7-23-25 - 6am - Jon Caldara Filling In - Coca-Cola & Sugar and Banning Plastic

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Good morning, Dragon, And will it be Michael, Ryan, Jimmy
or John whoever you're hanging with today. Dragon. I know
you'll do a great job. John. So Dragon's gonna do

(00:21):
a good job. Is that what I hear? What about me?
You know I'm gonna do good well, it'll be the
first time if I do. Hey, it's John Caldera. No, no, no,
mister Brown is still down. The Brown is down. He
still has man cold. So he's he's curled up with

(00:44):
a teddy bear. Wife is kissing his forehead, patting him
on on the top of the head, going there there,
little bunny, and he's he's on the mend. He's on
the mend. But kitty warm, kitty ball of so kity

(01:04):
what kitty per per per h. If you don't get
that joke, someone will also explain it to you. Give
me a call. Three oh three seven one three eight
two five five seven one three talk. Let's just start
off with this because I remember what has become the

(01:28):
classic marketing mistake called new Coke. Do you remember new Coke?
When was that? Was it in the eighties or early nineties.
I'm trying to remember when when Coke changed its formula
Coca Cola, which had been around for one hundred years.

Speaker 2 (01:50):
New coke was introduced April twenty third, nineteen eighty five.

Speaker 1 (01:55):
Nineteen eighty five. I remember it like yesterday, and immediately
immediately it was rejected. It was it was a victory
for Pepsi. So Pepsi interestingly has one goal, or at

(02:16):
least they used to it. That was their stated mission
was beat Coca Cola. That was it. That was the goal.
How we're going to beat Coca Cola. It was a
good mission, their big, hairy, audacious goal. And then one day,
seemingly out of nowhere, Coca Cola announces it's brand new formula.
Because if you've been the number one soft drink for

(02:39):
one hundred years and the number two is trying to
get you, what do you want to do? You want
to mess with perfection? And they changed their formula. They
switched out their regular cane sugar that they used to
sweeten it and put in corn syrup, which is much cheaper,

(03:02):
I believe, And basically everything we drink that sweet or
eat that sweet has corn syrup. It's sugar, but it's
corn syrup sugar because it's cheap and it's everywhere, and
we are addicted to it, absolutely addicted to it and instantly.

(03:23):
I mean you think bud Light giving giving that trans
guy some some beer. You think that was a big
marketing mistake. Yeah, it was. I think New Coke was
even even bigger. Interesting yesterday, do you.

Speaker 2 (03:43):
Wanta had fun little facts about New Coke?

Speaker 1 (03:45):
Please? All right?

Speaker 2 (03:46):
So, introduced in April of nineteen eighty five, it only
lasted just a few months. They went back to Coca
Cola Classic, that's what they called it. They called it
back in July and nineteen eighty five. Oddly enough, New
Coke was still around until two thousand and two. They

(04:08):
named it Coke two in nineteen ninety.

Speaker 1 (04:13):
But if you get a coke today, it is corn syrup,
I think correct. Yeah, so the Coca Cola you order
a coke today, you're going to get what we called
in nineteen eighty five new coke, right.

Speaker 2 (04:26):
The coke that we get today, Yeah, we get the
it's the Coca Cola Classic. It's the original formula, but
really with the with the corn syrup versus the sugar.

Speaker 1 (04:36):
Right, so's it's the more recent version. Because on Tuesday yesterday,
Coca Cola said it would add a cane sugar version
to its lineup, and you've seen this. You can buy
the Mexican Coca Cola probably now with tariffs, now with

(04:57):
extra tariffs, and people like the original Coca Cola with
cane sugar. They can taste the difference. I don't know
if I can. But what I like about if you
go to a store and you see it in bottles
and it's with from Mexico, Heco and Mexico, and.

Speaker 2 (05:18):
It also does look like they started they switched from
regular sugar cane sugar to hyfractose corn syrup roughly around
that same time New Coke came around in the mid eighties.

Speaker 1 (05:29):
Right, So the New Coke, if I remember correctly, New
Coke was take out the cane sugar, put in corn syrup,
and then they had to have Classic Coke, which I
think was cane sugar again, and then Classic Coke seemed
to have disappeared somehow. That's how I remember it. And

(05:49):
now they're going to have a version that is basically
Classic coke. Is that the best way to put it?

Speaker 2 (05:57):
Classic coke prior to the New Coke debai, Yes, because
when Coca Cola Classic came back in that July of
eighty four, or excuse me, eighty five. They did keep
the high fractose corn syrup.

Speaker 1 (06:12):
Right. So, so the if I got this right, if
I got my cocaine right here. And by the way,
if they were going to call it a Coca Cola classic,
wouldn't they put cocaine in it? Because the original, the

(06:33):
original Coca Cola from you know, nineteen hundred, actually had
cocaine in it, small amount of cocaine in it. I'm
looking I'm looking at dragon, because I have any cocaine questions,
I asked, I asked a dragon. I know nothing, nothing, nothing.
There's a reason you can wake up this early in
the morning anyway, Trump who has something to say about everything?

(06:57):
They said in a social media post last week that
Coca Cola agreed to use real cane sugar in its
flagship project in the US, which had been sweetened with
high fruitose corn syrup since the nineteen eighties. Coke did
not immediately confirm the change, but promised new offerings soon,
and then yesterday the chairman said Coke will expand its

(07:21):
product range to reflect consumer interest in differentiated experiences. Well,
then it should have Coca Cola rum where you can
just buy rum and coke already. That would be great.
We appreciate the President's enthusiasm for our Coca Cola brand.
He said, We're definitely looking to use the whole toolkit

(07:45):
of available sweetening options. So apparently soda is having a
hard time. Soda is having a hard time because it's
terrible for you. It's terrable for you. But we're addicted.
We're addicted, and I still drink a lot of Coke zero.

(08:09):
I don't know about about you, but I'm trying. I'm
trying to to drink less because the diet coke is basically,
how to put it politely, an to freeze. It's It's
just I don't know what chemical content is in there
to make coke zero is better. No, they're both terrible. Gotcha. Okay,

(08:32):
let me make it clear. I'm trying to drink less
of diet coke and coke zero because it doesn't mean.

Speaker 2 (08:38):
From diet coke to coke zero that I'm making it healthy.
I'm healthy.

Speaker 1 (08:43):
Well, in the same way in my new quest to
be healthier, I've switched from M and M's to peanut Eminem's.
Oh yeah, because I'm trying to improve. You know, I
need I need, I need natural foods. I need health food.
So Pean and MS I consider to be health food.

(09:05):
I just find it pretty fascinating that, you know, this
is big, big stuff. Coca Cola and America have been there,
joined together, you know, just forever, just forever, and they're trying,
always trying to find something else. Do you remember, you're
too young. You're too young and too stupid. When I

(09:29):
was a kid here in Colorado was a Shasta. There
was some bottling plant that you could you could drink
your soda and giving these little fat bottles. You would
keep the bottles, put them back into those little metal racks,
bring the metal rack back to whatever store did it,

(09:52):
and you could buy refills. So all the bottles were
basically washed and redone and and I think it was Shasta,
if some listener knows what am I thinking of. I
thought it was kind of locally based, but it was.
It was a soda company that you bought the little bottles.

(10:14):
You bought a case of the bottles, and all the
bottles were worn, except every now and then you get
the new new bottles in. They're go oh, I got
a new bottle and then they would refill them and
put a cap back on with and with new soda.
And I thought it was a local company. Does that
ring any bells with you?

Speaker 2 (10:34):
Not me, But I'm I'm trying to scour the internet
and I'm not seeing so much right now.

Speaker 1 (10:39):
Yeah, there was Shasta, there was RC Cola. But I
thought it was kind of a local thing. And I
love the idea your local Coca Cola bottler back when
Coke would always come in bottles, and I don't care.
Glass bottles seem to be a thing.

Speaker 2 (10:56):
Yeah, you could, you could give those back, but it's
not a specific company. Looks like Coke did it, looks
like Shasta did it, looks like a number of companies
did that when it was glass.

Speaker 1 (11:07):
Yeah, And there is no better bottle than the original
Coca Cola bottle that I don't know what it is.
It's like when you when you have a scotch, you
want it in a tumbler. You don't want it in
a champagne glass. I don't know why, but it's just
taste better when it's in a when it's in a tumbler.

(11:29):
Coca Cola in the glass bottle, it just feels right
in your hand. It's just it's just perfect. I don't
know what it is. But in the same way, Cores
course would go back and forth from long necked bottles
to the little stubby bottles. I think they still use

(11:52):
for banquet and it just some people have a real
preference one way or the other. Oh, by the way,
do you know that Core's banquet beer is only brewed
in Golden So if you have a banquet beer, or
you're in Australia and you order a banquet, it came
from Colorado. Cours Light, I think, is made in several

(12:13):
different places. But you've got you've got the Rocky Mountain water,
whenever you get a whenever you get a real banquet,
which is also one hundred and fifty years old. Cores
beer is older than the state of Colorado. I mean
not the cores in Brownies refrigerator because that can't last more,

(12:38):
you know, a day. I imagine that's just just what
I'm thinking. So some Texas says the pop shop. The
pop shop is that what it was called. Back when
Colorado was tiny, we had all these weird, little great businesses. Remember,
Jolly ranchers were made here maybe they still are, and

(13:01):
they would give tours and come back with a bag
of candy Jolly ranchers. In grade school, we used to
have fights over which jolly r ancher flavor was was
the better, the better one? And it was it was
the red hots, of course, the hot ones, and you

(13:22):
got to hold on those. It was like you got
you stuck into your parents' liquor cabin. I got, I
got the hot I got the hot Jolly ranchers. This,
this is good, This is good, all right. So Americans
are traditional, are just addicted to sugar. Evolution has done

(13:45):
this to us. It's a terrible thing. It is an
addiction I have, and it is the worst, the worst,
because your body constantly craves sugar because for however long
man evolved, it was hard to get carbs, and you

(14:07):
would store your fat for all those times you could
not find something to kill or something to eat, and
so when you eat a donut, your body just goes, oh, safety, safety,
If I eat this, I will live longer. The problem
is that we now have food abundance everywhere. I don't

(14:32):
care what they say about so called food deserts. I
don't believe there are food deserts. There are people who
just don't want to eat good food. I don't know
if you have a trick to break the sugar addiction,
but it is worse than cocaine. It is worse than
sex or TV or anything else. Sugar is what we

(14:55):
humans crave, and it just so happens. It's also the
cheapest thing to make. That's why you go through the
grocery store and it's cheaper to buy pasta, which is
basically just sugar. Your body breaks it down in sugar.
So Coca Cola is America, but it's also why we're fat.

(15:21):
M so global case volumes a Coca Cola face fell
one percent last year. Juice, dairy, plant based beverages fell
four percent. Coke said sports drink volumes were down three percent.
Oh my god, we're not drinking enough sugar. One bright
spot was Coca Cola Zero, which saw case volumes grow

(15:45):
fourteen percent. Yeah, that's that's my drug of choice, I
think is Coke zero. I enjoy the Coke zero mix,
but it just tricks your body that you're getting sugar.
It's not good for you, man, it's not good for you.
All right. I just thought we'd throw that one up
there for you. If you miss your Coca Cola, it's

(16:09):
coming back. The Governor must have been listening to you
and I chatting yesterday when he dropped his plans for
his his great bridge. This is a surprise to no one.
It was. It was a silly idea and he needed

(16:32):
to get out of it, so he put on the pole.
The results of a poll that Governor Jared Polis himself
initiated to gauge support for his bridge project are in
and the public doesn't want it. All told, Governor's survey
drew nearly ninety thousand responses. I wonder how many of

(16:56):
them was it was just somebody hitting it over and
over and over again. My suspicion quite a lot.

Speaker 2 (17:04):
Supposedly, Polus had said that you could only vote once
from each device or IP, so you could vote multiple
times if you voted from your iPhone, from your desktop,
from your tablet, So maybe.

Speaker 1 (17:19):
From your watch, from your kids tablet, or maybe some
enterprising person just used an automatic VPN machine to constantly
change the IP address and vote a million times. We don't.
That's why it's it. It's so silly to say there

(17:41):
are these surveys mean anything. They don't mean anything because
they're not scientific. So out of the ninety thousand, almost
ninety four percent of them are against the proposal. Uh quote.

(18:04):
This exciting, big anniversary for our state is an opportunity
for Coloradens to celebrate together, and this survey was about
hearing exactly how we should do that. Coloradden's were clear,
and I will stop the pedestrian walkway proposal in its track,
he added, if needed, I will shame myself to the

(18:25):
Capital Plaza to prevent it from being belt God, and
I will personally intervene to assure we listened to color
Radden's feed back. Oh you're such a hero, Governor John.
It was called the Soda Shop. I remember.

Speaker 2 (18:43):
It was just a big red sign said soda Shop,
and every little bottle said soda Shop with the flavor.

Speaker 1 (18:52):
That's really cool, all right, so I'm not crazy, well,
not about this one. There was a place in Denver,
the Soda Shop, I think there was. They had these
little fist sized bottles. They were kind of fat, stubby bottles,
and you'd buy a crate of them. I think the
crate was wood. I think it was wood, and you'd

(19:14):
you'd drink the bottles, and you'd never throw away the bottle,
and you put the empty back in the crate. You
bring it down to the soda shop and you'd buy
more soda. I don't know what happened to that. Yeah, right,
that was back way back in the seventies, growing up
in Colorado. Of course, if you do that today, you

(19:38):
would be in viro. There is a place in Boulder
called Naked Foods. I misunderstood what Naked Foods was all about.
When I walked in Naked, I thought it was I
thought it was a clothing optional grocery store. It isn't
a clothing optionalcery store. Really, must you do that? Yep?

(20:10):
It's a place where you buy your stuff in jars
and then you bring back the jars. The idea of
the guy who runs the store or invested in it
was you go to a grocery store and it's just
full of plastic packaging. So in order to save the earth,
we're gonna have glass jars, and you bring the glass

(20:32):
jars back and then we fill it back up with
the food you want. Okay, I don't think that's gonna work.
I think people need their need their convenience too much.
This is why I hate, absolutely despise the bag tax.
It is the perfect example of progressive brain. I do

(20:59):
not understand regressive brain. I just know that progressive brain
wants what they want like a teenage girl, and they
just go, this is what other people should do. Today.
We're wearing green socks. Everyone should wear green socks. You
go to the grocery store and you have to pay

(21:19):
ten cents for a little plastic bag. Now, the store
can't even just give it to you. You can't do
it for gratis. They could give you ten cents, I suppose,
and you could use that to buy your plastic bag.
But everything that you buy in the grocery store comes

(21:42):
in mounds of plastic. What are you gonna buy yogurt?
It's in plastic. You gotta buy steak, it's in plastic.
You're gonna buy pasta, it's in plastic. Whatever it is,
it's in plastic. Somehow that plastic is okay for progressives,

(22:03):
but to carry it all home is wrong. It's somehow,
somehow that plastic is a bad plastic, and it is
an infinitesimal fraction of a fraction of the plastic that
you're bringing home is going to be the bag. This
is what This is what progressive brain does. What progressive

(22:28):
brain thinks is that if I force you into a
new lifestyle, you will, you will change your behavior, and
we'll we'll have a better we'll have a better planet. Now,
I won't convince you to change your lifestyle. I won't

(22:49):
go out to you and say, hey, a canvas bag
is so much better, or or a other bag is
so much better, or bringing your own is better or whatever.
I won't convince you because I don't believe in convincing you.
I believe in coercing you. All I need to do
is get you know, seven or four out of seven

(23:11):
city council members to ban plastic and then there you
have it. Or you know, fifty one out of the
one hundred legislators down at the capitol. All I need
to do is convince them to coerce you. I don't
need to convince you to change your behavior. That is
at the heart of progressives. It's also at the heart

(23:34):
of many social conservatives who will say, no, no, no,
I don't want you to gamble, So we're just going
to outlaw it so you don't do it because it's bad.
We're going to outlaw these drugs because we don't want
you to do them because it's bad. We're not going
to let you end your life sooner if you've having

(23:59):
a terrible illness, because well, we think that's bad, and
we'll make those decisions for you and we'll take away
those choices.

Speaker 3 (24:07):
That's called coercion. And plastic is just the perfect example.
Things like plastic straws. That's my favorite one.

Speaker 1 (24:17):
I think plastic straws. I went to a restaurant in Boulder,
of course, and they had a poster on the wall
showing why they don't serve plastic straws. Because because there's
a picture of a tortoise, a beautiful, huge sea turtle

(24:39):
with a straw up its nose, and because they love
ocean life and these plastic things can get into the ocean.
We are not going to let you have a plastic
straw to enjoy your new coke. It's that kind of
stuff that drives me nuts. Why, because no straw in

(25:02):
Colorado makes it to the ocean. To be really clear
about this, the Boulder restaurant that proudly says we don't
give you a straw, well, it doesn't matter, you see
where a landlocked state. Our straws either get recycled or

(25:24):
they get entuned in a landfill where there are no
sea turtles all. But they could get into the water
supply very good. They could get into the water supply.
But the water supply goes through treatment plant after treatment
plant after treatment plant on its way to the ocean.

(25:47):
The only way you are going to get a straw
from Colorado up a turtle's nose is if you fly
yourself out to the ocean, go scuba, find a turtle,
wrestle it, and shove a plastic straw up it's nose.
That is the only way it's going to happen from Colorado.

(26:08):
Maybe that argument works if there's a direct water supply
that runoff goes directly into the ocean where you live.
That's not here, But nobody wants to challenge their own
premises on this in the same way. Does does banning

(26:29):
a plastic bag really change the equation? No, it doesn't.
Or my favorite, of course is electric cars, which I
have one thank you taxpayers for subsidizing it to electric
cars save the environment. No, I see electric cars with

(26:54):
the thing that says zero emissions, zero emissions, two thirds
of all electricity in Colorado is made by fossil fuel.
You're just driving a car that, instead of being powered
by gasoline, is powered by coal or natural gas, not

(27:19):
to mention the incredible, incredible environmental damage it causes to
get the rare minerals needed to make your lithium batteries.
So are they a benefit to the earth? Not? Really?
Do they make you feel smug and superior? Absolutely? And

(27:40):
that's what being a progressive and sometimes a social conservative
is all about. Remember the flag, the emblem, the motto.
I know what's right for you. I know what you
should buy, I know what you should eat, I know
what you should drive, I know where you should live.
I know what kind of healthcare you should have. I

(28:01):
know what kind of education your kids should have. Because
we're smarter than you. Because if we weren't smarter than you,
you know what we would do. We would let you
decide these things on your own. We would let you
decide what car to drive instead of having the massive

(28:25):
subsidies and cronyism for green cars. Just so you know this,
and this one's important. I know it's a little wonky
for the morning. The one beautiful bill by the way
later on. I think in the nine o'clock hour, we're
gonna be talking to someone from the Tax Foundation about
what is actually in this one big beautiful bill. When

(28:46):
they remove the seventy five hundred dollars subsidy for electric cars,
that's not the biggest subsidy for electric cars. They just
make that part really clear. That's not the subsidy. The
subsidy is the environmental mandate on tailpipe emissions. Stick with me.

(29:06):
This is important. So Tesla and Elon Musk got wealthy
not because they sold cars, not because we give people
money to buy the cars or give them tax breaks
to build the cars, which we do. But that Ford
wants to sell their pickup truck, they need to buy

(29:28):
tailpipe emissions credits because too many of their cars from
their fleets that they build have tailpipes. So they gotta
They've got to buy credits from somebody who's got more
tailpipe emissions credits. Well, Tesla, that doesn't make a single tailpipe,

(29:50):
every car they make gets them a credit. Think about this.
The reason your Ford f ten is so expensive is
that they've got to give I don't know what it
is ten grand to Tesla to buy the credit because
your f ten has a tailpipe, has a tailpipe. That's

(30:14):
why your car is so expensive, and it's why electric
cars are so inexpensive compared to what the marketplace should
really be. Now, if they got rid of all of
these subsidies, the tax credits that Colorado gives, the tax
credits that the Feds give, the tax credits they give

(30:37):
to build the silly things in the first place, and
the tailpipe emissions credits, you would never ever buy an
electric car because the thing would be thirty percent more expensive,
maybe forty percent, I don't know. That's why it's so expensive.

(31:00):
All right, here we go. Let's take a quick breather.
I'm John kel Derek. You it right here. You're on
six thirty K.

Speaker 4 (31:05):
How good morning, John. You're speaking about the plastic bag tax. Well,
the jokes on the Democrats. I used to use a
two square foot plastic grocery bag for a sordid household chores.
Now I use a thirteen gallon kitchen trash bag, so
I'm actually using twice as much because those are about

(31:28):
five square feet, So I use twice as much plastic
thanks to the stupid Democrats.

Speaker 1 (31:35):
It's it's not it's not just that you're using a
bigger bag. If and this is why the stated, the
stated reason the left does something is not this real reason.
You know, they want to save the earth. So that's
why you're not going to use your plastic bag. Well,

(31:57):
the plastic bags that you get at the super that
they put your groceries in are remarkably thin. They're made
out of pro pain They're not made out of petroleum.
Let me say that again. They're made out of pro paine.
They're made out of natural gas, not out of oil.
So instead people w need to go and buy real

(32:18):
trash bags, which are much thicker, much harder to decompose,
made out of petroleum, not natural gas, and they're not reused.
The plastic bags that you get from the supermarket, you
use them over and over again, you pick up the
dog's poop, you put them in the trash cans at

(32:39):
your house. You use them over and over. But it's
not about the environment. It's about making sure your virtue signalings.
And now the left wants you to virtue signal at gunpoint.

(33:00):
That's all this is