ICE Eviction, Healthcare Grift, and Government Transparency | Controller Mark Pinsley
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Episode Summary
Mark Pinsley, elected Controller of Lehigh County, Pennsylvania, discusses transparency, public trust, and how government financial systems really work. From ICE evictions to healthcare billing fraud, Mark reveals how following the money exposes corruption and builds accountability in local government.
Key Topics: government transparency, Mark Pinsley, financial accountability, ICE, healthcare fraud, local government, public trust, corruption, Lehigh County, fiscal oversight
Conversation
Evan Meyer: 00:03.192 Today we have Mark Pinsley. He serves as the elected controller for Lehigh County, Pennsylvania, an independent county-wide role responsible for safeguarding taxpayer dollars and ensuring financial accountability across county government. As a fiscal watchdog, his work centers on transparency, rigorous oversight, and protecting public trust in how public funds are managed. Bringing a deep background in business and technology,
Mark oversees complex budgets and financial systems, translating audit findings into real world accountability. His work spans issues like efficient use of county resources, jail cost reforms, and health system oversight. It's a great pleasure to have him on today. Sir, how are you?
Mark Pinsley: 00:48.236 Very good. Thank you for having me. I'm excited to be here.
Evan Meyer: 00:51.874 Yes, we have some fun things to talk about. We had a great chat before this, I wish it was included in this, but we're gonna try to relive some of those moments. So tell me, what is top of mind for you as the controller? What's going on today in Lehigh County?
Mark Pinsley: 00:58.958 Yeah
I love it.
Mark Pinsley (01:12.11) Today in Lehigh County, well, you may have heard that we evicted ICE out of our government buildings. That's probably what's the biggest issue going on today. Turned yeah, I mean, it turned out that, and quite honestly, it was sort of an interesting thing. So they were in our buildings. I didn't know. And one of the reasons I didn't know was because normally contracts that are signed get put into our computer system. And in this particular case,
Evan Meyer: 01:23.714 That is the news.
Mark Pinsley (01:41.12) It wasn't signed, so it never made it into our computer system, but we had already invited them into the building. So I didn't know that they were there. We had a new election, so we have a new executive, which is like the mayor, if you will, of our county. And the guy that was in charge of that contract was retired. And so we had an empty space. as a controller, one of the things that I get is tips, like money that's being spent improperly, people stealing stuff, that kind of stuff.
And so we got a tip and we looked into it and lo and behold, ICE was there and they hadn't paid their rent in over three years. And so we kicked them out. I hear they've got 30 days or whatever's left, 20 days left.
Evan Meyer: 02:23.308 Right. So it wasn't necessarily because of just failure failure to pay because they didn't want to pay. But there was some negotiate. We'll call it a lack of consistent negotiation based on lease contract differences and prioritization.
Mark Pinsley: 02:37.198 Yeah, exactly. The problem with working with two governments working together is one government wants to use their contract, the other government wants to use their contract, and there were just a lot of back and forth that had gone on. And then the person who owned the contract becomes less and less important after a while, especially after they've already moved in. And I think it literally, just think it was a confluence of errors and they hadn't paid. in today's environment,
with ICE being in our building, you know, just not a good look for the county. And quite honestly, just to be upfront, like, I don't care. I just don't think that the county should have government, federal government officials in it ever, period. And part of that is, is because we can't look at citizens, we can't look, excuse me, people, our residents as citizens, we have to look at them as residents. You know, and so for example, let's say that, that,
You we have an immigrant and he sees that you, you know, you were robbed, you know, beaten, whatever. I don't want that immigrant not to report it. I want them to be able to report it. And so they should be able to work with the county in whatever capacity and not worry about being deported. So that's just more of a county versus federal government issue and maybe even state government issue. So that why we should at least look separate than everything else.
Evan Meyer: 04:01.784 Right. I mean, it happens to be interesting timing because from a news perspective, like, OK, we're evicting ice from the building does take a bit of a position on a very polarized manner matter. Excuse me. So what?
Mark Pinsley: 04:09.909 Yes, yeah.
Mark Pinsley: 04:16.076 Yep. Yep.
Evan Meyer: 04:20.994 I mean, is that your position? How do you feel about what's going in going on in Minneapolis? And what do you want to see for your own county here? And as a controller, put a kind of control or lens on it, because you may have your personal feelings and your political feelings, but you have to maintain that sort of balance and integrity as a controller, right?
Mark Pinsley: 04:34.082 Yeah.
Mark Pinsley: 04:41.248 Yeah, 100%. Yeah. like, look, as a controller, it's been three years, they didn't pay, they need to go out, they need to get out. Like, it's just that simple for me. And it's not like we were just a little bit, you know, we were only inches away from getting a deal. There was no inches away. We were still, you know, negotiating back and forth, right? So it just wasn't going to come to be. And so they need to leave and they just need to leave. That's just the way it is.
Evan Meyer: 04:57.258 wow.
Mark Pinsley: 05:05.326 Then on a personal perspective, know, like the Alex Prattie shooting hadn't happened yet. You know, the Nicole Good one had happened. like, you know, ICE in particular, you know, is threatening. I mean, like when you look at it, when you look at it the community, people are not saying, hey, well, I shouldn't say there aren't some. There are definitely some people that are very excited that ICE is there, but I would say the majority are not. And I would say law enforcement for the most part, local law enforcement is not because
They work with the community. They have to work with the community. Like the example that I gave you, you know, like I'm very familiar with a case where a, a woman was raped. She was an immigrant. she was raped by a white man. and she would not show up, to testify against him because she was afraid of being deported. And so now like any white guy knows that they can go rape an immigrant. Like that's not a good, that's not good for anyone.
Evan Meyer: 06:05.474 Well, you bring up a really a whole new category of protection that may, you know, because that's not specific to ICE necessarily, right? But it is specific to any immigrant who feels that they were mistreated in any way, large or small, right? Wage theft, for example.
Right? Where you can, if you commit wage theft against an immigrant, what are they going to do? It's hard for them to be like, Hey, what can you do? You hope that the employer is going to be fair with you. But if they're not, so where, you know, this is a larger issue.
Mark Pinsley: 06:34.722 Yeah, they're gonna do nothing.
Mark Pinsley: 06:46.798 Yeah, there was a level of fear that existed before ICE and that fear has now escalated to a 12 when it was maybe a four before or a five before. And once again, the local police had developed relationships within these communities, right? So that people would feel safe reporting and saying things that were going on and not feel like they were going to be turned over to even ICE five years ago, right? Like they just didn't have that fear.
Evan Meyer: 06:57.838 Okay, sure.
Mark Pinsley: 07:15.608 But now they do have that fear because ICE is just coming in and you know, ICE is, I mean, like we have ICE that comes into our courthouses, you know, and waits for people to show up. I know of a case where the guy was on parole, not parole, probation, and ICE called pretending to be his probation officer and he came to report as he should and then they picked him up. Now you could argue, well, he did something illegal, perhaps.
But now like that situation will make it so that other people who would normally show up for probation are going to question whether to do that or not.
Evan Meyer: 07:54.114 Well, I mean, as a controller, when you're looking at funds that are spent on, citizens versus immigrants, is there any way to differentiate that? And what do you feel is legitimate versus not legitimate? know, a lot of the polarized conversation that happens is around, say, health care. Right. Why? Right. Or any or the millions of people that are trying to get in legitimately that
The some people are just not trying to do that. That doesn't mean they're not good people. Doesn't mean they don't provide great value to in all sorts of ways. Right. But there's a lot of arguments to be made about fairness, I think, or at least that are being made. And as controller, when you see the money and the expenditures around different things and whether you're you know, the county is meant to protect its residents. But I suppose citizens primarily
But residents could be either. So how do you look at this? Res citizens versus not citizens. Yeah, or residents.
Mark Pinsley: 08:56.238 I look at it, yeah, so I look at it as as residents, know, I personally, um, the amount of money that we spend on non, on non-citizens is minuscule. If, if you could even put a number to it, you know, cause like, look for every dollar that you spend in taxes in the County, 71%, 70 cents, 71 cents goes towards law and order 71 cents, right? So that's.
the public defender's office, that's the DA, that's the jail, you know, that's the courts. 71 cents of every tax dollar is going towards law and order. The majority of those...
Evan Meyer: 09:36.814 in Lehigh County specifically. You're saying when you collect some taxes or fees, a dollar fees or taxes, you're spending 70 % of your costs. Okay.
Mark Pinsley (09:42.39) A dollar. A dollar in taxes.
Mark Pinsley: 09:50.518 Yep. Yeah. Go to law and order. So that's a high percent. When you think about that, that's like a high percentage. And my guess is that's pretty close in at least any of the counties in Pennsylvania. I can't talk about outside Pennsylvania, but that would be a pretty typical cost that you would see. Of that 71 cents, not even a penny of it is going to be for non-citizens. It's going to be very small amount.
Right? Like the majority of it is just, look, it's normal things. It's, know, drug usage, you know, it's actual, you know, physical harm crime. People are fighting. It's, it is the public defender that has to support these. It's, know, evictions, right? Like those are, those are sort of the normal things that are happening in our community. And then health.
Evan Meyer (10:39.18) Yeah. Well, what about crime people in jails? What about the people in jails or that are taking up resources? Are you able to identify like people in court, people in jail? Are these when you're saying that it's not for citizens, you're basing it on data points that would that you're getting from those departments essentially, right?
Mark Pinsley: 10:58.773 Yes. Yeah. I'm saying like the majority of them are citizens. The far majority of them are citizens.
Evan Meyer (11:06.06) Yeah. I'm curious to see what those data sets are. I guess that's why I'm asking that like, because when someone makes that claim, like where, what, what are you using to make that assessment?
Mark Pinsley (11:10.71) Yeah.
Mark Pinsley: 11:15.425 Look, we know who the citizens are and who the non-citizens are at this moment. I think our goal actually as a county is to not collect that information in the future. Right? Because this way we have nothing to give to ICE or whomever might want to.
Evan Meyer: 11:25.133 Hmm.
Evan Meyer: 11:30.701 Interesting.
Mark Pinsley: 11:32.534 Yeah. Like, that's like, and that's not me saying that, right? That's the county. That's the, you know, the commissioners that are, that are looking towards making that decision. I mean, look, you know, we have ice come, we have ice come into our courtrooms, not our courtrooms, but our courthouse, I should say. And like, they go out the front, they go out the back door, they come in the back door. We have tunnels, they go through the tunnels. Like, and my feeling is, like,
We don't, we don't have to have that happen. Like we don't have to let them have guns in. Like if you're a lawyer and you walk into our courthouse and you have a weapon, you have to turn it over before you walk into the court, you know, the courthouse. There's no reason to allow ICE agents to have weapons in our courthouse. Just no reason. Like if they want to go arrest somebody, you know, go arrest somebody, but you don't need to have any additional weaponry. We only want our sheriffs to have weapons. So like I'm a believer in that.
Evan Meyer: 12:27.372 That's an interesting. Yeah, that's interesting. That would be because law and for I guess does law enforcement tell other law enforcement to take their weapons off before they enter into a government level of government different than the one that's entering. Right.
Mark Pinsley: 12:46.306 Yeah, you have the right to do that for sure. Right now we don't, but we have the right to.
Evan Meyer (12:49.09) You do.
Evan Meyer: 12:53.737 I see. You could mandate that.
Mark Pinsley: 12:56.374 We could. absolutely. Yeah, right now we don't. But you know, like you could see a time where you would want to because of the escalations that we have seen elsewhere. Whereas like, you know, our sheriffs are primarily there to, you know, protect the judges, quite honestly. And they should maintain that. And then if, you know, if there's a kerfuffle, you know, between an ICE agent and whatever, we don't want guns going off.
Evan Meyer: 13:07.971 Yeah.
Evan Meyer: 13:18.412 Yeah.
Mark Pinsley (13:25.44) you know, in the courthouse.
Evan Meyer: 13:25.582 Of course.
Yeah. How do you how do you separate the the the controller brain from the which is such a critical spreadsheet? You know, right. You're you're dealing very objective at the controller level. And that is a credible role because it's your job to not be political and to do things that are sort of by the book and to make sure that
Mark Pinsley: 13:40.491 Yeah, yeah.
Mark Pinsley: 13:44.387 Yeah.
Mark Pinsley: 13:51.032 Yep.
Evan Meyer (13:56.77) math works, right? How do you separate the feelings that you have about whatever it may be? In this case, we're talking about ice, especially because political labels, right? And your stances on things are the first things that people notice and want to hear about, right? So there's this like craving of that, but your goal is to be objective. How do you balance this?
Mark Pinsley (13:58.7) Yes.
Mark Pinsley: 14:15.267 Yeah.
Mark Pinsley: 14:24.332 I mean, so the way I try to look at it, quite honestly, is am I helping the people or am I helping the powerful? And so my goal is to always help the people. And I don't care if you're a Democrat or a Republican or independent or whatever, you know, whatever shade you are these days. Like it just doesn't matter to me. What does matter to me is just like, are we effectively using our money or ineffectively using our money? And like sometimes, obviously I have opinions on that, right? So for example,
You know, our DA, you know, has a budget, for example, that's three times the public defender's budget, 300 % more. And if you ask the DA, he would say, well, I need that because I have to get 12 people to say yes in order to convict someone. Right. But the fact of the matter is most of the, most of the, most everything is negotiated. Very rarely does it get in front of a judge. So he has all the, he, in our case has all of the power.
Whereas the public defender has very little power. They don't have the ability to go to the research. They don't have the ability to have all the police work done. They don't have all that ability. And I've seen in like, for example, in Tennessee, very red state, know, what they, what they mandate is that the public defender has the 70 % of the budget of the DA. And that works for us too, because 70 % of the DA's client load.
are defended by the public defender.
So like, there's an example where I think like there should be more fairness and I'm looking at a red state for fairness. Like I'm not looking at a blue state or you know what I mean? Like I think that you can look at things and say, does this make sense? Does this seem fair? And so I tried to do that.
Evan Meyer: 16:05.165 Yeah.
Evan Meyer: 16:10.156 Right. well, what do you identify on the political spectrum?
Mark Pinsley (16:17.89) Yeah, so I'm definitely a Democrat for sure. know, some people would call me progressive. I don't really, I don't love that title particularly. I don't hate it either. I like, really think of myself probably in many ways more as a populist. Like I care about the people rather than the powerful. Like, and so like, I don't think about it as left versus right, but I do think about it as up versus down. I think that, that like in today's world, you know, we just had that egg, those egg prices go up.
for a while there, right? Dramatically, because of the bird flu. Do you remember that? It just like a few months ago.
Evan Meyer: 16:52.398 yeah. I'm not sure because Costco always has their egg prices at about the same. So if you get your eggs from Costco, they're still like under three bucks for 18 of them or something. You're like free range? Sure.
Mark Pinsley: 16:58.542 Okay,
Mark Pinsley (17:04.15) That's great. Yeah, that's great. Well, up here, they went, mean, the egg prices went crazy. And it was all because of the bird flow. They destroyed all these birds. But then if you go and you look at the, if you look at the financials of the large egg distributors, like their profits went up three times, 300 % more, like during this time, like they're just taking advantage of us. And so like I view that as completely wrong.
Evan Meyer: 17:26.156 Yeah. Yeah.
Disneyland pricing at every moment, you know, you're just baseball game. So I don't want to badmouth Disneyland, but I love Disneyland. Okay. Yeah, that's right. But yeah, we'll go baseball, know, sports game stadium pricing on every possible thing.
Mark Pinsley: 17:38.046 No, no, I'm with you. Like, I'm with you. Like, I just think that we're being ripped off. Yeah, I'm a Disney World guy, right?
Evan Meyer (17:52.91) And there is also, by the way, common. It's this is not a new story. what do you know? The people are making more money in times of crisis. How many times do we have to hear that until we get to the root of that? Because it's become trite, right? Right, trite?
Mark Pinsley: 18:12.886 Yeah, it has been. no, and again, part of the problem quite honestly is that, so we have antitrust laws, you know, that we're supposed to keep these big companies from becoming so big, but we don't enforce them. Like, why does Amazon need to be a bookstore and a warehouse company and a data center and, you know, name all the things that they are today? Why do they need to be that big? Why did we let them, we let that happen. We didn't have to let that happen as a society.
You can argue that's good. You can argue that's bad. Like, and I think that that's an independent decision. I think it's bad because there's not enough competition. I'm like, I do like competition. Like the more competition there is, that's what drives pricing down. You know, like if you only have two or three players, if you have sort of this monopolistic, even if it's all, even if it's three players, they act like monopolies, that's not good for us. That's not good for us. Like it's good for them, not good for us.
Evan Meyer: 18:54.605 Yeah.
Evan Meyer: 19:08.044 Right. Well, it's good for competition as it relates to going into space because if you get enough money, you can start a space company.
Mark Pinsley: 19:14.912 Yeah, space is sort of an interesting. Right, right. Yeah, exactly. Space is kind of an interesting one because you can't make any money yet there, right? Like you really do need true R and D. Yeah. But, but for the most part. Yeah. Yeah. Well, yeah, exactly. They just, and, they're, and look, there's no money to be made unless you're working for the government. That's why Elon Musk company is the only one that's really making money at the moment. Cause he's got all the contracts.
Evan Meyer: 19:23.074 bright.
You need a lot of money to just do it.
Evan Meyer: 19:40.727 It's interesting. So so why identify as a Democrat at all? Like, why not identify as independent and pick not pick labels? What what makes you want to choose that label over any other label? Because no one everyone's version of what it means to be a Democrat or Republican is their own way of thinking about it. And then they call you something like that's what you are, because that's how I think about it. You know,
Mark Pinsley: 20:03.629 Yeah.
Evan Meyer: 20:08.495 the fidelity there, there's a mismatch probably, right, between what they're thinking and what you are. So, like...
Mark Pinsley: 20:11.778 Yep.
Mark Pinsley: 20:15.272 I think the reason is you can't win an election being independent, at least not here. You have to choose a side. know, if you could win being an, like, I happen to be a big believer in ranked choice voting, because I think it does allow for the independence or green party or libertarian party to win. Yeah, I think so too. And like, so if that were to ever become sort of like the way I might change to independent at some point, like that would make sense. But today there's just no way to win. And by the way, the money.
Evan Meyer: 20:27.554 Yeah, great concept, great concept.
Evan Meyer: 20:38.872 Yeah.
Mark Pinsley: 20:42.702 In order to raise money, to run a race, you have to be one side or the other. Nobody's raising money as an independent. Unfortunately. Unfortunately.
Evan Meyer: 20:51.842 Yeah. Yeah. OK. So the answer is easy. It's you just can't win an election. Yeah. It's it's. Yeah. Yeah. Not much more to it than that. But but OK. So in in being a controller you have the opportunity of overseeing lots of different systems. Right. All sorts of systems. What makes
Mark Pinsley: 20:55.084 You know? Yeah, you can't win an election. it's simple. Yeah.
Mark Pinsley: 21:19.739 yeah.
Evan Meyer: 21:21.174 and these systems guide how you make decisions. Tell me a little bit about how you're making sure that the systems you're using are up to date or being modernized if they're not modernized and how you think that affects the quality of the data to make the decisions that you need to make.
Mark Pinsley: 21:42.272 Yeah, I mean, so there's a couple of components to that. So like when we talk about systems, systems can also just be process and procedures, right? So like, how do you collect your money? How do you write down the money? Where do you put the money? Like just very sort of how many different people touch the money, right? Like there's, doesn't necessarily have to be computer programs in that. Like it even could be paper. I'm not saying that it is, but like it could be. And so the first thing that we do is we look at those process and procedures and see like, does it make sense? And a lot of times there are
simple procedures that you can change. Like, so, you know, for example, you might have somebody that does accounts payable, meaning who you pay and accounts receivable, meaning who you receive money from. If that's the same person, you're at risk. And so we would make a recommendation to separate that into two different people as an example. Like that's a very high level, you example.
But that is what we start going through, or just like the process and procedures. We literally map them out. We use like Visio or whatever. draw little boxes. And we show how the steps work. So you could literally see how something happens. And then based on that, we then make recommendations saying, here are the areas where there's weaknesses. And it might be a computer program that's being used, or how the data is being stored.
You know, or might just be something very simple like that data is being entered twice by two different people where errors can form. So we just look at like, that's the kind of stuff we look at. We really look at the flow of things versus necessarily the computer program, although we make recommendations around that as well.
Evan Meyer: 23:24.398 What are the few pieces of software you use?
Mark Pinsley: 23:29.294 So we use Excel quite a bit, quite honestly. I use Python as well, like to do a data manipulation. So if we have a lot of data, like I'll write some programs or someone will write some programs. We have another piece of software, which I can't think of the name of, off the top of my head. want to say ACLU and that's not it. like, but it's another program. It looks, it works with Excel and it does a lot of data manipulation, but heavy data.
And so a lot of it's computer, you know, like small programs that you're writing to sort of understand. It's like, like very simple. Like, so for example, one of the things that we check for on a monthly basis is making sure that, that we didn't pay the same bill twice. Right? Like we just run that through. We look for the like exact dollar amounts or whatever. Oh, we paid $120,527 twice. Right. Now we need to go figure out, was that the same invoice? Why did that happen? You know, and so.
You know, some of it's still manual, but like it reduces the manual effort down to something like that.
Evan Meyer: 24:34.304 Interesting. Would you like, do you think there's room for modernization right now though in terms of like, what would you dream, what would be your dream for Lehigh counties? Yeah.
Mark Pinsley: 24:34.599 It's fun, quite honestly.
Mark Pinsley (24:43.33) Well, so first off, like we have an old system called Kia, which nobody has ever heard of. Nobody knows what it is, you know? And so the good news about that is no one's ever heard of it. No one knows what it is. Right. So there's no like, you know, there's no malware, you know, that's trying to take over this really old database. But, you know, I can't write, you know, queries to it. You know, so
I would like to see something modernized, know, that it has, know, like an Oracle database, you know, or a SQL database so that we can actually, you know, access data more easily. Right now, if we need to do that, we have to go through the IT department. And then we have to wait for that to be able to write some pretty basic queries.
Evan Meyer: 25:28.782 Okay, that's a problem.
Mark Pinsley: 25:31.594 It is, it really is. Yeah. Cause you know, like, look, they better, they've got better things to do too. You know, like if you have somebody who's skilled, you don't need the right access. You need the read, right? Like I just want to be able to understand what the data says.
Evan Meyer: 25:45.603 Yeah. Well, a lot of this comes out, you know, it's interesting at the controller level and at the things that you're working on, transparency, efficiency, things that like the Doge was coming out and saying supposedly for and working to achieve at the federal level.
Mark Pinsley: 26:01.688 Supposedly four. Yeah.
Mark Pinsley: 26:08.621 Yeah.
Evan Meyer: 26:09.294 How do you find the work that you do in relationship to what the Doge said they were going to do or you think they did or didn't do? But there is intent there. It feels like the mission of any good controller would be something similar to what the Doge, right?
Mark Pinsley: 26:25.994 yeah. mean, like quite honestly, like I love the concept of Doge. I think that the way they went about it was terrible. but for like, so first off I hire CPAs. don't hire programmers, you know, that are 18 or 19 years old. Like, so, you know, start there. Then secondarily, like once we were like, if we were, let's say that I did hire some programmers to do some of the work, right. Python stuff that I said that I was doing. Like we wouldn't accidentally, you know, fire the people that are like.
manning our nuclear weapons, right? Like that just doesn't, that should never happen. So like what they were doing was like, they were writing some queries, they were looking for words, you know, like that they didn't like, you know, so it would be like transition, right? So like I saw, you know, so, they, they, for them transition meant from a man to a woman, for a woman to a man.
But a lot of times the word transition, even in their stuff, meant from grade one to grade two, grade three to grade four. So they were getting rid of people that were in education because they use the word transition somewhere along the line. And so like that's what I didn't like about Doge is like, wasn't, it wasn't what it should have been, which is let's make the government work more efficiently. And I'm all for that a hundred percent behind that. And I think there are plenty of ways to do that.
And so it was just unfortunate to see, like, first off, they politicized it way too much right from the beginning, where it really could have been a really good effort, quite honestly. I just think it could have been.
Evan Meyer: 28:00.993 Did you appreciate any of the work that was done? And I say done is claimed to be done. It's so hard to know what's done, how far they went with things and what actually happened sometimes on certain issues. So yeah.
Mark Pinsley: 28:13.354 Yeah, I mean, the numbers that I have seen, the numbers that I have seen, like, I can't remember what the final number was like, like, they were trying to save $2 trillion, right? And I don't think they saved a billion. I don't remember what the final number was. It was like tiny compared to like what they were trying to save. First off, there's just no way to save $2 trillion. Now, how did they get to the $2 trillion number? They got to the $2 trillion number because we spend $2 trillion more than we collect right now.
Evan Meyer: 28:26.467 Yeah.
Mark Pinsley: 28:41.516 Right? Like that's, that's where the two trillion came from. okay, great effort, right? But the question is, like, should, should taxes go up or can you cut that much? And now what we've learned from Doge is there isn't that much to cut. Right? Like neither side truly wants to cut that deeply into what's going on. You know, used to be the Republicans were much more about small government. I don't know that they're there anymore. Look, we just put, ice in and spent.
Evan Meyer: 28:43.918 Mm-hmm.
Mark Pinsley: 29:09.646 two thirds of the cost of the Marines on ice, right? They just bought a detention center here, I think it was for like 70 billion, $70 million. I don't think on either side there's this true notion of trying to try and shrink government or save money. I just don't believe it's there. And so what should be there is if we're going, if we as a country agree that that's how much we need to spend.
Evan Meyer: 29:19.982 Yeah.
Mark Pinsley: 29:39.886 then we have to collect more revenue. And I think that revenue should come from the richest of us. Like I don't think that, you know, Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos or Bill Gates are paying enough taxes. That's my perception.
Evan Meyer: 29:54.701 Yeah, interesting. Well, some of those are sort of classic Democrat points, know, which help, it would lean into that.
Mark Pinsley (30:01.07) Yeah, no, I agree. mean, you know, like, just to be honest, that is truly how I feel. Like, we can't, we as individuals, we cannot fathom, you know, how much, you know, $100 billion is or $400 billion is like, there's just no way to fathom that. And there's no way that somebody needs that. Like in their lifetime, they just, there's nothing that they need that for.
Evan Meyer (30:16.91) Yeah.
Mark Pinsley: 30:28.236 And so like, and like, look, you know, the easiest way to not pay taxes is don't take a salary, right? Pay yourself a dollar. So now you're, you're actually entitled to Medicaid, right? You'd be entitled to Medicaid if you only made a dollar. And, you know, you're making like, I think I saw that like Steve Bezos made $6 billion one year, like basically an interest, not exactly interest, but an interest. We'll call it $6 billion in interest.
And so he doesn't have to pay a dime of taxes on that unless he liquidates it. There's no reason to liquidate it because he can just borrow against it. So he could pay zero in taxes if he wanted to.
Evan Meyer: 31:13.602 Yeah. Yeah.
Mark Pinsley: 31:13.612 You know, that to me is just not right.
Evan Meyer: 31:17.132 Yeah, well there are some philosophical arguments about it may not be right. know, like some people, there's plenty to justify why people earn tons of money, can have tons of money. I guess what you're saying is there's a certain level, there's a threshold where it's too much and the government should then step in and say you have too much.
Mark Pinsley: 31:40.506 Yeah, I don't know if too much is the right word, but yeah, there's a point at which... So how much money do you think we have in the system right now? Like how much money do you think has printed money? And when I say printed, it can be digital today, but how much do you think the... There's nothing you could say that would be wrong, but if you had to guess. Yeah, so it's $5 trillion. That's the amount of money that we create. Now, banks are allowed to create more money.
Evan Meyer: 31:56.856 Trillions. Trillions.
Mark Pinsley: 32:06.636 right by loaning money. when you look at that, there's $22 trillion in our economy right now, 22 trillion. And they just gave Elon Musk a bonus of up to $1 trillion. So 1 22nd of all of the money that exists in the United States. That is not necessary.
Evan Meyer: 32:29.838 No, I think it's not necessary. guess you could say someone with that amount of money would do extraordinary things with that amount of money. you know, I don't know if he's... And that's not all liquid, right? That value is in the cup. know, it's... can't just... He doesn't have... He can't buy a trillion avocados, right? He can't buy...
Mark Pinsley: 32:45.262 Yeah, yeah, you know, it's, yeah.
Right. But what they do buy is they buy assets. That's what the problem is. So if you look at the price of gold today, what is it? It's $5,000 or something like that, right? Because they're buying assets. Money isn't really worth anything, literally. It's just a means of getting an asset. And an asset could be a home, it could be a car, it could be gold, it could be whatever. So they're competing with us on buying those things.
Evan Meyer: 33:07.918 All
Mark Pinsley: 33:17.738 including buying politicians. Like you and I could not go buy a politician, I can assure you. But Elon Musk can, like, you know, Bill Gates can. Like, and so like they're buying our politicians and that's, I think that's a problem.
Evan Meyer: 33:29.783 Yeah.
Evan Meyer: 33:34.167 Yeah, well, that I mean, and that gets into really money in politics in general. Citizens United, who I just had Tiffany Muller on recently, who's doing great work on trying to address that and how how money can play a role in politics. And I guess a lot of it comes down. You know, one of the big issues is no matter what you do, the incentive structure still leans people into moving in a direction and.
Mark Pinsley: 33:41.644 Yep.
Evan Meyer: 34:00.303 spending the most time on the things that bring in the most money. Whether you're a business, you spend most of your time on the 20 % of the clients bringing in 80 % of the revenue. Right? And if you're a politician and you're raising money, you're spending
Mark Pinsley: 34:09.422 100%, yeah.
Evan Meyer: 34:18.286 80 % of your time on the 20 % of the people who when they call you you pick up for them. You don't pick up for the guy who gave you 10 bucks. You pick up the guy who gave you 10 million bucks. How do you how are you going to change that? And look you're you've run for things. You know this game. How do you change the human nature of that problem? You could put and you could put money in all sorts of things. Okay, I won't give it to you cash. I'll just give you I'll give you it in this way that no one will detect.
Mark Pinsley (34:26.21) Right, yep.
Mark Pinsley: 34:32.163 Yeah.
Mark Pinsley: 34:43.798 Yeah, no, you can't change the human nature.
Evan Meyer: 34:44.172 You know, come stay in my mansion. Come stay in my mansion whenever you want and have access to my horses. I don't know.
Mark Pinsley: 34:50.402 No, no, I don't think you can change human nature. I think that you can try and legislate out the ability to give money so easily. Like right now, like in Pennsylvania, for example, if you're a state senator or a house member, you can get an unlimited amount of money. Unlimited. you know, like if running for Congress, you have a $3,500, you know, limit on individuals. Now, businesses are a whole nother thing. They could spend an unlimited amount of money. That's completely wrong, right? Like,
So we're allowing those that have the most to buy us. And I think like, you can't change the human nature. So you got to change the law to cover them.
Evan Meyer (35:29.26) Yeah, well that most people agree. think 70 % of people like you said, like agree on that that is too much, right? But if I were but but the limits what 3500 so someone who can afford to give up someone running have enough money to just shell out $3,500 for a person running and hope they win. What if they don't win?
And what if they, what are they doing? You don't know how they spend your money, right? Like, so what's the difference? So let's just say, let's shrink it down. Now someone gives you $3,500 versus someone gives you $35. Who are you going to pick up the phone for? So it doesn't matter how big the number gets when it comes to prioritizing this problem. It just means that you get a disproportionate size of the money and potentially the time on the phone and ear and it's not lobbying.
Mark Pinsley (35:51.48) Yeah, yeah, no, absolutely.
Evan Meyer: 36:17.794 But it's sort of lobbying, right? The same with Tiffany Mueller, right? Where's that line exactly? One's before you get in, one's after you get in, but you can't really shave the line of where that work starts and stops, right?
Mark Pinsley: 36:20.366 100%.
Mark Pinsley: 36:30.538 No, but we have to come up with, we have to do better than we are. Right? Like.
Evan Meyer: 36:35.468 Yeah, well you're a controller. What as a, at the county level, what can we do? What can you and your team concoct to help at least when you're electing, I'm guessing you have county supervisors?
Mark Pinsley: 36:49.462 Yep. So we can't do anything. We can make it visible. And what's visible right now is it's unlimited amount of money. And so we could make that visible. then the commissioners themselves would have, and this will never happen, right? The commissioners themselves would have to limit the amount of money that they were allowed to receive. It's never going to happen. It has to come from the people. It really does. Because if there's not
If there's not pressure on the outside, the inside's not gonna wanna do that. It's just not, you know? And I think that's unfortunate.
Evan Meyer: 37:24.078 They will not take money away from themself. Yeah.
Mark Pinsley (37:29.24) Correct. Yeah. Cause like at the end of the day, you want to win, right? Like that's what it comes down to. And by the way, you play the game you're in, right? Like somebody gives me $50,000. I'm taking it. Right. Like even though like I might know better, but I know my competition is going to take the 50,000. So I'm playing the game. I'm in. I'm not like if we're playing baseball, I'm playing baseball. I'm not playing football while you play baseball, you know, right.
Evan Meyer: 37:35.264 Right, that's sort of why... Yeah, sorry.
Evan Meyer: 37:42.497 Yeah.
Evan Meyer: 37:55.023 Of course, yeah, that's the way it goes. It's just the way it goes. I always wonder what is the acceptance that people will have towards that fundamental truth, which I think is a fundamental truth. You could say whatever you want about any of these, you know, rulings and I think that one's not one that I agree with, Citizens United, but I think that was a bad thing for, in general, for most people.
Right? It creates a large unfairness. you know, but still, you could chop that off and you still have all these same issues. And I don't know. I think some of it's just an acceptance of like, well, that's just the way it is. Or is it? I don't know. Like, I think there's probably a solution. There could be something that can fix that.
Mark Pinsley: 38:19.436 I think so too.
Mark Pinsley: 38:41.868 I mean, you could definitely start with transparency, right? Like these super PACs are allowed to be non-transparent as to where they're getting their money from, right? For long periods of time. So you could at least start by saying, if you're getting money, you have to truly disclose where it's coming from. So the super PAC can't just say, you know, we don't know where we got, you know, a hundred million dollars from. No, you got to disclose it. So like people will know, Hey, that's Coca-Cola or that's McDonald's or that's, whatever it is, you know, like, I don't know who's donating, but.
Evan Meyer: 39:03.555 Yeah.
Mark Pinsley: 39:11.406 At least people would then be more aware, which I think is, I really do think that awareness helps. It's not perfect, but it helps.
Evan Meyer: 39:14.317 Yeah.
Yeah. Why can't you? Why don't in terms of transparency at the county level? OK, so that's a good start. But why? What is the limitations that the county can do when it comes to its its more localized enforcement of these rules? Where does that start and stop?
Mark Pinsley: 39:36.406 I mean, they could definitely, the commissioners themselves could say that there was an upper limit. And now by the way, they would probably be challenged and taken to court. I don't know who would win, but they could start by saying there's an upper limit on the amount of money that could be taken for, let's say a commissioner's race, but they can't go to anything else because, you know, the state rules, the state, you know, government, the judiciary would be different. They can only rule county elections.
Evan Meyer (40:01.58) Yeah.
Evan Meyer: 40:05.836 Got it.
Mark Pinsley (40:09.96) least in Pennsylvania, by the way. different states could be a different...
Evan Meyer: 40:12.738 Yeah, they're called commissioners.
Mark Pinsley (40:17.28) Yeah, for us they're called commissioners. Yeah.
Evan Meyer: 40:19.694 interesting. They're called supervisors here. That doesn't help with the common understanding of how of how civics works either because we have commissioners at local levels and so so you know civics is such an understudied thing for most people to even understand why problems exist they blame who do they blame Trump Gavin Newsom right whose fault is it
Mark Pinsley: 40:26.164 Yeah.
Mark Pinsley: 40:40.142 Yep. Yeah. Yeah.
Evan Meyer (40:44.78) That's really most of what they have. They don't know that there's even a county supervisor. It's like it's it's a or a commissioner. They don't even know that that's a real role, right?
Mark Pinsley: 40:45.165 Yeah.
Mark Pinsley (40:52.27) I definitely don't think, and quite honestly, I didn't learn civics to this degree. To the degree, I think that we should be teaching it. You learned about the three branches of government, blah, blah, and then that's about it. You don't learn, and you might learn there's state senators and there's US senators. You have no idea what the difference is. You cannot understand what each one does, and there's just not any education on it, which is a mistake, I think.
Evan Meyer: 41:14.348 Yeah. Yeah. Well, you're probably blaming the wrong people with a lot of passion. And part of what I do here is try to educate people on how things work so that maybe they can not be so hateful if they are right now, because I think there's a lot of nuance to things, right? There's a lot of... You can see things in a lot of ways and it's hard to understand... No one's in the room where it happens. No one.
Mark Pinsley: 41:41.494 Right. Yeah.
Evan Meyer: 41:43.692 You don't know we're all in a game of telephone and then people hate people on a game of telephone. So it's like where you know I'll ask you where do you get your news from?
Mark Pinsley: 41:52.966 as many sources as possible. So I would say, the Washington Post, which I don't particularly care for, by the way, but I do read it. I do read Yahoo news to see what comes up there. Cause like, that's good, like smattering of everything. there's this, there's this company now that I use, can't think of any of it now, but like, it gives you like rankings and it shows you, your blind spots. So it says, you know, this is from the far right. This is from the far left. This is from the middle.
Evan Meyer: 41:57.282 Good answer.
Mark Pinsley: 42:22.826 And then it shows you like, you know, things that you might not see. It's yes, not all media, but it's something very close to that. Yeah. And so I really like that. AP news is probably the place that I go for what I consider to be the most centrist news. Like, like their headlines aren't sensationalized, you know, things like that. So that's what I like about them. But I also, I do look at Fox news, which I don't care for at all, but I look at it to see like what they're promoting.
Evan Meyer: 42:24.106 Mm-hmm all media is it called like all media. Is that what it's called all media buys it have like a bias chart. Yeah Something like that.
Evan Meyer: 42:44.717 Yep.
Mark Pinsley (42:52.43) And we have a subscription to the New York Times, but I would say my son uses that more than I do.
Evan Meyer (42:52.44) Mm-hmm.
Evan Meyer: 42:58.454 Yeah, well, and so you're a product of your background and experience and your opinions and the news that you consume.
Mark Pinsley: 43:04.279 Yeah.
Mark Pinsley: 43:07.886 100%. Yep. And I don't trust any news at the moment.
Evan Meyer: 43:11.118 Yeah, right. They're very hard to trust, especially when they're sensationalizing so many things. you're like, usually my bar is like, if I read a word that says like, okay, you just totally tried to get me, I don't even click. I'm like, next. Yeah.
Mark Pinsley (43:23.03) I'm with you. Yeah, exactly. That's why I like AP. Like I think they've done a pretty good job of not doing that. They're not great, but they're better than a lot. Like, you know, when I see the Washington Post or the New York Times, it's always like clickbait, just as you said, like they're trying to say something.
Evan Meyer: 43:32.706 Yeah.
Evan Meyer: 43:38.223 It's terrifying in a lot of ways. All right. Let's before I got one more for us to cover. think I'd like to talk about health care before we close out here because it's important and I know you care a lot about it and you've you've discussed a lot about the pharmacy pharmacy benefit managers and
Mark Pinsley: 43:54.733 Yep.
Evan Meyer: 44:01.023 slice off the top that folks are saying and you can't get the audit information that you're looking for for because of gag orders. Explain a little bit about that situation where that cut is coming from. What is a gag order and and what you feel the county can do. What power does the county have to fix that in Lehigh County?
Mark Pinsley: 44:07.383 Yep.
Mark Pinsley: 44:22.784 Yeah. So what we, and we've done. like one of the things that, so I was doing research on, the healthcare that we provide to our employees. And so there's really two sections of that. So one side is if you're an employee, you go to the pharmacist and you get whatever drugs you need on the other side is, you know, your, your hospital, your doctor, all of that kind of stuff. So I divided that into line because I thought, it's going to be easier to understand pharmacy.
It's not that much easier, quite honestly, as you dig into it, there's so much. And I learned about what you mentioned, the pharmacy benefit manager, which is this middleman between us, Lehigh County and the pharmacist. so Lehigh County is self-insured. And so what that means is if you walk into the pharmacist and you buy your hundred dollar drug and you pay $10 for your copay, Lehigh County pays the remaining $90.
The method that we use to pay that $90 is we take that $90, we give it to the pharmacy benefit manager, the PBM, and the PBM then gives it to the pharmacist. Hopefully. And we pay the PBM, by the way, we pay them an administration fee for doing that. So the first thing I did when I started, when I started doing this was I said, okay, let me go to the PBM and ask them. know, Evan went to the pharmacist, he got his hundred dollar drug.
He paid us $10. We pay the $90 to you. Prove to me that that $90 went to the pharmacist. No, sir. We can't do that. There's some secret sauce in there. What kind of secret sauce would there be? You know? So I then went to the, I went to the pharmacist because I know what pharmacist you went to, right? I know what drug you bought, quite frankly. And so I went to the pharmacist and I'm like, look, I know that Ian, rather, Evan came here. What?
Did you get the $90 for him? I'm sorry, sir. We can't tell you because we have a gag order. We have a non-disclosure from the pharmacy benefit manager that doesn't allow us to tell you whether we got that money. So now what do I know? I know someone's skimming off the top, right? Because there's no reason for me, the person that's paying this bill, not to know. So then I did some more research. Like I start digging in some more.
Mark Pinsley: 46:45.844 And like, have a list of all the drugs, you know, that we purchase. And are you familiar with GoodRx? Yeah. So GoodRx is this like site that you can go to if you don't have insurance, you can buy, you know, a drug at a lower price. So I took a list of all of our drugs and I ran it against GoodRx to see whether or not GoodRx would have a better price than what we were getting as a negotiated rate.
Evan Meyer: 46:52.376 Sure.
Evan Meyer (47:09.74) Wow. You must've used Python from that and connected to their API.
Mark Pinsley: 47:12.366 I did exactly right. That's exactly right. And so I ran all that and I found hundreds of thousands of dollars we would have saved had we just used GoodRx instead of using our negotiated rate.
Evan Meyer: 47:29.784 Yeah, wow. Hey.
Mark Pinsley: 47:31.468 Right. And so like in the end, I end up finding nearly $3 million worth of grift, you know, that, that, that this company was taking. And so we went back out to bid, and we got another company to come in and this other company was called capital RX, which I like highly recommend. They, were, I mean, you should look at your own obviously, but I think that what they, what they did that I like as a controller is that.
I can now go to them anytime I want and say, show me that you paid this pharmacy and they can show me the receipts. Like there is nothing like, there is no, they're not taking anything off the top. Like I can see exactly what's happening and I can see exactly what I'm paying them and exactly what money they're making and exactly what the pharmacist is making by the way. Like, so one of the problems that I had with our last one is that they were taking
They were treating the mom and pop pharmacy worse than the CVS, worse than the Walgreens, worse than that. Right? And so mom and pop pharmacies in many cases were making less than what they paid for the drug from the PBM. So if they paid a dollar for the drug, they might've been getting 95 cents or 90 cents. They were losing every time they paid. And in this case, they're not. We know that they're making at minimum $10 per fill.
Evan Meyer: 48:52.141 Hmm.
Mark Pinsley: 48:58.412 So they're at least making money. Cause I don't want mom and pop businesses to go out of business. And we're still spending $3 million less.
Evan Meyer: 49:05.068 Yeah, wow. Well, do you, mean solid upgrades there. And do you appreciate any of the work that the current administration is doing to reduce costs or at least what they're saying they want to do to reduce costs?
Mark Pinsley: 49:12.332 Yep.
Mark Pinsley: 49:26.415 On the pharmacy side?
Evan Meyer: 49:28.426 pharmacy benefit manager side.
Mark Pinsley (49:30.23) Yeah, no, I'm a hundred percent behind it. Like 100%. To be honest, during the last Trump administration, and I'm not a Trump fan at all, but to give credit where credit is due, like they did come out with some transparency laws that actually helped me on the other side, where I was looking at the hospitals, that I wouldn't have had access to information had his administration not made some very good transparency laws.
Well, one of their mistakes, quite honestly, was that, and I don't blame them, by the way, just it was as they were trying to get better, they just didn't go quite far enough, which is so like right now what ends up happening is if you're a hospital, they, the Trump administration created a law that said you have to present all of your pricing that you're getting. So.
that you're negotiating. like if you negotiate with Aetna, if you negotiate with Humana, if you get a negotiation with whatever, that information has to be available to everyone. So you can just go look at it electronically. But what happened was their fine was only $2 million if they didn't do that. So the hospitals are just paying the $2 million.
Evan Meyer: 50:41.746 yeah. That's a classic, classic issue in government of if the penalty isn't worth, you know, the compliance or the compliance is or the non-compliance is worth the penalty. That's the yeah. Yeah. Wow.
Mark Pinsley: 50:57.374 Right, exactly. And so while they did well, that was an error, I think, that they just didn't understand at that time.
Evan Meyer (51:04.61) Yeah. Yeah. Well, it's great that you can at least have the nuanced ability to, you know, see, give credit where it's due. always, I always appreciate that on any side of where how people feel about one another that they can do that, because I think that's where we can stop hating each other less. Yeah.
Mark Pinsley: 51:21.742 Yeah, look, they helped me. Yeah, yeah, exactly. No, no, they really, this was something really good. And I think it will change the industry over the long term. It takes time, but I think it's going to actually have a really positive impact.
Evan Meyer: 51:31.182 Yep.
Evan Meyer: 51:37.039 Cool, cool. So lastly, look, want to, you know, something happened today that is worth, I think, I want to say closing out on it because I want to thank you for being here and taking your time to be here. I know you had a stressful day and yeah, and that's, and you can explain a little bit about it, but you know, this is one of the sad realities about being in an elected position.
Mark Pinsley: 51:52.088 Yeah.
Evan Meyer (52:05.23) and some of the risks that people are taking now. it makes, you know, being an elected ever more honorable because you do put yourself in that risk. But just explain a little bit about what happened today and to the degree you're comfortable with and yeah, and why you think it happened and how can we can maybe have less of this from a county perspective, try to move towards, you know.
Mark Pinsley: 52:21.144 Yeah.
Mark Pinsley: 52:28.908 Yeah. Yeah, some common ground, you know, like, so I got a death threat today. It was a gentleman who left a voicemail. was considered a credible threat. And it was because of ICE. It was because of the work on ICE and kicking these guys out of the building. so he was very, this particular person was very pro ICE and very anti immigrants. at least on the phone call, he didn't make any discrimination between
You know, documented, undocumented, legal, illegal. was just immigrants in total. And I just think we should be able to disagree. And like, look, I've been in, I've been office now seven years. This is my seventh year. And like, I get hate mail and I got hate calls and I get love calls and I get love mail and, and I respect all of that. And quite honestly, I take every hate call that I get and, or I will call them back.
and have the conversation because I think like they're paying my salary and they're entitled to my time. We don't necessarily have to agree. Nobody should be getting these kinds of threats. You know, I don't care what level of government they're at. think that we need to, that is something somehow we all need to agree to. Like, I'm not going to call, you know, some Republican that I disagree with and be like, I'm going to come after you and your family and do this. Like, no, like we, we have to win at the ballot box.
Whoever the side is, you don't like it. that's, that's your, that's your next role. Um, or even before that, why don't you seek to understand why the person did what they did, you know, and then, and then, and then maybe seek to be us to be understood that sort of Steven Covey, you remember him. Yeah. Yeah. Seek to understand and seek to be a seek to first understand and seek to be understood. Like, I just think that we need to start doing that. And you see it in government, you know, even, uh,
Evan Meyer: 54:11.923 yeah, one of my favorite, one of my favorite quotes.
Mark Pinsley: 54:24.204 know, AOC and Marjorie Taylor Greene, you know, both sort of lightning rods for death threats. And neither one that should be put in that position ever. You know, and I just, feel terrible for the moment that we're in. It just, it's become so heated and I don't, I don't know how we turn the temperature down. I really don't.
Evan Meyer (54:52.75) Well, you know, I think it's a difficult situation. think one thing that may be helpful for people is to think like, I know everyone thinks this is the worst time we've ever lived in. I don't think that's true. I think it's the best time we've ever lived in. It may be a difficult time for our democracy and like things in the way people feel, but.
Mark Pinsley: 55:07.692 Yeah.
Mark Pinsley: 55:17.539 Yeah.
Evan Meyer: 55:18.222 you know, still under how everything is in terms of quality of life, the people, the lowest income in America live better than 95 % of the rest of the world. And, you know, we've, we're, every country has, has, has practically doubled their life expectancy and, you know.
Women pretty much everywhere go to school except in a couple, know, like that doesn't exist except in a few annoying places. And the level of education people get, how the type of resources they have access to, you know, there's a great book by Hans Rosling called Factfulness, which really kind of makes you see how good we have. And it doesn't mean there's not a long way to go. But I suspect around the Civil War was a lot worse.
Mark Pinsley (55:47.16) Yeah.
Mark Pinsley: 56:03.212 Yep.
Mark Pinsley (56:12.16) Yeah, no, no, you're absolutely right. Like, you know, I've been fortunate enough that I've got to, I've had a chance to travel the world and see like how other people live. And we could be very grateful to be honest that, you know, that we live here. At least I am. And that gratefulness makes me want to fight for the democracy, the type of democracy that I believe we deserve. And I think right now it's very difficult because people hate each other for no reason.
Like, and that's when I think about the hard times that we're having, that's the hard time. Like it's, it is like the old brother versus brother, you know, like there's no reason to be there. There just is no reason to be there.
Evan Meyer: 56:49.048 Yeah.
Evan Meyer (56:57.09) Yeah. Well, I think you summed it up pretty good there. You said the magic word there is gratitude. And and sometimes that bit of gratitude you could share that with other people who have gratitude and, you know, maybe start a conversation with gratitude instead of.
Mark Pinsley: 57:05.164 Yeah.
Evan Meyer: 57:19.362 why you think one way on ice and someone else thinks differently on ice. So let's end on gratitude. I'm grateful to have you on today. Thank you. Yeah. Really good insights. Stick around for a second while this video uploads to the cloud. All right. Thanks again.
Mark Pinsley (57:23.49) Yeah, exactly. I agree.
Mark Pinsley: 57:31.534 Yeah, I'm grateful to be here. Thank you. I appreciate it. It's very exciting.
Mark Pinsley: 57:40.503 I sure will.
Mark Pinsley: 57:44.344 Thank you.
This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity while preserving the authentic flow of conversation.
Written by
Evan Meyer
February 5, 2026