Speaker 1: What's going on.
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Speaker 1: Johnson has lost the first vote and now they sill.
They took a break and they've quickly regathered and it
is a second vote is eminent. I don't know what
has happened. I don't know if they had to punch
through to a deal. I know it's in his best
interest to get this thing wrapped up. And maybe, you know,
people were able to have that protest vote and they
were able to make their peace and say, look, I
voted against him, It's time to move forward. I don't know,
but that's a lot of people are like just shaking
their heads, going here go those crazy Republicans again. They
can't get their act together on even voting for a
speaker and Hakeem Jeffries is out there just you know,
pontificating and being hakeem. Well, what to the break? By
the way, my name's Chad Adams. I'm sitting in for
Pea Calendard. This will be my final day at the
microphone for the first week of the year, as we
close out the first week of the year. It has
been an honorant privilege to be here in the past
two weeks here on News Talk eleven ten ninety nine
three WBT. I've had a blast. You guys are an
amazing audience, amazing staff. I say that I can't say
it enough. You want to get in on the conversation.
It is seven four five seven eleven ten, seven oh
four five seven eleven ten went to the break. I
was talking about the digital age. I every age has
its challenges, you know, at every age. And I'm not
talking about great societal challenges like Vietnam, Civil Rights, Civil War,
World War two. These guys, I'm talking about challenges in
the complexity of life. So many aspects of our life
are so much easier. I mean, I think our cars
are making us dumber. I think technology in many ways
makes us dumber because if you've ever driven a very
advanced car for any period of time, and then you
switch to a car that doesn't. Like you have a
car that has a backup camera. You have a car
that has blind spot indicators in blind spot cameras, and
it when you're backing up or something. It has a
top view camera that sees all around the car. These
technological advances are rather staggering and amazing. Even has lane sensors.
If you've ever driven a car with lane sensors and
with adaptive speed cruise control, and you've got radar sensing
which can determine the distance between you and the car
in front of you and keep the car there, you
basically have for the most part, a semi self driving car.
But if you go into if you were to get
into a nineteen sixty eight Ford pickup truck and start
to drive it, you would think, oh my god, I
can't believe people drove these things, because you have to be.
One thing about driving a more primitive car does is
it makes you very situationally aware. When I'm driving down
the these days, I look at all the people that
are completely unaware of what's happening outside their cocoon. It
could be it could be raining, daggers from the sky.
They wouldn't see it coming. Pigs could be flying winged pigs,
they wouldn't notice it. UFOs could fly right over their car,
they wouldn't notice it. They're on the phone more and
more lately, more people I notice people are talking to themselves,
but they're really not. They're talking on their phone with
their ear pieces in and they're just prattling on with
no awareness about what's happening around them. So in that way,
I think technology makes us a little dumber. I'm amazed
when people don't. I'm a wildlife junkie, so I'm always
looking for what's up in the trees and stuff, and
I'm amazed at what people don't see. Did you see
that owl? It was like twenty feet above your head.
You didn't see the owl? What are you talking about? Owl?
What's an owl? So in many ways, the columnists over
at The Guardian rights I love living in the digital
age as someone who grew up in the analog world.
My first journalism john as a college intern, involved a
manual typewriter and carbon cape. That's really dating yourself. You
know what carbon paper is, and many of you are
old enough and I'll bet you. I'll bet you some
of the people in the studio that are listening right
now and helping me make this show possible know the
smell of a mimiograph machine, Remember that blue ink and
the way that smelled when that's the only thing the parents,
the teachers had to kind of give you copies of stuff.
They did, they do they are, so that's a manual. Typewriters,
even electric typewriters are kind of strange. The downside of
digital life is driving me batty the columnist ride, so
much so that I sometimes consider trying to get off
the grid altogether to seek a less frustrating experience. And
I'll tell you why I think this is fascinating in
a second. I have a fantasy of this simple life
that I described as full boor throw. It involves listening
to bird song and reading Russian novels while occasionally using
a landline to maintain contact with other humans. What's made
me get to this point, consider as an example, my
recent adventure with usernames and password. Yeah, if you have
a toll pass and you've let it expire, you haven't
driven on the toll roads in the years, And then
you do, and you get you want to change that account.
This is exactly what this person went through. They had
as easy Pass, the device that allows you to travel
through toll bearers without stopping to hand over cash. When
I signed up four years ago, I apparently got a
username and passed word, and I gave them my credit
card information so that it could be charged when necessary.
As the years went by, everything was fine. I'd get
a hard copy of the statements of the mail, but
never kept them around. I gave this arrangement no thought
until the day I got a voicemail claiming to be
from a law firm saying I had accrued massive easy
Pass debt. Massive easy passed debt. I thought it might
be a scam, so I decided to check the account ballance,
something I never felt the need to do before. This
is not me, by the way, this is a columnist,
but I can relate. But horror as it turned out
that my username was not my email address. I tried
to retrieve it on my cell phone number or email address,
but only descend it into another concentric circle of digital hell.
A phone call old school I know, to customer service
resulted in a demand from my account number, but in
order to get that I needed to sign into my account,
So round and round I went. Of course, an issue
like that is minor, only one tiny piece of the
daily puzzle of life that involves all the ways that
we like institutions and banks employers try to protect you.
Two factor authentication now stops us everywhere. To log in,
you need to put in the code that's just been
set to your phone, But as you go to your
text messages to find it, the original question disappears from
your phone. Those of us who do any freelance work
to send into a special torture chamber that comes with
the registering as a vendor with part time employers. That
involves layers and layers of providing your identity, submitting tax forms,
blah blah, blah blah. All of this is a privilege.
These are very definition of first world problems. We're lucky
to have them. Doesn't feel that way. I wish I
could step off this merry go round. The solution, as
it turned out, was marvelously old fashioned. I dug out
a small notebook from a drawer that had the usernames
and passwords. By the way, my mother was phenomenal at
usernames and passwords. She kept a handwritten book with all
of her usernames and passwords in it, so whenever it
was updated, she'd scribbled through the old one and put
the new one in there. And when she passed away,
it was really important that we found that book. It
made a profound difference in us being able to move
anything forward on her estate now, as complicated as that is.
And again I started the show talking about how we
are really a first world problem country. The people in
many other parts of the world that want us dead
every day and wake up with that soul goal in mind,
organizing and structuring, are really good at staying off the grid.
They're remarkably adept at not having these first world name
and password problems. Now I'll talk about that, and I'm
going to connect it to let's see reality show survivor
any reality show.
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Speaker 1: We spent a good deal of time talking about the
the nature of the threat to you to me, and
to your children, your grandchildren, your parents. It is real.
It is not. You know, we can pretend that when
we're complaining about you know, whatever, I didn't mow my
yard this week or something. You know, that's we have.
We are very fortunate to have the first world problems
of worrying about your name and password. It is hard
to write, It is hard to stay on point that
your enemies are out to get you all the time.
It's not paranoia, it's true. It is an ideology that
is incompatible with freedom in this country. It is incompatible
with our constitution, it's incompatible with the very fabric of
American life. It is important to stay vigilant with that.
And so as much as we can disagree political and things,
we've got and we I think many of us in America.
We have to get the Democrats to start focusing on
differences of policy that are not the border. You know,
the Democrats should be on board. There are many things
that Democrats need to get it. They need to get
on board with law enforcement, they need to get on
board with the border, they need to get on board
with America. First, they've got they've got to quit putting
the country down it is providing aid and comfort to
our enemies each and every day period. It is now
back to the first world problem of names and passwords.
I and this is this is a reflection. This is
my personal reflection on things. I'm fascinated with reality shows,
whether you know, especially contestant like Survivor. I don't watch
all of them. I just don't have the time. I
don't have the time to sit there and veg out
in front of the TV. I'm too much of an
avid reader. So when I do what there is a
fascination I have with these realities ships. There's one mister
Beast has done. For those who unfamiliar with mister Beasts,
I think he's from Greenville. I actually know someone who
works for that organization. And here's how when you talk
about the fabric of society. Mister Beast is a multi basillionaire.
He does a lot of philanthropy, givey stuff. But how
one of the things he did to become famous was
he he taped himself or live broadcast himself, counting from
one to one hundred thousand, and millions and millions of
people watched. This dude is right in the process right
now of giving away five million dollars on a game
show of his creation loosely based on squid Games, where
he gives you a lot of psychologically challenging decisions that
you need to make ethical quandaries. Where you were if
I were to offer you. So there's twenty people that
have that are on your team. You're the captain for
that team, and you're standing on a platform and there's
money being offered. There's four other captains with four of
you total that are standing up there, and each of
you have a team of twenty forty fifty people that
are standing below you, and you personally are offered an
ascending amount of money, a more and more progressive amount
of money, and you can personally take that money, but
if you do, all of the people on your team
are eliminated from getting more money. That prize money got
up to a million dollars. So these four individuals who
are by the way, all these people are strangers. They
don't know, they didn't know each other before entering this
game show. They stood on that platform and they were
offered a million dollars. Any one of them could have
hit the button, walked off that stage with a million
dollars and forty fifty sixty people they didn't know would
go back to their lives. And these individuals stood on
that platform as it went from two hundred thousand to
three hundred and four and went to a million dollars,
and none of them hit the buzzer, none of them
took the million dollars. And it was portrayed by the
people that all this is they're so they care about
their fellow and they're so altruistic. In the very next game,
one of them got eliminated by people on their team,
and that was a whole psychological drama. But it is
It is interesting the value system that these people have
with or spend. A lot of these people could have
used the money for their kids' education, for their families,
and then they go home with nothing nothing. But here's
where my fascination is. It's not with the ethical dilemmas.
There's a phrase called situational ethics. A lot of that
show is about situational ethics. What would you do if
you were placed in a situation where you put three
people in a room and you have five hours to
decide which one of you will not be moving on
in a game that it's going to be eliminated. Three
of you get to decide. You have to come to
a conclusion. And they did this with all these people
and the one that decides to stay back handcuffs themself
to a wall. Boom. That person is eliminated. But they
have to decide. Some people did game of chance, you know, dice, rock,
paper scissors, whatever, but it was it was, and some
people just lied. Now, if you couldn't come to a decision,
all three of you went home. All three of you
went home with nothing. And there were multiple groups where
all three of them went home because no one would decide.
It is you see the worst in human beings, sometimes
you see the best again. Still not my fascination with
the show. My fascination with the show is entirely selfish.
Whether it's survivor whether it's any of these shows that
take you away from life for weeks at a time.
I'm fascinated because how many of you would like to
be able to just walk away from your life for
a few weeks at no cell phones, no emails, no
bills to worry about, no phone calls you need to return,
no emails you need to return that you walk away.
I mean those people that go on survivor are there
for weeks. They go to the other side of the planet,
and you wonder what is their life like that they
can walk away from everything and all of them now
every one of them loses weight and naked and afraid
is like the extreme version of that. Those people just
get emaciated. But every one of those people lose his weight.
Every one of them physically is stronger, better, faster, stronger
by the time they leave than before they went. Every
one of them has a readjustment on what their priorities
in life are when they come back, and you know,
they learn a lot about themselves. How many of you
would love to do that, would love to be able
to step out now my grandparents on both sides, you
know what. And I'm sitting here going by the way, Dave,
I apologize. Let's get to Dave. Dave, what the heck
are you up to this afternoon? And what's on your brain?
And apologies for making you wait? Dave.
Speaker 3: Hey, I'm here. I'm sorry. I didn't realize I was
online here, That's okay. The opportunity. Yeah, first of all,
on that four people that declined a million dollars to
I'm gonna clean this up. But Nick Saban other day,
he had a comment, he said, they would be a
blank out of luck.
Speaker 1: It was amazing to me that it was just amazing
to me that they just sat there and then they
end up going home with nothing. They could have had
a million dollars.
Speaker 3: Yeah, exactly, I man, I promise you I'd take the
money run so quick it'd make their heads thin. But
but the reason I wanted to call, I really do
think that we need to be extra vigilant over these
next several weeks. Uh, you know, once Trump gets in
and things the ship starts getting righted. I mean, these
these folks that are after us are not stupid. They
know that that it's going to be a lot harder
for them to do what they wanted to try to do,
to be bad actors against us, And they know that
their time and their windows are short. And so I
just encourage everybody to keep keep vigilant. I pray that
I'm wrong, I really do, but but I promise you
my for myself and my family and my life of
the ones, we're gonna all be keeping our head on
a swivel. Appreciate you and joining your hosting of the show.
Speaker 1: And Dave. I appreciate the phone call, and to Dave's point,
this is what I love. Many of the callers are student,
They're going about their day to day life. They don't
do this for a living, and they took the time
to call in. I think Dave it has a very
common sense vision there, and that is that this is
the rocky this is the turnover period. This is where
we're the largest transfer of power in the world as
you're turning over the executive branch of government to a
new person. Luckily this person has experience going into it,
but you're right through. That transition is a very especially
right now because the Iranians have put out a hit.
I mean they absolutely have said we want to kill Trump.
They've said that they would love to be able to
kill him here on our soil. They would love to
carry out that that thread and make it real because
in their mind it escalates them. We took out the
leader of the free world. We can do it to you.
We can do anything. You're a terrorist state, we can
kill anybody anytime. Now. A lot of that is bravado.
I mean, they would love to eradicate Israel and they
haven't quite been able to do that yet, but make
no mistake, they want to and they're going to continue
to try to do so through their proxies or directly.
But to Dave's point, I think, once if Trump can
make it to the inauguration, get into office, and start
that train heading down the tracks, in spite of his enemies,
meaning the ones domestically the Democrats, in spite of the media,
which I think the media has been much softer touched lately,
it's going to be it's going to be brutal. I
think that he's right. I think that the more the
ship gets righted, the better this will be. The stronger
the nation will come, and more moderates and even some
Democrats will I think, start saying, hey, you know what,
let's give this guy a chance. I do don't think
we're going to have the hyperbole and the crazy fifty
one spies who lie and in multiple silly sham impiachments,
mainly because the Republicans have the House in the Senate.
So today's point, I think it was in a stude observation.
I think it was a good one. I appreciate his
call always love this audience, and they're right. Some of
the one I just I just love it. But I
will say I'll continue as we wrap up this segment
to say, I it's hard to switch gears in because
they said they said, they made such a good point
that me going back and saying, hey, I'd love to
be able to walk away for two weeks. That's that's
when I said it was selfish. I mean, I'll bet
you the guys running the board right now would love
to be able to not worry about bills, not worry
about anything, and go and getting great shape and focus
on different priorities in a much more primitive setting if
they had the opportunity to do so. He likes the
Buffalo bills. Okay, he said it. There you go. Now
I'm kidding. Is that? But how many of you could?
I mean, when you think about traveling, how many of
you can organize your life in such a way that
you could go, oh for a month and just hit
the road. Now, what you've got to figure out is
do I have WI file wherever I'm going to be?
Can I manage my life from a distance no matter
where I am? Can? Because retirement is becoming much more
complicated for that reason, isn't it? The vision of retirement
as Americans see, it is very complicated because from a
digital standpoint and a paperwork standpoint, it ain't as easy
as it used to be used to You didn't have
to worry too much about it. You just go. But
now I don't know.
Speaker 2: All right, I hope you had a happy holiday season.
But tell me if something like this happened at your house.
Your family and friends are gathered around, Maybe y'all are
in the living room, You're laughing, swapping stories, reminiscing, and
then somebody says, hey, Dad, remember those old VHS tapes?
Did you ever get them transferred? And then the room
gets all quiet. All eyes are on Dad, who says, oh,
you know, well, I've been meaning to but I just
having gotten around to it. Look, don't let those priceless
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Speaker 1: Now, looking at the speaker Johnson vote, they're having some
technical issues trying to get the next one. Is he
lost the first round of voting. They're trying to figure
out what to do. They don't want to dismiss, they
don't want to formally adjourn. Who knows what's going to happen,
but it is a bit of a mess now earlier
I'm gonna get There's three or four things I want
to get to that should be fun. I'll get to
the serious one, then we'll go to the rest of them,
and you guys are welcome to be a part of
the conversation. News Talk eleven ten ninety nine three WT
seven oh four five sevenh eleven ten seven oh four
five seven oh eleven ten to call in numbers. Since
twenty twenty, thanks to your generosity, WBT in Moments of
Hope Church have raised over eight hundred and fifty thousand
dollars to he'll feed the most vulnerable kids in the
Charlotte region. This year, the need is even greater and
your donations are needed to benefit Hurricane Helene relief work
in western North Carolina. Our goal is to raise one
hundred thousand dollars in every penny donated will be matched
by Moments of Hope Church. Please consider a donation to
City of Hope clt dot org today. That City of
Hope clt dot org today. Thank you. Now, what's throughout
the show? You know, it's been interesting. I think Brandon
Dixon and Pam Warner could have a conversation and it's interesting.
It's actually I'm paying attention to. One of the first
ones they had was about the dinosaurs, and the dinosaur
Highway in Great Britain had been discovered. So that made
me curious. I was looking at this, this dinosaur highway.
I was fascinated by You have carnivore prince, you have
omnivore prince, you have vegetarian prints, and they're all kind
of galloping along, you know, one hundred and some odd
million years ago in the tropics of Great Britain. Because
climate change was real back then, so, and what was
fascinating me was the size. Like, if you're an avid
nature watcher, you know seeing a whale is a sto
You see a sperm whale, you see a right whale.
Those are big critters, even elephant's big critters. But the
size and scope of these animals that lived then are
staggering in proportion. So this dinosaur highway. One thing they
had never known is they had a sixty foot long vegetarian.
It's a sauropod. It's called well, it's called the sets
you of saurus, that's what they think. It is sixty
feet long. You imagine something walking through your yard. It's
sixty feet long walking up right. I'm not talking about
swimming in the ocean. I'm done. I just cruise long. Hey,
what's up yo, I'm eating your garden. I'm sixty feet long.
You think, dear a problem. Imagine a group of those
just kind of walking through. And the Megalosaurus that's the
other one. That one was one of the first big
carnivores discovered. That thing was thirty feet long and stood
upright or at least and between each print nine feet long,
one footprint nine feet next footprint and they're not thinking
this is at a run because of the angle of
the foot. It's just a step. I'm taking a step.
I'm nine feet. You have a couple of those crews around.
I'm thankful when I see birds. If you're a birdwatcher,
you have no doubt those things, you know, scales turned
into feathers, These things when they look at you. I'm
convinced when I see hawks and eagles and a lot
of things that crawl around at the beach. These things
they look at you like, you know what if I
were bigger, you were smaller, your food to me? They
have no It isn't about compat We just eat you.
Nature is a cruel mistress. And these guys they'll kill
each other. You see a group of crows around a hawk.
They're thinking, how can I kill that hawk? The hawk's
thinking how the hell am I going to get out
of here? It's reality. That's the ultimate reality there, and
they're not on TV. Now. I do want to get
to fun stuff, and one of those I'm gonna get
to the potato cartel. I didn't know there was a
potato cartel, but apparently there is. I think they may
own me, They may own many of you potato cartel,
But this is about the five second rule. How many
of you see We can end on a lighter note
and just talk about the end of the world. We
can talk about things that affect you, like how many
times have you been around somebody or you yourself drop something?
Five second rule? Right? Pick it back up? Say five
second rule. It's referred too often. So you drop it
on the floor? Is it a real Is it a
real deal? Is the five second rule real? Is? Suggests
that something dropped on the floor. This is from uh,
it's actually a scientific journalism. It's the American Council on
Science and Health. The rule suggests that if you drop
something on the floor and you quick pick it up
within five seconds, first, the morsel is too taste you
to have dropped and needs to be eaten. Regardless, and
in some scientific way, bacteria needs time to transfer And
that's the assumption. Isn't it you drop it, the bacteria
can't jump on it that quick. While there is abundant
personal experience scientific research on this, believe it or not,
people have looked drawing inconsistent conclusions using different surfaces, foods, bacteria,
and contact times. A study an Applied and Environmental microbiology
wanted to come out and look at this, and they
looked at a non pathogenic bacterium with a heat. I
loved it. I love how side just go you know what?
And I'm thinking they're sitting around a table in there,
and I what do you want to do today? I
don't know. Oh my god, Fred dropped his bread and
he picked it up and ate it. You have five
second room fellows. Wait a minute, you know what I think.
I know what we're gonna do today. Fred, get that stuff.
Let's run in the lab right quick. Get some bacteria,
bring some pathogen in. We're gonna test that theory. We're
gonna continue to drop food and we're gonna test to
see if any of that bacteria jumps on your bread.
See if it's real. Boom. Let's write a grant. Maybe
the government will give us some money. Yeah, we'll get
a million dollars to study if bacteria jumps on your bread.
So anyway, the introbacter origins autogenes, a non pathogenic bacterium
with adhesion characteristics. Did you know your bacteria had that
like duct tape? Except with bacteria of the more pathogenic
salamonella were inoculated on four types of surfaces. In other words,
they put it on four different types of surfaces found
in our homes, stainless steel, ceramic tile, lambin it, wood,
and carpet. And it left it there for five hours.
So they put a pathogen and they put the other stuff,
put it on those surfaces, left it, didn't touch it,
went and had another food break.
Speaker 2: I guess all right, if you're listening to this show,
you know I try to keep up with all sorts
of current events, and I know you do too, And
you've probably heard me say get your news from multiple sources.
Why well, because it's how you detect media bias, which
is why I've been so impressed with ground News. It's
an app, and it's a website, and it combines news
from around the world in one place, so you can
compare coverage and verify information. You can check it out
at check dot ground, dot news slash pete. I put
the link in the podcast description too. I started using
ground News a few months ago, and more recently chose
to work with them as an affiliate because it lets
me see clearly how stories get covered and by whom.
The blind Spot feature shows you which stories get ignored
by the left and the right. See for yourself. Check
dot Ground dot News slash pete. Subscribe through that link
and you'll get fifteen percent off any subscription. I use
the Vantage plan to get unlimited access to every feature.
Your subscription then not only helps my podcast, but it
also supports Ground News as they make the media landscape
more transparent.
Speaker 1: Narrating my own version of the story. Mind you, it's true.
Everything I'm telling you is true, but I'm narrating it
in a way that maybe fictionalizing some of the way
these guys came to this. Because I'm thinking about what
kind of scientists are sitting around going, you guys want
to look at climate change? No, you want to study
a bola and what it might do. Nah, I don't
want to do that. Let's see what else can we do.
I don't know. You want to cure cancer? No, don't
want to do that. But Fred dropped his bread, and
I'm wondering. He picked it up pretty quickly and he said,
five second rule, why don't we study that? And they
went and did it, and they did. I mean, there's
grafts and charts and all sorts of really cool information.
They went and found four surfaces, so they had a
very dangerous pact. They had salmonella. They sprayed that on tile,
on stainless steel, all these things. And then they also
put something that's a nonpathogenic bacterium just to see if
it jumps on stuff. So then this is what's great,
talk about scientific inquiry. So they had the four surfaces.
Then they get four different types of food, So they
get watermelon, they get bread, butter, gummy candy because gummy
candy has to be included, right, must have been near Halloween.
But gummy candy, by the way, pre get in your
mouth gummy candy, so it's not all wess, just gummy candy.
And then they're gonna go This is where they gets funny.
So the scientists are wandering around the lab. They've got
their surfaces sprayed with the bacteria and the pathogen, and
then they've got their their food and where are they
going to drop it from the table. No, they're gonna
hover about five inches above these surfaces and the drop
it and they leave it there. Each of the four
on the four surfaces times the following times one second,
five second, thirty seconds, or three hundred seconds, and then
they determined the transfer to each of those surfaces on
the various foods. It shouldn't be any surprise to those
skeptical of the five second rule that outcomes are kind
of entangled. In other words, the science isn't one hundred
percent clear, but it's pretty clear on what happened here watermelon.
Here are the results watermelon, melon. I guess all the
melons what fruit. Watermelon, irrespective of surface, picks up a
great deal of bacteria. Five seconds way too long. So
if you're a germophobe and you drop melon, any of
the melons, don't pick it up. Just don't worry about it.
I mean you can pick it up throwing a trash.
Don't eat it. Bread seems to have very little transfer
in those first five seconds, but you have to move quickly.
By ten seconds, most everything gets transferred, even to the bread.
There is a notable exception for carpeting where you do
have more time. So if you drop your bread on carpet,
you got more than five seconds. But there may be
other things on the carpet that you don't like as well.
So there you go. Another important conclusion for those of
you engaged in the butter side up butter side down
on your bread doesn't seem to make a difference. They
couldn't determine whether the butter made it worse or better.
So there you go. The one thing you gotta worry
about is the butter clearly got on the surface, right,
so you got to clean the surface. Gummy candy. Why
of all the things they could have dropped on the floor,
it would be gummies. But I mean, you know what,
maybe they were THC infused gummies and the sciences were
just having a little bit of fun at our expense.
But gummies made the list. They offered the greatest opportunity
for microbiology safety. And they had to put that in
there to make it sound really scientific, didn't they. They
couldn't just say, hey, gummies most likely to get crap
on them. They said opportunity for microbiological safety under the
five second rule. A word of caution. The gummany wasn't
already moistened. I told you that earlier, So there you go.
The longer the food contact times, the greater the bacterial transfer.
That's the really part of the study. Surface characteristics also
play a role with polished surfaces like tile and stainless
steel transfer more than carpet because carpet has lots of
nooks and carrines, kind of like hamburger meat. The topography
of the food, specifically it's moisture, impacts the speed of transfer.
So there you go. They spent time because scientists study
all sorts of stuff. And the good news is we
know more about the transfer of bacteria to food than
we do our climate because a lot of those guys
get it wrong. Now, final story that I'm going to
try to get through today is the potato cartel. Didn't
know this. I didn't know there was a potato cartel,
but apparently there is, and now I've learned about it,
so you are going to learn about it as well.
A potato cartel has allegedly conspired to artificially hike prices
on French fries and hash browns as they corner the
sixty eight billion dollar frozen potato market, according to multiple
lawsuits after Now, again that's not necessarily true, but that's
what the lawsuits are asserting. After decades of consolidation, just
four companies LAMB West In Canada based McCain Foods, the JR.
Simplock Company, and Cavendish farms. I've only heard of one
of those. By the way, the Cabinish i'd heard of,
controls ninety seven percent of the market. Go figure. It's
kind of a virtual cart That's why they call it
a potato cartel. Right, it's not a monopoly, it's a cartel.
According to antitrust lawsuits filed in the US District Court
of Illinois between July twenty two and July twenty four,
these tater Titans set the price of frozen potatoes soaring
forty seven percent by colluding to raise prices. Now this
lends createds to what the Democrats would say, Right, there's
a collusion to raise they're gouging. It's price gouging. When
there are only a handful of players. Collusion is too
appetizing for these companies to pass up. The companies blame
the increases and again I would be more likely to
believe this, but the rising cost of operations, because we
know through COVID and through the idiocy of the Biden people,
that prices went up. And when prices go up, Democrats
want to blame gouging. They don't ever want to say, well,
fuels more expensive. Raising things is more extensive, fertilizers more extensive,
blah blah blah. So the operators said, hey, frozen potatoes
is high after operating costs went up, and they're saying
other people say, no, that's not it. So Mark Ducet,
vice president of communications at Cabinist Farms, call the allegations basis.
We intend to vigorously defend ourselves according so the potato
cartel will go into court and they will fight this.
The three other companies mentioned in the lawsuits didn't respond
to request. Since November, restaurants and growrocery stores have filed
more than a dozen class action suits arguing that the
price is imposed by the potato cartel has crushed their
bottom line. Around forty percent of all potatoes grown in
the country, seventeen billion pounds are sold to frozen potato companies.
Seventeen billion with a bee pounds of potatoes. I didn't
even I couldn't even believe Dave. Well, now actually we
had Dave and at Oh that's the staff being nice
to me. Thank you, uh percent. That it's hard for
me to fathom. You know, you see these things about
how many you know, how many milkshakes people get? You
know that we consume in a year, how many pounds
of beef. I would never have thought seventeen billion pounds
of potatoes. And that's just the potatoes sold to frozen
potato companies each year. That's not the baked spuds that
you see how the grocery stores. You're gonna buy, the
red potatoes, whatever kind of potato you're going to buy.
Seventeen billion the people that we quoted seventy percent of
the market, while JR. Simple It holds twenty percent and
Cavendish has seven. So that's where you get to the
ninety seven percent of the market. All these industries are
trending toward duopolies, the model of coke and PEPSI. Phil Howard,
a professor of Michigan State, told the Lever Investigative News
the four companies have been colluding to fixed prices since
twenty twenty one, according to the lawsuits. Now here's the
thing that makes this as a pre capitalist swine that
I am is that it's in the interest of these
companies to compete with one another. Their fiduciary responsibility is
to the owners of their respective companies, So at any
given point in time, they can if this was a
true price fixing goalging situation, they could allegedly lower their
prices and gain market share because theirs would go It's
just like I don't know if you've ever heard of
gas wars, but back in the seventies or in the
late sixties, there would be times where the gas station
up the street would lower its price two or three
pennies and start kind of a price war with one
of its competitors. So there are times that prices are
and that's the great equalizer in capitalism is that you
try to have lower prices with greater value and you
compete that way. So to try to come up and say, hey,
all of their prices went up because these guys had
some kind of secret meeting in a bathroom somewhere and
fixed it. It's like pepsi and coke. These guys hate
each other. They don't hate each other, but they want
to win. They want to win that war. They wouldn't
spend billions of dollars in advertising if they weren't trying
to win the war. If they could just fix the
price on things. Then commercials are kind of superfluous. How
many of you seen the Idaho potato commercial. We know
the big truck guy can't see the potatoes driving by
in the background all the time. So that's where I
have trouble. It's like price gouging when Democrats want to
scream every time there's a hurricane down at the coast,
there's price gouging on all that ply would see. We're
going to go get them. They're raising the prices. This
is where they miss. This is you can tell they
never took an economics course, because scarcity raises the price
on something. If you have the last bottle of gatorade
on the planet Earth, that bottle of gatorade's going to
be worth a lot of money. If there's five billion
bottles of gatorade, then the price is adjusted accordingly. And
when you have a storm, if prices don't go up,
then people hoard things. Pricing it means that there's more
of that asset, of that asset, or more of that
product that can cover and help more people. And that's
the weird thing about the left in general, is that
it looks at at creating division that's not necessary. There's
nothing to stop people from grabbing a bunch of plywood
and going down to the coast if they want to
when it's not as expensive in Charlotte as it might
be at I don't know the outer banks when something happens.
But we've got to figure out a way to kind
of get on the same page about things we talked
about in this The number of people one hundred and
forty million radicalized Islamic extremists that would love nothing more
than to destroy everything you believe in. They would love
to We're finding the suppression of Christianity across the globe
right now in not too just at future Islam will
dwarf Christianity. Christianity will give the second because the witnessing
and the growth of Christianity isn't happening that well. We
have to be vigilant here while the left is focused
on DEI all.
Speaker 2: Right, that'll do it for this episode. Thank you so
much for listening. I could not do the show without
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and don't break anything while I'm gone,