10-09-25 FULL SHOW - Obamacare Is Designed To Create Dependence Not Cost Savings

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
The Mandy Connell Show is sponsored by Belle and Pollock
Accident and injury lawyers.

Speaker 2 (00:05):
No, it's Mandy Connell KOA ninety one FM.

Speaker 3 (00:15):
Got can through three many connall keeping sadda.

Speaker 4 (00:27):
Welcome, Welcome, Welcome to a Thursday edition of the show
on your host, Mandy Connell. That guy we're right over
there for at least the next hour, Anthony Rodriguez, we
call him a rod. One of us will put in
a full day's work and stay here until three pm.
Someone else will work till three One of them will

(00:48):
be jetting away at one pm for parts unknown. I'm
working longer than you today. Stop it. Are you down
the Beer fest with the guys for a little while?

Speaker 5 (00:56):
Oh?

Speaker 4 (00:57):
I don't drink beer, Mandy, Well.

Speaker 5 (00:59):
You're luck this year.

Speaker 4 (01:01):
It's not just the Great American Beer Festival. It is
the Great American Beverage Festival. I have a story on
that on the blow. Yes, they have opened it up.
They're gonna have distillers, They're gonna have uh like hard Seltzers.
They've had hard Seltzers and ciders for the last couple
of years. Still called here though, I know, but I've
renamed it to the Great American Beverage Festival. I stole

(01:25):
that from some other news media outlet. I don't know
which one, So uh well, we'll have fun.

Speaker 6 (01:31):
Then.

Speaker 7 (01:33):
I know.

Speaker 4 (01:34):
I got to go what a couple of years ago,
but there was literally no one was there and nothing
was open. Yeah, it kind of defeats the purpose. I've
been four years ago. Mark Stout and I did a
live showdown are appropriate place for Mark Stout to broadcast from?
Even though it's spelled differently? How does he not have
a podcast?

Speaker 7 (01:49):
Mark?

Speaker 4 (01:50):
You listen to the show? What the hell you doing to? Seriously,
why are you wasting your life? Mark? I haven't you
started Stout Stout podcast and only talk about Stouts nothing else.
You could talk about family members named Stout, or you
could talk about the beer's name Stout. You're welcome, Mark,
You're welcome beer. Either would be so perfect. Then he
could spend every single episode just hear me out, hey, Rod.

(02:14):
He could spend every episode trying a Stout and then
talking about why he hates it. There you go, Stout
on Stout. I think this has legs. I feel like
we've created a juggernaut right here. In the first few
minutes of the Mandy Connell Show. Let's jump over to
the blog because I got guests, I got serious things
to talk about today. I got some nerdy healthcare stuff

(02:34):
and we all are just gonna have a little chuckle
at Senator John Hickenlooper's expense because he tweeted something that
is so unintentionally hilarious that we're gonna have a little
fun with it today. Okay, so that's coming up. Let's
do this. Find the blog by going to mandy'sblog dot com.

(02:56):
Mandy'sblog dot com. When you get there, look for the
latest post section. Then look for the latest post headline
ten nine to twenty five blog Obamacare is not is
designed to create dependence, not cost savings. Click on that,
and here are the headlines you will find within.

Speaker 6 (03:12):
I don't be with missing office half of American all
with ships and clipments of say that's Conda Press plant.

Speaker 4 (03:18):
Today on the blood. The fight over Obamacare is about
to get so much worse. Hick is out there rewriting
the history of the shutdown, more ugly crime stats for Colorado.
Can somebody sue here? Why school board elections matter? Important
points from the Denver school board debate. I'll believe it
when the hostages come home. Michael Bloomberg is meddling in

(03:39):
Denver politics again. OURTD is reminding people how unresponsive their
service is. I love Aurora pde Chief Tea Todd Chamberlain
is excels PUC approval to override Albert and Alpaso County
in the bag. Democrat violence is the insurrection. Zo Ron
Mamdani is cool with women being sexual assaulted. James Comey

(04:01):
thought he was above the law. Why school board elections matter?
Mayor Mike says, if we don't agree to billions Beyonce,
we'll skip us next time heading to the Great American
Beverage Festival. Christy Nauma is kind of kicking ass. Swifties
are big mad about the new album. This sounds like
the worst vacation ever. Soda of any kind can raise

(04:22):
your risk of non alcoholic fatty liver disease. AI isn't
quite ready for prime time when it comes to travel.
Charles Kurult Secret Family, the real truth about the good
old days, that young's are pining for a young gentleman
in action, more big brother cuteness. Those are the headlines
on the blog at mandy'sblog dot com. Tick Tech P

(04:42):
two a winner. Wait a minute, what.

Speaker 1 (04:46):
There was?

Speaker 4 (04:47):
There was a tiny stumble before we even got started.
In the main headline. At stumble, the band had to
play an extra beat. I can't help it. If I
want to pack my blog with so much information that
it requires a lot of effort and time, maybe the
band needs to add a little to that chunk there.
I don't make the decision. I'm just saying I didn't
know Nancy was so tight with the band. Mm hmm.

(05:09):
From the company pay Well from the Common Spirit Health
text line at five six six nine zero, where you
can text us Mandy. How's a three hour show working
a full day? If you people think that I just
pulled that blog out of my heiini in a matter
of seconds, well then congratulations to me from making it
look so easy. My day starts at six am, just

(05:31):
getting ready for this silly program. Yep, every day, every day.

Speaker 7 (05:38):
Let's do this.

Speaker 4 (05:39):
Let's talk about who's coming up. We've got Brian Blaze
from the Paragon Institute. He's coming up. They are a
healthcare policy think tank. Boy that's nerdy but necessary. And
yesterday he's coming up at one o'clock today. And yesterday
he sent this tweet out and he said, insurers to Congress,
our Obamacare plans are junk. We can't sell them. If

(06:00):
people pay twenty percent of premiums, taxpayers must cover ninety
three percent on average and one hundred percent for many.
And if the twelve million people never use the coverage,
don't ask questions, just send more taxpayer cash. And then
they show a little graph from the Paragon Health Institute.
Obamacare subsidies cap enroll lee payments, and taxpayers cover the rest.

(06:24):
So you know how your health insurance, if you're paying
the full freight on yours, has gone up over the years. Well,
the cost of Obamacare has gone up over the years,
but it has not been borne by the people on Obamacare.
It's been born by the taxpayers. I've got this on
the blog today, and you really should look at the graph.
I'm not going to go through all the numbers here

(06:45):
because we're going to get into it with Brian. But
this is the fruition of Obamacare's promise back in two
thousand and eight when they were working on this stuff. Yours, truly,
I read all iterations, all serious iterations, four two thousand
page bills. Okay, so don't even tell me that I

(07:05):
don't know what's in this bill. Obamacare was never designed
to lower healthcare cost because the only way to lower
healthcare costs not what we're willing to reimburse, not that
what the actual cost of healthcare. The only mechanism that
will bring that down is competition. Wherever you can inject
competition into the system, prices are going to come down.

(07:28):
That's just the way it is, and it's been proven
an effective model in healthcare. In Oklahoma City, there's a
surgical center in Oklahoma City called the Oklahoma City Surgical Center,
and they take cash payments. They don't do insurance. They
post their pricing on their website. You can go right
now just google Oklahoma City Surgical Center and they will
show you how much a need replacement will cost if

(07:49):
you come to their facility. What's happened in Oklahoma City
is it has actually been very effective in managing to
keep the rates down in the hospitals in Oklahoma City
because they now have to compete. That's the thing. They
have to compete, right, So you can inject certain ways
you can for emergency we're not talking about emergency care, right,

(08:11):
We're just not but if you need your hip replaced,
competition would go a long way to bringing the cost
of that down. But because we have a third party
payer system, it distorts the view that the consumer has
because they're not on the hook for all of the bills.
So there's no there's no one's pressuring prices to come down.

(08:33):
Insurance companies have negotiated their fixed reimbursement rate for certain things,
and hospitals have agreed to take that. So if there's
no nobody is asking for lower prices in that triangle.
But there are ways to inject the free market into healthcare,
none of them are in Obamacare. After reading the Obamacare bill,
ironically named the Affordable Care Act, I told my listeners

(08:57):
back in the time that there was a zero percent,
zero percent chance that this was in any way, shape
or form going to make health care better. sureI was
going to give health care to put people that were
going to use other people's money to pay the premiums,
and those people would probably be very happy, and they are.
I mean, if I could offload some of my bill
payments to someone else, I'd be happy to, but I

(09:19):
don't have the option for that. So Obamacare is doing
exactly what it was designed to do, which is get
more people on the government dole, right, because once you
have people on subsidies. And isn't this what we're hearing
right now, isn't this what we're hearing from Democrats who
are saying things like Republicans are ruining your health care
and that's why the government is shut down. This is

(09:41):
the tweet from John Hickenlooper, our senator. This is from yesterday.

Speaker 5 (09:46):
Eight days.

Speaker 4 (09:48):
That's how long Republicans have kept the government shut down,
and not a single one of them has come to
the table to tackle the healthcare crisis they created. Unbelievable. Now,
I use the Google machine. Took me, I don't know,
a couple minutes to figure all this stuff out. But

(10:08):
this goes back to when Obamacare was passed in twenty ten,
and in twenty ten, the ACA Bill HR thirty five
ninety was passed by Democrats. Only in twenty twenty one
as part of the American Rescue Plan Act HR thirteen
nineteen that removed the four hundred percent income cap and

(10:31):
it lowered the premium percentage that was born by the recipients.
They did that as part of the COVID response, you
know how many Republicans voted for that? Zero Democrats? Only then,
in the Inflation Reduction Act HR fifty three seventy six,
they extended the subsidy expansion to twenty twenty five. Where

(10:52):
we are now, do you know how many Republicans voted
for that? Zero? Zero Republicans? So I am not sure
what kind of contorted logic that our esteem senator from
the great state of Colorado has to engage in to
come up with. This is the Republican's fault. Now, it's

(11:13):
important to understand what exactly the Democrats are fighting for here.
They're not fighting to save Obamacare. They're fighting to save
subsidies for people that make way too much money to
have gotten it under the original Obamacare plan. See, they
couldn't get enough people on the government dole with the
first plan, so they needed to find ways to expand it.

(11:34):
And oh look what happened. Here comes COVID, a health emergency.
And during COVID, they said, you know what, we're going
to use this emergency because never let a crisis go
to waste. You know, our good friend Ram Emmanuel never
let a crisis go to waste, right, So they use
COVID to add even more people to the government dole.
And what they're fighting for now is to keep that

(11:56):
expanded group of people who made too much money when
Obama Care was first past to be eligible for subsidies,
and they want to continue having people pay very very
little while the taxpayers are on the hook for more
and more. That's what they want because once you have
people on the dole, we hear it all the time.
If you vote for that guy or that woman, she's

(12:19):
gonna kick you off. She's gonna throw you off your benefits.
She's gonna take away something that you believe is yours,
even though you've done absolutely nothing to earn it. Now,
I mean, they call it an entitlement for a reason.
So that's what the Democrats are fighting for. It's not

(12:39):
just to fight for the people that are gonna have
to pay for their actual own health insurance. No, it's
not for them. They are fighting because they need more
people on the dole to use as a campaign tactic.
This is like the oldest As soon as they passed Medicare,
its started being used as a campaign tactic. As soon
as they started any kind of something where someone pays

(13:02):
less for what they get back, and I'm not. When
I talk about Medicare, I try to be careful about this.
We have Medicare for a reason. We as a society
decided that elderly people, who are far more likely to
need some kind of health care assistance and have more
health issues, we decided as a society we didn't want
them to bankrupt themselves, or live on the streets, or

(13:24):
just die without care. So we created Medicare. But the
reality is is older people are going to have far
more health issues than young people, and the cope is
not the copez. The premiums for Medicare are artificially low,
I mean really a lot way artificially low. So it's
just it's super frustrating to watch it happen again. But

(13:48):
the good news is is that for the first time
I can ever remember, and those of you who are
a little bit older than me, maybe you can help
me out with this. I don't remember the news media
handling the shutdown as fairly as I have seen it
in the in the news portion of the media. The
talking heads on CNN and MSNBC are absolutely, you know,

(14:10):
blaming the Republicans, But the news media overall has not
been the the you know lapdogs. They've been before with
it's all the Republicans fault. And we've seen it in
the polling data. We've seen it in you know these
non I mean, do you really think John Hickenlooper thought
up that tweet? I mean, that's that's I'm being genuine.
There are a few politicians that run their own social

(14:32):
media accounts and run them. Well, Thomas Massey runs his
ran Paul I think he used to run his. I
don't know if he still does. But for the most part,
they get messaging and they're told, go ahead, just put
it out on social media, and so he's completely This
is like animal farm level rewriting of history, right, excuse me?

(14:53):
In nineteen eighty four, got my George Orwell mixed up there.
It's it's almost comically bad. It's like they don't I
know that we have the wayback machine that is the Internet,
Like we don't have the Google. Why is that?

Speaker 6 (15:06):
You know?

Speaker 4 (15:06):
I heard Ross talking about the fact that the guy
who started Polymarket, which is an online website where you
can bet on anything. You can bet on politics, you
can bet on I mean not anything but a lot
of stuff. And it's super cool because poly Market was
the most accurate poll that was out there in the
last election cycle. And of course the government has come

(15:27):
down on them several times and created a lot of
havoc for them, and Ross's like, I don't understand why
they would do that. I'm like, of course, it's obvious
because Polymarket measures the emotional aspect of voters, right gambling
and gambling is an emotional decision. I know you can
tell yourself that it's an educated emotional decision, but it's
not a rational financial decision, right, So it must be

(15:51):
an emotional decision, so is voting. A lot of voting
is emotion. We like to think we're all cool and
calm and reasoned, but our emotion is a big part
of this. Politicians know it, so they send out idiotic
tweets like this one, or they're just counting on people
to not know the truth about how we got here,

(16:12):
and counting on people to not know the truth about
what the end result is. That's the thing. So we're
going to talk to Brian Blaze more about just overall healthcare.
I want everyone to understand this because what I love
for people to start asking is not why are they
doing this to my subsidies. But why does health insurance

(16:34):
cost so much? And that's where you really start to
get to the media the issues. You know, why health
insurance is so expensive in Colorado and why I believe
insurers are leaving our market because Colorado keeps adding things
that insurance companies have to pay for, and they don't
just go, oh, well, we got to pay for that.
Now we're gonna eat. We're just gonna eat the cost

(16:55):
of that and a lot of that stuff. You guys,
we are insurance carriers in Colorado are now on the
hook for gender affirming care for someone who is trans
who wants to feel more like the opposite gender. So
if a man decides he's a woman, now, insurance companies
in Colorado, which means every single one of us that

(17:16):
has insurance in Colorado is now paying through cost shifting,
because that's how insurance works, is now paying for some
dude's boob job, and that is why our insurance costs
are so high. But nobody's asking that question because then
it reflects back on the same people that are now
trying to tell us that back in two thousand and
eight they fixed the problem when they did nothing of

(17:38):
the sort, Yell. I was an insurance agent in two
thousand and five in Florida. I had health insurance plans
for people between the ages of eighteen and twenty eight
years old that gave pretty good coverage. It was like,
you got a couple doctor visits a year, you got
a twenty percent cope. After that, you had an out
of pocket maximum of like five thousand, and it was

(18:01):
an eighty twenty plan. Yeah, you could rock up some
big medical bills, but for that age group, no one
really ever Did you know how much that plan cost
ninety five dollars a month? But that plan is illegal
to sell now because the government decided in two thousand
and eight that you are too stupid to pick out
an insurance plan that works for you and your family.
And now they're trying to tell you that bills that

(18:24):
were passed with zero Republican support have created the healthcare crisis.
But it's somehow the Republicans fault. Seriously do the Texter,
who I just had the following text exchange with I
just want to share this with you about the boob
jobs now being covered for people, Texter sends, Can I

(18:46):
get my male boob job? Now, to which I respond,
of course, as I would, only if you donate it
to your favorite talk show host, to which Texter responded,
I don't know if rost needs boobs, to which I respond,
I would have been so disappointed if this weren't your response.
So well done, text, I set it up for you,

(19:06):
I put it on the t ball t and you
just just cranked it right out of the park. I
want to read this though, kind of going to a
different angle on just the cost of insurance and how
much everything costs in Colorado. Hey, Mandy, when you're talking
about insurance and whether it's health or whether it's vehicle insurance,
why don't we go back and start questioning as to
why all of these vehicles are being all these vehicles

(19:30):
to drive around with illegal plates, plates that are expired,
temporary plates that are being wiped out with the expiration
and ripped off and then taped up and made to
look fa fake, which they are. Why is the state
not following through with it and the cities and the counties.
That's number one? Number two, how do we know that
they have insurance on those vehicles? Vehicles people are driving

(19:52):
better than I have, They don't have plates or insurance.
So basically that was a massive run on sentence, Texter,
but I appreciate you getting all your thoughts in this morning.
Just for fun, I heard a bellin polyt commercial. You've
probably heard it on the station, and it's one where
Gary is talking about uninsured motorist and getting uninsured motorist insurance. Ay, Ron,

(20:18):
what do you think the percentage? Just wild guests here? Okay,
what do you think the percentage of uninsured motorists are
in Colorado right now?

Speaker 5 (20:29):
Well?

Speaker 8 (20:29):
I heard you tell Ross earlier, but I would have guessed, yeah,
I would have guessed a fourth.

Speaker 4 (20:35):
Well, it's nineteen point seven percent. That means that there
is a one in five percent chance. Well, okay, this
isn't an exact percent, but you just go with me
one in five chance if you get into an accident,
you're gonna get hit or have an accident with someone
who is uninsured. And so if you don't have uninsured
motorists coverage on your insurance policy, you need to buy

(20:57):
it now. I believe that the combination of a massive
influx of illegal immigrants and the high cost of auto
insurance here in Colorado, you've created a perfect storm and
now you've got a bunch of people driving around with
no insurance, no tags, no nothing, and it needs to
be made a priority. You know, the broken windows theory

(21:17):
of policing, which was touted Riddy. Giuliani didn't come up
with it, but he definitely cleaned up New York using it.
And the broken windows theory goes that if you see
a window that's broken in a neighborhood and it's not
fixed right away, you know that that neighborhood is neglected,
and therefore it makes it easier to commit or do

(21:39):
crime in that area, right and it just spreads from there.
And that's the whole basis of the broken window theory.
And that's a gross over simplification, but it'll work for
the purposes of this discussion. So when we're talking about
people not getting tags and not getting pulled over, people
not buying health insurance and not paying any penalty for that,

(22:02):
then we're talking about this sort of las A fair
law enforcement view. That is where we are, why we
are where we are when it comes to crime in Colorado.
When coming up at one o'clock, I've got my favorite
statistics nerd, Mike O'Donnell coming on to talk about the
latest crime stats. Guys, Colorado is not doing well when

(22:23):
it comes to crime, and it's because we let all
these little things go, right, we let all those quality
of life crimes. If you're not back to following the
real at do better. Denver, Oh boy, they're on their
game posting just ridiculous scenes from all over Denver that
are not being addressed. It's just uugh, mandy boobs. Maybe

(22:49):
A Rod can use them for one of his Halloween costumes.
Quite extreme but effective. You know what, I'm just gonna
go ahead and say A Rod is not going to
take the boob job?

Speaker 5 (22:56):
Is that fair?

Speaker 6 (22:57):
A Rod?

Speaker 4 (22:57):
I don't want to speak for you, A very fair assumption.
I'm good.

Speaker 3 (23:00):
Yeah.

Speaker 9 (23:02):
Uh.

Speaker 4 (23:02):
You know Marilyn Manson got a boob job once.

Speaker 7 (23:05):
Did you know that?

Speaker 4 (23:06):
Yeah, that's some of the working got done. Yeah, not
going to repeat what we all heard. The job he
got done. No, I don't know what that was. I'm
not telling you. Well, I told you I met him once, right,
and had a long conversation with the guy.

Speaker 8 (23:17):
I will just say for those somewhere near my age,
you grew up hearing a rumor about Marilyn Manson and
a procedure he had done.

Speaker 4 (23:24):
That's all I'm gonna say. Are you going to tell
me off the air? Absolutely? Okay?

Speaker 8 (23:28):
And I'm wondering because textures, you aren't forced to abide
by FCC. Does any other texture know about that rumor?

Speaker 4 (23:35):
Yeah, you can text us at five six six nine
O or am I? The only weirdo is when Mandy,
I identify as a trans woman? Could I get insurance
to pay for my electrolysis and some light bot suction?

Speaker 7 (23:46):
You know what?

Speaker 4 (23:47):
Maybe I identify as a trans woman as well. I mean, really,
that's all I have to say, right, because that there's
no you just you just get to say it now
you don't have to actually do anything with it, Mandy,
auto insurance should require tags and stickers be shown on
a rear license plate similar registration, of course, and I

(24:08):
believe that's the rules. So if twenty percent are driving
around uninsured, how many are driving around without tags? Mandy?
My plate costs eight hundred and fifty dollars, And I,
for one, I'm sick of watching my neighbor drive away
without a plate on the car. Amen to that, what
are you cheering about? You're taking the boob job aren't you.
No one of the Texters knew the rumor. Don't repeat it,

(24:30):
Do not repeat it. Well, I'm not going to repeat it. Stop. Yeah,
that was a rumor growing up. Stop it. I swear
to God. Stop it right now.

Speaker 2 (24:38):
Swear to God.

Speaker 4 (24:39):
You sick and twisted people. Why do you even know that?
I really thought it was true. Also, Mandy, it's a scam.
I can't get uninsured coverage. It's called you. I am coverage.
You I am coverage uninsured motorist coverage. And what kind

(24:59):
of janky auto insurance that you have if you cannot
get uninsured motorists coverage? That's crazy. Yeah, I shouldn't have
said that. Maybe you have great auto insurance coverage. Maybe
there's just something going on that I don't know yet, Mandy,
your insurance guy. Again, some states have no pay, no
play laws that would greatly reduce insurance rates and the

(25:20):
amount of uninsured drivers on the road. While all of
you know this really crazy thing about Marilyn Manson's I
could say ribs, I triple checked. He he denied it.
He had to deny it. Well, but you know what
I mean. He did sort of set the stage right
for that kind of rumor to be spread about him.

(25:44):
I like Marilyn Manson. I I don't hate his music,
but I really think he is a classic like abusive scumbag.
And he now has a chain of women that have
come out and talked about how he treated them in relationships.

Speaker 8 (25:59):
Yeah, because that I always heard that he was like
a good guy. Now do you remember that people used
to say he used to be a good guy.

Speaker 4 (26:06):
Well, I actually so. When I was a flight attendant,
I had him on a long flight. It was either
coast to coast or you're I think it was to
Amsterdam now that I'm thinking about it. And I had
just seen him on the Field Donohue Show. That's the
only reason I knew who he was is because he
was on Donahue to talk about his music and his
makeup and all this stuff. And it was like, hey,
I just saw you're on Donahue. And we ended up
chatting for probably like forty five minutes because it was

(26:27):
a long flight in the middle of the night, so
I just sat there and chatted with him, and he
wasn't at all or in any weird or inappropriate way.
I was treated far worse by other passengers during my
time as a flight attendant. But then yeah, there's a
lot of women who have come out to say he's
just not a nice boyfriend, and generally speaking, like I

(26:48):
stay out of that, But some of the claims that
had been consistently made are consistent enough to remind me
of people that I have known in my past that
I generally don't like.

Speaker 8 (27:00):
I used to always get a kick out of family
Guy portraying him as like a really solid role model.
He would like deliver life lessons in the episodes he
was in.

Speaker 4 (27:08):
It was really funny, of course, really really of course,
Bingo says this texter. We all need to say we're
trans and then sue to get the attention to the media.
Then this will get reversed, just like the Ballerina news story,
getting then to switch their tune on price gouging. There
you go, Mandy, can't women get taxpayer funded breastfeed breast
enlargement to feel more woman? You'd think so, you would

(27:31):
think so, But no, cause we're not men. See how
that works. We're not men. I take that back. We
can have him lopped off, but only men can have
him put on. We are talking about all sorts of
things today, on the blog. It's a massive blog, an
incredibly big blog. One more time. I want to reiterate,
and I'm trying to just make a mention of this

(27:53):
every day so we can all understand how important it
is school board races. School board races.

Speaker 7 (28:02):
Say it with me.

Speaker 4 (28:03):
School board races matter so much. School Board races are
setting the tone for student achievement. They are setting the
goals for student and they are ruining some school districts.
And by ruining, I mean they have completely taken their
eye off the ball of student achievement, which should be
the number one, number two, number three, number four, number

(28:26):
five concern of any school district should simply be student achievement. Now,
that doesn't mean that every kid in that school district's
going to college, because that's just not reality. What it
means is is that a school district is meeting the
needs of the most students they can with the options
that students need in order to be productive adults in

(28:47):
the future. You got to pay attention to school board races.
There's a great story today, Denver Wright's and now I'm
urging you please go watch the debate. Okay, go watch
the debate because you need to understand. If a candidate
expresses support for Superintendent Alex Morero, they are that should
be a non starter. It should be a disqualifying position.

(29:10):
If someone says they think the superintendent's doing a good job.
The only metric that the superintendent talks about is graduation rate.
You know why, because that can be messed with. You
can't talk about sea mass scores because you can't, you know,
rig those. But you can keep passing kids along who
can't read and write, graduate and ride out using great inflation.

(29:35):
And that's all he talks about. Are they college ready?
I don't know. Are they trade school ready? I don't know.
I have no idea, Mandy, while you were talking about
unregistered vehicles this from the Common Spirit Elf text line,
I was sitting behind one with no plates and another
one with expired temporaries. The guy with no plates was
leaved and tattoos, and knowing that tattoo parlors usually charge

(29:57):
over one hundred bucks an hour, it just made my
blood boil. Hate it when you see someone making dumb
choices and they have nicer stuff than you. I am
not a jealous person. I love to see people have
success and then celebrate and you know, live a lifestyle
that they aspired to. I think that's wonderful. I celebrate
it until I see someone it is making a bad

(30:20):
choice or doing something dumb or in some way I
don't know. It's frustrating school board races, how about skateboard races?

Speaker 6 (30:29):
BRA.

Speaker 4 (30:30):
You didn't really think I was gonna read the BRA,
did you? But I did. I don't give Mandy enough credit.
You have to be pretty smart to sell insurance. And
for a long time I thought they just said her
behind the microphone and told her to bitch for three
hours a day. Ah, technically they told me to talk.
I just took the liberty and decided to make it
a bitch fisted Mandy. I know you're saying that a

(30:51):
woman can't get a boob job paid for in Colorado,
but as anyone tried, I imagine it could make its
way to the Supreme Court. You know what, here's the thing,
you guys, I would love to be that plaintiff, like
I would go to court and say, your honor, I'm
a fifty six year old woman and the girls are
not where they used to be, and I just I

(31:12):
don't feel as feminine as I used to because I
feel old. I want to feel more like a youthful,
vibrant young woman because inside that's who I am, But
outside I have fifty six year old woman boobs. But
here's the kicker for me, guys, I don't want to
pay for that? Do you want to pay for that?
Who could I get to do this pro bono? Who's

(31:32):
gonna take on a passive, aggressive, sarcastic lawsuit for no pay?
I need that organization. I need passive aggressive attorneys, inc.
That's what I need. So if you could, Mandy will.

Speaker 5 (31:48):
Wait.

Speaker 4 (31:50):
Oh well, okay, okay, you guys are saying things I
cannot cannot read on the air, Mandy, when my wife
was based to JFK had Al Sharpton on numerous flights
and said he was consistent, always a world class, a
whole there you go. Yep, some people just can't get it.

(32:15):
Can I get uninsured coverage on my breast and plants?
There's a lot of hit and runs going on there too.
Uh huh, Mandy. I've heard that Manson is quite a
nice and intelligent guy. I've also heard the same, but
he apparently is not nice to the women that he
has dated at all. Mandy, make insurance one year non cancelable,
then make the insurance companies tracked down nonpayers, then confiscate

(32:38):
cars caught without it. I would love all of that stuff.
I would love every single bit of it. But it's
just not a priority because, again, unless you believe that
smaller crimes lead to bigger crimes, which is the crux
of the broken window theory, and the Democrats here certainly
don't they just making crime easier since twenty nineteen. We'll
be right back with Mike O'Donnell to talk about some

(32:59):
of those crimes stats.

Speaker 1 (33:02):
The Mandy Connell Show is sponsored by Belle and Pollock
accident and injury lawyers.

Speaker 2 (33:07):
Well, no, it's Mandy Connell, Andy don Kam, got.

Speaker 3 (33:19):
Satty, the Nicety, Gus Frey, Andy Donald, Keith sad Babe.

Speaker 4 (33:28):
Welcome, Local, Welcome to the second hour of the show.
I'm your host, Mandy Connell. And that's not Anthony Rodriguez
is now Grant Smith. A rod turned into a pumpkin
and Grant stepped out in his broncos gear.

Speaker 7 (33:40):
Uh.

Speaker 4 (33:40):
This hour, I am pleased to have with us again
the president of the Paragon Health Institute, a nerdy think
tank that talks about making healthcare better boring, but boy,
am I glad they're doing it. So, Brian Blaze, welcome
back to the show. First of all, thanks Mandy. Great
to be with you. So let's talk about a tweet
or post or whatever it's called now that you sent

(34:01):
out yesterday, because there's a whole bunch of stuff happening
right now around Obamacare, and I would argue that the
promises of Obamacare are coming to fruition right now. And
one of the reasons that the Democrats are arguing so
hard to keep everybody on Obamacare subsidies, even though they
weren't originally intended for them, is that they require more

(34:24):
and more people on the dole to get to the
end result, which I think is they've always wanted single payer,
and this is just a middle step to single payer
in my view. You don't have to comment on that
if you want to, But the reality is is that
they've been shifting more and more responsibility for these plans
onto the taxpayer for years. And how did we not
know about this until now? Brian?

Speaker 6 (34:49):
So, Obamacare significantly increased premiums in the individual market. The
core changes in Obamacare took effect twenty fourteen, and on
average there was a forty seven percent premium increase from
twenty thirteen to twenty fourteen.

Speaker 2 (35:07):
The only way that people.

Speaker 6 (35:10):
Buy these plans is if they either expect to have
significant medical expenses or they receive large subsidies. The key
with understanding the subsidies there's two keys. One, they go
directly to health insurance companies, So the person picks a
plan the plans offered by an insurer, they qualify for

(35:32):
a subsidy. The Treasury sends the insurer a check every
month that that individual is enrolled. The second key point
with the subsidies is that they limit the amount that
an enrollee has to pay, so his premiums have gone
up over time, the taxpayer has picked up the entire

(35:54):
cost of the increase. So in twenty fourteen, the average
taxpayer shape was about thirty three percent. It was about
sixty seven percent in twenty twenty, it was eighty percent.
In twenty twenty one, during COVID as a temporary pandemic measure,
President Biden signed legislation that shifted even more of the

(36:18):
cost from the enrolle to the taxpayer. So for the
typical enrolling now ninety three percent of the premium is
paid by the taxpayer. They set those subsidy add ons
to expire after twenty twenty five, so for the typical enrollly,

(36:38):
they'd go back from ninety three percent of the subsidy
or ninety three percent of the premium paid by the taxpayer,
to about eighty percent of the premium paid by the taxpayer.

Speaker 4 (36:49):
I mean, Brian, this is so frustrating. Not only did
they do that, they also significantly raise the income limits
for subsidies, so they added an entire new class of
people on government subsidies. And I've been really frustrated because
our own Senator John Higgenloper is tweeting out that this
healthcare crisis is created by Republicans. Not a single Republican

(37:10):
voted for any of this, not a single one on
any of these bills. So how exactly did we get
to the point where we are now, where we're paying
so much? Was that all part of ARPA or the
Inflation Reduction Act or was there separate legislation that did that?

Speaker 6 (37:28):
And you're right, the subsidies originally were capped for people
making below four times the poverty line. And what ARPA did,
which was the first Biden stimulus, was increased the subsidies
to insurers for twenty twenty one and twenty twenty two.
In the summer of twenty twenty two, they extended these
COVID era subsidy add ons through twenty twenty five. And Mandie,

(37:53):
You're absolutely right. Not a single Republican voted for Obamacare.
Not a single Republican voted for these expanded stuff. So
it is I mean, the Democrats are blaming Republicans even
though not a single Republican has ever supported the Obamacare structure?
Is there?

Speaker 4 (38:11):
And I don't mean politically, what if any is there
any plan? Are you aware of any plan? Does Paragon
promote any plan that would potentially do something to go
after the underlying causes of health insurance? Because I read
the Obamacare bill when they passed it. I read every
stupid iteration of that bill back in two thousand and eight,
and I told my listeners then it was never designed

(38:34):
to control costs in any way. There's nothing in Obamacare
that is really going to control the rise of health
care costs. What could we do to go after the
root cause of why health insurance is so expensive? And
that is health care is so expensive.

Speaker 6 (38:51):
Yeah, So I'd say there's a couple of things. One,
healthcare is expensive, and health care has been made more
expensive by bad government policy. Partly, it's because government is
over subsidizing demand and creating all of these mandates on
what insurance has to cover. And the more the insurance covers,

(39:13):
the less the enroll The consumer is sensitive to the
price of the services, so the more pricing power goes
to providers. So actually, just by increasing mandates on what
insurance has to cover, you will increase the price of healthcare.
Government also does other things, like through the way the

(39:33):
Medicare program sets payment rates. Medicare pays much more for
the same service if it's delivered in a hospital then
if it's delivered in a physician office. And one of
the things that happens in commercial insurance is that they
often bench their prices to how Medicare pays. So because
Medicare pays inflated prices, we play it pay inflated prices commercially.

(39:57):
One other thing about Obamacare care subsidy structure is inherently inflationary.
If the enrollee is held harmless from any of the
premium increase, and all of the premium increase over time
is borne by the taxpayer. Insurers know that they know
that they're able to raise premiums and pass the cost

(40:20):
off to the federal taxpayer. What that means is that
they can go into negotiations with providers and say, yeah,
we can pay you providers more because our enrollees aren't
going to bear any of the burden of these higher premiums.
So Obamacare, by linking this a little wonky, but by
linking the subsidy to the premium, is independently inflationary on

(40:46):
healthcare prices. So fundamentally, we need to reduce all of
these distortionary subsidies of health care that pass the bill
to everybody else, but ultimately we all pay. And that
also reduce these government to store that have so inflated,
really hospital prices.

Speaker 4 (41:03):
I was explaining to the audience earlier. Normally, in a
capitalist transaction, for lack of a better way to put it,
you have some one who is going to put downward
pressure on pricing, right, But in a third party payer
system that we have with insurance, we've created a triangle
and nobody has an incentive to drive costs lower. That's

(41:24):
the distortion that you're talking about. And so now we've
got a third party subsidy on health insurance that is
distorting a third party distorted healthcare system in the first place.
So we've gone so far away from anything that could
be considered a capitalist type system. Would some of the ways,
and I'm sure you guys have talked about this, what
are some of the ways you see to inject free

(41:46):
market wherever we can into healthcare? Because I've long had
an idea, and I don't know if it was original
to me, but we should have two kinds of health care.
We should have scheduled health care, we should have emergency healthcare,
and they should have different kinds of coverage if I
need a hit replacement. There should be able a way
to inject market forces into that, don't you think. Yeah,

(42:06):
So you have to look, there's two sides of the market.

Speaker 6 (42:09):
There's the consumers in the demand side of the market,
and then you've got the producers in the supply side
of the market, and government is screwed up both sides
of the market. On the supply side of the market,
we need medical professionals to be able to practice to
the top of their license. For nurse practitioners to be
able to take care of patients to their ability. You know,
Obamacare contained a provision that makes it much more difficult

(42:33):
for physician owned hospitals. That really gives an advantage to
traditional hospitals, even though we know that physician owned hospitals
tend to have lower costs and better quality outcomes.

Speaker 4 (42:43):
So we need to and a lot of states have
these things called.

Speaker 6 (42:47):
Certificate of need requirements, which means you can't expand supply,
whether that's new hospitals or imaging equipment, unless you get
permission from the existing market entities to have competition come on.
So we've restricted competition on the demand side. We have

(43:10):
you know, as you correctly note all of this subsidy
for third party payment, what we need to do is
restore the financial control to the individual patient. So we
have thought through and have some specifics on government's going
to subsidize healthcare. It's going to subsidize healthcare for the elderly,
it's going to subsidize healthcare for.

Speaker 2 (43:29):
Lower income people.

Speaker 6 (43:30):
How about taking those subsidies and sending them directly to
the patient has HSA contributions, so the patient has maximum
flexibility to choose the care that works best for them
rather than just funneling everything into the current system.

Speaker 4 (43:44):
I completely agree with that. I actually just thought of
a question based on a comment you made a little
earlier in this interview, and that is you just said
Medicare reimbursements are higher for hospital patients than it is
outside the hospital. Is that why hospital are buying every
doctor's office? Are those larger premium reimbursements happening in a

(44:05):
doctor's office that is now owned by a healthcare system.

Speaker 6 (44:09):
That's exactly why hospitals and physicians. They have mutually beneficial
financial interests for the hospital to buy up the physician practice.
So you can have an independent physician practice one day
that is bought up by the hospital, and the next day,

(44:29):
crisis will double, even though nothing has changed about that
office other than the fact that it's gone for being
owned by an independent set of physicians to the hospital
acquiring the physician office.

Speaker 4 (44:42):
So essentially the game was set by the government deciding
that those reimbursements are going to be higher, and you've
got independent offices that have to maintain billing and insurance
and all of that stuff, and they come in and
say we're going to take care of all that. We're
just going to buy you out. I mean, it's really
a genius system. And I don't hate them for taking
advantage for the way that the game is rigged, but

(45:02):
it does seem to be that the game is significantly
rigged to favor large healthcare providers that are now making
more money from Medicare, which means Medicare what is insolvent
faster now. I mean, and don't get me wrong, Medicare
reimbursements for a lot of stuff suck really bad, right,
I mean, they just do. But that just seems like
to see how clearly the game is set up is

(45:24):
interesting to me. Now.

Speaker 6 (45:28):
I mean, the government has created distortions of an unbelievable
magnitude in the healthcare sector. I mean for your listeners
that have taken like the basic economics class. You know,
first you learn supply and demand, and then you learn
about price controls. And whenever you have price controls, you
reduce the markets signal for what value is placed on things,

(45:52):
and you get excess or you get an under provision.
And think about the health sector, we are set by controls.
The price has come out from a bureaucracy in Washington.
They come out through the Medicare program. And because part
of it is just how lazy commercial insurers are. And

(46:12):
this is a sort of a new paragon. We've commissioned
some research on this. They just benchmark to Medicare payments.
So if you want to you know, in so you
have all these prices that are set by the deureaucracy.
They also determine whether new services or new you know, pharmaceuticals,

(46:34):
whether they can come into the market, and what price
point they're set at. So there's so much We allocate
so many of our resources in healthcare by whoever has
the best lobbyists, and that lobbying and healthcare is seven
times more than lobbying for the defense related to the

(46:55):
defense industry.

Speaker 4 (46:56):
Holy cow, I'm not surprised at all by that. I
mean here, I don't know where you're located, Brian, but
here in Colorado, we just passed a new insurance mandate
that you have to pay for cosmetic surgery for trans people.
I can't get a boob job, but if you, Brian Blaze,
would like a boob job, you can get one here
in Colorado, paid for by your insurance company. It's really

(47:18):
frustrating to be a talk show host and know all
this stuff because they used to sell health insurance and
life insurance. They sold all that stuff, So I understand it.
How many people truly don't understand how all of these
mandates are driving up the cost of insurance dramatically for everyone.
That would be a message that I think would be
nice if we could get that out. Yeah, no, I agree.

Speaker 6 (47:42):
I mean these mandates, you know, the special interests come in,
and so the cosmetic surgeons come in, and they want
the additional mandates because that makes people less sensitive to
the price changes. And you know, insurance is supposed to
be the pulling of resources to finance unexpected, unpredictable events.

(48:08):
So that's how most insurance works, like life insurance, home insurance,
auto insurance. That is not how health insurance works. So
there's a portion of health insurance that is sort of
that financing of unpredictable risk. But a lot of health
insurance is just prepayment of medical care, and it drives
up demand because people pay this amount in advance and

(48:32):
they're like, well, we've got to get our you know,
benefit from all of this money that we've paid in
our health insurance premiums.

Speaker 4 (48:42):
It's a perverse cycle and that's where we are. Brian
Blaize with the Paragon Health Institute, thank you for coming
on the show. Thanks for what you guys do being
as nerdy as you are. Keep it up on X
because I follow you on X and you give me
great information quite often. So keep up the good work, Brian.

Speaker 9 (49:00):
Thank you.

Speaker 5 (49:00):
We'll do all right.

Speaker 4 (49:02):
Thank you. Yeah, there's so many ways that all of
this stuff is interconnected, right, and it's whether it's the
crime stats we're going to talk with Mike O'Donnell two
o'clock about driving up the cost of our other insurance,
it's the hailstorms that happen on the planes driving up
the cost of our homeowners insurance. But what's baffling to

(49:23):
me is how people love to say yes, insurance could
cover that for other people. But the follow up question
of how much are you willing to pay in a
premium to make that happen? Never gets asked, right, It
just doesn't get asked because people don't think like that.
The people voting yeah, we need to keep those Obamacare

(49:43):
so well, how much of your health insurance premiums do
you want to go to pay someone else's health insurance premiums.
What's that number? Because I think when you start talking
real cash money, like here, we're gonna tack on whatever
amount you say, We're just going to tack it on
in the form of attacks on a your health insurance
to pay for someone else's health insurance, you know, someone

(50:04):
who might not make bad money. So it's we need
to completely unwind and I mean completely unwind Obamacare and
allows states to offer plans that work for people. You know,
if I'm a fifty six year old woman, do I
really need health insurance with maternity coverage?

Speaker 3 (50:25):
No?

Speaker 7 (50:26):
I do not.

Speaker 2 (50:27):
No, I don't.

Speaker 4 (50:29):
Does my sixty one year old husband need it? He
better not. It's time to allow people to make good decisions.
If you really want to shop for insurance and you
really want to find a plan that is cheap on
the front end when you're young, especially do it. But
you don't even have that option. You don't even have
the choice. And how many people with these plans that

(50:50):
we've got now you may not even have a regular
physician that you see on a regular basis. Maybe you're
just using urgent care because if they're not going to
pay anything until you hit five thousand, why, you know,
establish our relationship with the doctor. It's just it's just
been terrible, and it's terrible by design. It's terrible. It's
a it's not a bug, it's a feature.

Speaker 7 (51:11):
Right.

Speaker 4 (51:12):
The main thing Obamacare was designed to do was to
make us all hate the health insurance system and make
sure we're too stupid to understand that there are ways
to fix it. So people would clamor for single payer
because oh, it would have to be better than this.
It won't be It will not be better than this.
If you're healthy, single pair is amazing. If you get sick,

(51:36):
good luck. That's the that's the harsh reality. You can
have quickly delivered healthcare, you can have good healthcare. You
can have cheap healthcare. You can't have all three. Anyway,
we are going to take a time out here in
just a minute. When we get back. By the way,
you should really look at the tweet that Brian put
out and it's on my blog at mandy'sblog dot com.

(51:58):
When we get back, I want to go through really quickly.
I'm not going to spend a lot of time on it,
but i want to go through really quickly. Again for
this hour's listeners about the nonsense that Democrats are trying
to sell and all you need to know about how
much nonsense it is. And we're going to start with
a post by our own Senator John Hickenlooper. Also in

(52:19):
the next segment, OURTD has once again proven that they're
not really that interested in providing an incredible high level
of service that would make people want to use their
product more. No, I'll explain how their latest announcement proves

(52:39):
once again that anything done by government is Yeah, I
shouldn't say that. That's too sweeping, that's too broad. I'll
walk that back. Maybe there's like a you know, a
needle in a haystack that I'm missing. But generally speaking,
whatever government provides, they don't do a great job. They
just they don't do a great job. And this is

(53:03):
proof of it because we've been talking for I don't
even know how many years now about how inconvenient RTD
is and how people don't want to write it because
they're afraid of getting stabbed. And when you hear their
response to what they're telling people about This Saturday night
in downtown Denver, there's a Paul McCartney concert, there's an
AVS game and the Great American Beverage Festival is going on.

(53:26):
I'll share with you what RTD had to say about that.

Speaker 2 (53:30):
Next.

Speaker 4 (53:31):
The Democrat talking point on the government shutdown is that
the government shutdown is the Republican's fault because they created
a healthcare crisis. Case in point, our own Senator John
Hickenlooper tweeted this out eight days. That's how long Republicans

(53:52):
have kept the government shut down, and not a single
one of them has come to the table to tackle
the healthcare crisis created. Unbelievable, except I used the Google
machine and I went back to see who voted for what.
When it came to Obamacare. You may remember back in

(54:14):
twenty ten, Obamacare's original subsidy was up to four hundred
percent of the federal poverty level, and only Democrats voted
for that. In twenty twenty one, they took advantage of
COVID to raise that again. They removed the four hundred
percent cap and lowered the percentage that people were responsible
for in their premiums. Who voted for that Democrats only. Oh,

(54:38):
by the way, in twenty twenty two, the Inflation Reduction
Act extended subsidy expansion straight out until twenty twenty five,
which is where we are now. Who voted for that?
Democrats are the only people who voted for any of this.
So the notion that somehow the Republicans have created any
kind of healthcare crisis is beyond patently absurd. So now

(55:02):
that's the thing, you know. Now, all of that data
is on the blog at mandy'sblog dot com if you
need to reference it with friends later. Now, we got
to talk about urtd on Saturday night? Grant, are you
going to any of these things on Saturday night? Got
the Avs game? You got the Paul McCartney concert, You
got the Great American Beverage Festival. And I'm calling that

(55:22):
on purpose, by the way. Yeah, it's it's a Great
American Beverage Fest.

Speaker 7 (55:31):
I may go to the Great American Beer Festival, but
I have to be here at four am on Sunday
for the Roos game, so no, I doubt it.

Speaker 4 (55:39):
I'm on Saturday afternoon. Oh nice at the DCPA. Yeah,
I'm going to see kat on a hot tin roof
on Friday night. As a Southerner, I'm contractually auber great
obligated to love Tennessee. Williams Luckily he's just an amazing playwright.
But cat On Aunt it's long, like so long that
Chuck looked at up and he's like, yeah, no, i'msions. Yes,

(56:01):
there is two intermissions. Two hours and fifty minutes with
two hour ten minute intermissions. Wow. The longest play I've
ever gone to was Long Day's Journey in the Night,
four and a half hours, no intermissions long.

Speaker 1 (56:13):
It was.

Speaker 4 (56:15):
Okay, I'm just gonna say this, if you're a if
you're the kind of person who goes to the theater
for action, long Day's Journey in the Night will be
the longest four and a half hours that you ever
spend in your entire life. However, if you enjoy a
character study which cat On a hot tin roof is
it's one of the reasons that I love this show
so much. That was one of the most intense theater

(56:36):
experiences I ever had seeing Eugene O'Neil's Long Day's Journey
in Tonight, because it's about this dysfunctional family and the
mom is addicted to opium, and I mean, it's just
it's crazy. It's crazy, but it is.

Speaker 1 (56:49):
It was.

Speaker 4 (56:50):
It was emotionally exhausting by the time I left, I
was like, oh god, okay, but it was it was incredible.
It was an incredible theater experience. I know not everybody
loves an incredible theater experience. I have grown to love them.
I I gotta tell you, there's nothing better than just
having the doors blown off by a show. I love it. Yeah.

(57:10):
We went and saw Jesus Christ Superstar last year.

Speaker 9 (57:12):
Home.

Speaker 4 (57:12):
Oh yeah, there you go. But there's action in that. Okay,
long day's journey, tonight cat on a hot tin roof,
nobody's singing and dancing in the chefs.

Speaker 7 (57:20):
But to your original point, I will not be in
this debacle of RTD on Saturday, which gets.

Speaker 4 (57:26):
Me back to the story that I actually started talking about.
RTD knows that there is a Paul McCartney concert, there
is an AVS game, and there's the Great American Beer
Festival downtown. So what do they do They make sure
to put out when the last of their trains are running.
Not hey guys, we've added cars. Hey guys, we'll be
running two trains outside Ball Arena or any of the

(57:48):
other places. No, none of that.

Speaker 10 (57:50):
It's just, yeah, if you're going to take the trade,
you need to know when the last one's gonna leave,
then you better hope you could get on it, because
that's the last trade and we don't care what happens
to you after that.

Speaker 4 (58:01):
It's amazing. It's you know, if they were overflowing with customers,
if they were if they were having to turn people
away at the turnstiles, I might understand this attitude. But no,
that's not what's happening. So my prediction is if you're
a lift or uber rider or you're going to make
a fortune because people are going to come from Douglas

(58:23):
County to go to one of these events and then
find out after they missed the first train stand for
an hour. Wouldn't it be not grant? Wouldn't it been
cool if urtd had said, Hey, guys, we know we
got all this stuff going on downtown, so we're adding
trains on the fifteen minutes. We're going to add trains
to the mix. We want you guys to be able
to get where you're going quickly and efficiently.

Speaker 7 (58:43):
And not only are they not adding trains, my guests
would be I haven't seen the schedule, is that they'll
have them spaced out at least a half an hour.

Speaker 4 (58:49):
Apart correct, So it's an hour. Yeah, it's a nightmare.
I've been in that situation. Oh the last time. That
was absolutely the last time that I ever put myself
in position again, So it's you know, but our TV
has now reminded you you can. Yeah, if you need
the E line. Wait, where's the one? My favorite? The

(59:10):
B line? Good luck? You got to be home by
eleven oh nine, or at least on the train by
eleven o nine. Want to stay for the encore?

Speaker 9 (59:16):
Sorry about that B line?

Speaker 4 (59:19):
You better make a B line for the train because
you're gonna miss it. By the way, these are all
when they're leading Union Station, so they may be a
little bit different. But nothing. No, like, hey, we're gonna
have that. No, no, just be ready because it's when
the trains leeve. This is what happens. Sorry about your
luck anyway. What is Brian's last name again? Please? I

(59:42):
want to follow him on social media, but I missed
it on Twitter, which is where I follow him. He
is Brian b R I A N underscore Blaze and
I think it's Blaze. I never asked him b L
A S E. And I put one of his tweets
on my Facebook, on my blog today. If you just
want to click on that and then hit the follow button,
you can do it that way as well. So, Mandy,

(01:00:05):
I just learned that RTD cannot pull more than four
rail cars at a time. Are you hitting me? Fiddler
on a hot tin roof would be much longer, says
this text?

Speaker 2 (01:00:17):
Correct?

Speaker 4 (01:00:18):
Correct? Somebody said, Mandy, this is what our governor just
posted on Facebook. Guys, we cannot get images on the
text line. So unless you throw a link there, I
cannot get. And I don't click on every link, but
if it goes straight to Facebook, I'll click on that. No,
I did not know that RTD can only pull four
rail cars at a time. Huh yeah, huh. Anyway, Also

(01:00:47):
on the blog today, boy, I got a lot of
good stuff on the blog today. You'd be so much
smarter if you just read it. Okay. I want to
get this in before the break though, because it's not
really a talk story. It's a horrible story. But there
was a sergeant in the Aurora Police Department that was
just arrested for child exploitation on the web. He is

(01:01:08):
attached to the SRO program. He was not, from what
I understand, working at a school, and none of the
children that he allegedly exploited were in the schools that
he was around. But nonetheless, but remember when Vanessa Wilson
was in charge of Aurora pad and whenever anything happened,
all of her statements felt like, we have so far

(01:01:29):
to go. We have to take responsibility. We we we
as if what a bad cop did was reflective of
every cop in the Aurora Police Department. Is really frustrating
and annoying. She could not wait to be like, oh,
we will wear But Aurora Police Chief Todd Chamberlain put
this statement out. This is a sad and angering day

(01:01:51):
for the Aurora Police Department in the community we serve.
The allegations against this individual are disturbing and completely contrary
to the values in mission of this department. This person
has brought a shame and disgrace to the badge and
to an honorable profession. Such behavior undermines the trust and
legitimacy that our officers work hard to earn every day.

(01:02:12):
I want to make it absolutely clear these actions will
never be tolerated. This case will be investigated thoroughly, and
the individual will be held accountable through both the criminal
justice system and our internal processes that, my friends, is
a statement that you use to address the malfeasance of
one officer. He made it very very clear that this

(01:02:36):
was not representative and that this is not okay, and
that none of this will be tolerated. But in no
point did he in any way make it look like
this was somehow a problem that we needed to solve.

Speaker 3 (01:02:50):
No.

Speaker 4 (01:02:52):
I love this guy, and I know I haven't met
him before. We shall see if I could actually get
him on the show at some point. That would be
great when we get back. There's a couple things on
the blog today that are really I mean, does it
really matter who becomes the president or excuse me, the
mayor of New York City? Uh kinda. But there's a

(01:03:14):
really funny AI video about Zeron Mondomini, and I put
it on the blog. We'll be right back to talk
about it. Can't find anything about the RTV only being
able to pull four cars at a time. I'm not
saying you're wrong, Texter, but I am not being able
to find any Can you see if you can search
that search that down there, Grant. In the meantime, though,

(01:03:36):
I'm gonna tell you a few things. I started this
earlier and I forgot to finish one thought about these
school board elections. And I know you guys are like Mandy,
it's so boring. Why do I care about school board elections?
First of all, you want to know why these kids
in college are walking around with heads full of mush.
It's because of school board elections ten years ago. That's

(01:03:56):
what I'm hered to tell you. They truly, truly do.
But there's something else that you have to understand, and
that is the teachers' unions are relentless. In Douglas County,
they stripped the collective bargaining away from the unions years ago,
years ago, and the unions have never stopped fighting to

(01:04:18):
get it back. They back candidates to they believe have
the best chance to bring back collective bargaining, even though
results being what they are, Douglas County has flourished without
having a collective bargaining agreement, at least the children have.
So One of the things I want to point out
is that right now in D eleven in Colorado Springs,

(01:04:39):
they too voted to do away with collective bargaining. They
replaced the collective bargaining agreement with what they call their
Master Handbook. And it has all of the same stuff
that the collective bargaining agreement had, but it's just done
by the district without negotiating with the union. Now D
eleven is doing a one day strike and they're urging

(01:04:59):
teachers in Douglas to strike with them. This is how
toxic they are. They can't make the argument that they've
made student achievement better because they haven't. It's just the
the data doesn't bear that out. So school board elections matter. Yes, Grant,
did you find the answer to why RTD cannot carry
more than four cars at a time.

Speaker 7 (01:05:19):
I'm not seeing anything that it's limited to four cars,
but it does say that they only pull for four cars.

Speaker 4 (01:05:24):
Well, this one pointed out the train length is limited
by platform lengths, and that's probably accurate. That's that's probably
the best reason right there. But why not add more?
I mean, I don't know how many, I don't know,
you know what, I'm gonna call Kathleen Chandler. I'm gonna
see if I can get her on this. She's on
the RTD board. I see if I can get her
on the show to talk about this. Complaints about them

(01:05:45):
pulling less than four cars. Oh, Grant the car, the
train that goes down to RidgeGate, the furthest South train.
Half the time it is one car. It looks like
the little trolley and mister Rogers Neighborhood go into land
to make believe. It's like the saddest thing you ever
saw in your life. And it's empty. It's one car

(01:06:07):
with no one on it, just like mister Rogers Neighborhood.
It's crazy. It's absolutely nuts, Mandy. The E Line trains
from the Broncos game two mondays ago had at least
eight cars and they were all packed so full it
was like sardines. Mandy. Just look at the trains. They
only have four cars, both light and heavy rail. Mandy.

(01:06:31):
Station platforms are not long enough. The texture from the
E Line just said, oh that's that's you know, not accurate,
So we'll have to see about that. One earlier from
the text line, someone texted in this my problem with
mass transit of any kind is the last mile issue.

(01:06:52):
I can't walk a mile in a decent amount of time,
and I'm going to hurt doing it. As for self
defense issues, hollow point nine millimeter solves that issue, except
the progressive das will try to try me for terminating
one of their precious criminals, insane whatever, I'll be portrayed
as a psychopath, white supremacists, et cetera, ad finem ad dassium.
I wish I could tell you that you're wrong, but

(01:07:14):
I have a feeling that that is exactly what would
go down. So I'm trying to do that. Get that
out of the way so I can get here. Oh,
Kathy Chandler, Oh no, that's not it. Um, Okay, I
just got data from well I have to see Okay,

(01:07:38):
I'll look at that on the on the on the break,
someone just sent me data and said I should get
Kathleen K. Chandler on the air, which I will because
I like her so much. Hang on one second, trying
to open this and close this opening that closing that. Okay,

(01:07:59):
I realized, in a system like this, it's not like
it's a complex system that has to be kind of
worked out, Chuck and Over watching this show, do you
ever watch Mighty Trains Grant Like it's on the Smithsonian Channel.
It's just literally about trains all over the world. Blas.
Show I watch on the Smithsonian Channel is Aerial America. Okay,
so it's in a weird way in that same genre, right,

(01:08:21):
it has that same vibe even though it's totally different.
But they were doing this. They were showing a train
in India. Okay, like a quote luxury train in India. Now,
these shows should make you want to go right and
do this stuff, right, that's kind of the purpose they're
doing it. I have never been more certain that I
will not get on a train in India in my
life than I was after I watched that show. Not

(01:08:43):
looking very safe. No, you should see their archaic system
that they use to map where all the trains are.
Oh god, it was. It was scary as hell. I
was like, there's not a snowballs chance in hell getting
on a train in India. Good thing, that's not an
option right now. Now, can we get back We're talking
Great American Beverage Festival. Oh yeah, that's up next.

Speaker 1 (01:09:07):
The Mandy Connell Show is sponsored by Belle and Pollock
Accident and injury lawyers.

Speaker 2 (01:09:11):
Well, no, it's Mandy Connell.

Speaker 4 (01:09:15):
Mandy Dona.

Speaker 2 (01:09:18):
KOA ninety FM got way to say.

Speaker 3 (01:09:25):
The nicey us through Frey Andy Connell, keeping your real
sad bab.

Speaker 4 (01:09:33):
Welcome Local, Welcome to the third hour of the show.
I'm your host for the next I don't know fifty
five minutes. Mandy Connell grim Smith in for Anthony Rodriguez.
He will be at the Great American Beverage Festival. More
on that in the moment. You've heard him on before.
Mike O'Donnell is a numbers nerd who loves to dig
into statistics and then write stuff about it. And he

(01:09:54):
had a great column yesterday at the Rocky Mountain Voice
about the crime statistics for Colorad and they are not
good at all. Mike, welcome back to the show. First
of all, thank you very much, Mandy.

Speaker 5 (01:10:07):
I appreciate you inviting me back.

Speaker 9 (01:10:09):
Well.

Speaker 4 (01:10:09):
I so enjoy your nerdy work, and this nerdy work
is very disheartening. I'm not going to lie. What did
you dig into to get this data about the crime stats?

Speaker 9 (01:10:21):
What I do is the FBI does a really good
job collecting or canvassing, all of the different agencies across
the United States to collect the information about incidents and
crimes that are reported in jurisdictions. And you can look
at the information down to an individual county or a
city and collect these from across the country and the states.

(01:10:41):
And so what I did was I was curious about
the two main categories. We've got violent crimes and we've
got property crimes. And first of all, I looked at
violent crimes because that received scares me a little bit.
And I wanted to see how many crimes are occurring
in Colorado for one hundred thousand of population and then
compare that with the rest of the country. Because everyone

(01:11:02):
talks about the fact that crime writes it down there's
not that much violence, all this sort of stuff, and
I wanted to just see if that was actually true
and whether they were going down fast.

Speaker 5 (01:11:14):
In Colorado or slow or not at all.

Speaker 9 (01:11:16):
So that was really my intent is looking at the
numbers and overlaying them with census system the data for
Colorado to see whether things were changing.

Speaker 4 (01:11:25):
So what did you find out? And I want to
start with just the basic numbers in Colorado and what
I'd like you to do, Mike, just because when you
start throwing out a bunch of numbers on the radio,
it gets hard to follow.

Speaker 5 (01:11:36):
So let's find out.

Speaker 4 (01:11:36):
Yeah, let's stick to percentage increases, how about that or
percentage decreases because those are easy, right, So what did
you find out about crime in Colorado.

Speaker 9 (01:11:45):
First, well, crime has been going down in terms of
just the percentage numbers.

Speaker 5 (01:11:51):
It's decreasing, and it has.

Speaker 9 (01:11:53):
Been doing that since twenty twenty two was that peak
year in Colorado about the number of property crimes as
well as violent crimes. And when we looked at it's
gone down but per capita, and it has gone down
to capita. But when you compare Colorado with the rest
of the country, it's gone down faster and further in

(01:12:15):
pretty much every other state other than Colorado and perhaps
one or two others. So the challenge we have is
when we go from you know, like two thousand online
and we have less property crime than we did, then
almost by it's down by it's down. Where's my numb

(01:12:35):
It's down by about fifty. Well, it's just sends me
down significantly, by almost about half. But it's come down
much more rapidly for the rest of the country.

Speaker 5 (01:12:46):
As a whole, and for most states in particular.

Speaker 4 (01:12:50):
That's truly disheartening. And you don't really dive into it
in the article that you did for The Rocky Mountain Voice.
You don't necessarily dive into what you think the underlying
causes are. I can they're all political, and some of
the criminal justice reform we've seen happen in Colorado has
been absurd in making crime so much easier. Do you
have any data about what other states have done or

(01:13:15):
is there is there any analysis of why there's such
a big difference?

Speaker 1 (01:13:19):
Is it?

Speaker 4 (01:13:19):
Have you done any of that?

Speaker 9 (01:13:22):
Not so much other than it's just anecdotal. We know
that a lot of mayors in big cities, you know,
don't like the fact that people get put in prison,
so they avoid putting people in prisoners.

Speaker 3 (01:13:32):
Right.

Speaker 9 (01:13:32):
This is something that that I'm sure you've talked about
in the past.

Speaker 5 (01:13:35):
Is that and when you look at and this is another.

Speaker 9 (01:13:38):
Future article, but I ask, you, know the Google AI program,
why has property crime, for example, dropped? Google will not.

Speaker 5 (01:13:47):
Give you the answer. I will not give you the answer.

Speaker 9 (01:13:49):
One of the reasons is it incarceration rates that actually increased.

Speaker 5 (01:13:52):
So I thought I'd.

Speaker 9 (01:13:53):
Actually look and see that we actually have few prisoners
incarcerated in Colorado in twenty twenty five than we had
in two thousand and two and two thousand and one.
So what's happened is that we're not incarcerating people, We're
not giving them a disincentive to commit crimes. And when
you don't tell people not to do things, you know,

(01:14:14):
or give them a reason, you know, they get a
slap on the wrist. They can they can steal two
or three cars instead of one car. There's no three
strikes you're out like like some states used to have.
You can just do that with impunity. And just talking
about statistics, I mean on the property crime you know,
that includes things like stealing cars. And in Colorado, across

(01:14:34):
the United States, the number of car thefts in the
last twenty five years has gone down at angles and
put in Colorado it's gone up one hundred and five percent.
So yeah, we've undoubled our car thefts because obviously we're
not disin sending people to steal cars.

Speaker 4 (01:14:51):
Aimen to that. That's a nice way to say, disincentivizing
people to steal cars out there. That's that's a really
really nice way to put it. You can follow on X.
You can also Mike. What's your handle on X It's just.

Speaker 5 (01:15:04):
M O'donald's pretty simple.

Speaker 4 (01:15:06):
M o'donald. He posts the most interesting nerdy things. And
I appreciate you making time for me today, Mike. All right,
I have a good one. Yeah, that's Mike O'Donnell. I
promise you m O'Donnell follow him on actually post fascinating stuff.
Hey this. If I were younger and more enthusiastic about
such things, Grant, I would totally wake up and go

(01:15:28):
watch the London Broncos game with Ben. Alright, Nick Ferguson,
they're gonna be out there at burned Down Denver on
Broadway or off Broadway rather from seven am to nine am.
It's ajama part. That would be super fun. Kind of yeah,
why why wouldn't you show up in your jammis would
then show up in his Jammy's band totally.

Speaker 7 (01:15:47):
Would Then I'll probably wear a deep V black T
shirt and his weird black shoes with roses and some
pants that are too small for him if I had
to guess what, But Nick Ferson said he's coming in
one of his robes.

Speaker 4 (01:16:02):
I kind of hope that Ben didn't near that, and
then we can just play it for him after we
see a picture exact outfit. It's all presented by Arta Tequila,
the official tequila of the Denver Broncos. Seven to nine am,
Golly burned Down off Broadway, You guys, should go cracking
me up. On the text line, Ben will show up

(01:16:25):
in his wet blanket. That's fantastic anywhere without it, exactly Mandy,
They'll be They'll be there and gone from that place
on Broadway on Sunday morning before I'm even out of bed.
My favorite is I just turned I just turned it
into the burn down Pajama Party, because that's what this
textter says. I want to go to the burned down

(01:16:45):
Pajama Party? Where can I find details? Do you have
to make a reservation?

Speaker 6 (01:16:50):
No?

Speaker 4 (01:16:50):
But when you walk in, I need you to make
this joke. When they say do you have a reservation?
You go no, I had some, but I came here anyway.

Speaker 5 (01:16:57):
Get it.

Speaker 4 (01:16:59):
Get it, Grant, Yes, I make that joke a lot,
and I get the dul stair of the dairy cow
by about ninety percent of hostesses, but ten percent are
very appreciative and laugh.

Speaker 7 (01:17:08):
My dad stole a Jim McLaren line when he was
in town in Denver this past week and said, they said, oh,
do you want a box? And he said no, but
I wouldn't mind a little wrestled yep. And he was
met with the same groan as you would expand.

Speaker 4 (01:17:23):
Yes, indeedy Mandy hardwood floors. A few years ago, after
my divorce, I bought a new built condo in Parker.
I was with a buddy and I was excitedly telling
him about the condo and he asked if I had
hardwood floors, and I said kinda. It has luxury vinyl plank,
to which he replied, so no. Bless his heart. When
I remarried and we bought a house, you darned skippy,

(01:17:44):
we bought a house with real hardweed. Lol. Luxury vinyl
plank has a place. It's not in my house, but
it has a place. You know, I don't have little kids,
I don't have dogs, all that stuff. Reservation joke, love it,
Thank you. You can use that. Don't expect to get
a lot of laughs. Though it's similar to this one. Grant.
Let's just say we're about to have lunch at a

(01:18:05):
sandwich place and they have a Cuban sandwich on the menu.
I do enjoy a Cuban sandwich. I am often known
to make the joke. You know what, I like the
boast about Cuban sandwiches, Grant, they don't even taste like people.

Speaker 7 (01:18:20):
I do like that.

Speaker 9 (01:18:21):
See.

Speaker 4 (01:18:21):
Now there you go. These these are my two lunch
jokes I got. I got nothing after that for restaurant jokes. Nothing.
That is my father's genetic code coming out of me.

Speaker 6 (01:18:32):
You know.

Speaker 4 (01:18:32):
I'd see my dad and I go, Dad, you got
your haircut. He is like, nope, I got them all cut.
That was my dad in a nutshell a grandfather. I've
heard that one, oh a few times, I bet, yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:18:45):
Yeah.

Speaker 4 (01:18:47):
Anyway, anyway, anyway, we've got a You know, I have
not talked at all today about the fact that there
may be a ceasefire agreement that leads to the return
of the hostages from the horrible people who have been
holding them for two years now, because I am cautiously optimistic,

(01:19:09):
but I'm not going to believe anything until the hostages
that are still alive walk free. Now two Hamasa's credit,
I guess they have admitted that they don't know where
all the bodies are. I mean, you know, why would
they worry about that, right? Why would anyone? Because Jews
care about their people, and unlike am As, they care

(01:19:31):
about their citizens dead or alive, and they want to
bring them back and make sure they got a proper
burial again, I'm like Comas, who doesn't care at all
about the deaths of Palestinian citizens. As we've seen over
and over and over and over again, Mandy, my line
about do you have a reservation is only about the
salad bar?

Speaker 6 (01:19:49):
Oh?

Speaker 4 (01:19:50):
I like that, Mandy. How many are in your party?
Just me and my ninety nine imaginary friends know that
would not be good a great joke. So I will
be hopefully talking with great joy about people being released
from captivity. But in the next segment of the show,
can we talk about three dumb things? Grant? Well, when

(01:20:13):
it's not dumb, I do want to talk about the
fact that the Great American Beer Festival, which for many, many, many,
many many years was what I thought the world's premiere
beer festival. It really was, but we're not drinking craft
beer likely used to, and now there's like you can't
swing a dead cat without a beer festival smacking me
in the face. And so they have to adapt, they
have to evolve, they have to overcome. We'll talk about that.

(01:20:37):
And I believe that I have discovered and I say
this as someone who thinks, really a vacation, even a
bad vacation, becomes a family lore. And sometimes is worth it. Right,
You're like, remember that time you got malaria when we
were on vacation. Yeah, good times, good times. So I
believe that most vacations, all vacations should be good vacations.

(01:20:58):
I found the one vacation. This sounds horrible, like hard pass.
I'm not doing this. You can't make me. I'll tell
you what it is after this. The character that he's
embodying in that song is that, Hey, guys, it's gonna
be awesome. Did you hear what corporate said? It's gonna
be great. We're gonna have a pizza party. That is

(01:21:22):
funny because it's true. Anyway, there you go, Mandy. You
already told us the worst family vacation a train ride
in India. No, I'm just saying, after watching Mighty Trains
in India, I do not trust that whole system. Okay,
that's just taking your life into your own hands. Not
doing that.

Speaker 1 (01:21:40):
No, listen to this.

Speaker 4 (01:21:41):
This is the thing, you guys. I saw this today
and honestly I'm reading the story and I just went
out loud, no, no, this is not a thing. They
now have guided running tours that you can book on vacation.
Gross instead of taking looking a stroll down the piazza

(01:22:03):
in Italy. You can run like a Maybia can use
this everything.

Speaker 7 (01:22:07):
Then you just yell there's something, there's something else. What
was that?

Speaker 4 (01:22:12):
I don't know. Just listen to this. Wait, it gets better.
Running tours aren't just for long distance runners. They appeal
to everyone. No, they don't, from marathon runners who don't
want to skip a beat while traveling, to casual joggers
who just want to stay active and soak up the scenery.
Most running tours can be tailored to fit to your

(01:22:34):
fitness level and interest, from those who prefer a gentle
jog through cobblestone streets to experienced runners who want to
set a fast pace on a mountain trail. You know,
my problem with this grant is that now the only
time I ever really drink is on vacation. So if
I was trying to do some kind of like you know,
too much cardio, I'd just be sweating out booze the
entire time. At most, I'm going on maybe an easy

(01:22:58):
hike on vacation. I'll go on a hike. Now happen
for me? It doesn't feel like a hike in a
beautiful area, does not feel like work to me, you
know what I'm saying, Like that still feels like vacation.
I will if I'm on a cruise ship, I do
go to the gym, because if you're on a cruise ship,
you better do some kind of exercise or you'll come
back the porkiest version of yourself you've ever seen. But

(01:23:21):
this is one of those things. First of all, I'm
just gonna say it. I think runners high is a lie.
I have never experienced it, and there have been periods
in my life where I diligently tried to become a runner.
I was consistent. I use that stupid couch to five
k program, and I got to where I could run

(01:23:41):
the five k and I never never This is me
running the entire time. This is horrible. I hate this.
Every single step is misery. I don't know why I'm
doing this. No, runners high nothing. I think it's a myth. No,
I don't agree with you. And I ran in college
and I the first mile You're like, God, what am
I doing? Why am I out here doing this?

Speaker 7 (01:24:02):
And then you reach like a mile and a half
two mile and you're like, okay, that's where I throw up.

Speaker 4 (01:24:07):
And if the two mile mark is where I vomit
pretty much every single time. I don't well after I've
tried to run. When I was like fifty, no, maybe
a little hold was eye when I found out my
legs were a different length anatomically, my legs are about
eleven millimeters different. That would make it difficult to run.
It's one of the reasons I think I hate to
ride a bike. I don't like riding a bike because

(01:24:29):
it is uncomfortable because of the way my my legs
don't go down the same amount on the pedals, and
I don't know how you can't really fix that on
a bike, you know what I mean. I don't think so.

Speaker 9 (01:24:41):
But this this.

Speaker 4 (01:24:41):
I saw this, and I was like, if anybody, if
one of my friends called me, I was like, hey girl,
my friends don't say that. But I'm just doing it
for the effect of, you know, the show. Hey girl,
I'm going to give you an all expenses pay trip.
We're gonna go to Italy and it's gonna be a
running tour. I would just be like, right, yeah and
click and hang on. That would just especially a band

(01:25:02):
of their.

Speaker 7 (01:25:02):
Number, like I want copious amounts of wine and pasta
thank you, and to go see some old stuff.

Speaker 4 (01:25:08):
I'm going to be perfectly frank, especially in Europe, you guys,
I walk around with my head in the sky because
the architecture there is incredible, just looking at old buildings
and doors and oh god, I sound like such an
old person right now even as I'm saying this. That's
what I love about going to places. Yes, that's been
around since the thirteen hundred. When you go to Jerusalem

(01:25:29):
and you go to Old Jerusalem, the you know, ancient
part of Jerusalem, and you're walking through the streets of
Jerusalem and you realize that you're walking on the same
road that Jesus fell carrying the cross. It's overwhelming. So
I want to do all that stuff. I'm just like, what,
who are these people? And I know that there are
people who are such passionate runners that they can't, you know,

(01:25:51):
for a second, do without Well, what's the Just go
for a run and then take a nice walking tour
where you eat chocolate at twelve different shops along the way.
We did that in Geneva. Highly recommend two th elves up.
It was fantastic.

Speaker 2 (01:26:06):
Mandy.

Speaker 4 (01:26:06):
Remember, Jim Fix wrote the book about running still had
a heart attack and died. Yep, sure did, Mandy. You
shouldn't do long distance running anyways. It's bad for your knees.
It's better to do short sprints, like one hundred yard dashes.
Text or what in our history together makes you think
I'm going to do one hundred yard dash at any
time soon?

Speaker 6 (01:26:25):
Like? What?

Speaker 4 (01:26:26):
What could I have said to giving you the misconception
that I have any dashes left to give.

Speaker 7 (01:26:31):
I'm just picturing you. You don't run it up and
down your your neighborhood yards at a time.

Speaker 4 (01:26:38):
No, No, what did the lululemons of my jogging guide
look like it might convince me to take a tour?
That's a fair point. I'm sure he'll be very handsome.
You weren't expecting that, were you. No one expects the
Spanish inquisition, Mandy. Don't forget about the heavy breathing while

(01:26:59):
described with their passing Dave Cathedral. Like worst vacation in
the history of vacations, I can't think, and y'all have
done some dumb stuff on vacations. Not dumb in the
sense that they were bad or wrong, but I sometimes
find these excursions. When we were on our last trip

(01:27:20):
to Norway and we stopped in Belgium. I was like, well, dang,
I'm gonna learn how to make Belgian waffles. And that's
what we did. We made Belgian waffles and it was outstanding.
So I'm not afraid to do something you know that's
not normal, but a running vacant. Why not just make
a burpees vacation. Hey, everybody on this tour, We're gonna
go from iconic scenery to iconic scenery and then drop

(01:27:41):
and give us twenty burpees.

Speaker 6 (01:27:44):
No.

Speaker 4 (01:27:45):
No, it's a horrible, awful idea awful Mandy. The claim
that long distance running is bad for us was probably
made by somebody with a cholesterol of four hundred and
four times the average body weight. Know that that texture
is not wrong. There are many doctors who will tell
you that long distance running is way too hard on
the body. It does destroy your joints, It makes your

(01:28:07):
skin sag on your face. We were made for short
sprints as predators back in our most base biological form.
We were made to run fast for short distances so
we could catch stuff to eat or catch stuff to
have sex with. Either way, that's the most basic biological
function of why we maneuver. We did not get two

(01:28:28):
legs so we could walk to the subway stop. That's
not what this is all about, right, It's all about
food or something else that starts with F, and that's
why we are a But we're not designed to run
long distances.

Speaker 5 (01:28:41):
We're just not.

Speaker 4 (01:28:43):
Hey, Mandy, you don't answer your text. Never mind, I'll
ask Ross tomorrow. Guys, there's a lot of texts here, Mandy.
I was actually disappointed when I had my hips replaced,
when they told me I could no longer run unless
someone was chasing me. But the funny thing about that
is you get used to it right away. When my
orthopedist before I went to Regen Revolution, I went to

(01:29:03):
an orthopedist and he said, look, you're these are pretty
bad right now. You probably never need to wear heels again.
And I was taking aback. I was like, don't take
away my femininity. Until I went to my first wedding
wearing flat shoes and was well, it was glorious, people.
It was the most wonderful wedding I've ever been to.
My feet never hurt. They didn't hurt the next day,

(01:29:26):
and I thought, I think I can get used to this.
No thing edict here Mandy time out. There was also
persistence hunting, where you would chase your prey until it
tired out and caveman were able to show down. I'm
just gonna assume that I would have let somebody else
handle that. In caveman times like I would get going
for like the first you know, one hundred yards, They'll

(01:29:47):
be like, I'll be back here if you guys let
me know, I'll be up there. Is just really quick,
as fast as possible, Mandy. We took a golf cart
tour of Rome so fun. I will tell you the
best tour Chuck and I have ever booked, had the
most fun, would do again one hundred percent, no matter
how much it cost. We did the Fondue Tour of Zurich, Switzerland,

(01:30:09):
where we rode around in the back of a Tuck
Tuck and drank wine and ate fondu as the guy
took us all around Zurich and showed us everything we
needed to know.

Speaker 7 (01:30:17):
It was absolutely fantastic. How could anyone rather go on
a running tour than that?

Speaker 4 (01:30:23):
That just makes crazy. These runners are nuts, Grants, They're nuts. Mandy. Hey, Hey,
I'm on vacation naked on the beach and wait, Nope,
can't say that. Horrible for your bladder and pelvic floor too,
says this texter. I don't think that's TMI. I think
that's the right amount of eye not at all TMI. Mandy, Mandy,

(01:30:47):
you better recheck your information on that. We evolved for
endurance running. That's why we sweat. That's why over a
long distance we can run a horse to death. I
am not one willing to test that theory. So we
stayed of the Mexican hostel in Rosarita, and hostile is
being generous. It was missing half the wall. See that's
a great story. I have a story on the blog

(01:31:09):
today about using AI to plan your travel, and AI
for travel planning is so hit or miss that if
you're not familiar at all with your destination, I would
be very cautious about relying on what AI tells you
is possible. And I'm gonna use myself as this example.
A lot of people are saying, I use chat GPT
and I just hadn't planned my entire itinerary. And I

(01:31:32):
know people have done this and had a great experience,
and I know people who have done this and had
a horrible experience. I had like a mid level experience
when we were going to Japan and I realized we
had an entire day in Kyoto. I wanted to plan
as much as I could in that one day in Kyoto,
so I used chat gpt to sort of lay things out,
and chat gpt was not even remotely close about how

(01:31:54):
long it would take us to get from one thing
that we wanted to see to the next thing that
we want to see, so logistically it was not helpful
at all. Uh So you know this, dexter, said Mandy
at seventy five. I'm retired from running at age sixty five.
I wanted to save my joints. Not everyone is meant
to be a runner. Some are meant to be gatherers

(01:32:16):
of berries and grains to go with the meat from
the hunters. Some of us have evolved to be able
to hunt with a firearms, so we don't have to
chase things down anymore. I'm just saying, tequila tour in
Mexico highly recommend. I gotta tell you I have to
stay away from the drinking tours these days because I'm
really a two's my limit person, and if I have

(01:32:36):
too much to drink, like I'm uncomfortable. By the end
of the tour, I'm like, I don't know, I don't
I'm not feeling well. I gotta go.

Speaker 2 (01:32:48):
Mandy.

Speaker 4 (01:32:48):
Well, I don't agree with your thoughts on this running business,
but you're still funny. And it's not enough to drive
me out of the audience. Damn it. See that's that's
my skill. I annoy you, but not enough to fully
go away. I'm sure that'll happen at some point in
the future, though, Mandy. Forrest Gump was a runner, and
you notice you quit. Didn't he just up and quit,

(01:33:11):
just stopped one day, Mandy. This person is my spirit animal, Mandy.
If you see me running, you should run too. Something
is after me. I usually lie down until the feeling passes, Mandy.
Where the psychologist says to the man wrapped in saran wrap,
I can clearly stop it. Stop sending me these jokes.

(01:33:32):
And I can't read the punchline too, Mandy. I run
on vacation so that I can eat all the fun
do now. To be clear, when we're on vacation, we're
walking like twenty five thousand steps a day. We're getting exercise.
It's just not in the form of a forced running
with other people. Grit is your lovely wife A Taylor

(01:33:52):
Swift fan? No, not really. See there's a bunch of
friends who are forced to be a Taylor Swift fan
because I have a sixteen year old daughter and she's
got this new album out. I love it. I hated
the last album. I didn't like it at all. Life
of a Showgirls.

Speaker 7 (01:34:08):
Yes, there's a song about Travis Kelcey's one of his appendages.

Speaker 4 (01:34:13):
It's called wood Grant and I was like, hat tip
to Travis kelce after that one. There's some raunchy business
on this album, and I like it good. It's her.
It's here good pure pop music, right, like just pure
pop music, so good. But the Swifties are mad because
it's two is not wholesome and not not as moody

(01:34:35):
and dark as Folklore and Evermore were. And they're in
the mood for moody and dark because they're stuck in
the Emao world of breakups. And Taylor's moved on and
she's happy and she's singing about basketball hoops in the
driveway and two kids and that kind of stuff because
she's thirty six years old, right, this is this is
the Taylor Swift.

Speaker 7 (01:34:53):
I like, like, you know, going back to like twenty
two and yeah, bad Blood and the fun songs.

Speaker 5 (01:34:58):
Yep.

Speaker 4 (01:34:59):
I love this album. And I just think it's interesting
because there's a whole story on USA Today that I
put on the blog about these parasocial relationships that these
fans develop because now there's so much alleged information about
famous people out there through gossip sites and all of
that stuff, and it's just like instantaneously on your phone.
People start to feel like they have ownership over what

(01:35:21):
she should and should not do right, And that's just silly.

Speaker 7 (01:35:25):
I think the good the sign of a good artist
or a musician is reinventing yourself.

Speaker 2 (01:35:30):
Yeah.

Speaker 4 (01:35:31):
I hope she did. Yeah, Mandy, Seriously, I've been at
my healthiest at the times I was running the most.
For instance, in twenty seventeen, when I was fifty seven,
I ran a half marathon. I rode that wave until
COVID shoved me down into the apocalypse. We're not talking
about while you're running. We're talking about the damage 're
doing to your body that will show up later, the
same kind of damage that sir or madam will send

(01:35:52):
you to see. My friends at regen Revolution for regenerative
medicine on the joints that you have busted up. So
I mean, I my knees were horrible because of athletics stuff,
and that's what happens. So maybe I should shut up
everybody start running. Just remember three oh three two nine
ninety two for rechen Revolution, because you're gonna need him

(01:36:14):
at some point in the future. One thing I know
is Rob Dawson, big ultra distance runner. Wait, actually physically
run before. I've seen Rob run, actually chasing down a
news story at the Was it the DNC, the R
and C. Yeah, I chase Uh no, you were on

(01:36:35):
the other side of the fence. Yeah, when when they
were trying to break down the fences.

Speaker 7 (01:36:39):
Was that the d n C.

Speaker 4 (01:36:42):
I've seen Rob run, and there's no way that's going
the distance. Well, I used I used to when I
lived here the first time I was in a good regimen. Yeah,
I could do I could do threety five miles. Not
right now, there's no way anyway, Nope, nope, nope, anyway,

(01:37:04):
Let's do this because now it's time for the most
exciting segment A second off the radio of its kind.
In the word of the day. All right, I have
a dad joke. I have one that just got texted in.
At a new wedding, you always know who the best
man is. Go ahead, grant what's yours?

Speaker 7 (01:37:28):
I don't know if I could top that. I've been
trying to break up with an optician recently.

Speaker 4 (01:37:32):
It's really hard.

Speaker 7 (01:37:33):
Every time I tell her I can't see her anymore
and says, how about now?

Speaker 4 (01:37:40):
Is one or two better? One or two? Okay? What
is our word of the day?

Speaker 2 (01:37:48):
Word of the day?

Speaker 4 (01:37:50):
Your running style? This is why you run? Duress?

Speaker 5 (01:37:53):
Oh?

Speaker 4 (01:37:53):
Duress? Dress means that you are under some kind of
pressure or external pressure that is creating a motivation that
maybe you didn't have before. Yeah, okay. What English monarch
received a giant wheel of cheddar cheese as a gift
during her reign. I'm just gonna say that would be
Queen Elizabeth. I go Queen Elizabeth too. I heard this

(01:38:14):
the other day somewhere I don't know where, but I
knew that. Well, it's not Queen Elizabeth, it's Queen Victoria.
And the real way, I wouldn't know that the wheel
weighed more than one thousand pounds cheese. That sounds like
a party right there. Okay, you bring the crackers. I
got a thousand pounds of cheese and we'll just bust
it out here. Okay. Rob Dawson, Mandy Cornell, Okay, what

(01:38:36):
is our Jeopardy category?

Speaker 5 (01:38:37):
Please?

Speaker 4 (01:38:38):
Jeopardy category for today? Words of weather? Okay, okay.

Speaker 7 (01:38:43):
To those hoping to harvest to literally and or figuratively,
it's when you should make hay according to a proverb.

Speaker 4 (01:38:52):
I know I know this proverb, but I can't remember
how to risk you. I don't want to answer. I
don't know, we don't know. We give up time out
while the sun shines. Oh, I did know it? Crap
going next one.

Speaker 7 (01:39:03):
Don't spout off about trivial things you might be accused
of brewing one of these mini squalls.

Speaker 4 (01:39:11):
Mandy? What is a Mailstrom incorrect? Dang it?

Speaker 2 (01:39:16):
Rob does?

Speaker 4 (01:39:18):
I don't need to say?

Speaker 9 (01:39:18):
What is it?

Speaker 4 (01:39:20):
Dust? Devil? Incorrect? A tempest and a teen.

Speaker 7 (01:39:27):
Get engaged at someone else's engagement party, and you've committed
this larceny.

Speaker 4 (01:39:33):
What is thunder? Stealing? Stealing someone's thunder? I'm going to
give it to you. Okay, what is stealing thunder? Okay?
There you go back to zero.

Speaker 7 (01:39:41):
Don't look for this hyphenated companion when dark clouds roll.

Speaker 4 (01:39:45):
In, hyphenated companion, when dark clouds roll in. I have
no idea. These are so hard a fair weather friend. Oh,
there you go. This is a hard category by answers.

Speaker 6 (01:40:00):
I do too.

Speaker 7 (01:40:01):
It's what you've captured if you achieve what is lightning
in a bottle?

Speaker 4 (01:40:07):
Correct? Yeah, that was good. One to minus zero. We
did not exactly blaze a trail on that category. No,
we get no applause. Nancy gives me no applause for
my blog. Now it's just terrible, just absolutely terrible. Okay, kids,
we're gonna make room. We've got Ko Sports coming up next.
You know who's in today?

Speaker 7 (01:40:27):
Ryan and Ben live from the Great American Festival, the Great.

Speaker 4 (01:40:32):
American Beverage Festival. We should talk a little bit. Are
you are you going to that?

Speaker 7 (01:40:36):
No?

Speaker 4 (01:40:36):
Great, you're not going this year? Okay, because I want
to know. I want to hear from somebody who went, like,
what kind is the vibe different? Because you know, a
beer festival is super chill. But now we've got distillers in.
There is some guy going to get tequila wasted and
create a problem. I hope, so they stop sports broadcast.

Speaker 5 (01:40:52):
There you go.

Speaker 1 (01:40:53):
Do it.

Speaker 4 (01:40:53):
If you're going there, Tequila drunk KOA Sports broadcast. Make
it happen people, you have a mission. I will be
back to Sorrow for a big Friday show. Keep it
right here on KOA