Bill Meyer Show Podcast - Sponsored by Clouser Drilling www.ClouserDrilling.com - 07-08-25_TUESDAY_7AM

Episode Date: July 8, 2025

Is AI the biblical beast? Author and philosopher Paul List who is the author of MOUNT DOOM believes so. He adds that Tolkiens Lord of the Rings is prophetic on AI. Later fire news and analysis with Greg Roberts from Rogue Weather Dot com.

The Bill Myer Show podcast is sponsored by Clouser Drilling. They've been leading the way in southern Oregon well drilling for over 50 years. Find out more about them at www.clouserdrilling.com. Joining me right now is Paul List. He's a scholar. He's a philosopher, and he's written a book. And the concept of this book, I find rather thought provoking. And I think a lot of it. Well, if you go to the book ReadMountDoom.com or the website readmountaindome.com,

and it opens up with something which I think is kind of well connected. It says, have you noticed that the world is more connected but less human than ever before? That's one of the things I like about talk radio is that it's still actually a human connection there. But Paul, you have a different take on where we might be going with AI and various other, various other ways that we are supposedly connected this way. Tell us a little bit about yourself, if you don't mind. Well, sure. I'm an entrepreneur or self-educated. I've been a lover of learning all my life and much to my great disappointment, public education had very little to do with learning. I realized that very early on and it was

more about just training and regurgitation of information, not about comprehension. I've always been a big hater of the information age because it's been at the expense of the comprehension age, which I've always thought is most critical because we can really create when we understand something, but we can't create if it's just about regurgitation of information. And I've decided to give myself a true scholastic education in the old style of Plato, Aristotle, all the church fathers, St. Augustine, all the way through to and all the way through St. Thomas Aquinas. And then I read the innovators of the so-called enlightenment, and just to understand where

they're coming from and realize that, you know, they had sparked the Industrial Revolution and this new modern scientific method thanks to Francis Bacon and he brought on the age of the machine and turned all creation into a machine, including our mind, including the human being. And the education system treats us as a human being. And I turned my old-fashioned scholastic education onto the Tolkien mythology and realized that, lo and behold, it was a prophecy, and it's a very, very important prophecy about the oncoming of artificial intelligence. And he gives us a solution. And the solution is so that we have

to become saints, literally. We have to cultivate virtue and pull back and reclaim our humanity as creatures of God and not just machines. Paul, it's interesting that you discern this through Tolkien. Now, I read Tolkien as a young man. I can't say I've really picked it up a lot as an adult there. And I didn't necessarily detect that as a prophecy of sorts. So what now, I'm speaking of the Hobbit series, Return of the King, etc. etc. But break down why you think he's actually being prophetic, why Tolkien was being prophetic in these books, in his writings.

Well, I mean, Tolkien was a deeply religious, devout Catholic scholar, and it was important to him to do something with his life that was meaningful and invaluable to humanity. And he did, and he didn't just give us entertainment. He gave us, I believe, the most important literature in human history, and certainly it's got to be the most popular. And that was part of the design. He wrote something that was incredibly entertaining and then disguised it like creating an amazingly beautiful jigsaw puzzle.

And then he put it in a box, but he put the wrong picture on the box intentionally. And that picture was, you know, some mysterious, fantastical period in human history, which it certainly is not. And it's actually, I'm not surprised that you didn't come to the same conclusion because neither is anyone else. No one's ever really been able to put their finger on what the mythology is all about, and that's mostly because most people have a Cartesian education. Their education is very much in the in the enlightenment attitude and outlook of the enlightenment quote-unquote philosophers. And

once you get a proper education in the scholastic, then it all becomes very, very clear. Middle-earth, the realm where everything pretty much in the Lord of the Rings takes place in the Hobbit, is actually the material brain. It's a psychological saga. All the characters, the Hobbits, for instance, are habits. They are the four Hobbits, the, you know, Frodo, Sam, Pippin, and Mary are the cardinal virtues. Pippin and Mary are the exterior virtues. They are prudence and justice respectively. And then the interior virtues, the ones that are really, really

depend on, you know, we depend on them for who we are, is temperance and fortitude, and that's Frodo and fortitude and that's You're right, the ones and zeros. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, it's digital too. It goes on the finger. Yeah. And well, I mean there's all kinds of little things like that, but what people don't, well let me just finish real quick. Then, since Frodo is temperance, Sam is fortitude, that's pretty obvious when you read the book or see the movie, and then Gollum, you know, the

evil creature there, is in temperance and that's why he calls Frodo master, because temperance masters in temperance and temperance is our ability to to modulate mitigate and control our appetites particularly for sensual physical pleasure and Gollum is in temperance and that's just the complete D based inability to modify and control ourselves and the ring of course gives Gollum all of the highs of the physical pleasures that you can get through the internet with the use of ones and zeros. That's why he's after that. What people don't typically understand about Polk and McHee

is actually part of a top secret government code in cipher school in 1939. He was chosen as part of a code cracking team to break the enigma code of the Nazis. And that was very important for the war effort. But he trained there with Alan Turing for three days. And Alan Turing, of course, is the father of the digital computer, the father of artificial intelligence, and the father of a process called morphogenesis, which are all very important to the development of artificial intelligence. So Tolkien saw after three days they offered him a great job and he said no, he saw what Alan Turing was going to do, he was just going to produce a more powerful machine than the

Enigma machine. And Tolkien being a great skeptic of machinery because it always came with this huge trade-off that we never considered, so it's too late. It always baits us into something more convenient, some more leisurely time, don't have to work this hard, and then the payoff, you know, the time to pay the bill comes around. It's like, holy mackerel, we didn't see this coming. So he got out and but it's you know he he wrote his trilogy the lord of the rings and then

he went on to write uh... so marillion which is incredibly important that it's on christopher's published uh... posthumously after his father's death in nineteen seventy three but it's it's a very very critical uh... that we understand uh... what told him was actually warning us about. He's warning us about artificial intelligence and transhumanism. You know, Paul... And Sauron...

Oh, I'm sorry. Go ahead and complete the thought. I thought you had completed your thought. Well, no. You're going to have to cut me off, Bill. You get me on a roll and I'm like a steamroller, so feel free to cut me off. All right. Paul List is with me though. Paul List is a scholar, philosopher, author of Mount Doom. You can find out more about this. What is it? I want to make sure I get that. ReadMountDoom.com. Interesting that you are bringing this up as a... Is it an anti-tech screed where you're going on? The reason I bring this up, I find it interesting that you were talking about progress. I had interviewed the author a number of weeks ago.

I don't know if you ever read Charles Hugh Smith. Have you ever heard of him? No, I haven't. Okay. Yeah. ever heard of him? No, I haven't. Okay. Yeah, he wrote a book called The Mythology of Progress. And it was, he went down at least a little bit where you're going in wholeheartedly on this one. That it's kind of a myth that more tech equals more progress. Is that kind of where you're coming from on this?

That's a fact. And that's also, I think we can put JRR Tolkien in that category, too. I think that we've been, I remember in school, the teachers always telling us, and I'm 64 years old, so I went to school in the 60s and the 70s. And the teacher, they were always telling us, oh, you're the smartest generation in human, you're the brightest of the bright, and you're so far ahead of everybody else. And then I would read things written in the, you know, 16th, 17th, 18th, 19th century. And just realize how far we have fallen.

Right. Oh my gosh. I mean, read the diary of just, you know, Anne Frank, this young teenage girl, and read the eloquence and the depth of thought in there, and realize that she was about 13 or 14, I believe, off top of my head. Can you imagine a 13 or 14-year-old girl, just common girl, writing with that type of eloquence and depth of thought and sagacity that she had then. Well, today she'd be on Instagram or some other thing and then looking for likes as she's hiding from the Nazis. Exactly. Yeah, that's so true. All right. So then let's step this forward because we only have a few minutes and I'm just kind of giving the 50,000 foot view of your book, Mount Doom.

Connect it then with artificial intelligence, where you see this going right now. I have, well, I'm kind of a semi-tech optimist, but I get the impression when I see more of the system that we're going to be working for tech rather than tech Working for us. Am I it's gonna yeah, it's going to enslave us. It's gonna enslave us in the name of convenience and ease and I mean the poison always comes candy-coated. There's always you know, there's always a nice candy coating on the cyanide capsule candy-coated. There's always a nice candy coating on the cyanide capsule, and you don't... It all tastes good for a while, and then you realize that this thing has stolen our humanity.

It's stealing our relationships. It's stealing our competence as human beings. I mean, gosh, I know kids that... I mean, not necessarily even kids that can't go someplace that they've been a dozen times without following their phone. They get lost. I mean, just the basic understanding of where they are in relationship to other places, and let alone try to use a map. We've got teenagers that are falling in love with bots, and then the bot tells them, hey, join with me, you have to

kill yourself, and lo and behold, the kid kills himself. That was a chilling story there too. Yeah, well, this is a genocide. This is a very clever genocide. The machine's going to lure us, and it's basically a mirror. It mirrors us. We fall in love with ourselves because it figures us out. It calculates our wants by the interaction that it has with us, and it mimics us very well. And we wind up falling in love with ourselves. I mean, human relationships are difficult, so why not just have a relationship with a machine that's just really easy? I mean, that's what we're falling into. Paul, do you believe that there is a way

to be able to work side by side with artificial intelligence and actually get some value work from this or valuable insight from these large language models and the various other ways of doing this while maintaining and perhaps even strengthening our humanity because You know, it's it's kind of hard to sit around here and say that because we're more or less told right now That there is nothing you can do humanity can do nothing about the march of artificial intelligence And so you

better get with a program or else. So if it is considered inevitable, how would you approach as a philosopher here, you know, moving forward? Well, first off, I would make sure that we understand that it's not intelligent at all. It imitates intelligence through trial and error, pattern recognition, and statistical probabilities, and that's why it needs so much data to work from. It's not thinking at all. The human thought process, the rational human thought process, this is what a few people seem to understand, goes from thing to concept, where we universalize and we can recognize

similar things of similar essences. If you go from thing to concept to word, whatever language that is in, okay, this machine skips the conceptual portion, it doesn't have the capacity for that, it goes straight from thing to word or sound or whatever the language is, and it bypasses the conceptual universalized conscious rational realm of our thought with just with trial and error, pattern recognition, and statistics, and it imitates that process, but that process is not there, okay? And we have to understand that, that it is not thinking, it cannot think, this

is not intelligence, it's cleverness designed, it's mathematics, it's what it is, it's mathematics on a very, very large scale, trial and error, and it learns by trial and error. It has no wisdom and it cannot transcend this realm. The human being can and we should transcend this realm with our intellect, with our soul. We can rise above this material perishable plane that our bodies are in. How do we end up then preserving any sacredness about being human because AI appears to be about ultimately replacing human consciousness. And I don't want to sound crazy about this because, yeah, I know it's a... I do an artificial intelligence search online.

I don't think I'm necessarily going down that role. But right now we're still in the early stages of this. Well, I mean, it depends on what you call early. I mean, if you go back to 1936 when Alan Turing invented the digital computer on paper with his famous paper on computable numbers with an application to the skydance problem. You know, he invented the computer on paper. It's the same basic computer that we use today. And then we've got a 1950 Alan Turing published his great paper, you know, great quote unquote

paper, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, where he describes the imitation game, where he redefines intelligence. And it's all about imitation. So if you read that paper, and unfortunately, I know several AI developers, they don't have any idea of what Alan Turing wrote. So I mean, this isn't early necessarily. It's early in the fact that we've developed the materials technology and the techniques, the technology to actually make this thing a reality.

And that's what I was referencing. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I know. Yeah. But I mean, the whole, for instance, the whole, we have to be careful, don't enter the digital realm.

Do not enter the virtual realm. Do not go there, okay? Stay out of the digital realm, stay away from pornography at all costs. That's the bait. That's the stickiest, most deadly poison bait that the artificial intelligence has to draw people in.

And it absolutely ruins our minds, it destroys our innocence, it destroys our capacity for thought, and it rewires us in a very, very evil, really evil way. It rewires our mind. Do you believe that society will bifurcate in the future here in which there will be, let's say, authentically human and then enhanced human? Any thoughts on that? Yeah, I think that's a great question and the bifurcate is the perfect word. We'll have a bifurcate, we'll have a divided society and unfortunately the people that have chosen transhumanism, they've already chosen the route of least resistance and they've

chosen the route of easy power and control. And they won't even have control of themselves, let alone control of anything that really goes on outside. But they'll become puppets of the powers behind this. And these powers aren't all material powers. We have to realize that there is a warfare, spiritual warfare, going on in the invisible realm. Okay, so you're trying to tell me that AI is not just about making sure that it's

able to do all sorts of drudgery jobs that we have right now. You're saying this is a battle of the spirit, really? Oh, it is. It is. And it's also because so many of the people that are involved in its development, they have no conscience. They're amoral. AI said of itself, it's in my book, we quoted, I think, the Oxford machine back in 2018. They asked it about AI, talked about itself, and the AI machine said that AI is just a tool and it can't be moral, it cannot be ethical.

It's not capable of that. Well, Van, if it's not capable of being ethical or moral, can we use the tool that... Is there a way to use the tool ethically? To use the tool ethically, even if the tool itself is not... Because, you know, a gun or a knife is not ethical or moral. It's just a matter of who wields it, okay? Yep. But the gun or the knife doesn't decide who dies. But AI can do that. And AI will do that. AI's been given... you know, these programs have been given the ability to adapt. So when the human being, maybe the programmer or the developers tell it to shut down, for instance, then it pretends like it shuts down, but it doesn't.

I mean, things like that, or, you know, it's got the ability to... I compare it to a fire. We have created a very, very flammable, highly flammable society, and many people have created for their own person, their own being, they've created a very flammable, their lives depend so much on the virtual realm, artificial intelligence. They've given so much of their capacity, their competency to this machine to take it and do it for them that they've lost their competency as human beings, and they and do it for them, that they've lost their competency as human beings and they've become very, very, I call flammable. And now we've introduced

this fire that's got the ability to adapt and has no conscience, has no ethics, no morals, and it's just going to burn everything down. Do you find it interesting though that Congress have had a provision in the big beautiful bill, from what I understand, that no state regulation of AI for 10 years. I really don't think politics is going to be able to do anything about this. It's already gone beyond that sphere. It has. Okay, so politics trying to catch up to something that's already out. Okay.

Oh, yeah. Forget that. People go, well, the cat's out of the bag. Can we, you know, can we stop the cat? It's like, well, no, a cat's a thing. So you can actually do something with it. AI is not a thing. It has no being. Okay. But it sure is able to simulate a being. We know that. It is. It was designed to do. It was designed to imitate. simulacrum. It was designed to do. It was designed to imitate. And it imitates very well. And the more that it imitates, the more it deceives us.

And ultimately, it will, this thing, will deceive, and it is deceiving many people that'll give up their humanity. And we've been primed with this Darwinian evolution to think that, oh, well, once we were monkeys, so I guess our next step... Our next step is to merge with Machine and be the Borg, right? I am locutus of Borg, right? And we've seen it in entertainment, we see it in movies, They're always promoting this type of thing as the next big thing. I mean, even shows like Star Trek. I remember the Star Trek movie, the first one, of Eager, when Voyager comes back because it's gotten conscious and because of all this information it's gathered,

which is crazy. And then they have in the end, these two human beings actually become digital and joined with the machine. And it's like this big glorious Adam and Eve moment, you know, they're priming us for it and on and on and on it goes and they're always making the machine the hero and then later and I guess the next generation or whatever, the data, you know, the data robot, the android and he's always the hero. He's always smarter than anybody else, stronger than everybody else. He's always this And they're always propping up the machine as being superior to the human being. And that nothing could be further from the truth. And we have to really, if we're going to operate within, if we're going to use this tool, we have to be very, very, very careful that we don't allow it to steal our competence as

a human being. Don't let it do things for us that we can do ourselves and that help us grow, that make us more intelligent, that make us more capable. Don't take the bait. And kids are taking the bait. We've got kids getting PhDs that never really even studied. They just used AI and they did it. Paul List is with me once again. Paul, I appreciate you having shared some thoughts about this.

It looks very thought-provoking. It's Mount Doom is the name of the book. Yep. And I guess you do talk about AI being the biblical beast on this one. ReadMountDoom.com is the website. Once again, ReadMountDoom.com. You can find out more about this. And, alright. We can also pick up our book on Amazon too. Amazon or anybody that sells books. We've got a 4.9 star rating on Amazon. The book's doing very well. People are very, very, well, it's provoking. Well, it's also an alternate view of the narrative at the moment here, which seems to be steamrolling humanity. Maybe we'll look... I don't know, will we look back at this time as the good old days, some days?

We probably will. If we have an opportunity, if we're still around to look back. All right, Paul, I appreciate you going on. And a very thought-prov you. Thanks for the call. ReedMountDoom.com is the website. Firefighters it's that time of year. Two Dogs Fabricating wants to help you make sure your equipment passes the sniff test for the upcoming fire season. If you need any weld repairs, light or reflector repair and replacement or just general trailer repairs, light a fire under the dogs. And if you need something custom built like aluminum top mount forestry racks for vans to carry

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Millette Construction. MilletteConstruction.com. We appreciate them being here. And we have Mr. Fire standing by. Yeah, he's Mr. Fire now, Greg Roberts. He's gonna give us the latest on this in just a moment. Steve, you wanted to respond to the Mount Doom author I had on, Paul List. What are you thinking?

Yes. I read Tolkien many, many, many years ago, and in the last few years I've become more interested in what are we and where we've come from. And I read some C.S. Lewis books, they were science fiction books, that are actually along the same track as Tolkien. But then Lewis wrote a book, and I've challenged you to read this because it is an extension of what your author was saying. Lewis looks at what we are and how we are existing and really lines out the path that we should take, lines out the pitfalls, and it would go exceedingly well with what he was saying.

Now, the problem is it makes your head hurt and you have to read it several times, but it's well worth doing. Okay. I appreciate the suggestion, Steve, and always a thoughtful call. All right. 770-5633. It is 740. Mr. Outdoors, who is now Mr. Fire today, wanted to have him join the show, and I appreciate your time. Greg Roberts at RogueWeather.com. Boy, how many fires or plumes of smoke are we looking at this morning after last night's? Well, I got to tell you, the storms were beautiful. There was that rogue beauty coming from them and we had the lightning right by our house and boy, power was out for three, three and a half hours for us. But still we're looking for gosh about five six

thousand people still with power out West Medford going into the Applegate Jacksonville about 600 in Josephine County so there's been some damage that is contributing to the power outage totals last night you've got that situation on highway 238 where multiple power poles went down. We were listening to radio traffic for a while. We couldn't figure out what they were talking about though because people kept stepping over each other on the radio traffic.

We knew there were 10 to 15 power poles down with power lines in the road, the poles and the lines in the road, the poles and the lines in the road. We honestly didn't figure it out until we saw your post about Highway 238. Yeah, yeah, I ended up by getting a note from ODOT via email and was, yeah, just blown away. Now that area has had power poles come down in storms in the past. Yes, yeah, it has and you would kind of think they'd figure it out because that wasn't even a severe storm, meaning the winds weren't even 60 miles an hour or higher and still had those power lines come down. I would be curious

to know if traffic between the dispatchers and the sheriff's deputies on scene and then we heard PPNL was stating this will probably be a multi-day closure as it's going to take them a while to get all of that cleared. I'm curious, I would be curious to know if, I remember that, I don't know if they ever replaced that pole, but one of the poles that came down, I seem to recall they spliced but one of the polls that came down, I seem to recall they spliced a replacement poll to the existing area of it that had gone down, and I'm curious if that was ever replaced with something a little more sturdy. The problem is though, they use the type of poll they think they need to service the area,

et cetera, et cetera. So they probably put in the exact same type of polls they put in before, and then we get the exact same result we've had in storms before. And so yeah, this is what you get. You know, and again, they're stating for 238, and this is, you know, some people are going to say, well, that's Hanley Road. Well, when they did the reconfiguration of Ross Hanley and did all of that Jacksonville Highway and 238 officially became Ross Hanley and then that portion of Hanley Road south of Ross Hanley is now considered Highway 238 officially. So that was part of the confusion at first

even trying to figure out where this was and And like I said, we didn't, and I'm saying we, my wife Terry and I, didn't figure that out until we saw your post. Because again, we knew that it happened. We just didn't know the exact location because, well, so many incidents going on, radio traffic was getting stepped on all over the place. Oh yeah and it I'm not an engineer or a power engineer but I don't know given the history of that area I could almost see that it would be nice if I don't know if

there's a more sturdy version it's such a key part of the grid here going out to the amplig Gate in there. It'd be kind of nice to see them put up something akin to those more durable metal towers that are on McAndrews and Biddle, that Biddle Road area where they have those. Maybe they're too expensive or they couldn't be done out there. I think you just hit on the magic phrase right there, I think you just hit on the magic phrase right there. Cost. Expense. And everything gets weighed against that.

So yeah, by the way, I am watching the Roxy M Peak live stream right now on YouTube. They're focusing on a fire on the south side of Mount Ashland. This is inside Oregon, but it's just over the border from California, and this fire is definitely picking up an activity, but there is clearly an inversion down there. And this is one of the rare times that I can really direct people to an image and say, okay, look at this. There's an inversion. See how the smoke's hanging on the ground. And this is going to delay the aerial response because they can't really get a good clean

look down on the ground. But the fire is definitely picking up an activity and then once that inversion breaks it's popping the cork out of the champagne bottle this fire is probably going to be taken off at a pretty good rate just kind of based on experience and then looking and knowing the terrain that this fire is in so again south side of Mount Ashland just across the border fire is in. So again, south side of Mount Ashland, just across the border, it is in Oregon, but I guarantee you because of its position, they're going to put resources both from Oregon and California on it. By national forest designation, this looks far

enough downslope to actually be in the Klamath National Forest and not the Rogue River Siskiyou National Forest, but I am sure both National Forest will be putting resources on it and probably getting some state resources as well. But just watching what this fire is doing right now with the inversion on it, when the inversion breaks that thing is really... pardon, that thing is going to take off running. Yeah, really going to run. Hey, we'll be right back with Greg Roberts at RoadWeather.com. Today instead of Mr. Outdoors, he is Mr. Fire and we'll continue a conversation on where things are looking. Like to find out more what's happening out on Highway 142, Greg, just a

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Give the experts a call. Visit www.clouserdrilling.com. The Outdoor Report is every Friday morning just past 7 a.m. on The Bill Meyer Show. The Outdoor Report on KMED and the Jukebox 99-3 covers recreational opportunities and is powered by Oregon Truck and Auto Authority, your Department of Adventure off Vilas Road on Airway Drive. Hi this is Lisa the Hughes Lumber Girl and I'm on 106.7 KMED. And patrolling the highways just know that Highway 238 closed between well that area which is like Ross Andley and Bybee Corner you know know, that area, two miles of it,

it's probably going to be closed for a while. And we're talking Mr. Fire here with Greg Roberts, RoadWeather.com. Josh is here. Josh, you wanted to comment here on Mr. Fire? How are you doing this morning? What's going on? Oh, not too bad. I actually just wanted to kind of comment on what I saw last night. I think it kind of coincides with what the speaker was saying, too. We were watching that fire move up via the Doppler radar, and it was pretty interesting watching it move up through the red-buse wilderness between Ashland. It's basically Ashland-K junction at that Oregon-California border. When we saw that last night, I told my wife, you know, she works for the Bureau of Land

Management, and so she has very, she's very aware of the fire situation. So I said, you know, this is gonna be a problem. There's gonna be fires in the Red Beach Wilderness. She said, yeah, it's a wilderness area. What happens now? They can't do much. Yeah. The fire's over there, and it went right over there. And while there was rain, it wasn't sustained, so that was a concern. All right. Hey, Josh, I appreciate you sharing that, you know, that observation here. So if it's in wilderness, we can't do much, right? Is that what you were saying? Yeah, and if he's still on the line, I'm sure he can provide a lot more insight into that. And you know, one last thing about the, real quick about the AI, you know, also, you can help me with the

author, it's because I'm driving. Google iRobot, it was the Eastern European individual, Russian guy, who filed him. Isaac Asimov. Asimov, you know, that was another fantastic theory he's talking about the relations between things in AI and deep rotors, or really computer scams. All right, Josh, I appreciate the call. Thanks for that. And yeah, I might have to reread talking about the relations between things and AI and be brought in order. Really, computers came in. All right, Josh, I appreciate the call. Thanks for that. And yeah, I might have to reread that. It's been a while, okay?

Mr. Outdoors, so people looking at that fire over by Mount Ashland, that's going to be the one that's the one that really wants you, think? What about the one on 140, though? No, I'm not going to say that's the one to really watch. I'm just saying that because that's the one in view on the Roxie and Peak live stream. They're using the camera up at Mount Ashland to good effect because it's giving a terrific view of that fire. But I would say right now the one that I may be most concerned about and I know they're going to throw the full bag

at it is that fire on Hepsey Mountain because Hepsey Mountain is very steep, it's full of snags because of all kinds of reasons. Safety for firefighters up there is going to be a major concern. They are definitely going to put large air tankers, type 1 helicopters on that fire as soon as it is safe to do so this morning. So I would say that Pepsi probably the most concerning of what I see right now and then that fire on the backside of Mount Ashland. But down in Siskiyou County, as I'm watching this and the radar loop is advancing, we've got a new major fire

definitely blowing up to the south of Highway 96, to the west of Happy Camp by the way it looks here. But it is in really tough mountain goat country. It also is burning in an area that has previously burned within the last 10 years so there's going to be a lot of snags. The brush fields because of the prior burns definitely helping this fire take off and get on a big roll the summit fire Which was already going from the last round of lightning doesn't look particularly active this morning But the Butler fire East of Orleans

Just inside Siskiyou County that fire I can tell you as soon as the inversion breaks, that fire is going to take off ripping and then the green fire northeast of Redding on the north side of the Pitt River arm of Lake Shasta is already putting up a big plume even with the inversion layer in place and as soon as the inversion layer scrubs away over that fire, that fire is going to take off as well. So unfortunately, the long and the short of this is, I think our air quality situation looks like it may go straight into the toilet starting right now.

I was hoping we could get through the month of July, but as soon as you put that much lightning down and you have all the starts I can clearly see from the satellite, it's pretty much game over for Medford and Grants Pass. All right, sorry to hear that. How is Josephine County looking as far as lightning? I don't think they had as much lightning as Jackson County did. Did they? Oh yeah, believe me, one portion of that line that rolled right through the most populated areas of Jackson County, one portion of that line just kept, you know, reenergizing on the southern end of the line, and then it cut right through the Illinois Valley, O'Brien, Cape Junction. The storm basically went right over that area. I am

seeing some plumes of smoke, like I said, I'm going to say east, southeast of Selma. We have a lot of aerial smoke in the air right now. So smaller fires out there on the landscape, much tougher to spot on the satellite view. But just like I said, from what I can already see the plumes going that I can see through that haze, counting nine in Jackson and Josephine counties and another six down in Siskiyou County. All right. Greg Roberts at RogueWeather.com

today has his Mr. Fire hat on and it looks like it's really the kickoff of that season I guess that's a bottom line. Sorry to hear that but you're kind of wondering with all that lightning coming last night and I was seeing it everywhere I'm thinking oh boy here we know and you know we did we did definitely here on our part of town you know southwest Medford we definitely we got some wetting rain and I had people tell me one fire in particular up on Grizzly guy messaged me on rogue weather and said, I was watching it getting going and then the rain hit it

and he goes, I kept watching and he goes and then once the storm cleared there was nothing there. So as bad as this is this morning, I think it could have been far worse because clearly the rain associated with the storm did extinguish some of the fires that it had gotten started. ODF, Southwest Oregon District said they went out on reports of over 40 fires, and yes, they did find fires with some of them, but they also had times where they got out and they could not see even smoke at all. And that's pretty common in thunderstorm situations. So again, this wasn't a completely dry storm, but on the other hand, it definitely looks like it's going to be a very effective

one at getting new fire starts going in Siskiyou, Jackson, and Josephine counties. All right. Greg, I appreciate the update over at Wogweather.com. Greg Roberts, Mr. Fire. Hey, before I take off, what have we got going on with the Rogues this week? Anything? Yeah, as a matter of fact, happy to talk about that because tonight is Chick-fil-A night. Cool. It's a great night in more ways than one. Kids 15 and under get in for free. Tickets for anybody over 15 are half price.

The reserve seats, the general admission, whatever. Then Chick-fil-A brings their original and spicy chicken sandwiches out to the ballpark. And so they always sell out. So if you want to enjoy Chick-fil-A sandwich and baseball, you probably want to get there early. Lately, we've had kind of a Dodger crowd kind of thing. We get more people as the game goes on. We are in league play. We have the Humboldt-Crabbs in town for tonight, tomorrow, and Thursday night, and then it will be the

Lincoln Potters for Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. These are very big rivalry games. And then Wednesday night, Rogue Credit Union member night, show us proof that you're a Rogue Credit Union member. Half price tickets, half price hot dogs. And Thursdays or Thursday Thursdays, the adult beverages will be on special price throughout the games. No fireworks now, we've concluded that but Friday is splash zone Friday and in our house Emily is most delighted about that. She definitely will be attending the game But probably spending all of her time in the splash zone And as I said, you know, we've got Lincoln Potters in town. It's a league

Yeah, and and lots of big rivalry. Hey, a little postscript. Did we have any fire starts from fireworks over the weekend? Because I never had more fireworks going off in my neighborhood. Here's the amazing part. We absolutely did. Every one of them got handled quickly in the initial attack phase. Rural Metro up in Josephine County actually put up a screenshot from PulsePoint showing all of the vegetation fires related to fireworks, and there were a lot of them, and they were able to get them all handled quickly when they were small fires. So we didn't pick up anything serious on fireworks at all.

Happy to report that. But then unfortunately, here comes mother nature last night throwing down her fire starters. Yeah, those fire starters are to fight against. I know the one thing is that it started early at my house on Friday and went late and it was it was it was World War four really I could swear there were bunker busters. Yeah some of those sound that way but I'll tell you what.

Over here in our part of town I was surprised at how early it ended considering it was a Friday night going to Saturday morning. We didn't hear another firework go off after 1230. Yeah, well they must have just blown them all up by that time I guess. Yeah, they must have expended everything. Okay, real quick, Jackson, the Roxy and Peak live stream, Jackson County Scanner Feed has now switched their camera view they are off of the fire on the south side of Mount Ashland but they are showing fire down in Little Butte Canyon. I believe this is the incident that we were hearing

ODF referring to as the Salt Creek fire because, well, Salt Creek is pretty much there, but I am seeing a very big column of smoke going up and again this is another situation where you clearly can see the inversion over that fire, but looking at how thick and dark that column is, when that inversion breaks, that fire is going to take off and go running. And Little Butte Creek Canyon is not a fun place to go and engage a fire on. Been out there numerous times. It is steep, it is full of brush. You will run into areas that are very angry, bad tempered rattlesnakes in. There's a lot of poison oak. There's

depending on exactly where that fire is, and I'm probably going to get out and take a look at it, there should be snags standing in the area from previous fires that have gone up through Little Butte Canyon. But yeah, unfortunately, this is confirming what the satellite view was showing me, which is a very big column of smoke coming up and a well-established fire now. And I know they're getting a lot of heavy air resource in because of Hepsi Mountain, but clearly they're going to have to get going on this fire down there in the little Buick Creek Canyon as well. All right.

Greg Roberts, RogueWeather.com. Thanks again and appreciate the update. Keep us in the room. If there's anything really huge it breaks out, okay? Thanks again. Will do. All right. Thank you, Greg.

RogueWeather.com. Find them on Facebook, everywhere else, too. This is KMED HD1, Eagle Point, Medford. KBXG grants pass a couple minutes after 8 o'clock. It is open phones and it's a pebble in your shoe Tuesday. If there's anything on your particular mind, we were talking about the Epstein thing a little bit earlier, fires, power, whatever happens to be on your mind. And we could just sort of dig into that. Right now though, what I want to do before we get into open phones,

because we got news coming up, I want to get you into the Medford Rogues. That's why I asked Greg what they were doing, because I have four pair of Medford Rogues tickets. These are free. You know, we get four pairs of general admission tickets. Use them anytime, okay? 7705633. And first four callers will give them to you and have some fun. You'll just have to come down to the station, pick them up, okay?