Gray Matters Radio With Michael Devine

Silverthorne has been great to us but at some point we have to go home and this episode is our farewell. We start off by welcoming future Olympian Kaitlyn Adams into the Gray where she lays down the gauntlet by boldly declaring she will be in the 2022 Winter Olympics & her intention to destroy the label of "being good for a girl". Next up in our finale is our good friend Linzee Vito who talks about competitiveness being a necessity in every family. Last but not least, Mike and Dom invite Silverthorne Railjam organizers Kevin Sayler & Teddy Goggin back into The Gray to give their final thoughts about the event and to discuss what to expect for next year. Gray Matters Radio with Michael DeVine is a proud member of The Reporters Network family of podcasts. Listen to new episodes of Gray Matters Radio With Michael DeVine every Monday.

The longer we are in Silverthorne, the more we begin to realize how special of a place it really is. This episode is a best of compilation of the Silverthorne Rail Jam featuring the residents and organizers of the town of Silverthorne.We get things started when event organizers Kevin Sayler & Zach Griffon dropped by the studio to talk about the rail jam, what the sport of snowboarding means to them, and why Z Griff carries a samurai sword with him. Next up we have event organizer and USASA free style ski coach Teddy Goggin stop by to talk about year 2 of the event and the psychology behind coaching future olympic athletes. Then we have event coordinator for the city of Silverthorne Sydney Schwab stop by to discuss why the town has gotten behind the rail jam and how the importance of community guides many of the events for the town of Silverthorne. Last but not least we close things off with a post event interview with Kevin Sayler and Teddy Goggin discussing their thoughts about the event and even bigger

The longer we are in Silverthorne, the more we begin to realize how special of a place it really is. Kicking things off in Part 2 is Sami Spezio and Dominic Buccilla of Cannagroup where they talk about why they have gotten involved in the Silverthorne Rail Jam and what the state of Colorado means to their business plans. Next up we have event organizer and USASA free style ski coach Teddy Goggin stop by to talk about year 2 of the event and the psychology behind coaching future olympic athletes. Last but surely not least, we have event coordinator for the city of Silverthorne Sydney Schwab stop by to discuss why the town has gotten behind the rail jam and how the importance of community guides many of the events for the town of SilverthorneGray Matters Radio with Michael DeVine is a proud member of The Reporters Network family of podcasts. Listen to new episodes of Gray Matters Radio With Michael DeVine every Monday.

Join us for part 1 of our 3 part series live at the Silverthorne Rail Jam Presented By Arapahoe Basin. We get things started when event organizers Kevin Sayler & Zach Griffon dropped by the studio to talk about the rail jam, what the sport of snowboarding means to them, and why Z Griff carries a samurai sword with him. Michael and Dom are recovering from a...ahem...busy first night in Silverthorne. Last but not least, we have 2022 & 2026 future Olympic snowboarders Makai & Callum Gelvezon talking about how sibling rivalry on the slopes fuels their success.As always I am joined by the Armchair QB himself Bill Reed to help keep me in-check and firmly in The Gray. Gray Matters Radio with Michael DeVine is a proud member of The Reporters Network family of podcasts. Listen to new episodes of Gray Matters Radio With Michael DeVine every Monday.

In case you have been living under a rock the past week, you may have heard something about the Mueller Report being delivered to the Attorney General & the findings did not implicate President Trump of any wrong doing. Even before the report was released people were salivating about what it would say but count me as one person who was thinking the report would not make a difference at all. Why do you ask? Simple, regardless of what that report said each side was going to reject the data and evidence and continue to believe the same thing.Since it came out that Trump did not do anything wrong, I knew that Democrats were going to say the report was fixed or still somehow believe that he was guilty. If the opposite happened, then Republicans would have rejected the evidence and said that it was a fake witch hunt & failed attempt to impeach the president.That is the world that we live in...a post facts world where people deny evidence that contradicts what they want to believe. We literally live in a wor

Anybody that knows me well enough understands that skiing is one of my passions in life. It isn't just because I am an adrenaline junkie (which I am) but more because it is the only sport that gives me the ability to push myself beyond my comfort zone and whether I succeed or bite it hard, I grow exponentially as a person.Snow sports is a unique sport that you have to embrace failing as a necessary part of getting better. If you are afraid of failure, then you will never do anything to push yourself and will never learn what you need to learn to get better. It is something so pure and so simple but something any snowboarder or skier will tell you you must learn how to be okay with. This dynamic is very personal to me because I hear in my office every day a generation of children who are so scared of failing that they will avoid doing anything that might give them a chance of failure.I don't know about you, but in the world that I live in it is impossible to grow as a human being and get ahead in life if you a

I remember in college sitting around with my friends and talking about what it would be like if marijuana were legalized. Most of our visions centered around going to the local mini-mart and buying a pack of Marlboro Green. How far off could we have been? Just go to any state where marijuana has been legalized for medical or recreational use and you will quickly see that this business is not only here to stay, but whoever was able to get in on it is going to make lot's of money.But with all of that money has come the very corporate practices that most marijuana patients/enthusiasts are completely against...in fact the yin to their yang. In my own home state of Ohio, we had a legalization bill voted down not because the people didn't want to legalize it, but rather the people behind the bill wanted to have a monopoly where they were the only ones allowed to grow and sell it.Fast forward a few years and Ohio passed medical marijuana legislation but ask anyone who wanted to open their own dispensary and they qui

Ever since Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez unveiled her Green New Deal, politicians and pundits have been either saying it is a communist trojan horse or progressive thinking that will save the planet. In my years as a therapist, whenever you see that big of a spread between people's interpretation of something you know the truth lies somewhere in the middle. With something as complicated as the Green New Deal, we decided that if we were going to take this to The Gray, we needed someone who actually understands history and macro economic theory. So we once again enlist the knowledge of The Professor, Richard DeVine to help us understand the economic feasibility of the Green New Deal and what the effects of a 80% tax rate would be on people making more than 10 million dollars. Since The Professor actually lived through real communism during the 60s, we asked him to weigh in on any fear that he has about The Green New Deal and what he really thinks of the progressive wing of the Democratic party.Joining me in the stud

Anybody that has worked in the addiction industry long enough knows very well that the most important part of treatment/recovery isn’t treatment itself but rather the aftercare. That may surprise many of you considering how much emphasis we have on treatment programs and the costs associated with treatment, but the truth is that real recovery begins and ends with the plan after they finish treatment.It makes all the sense in the world if you think about it because many of us look at addiction as one part genetics and one part the enviroment someone lives in. How successful could someone be with staying sober if once they get out of treatment they go right back into the same environment that helped contribute to their addiction to begin with? It is almost impossible.While people who come from a family of means have it much easier to change their environment, people who tend to be poorer and live in lower socioeconomic areas have much less control over changing their environment. That is pretty obvious but you

It doesn't take a rocket scientist to realise that America is hopelessly polarized right now. America is stuck in a bad marriage between Democrats and Republicans and they are putting the children (i.e. us) in the middle. As a result each side is so dug in that they are waging a gang style war using rhetoric and division as their weapon of choice.While their tactics are great for votes and ratings, the collateral damage to the country is painfully clear. How many families and friendships have been torn apart because of politics the past 6 years? How many people do you know have talked about how stressed, angry, & anxious they are about our current political climate?If that wasn't bad enough, just this week we had two incidents where we had a US Coast Guard Officer planing a terrorist attack on liberal media personalities and politicians and we also had a college student beaten up at UC Berkley because they were recruiting for their college conservative group.Things are not good and something bad is going

For far too long, the short comings of our mental health and addiction industries were only talked about in the counselor's office. Usually it was a conversation with a parent discussion their frustration at insurance not approving treatment, them finding the right program but them not taking insurance and not being able to afford it, or them struggling to fund treatment again when it had previously failed multiple times over. These conversations weren't just with clients, but counselors and other mental health professionals also quietly lamenting about their dissatisfaction with the treatment industry and often times the downright shady practices that many people in this industry are on a daily basis. So why is it that you are really only hearing about this right now? That is because most people complaining about it are people that actually work for a treatment facility or an insurance company and them speaking out against it means jeopardizing their career. Not only that, but many clinicians rly on referral

One of the things that gets under my skin more than anything is hearing politicians & media personalities talking about what is wrong with healthcare when they clearly have no idea what the hell they are talking about. They come up with solutions that are either too simplistic or radical with neither having any clue of working let alone getting passed. The problem that creates this issue is that too many clinicians or people who work in healthcare are too afraid to lose their job or lose clients if they come out and start speaking out publically about healthcare. In that vacuum the only voices we hear are people who don’t have a clue and/or are biased because they are getting paid by lobbyist to keep the system in chaos which ensures that things stay the same.The only way any of this changes is if people who actually work in healthcare actually start speaking up and that is exactly what we are doing here at Gray Matters. In Part 2 of our 3 part series on healthcare we attempt to have a hard conversation

A Mount Carmel Hospital doctor has been making the national news this month but for all of the wrong the reasons. While the motives surrounding how a doctor might over-prescribe Fentanyl has not been discovered, the press has been all over the hospital system, asking how this could happen. Th local and national press have been asking the whodunit type tabloid click bait questions but there are ever bigger questions that nobody is asking and more important, nobody is connecting how what is going on at this hospital is actually just a symptom of a much bigger problem in our healthcare system across this country.If we are truly going to have a debate about healthcare in this country then we need to actually look at what the real problems are and our elected officials have not been honest in explaining that to the public. If they would be honest, then we would all realize that none of their solutions work and that the only purpose of their rhetoric is to distract and divide us so the system stays the same. What a

Maybe it was a 30 plus day government shutdown, maybe it was our president claiming that 800,000 federal workers were Democrats, maybe it was Nancy Pelosi using a shutdown to play politics and refuse to negotiate, or maybe it was Wilber Ross saying that he didn’t understand why not receiving a paycheck for over a month would make people go to a foodbank. Whatever it was, this shutdown was clear evidence that our government is full of people who put party above country and have absolutely no idea what real Americans are going through.I would say that the shutdown was the canary in the coal mine dying but that canary died years ago. In all reality the shutdown was a zombie canary that has died several times over and finally was beheaded like in The Walking Dead. But should we really be surprised that all of this is happening? What do we expect is going to happen when 50% of our government is made up of millionaires and Trumps team is made up of multi-millionaires and billionaires. We are talking about people wh

One of the things that has really bothered me about this whole border wall induced government shutdown…besides the actual shutdown…is the fact that we are shutting down the government and making immigration out to be the gravest threat to our existence when other much more grave threats are going on right now and nobody is talking about them.We have discussed the issue of substance abuse a lot on this show but I wanted to hit the growing issue of the rash of pregnant mothers who are struggling with addiction. What makes this problem even worse is that nobody is really talking about it. What is even worse is that I knew that I would have to get peoples attention in other ways to care about this topic besides the awful details of what it is like for a baby to be born with NAS or Neo-natal Abstinence Syndrome. The numbers of children being born with NAS have quintupled in the last 5 years.So why would anybody care about this besides the obvious and how does this relate to the government shutdown? Well, Medicaid

If there is one thing that we can agree upon as Americans, it would be that our country is so hopelessly polarized that we can’t even pass a budget anymore without shutting the government down. Instead of doing what is best for the country our politicians are doing what is best for their party at the expense of real Americans. I guess that is what we deserve…allowing ourselves to elect millionaires who have zero clue what it is like to struggle or live paycheck to paycheck.We should have seen this coming, but like a frog in boiling water we didn’t see it until it was too late. So the question is what do we do about it? The obvious answer is to throw all these bums out but even if we did that, the cancer (i.e. lobbyist, dark money groups, etc.) is still there and would infect even the most idealistic democratic or republican candidates. So maybe we need to have a real discussion of whether it is time to have a legitimate centrist 3rd political party?The reality is that it’s great in theory but if it were easy

I know this week’s episode is going to raise some debate but if The Gray didn’t take on the responsibility to discuss it then we shouldn’t even be on the air to begin with. For this week’s episode we take on the border wall and decide whether a border wall is the most pressing need in America and whether Trump was right to shut down the government in order to get it. As always we veer far off course in our discussion but always end up exactly where we need to in order to have the discussion that needed to be had on this topic.Before listening to the show the one question that I want everyone to ask themselves is what are the things that they worry about the most in their lives and the lives of their family members. Not what the media tells you but what you personally worry about the most and why you have that concern. That answer will serve as the basis for our show and our exploration into whether the wall should be built or more specifically when the wall should be built.This is a hot button issue that will

Damn, here I thought we would take the Christmas week off from our show and would be able to do a nice fun New Year’s show but apparently this administration can’t take a break for the holiday. Literally so much happened over the Christmas break that we couldn’t even get to everything that happened in one show.For our New Year’s episode, we decided to catch up on the weeks news and tackle the General Mattis resignation, John Kelly firing, and explore whether Trump’s decision to pull our troops out of Syria and Afghanistan was a good idea. Naturally if we were going to explore middle-east military strategy and history we needed to bring in our resident history correspondent Richard “The Professor” DeVine to keep our facts straight. As always, I am accompanied by my trusty co-host Bill “Billy Ray” Reed of “The Arm Chair Quarterback” to keep me sane and on task.So while you are cleaning your house for your New Year’s Eve party or just getting ready to go out, tell Alexa or Siri to put on Gray Matters Radio in th

As a counselor who has worked with families and clients on the Autism Spectrum for over 18 years, I have seen it go from a disorder that people have no clue what it is to almost every person knowing at least one person they are close to having it or being affected by it. One would think seeing the Autism rates jumping from 1/10,000 in 2000 to 1/59 in 2018 would make voters demand their politicians take action in making sure every American has access to quality treatment…but I guess most of us didn’t get the message and instead are too pre-occupied with border walls and whether Donald Trump is a racist.The sad truth is that while people privately will express concern about autism and whether their child will be born with it, politically we seem to get caught up in the tabloid BS that out media and politicians are peddling. The sad truth is that quality early intervention therapy can cost upwards of $60,000 a year and much of that is not covered by your insurance and partially covered by your state Medicaid pro

As a counselor, I have a unique perspective on the world. I have this perspective because I get to talk to people from every walk of life, political party, socio-economic status, religion, etc. I would argue that no other profession has a better feel for the heart beat of a nation than counselors. Our only goal is to help so people have a tendency to be honest with us and check all of the BS out of the door.What I hear people talking about is not fear of illegal immigrants, terrorism. or globalism but rather fear of their children getting addicted to drugs, being depressed and committing suicide, getting bullied, fear of the influence of the internet, being taken advantage of by sexual predators, etc. That is what people worry about and who would blame them? Every year suicide & drug abuse rates go up and despite new awareness and money going towards these programs the numbers keep rising.Just look at these statistics, according to the CDC suicide rates are growing at their highest rates and in 2016 alone