7-23-25 - 7am - Jon Caldara Filling In - Virtue Signal Recycling

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hey, Dragon, is the gurly man host going to be
in today or is he still out taking care of
his tiny little man cold?

Speaker 2 (00:06):
Thanks, I'm a decider. Are you talking about John? Are
you talking about Michael?

Speaker 3 (00:10):
We're talking about Michael. I'm here. I don't have a
man cold. He has a man cold. Gotcha. Doesn't mean
I'm not a girly man. True? Yeah, these are mutually
These are not mutually exclusive. Just written about that. Hey,
I'm John Caldera. Give me a call. Three h three

(00:32):
seven one three eight two five five last hour. We
gone off on a tangent, as is our wont about
a store when I was a kid that you would
bring your empty soda bottles to and they would give
you new ones, and you know it was environmental, but

(00:53):
that wasn't the idea. It was just that your parents
were cheap and it was a cheaper way to buy soda.
And thanks to some listeners who got onto our text
line and told us it was the pop Shop, so
I looked it up online. I guess the pops Shop
is still kind of there and they're frequently asked questions.

(01:15):
The pop Shop wasn't around for a while, where did
it go? Answer the pop Shop enjoyed a good amount
of success. A good amount of success is not enough
to keep you in business. Enjoyed a good amount of
success during the seventies and early eighties as a price
busting brand. Then when the cola wars happened, dot dot

(01:37):
da actually says dot dot da. In the early nineteen eighties,
major supermarket chains began selling their own lines of value
priced pop This was a dark time for smaller companies,
who responded by further reducing their prices, making many of
these companies, including the pop Shop, didn't it wow. Turns

(02:03):
out you just can't keep a good brand down, they say.
The pop Shop began showing up in store coolers again
in two thousand and four and has since become Canada's
number one premium soft drink. Has measured by what we
don't know? Can you still return Pop Shop bottles? Times

(02:27):
have changed and recycling has become the new refillable, meaning
you'll recycle our bottles just as you do other bottles
and cans. You do recycle, don't you, It says, all right,
so the pop Shop. Somebody must have purchased the name
the pop Shop, and now you can buy pop Shop soda.

(02:52):
How many flavors do they have? Back in the day
they had a whopping twenty six flavors. That's what they say. Oh,
are my publicly traded shares from circa nineteen seventies still available?
Still valid? And what are they worth? In short, the

(03:13):
answer is no, not the pop shop relaunch under a
new articles of incorporation. The original company ceased operations and
became defunct. What did we do before the internet? How
did we know anything before the Internet? So I wasn't hallucinating,

(03:34):
It wasn't a bad assid trip. There was a place
in Denver that you could go called the pop shop
and return your bottles and get it refilled and get
new soda. And then generic soda came along Kroger Brand
or whatever, and these guys went out of business. There

(03:56):
you have it. And if it was done today, if
it was done today, instead of being a price busting,
lower price way for your cheap mom and dad to
buy you a soda, it would probably be a much
more expensive way because it would be sustainable. What is
this sustainable soda shop? We we recycle our canser No,

(04:19):
they didn't. Now when you recycle cans and your stuff.
They don't get reused. The glass gets busted up, melted
down and hopefully used for another bottle. But these guys
would actually wash the bottle and use it again. That's
that's what happened. And by the way, I've talked to

(04:43):
guys in recycling, recycling is such a scam, usually usually
tying together a couple conversations from last hour. Among the
worst things to recycle is glass. Apparently the recyclers hate
glass because it busts, it has no real value. It's

(05:05):
cheaper to make new glass. I've heard recyclers say, eh, glass,
But the real thing you don't want to recycle is plastic.
We were talking about plastic straws and the virtue signaling,
the virtue signaling that that's done by outlawing plastic straws.

(05:33):
Plastic it doesn't really get recycled. It can get recycled,
but when you put it in your recycle bin, most
of it at least used to end up in China,
where they would just put it in a landfill and
it would just get into the water anyway. In fact,
if you care about the environment, you throw your plastic

(05:54):
into the trash where it gets entuned in some landfill
and doesn't find its way to China. I don't think
China is taking recycled plastic any longer because there's no
market for it, so we have to give them money
to take it. And most of the plastic that we
quote recycle ends up going to Africa or going to

(06:18):
China to be thrown in the ocean or thrown into
a landfill somewhere. So let's think about that for a second.
One you think you're recycling, you're plastic. You throw it
in the recycle bin, you feel self satisfied. And ohso
in viro because quote we recycle, it goes to a

(06:40):
recycling center, somebody separates it all out, They put all
the plastic together, and then they use diesel trains to
bring it to a port somewhere and then put it
on a diesel boat to send it overseas to be entombed.

(07:01):
Because there is no market for it plastic, very little
plastic actually gets recycled. Now, what I am fanatic about
recycling is aluminum cans. Aluminum cans are fascinating stuff. Aluminum
is easy to recycle and there is a market for it.

(07:25):
That is, when you recycle an aluminum can, people want.
They melt it down and they make it into more cans,
and that is cheaper for them to do that than
to go and create more aluminum. That's how I mentioned
that if you buy a Course banquet beer, it is

(07:46):
made in Golden doesn't matter where you're in Russia, and
you get a Cores banquet beer, it was made in Colorado.
Cores light is made in several different factories all over
the country, maybe over the world. I don't know. It
was Cores who developed the aluminum can. Do you remember this,

(08:10):
If you're old enough to remember, your beer and soda
would come in a tin can, very much like the
can you buy your pork and beans in. It was
a tin can. The problem with the tin can is
it was expensive to make, and so Cores was one
of the leading companies to come up with a new

(08:30):
technology to make aluminum cans. And instead of rolling a can,
welding a seam and putting a bottom on it and
a top on it, aluminum does this weird album, this
weird thing where they take a sheet of aluminum and
they pound it a couple different times with different different

(08:54):
sized plunges, or I forget what it's called until it
turns into a can. It's one piece and then they
put a top on that one piece. When Cores figured
out how to do this at scale, they let most
of the other they let all the other competitors use it.
And now that is the common That is the common

(09:16):
can that's used for just about any soda or beer
that you or energy drinks that you have. It's in it.
It's an aluminum can. Really pretty fascinating engineering. And it
happened here in Colorado. And guess what that was market driven.

(09:38):
It wasn't driven by some nannyist who said I need
to use they steal can then anymore. He said, we're
gonna forest, you know. They were like, we can't afford
to use as steel cans anymore. What are our alternatives?
And they came up with this remarkably environmentally sustainable uminium

(10:00):
can that can be recycled basically and definitely. So when
it comes to my recycling, i've got a recycling can,
I'll put paper in it because I think paper might
be okay to recycle, might be cheaper to recycle. But

(10:21):
I put any tin can, and especially any aluminum can
in there because that's where there's a market. Your plastic.
Your plastic is just better off going to the landfill
to be entombed and let it buy or degrade over time,

(10:41):
rather than being stuck on a train and then a
boat and then a truck to go into a landfill
in some African country then into the ocean. There. Dragon
was telling me about turtles and how many turtles have
plastic in them? What was that? What was that? Dragon?

(11:03):
Do you?

Speaker 2 (11:04):
I don't have to shug up, but if I do
recall correctly, if it's like nature dot com and they
were saying something along the lines of one hundred percent
of turtles found on the coast of Brazil had plastic
in them. They had ingested plastic. And I don't think
one hundred percent of the ones that were dead, so
it's not going to kill them.

Speaker 3 (11:24):
I mean, in certain that was the highest percentage. It
wasn't around the United States. It was around Brazil. I
don't know if that just means they have more turtles there,
but as a percentage, they had more plastic in them.
You know what Americans seem to forget is America is
the most environmentally sound country on the planet.

Speaker 2 (11:45):
We do thee most the Mediterranean. I think the other
one was somewhere around China. But yeah, they didn't have
any numbers for oh, the United States or around the Americas.

Speaker 3 (11:55):
But sure here, yeah, go ahead. Yeah. It's it's ridiculous
when we beat up America for not being environmental enough,
when in fact it's the rest of the world that
isn't up to our standards. And I get it, we
consume more, I get that, that's terrific. But when it

(12:15):
comes to environmental damage, environmentalists in America want to destroy
the American economy to make a marginal, tiny, little difference
in greenhouse gases that makes no real difference, especially here
in Colorado. We're going to need to go to all

(12:37):
renewable energy by twenty fifty. That's twenty five years from now.
There's a move to move that up to twenty forty,
which is fifteen years from now. It cannot and will
not be done. We are going to have massive power
blackouts in Colorado in the coming decades. Why because one,

(13:02):
our energy needs are going to triple trip thanks to
population growth, thanks to AI and thanks to all the
new mandates that say you cannot have a water heater
out of natural gas or a home heater out of
natural gas, which is insane. You're gonna have to use electricity,

(13:22):
which sucks up so much more power. So there's not
gonna be enough power. It's not going to do anything
in the meantime, Why we destroy our economy trying to
reach these unattainable goals. Countries like China continue to build
new coal fire power plants every couple of days. So

(13:46):
let's think about this for a second, because this is
again the progressive mind not understanding basic math. The world
does not care if the greenhouse gases came from the
United States or from China. So while we are remarkably clean,

(14:08):
China is remarkably dirty. Let me put it a different way.
I like to go up to environmentalists who want to
make sure that every bit of every bit of oil
stays in the ground, and I'll ask them this question,
is global warming an existential threat to human existence to

(14:29):
the planet? And they'll say absolutely, That's why we got
to do everything, because we're gonna save the planet. All right.
So here's a hypothetical. Here's a thought experiment. If we
the United States and all the other Western countries do
exactly what you want us to do, destroy our economies,

(14:51):
to make all renewable electricity. But China doesn't change at
all and will not will not ever change no matter
what you do, do you support military action against China
to get them to change their energy policy. If the

(15:13):
answer is no, under this hypothetical, no, no, you can't
go to war with them, then you do not. You
don't believe that this is an existential threat, because if
it is an existential threat, to save the planet, to
save our lives, to slave humanity, of course you're going
to have to invade China and force them to use

(15:36):
wind power. If you don't, if you don't get that hypen,
it's just a thought experiment, then you don't get it.
Or how about this one? This blew my mind. So
let me give you the facts on this one. There's
eight billion of us on this rock. One billion of

(15:57):
us have what you and I have. You turn on
the light switch and the lights are guaranteed to come on.
That's one out of eight of us. Two point three
billion people still cook over open fires. That is, they
spend hours a day scavenging for wood. They take the

(16:17):
wood and bring it into their kitchen. They put it
into an oven or a stove, and they burn it,
and everyone around them breathes in the carcinogens and all
the smoke, and it's really unhealthy. And they and they
use wood. If in those places they switch to natural

(16:38):
gas or propane the pro painting tanks, it would reduce
greenhouse gases as much. Listen to this, as much as
if we ended all air travel, all boat travel, all
train travel, and all road travel. Think of that oil

(16:59):
and gas to save the planet by getting people to
stop burning dung and would and oh, by the way,
it would liberate billions of women from this tedious and
dangerous task. But you don't really want to save the environment.
You want to virtue signal. That's why you're gonna keep

(17:24):
oil and gas in the ground, because you don't care
about humanity. You care about your own image. I do believe.

Speaker 1 (17:31):
I recall pepsi bottles, all scoffed up.

Speaker 3 (17:36):
Have a good day. Thank you for your attention in
this matter. I'm John Caldera in for the ailing mister
Brown who is down. He is down for the count.
Hopefully he'll be back tomorrow.

Speaker 2 (17:52):
Damn near on his deathbed. He's got the man cold. Yeah,
he's got a man cold.

Speaker 3 (17:56):
He is nearly here they are performing last rite on
him right now as he is suffering with a man
called it is touch and go. Our thoughts, our prayers
we're gonna have. There are worldwide vigils for him. He's
got the sniffles and nothing, nothing more, nothing more interesting

(18:19):
than watching a man suffer a man cold. Women don't
get it. It's so much worse than childbirth, all right.
The last the guy who called in with that wonderful talkback,
it's true great talkbacks. Here we're talking about the pop shop.

(18:40):
I guess there was one of them, Boulder on Valmont,
and here's this one long neck. Beer bottles and sixteen
ounce pop bottles used to be washed and reused. You
could see the wear on the bottles. So think about this.
Most bottles now that are quote rich. I don't even

(19:01):
know if they are recycled. I don't know if the
glass actually gets melted down and reused. I think most
bottlers use new glass. I believe could be wrong. Let
me know about that. But it used to be that
making a bottle was expensive and they would wash it.

(19:23):
Colin just said, I remember the beer bottles being warned.
Do you remember beer bottles and coke bottles being worn
like they've been through the machine a few times and
scuffed up. Now, wasn't that real recycling? That was sustainability.
But we didn't say, you know, we're doing this because

(19:43):
it's sustainable. No, it was cheaper. Now your mother who
used to reuse the aluminum foil. I'm doing it to
save the invite. No, you're just cheap, Ma, They're just
really cheap. Yeah, Hey, John, did anyone ask the turtle

(20:03):
if he was snorkeling? It would make perfect sense to
put a straw on your nose if you can't breathe underwater,
That makes perfect sense. We are freaking out about a
straw going up a turtle's nose when he just wants
to enjoy a swim. It's a snork. I'd never thought
about that, John, here's a can of worms to open

(20:27):
that is destroying the environment in an effort to save
the environment. Do you know how do you know what
the bad plastic is? Not? Really? No? Two point five
gallon diesel exhaust fluid jugs? What is a diesel exhaust
fluid jugs? You want to explain that one to me?

(20:48):
I'd be curious. Three oh three seven one three eight two, five, five,
seven to one three talk the old saying it has
to be sasta. Yeah, we're talking about new coke being
old coke, being new Coke being old coke, and they're
putting sugar back in. This guy said, I worked for
Coca Cola for over forty years. New coke was a

(21:10):
different formula. High fruitose corn syrup was in coke before
New Coke came out. Coke Classic was the formula used
up to New Coke came out. That's interesting, that's good.
And by the way, yeah, the stores have to charge
ten cents for paper bags too. I don't get that. Now.

(21:38):
If you wanted to give somebody a paper bag or
a plastic bag, that would be legal, but it is
illegal for King Supers to give you a plastic bag. Listen.
I know I'm not the brightest ball in the drawer,
but I don't know what is different about that plastic

(22:02):
bag or that paper bag compared to all the other
packaging that happens. I got into a conversation with an
orange juice manufacturer. So it's at a conference, and his
job was, you know, to move orange juice, and he

(22:26):
got hauled up in front of Congress and the The
politician up there said, you know, we don't need all
this packaging the you know, nature provides the best packaging.
Look at the orange. The orange has this beautiful package.
It's right there. And this guy had to kind of

(22:49):
slap himself in the head and go, hey, lady, that's wonderful.
But you see nature, when it made an orange, that
was just a seed that was supposed to drop from
the tree and make more trees. That wasn't how God
designed it to get across the country. And so if

(23:13):
we kept all the oranges in orange in the Gods package,
we would have to He did a quick calculation of
how many more crates, how many more boxes, how many
more things to stack them, because you can't put too
many oranges on top of each other until they break,

(23:34):
And how much in diesel and shipping costs to get
that healthy food to some other place where people could
do it compared to squishing the orange juice right there
and sticking it into a bottle and sending it out.

(23:56):
Meant that we could send out this many more oranges
and the juice that people want and save the environment,
or we could spend one hundred times more in shipping
to send people the oranges, and then they could squeeze
their own juice, and then and then we do more

(24:20):
environmental damage. This is one of the most entertaining, slash
frustrating parts about dealing with the Left is that their
propensity to avoid simple math. Simple math is just beautiful.
I'm not talking about chaos theory. I'm not talking about

(24:41):
tracking particles through space. I'm not talking about any of
that stuff. I'm talking about simple, simple math, and the
simple math it doesn't add up. Now, there are some
in the enviro community who can do simple math. I'll

(25:05):
give you a perfect example. So here in Colorado, we
have this plan that we're going to stop doing stop
doing any quote dirty power. It's all going to be
renewable power in twenty five years. They want to bring
that up to fifteen years. The simple math is it

(25:26):
cannot be done. It cannot be done. Two thirds of
our power comes from fossil fuels. The sun doesn't shine
all the time, the wind doesn't blow all the time.
We don't have enough in storage batteries. We're not going
to be able to make enough in storage batteries to
take care of our power needs in the future. It

(25:48):
just cannot It's simple math. Now there are some who
are religiously environmental, and they say, we don't care. We're
going to go do it anyway, which means the country's
going to go bankrupt. People won't be able to get
their jobs done. It means that people will die. When
power outages become more common, as they are becoming common

(26:11):
in California, people will not be able to turn on
their air conditioning. People who are vulnerable will die. Those
people who keep their drugs in a refrigerator or need
an oxygenator or a CPAT machine to be powered, they're
going to die. We don't care. What's important here is,

(26:32):
you know, virtue signaling. Some environmentalists realize the only way
that we're going to be able to meet our power
needs if we turn off all fossil fuels, will be
with nuclear energy. In fact, at the Independence Institute, the
organization I run, we're pretty instrumental in helping the Colorado

(26:55):
Legislature for the first time say that nuclear energy is clean.
It's clean, it doesn't give off any gases, it doesn't
give out any carbon dioxide, it doesn't give out any
anything that's bad for the environment. Environmentalists are now coming

(27:18):
to the realization if if you're going to make these
energy goals, you're going to have to do it with
nuclear energy. The problem here in Colorado was that nuclear
energy was never labeled as clean, even though it is
the cleanest, the absolute cleanest. Oh, you say, but what

(27:39):
about nuclear waste and all the damage from nuclear waste? Oh,
what are we going to do with it? Interestingly, the
technology is changing. What they call now modular reactors will
soon be able to use the old spent fuel from
old reactors. Let me put it a different way. You

(28:05):
put in the nuclear fuel into a reactor. Over time,
you take out ten percent of its power and the
rest is waste. The new reactors can take that waste
and say, wait a minute, there's still ninety percent of
the juice left in there. Let's continue to get it
and then we'll reduce it to eighty percent, so it

(28:26):
cleans up the nuclear waste as well. The point being
basic math is dangerous to those who want to virtue signal.
Basic math will destroy you. Oh it's not just liberals,

(28:46):
by the way, it's not just progressives. The basic math
of our monetary system is also completely broken. We are
in debt to our eyeballs. We have put our great
great grandchildren into debt for things we buy today, for

(29:09):
our own social security and medicaid and medicare and benefits
and welfare. It's unsustainable. Beyond that, our dollar has turned
into well imaginary. It used to be that a dollar
was backed by gold. It's backed by nothing today, which

(29:30):
is why we have so much more inflation. Basic math
can be our friends. Do you realize right now we
spend more on interest on our debt then we spend
on our military. Let me say this again, because this

(29:50):
is terrifying. We have never had this much debt in
our history. We briefly had close to the amount of
debt in World War Two, and then we pulled it back.
We spend more money paying bankers for what we owe
them than what we paid to protect our borders to

(30:13):
build our military. The basic math here is terrifying. That's
why many people were so concerned with the one big,
beautiful bill. So on both of these topics. At the
top of this hour and eight o'clock, I'm going to
talk with somebody about what bitcoin does and how that
all works in and at nine o'clock we're going to

(30:33):
talk to the head of the Tax Foundation, about was
the big beautiful bill really that beautiful. We're gonna find out,
but first, let's take a breather. I'm John Caldera inver Brownie,
keep it here six point thirty k.

Speaker 4 (30:46):
How oh, you gentlemen have certainly screwed up my morning.
I have a popshop lemon lime full bottle around here
someplace that I've been frantically searching for. I've moved it
around for fifty years, and now I can't find it.

Speaker 3 (31:04):
And you know what, it it might not be good
anymore after fifty years. Just just thinking, Hey, I'm John
Caldera in for the big man. Give me a call.
Three h three seven one three eight two five five.
Here's an interesting text. In twenty ten, the EPA mandated
the use of diesel exhaust fluid in vehicles equipped equipment

(31:29):
with a diesel engine over a seventy five horsepower HMM.
Diesel exhaust fluid is used to reduce nitrogen oxide in
the in the exhaust. One hundred and thirty million single use,
two and a half gallon plastic jugs are produced each
year to dispense the diesel exhaust fluid. I can't imagine

(31:53):
how much oil is used to produce this amount, and
how much space it has taken up in landfills the
exhaust cleaning. Some ads about twenty to thirty thousand dollars
to the cost of a new truck. I'm a diesel
technician for cat equipment. Interesting, there you have it. I

(32:16):
didn't know, so it was interesting. Once I did an
interview with Pete Cores from Cores and if you remember
the good old days, of course it was a regional beer.
Do you remember smoking the bandit? Why was smoking the
bandit going so fast over state lines? They were smuggling
Cores beer. And I remember when relatives would come out

(32:40):
to Colorado, they would always buy a bunch of Cores
beer because it was an oddity back east. He said.
The problem was that people would buy the beer and then,
like our collar there who never drank it, it would
get skunked over time.

Speaker 1 (32:59):
So he said, these people thought, of course, beer is
so great, which it is, but then they'd hold onto
the beer for three years before they drank it, at
which point it didn't taste as goods.

Speaker 3 (33:11):
Something to know about. All right, when we get back,
we're going to talk a little monetary policy and how
bitcoin might be the savior, not the danger.