I would like to talk about at greater length on another show.

Oh, please.

Yeah.

The grimmest place I've ever been.

Yeah.

Well, hey, I heard it's the city authentic now.

So basically, the mayor, Carmella Mantello, is the Republican mayor of Troy, New York, and her campaign for mayoralty included a new city hall in a new location because they're trying to terminate their current lease early.

About 20 years ago, the old city hall of Troy sort of fell down.

And so they had to move to it.

You're calling it the most no-gods, no-mares event imaginable.

You're losing the mayoralty of heaven.

Yeah, it sort of fell down.

It was too decrepit to occupy.

And so they moved into like a rented floor of an office building,

which they were in for a while.

And they're trying to terminate their current lease early.

Whether or not they can do that is currently in dispute.

I mean, landlord disputes fucking sucks.

I'll say that for anyone.

So, Troy City Mayor Carmela Mantello is disputing part of what's owed in the city's rent agreement, but other lawmakers say they're in the dark over the controversy.

This is, of course, from Troy Local News.

I love how much local news I read now.

I'm still following London, Kentucky local news.

Wow.

He said

a lot of tenants might have a problem once in a while, but we've never had somebody just stop paying us.

Oh, I mean, listen, if Troy City Council are going to start doing like a rent strike,

that's cool.

In my 35 years of doing this, only a Republican mayor could do a rent strike.

Yeah, doing mutual aid for a Republican mayor they're trying to evict from City Hall.

We're outside singing solidarity forever while the bailiffs are trying to bust it and take the sash.

Urgent help needed.

Comrade Mayor,

Italian-American Republican mayor, currently

a racialized Republican mayor is currently trapped in City Hall.

It's not even like unhoused.

It's like unhauled, you know?

The problem of city halllessness.

Yeah, you're actually, people think that like, you know, they're, they're very close to becoming a billionaire, but you're actually much closer to becoming hauless.

An unsash.

When your sash falls off and your hall falls down.

Oh my God.

Okay, I think we've just created the first line of like a mournful municipal country song.

When your sash falls off and your hall falls down.

I'm not good at music, but someone good at music.

When you play a mayoral country song backwards, you get your sash back, you get your city hall back.

Okay,

this is a call to action.

A musician, if you are a musician and you listen to this show, the call to action is, my sash fell off and my hall fell down.

Can you turn that into a verse with a line?

I know one of us is a musician on this call, but I want to see what the listeners can do.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Have any of you out there listening met the DNC consultant at the crossroads at midnight to learn how to play the guitar?

Of course, of course, the idea of like, you know, mayors overlapping with music is so completely item.

Okay,

one more thing about this.

One more thing thing about this, then we'll drop it.

This is what I want to say, though.

So he's like, they're like, okay, we're not paying.

The city recently paid only their taxes, and a month late, they didn't pay the rent.

And when questioned by the city council about the rent payments, Troy City Council President Sue Steele asked, I'm asking for 2024.

Has the lease been signed and have we paid our rent?

To which the deputy mayor responded, correct.

Steele asked once more, so you're confirming we have.

The deputy mayor then only said, Mm-hmm.

Polycure House City Hall.

as

did you do did you do the chore wheel your honor uh-huh

yeah just like like kind of saying without saying like the definition

to be distracted by something else

oh yeah your honor 100 your honor uh she didn't label the yogurt uh therefore it's fair game that's what caused the first city hall to fall down

um so the spokesperson uh alex alex horton with the mayor's office claims the city is getting out of their lease early and moving on the city of troy has lawfully and timely exercised its option to terminate the lease.

We expect a new city hall site to be approved by city council.

But Sue Steele then said, We still have not been made aware of the location.

The whole process is regarding city halls and shrouded in secrecy.

So they've stopped paying their rent and they don't have a city hall to go to.

They may be made hallless soon.

Oh my god.

Experiencing halllessness.

Just do it in a park or something.

That's horrible.

Yeah.

What good items?

Thank you.

Thank you.

Thank you for that beautiful mayor information corner.

That was item brigade.

Welcome to local items.

Well, there's your items.

Carolyn Goodman.

If you remember from the first episode, she moved out.

She got married to Oscar Goodman, the previous mayor.

in when they lived in Philadelphia.

They moved out to Las Vegas together.

And while he was being a mob lawyer, listen to the episode, it's really crucial context.

While he was being a mob lawyer, she's like, wow, it seems like Vegas has no good public schools.

I'm going to start a private one.

And so that's what she does with like her career while he's a mob lawyer and then while he's the mayor is she is running this like academy that she started.

But she is sort of decides at the last second to enter politics and to run.

And This fucks over all of Oscar's cronies.

Her main opponent, and I say this purely as an opportunity to read her name into the record, was Chris Gianchigliani.

Oh,

I love Giunchigliani, but you gotta have it in Genoa.

Nevadans just call her Chris G, would you believe?

That's shocking.

Yeah, she's kind of Liz Warren-esque.

She's not really the focus of the thing.

Wait, I love that, though.

Because the thing about Oscar Goodman is that the only way to understand him is everything is Nevada first and then normal politics second.

I would love a Liz Warren Nevada that's the same way.

I did find some Nevada characters in this one, but Chris Gianchigliani is not really one of them.

So like the Gianci Gliani campaign, Gianchi Gliani, Chris G, the Chris G campaign was I can make a run for the mayor because I am beloved by two constituencies in Vegas, Latinos and queers.

And together, together, that's a path to the city hall.

It wasn't.

Carolyn wins on name recognition with like 60% of the vote.

Las Vegas mayoral elections are in off years as well.

So it gets like 24% turnout.

And she runs and wins as an independent because both she and Oscar quit the Democrats in 2009.

Not sure why.

Possibly it was because Oscar had beef with Obama.

The stupidest beef of all time with Brown Obama.

Yeah, the stupidest, most one-sided beef of all time.

Are you saying that gambling exists in Las Vegas?

Yeah, it can be an irresponsible thing to do with your kids' college fund.

How dare you, how dare you, sir?

But so she kind of ran in like on name recognition in his shadow.

I have a couple of quotes here.

Oscar was a notable part of Carolyn's first campaign.

She would often, and then again, announce herself to any room while working the voters that she was Carolyn Goodman, the mayor's wife.

I'm running for mayor.

Carolyn stresses that she wants to be judged on her own merits.

I am my own person and I will stand on my own beliefs, she says adamantly.

In the next breath, she introduces herself to voters as Oscar's wife.

This is incredible.

I'm thinking about Ptolemy's son going around being like, I'm Ptolemy's son, Ptolemy II.

Go ahead.

Ptolemy II Philadelphus.

Yeah, to be fair, they do a lot of Vox pops with people who are like, oh, like Oscar, then sure, I guess I'll vote for you.

I remember him being fun and I loved his gigantic martini glass.

Exactly, exactly.

So between the this and the threatening to have her whacked thing, people in Vegas tend to assume initially that this is another entry in the majestic political tradition of men using their wives to evade term limits.

Yeah.

I note the New York Times headline when she was elected, which was, Nevada, mayor's wife elected.

That's an incredible way of saying someone got married.

Yeah.

I've elected a new wife.

White smoke issue.

Or else, like

the municipality municipality chooses a wife for the mayor from among their number

yeah there's some shit they were doing in like 16th century germany yeah yeah yeah yeah that's that's the actual powerful position is the mayor's wife the mayor is purely ceremonial and hereditary there's an interesting article about the two of them uh where he just like comes and bothers her in her office at one point stinking of alcohol and they just bicker for a while that i was going to use as a reading series at the end of it but aren't they the lockhorns yeah kind of she kind of looks like the lockhorn woman a little bit.

Yeah.

So, so, so, like, Oscar's mostly focused on, like, his mob museum.

In the last episode, he's focused on, like, yelling at the TV and daydrinking.

And Carolyn, Carolyn has her own shit that she wants to do.

So, most noticeably, she, she sells.

Actually, this was something Oscar started and she finished.

She sells the old Adobe strip mall type City Hall to

character, Nevada character, Tony Sier, the guy who owns or owned Zappo's shoes, like eBay for shoes.

Yeah.

The company that was like single-handedly going to like revitalize downtown Las Vegas.

And so now Vegas has like a city hall made of glass.

It looks like an office building.

Okay, I think that's really fucked up that some mayors don't have city halls.

And like, oh, Las Vegas,

there's a city hall crisis.

Sometimes they fall down.

That's true.

There's a city hall crisis.

And the fact that, you know, Las Vegas is able to build this like incredibly modern glass, fancy city hall while other town councils are going hall list is an indictment of our system.

So yeah, the only zany shit that she has in her office is a sign saying you are now entering the fabulous Mayor Goodman's office, which is it's very wine o'clock, but compared to bucket of gin o'clock, which it was the hour previously.

Oh, is that like referencing the Las Vegas sign, perhaps?

I think so.

I think that that tracks, yeah.

The zaniness will now be at an end.

However, I am a little bit wacky.

So please sit down, put on this colorful hat, but you'll notice there is no bucket of gin.

There are no memorabilias or tchotchkes.

And I'm sitting on a normal office chair rather than a throne.

So you'll see that I'm a whole business.

Unlike my whimsical husband.

Yeah, I'm passing you a bowl of olives that are normal size and not the size of baseballs.

Would you care for a normal olive?

It's such a great question.

So if you remember the previous episode, Oscar Goodman, he wanted to do two things, right?

He wanted to bring business that wasn't gambling into downtown Las Vegas, and he wanted to bring sports to Las Vegas.

And so these are going to be also the trends for like her first term, pretty much.

Weirdly, one thing that seems to mark her out as her own woman politically is she goes to the casino, The Four Kings, I think it's called where her husband used to have the hundred dollar chips with his face on them and happiest mayor in the universe and she's like yeah i want a thousand dollar chip with my face on it

awesome even the happiest mayor in the entirety of reality so clearly like a marital argument that has been simmering for years you know yeah like you'll see i'm gonna i'm you don't do the dishes will you you'll see i'm gonna dwarf your chip value

she also flexes on him by starting going everywhere with the Chippendales.

Like, you know, the shirtless, like, male exotic dancers.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So

he had show girls.

Is Carolyn Goodman, are they kind of the same person?

Sort of.

Not that one's controlling the other, just that, like, they butted off the same.

Are they from Dalton, Illinois?

Yeah.

We've gender swapped Oscar Goodman.

One other thing she does early on is reset the relationship with Obama, which is such a funny thing for a mayor to have to do.

Like, he comes to, he comes to town and she gives him one of these thousand-dollar poker chips and tells him the slate is brand new and clean.

So I guess he's no longer banned from Vegas, the thing that Oscar Goodman said that he did and had no power to do.

The thing is, she says this, but I don't know if she ever actually took action to unban him.

So

he may just, he came to the airport.

Yeah, I was going to say, crucially, like the airport and the strip are not in the city of Las Vegas, right?

Yes, yeah, this is is a key thing.

He could still be banned from like where the houses are.

Yeah, this is a detail that I mentioned last time that I should probably reiterate, which is the city of Las Vegas does not include any of the casinos.

That's all like county land.

So basically the mayor of Vegas's only power is to be a kind of salesperson.

So many mayors are reduced to the role of just sales for their city.

It's brutal.

It's brutal.

But so

2012 comes around after the 2008 financial crash, and the economy is kind of recovering to the extent that like Airbnb is moving into Vegas in a big way, which is really depleting some housing stock.

But also, an entirely private consortium puts together a bid at long, long last to build a stadium in Vegas.

And this is unusual because normally the way you build a stadium is you hoover up as much public money as you can to do it.

But this is going to be entirely privately funded because Vegas has no income tax.

Nevada doesn't have income tax.

So there's no like basis to fund it publicly.

And the deal is this is going to be a combination, like it can be either hockey or basketball stadium.

Yeah.

And it's going to be on the strip.

It's going to be outside of the city and it's going to be entirely private.

And weirdly, some of this happens thanks to Oscar's nemesis, Sheldon Adelson.

Yeah.

Yeah.

But because Oscar isn't in office anymore.

So like Sheldon can deal with his wife, I guess, to the extent that she's involved in this.

Although I will say the NBA still hates Vegas and still hates Oscar.

So ice hockey in the desert.

Yeah.

Uh-huh.

That's cool.

Love you to see how many Canadians are on their team.

Probably a lot.

Yeah.

I mean.

Oh, so many.

It's mostly Canadians.

They have to keep one hockey team in the desert because at this point, the coyotes are phasing out as a franchise and moving to Utah eventually.

where they will eventually go to the Natural History Museum and learn about mammoths.

Because that's the coyotes.

But like, you know, there's so at this point, there's like so many hockey teams in places that don't have hockey that is a long time source of consternation for many Canadians.

So yeah, this is, this is, it's intended to be an ice hockey team.

We'll see how this develops.

But the next few years are essentially the payoff for all the stuff that we talked about last episode about regenerating downtown Vegas.

Like they finished the brain center that they were going to build.

They finished

the brain center.

Yeah.

They finished the Mop Museum.

They finished the Performing Arts Center.

They said the Mop Museum.

The Mop Museum.

That's right.

Come try our signature drink in our bar, the Bucket of Gin.

The mop is the garnish in the bucket.

Gin on draft.

Horrible.

But so

the main anchor of this is something called the Downtown Project.

And this is largely funded by Zappos, the shoe company, right?

And I was like,

that's interesting, but I'm not going to dig too much into this.

I dig slightly into this.

It forms the middle half of the episode, essentially, because I thought this company, Zappos, right?

We described it last time as like eBay for shoes or Amazon for shoes.

Yeah.

And

the big get that Oscar got in his term was luring them from Henderson, which is the shitty little suburban bit of Vegas, into Las Vegas proper and investing a bunch of money.

I then discover that it was founded in San Francisco as a startup and then moved to Henderson because no taxes and then got lured in.

And so what happens is you get this downtown project, which has a bunch of different sites.

It has a container park, like in Shoreditch.

It has a restaurant called Eat.

You kind of know the vibes that you're getting here.

And there is a book about this called The Kingdom of Happiness Inside Tony Sie's Zaponian Utopia, which I have not read, but Tony Sie is the kind of like messianic figure of this, right?

He owns Zappos and he is going to remake downtown his way.

Yeah.

Hey, man, Eat closed very recently.

That tracks.

That tracks.

Eat got $255,000 from the downtown project and hired a sous chef from one of the casinos.

Like, sure.

Sure.

Also, my understanding of like

Tony Sia's vision of the world is it's like Zappos is a bit like the business, the business might look like Amazon or eBay for shoes, but the corporate culture is Netflix for shoes.

You're so right.

I'm going to talk about this, but like it's essentially because I mentioned them last time and I was like, oh, it's a shoe company.

It's from Henderson, Nevada, whatever.

I took Oscar's thing about dismissing them as like $10 an hour phone people to heart.

Oscar was wrong.

Oscar completely misunderstood the culture here.

These are, these are tech bros, right?

And Tony Zia's deal is the city is a startup

and the downtown project is is going to invest not based on return on investment.

It's going to invest based on return on community,

right?

Which means, it's meant to mean like, you know, what are you, what are you kind of like doing to regenerate the thing?

What it means in practice is, do, does Tony Cia want to hang out with you?

Yeah.

Well, you know, or more importantly, how full is Tony Cia's social calendar?

You know?

Yeah.

Is Tony Cia bowling alone?

And if Tony Cia is bowling alone, then we know that Las Vegas is not giving a good return on community.

I pulled two quotes which struck a deep terror into me.

Oh, good.

One, one, because he kind of like he has an immense amount of power, but no formal role.

He's just on the board of the downtown project.

Tony would often ask visitors from the media to meet him and his deputies serendipitously, not committing to a time or location.

Okay, it's cool that we have a Manic Pixie dream CEO.

That's funny.

I also note that the culture, as Zappos is described, inspired by the culture of Burning Man, because he's a Burning Man type guy.

Okay.

So

this guy now owns a surprising amount or controls the operation of a surprising amount of downtown Las Vegas and has put a bunch of stuff in there.

I note the container park, which I initially thought was going to be like a shortage box park type deal.

No, no, no.

It's got a slide, like for adults to slide on.

And there's a photo here in the notes.

It is fronted by a 55-foot-tall scrap metal praying mantis originally built for Burning Man, which at night periodically shoots fire from its antennae in bursts audible for blocks around.

Oh no,

I would, if you're like, okay, here's the thing, right?

Listeners to this show will know that I'm an easily startled person in some ways.

I would find

random all-hours gouts of flame

that I could hear from my house to raise my blood pressure to levels hitherto unknown by humanity.

Yeah, and yet, and yet you paid all that money for that house because it had, and the realtor said, Mantis views.

Just hearing like the gouts of flame interspersed by a bunch of yuppies clattering down a slide.

Yeah, this is the second big slide we've covered on the show.

It's weird that it keeps coming up, isn't it?

It's very strange.

Surely big slide must just be what you do when you have a tower and no other ideas.

Right.

Just like, well.

So this is getting weird now at this point, because they're building a lot of stuff.

And it's all kind of part of a self-referential insular corporate thing

to the point that journalists going out there are being being warned not to drink the Kool-Aid, so to speak.

Don't trust the mantis.

Yeah, and if the city's between like the giant mantis or the vacant lot, they're going to go with the mantis, right?

Yeah.

And it costs them almost nothing to do this because nobody else wants to buy land in Las Vegas.

It's after the end of another housing bubble, so everything's very, very cheap.

And Tony Sierra then installs himself in a kind of tower.

Oh,

yeah.

He buys a $200 million,

like 21-story building called The Ogden, which was built the year before the financial crash, like in 2007, as condos.

And then he just takes like a couple of floors of it and then rents out some, but a bunch of them are just crash pads for entrepreneurs, journalists, people Tony thinks are cool.

And so there just ends up being this

building he controls that is full of like,

it is the giant polycule house.

It's kind of terrifying.

Yeah.

You know, that reminds me of not just any polycule house that's a little bit like the polycule house that FTX was based in.

Yes.

Oh, yeah.

Oh, yeah.

And I know that they did this in a couple of other buildings.

And a journalist from The Guardian writes, I stayed in a crash pad at the downtown project-owned Gold Spike, a facility remodeled from a hotel and casino that had seen better days.

Stripped of all the vestiges of the gambling industry, Gold Spike now operates as a combination bar, concert venue, board gaming, and beanbag tossing space.

Sure.

What?

And college dorm-style residence complete with white eraser boards bearing messages like live, learn, and need cell phone charger to those looking to set up businesses.

You always know you're in a white lady's room when she's got the sign up that just says live, learn, need cell phone charger, you know?

Also,

he's seeing where Vegas is going.

He's like, no, we're doing something that's like corporate and techie and no gambling at all.

Yeah.

And cornhole only.

Yeah.

There is one detail I noticed about this that I didn't put in, which is this same journalist goes on a tour and is in one of the skywalks connecting one downtown project building to another.

which has like fake grass and like picnic areas and stuff.

And one of the people they're on the tour with is like, oh, can like employees bring their dogs up here?

And in the most PR speak, they're like, we're pleased to tell you that they cannot.

We are happy to

engineer an

animal companionship solution that does not include the bridge area.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So Tony pours like $350 million into this.

Forbes is calling him like the unofficial mayor of Las Vegas.

And the whole time he's building all of this stuff, it's all getting like nodded through, of course, by Carolyn and by City Hall.

But all of the sorry.

I was going to say, oh, there's just never been a mayor's wife regnant, so she doesn't really know what to do.

Yeah.

And I mean, of course, they hate this as well.

Like, as much as this is one of the only places where you can be like, yeah, I want to build the flame-shooting mantis and city halls.

Like, absolutely.

So

I didn't want you to think that you even had to ask.

But genuinely, they're mad that

they have to ask for Mantis permission.

Yeah, but I, well, they're lucky that the city is devoted to startling Riley.

So, I mean, you think this sounds like maybe the most annoying cult in the world.

And then the economy kind of economies some more.

And the general culture of overwork and hustle and being a small business owner serving Tony Sia's needs leads to like four of these guys killing themselves like in a month.

Oh, oh, that's so many in such a small amount amount of time.

It's real bad.

I mean, the Kool-Aid joke sort of gets worse.

But so

I have a quote from an interview about this.

Suicides happen anywhere.

Look at the stats.

Oh, God.

Sounding agitated

when I asked him about it one evening on folding chairs in the learning village.

where speakers regularly come to lead sessions.

Sorry, did David Foster Wallace write this guy's life?

What the fuck?

It's harder for people who are really good students in school.

Then they move into this where there is no instruction manual and you have to MacGyver it on your own.

Yeah.

Former gifted kid burnout as claiming lives, apparently.

My question appeared to make him uncomfortable.

He scooted two seats away.

Hope they don't notice me scooting two seats away.

We're just the two of us in the empty learning village unfolding chairs.

I was going to ask him this hard-hitting question, but now he's slightly further away and I've been snookered.

I don't know what to do.

Should I call him?

He's very far.

Just to give you a sense of some of the other people involved in this further on in the same article, Jonathan Jenkins, the affable southern co-founder of supply chain startup Order With Me, said that by the third suicide, he realized he needed to start a church.

That's so cool.

That's the

greatest sentence I've ever heard.

A lot of the young people who do these startups, they don't think they can be frank with each other.

Just before this meeting with you, I met with someone who said, you know, I'm out of runway, like even for food to eat.

And who do they turn to?

That supply chain startup guy being the pastor of a church and being like, you know, who also was always just in time.

He compared it to the concept of face in China, essentially preserving one's reputation.

and pointed out that often the only people an entrepreneur knows in Vegas are venture capitalists and other struggling founders.

We call it face in China.

Everything's great.

We're doing great, said Jenkins, who founded his company in China.

Okay, cool.

I understand that more now.

Profiles and courage.

These are the two types of guy.

So there are then immediately like 10% layoffs across the downtown project.

Yeah.

Hey, you know what?

There's an opening at the church.

Go be the pastor.

Again, you'll note that the investing based on return on community and community being one guy determining your vibes is insanely unpredictable and tends to make people kill themselves when their vibes don't match.

Kill themselves or start a church.

Anything can happen in Las Vegas.

Exactly.

So Sierra steps back from the downtown project, which has now become this kind of drug-fueled Third Reich startup Hanserstadt.

Like

it sort of runs like all of these buildings and like a large segment of downtown Vegas and is entirely on this kind of self-propelling startup incubator thing where everybody thinks they have to pitch like the next Uber or kill themselves.

Uber for killing yourself.

Yeah.

So Sia quits and the city is just left with this stuff.

The mantis, as far as I know, is still there.

Now, obviously, this is a huge sort of like problem, but you also want to know, of course, what happened to Tony Sia.

Well, he fled to Connecticut.

tried to start another company town there,

got so heavily into nitrous oxide abuse that he was doing 50 whippets a day and lost like a hundred kilos.

Is that a lot of kilos?

That's to be fair, that's very burning, man.

That's a very burning man thing to do.

There is, there is, there is a quote here, which is both depressing, but also one of the most like uh mind-logic brain force plus things I've ever heard in my life, which is brain center.

Uh, one of his friends tells him he needs to see a therapist, and he goes, Okay, I'll make a deal with you, I'll see a therapist, but only if for every minute I'm in therapy, you sit in an ice bath to like recenter yourself or whatever.

Did it work?

No.

No.

Can I ask you two a question?

I have a fact in front of me now.

Ooh, fact.

It's the fact corner.

Yeah.

What do you think the Google rating on Google Maps of the giant metal mantis in Las Vegas is?

It's out of five stars.

Two stars.

Yeah,

one and a half.

It's a 4.9.

People love it.

Oh, shit.

Yeah.

Okay.

It's a good mantis.

I'm looking at it now.

Oh, my Lord.

Yeah.

This rips.

People love it.

You should go see the Mantis.

I got to go to the Mantis.

It's attached to a truck.

So my favorite Google review of this is free and unobscured viewing, sunset time on any day.

An operator will not run the Mantis in any rain.

Even gusty wind could pose a risk to safety.

But you feel the heat from the antenna flame burst from across the street.

Jesus Christ.

Just west and across from Evil Pie, the best place to get pizza.

It's much better, IRL, and free.

Have fun, everyone.

My name is Ozzy Mantis, King of Kings.

Feel my heat from across the street.

E-Mighty.

One of the is almost sounds like Trump.

Very cool, Mantis shoots fire from his antennas.

He bobs up and down to the music in front of the downtown container park.

You won't be disappointed.

Take the time.

Go see it.

Very unfair, none of the wind.

So I gotta say, I'm afraid to tell you that the end of the story of Tony sier is not a happy one at all

because he's because he's on the whip it's real bad and also like mentally he's not doing good largely because of that um he he like dies in a uh and i'm quoting the fire chief here careless or intentional act fire while locked in his own pool house which

is is like a perfect little microcosm of like 2008 to 2020 america just to be like what the fuck was that scene fleeing the scene, a gigantic praying mantis.

What's behind this string of antenna arsons in Las Vegas?

We need super cop Oscar Goodman to come out of retirement.

So it's it, so that's Tony Sierra.

And I believe me, I was weirded the fuck out by discovering this because I just googled the guy to be like, yeah, tell me about the shoes guy.

And I'm like, oh, he's dead.

That's weird.

He's so much more than the shoes guy.

Oh, he died how?

Like, He died in a pool fire in Connecticut?

He went mad for whippets and died in a pool house fire.

He was at one point trying to do so many whippets that he could starve himself so he would never need to use the bathroom again for efficiency reasons.

Yeah, no, that's...

Okay.

American startup culture, not in a great place.

Whoa.

What?

So because of this, because of this, Las Vegas has a mantis.

So thank you, Tonis.

Yeah.

Your sacrifice.

We're in the middle of the day.

Yes, yeah uh so it's 2017 ice hockey is about to arrive in the desert because in order to do this they had been they had done a kind of like go fund me thing where they free sold season tickets yeah and oscar goodman was kind of right like uh las vegans really wanted sport they wanted a civic rallying point and uh they get this team together called the vegas golden knights with a k uh-huh uh full of Canadians.

They were almost sued by the U.S.

military.

Oh, because of the army.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Because

they're called that, and their logo is that because their owner, who's some bank freak, went to West Point, I believe.

Or he's just a big West Point booster.

I care which one, but he wanted to make them just like the Black Knight to have the thing.

And the Army was like, you simply can't do that.

Simply can't do that.

Getting in trouble with the Army.

I think an Army legal team, actually, if you put them together,

could sue any sports team in America.

So yeah.

So are we ready for another jarring shift in Tony?

This all this gets quite dark, right?

Like, the Tony CF thing's dark.

This is also dark.

Um,

jolted around like in a haunted house in a huge.

What do you mean?

Yeah, something bad that happens in Las Vegas after 2017.

Yeah, yeah.

So, I mean, it's it's weird that we do a show about often American mayors, and it's taken us this long to have a mass shooting to talk about.

That's a good point.

I guess we did open with 9-11, and then we did also do all those like mass shillalings.

Um, but like

Firing one really big bullet at the trade center.

But yeah, so possibly you remember this one.

20 radicalized Irishmen go and beat the World Trade Center with shillalings.

Sorry.

Probably happened while it was being built.

But so, yeah,

maybe you remember this one.

Like mysteriously disgruntled bourgeois buys a shitload of guns.

gets a suite at the Mandalay Bay Casino, and then like shoots out the window into a country music festival while the cops like sit around for an hour in the corridor like shrugging their shoulders at each other.

What are you supposed to do?

He shifted two seats away.

Yeah, well, exactly.

He scooted.

He scooted.

He scooted.

So yeah,

this guy kills like 60 people, wounds 413,

and then kills himself.

The cops, of course, do nothing.

If you're interested in the like legal technical part of how can one guy do that, this was the bump stocks mass shooting.

Still, to this day, no motive no nobody knows why he did that like for real why was he doing all that stuff so yeah just one of many things that can happen in the great nation that is the united states of america and what does that leave for a mayor well a mayor is america's last line of defense against a mass shooting or at least feeling bad about a mass shooting And there's not really anything anyone can say about it.

So I don't really like begrudge Carolyn Goodman this.

What I do begrudge her for is the week afterwards, she said, I'll just read the quote here, in the wake of the Las Vegas massacre, the city's mayor said that she might look to Israel for ideas on how to proceed on safety and security in the future.

How would the fucking Iron Dome stop this?

I don't understand.

A miniature iron dome stopping every bullet.

Jason Aldean performs a schedule.

Yeah.

If it's working well, you won't even know.

There could be mass shootings all the time and they would just be getting intercepted at the cost of what, like $150,000 per shot.

I'm getting fucking murdered on interceptor vehicles here.

Yeah.

I was going to say, just getting like bullet shrapnel in me from the exploding bullets.

It's like, ow.

Our death rate from mass shootings is down by 100%, but our death rate from airborne

airborne shrapnel is up a shocking 4 million percent.

People are getting admitted to the hospital with bullet mist inhalation.

Lead poisoning.

Israel has lived with this every single day since 1948, said the mayor Karen Goodman, in comments to the Times of Israel.

The world's longest fart noise.

I don't want to reinvent the wheel.

We always have safety first.

We have 43 million visitors a year.

Why was she talking to the Times of Israel about this?

Yeah.

Did they just have someone there?

I guess.

Is it just someone on vacation?

Yeah.

So we said last time about how Vegas is a city that kind of lacks civic character because it's all just casinos, which are not in the city.

Yeah.

Well, now it has one thing instead of zero things, and the one thing is a hockey team.

And so we get, you remember the like bad thing happens in city, hashtag city strong,

sort of knee-jerk reaction.

There is a hashtag Vegas strong thing, and the Golden Knights go all the way to the Stanley Cup final in their first season off of that.

And so that's very fortuitous.

The city gets like a nice, clean, packaged narrative.

And Goodman is like generally pro-gun control.

So she can be like, you know, why did we let this guy who I analogize to a Palestinian have these weapons of mass destruction, et cetera, et cetera?

Yeah.

Well,

yeah, good, good, good talk.

Like, that's, that's, yeah,

that's, that's how Vegas weathered the 2017 shooting from a mayor perspective.

However,

watching hockey in unincorporated Clark County.

Yeah, yeah, pretty much.

And then just being like, man,

we are, we're Israel number one.

Yeah.

We have, so we have many visitors a year, safety first, just like Israel.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Note that she doesn't control the cops either because that's also county.

Yeah.

We've built a series of walls between us and the disgruntled, which is a population we've now identified.

Steven's in his paddock again.

Don't worry about it.

Yeah.

So you'll note, though, I said

she was generally gun control, pro-gun control.

This is the segment.

This is the segment where I get to talk about how homophobic Carolyn Goodman is.

Woo!

How does that sound like?

I know how it does, but because I've read the notes, but it is to be like, well, you know, I talked about gun control.

Well, let me talk to you about how homophobic she is.

It's quite the segue.

Oh, believe me, she earns it.

So, the year before the Vegas mass shooting, there was another mass shooting, a terrorist attack, actually.

Well, I guess they're both, but like the Pulse nightclub shooting in Orlando.

We remember this.

Homophobic massacre.

The anniversary was very recently.

Yeah.

Would-be ISIS guy.

And so Las Vegas is a tourist city.

And so Goodman has this kind of professional working relationship with like LGBT groups in that she'll go to their shit when she's invited.

And so she gets invited to a vigil commemorating this.

And she gets invited to make a speech in which she said, and I have four different quotes from different articles about this,

that guns weren't the issue, that behavior was.

She was literally booed and catcalled off stage with people yelling for assault weapon bans and chants in support of question one, which is an assault weapons, but no, it's like a straw sale ban, echoing throughout the room.

My God.

So wait, she's

so she's like kind of pro-gun control, but then she's like, we have to do nothing to stop this kind of thing in the future.

Yes.

Yes.

Specifically in this case.

Uh-huh.

So she's pro-gun control, except when guns are used homophobically.

Yes.

Okay, right.

I got it.

Literally, yes.

Goodman's statement was interrupted by a man who shouted gun safety laws.

When Goodman objected, crowd members began shouting chants of yes on one, a reference to a ballot initiative requiring firearms transfers to go through licensed arms dealers.

Goodman cut her speech short and stepped off the stage.

I mean,

yeah, she doesn't

see us as human enough to get a miniature iron dome around all of us.

That's the

her tack is, according to this, this third article, laws are in place.

rattling on about responsibility and politicizing a tragedy, despite her tweet hours later accusing the audience of the same thing.

Yeah, she tweets and she tweeted sort of like meanly about this.

The 400 or so inside the room became so audibly upset that their booze drowned the mayor out until her abrupt exit, which happened not a moment too soon.

Their booze even drowned out the

gouts of flame that were shooting from the nearby praying mantis.

Slowly rolling the mantis over to chase the mare around as I'm mad at her.

Yeah, I would generally describe Goodman's relationship with the LGBTQ plus community as testy.

She does keep going to the functions, which kind of reveals the functions to be a bit of a farce for me politically.

Yeah.

Most notably, she's always been against gay marriage, just on like an instinctive homophobic level.

This is from a 2011 luncheon, which was sponsored by like an LGBT non-profit.

Yeah.

From the Vegas Sun.

She flip-flopped on her position on gay marriage.

At first, she said she supported domestic partnerships.

Then she suggested that if she were gay, she'd go to a state where same-sex marriage is illegal.

A few moments later, she said about domestic partnerships, with my religious beliefs and my own personal way I live my life, I am not in favor of that.

Why wouldn't you have your position on gay marriage kind of worked out before you go give a speech on gay marriage to the LGBTQ charity?

Just, I assume they won't ask me.

What are they going to do?

Ask me about it.

This is kind of how American politicians were in the mid-2010s, though, I feel like.

Who just sort of like, uh,

while they were running away.

Goodman also referred to homosexuality as a choice rather than an innate quality, referring to individuals who prefer a gay or lesbian lifestyle, causing scoffs from many in the audience.

Goodman also received less than favorable reaction when she described people as transvestites rather than transgender.

Several people gasped.

Right.

Okay, I'm coming around on her, actually.

But let me say, as Carolyn, is Carolyn Goodman Cunty?

She is this camp?

Yeah.

I'm looking at photos of her.

She's like kind of campy.

She's a little bit camp, especially with the Chippendales.

When asked what LGBT event she's participated in since the primary, Goodman said, I can't give you specifics since I didn't have that question ahead of time.

She said afterwards

that she participated in an event with Frank Marino, a Las Vegas female impersonator, and attended a fundraiser her neighbors hosted for her and several members of the gay community.

Okay,

that sounds like a Nevada slash Vegas specific thing, right?

Where it's like, no, of course, I'm doing an event with like someone who it does a nightclub act.

Basically,

she she then she then walked out again, like halfway through lunch.

So, yeah, she's she's she's a homophobic lady.

I'm sorry, I don't know to tell you.

She's also, uh, let's say not un-racist.

Is there a word for that?

Um, not sure, not sure because she did tweet dot at city of Las Vegas is not a sanctuary city and we're compliant with federal regulations.

I'm passionate about finding a pathway to citizenship, which then gets her yelled at so much that she has to write a whole op-ed in which she's like, well, we're not a sanctuary city.

We're a compassionate city.

Yeah.

That's a

cool.

Was Nevada ever part of another country?

No?

Great.

Don't think so.

Don't think so.

That could possibly be true.

No, that's crazy.

Come on.

This is my longest, my longest section by far.

It's called God, She Fucking Hates Homeless People.

She's got a fine form for it.

Oscar was pretty horrible.

I wonder if queer people are disproportionately homeless.

Anyway, so

Oscar and Carolyn,

they're kind of interesting because they're a good model of the two-party system, despite both having been Democrats.

Because Oscar, Oscar would, like, if you were homeless, he would go up and he would shout at you and would threaten to have you sent to like an abandoned prison in the desert.

Very Republican.

Yeah.

Whereas Carolyn, Carolyn talks about how like every homeless person has a different story.

A lot lot of them are like our veterans who we respect or whatever.

And then passes an ordinance criminalizing homelessness and then lies about whether or not it does that.

It is illegal to sit or lie down in a public right of way in the city of Las Vegas because of her.

Yeah,

you're never going to be able to.

So if you just take a brief pause in Vegas, they're like, no, no, move it on.

Yeah, literally.

No sitting, no lying.

Streets for walking, stores are for spending.

Get going.

Yep.

Always be startled by the mantis, ideally.

I keep thinking about that.

The cops driving around in the mantis.

There's so many uses for this thing.

Amid applause on Thursday, the mayor asserted that concerns of commerce, public safety, and health must come first when dealing with homelessness.

It's the job of the city government through its ordinance to demonstrate compassion while promoting and always understanding that public safety and the good health of its residents, tourists, businesses, and property comes first, Goodman said on Thursday.

So residents, tourists, businesses, property, then people who are not homeless.

Yeah, then queer people, homeless people, under property.

The feedback from our citizens that has resulted from the passage of this ordinance has been extremely and incredibly positive, she said.

So when the cops find a homeless person violating the you're not allowed to sit down in public ordinance, they're supposed to, it's like diversion programs because it's lib shit, right?

They're supposed to divert you to a shelter.

If the shelters are full, they're supposed to divert you to the courtyard homeless resource center.

Oh, an open-air space with bathrooms, water, service offices, and 24-hour security guards.

Oh, like a free-range corral.

Yeah, like a corral, like a petting zoo.

By the way, Nevada has the highest rate of youth homelessness specifically in the entire U.S.

So we're also often talking about like children here.

Yeah.

Did her one school not fix that?

Apparently not.

I included a couple of photos of the Courtyard Homeless Resource Center in the notes.

If we want to venture a description, I don't love to look at this.

I'm going to describe this as a parking lot that has some Portaloos in it.

It does.

And a small covered area with some folding tables that it seems like you can't leave so easily.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

It looks not great.

I feel like indoors is probably good for when it's regularly like 120 degrees.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Which is like, well, like in the 30s for you.

Yeah.

I uh

uh

I don't like looking at this at all.

It looks like sort of like they like just like what used to be a park or something or just like an empty lot that's filled with uh dirt.

Yep.

A lot of dirt.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And the and the and the toilets are like Porta John's, which are, I imagine, cleaned regularly for sure.

100%.

Sure.

You know what they say?

Poor services are good services.

So, you know, it's, it's not an an abandoned prison in the desert, but it's, you know, it's getting there.

It's kind of like

a semi-abandoned park in the city.

If you see the next image, you'll see that subsequent mayors have built a big kind of at least roofed kind of gentrification homeless warehouse there.

It's very colorful.

It's got like, it's won like architecture awards, which is cool, I guess.

Yeah, it looks like a parking garage a little bit.

Yeah, yeah.

And that's, that's still the same same thing.

I think they just put a roof on it.

Yeah.

Here's my final note about the courtyard and the difference such as it is between Carolyn and Oscar.

A report by The Current revealed that the most popular service provided by the courtyard is what they call the ticket to home, a free bus pass out of town.

The old Rudy Giuliani maneuver.

Yeah.

What if your home is Vegas?

A ticket to a new home then.

Anywhere that's not here.

So Carolyn wins re-election with like 80 the vote she has this kind of biden-esque campaign because she got breast cancer the year before she's fine now thankfully uh but she like kept that secret so she didn't like do any campaigning yeah wins again airbnb hollows out the entire city housing stock sends a lot of people to the courtyard homeless resource center and then itself kind of explodes a woman named michelle fiore gets on city council.

She's like MAGA femme Oscar Goodman.

I hope she never becomes mayor of Vegas.

Sounds powerful.

I will write the episode if she does.

Let me read you two sentences from her Wikipedia page.

Please.

In 2024, Fiore was convicted of seven counts of federal felony fraud for stealing $70,000 meant for a memorial to fallen police officers and spending it on personal expenses, including cosmetic surgery.

Look, my

beautiful face will be a memorial to the fallen heroes.

This too is cunt.

Yeah.

In 2025, she was pardoned by President Donald Trump before she was due to be sentenced.

He said femmes to the front.

That's right.

How does the surgery look, you ask?

I've included a photo in the

tabbing over.

Uh-huh.

I'm scrolling.

Okay.

I'm going to give you a large photo.

I'm going to count three, two, one, and then we're both going to open our eyes.

Okay, okay, okay.

Three, two, one.

Ah.

Sorry, I know you're easily startled.

For such a high-resolution photo, very, very few pores.

This woman has been sort of like, they got her with the actual airbrush.

Did she have her pores filled?

Hey, a lot of dead cops pay for that pause.

Look,

this face is being held up by the ghosts of like 10 police officers.

Like, I truly hate to be like, well, this lady's appearance or whatever.

Yeah.

Man, oh, man, this lady's appearance.

This lady's

the thing is, she looks like the Republican makeup TikTok.

Yeah, she really, she really truly, like, this looks like someone making, if you were like, here's a drag act in Las Vegas making fun of Republican women, I'd be like, absolutely.

Yeah.

And I think, I think you are a bit allowed to make fun of it when you know that it was paid for by the dead cop frauds.

Oh, yeah.

Yeah, I actually think that's cool.

Unfortunately, if you're like, I got, I did dead cop fraud to get lots of plastic surgery.

The outcome of the plastic surgery is fair cave for discussion.

Yeah.

Like if I, if I met like a trans girl here who was like, I defrauded the NYPD to get FFS.

Call 1-800 cop shot.

Yeah.

I would like immediately just start following her around like a lost dog.

Like that's the coolest thing I've ever heard.

So like.

Critical support to this insane woman, I guess.

Call 1-800 cop cunt so you can cunt up.

Yeah, she's on the city city council now.

She's doing MAGA stuff.

In 2018, the Supreme Court legalizes sports gambling in all 50 states.

The Murphy versus NCAA, I think it's called.

NCAA, NCAA.

Maybe, maybe one of the, I think what we're finding out for how society is doing here in the old US of A, maybe one of the worst Supreme Court decisions ever.

Oh, yeah.

Like,

up there with Obergfell.

Yeah, up there with Obergfell, up there with like Citizens United.

Like, like, it's really,

really gnarly.

Like, it's been, it's been bad for how people interact with the world.

A nation gets really into sports betting.

Um, so if you remember, Oscar Goodman's big problem with trying to get professional sports to Vegas is that none of them wanted to be associated with gambling.

Ah, now all of them do.

Uh-huh.

So, Sheldon Adelson.

It turns out they were visited by the same ghost that night.

Yeah.

Taught them how fun gambling is.

They also uncut gems.

The ghost of the draft king himself.

Sheldon Adelson, again, helps put together a bid to build a stadium to lure the raiders away from Oakland, the Raiders NFL team.

This will cost $750 million in public funds.

You can't do income tax in Nevada.

So how do you raise that?

The answer is you do a hotel tax.

Easy peasy.

And this gets rushed through.

And the city does indeed raise from tourists.

three quarters of a billion dollars to spend on, I think I describe it here in the notes as idiot pigskin hut, hut, hut instead of, you know, housing.

Uh-huh.

So, and this works.

Like, please welcome your Las Vegas Raiders.

Yeah.

They have this kind of usual fight about where the stadium's going to be because Carolyn wants it to be in the city.

The city always loses.

All the stadiums in Vegas are in Paradise, Nevada, which is right next to the strip.

Yeah, I wonder, is like Paradise, Nevada, is it one of those places that, because you can tell me, because because you've been looking into this or maybe it's worth looking into is it kind of like does is it a bit like a vernon situation where there's like i wish okay i wish i wish there were a mayor of paradise unfortunately as far as i know it's like clark county still it is my favorite kind of u.s designation which is census designated place

which is like the government admits that this place exists this place exists but it would be inconvenient for it to have any kind of standing that's that's not always a dead certain nevada specifically um but so look at the guys in cowboy hats from casino just kind of roaming around free here

but this is kind of oscar's dream coming true like say what you like about the guy he had vision and this is the thing that really pivots vegas into the town that will host your thing yeah it's it's why they have formula one uh it's also worth noting that las vegans hate f1 even after drive to survive you apparently you can see like fuck formula one bumper stickers uh but like partially because f1 doesn't want any novadin to be able to watch it.

So like the Skybridges and stuff, they will like paper over with like opaque coatings so that you can't see it from them.

And they'll sell like discounted tickets to residents, but only for the qualifying, not for the actual race.

That's so mean to be ready.

Yeah, it's really shitty.

And of course, they have to close all the streets.

The city has to pay for a bunch of like resurfacing so like Oscar Piastri doesn't get killed by a manhole cover.

It's it's like, yeah, so, but like Vegas has F1 now, which is a tremendous boondoggle.

It also has the Oakland A's.

Gut, they're like every Oakland team.

Well, yeah, yes, but they're the A's are also this hilarious big fuck-up thing now where they're like, we're moving.

They've been threatening to move for so long.

They've been threatening to move to Vegas for a really long time.

And then they're like, we're moving.

And then they're like, and the Vegas is like, absolutely.

And then didn't build a stadium in time.

So now Oakland can't play in Oakland anymore because the city's like, well, you can't be here anymore.

You can't call yourselves Oakland anymore.

They are now just the athletics they play in a triple-a baseball stadium in sacramento for like three years now oh that seats like 10 000 people they really they really it's very funny oh god they need billy bean back yeah carolyn's sole contribution to this is amidst another fight about where to put another stadium that was going to cost the city like 380 million dollars she tells them publicly oh well maybe if you don't want to come to vegas you should just stay in oakland then and everyone gets really mad at her and she has to back down off of that because all this sports sports stuff culminates in Vegas hosting a forgettable Super Bowl.

Still doesn't have an NBA team yet.

Fuck you, Oscar.

Like I said last episode, that's probably, there's a really good chance in the next like two years the Dallas Mavericks end up there.

Thanks to Sheldon Adelson, his wife.

It's noticeable as well that the Goodmans have U-turned heavily on this.

They're anti-sports now.

Because the Adelson's are so into it?

Yes.

Really?

Genuinely, yes.

Purely spice.

Oh, my God.

The dimension of the Goodmans that we haven't explored yet, yet, really, is I think the extent to which these two are Larry David.

Right.

Oh, all Jews are Larry David to Riley Quinn.

That's interesting.

I found in the course of doing this, the thing that was going to be in the reading series is the article where he's like drunk at her office, just showing up in the middle of the day.

It also reveals that he also has lifelong beef with Donald Trump over, I shit you not, an architecture dispute on a phone call.

That's great.

Beautiful.

Because Trump, Trump, when he bought a casino out there, wanted the decoration one way.

And Oscar Gutmann, who is mayor of Not the Strip and had no authority over him, wanted it a different way.

And he was like,

this is blood feud time.

That's so funny.

If they only agreed, they could have just been queening out together because they seem so similar.

He says he'd love to have to have run against Trump, which is a really funny image.

But yeah, so the money wins.

Obviously, Vegas is now sports city and sports betting city.

Sheldon Adelson gets the last laugh.

This is what it's been leading up to, right?

This is the bit that people know Carolyn Goodman for.

Yeah.

So Carolyn's re-elected for her third and final term just in time for something called the novel coronavirus.

I remember that.

Is that bad for a vacation?

It is.

It is.

And so as mayor of a vacation town and also because she's a boomer, Carolyn is very anti-lockdown.

Anderson Cooper's booker on CNN plays a masterpiece of their career because at some point, I don't know how they decided on this.

They go, hey, do you want to do an interview with the mayor of Las Vegas?

Talk about stuff, how it's going.

Supposed to be a five-minute interview.

Goes 25.

Oh, my God.

And

it is brutal.

It is absolutely brutal.

I have a series of clips.

I'm just going to play them in sequence and we can just react to them accordingly.

Please.

So this is Carolyn Goodman talking to Anderson Cooper.

And this is like 2020, mind you.

We're not getting the truth.

And I know over the years, going back to

the 1950s with the atomic bomb, don't worry about it.

We're testing in Nevada.

You'll all be fine.

Take a shower.

The reality is.

You're the one saying you'll all be fine.

What we're saying is...

No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, you're putting words in my mouth.

Not sure why she brought up the atomic bomb testing.

But so this is part of her general point that the city should not lock down, right?

It gets worse.

It gets worse.

So you're not rolling up your sleeves, helping your health department to try to figure out.

My days are so full.

I am everywhere in the city trying to hold the hands of families and everyone else.

Which, if you're having to be asked the question, so you're not rolling up your sleeves, it's kind of a bad sign.

Yeah.

You're not rolling up your sleeves.

Also, you seem to crucially misunderstood the context of what's happening here.

What you seem to want to do.

You seem to not know why you're mad at this.

You also, I mean, this is because she says that her job in the course of this is like forwarding emails.

It gets worse.

I just want to put up for our viewers, this is a restaurant.

Anderson, you are

not talking about it.

Back to China.

This isn't China.

This is

Las Vegas, Nevada.

Wow.

Okay, that's really ignorant.

This is a restaurant.

Wow.

I'm also realizing I cut that off in just Anderson Cooper tries to explain what a restaurant is.

You're such a fucking idiot.

This is what a restaurant is.

This is a restaurant.

A restaurant with a name like Eat.

Yeah.

No, he's trying to explain social distancing.

And she's like, what are we?

China?

That's not where we are now.

We're in Nevada, which isn't China.

Yeah.

And he sort of like cuntily after this says, you know, they might be from China, but they're human beings too.

And she's like, oh, yeah, sure.

Which

it gets worse.

It gets worse again.

Oh, there's more.

There's more.

I've got three more drops.

Okay.

Okay.

Drop number one.

And so we're aware of this.

We learned from history.

We've had Ebola.

We've had the West Nile.

We've had polio.

We've had these pools.

None of those were as infectious in Las Vegas.

I mean, you didn't have people with Ebola on a casino floor.

You know what?

If you did.

I don't know that.

Well, yet you do because you had it.

A neighbor of mine died from West Nile because the swimming pool on the next property was filled with mosquitoes.

And the people who had abandoned the house left the pool full.

That's such a terrible advertisement for Las Vegas.

Come to Las Vegas.

Someone might have Ebola.

My neighbor.

Someone who lives next door to the mayor is there's also an abandoned house with a fucking West Nile-filled swimming pool.

Come to Las Vegas.

That's two properties over from the mayor.

Because that's my neighbor's neighbor, who isn't me, killed my neighbor with her pool.

The neighbor of my neighbor is my neighbor's neighbor.

My favorite detail in all of this is the perfect beat before.

Well, we don't know.

We don't know.

We don't know.

We don't know.

I don't know what.

Oh, so you have the Ebola statistics for Las Vegas.

Wick could be more.

Everyone thinks it's none.

It could be more.

Yeah.

Great.

Flawless.

This is the best interview ever recorded.

She's doing great.

I love the little like chuckle and be like, oh, you're good.

Yeah.

Like, as she's

fucking up.

Oh, yeah.

She's like, hey, this is hard.

This is difficult.

And then he's

very in over her head and now getting mad about it because he's like, well, are you going to like lock down the city?

And this leads to the, this is the dagger, right?

This is the main one.

This is the one that people remember.

So please, the dagger.

But hasn't it been because of social distancing that the numbers have been what they are?

How do you know until we have a control group?

We offer to be a control group.

Anybody who knows anything about statistics knows that, for instance, you have a vaccine.

you're offering the citizens of las vegas to be a control group to see if your theory on social distancing

no no no no wrong absolutely wrong don't put words in my mouth you just said we'll be a control group excuse me what i said was i offered to be a control group and i was told by our statistician you can't do that the statistician told you not to i love also like incredible exchange here where it's like we'll be the control group.

And Anderson's like, so you're saying you want to be the control group.

Don't put words in my mouth.

What I said was, we want to be the control group.

So I said I wanted to be the control group with a big smile.

You said, so you want to be the control group, and you were clearly frowning.

See, you said the smart thing that I said in a way that made me sound stupid.

So you were putting words in my mouth.

Can we start this over again, but maybe you let me win this time?

It's my turn to win the interview.

I'll just smile when you ask me the questions.

I think it'll change your inflection.

I got one more.

We're just doubling down on this.

And this is just the perfect intersection of like boomer and like everything else that Carolyn could be.

Boomer and Vegas.

Because I know when you have a disease, you have a placebo that gets the water and the sugar.

And then you get those that actually get the shot.

We would love to be that placebo sides you have something to measure against.

So Las Vegas, Nevada.

Again, big quotes, the placebo city.

Yes.

She does kind of volunteer the entire city to die of COVID.

Yes.

My favorite thing that I was, yo, I was going to say, I was looking for photos of her to just look at her while we were talking about her.

And I found a Vanity Fair article with just an incredible headline I want to read, which is just, Las Vegas mayor proposes casinos reopen, comma, let the free market decide who gets to live.

Subhead, Carolyn Goodman thinks businesses should compete to see who can fit, who can kill the fewest people.

So smart, though, that's really smart when you think about it a certain certain way.

There's a half hour of this, and it's all like this, right?

Oh my God.

This is, I mean, so I think there's also a thing up here about the attention economy, right?

Because this goes viral, like nationally.

And this led to this kind of like liberal national ridicule, right?

She's a national laughing stock.

Like Jimmy Kimmel is like saying she should resign, Stephen Colbert.

Everyone is very mad at her.

She is, again, a very defensive woman who does a lot of tweets and is kind of dumb and a tv interview is a good way of showing someone who is kind of dumb to be dumb yeah uh she goes to her next city council meeting and she goes on this like anti-lockdown tirade and everyone else gets even more mad at her but the thing is she has no power to do this like she doesn't control any of the casinos at all yeah it's the cowboy hat guys again she's setting social distancing for like the mantis yeah but you know what would be really oh well you know people need the mantis but you know what would be really really funny as well is like let's just say she does do that, right?

Las Vegas and Las Vegas becomes like the placebo group, the experimental group.

The city of Las Vegas is full of enclaves of Clark County.

Like,

if you look at Las Vegas on a map, it is, it's like a patchwork.

It's not even contiguous, right?

So if you were to do that, there would just have to be little bubbles around the Clark County bits with like walkways between them.

Well, that would help with mass shootings shootings as well i imagine yeah we just need to up armor clark county around vegas

i'm always i'm always staying six feet away from the big mantis though yeah because that thing is hot hot it's folks it's hot and it's it's kind of the kurt vonnegut quote about you know artists against the vietnam war because you have this like full blast kind of all of her opponents everyone is like she's got to resign this is she's making vegas out to be a joke she's a laughing stock and she just doesn't and she just weathers it because people don't care who the mayor of Las Vegas is.

She serves all three terms.

Dropping a custard pie, right?

Yeah.

Yeah.

She just weathers it.

And I have a quote here on as she is leaving office.

As she looks back, Goodman told the Nevada Independent that she, and this is my favorite lie she's ever told, loved every minute of the CNN interview.

and is still waiting for Cooper to apologize.

Oh, God.

She's one-upping her husband on just like gleefulness,

which I think is really great.

Would you believe this woman used to run a school

and so and so that is the story of carolyn goodman a very defensive woman

i mean look remember she and oscar made for each other yeah you know what two of the pettiest people i bet we've ever covered yeah i gotta say you know how we got

there mayor statue mayor statue mayor statue what a what a what a thing what will we google next she's she's she's not like we didn't get as many laughs out of her in in this one one because like she doesn't have a giant olive but like

i think i genuinely think she's worse yeah oh she's so much worse yeah for instance she didn't have any big olives for me to laugh at that's true that is true it's offense number one for me she's more she's more amusing in terms of like in in terms of her personal her personal style than um prickliness yeah and prickliness than sort of oscar's flamboyance but i love both of them and i wish them a happy rest of their marriage of course Absolutely.

That's the story of Carolyn Goodman.

Thank you so much for listening.

I loved that one.

Yeah.

Thank you so much for giving us Las Vegas' Ptolemy Dynasty.

20, what was it, 24 years of Goodmanity?

Yeah.

Oh, the Goodmanity.

All right.

Well, God, this one's gone long.

There's a lot of good manity.

It's gone quite long.

I'm sorry.

It always goes long when I write that one.

Oh, no, please.

This is good.

It's beautiful and perfect.

That's a little more mayor for the listeners.

That's true.

Thank you so much for listening.

We have a Patreon that you can subscribe to.

Oh, yeah.

That's right.

Where do you find that Patreon?

Oh, it's on nogods, nomayers.com.

That's such an easy stretch.

Yeah, it's called the Mayoral Benevolent Feed.

What's our next

fund, I think?

The Mayoral Benevolent Fund grants you access to the Mayoral Benevolent Feed.

To the Mayor's boss.

That's so stupid.

Fuck.

November is fired for the podcast.

Next week, I am the mayor, and I am, it's, it's another one of Maddie's Flights of Fancy where I say, where I say to you, is a town a mayor?

And the answer to me is yes.

And it's about the libertarians that took over an entire town in New Hampshire and destroyed it thoroughly.

Cannot wait.

It's about the town that said no gods, no mayors and what happened.

It's about the, it's about a mayor, it's a town that started with no mayor and then ended with really no mayor.

Okay.

I'm looking forward to that, which we're going to record right now.

Yeah, that's right.

So bye, everybody.

Bye.