Automated Transcript
Sam:
[0:00]
| I can't hear you talk again are you there I.
|
Ivan:
[0:06]
| Got nothing I have volume set to low there.
|
Sam:
[0:08]
| We are I can hear you now whatever you did fixed it.
|
Ivan:
[0:12]
| Well mainly speaking well.
|
Sam:
[0:15]
| I heard I saw your mouth moving before but didn't hear anything.
|
Ivan:
[0:18]
| I think I may have my mouth may I doing this thing which I noticed confuses people which is where sometimes I am like thinking of something, but I'm kind of like mouthing what I'm thinking and so people keep thinking that I'm saying something, I'm trying to talk but I'm really going yeah, it.
|
Sam:
[0:40]
| Just cut out again because you weren't.
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Ivan:
[0:42]
| Speaking I did cut out because I wasn't speaking because in my mind I'm like thinking what the fuck are these people doing but I don't want to say that out loud but I keep going and like thinking it and going, mouthing it And so I'll tell you that I keep, I regularly keep confusing people and they think, hey, you're on mute. I'm like, no, no, no. That's just me being, that is by me being frustrated and wanting to say that, but me not, you know, doing this. And I, and I just did this to myself a little bit right now.
|
Sam:
[1:20]
| It did say you were starting on a new track though, cause you, you know, changed your setting or something.
|
Ivan:
[1:25]
| But anyway, I, I did?
|
Sam:
[1:28]
| I don't know.
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Ivan:
[1:30]
| Heads up. New record. Yeah. New recording. Trump created due to changing your device. Hey, shit. The fuck is this thing? Well, that may have added something to it, I guess. But here we go. Do anything.
|
Sam:
[1:42]
| Hello. Good to see you. Yeah.
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Todd:
[1:45]
| You too, fellas.
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Ivan:
[1:46]
| Hello. It's been a while. Oh, my God. You got a RCT t-shirt. Damn it. Why didn't you say that? I think I have one there. Somewhere that I've saved.
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Sam:
[1:57]
| Okay i i have all of my shirts a while back to make sure they didn't deteriorate any further.
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Ivan:
[2:03]
| Archive yeah sorry.
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Todd:
[2:05]
| I wish i wish i would have this is from last year's 75th anniversary gotcha you guys yeah you guys must have been on the other side of the room because i don't remember seeing you at the reception no.
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Ivan:
[2:17]
| No no i way back yeah yeah we were way on the other side in a room like thousands.
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Todd:
[2:21]
| Of miles away. Yes.
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Ivan:
[2:23]
| No, I had, um, no, I have some, well, I'm very good at keeping my old shit as Sam knows. I have shirts from when I was at CMU that are still in wearable shape that are RCT shirt.
|
Todd:
[2:38]
| So yeah, I, I sadly don't. I have, I have one that I grabbed, you know, I did, I did shows in the summer right up until we started having kids. Cause I, I'm still in the Pittsburgh area. So I have one or two of those that are kind of hanging on by a thread. And this and and that's about it yeah i wish i would have held on to a lot of them but uh.
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Sam:
[3:02]
| Yeah at some point probably i don't know 15 years ago now or something i said i i basically said these these are starting to deteriorate so let's let's pack them up stick them in a box somewhere so i still have them but they're no longer in the wearable rotation and of course.
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Ivan:
[3:21]
| By sticking them in a box somewhere basically means that I.
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Sam:
[3:24]
| Think I'll never see them before.
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Ivan:
[3:26]
| Yeah, basically. Apparently Sam named me his executor to his estate. So basically, I will probably at some point, if I outlive Sam, will find them.
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Todd:
[3:41]
| Okay.
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Sam:
[3:42]
| Possibly.
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Ivan:
[3:43]
| Yeah.
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Sam:
[3:43]
| Okay. First of all, Todd, do you have a hard stop that we should respect?
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Todd:
[3:51]
| No.
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Sam:
[3:52]
| Okay.
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Todd:
[3:53]
| No, you said you'd go for about two hours. I don't know if I'll stay for two hours, but I don't need to stop.
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Sam:
[3:59]
| Okay, gotcha. Okay.
|
Ivan:
[4:02]
| My 12-year-old may wander in at some point because mom is going to do something, so I don't know. So just be aware.
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Todd:
[4:08]
| Yeah, my 18-year-old may wander in. We'll see.
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Sam:
[4:12]
| Okay, and my 15-year-old has been known to participate as well. Anyway, here we go then. Welcome to curmudgeon's corner for saturday may 17th 2025 it's just after 18 utc as we're starting to record i'm sam minter yvonne bow is with us and we're gonna do something a little bit different uh this week rather than start out with our light and fluffy and then move on to more serious topics as we go we have a guest today and this is uh someone who yvonne and i knew a long long time ago in college um.
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Ivan:
[5:07]
| A long long time ago.
|
Sam:
[5:09]
| Yeah long long time ago okay yeah we don't wasn't that long yeah not not it was like last week right yeah um anyway.
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Ivan:
[5:20]
| Listen you want to know a long time the other day i told this person i was at the office which is not common but i'm at the office that we had this this person and you know i i came back from rally having a really really rough day visiting customer okay this was just a disaster okay you know i'm just she sees me that i'm blown out exhausted and she's like why is that I'm like well look I started doing this shit in 97, I mean I've been doing this for a long damn time and she says oh 97 I was I was in the, I was nine years old at that time.
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Sam:
[5:57]
| Yes.
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Ivan:
[5:57]
| And I'm just like, me?
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Sam:
[6:02]
| Here's one along those lines. I have been at my current employer for over 19 years now, coming up fast on 19 and a half, okay? And that makes me realize that I am moments away from the summer interns being born after I started at this company. oh fuck.
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Ivan:
[6:26]
| Come on man yeah.
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Sam:
[6:28]
| Oh fuck.
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Ivan:
[6:30]
| What what what she's okay.
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Sam:
[6:32]
| Anyway so we we have with us a guest who i know they posted something on social media about tariffs and how it affected their industry so i invited them on so i'm gonna murder your last name todd so this is todd padizanan that's it I got it right?
|
Todd:
[6:51]
| Yeah, yeah. Which is funny because I don't know if anyone back then ever knew my real last name.
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Sam:
[6:57]
| It was like Panzan or something.
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Todd:
[6:58]
| Yeah.
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Sam:
[6:59]
| Yeah. So anyway, let me let me introduce it. Let me let you introduce yourself a little bit and sort of who you are and whatever elements of your background you feel comfortable with. And then we're specifically going to start out this first segment talking to Todd about Trump tariffs and how they might impact his industry, industry in general, and just the whole tariff thing, which we've talked about a lot, but I felt like it would be useful to get somebody who's sort of directly impacted. And then after that, Todd may leave, Todd may stay, but we'll talk about other things after that.
|
Todd:
[7:38]
| Yeah, sure. Todd Padasanin. We all went to college together once upon a time, Carnegie Mellon. So I have a civil engineering degree. I started in structural engineering, did that for a few years. My career evolved into individual sales and then about 11 years ago into sales leadership. And so I've been, you know, selling or leading teams selling into the utility scale power generation industry roughly since 2010. I was doing it occasionally before that, but really exclusively after that. And for the last three and a half years it's been exclusively utility scale solar photovoltaic power generation as well this is a logistics intensive industry there's executives i know at one of the big construction companies that do this kind of work who said utility scale solar power is a huge logistics operation that happens to also generate electricity whenever it's finished it they're massive these these These projects are hundreds of megawatts. They take up thousands of acres. And so during construction, they're very labor intensive.
|
Todd:
[8:47]
| And our supply chain is very globalized. There are many components for a variety of reasons that don't get manufactured here in the U.S. Anymore. In some cases, because that technology never really took off, or in other cases, because over time it became more profitable to manufacture certain components and raw materials in lower cost countries. And a focus more here on construction, operations, services, and so forth. I'm talking specifically about power generation, but I think what I said probably applies to 100 industries as well. So that's what I've been doing for the last 34 years or so since we saw each other, guys.
|
Sam:
[9:30]
| Yeah. So let's jump into it. And, you know, Yvonne's usually the econ person here, but let me start by asking, you know, So just over the last few months since the start of the Trump presidency, just at a very high level, how have the policy changes affected your industry?
|
Todd:
[9:56]
| Until this rapidly and, in my opinion, ridiculously escalating trade war with China five.
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Ivan:
[10:04]
| Six weeks ago. It's not just your opinion.
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Sam:
[10:07]
| Okay.
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Todd:
[10:08]
| Some people's opinion. most.
|
Ivan:
[10:11]
| People with a brain in business okay.
|
Todd:
[10:14]
| I it it people in the industry in this part of the industry were paying attention but trump administration didn't do anything drastic to really slow our momentum for the first month or two there's obvious concern about terrorists before he started enacting them and there's concerns about you know what he and Congress might try to do to the Inflation Reduction Act, which has accelerated our industry. We don't depend on it, but it's accelerated our industry for sure. It's made some projects viable where they maybe would not otherwise have been. But it was particularly, I should say from my point of view, right, because I can't speak for the entire industry that employs hundreds of thousands of people. But from my point of view, these rapidly escalating tariffs on China that started about six weeks ago and then ended abruptly the beginning of this past week were extraordinarily disruptive because what it meant was any raw materials or finished components coming out of China in the span of a couple of weeks had to be repriced, repriced again, repriced a third time. And at the end of those couple of weeks, a lot of things cost 80 or 90% nearly double what they had just a couple of weeks prior.
|
Todd:
[11:30]
| For projects that were just getting started, for the major construction companies that need to purchase millions or tens of millions of dollars worth of capital equipment or wiring systems or other materials that go into this construction, they had to slam on the brakes because nobody wants to pay 20 or 50 or 80% more than they were budgeted for. Or in fact, that would make many of these projects unviable, you know? So I know from my own individual experience that stopped progress on numerous projects, just almost entirely. Some of my competitors in the industry stopped giving price quotes. They, you know, they had to freeze sales activity and evaluate what their alternatives were going to be. My company happens to be fairly dependent on imports from China right now. We were already exploring diversification into other countries because, you know, after the election in November, everyone knew what might be coming. And so that's only accelerated our activities. But, you know, one of the byproducts of diversifying outside of China to countries with lower tariff impact is that things are going to cost a little more than they would have four months ago. That's a lot of words, guys. I don't know if I answered the question or not.
|
Sam:
[12:55]
| Look, no, that's a good start. I mean, one thing that I immediately want to ask is, you know, you mentioned how things got ratcheted to the roof and then abruptly stopped, but it's still not back to where it was before.
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Ivan:
[13:09]
| Well, yeah. What is the tariff percent that you're seeing right now on most of your products now with this downward change?
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Todd:
[13:18]
| Yeah, we're focused mostly on Chinese imports, my company at least, for another couple of weeks. Okay there's even there's even more nuance to it than that there's things that we can take orders for today that would come from other countries and that's the way we're going to operate going forward with with alternatives and so we'll price based on where people want to buy from and that affects lead times to an extent price to an extent not quality or design or anything like that thank goodness so at one point so i'm talking about incremental tariffs i guess so there were some tariffs in place before Trump took office. He enacted tariffs on certain imports from China. Biden never repealed them. The industry adjusted. So let's say that's the new zero. Okay. That, that, that threshold inauguration day, let's just call that zero. We're right now 30% higher than where we were at on day one of Trump administration. So 30 is better than 145, but it's worse than zero.
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Ivan:
[14:15]
| So you're seeing 10. What you're seeing right now at the current level is 10.
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Todd:
[14:23]
| No, we're seeing 30.
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Ivan:
[14:25]
| 30. 30.
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Todd:
[14:26]
| 30.
|
Sam:
[14:27]
| And you said it was 30 above where Biden was. So that's actually still higher than that.
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Ivan:
[14:31]
| That's right.
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Todd:
[14:32]
| That's right. But like, so the Biden tariffs, it started under the first Trump administration and they endured.
|
Ivan:
[14:38]
| Yeah, they didn't. They just didn't. Yeah, they weren't Biden tariffs. Biden just didn't rescind them.
|
Todd:
[14:43]
| Right. Yeah. Yes. So let's call that zero, right? Because the industry adjusted to that over, you know, the five or six years that they were in place. That's zero. We're now 30% higher on imports from China than we were Inauguration Day 2025. So we can manage that. The industry can manage that.
|
Sam:
[15:00]
| So let me explore that a little bit, because I think that's something that people have been talking about a lot, is that sort of there's a threshold where people will be like, you know, at 30%, let's say, you said, we can handle that. You know, maybe you absorb some of the cost, you pass some of it along to your customers, and maybe it slows things down a little bit, but it doesn't stop them. Whereas there's a threshold that's a little bit higher than that. And I've heard people throw around like 50%, 60%, something like that, where basically in a lot of industries, it would effectively be almost like a ban because prices would be high enough that people would just completely stop. It just wouldn't be viable to do it anymore. And so your thought is like at 30%, you're in that first zone. You're like, we can figure out how to make this work. It may have some impact, but it's not going to kill you.
|
Todd:
[15:59]
| Yeah, I think so. This industry in particular is still evolving, innovating, driving costs down. And people are finding more efficient ways to construct, to deliver the solar modules, the panels, you know. Have become more efficient. They're economically viable in higher and higher latitudes. You can build utility scale solar production in Canada now, and it's profitable. So there's a lot of things going positive direction in the industry, but this is definitely 30%. I don't want to say 30% is manageable, even though I may have said that a minute ago, it won't kill the industry, but it's going to slow it down a little bit until we adjust again. But that 145 was unsustainable. And so let me make one other point about that. We're on a 90-day pause right now. I think we're on maybe day three of the 90-day pause. There are few things in my industry that you can order today and clear customs in 90 days.
|
Ivan:
[17:03]
| Exactly.
|
Todd:
[17:03]
| And that's the biggest.
|
Ivan:
[17:04]
| Problem because you don't pay the tariff until this thing has landed and.
|
Todd:
[17:10]
| It's cleared.
|
Ivan:
[17:11]
| Customs and this is the thing that people don't understand why people are well why won't you order anything well damn it i don't know what the hell i'm gonna have to pay to clear this damn thing at.
|
Todd:
[17:24]
| This point our our conversations yvonne have gone from a month month and a half ago asking our customers if they can wait until we have stood up new production in other countries and in some cases they can and in other cases they can't wait and there are and we have competitors who are impacted to a lesser extent because again if you remember a month, month and a half ago it wasn't just China there were seemingly arbitrary tariffs supplied to nearly every country, mysteriously not Russia, even those are on a pod my god those are on a pod those could come back too Sure. And the point, the only point I want to make is, and you could say this for any sort of industrial machinery, you can say this about gas turbine generators and steam turbine generators that are still used in nuclear and fossil power generation as well. No one can order and deliver that stuff. In 90 days in the case of gas turbines i don't know how closely you guys follow the power generation industry all of oh yeah i'm on that.
|
Sam:
[18:36]
| Every day every.
|
Todd:
[18:37]
| Day i.
|
Ivan:
[18:37]
| Mean i'm not gonna say close but i i follow it but obviously i'm not an expert but.
|
Todd:
[18:43]
| I got.
|
Ivan:
[18:43]
| I have an idea.
|
Todd:
[18:44]
| You know there there is a well publicized growing demand for electricity in the united states driven largely by new manufacturing but especially by data centers and ai and you know so full.
|
Ivan:
[18:55]
| Disclosure sure what my second largest customer is a is a is a utility company.
|
Todd:
[18:59]
| Okay okay so there's probably going to be new natural gas fired power generation built but those turbines are sold out through 2029 if you place an order to ge or siemens or mitsubishi somebody like that today your plant's probably going to go online in 2030 or 2031 and that's if everything else goes right with the permitting and interconnection applications and substation equipment all the other things that go into this all right i'm i'm really deviating from i think where the construct the conversation is supposed to be my point about the 90-day pause that's that's all right that's normal for our show so don't worry about it we are okay we.
|
Ivan:
[19:34]
| Are the tangential.
|
Todd:
[19:35]
| Podcast okay i'm gonna i i i for better for worse i think i'm either gonna blow things way down or make things feel completely normal then as long as i'm on guys sorry i i'm losing my train of thought you're talking about the 90-day So basically.
|
Ivan:
[19:53]
| You're showing our age.
|
Todd:
[19:54]
| This is swing. Now, I would love to say that this is middle age, but I think I was kind of like this most of my life. So this has become now a race to onshore as much as possible. Tariffs have come down. Sale prices have come down above, but a lot closer to where they were a month and a half ago. And now shipping costs are spiking because people are racing to get priority position, expedited boats. It's still cheaper than air freight. People are trying to get on the fastest boat front of the line so they can get over here and, I don't know if we all did. I took econ electives, I think, my second year at college. I've seen the supply-demand curves, right? We're creeping up. People will pay what they're willing to pay to get stuff here because it's more worthwhile to beat the tariffs than it is to save a few pennies on shipping right now. So shipping costs are going up. And just like tariffs, we pass that along to our customers then as well. Typically, our things are delivered duty pay to the site.
|
Ivan:
[20:55]
| Listen, but shipping costs are significant, okay? And that's the thing. It's not an inconsequential thing, you know? When shipping a container from China goes from like $4,000 or $5,000 to $20,000, $25,000, $30,000 all of a sudden, and all of a sudden you've got to bring in 10, 20, 30 containers all of a sudden, you all of a sudden added like to your cost several hundred thousands of dollars. And especially depending on the value of the items that you're bringing in it could be that for some super high value items maybe that's significant but it depends on what you're bringing in if there are some relatively low cost items you're filling a container with them and all of a sudden your shipping costs just you know soared it becomes up it becomes material.
|
Todd:
[21:39]
| Yeah yeah and this is how i passed on to the consumer whether it is a business or an individual whether it's itemized or not you'll you'll see it in what you pay certainly businesses are going to try to absorb some of this because especially if you're in a very price sensitive market you kind of don't have a choice but in many but in many cases and for industrial machinery in certain industries and electric power generation for sure if there's still a limited supply then the end users are, oftentimes going to be willing to pay a little more because they have to get this because their project is still economically viable. Um, ultimately this gets passed on to all of us, right? Because we're electricity consumers.
|
Ivan:
[22:21]
| Right.
|
Todd:
[22:21]
| So, you know, maybe the promise of levelized or declining electric power retail prices, you know, we're not going to see that benefit as much because these things are driving things up. And the point I ought to make about the pendulum swinging from tariffs to shipping is it's a complicated, multifaceted problem. Tariffs and shipping and imports and globalized manufacturing are all interrelated can't simplify it the way that our president seems to try to be forcing everyone to believe that it can be simplified.
|
Ivan:
[22:55]
| Well here's the thing he continues to be under the impression that like the chinese government pays the tariffs okay he keeps saying this china needs to absorb the terror i'm like What the hell does that mean? Look, if I have a factory, I'm Apple. I have a factory in China. It's my factory I'm shipping to me, you idiot. You know, who the hell do you think is paying this? The government isn't running this show. And by the way, he still doesn't seem to understand that the tariffs are collected when customs is cleared. This concept has completely evaded him, you know, to this point.
|
Todd:
[23:42]
| I question Trump's judgment and competency in many areas, but I think that he's playing dumb and just lying. I think that he understands what's happening.
|
Ivan:
[23:55]
| I think he's a dumb fuck.
|
Todd:
[23:57]
| I think on many topics, you're right. In this case, I am sure by now, if he ever misunderstood by now, he must understand how terrorists work. He chooses to not talk about this publicly because he's still depending on popular support.
|
Ivan:
[24:16]
| Well, OK, so it may be like what you're saying is that maybe when he first did it, he didn't understand.
|
Todd:
[24:23]
| Yeah.
|
Ivan:
[24:23]
| But but by now, now somebody explained to him how it really works. And so he's maintaining the bullshit lie he said before because he's not going to admit that he didn't know what the fuck he was talking about.
|
Todd:
[24:35]
| He must have, I'm sorry, he must have realized it in 2017, you know? He chooses to present it this way because he needs his base to continue believing it. Sam, go on, I'm sorry.
|
Sam:
[24:48]
| Now, I was just going to ask because the one thing though, as part of what you talked about earlier, you mentioned, well, now there's a race to onshore. Does that actually mean that this is having exactly the effect Donald Trump wants? Because that's a stated goal, right?
|
Todd:
[25:04]
| Yes.
|
Sam:
[25:06]
| He fundamentally believes that any imports are by definition bad. We are losing money by spending money on things that are made elsewhere. And the goal is to bring it all back to the U.S. So like, is he succeeding?
|
Todd:
[25:25]
| You're right to call me out for using that word onshore because probably that's the wrong word. What I mean is products, components, materials, machinery. Is racing to clear customs here in the u.s right you cannot you cannot build a factory to make the sort of components and materials machines that i'm talking about you can't build a factory to do that in 90 days right so.
|
Sam:
[25:51]
| What so what you're talking about was just the thing that yvonne and i have talked about before which is.
|
Todd:
[25:56]
| Just like.
|
Sam:
[25:57]
| Everybody rushing to beat the tariffs and.
|
Todd:
[25:59]
| Get them in.
|
Sam:
[26:00]
| But this is an important point. Like his ultimate goal of bringing this manufacturing back to the United States, that's not something anybody's really thinking about at all, right? Or if so...
|
Ivan:
[26:14]
| Listen, the thing is that you can't bring it all back. There's a whole bunch of... Here's the policy about it. One of the reasons why so much manufacturing is distributed is because the only customer isn't the United States, okay? You're manufacturing to sell across the world in multiple currencies. And one of the things that you need to do is distribute the cost of these things amongst those currencies you're working with. Whether you're selling to Europe, or you're Asian, you're selling to whatever. So I go and I say, hey, well, let me bring all this manufacturing to the US. Well, you may not be able to build. First of all, it takes years to do it, number one. The second thing is, is the cost that it is. The third thing is, that you're probably only building some manufacturing limited for the United States and what it's going to wind up doing is limiting our options in terms of what we buy. And why do I say this? Because I saw this is what happened in Brazil for decades before they opened their markets.
|
Ivan:
[27:10]
| In the 70s, 80s, and 90s, where Brazil was a very closed market, they wouldn't allow PCs or computers to be imported. So what wound up happening is that their options for purchasing PCs and computers became extremely limited. OK, they basically because you the tariffs are so high, you basically it was impossible to bring one in. So then what you wind up getting is a series of very, you know, some companies like IBM, HP and a few manufacturing a limited number of products just to be sold in Brazil, which were wind up being of inferior quality and higher price because you were only building them to sell them at this damn market. It wind up being why in Brazil, IBM bet heavily on it, which is like why one of the biggest markets in the world for IBM midsize mainframes, like AS400 or whatever, was in Brazil because they were the only people that went and invested on building that kind of computer there. So every damn company had one because they were the only ones that bet on it. Nobody else could see the value in it. And that's what you're creating with the United States. You're creating this island all of a sudden where we are only 30% of the global economy and to a certain extent shrinking because the rest of the world is growing. And so you're going to wind up with this limited amount of manufacturing. By the way, our manufacturing is higher cost.
|
Ivan:
[28:35]
| Our labor is higher cost. you know the the the process of building all this we don't have the people everybody who is manufacturing in the united states at this point struggles right now to get people where are you gonna get all these millions of employees to go and build all this shit when even right now we struggle to get employees to do that and oh by the way we're deporting a whole bunch of them they're ones that we hired before anyway it's that the whole the whole thing has no plan of any kind whatsoever to bring manufacturing. And if you're a leader of a manufacturing company and you're thinking about doing it, you're looking at it and it's like, look, I just got to find some other place to move this shit because I can maybe move some stuff here, but there is no way I can bring all this shit here.
|
Todd:
[29:18]
| I, that's a lot. And I'm trying to make notes and gather my thoughts as well. Cause Sam, I'm trying not to forget your question either. I can't, I can't say definitively no business is considering adding new manufacturing here in the U S because of expected tariff policy. I can't say that.
|
Sam:
[29:42]
| I'm sure. I'm sure there has to be some, but it's the logistics of it are as as yvonne mentioned it's so long term for most things that and you need to have confidence that the situation is going to stay somewhat stable like for yeah just take the absolute extreme let's say instead of the 200 tariff or whatever it was just an outright ban you can't import from country x you know there would have to be some adaptation over time but you would have to believe that, okay, that's real and that's going to stay and that's going to stay for decades to make it worth your while. And one of the things we've seen, I mean, so far on every single one of these things that's hit, Trump has backed down when push comes to shove so far, there are all these pauses. And so if fundamentally you don't really believe that this is in fact permanent, then it doesn't make sense to make your long-term plans that won't bear fruits for a decade.
|
Sam:
[30:51]
| And so part of the question as well that I was going to ask anyway was with that level of uncertainty, how are people, what are they doing to plan? Like, are they, are you planning for the worst case that like these tariffs, you know, the high tariffs come back at the end of the pause and they stay? Or is everybody sort of acting like, you know, Trump's full of it, and none of this will stay and be real on the long term. And so we kind of act differently. You know, there's a little bit more uncertainty, but we have to assume things will sort of work out okay in the end and the tariffs will be low enough that we can manage.
|
Todd:
[31:36]
| Yeah. I, you know, I think I said it a couple of minutes ago, I got to stay in my lane. I'll tell you what I understand about the industry that I'm in. And I don't want to make broad generalizations. I know people in my industry are exploring supply chain diversification, adding capacity into countries that we hope, right? It's a calculated risk. countries where we think more likely than not any future trump tariff policies will be less disruptive than china and some other countries right but makes sense right how do you know makes sense how do you know because on day 91 he's going to tweet something out and it becomes policy and then we go we go back to the starting starting blocks again well and even.
|
Sam:
[32:23]
| On that in terms of the how do you know, right?
|
Todd:
[32:26]
| Yeah.
|
Sam:
[32:26]
| I mean, it is not out of the realm of possibility, that if Trump hears that industry X is moving from China to pick your random country, Thailand or something, that he says, oh, well, we don't want that to happen. We want them to go to the US. So we'll raise the tariffs in Thailand too to block that because the whole point of this is we don't want foreign manufacturing.
|
Todd:
[32:54]
| So I can tell you that that will have a very chilling effect on my industry and others as well. If there are such extreme policies that the only viable option is to manufacture in the U.S., Most projects become unaffordable, right? If you, if you have to make everything here, let me go back because I sort of make notes to answer one of your earlier questions. You asked, you asked, is this tariff policy going to incentivize people to add manufacturing capacity in the United States? Let's say that it did. One of my previous employers manufactures the utility scale inverters. These are the machines that convert DC power from the solar panels to the AC power that connects to the grid. So they're, they're, and they do more than that, but let's skip the details. They're, they're critical to renewable power generation, whether it's wind or solar or battery. This is the way those technologies interconnect to the grid and provide reliable electricity.
|
Todd:
[34:00]
| The Inflation Reduction Act passed, what, three years ago or more by now. So we knew there were tax incentives coming for manufacturers to add capacity in the US, even knowing that there was incentive and there was ability to make that pencil out and be profitable and to still meet market price for those machines here in the United States. It took my old employer about two years to get to ribbon cutting on that factory. So more complicated manufacturing. Let's say, you know, maybe his goal is to onshore more steel, more automobiles, more gas turbine or steam turbine to try to shift electric power back to fossil away from renewables. Those factories take even longer to build. Trump won't be in office anymore when those new factories open. That's how far out you're looking. So no, 90-day pause is, doesn't incentivize anyone to bring manufacturing. It incentivizes everyone like, let's wait and see what's he going to do in August. That's where we are.
|
Todd:
[35:05]
| I want to address something else also. Some of this manufacturing won't create the jobs that Trump wants his base. Unless he takes a really remarkable turn towards authoritarianism, Right. He's done in three and a half years. But there are senators and congressmen and aspiring politicians who are, you know, riding on his populist wave that, you know, they want to they want to keep they want to sustain that Trump message. Even when he's out of the picture, they're relying on the base, believing that higher tariffs are going to bring manufacturing back. And that means more factory jobs for everybody. There's a lot of stuff that's manufactured in China nowadays. Days i i think maybe the popular misconceptions everything they make over there whether it's barbie dolls or whether it's complicated electrical power generating machinery it's all manufactured by child labor forced forced leaguer like it is the.
|
Ivan:
[36:04]
| Most idiotic most idiotic thing ever i.
|
Todd:
[36:07]
| It's robotics well it's.
|
Ivan:
[36:11]
| Not totally robotics.
|
Todd:
[36:12]
| No listen.
|
Ivan:
[36:12]
| But but but the labor by the way they We have labor. The labor is expensive. Look, I had employees in China, in Shanghai and in Wuhan, okay, of all places. By the way, I ran an operations center in Wuhan when the pandemic started, okay, all right, of all the damn places, okay, all right. Look, my employees, the employees that I have in Shanghai basically made wages that were close to what we pay here. They weren't that far off, you know, 30,000, 40,000 a year for people, a manager, 60,000, 80,000. And so these people telling me that they think that we're using cellular, I'm like, what are you guys talking about? Yeah.
|
Todd:
[36:52]
| So I'm realizing that I have hardly stayed in touch with either of you for over three decades. And I shouldn't presume what you may or may not know. What I've learned about China, you could probably validate, is they've taken a decades-long strategic approach to becoming the factory for the world. Yes, totally. They have extraordinary manufacturing capacity that we can't touch.
|
Ivan:
[37:12]
| And that is the reality. And not just that. Listen, the one thing that you get, the incredible support that, listen, we as a foreign company, local government, to set up stuff, okay? Like subsidized buildings. We got, during the pandemic, nine months of free rent, okay, all of a sudden from the government. and we were foreigners and we were getting that money, for example. And I'm like, what the hell, man? They're supporting us this way or that way. So yeah, they support the manufacturing. They've got the people. They've got the infrastructure. And I think that's the one thing that they don't understand how when you set up a factory over there, the level of skilled labor that is available, the pool of people that they're trained that we just don't have. It's just really...
|
Todd:
[38:05]
| So I don't want to become a China apologist either, but this isn't North Korea. This isn't Soviet Union in the 70s and 80s.
|
Ivan:
[38:16]
| No, no.
|
Todd:
[38:16]
| In terms of global economy, this is a capitalist country. They are authoritarian in other ways.
|
Ivan:
[38:23]
| They love their Starbucks. Let me tell you something.
|
Sam:
[38:27]
| And the other misconception is sort of a decades-old information. Like people think of it as like a backwards third world country type of thing as opposed to modern technology that in many cases is ahead of ours yeah.
|
Todd:
[38:47]
| Yes yeah yeah so i'm not going to take any more detours.
|
Sam:
[38:52]
| Sure where.
|
Ivan:
[38:54]
| Were we about uh the tariffs manufacturing i understand where do we stay on brand we are we are we are i mean our tangents you know are yeah that's no anyway so we're gonna go.
|
Sam:
[39:07]
| We were we were fundamentally talking about how industries you know your yours as an example but industries in general are reacting to the uncertainty of okay here's what things are right now. But it could be different in 90 days. It could be different in 30 days. You know, from what we've seen so far, it could be different tomorrow. Trump could wake up one day having watched some random segment on Fox News and decide to completely change the policy tomorrow. And so how do you deal with that?
|
Ivan:
[39:42]
| That's actually exactly how this happens a lot.
|
Todd:
[39:47]
| This is maybe not addressing what you just said sam but i mean i could there's another fact just from things that i've been reading and listening to to keep up with the industry at large i talked earlier about the shortage of gas turbines there's more than one way to generate electricity i do solar but there's other ways and there's this well in the industry well publicized shortage of gas turbines the companies that manufacture them are also not interested in adding capacity because you think i talked about capitalism a second ago the you know publicly traded companies, more often than not, are strategizing ways to maximize shareholder value and making large capital investments, whether it's in the U.S. or anywhere else, does not always maximize return on shareholder value, right? So they're happy to charge premium prices and take orders that they won't deliver for the next four or five years, as long as it keeps the shareholder happy, as long as the board keeps the executives in place. I don't want to sound too cynical. I mean, that's a hard job that i don't have to do but it's not just so easy as to say look at all of these tariffs and it's and it's you know driving demand for manufacturing the u.s so hey you know giant global multinational companies why don't you build new turbine or generator or substation factories here in the united states well we're not gonna because that's a multi-billion dollar capital investment and the shareholders won't tolerate that right now there's more to it about tariffs yeah.
|
Ivan:
[41:13]
| And think about this when you're talking about that multi-billion dollar investment right Because.
|
Todd:
[41:17]
| That takes years.
|
Ivan:
[41:19]
| Number one, for it to pay off. And the reality is that one of the things that if I'm any of these manufacturers, okay, and despite whatever the U.S. Is doing on energy policy, the rest of the world is moving and pushing towards renewables, okay, very aggressively. And so, therefore, you're talking about, number one, like you said, this president is changing in three and a half years, okay, all right, most probably, okay? And the rest of the world is moving towards these other sources of energy why am i going to do a massive capital investment in this when when it comes online maybe because of where the market's going i'm gonna wind up with this white elephant manufacturer factory facility that i've got nobody to sell shit to well.
|
Sam:
[42:08]
| And i'll add there's no like, If you are truly going to have an industrial policy that tried to encourage this, you don't just put on the tariffs. You also have an industrial policy that actually supports it.
|
Ivan:
[42:24]
| Which is what Biden was doing.
|
Sam:
[42:26]
| Which is what Biden was doing. But if you really and truly wanted this, you would have to add massive amounts of investment to encourage industry to do this. You would give them grants outright. You would give low-interest loans. You would give all sorts of other benefits and things that would make it worth their while. But this administration has zero interest in that side of the equation at all, because they fundamentally don't believe in doing that. And so you have the one thing, but not the other, which makes it completely ineffective.
|
Ivan:
[43:02]
| Yeah, I agree.
|
Todd:
[43:05]
| There's some political desire for nuclear power as well. And once again, not a subject matter expert, but I try to keep up with the industry. What I've learned about nuclear power over the years, especially ever since Fukushima, I'm remembering the name of that plant correctly, right? Yeah, you got it right. Commercial banks are very, very hesitant to finance nuclear power construction. It's virtually impossible to build new nuclear without some kind of government guarantee whether it's a loan guarantee whether it's a direct loan the banks don't want to take the risk insurance companies don't want to take the risk.
|
Ivan:
[43:51]
| Yeah so listen but but you talk about that listen just the yeah commercial banks of course they don't want to learn about this look the last nuclear the big nuclear react georgia power yeah that hired westinghouse to build this massive nuclear reactor the this new one that came online in georgia that took that it's not only did it take forever to build not only did it go you know the cost overruns were insane okay but it literally drove the manufacturer bankrupt of making the nuclear reactor okay that's how that that is the last big nuclear project in the united states and it literally drove almost everybody that built it bankrupt i'll.
|
Todd:
[44:29]
| Add a little more to that the the schedule got so far behind georgia power fired the construction company that was running it and.
|
Ivan:
[44:36]
| Replaced them it.
|
Todd:
[44:38]
| Wound up finishing years behind schedule and this top of my head order of roughly double what the initial budget was supposed to be. Maybe you're looking at it right now.
|
Ivan:
[44:50]
| No, yeah, I looked it up. $14 billion was, you know, the owner pledged that the units would begin producing power in 2016 at $14 billion. Okay. It wound up taking to 2024 last year, and it cost $35 billion.
|
Todd:
[45:06]
| Yeah, so a little more than double. There was another plant, same Westinghouse Reactive Design, started around the same time in South Carolina that was called VC Summer. VC Summer is a half-complete nuclear power station that will probably never be finished, and it ran that utility out of business. They went bankrupt and were acquired by Dominion Power out of Virginia. So now, you know, nuclear is financially risky, and so banks won't touch it, and I agree. I'm not universally opposed. Nuclear power. There's a lot of upside, right? Zero emissions, it's always on. That's a terrific baseload generation technology. People are justifiably afraid of it because, The accident rate's really low, but when there's an accident, they're terrified. Yes.
|
Ivan:
[45:59]
| It's bad.
|
Sam:
[45:59]
| Right.
|
Todd:
[46:00]
| And so I understand that completely. I'm certainly not trying to become a nuclear power advocate as well, but one of the risks is banks don't want the principals to go bankrupt and take that risk of not being paid back, $34 billion that they loaned out to build a plant. So they just choose not to do it. If the government is not going to back that with loan guarantees or things that seem to be more popular with Democratic than Republican administrations. Trump's never going to get the nuclear power that he claims to want unless they're going to take on some policy positions that are traditionally more Democrat than Republican. Anyway.
|
Ivan:
[46:35]
| The problem with all of these is what happened like in the first administration that we're living through this again. Trump announced infrastructure week every week for four years. Never did they pass an infrastructure bill and the problem is that everything is a shiny object which to talk about to get clicks you know somewhere and that's the only things that they're interested in actual hard work that goes behind the scenes to create a program build it pass it fund it you know you know get the industry on board to do all of that whatever who really wants that that's all boring shit. Okay.
|
Todd:
[47:10]
| Yeah. Yeah. I, I, I, I, I wonder how interested anyone in this administration really is in what you said, the hard work of actually executing policy. Even if I fundamentally disagree with policies that they want, like they don't seem to be able to think beyond we're going to fire a bunch of people arbitrarily. We're going to, we're going to make a bunch of inflammatory statements. We're going to test the limits in the courts of just, bypassing due process entirely. And now I know we're getting way, way, way beyond tariffs.
|
Sam:
[47:45]
| That's okay. That's okay.
|
Todd:
[47:46]
| But even, even in tariffs, that seems to be, they haven't thought this out beyond, China, your tariffs are 145% now. Okay.
|
Ivan:
[47:54]
| Now it's 175.
|
Todd:
[47:55]
| Now what? You know, so I talked about the Inflation Reduction Act earlier. One of the big frustrations in the industry was, okay, you passed this bill that gives very general guidelines and then it all, it has to go to committees and organizations and departments, you know, the people who do the day-to-day work of executing government policy and providing government services, they had to write all the rules, all the details of how it's going to be executed. This shit takes time, right? It took over a year from when IRA was passed until we actually understood how it was going to be implemented and what our business choices really were, right? And it was then that, for example, a previous company and many of their competitors and many other manufacturers in the industry decided, okay, we're going to make the business decision to build a factory here because it's economically viable. And is it going to make a dent in the global supply chain for these pieces of machinery and these electrical components? Probably not. But it does provide supply chain security in my industry and a few others where.
|
Todd:
[49:00]
| If, let's say, another country decided to start a trade war and escalate tariffs, now we're protected now we're becoming more self-sufficient to provide components and other machinery to build solar power generation which has become the least expensive way to add new electricity generation it has an Achilles heel it doesn't work after dark right it has an Achilles heel but then batteries come in and so there was also incentives there's also incentives to increase and make the U.S.
|
Todd:
[49:30]
| More supply chain self-sufficient for batteries as well.
|
Todd:
[49:36]
| And for some of the other machinery that goes into electric power generation he also did with the chips act to bring more semiconductor manufacturing back to the u.s i admit i know far less about that than i do about the electric power generation side but then infrastructure week for all of the talk of infrastructure week biden actually passed the largest i might be mixing up the infrastructure bill with the inflation reduction act but it was perhaps the largest infrastructure bill in the history of the country and.
|
Todd:
[50:04]
| Hopefully, and maybe this wishful thinking, well, so maybe I don't know the details and I'm filling in my own wishful thinking, but hopefully learning from the mistakes of the American Recovery Act under Obama back in what, 2009 or so, they put a lot of money out on the street and there were not enough shovel ready projects and for better or for worse. And I was sort of in more of that industry at the time. Right before I got into power generation, I was more involved in civil construction. And what we saw was a lot of projects immediately being released to do things like adding handicap access at, at urban crosswalks and, you know, pedestrian bridges and things like that. But the really big capital intensive, labor intensive, manufacturing intensive stuff that needed to be done, like major bridge and highway reconstruction, those designs weren't ready to go. And maybe the industry, maybe the government learned its lesson over the last 15 years that by the time Biden passed the infrastructure bill, there were major multi-hundred million dollar infrastructure projects ready to go. Like within a year, it was far more effective than the Obama plan was 14, 15 years prior, if I'm doing that correctly.
|
Sam:
[51:16]
| Even then, like you mentioned, it was a lot better than the last time. Even then there's a significant lag. And I think that's one of the things that is, you know, a problem in general of American politics is like connecting cause to effect for the general population. Because there's so much time lag between policy enacted and regular human beings sees the effect of it, that it's really, really difficult for anybody to... Even the people who are paying close attention, but certainly the sort of low information folks, just don't make that connection at all.
|
Ivan:
[51:58]
| Look at the Affordable Care Act. I mean, it was one of the things that, you know, it took really for everything on the Affordable Care Act to really be implemented. It took years. Okay. It took so long that people even later went and was like, well, I'm getting my health care through KY Connect or something, whatever. Hey, that's Obama.
|
Todd:
[52:19]
| What yes what do you mean there i i i completely agree and so this is i think trump's real gift is he has this charismatic nature that the people who want to hear the things that he says he resonates with them so if he says as he has these tariffs have caused immediate effect and there are you know many many manufacturers coming to me saying sir thank you we're building new factories in the u.s sir it's this is the way he talks about this shit it's not true but it is what people want to hear they want to believe it and so they accept it and biden for whatever policy decisions that he made that i like is the opposite of trump's personality right he's low-key he's boring and he doesn't tweet about every stupid fucking thing every minute of every day for four years straight right it's right it's nobody does and in a in one of the in.
|
Sam:
[53:22]
| One of the interviews after you know harris lost biden did say something like you know, maybe I should have signed the relief checks myself like he did. You know, because there were so many people out there who literally thought that Donald Trump personally was sending them checks.
|
Todd:
[53:42]
| So I hate what politics has become because of him, but I think what we're talking about, the fact that the real effective hard work of executing policy, whether we think it's good or not, that real hard work of executing and of driving the results that you promised when you announced it, 18 months earlier that stuff needs to get advertised the way that trump advertises all of his petty grievances.
|
Sam:
[54:06]
| Well and you mentioned some of the smaller projects but there's also front load with that stuff like if there is stuff that you can do fast and easy like what one of the criticisms of the ira like that i forget which journalist put out was like the low number of electric car charging stations that had been added like they promised however many and there There was like a small number that were actually implemented. Well, you know, that's the kind of thing. Figure out how to do the easy things faster, you know, and I don't know.
|
Todd:
[54:37]
| That's a great point. That is a great point. And I was sort of, I was dismissing the handicap ramps at Urban Crosswalks earlier, but it is something, you know, you could get cameras out there and show people, like real people working, you know, getting paid to do labor, pouring concrete that's, you know, driving supply chain and so forth.
|
Sam:
[55:01]
| And the other thing is marketing. And back, you mentioned the things that the Obama era version of this got wrong, but one thing they did do is they put signs up next to every project identifying...
|
Ivan:
[55:13]
| Listen, can I just say something? Look, I was born and raised in Puerto Rico. Okay, all right. And so when I was born, you know, one of the things that I liked when I first came here to live in college, because I didn't live in the U.S. Before I went to CMU, okay, was the fact that in Puerto Rico it drove me crazy that every fucking politician, when they did something, had their fucking picture. Just put their name with their fucking picture beside it, and it was just.
|
Ivan:
[55:44]
| I found it just terribly disgusting, because it was very much like this fucking podcast of bullshit, like the Nazis do, And like authoritarians do all the time on, you know, with their pictures on the side of every building and this shit. And I actually totally love that you would come to a project in the U.S. And you would see, hey, we're doing this new highway. It didn't say who the fucking politicians or whoever the hell it was that did it. It just said, hey, we're working for you. And the problem is, and I'm telling you, the one thing that I hate is.
|
Ivan:
[56:17]
| That has infected this fucking country right now is that so much of the shit that we're living with Trump is shit that you're used to seeing that drove people to emigrate to the U.S. From places like Brazil, Argentina, Venezuela, and all these places where you had Hugo Chavez on fucking TV all day talking nonstop gaslighting everybody about the same shit. Every my god i still remember when i was in caracas the last 2008 okay i can't like yeah you know he was google chavez was on every you would flip the tv and he was on every fucking channel okay it was ridiculous and he was announcing this project where they were building these homes we're giving homes to the poor and showing this thing or whatever and give it with the shovel and presenting these people in front of everybody how happy are you with your new home, blah, blah, blah, which, by the way, most of the project was a sham. They were stealing money to people that are his friends. Everybody's just stealing it. Listen, the whole thing about it is this entire crony thing where all his friends basically, you know, just stole all the money on all these fucking projects. But he's on fucking TV blasting this shit. And this is the kind of shit that I hate, that Trump does not stop to drive he crazy. And the thing is, that what you're saying is, and I get what you're saying, and I fucking agree that Democrats need to do this.
|
Todd:
[57:41]
| But it yes so sam i don't want to lose my train of thought i don't want us to drift any more into cronyism than we already have in the last four months yeah however the like the genie's out of the bottle i'm not sure what the right metaphor is here but like we can't go back so there's there's another there's another former rct dj that i have stayed in in close touch with over the last year i'm not going to name because i don't know whether he would want me to name him here, but I've stayed in touch with this guy and you guys I'm sure would remember him as well. I.
|
Todd:
[58:15]
| I share his opinion, although he kind of had to, he didn't take a lot to convince me, but he has convinced me. Democrats are playing a game that ended 10 years ago, right? It's a new game now. The rules are different, and it has unfortunately become more vulgar. They have to be willing to behave the same way. I'm not advocating for cronyism at all, but you've got to be more of a... Yes, you've got to be more of a charismatic personality. And so, you know, the stuff that AOC and Bernie Sanders are doing around the country right now, I'm not sure either of them are the best spokesperson for the way the Democratic Party needs to behave and needs to be led. But I think that's a better model than as, as, as much as I really enjoyed that joy and positivity of the Harris campaign, it was, it was the wrong time for that, right? We've, we've moved beyond that.
|
Sam:
[59:19]
| Well, I, I, I'm just going to repeat something I've said on this show that I know you haven't heard before, but on my, I actually think the joy and positivity was working. I have this electiongraphs.com website where i track the polls and all this kind of stuff okay and in the first part of the harris campaign every week they were doing better than the week before until mid-september and roughly in mid-september they changed tone and they moved away from the joy and positivity and moved towards trump is dangerous and that's when they started losing ground again but.
|
Ivan:
[59:56]
| It wasn't just the joy on positivity it was the fact that they were mocking.
|
Sam:
[1:00:00]
| Yes. Mocking him rather than taking him seriously.
|
Todd:
[1:00:03]
| Isn't that interesting? So maybe you're onto something that our old Richard friend is onto as well. There's a better way to message this without sacrificing your dignity.
|
Sam:
[1:00:18]
| Yes, and I think one of the problems, and we're starting to move onto other things. Maybe we should take a break.
|
Todd:
[1:00:24]
| Hey, first, guys. How about those?
|
Ivan:
[1:00:26]
| How about those tariffs, Todd?
|
Sam:
[1:00:30]
| But yeah, one of the things there is the existing democratic leadership. I think you're absolutely right. Stuck in the past, trying to emphasize normalcy, try to get back to the way things were. And fundamentally, you have to come at this.
|
Ivan:
[1:00:46]
| That was what Biden wanted to do. That was what Biden wanted to do. And I know. And listen, can I be honest? I was, okay. I, listen, call me naive, but I really wanted that too. I i mean i did okay and so i wasn't i wasn't opposed to it because honestly i didn't want that i wanted like i wish like i could just put a freaking trump on top of a rock and shot him to the moon or actually i would prefer jail okay but we didn't do either of those yeah.
|
Todd:
[1:01:20]
| So i i i totally i think we're all kind of reaching the same conclusion or already have reached the same conclusion we i think we all long for quietly dignified efficient government action and you can't do that if you've lost power in all three branches right.
|
Ivan:
[1:01:40]
| Yeah they gotta.
|
Todd:
[1:01:41]
| Win a fucking election and.
|
Ivan:
[1:01:43]
| Yeah and.
|
Todd:
[1:01:44]
| And start crowing about the positive things that we're doing in this new 21st century way or they're never going to take power back and and.
|
Ivan:
[1:01:52]
| I don't even like i don't.
|
Todd:
[1:01:53]
| Even like the way i say that they're never going to earn power back the way the country is supposed to operate right as a representative republic they're never going to earn that right from the voters to do it again if they can't adapt.
|
Ivan:
[1:02:04]
| To this 21st century message i mean let me tell you something the true story historically i know that over the years i probably have not gotten as far ahead in my career as i could have because i was of that biden school fight just due to hard work whatever and not being a big self-promoter okay i i i i i have not been that way you know historically okay but look i i have to say that this this month something happened and i i got remembered you know what i i have to stop doing that at this point but i am like i don't know look i'm fine in my career it's not like i'm i'm gonna be ceo of a company right now at this point or whatever that shot already went that that's okay at this point okay i already i already have my shot i got And I got torpedoed. So that's himself. But what did happen is that there was something that happened with a customer where I, behind the scenes, fixed a major problem.
|
Ivan:
[1:03:00]
| But the people that were There were a whole bunch of other people That were in front of the customer They made it at first kind of seem like they did it And they didn't do shit The guy that had solved it was me And it's a major customer of mine And I said, fuck, I can't do this I have to send a message I sent the message to the CIO Dude, I, by the way, just so you know That problem was fixed Because I went and escalated this mess and he got it fixed. And it was me, not anybody else. So don't buy the bullshit that anybody else solved the problem. I'm the fucking guy that went to the mat and fixed it. And I realized that in my life, I never had done that. And it's the same problem that you're saying with the Democrats. We can't go solving everybody's problems in the background, making sure you have the health care, making sure you have food, trying to help behind the scenes like you can afford a mortgage, trying to help behind the scenes so you can get afforded student education, all of this shit without being up front and saying, hey, you know what? Sign the, like Biden said, he was right. He should have signed the fucking checks.
|
Todd:
[1:04:09]
| Yeah.
|
Ivan:
[1:04:09]
| All of them.
|
Sam:
[1:04:10]
| Okay, wait. I'm just going to take a quick break. It's only going to be a few seconds. Helps us divide things up. And then if you can stick with us a little bit longer, Todd, we can pick up this conversation on the other side and officially say we're not talking about tariffs anymore. We're talking about everything else.
|
Todd:
[1:04:29]
| We're not.
|
Sam:
[1:04:31]
| Okay. We'll be back right after this.
|
Break:
[1:04:36]
| You're listening to this podcast do you like it no do you want to support the show no well after you have subscribed to the show followed us on facebook and told all your friends they should be listening to what else can you do i won't subscribe you can help fund our patreon at patreon.com slash curmudgeonscorner. Patreon is a way you can throw us a few bucks a month to help out with the expenses of the show. You know, web hosting, equipment, a little bit of advertising to promote the show, and maybe every once in a while, some much needed sedatives for Yvonne.
|
Break:
[1:05:20]
| At different contribution levels, you can get a mention on the show, our curmudgeonscorner postcard, or even a curmudgeonscorner mug. Fun stuff. Not fun. In any case, the contributions help tell us that you enjoy and appreciate the show. I really, really hate Curmudgeon's Corner. Are we worth a buck a month? No! Five bucks a month? No! Or if you are nuts about us, maybe even more. One hundred billion! Billion dollars! Even though you don't have anywhere near a billion dollars. If we're worth anything to you at all, send it our way at patreon.com slash curmudgeonscorner. Alex hates, really, really hates, curmudgeonscorner! That's really mean, isn't it? But I hate curmudgeonscorner, but I really do!
|
Ivan:
[1:06:16]
| Okay you know it's been a while since we've got like reviews online for whatever reason it used to be for a while that i i don't even check anymore i haven't checked in a while but you know aside from from from alex's like great review of a show okay we used to for some reason you know we had a whole bunch of five stars but but then we had a whole bunch of people that just would write you know shit how you know we're two idiots you know get an editor i don't know we we really got We got a lot of like, I like the negative feedback and I got to admit, it was funny to read the negative feedback. I like reading that. Yeah.
|
Sam:
[1:06:54]
| So yeah, that's, that's bots eight years old now.
|
Todd:
[1:06:58]
| Wow.
|
Ivan:
[1:06:58]
| Yeah.
|
Sam:
[1:06:58]
| We've had that. That was my son when he was much younger than he is today.
|
Todd:
[1:07:03]
| He's got a future.
|
Sam:
[1:07:04]
| Yeah, there you go.
|
Todd:
[1:07:06]
| Yeah.
|
Sam:
[1:07:07]
| So we were, you know, I know I killed the momentum by doing the break, but we were talking about sort of how Democrats react to all of this stuff. Let me bring up one additional sort of part of that, that I think is a problem that is, how do you communicate with it, right? Like a lot of what, and I think this afflicted the Democrats during the first Trump administration. I think it's potentially happening again now, which is a lot of the conversation is about the worst case scenario. Like, for instance, you know, going back to tariffs for a second, you know, everybody's been talking about, oh, well, if the 150 plus percent tariffs stick, here's all the bad things that would happen. And then Trump backs off to 30 percent.
|
Sam:
[1:07:58]
| And, you know, there's some effect, but it's not all those worst case things. Similarly, in the first Trump administration, there was, you know, I mean, Trump goes on about how Russia, Russia, Russia was a hoax. Well, it wasn't. There was a whole bunch of real stuff that did happen. But the worst case scenario that was sometimes promoted by certain people turned out not to be the case. It was less than that, but it was still bad. And, you know, just in general on a lot of these things, when, you know, the reaction is, oh, my God, he's doing X, Y, Z. It's going to be awful in these ways. And the worst case scenario is painted. And then what you end up with is even if it's 50 percent of the worst case scenario, people end up with the impression of, you know, the boy who called wolf. Because what you said didn't happen.
|
Todd:
[1:08:53]
| You're hitting another thing, Sam. I wonder how much of this is Trump doing being, you know, unfocused and flighty and, you know, unable to maintain a train of thought. I have to be careful on how I criticize people on that. I shouldn't, shouldn't throw stones in that particular glass house, but how much of it is deliberate because he knows he's going to get this reaction. He's, he's going to make Democrats look like they're crying wolf maybe it's it's impossible to say right but it's probably a little bit of both i think that he.
|
Sam:
[1:09:32]
| I think he's got a real instinct for this stuff i think there's a combination of he is actually a bit dim and doesn't understand a lot of stuff and doesn't want to understand that stuff but he's got an innate instinct for how to manipulate people's emotions that tie directly into this. That's his, that's his whole thing. That's his whole personality. That's his entire career is how do you influence people by this sort of, I mean, we've used the word gaslighting, but it's appropriate here, you know, but by, you know, getting them to believe and think and do things and get excited about this or get worked up about that. And, you know, in some cases to get them to follow you, in some cases to get them to fall on their face because they do something that looks stupid when you change what you're doing later. People have called this, what is it, the OODA loop or something? It's some loop.
|
Sam:
[1:10:35]
| Yeah, it's okay. I'm going to have to look it up. Yeah, I will look it up, but it's basically a command and control loop that says, if you change what's going on fast enough to keep your enemy, there we go, OODA loop. It's a decision, I'm looking at the Wikipedia page, OODA loop, decision-making model developed by U.S. Air Force Colonel John Boyd. He applied the concept to combat operations process at the operational level during military campaigns. It's basically the decision cycle. It's basically saying that there is a loop where you get new information, you react to the new information, then you change what you're doing and it cycles, right? And the notion is if you can disrupt that loop, by changing the apparent facts on the ground faster than people can react to them, then you can end up controlling the situation.
|
Sam:
[1:11:40]
| And I think whether it's an intentional, like Trump knows what he's doing, or whether it's just instinctual, he does this all the time. And I think this also ties into like Bannon's flood the zone with shit comments are exactly tied into this as well. You basically keep throwing out the chaff and people keep reacting to it. And in the meantime, you're pushing certain things forward and people are just not reacting to them properly because they're reacting to all this other stuff and not not reacting fast enough. I mean, and we talked about Democratic messaging. You know, one of the things that is the old guard is just too, too slow. Like Trump will do something like they're threatening Medicaid or Medicare or something. And so the Democrats will schedule like, OK, next week's going to be Medicare week and we're going to talk a lot about Medicare. We're going to have some news conferences. whereas like you know the reaction time at this point has to be measured in minutes and maybe hours but even hours is often too slow you have to be getting back on these comments like the instant they happen not we're going to spend a week deliberating and then schedule an event you know and and that's i think part of what happens with.
|
Todd:
[1:13:00]
| Are there examples in you know global history where you've had a strongman type like Trump come to power and succeed with this sort of communication style. What are the effective and successful countermeasures to this OODA loop?
|
Ivan:
[1:13:20]
| Effective countermeasures. I was going to say, are there examples? Yes. I don't know how effective the countermeasures have been, but look, I cited Hugo Chavez. Let me tell you something. He reminds me so much of how Hugo Chavez ran Venezuela. And it is almost textbook, okay, in many cases, in terms of the messaging, in terms of enabling his cronies instead of sort of attacking his opposition. The one thing that he was able because he was able to control so much of the country is that he was able to just completely crush the opposition okay i mean literally just just annihilated out of existence that it and i but i think that the institutions in venezuela and the way that the country was structured also made that made that a lot easier to do okay in a certain way but the reality is that one of the things that is an outcome of this okay is that in terms of effectively running a country it's it's terrible it's it it it really doesn't it doesn't it it it serves to keep someone in power that it does do but does it help running the country better in any way the examples i'll show no no.
|
Todd:
[1:14:35]
| But all right we just discussed earlier how the crying wolf and And, you know, constantly advertising worst case potential scenarios are not necessarily productive. However, if Trump really is trying to achieve the sort of country like Venezuela under Chavez, for example, where it becomes more difficult for opposition parties to win a majority, to earn back control.
|
Sam:
[1:15:07]
| At some point, you have to panic. At some point, you have to, like, raise the alarm. Yeah. And the question is what the balance is. And like what I was saying about sort of the trajectory of the Harris campaign over time is like I would hope actually like calling out like, oh, my God, look what he's intending to do is an effective strategy. But it appears it is not. I mean, fundamentally, people tuned out everything of like, oh, he's a danger to democracy. Oh, he's corrupt. Oh, he's whatever.
|
Ivan:
[1:15:39]
| Just like when Hillary did it.
|
Sam:
[1:15:41]
| Just when Hillary tried to do it. And, you know, what are the messages that seem to—and part of your problem is we are currently in a situation in this country where, you know, look, 90% of the public is on one side or the other and will always vote that way no matter what, okay? And we are polarized in that way. That middle 10% that's potentially persuadable, is also the same group of people who fundamentally aren't paying attention and don't understand the details and don't want to know the details and and and so like how do you reach those people like if the if if that if that unengaged 10 like if one side or the other had 70 support then they wouldn't matter but.
|
Todd:
[1:16:32]
| We're in this situation so with this group.
|
Sam:
[1:16:34]
| Of people is the deciding group.
|
Todd:
[1:16:36]
| Sam i i i've gathered and i and i do kind of remember you posting about this social media maybe not recently or else um maybe the algorithm is just not showing you to me the way it did years ago you seemed you seem to be a lot more wonky about polling and and that sort of data so maybe you can answer something that i have no idea okay was trump was trump in 2016 able to reach that same kind of voter who are not paying a lot of attention, maybe not participating.
|
Sam:
[1:17:07]
| But his magic in both, well, in all three of elections, of his elections, it wasn't quite enough in 2020, obviously. But one of the key elements he had was he got voters to come out and vote who had never voted before.
|
Todd:
[1:17:24]
| Yeah.
|
Sam:
[1:17:25]
| And he reached a group of people who had felt alienated and unserved by the existing political process and and basically convinced them that, like, the system, you know, Democrats, Republicans, whoever, because it worked in the Republican primaries, too. The system is not working for you. I will come in, I will rip everything up and I will work for you. And he was able to bring in all of these people who just had not been engaged before and engage them in a way that, you know, nobody else had succeeded in doing. Or honestly, nobody had really tried.
|
Todd:
[1:18:07]
| Yeah. it's it's it's i guess disappointing kind of sad from my point of view i grew up near pittsburgh and kind of a somewhat rural but also very blue collar very dependent on steel industry you know part of the pittsburgh region and when i was a kid in the 70s and 80s most of that side of my family that were doing you know more factory work were clearly Democratic voters. Almost all of my cousins now vote Republican. I'm an outlier. That I'm not a Trump voter.
|
Ivan:
[1:18:46]
| Let alone an enthusiastic Trump supporter. I'm sorry, you got conditioned, you know, you got brainwashed at this elite educational institution, you know, what the hell, you know, that's why they're battling these now.
|
Todd:
[1:18:59]
| So, okay, I know you're being facetious, but I have these- But I'm being.
|
Ivan:
[1:19:03]
| But I'm not, because that's their line. They're attacking elite universities right now because they think that because we went to a university where all of a sudden we got exposed to all this. Other information you know which make you realize shit you know.
|
Sam:
[1:19:17]
| Well also on a completely factual basis one of the largest predictors of the the political divide right now is educational love yes.
|
Todd:
[1:19:27]
| Yeah 100 and and and and trump knows it and we'll talk about it in an insulting way that isn't hurt like he'll say i love the uneducated i love the uneducated voters, it's he's insulting the people supporting him and they either don't realize it or just don't care they're too stupid to know well no no they're being insulted listen now you're talking about my family in my old neighborhood i and i don't want to devolve in that way either i i've been trying especially the last six months to stop making this about the voters it's about the politicians that make impossible how to.
|
Sam:
[1:20:09]
| Reach out yeah.
|
Todd:
[1:20:10]
| Yeah well it's.
|
Sam:
[1:20:12]
| It's impossible it's impossible promises but also and this this is a recurring theme i've had too so apologies to our long time listeners but it's also the american system is intentionally set up with well until donald trump is blowing them all up with checks and balances that make it so that if you elect somebody, there are all kinds of impediments to them actually doing stuff, even if they want to. And people... The vast majority of people are not government wonks who paid careful attention during civics class in middle school and, you know, know how everything works. One of the polls that I remember from before this last election, and before Harris even, it was earlier than that, it was about Roe versus Wade and the overturning of Roe versus Wade. And they asked people who was to blame for this. And even among Democrats.
|
Ivan:
[1:21:21]
| Something like— Biden was his fault.
|
Sam:
[1:21:24]
| Well, 15 to 20 percent of Democrats and a larger percentage of the public at large said that the overturning of Roe versus Wade was Biden's fault because it happened while Biden was president. And that's as far as the thought process goes.
|
Todd:
[1:21:40]
| Yeah.
|
Sam:
[1:21:40]
| You know, and it's like, you know, did it happen while you were president? It's your fault. And by the way, that only works for blame. It does not work for credit.
|
Todd:
[1:21:51]
| Sure. It's an interesting point. First of all, maybe too few people understand the intended independence of the judicial branch. For better or for worse, we have lifetime appointments on the Supreme Court and these kinds of things can happen. They can make a decision that affects legal precedent and policy and legal enforcement, despite who might be in the White House or majority in Congress at the time. And then, I don't know, I'm losing my thread here again.
|
Sam:
[1:22:23]
| I mean, the point I was...
|
Todd:
[1:22:25]
| Oh, I know what else I was going to say, Sam. What we're finding now is until, especially, Trump's second time around, we've mostly operated in a country where presidents ultimately abided whatever the courts tell them. We're starting to find out what happens if the courts tell the president you have to stop doing A, B, or C, and he chooses not to. And then Congress also chooses to not execute their powers to check and balance, right? This is the scary thing that, and back to the balance we were talking about earlier, it's like you don't want to cry wolf at every little thing, But the slower moving, larger threat is what if the president just decides I'm going to throw people out of the country without due process and the courts can't physically stop me. So I'm going to keep doing it.
|
Sam:
[1:23:24]
| Well, and the key to this is that, well, first of all, like all of this was telegraphed, you know, either Trump or his supporters have said everything that they are actually doing today. But the question is, when the Democrats did cry wolf about it and say, he's going to do this, he's going to do that, look, he's saying he's going to do these things, people didn't care. Or at least that core group of swing voters didn't care. They were like, eggs cost too much. And so I'm voting against Biden.
|
Ivan:
[1:24:00]
| And, and, and, and, and don't forget, and don't forget, our American sports are completely overrun by transsexual people, you know, wanting to invade, you know, the different sports in our country. And by the way, we laugh about it, but here's the reality. That shit resonated so profoundly with so many people. That basically drove them to say, do you see, Democrats are trying to jam down my throat and, you know, all these transsexual people that I hate. And, oh, by the way, they're going to go and, like, groom my kids at school into being gay and transgender.
|
Sam:
[1:24:50]
| The thing is, too, you have to be careful not to move too far based on this. Like, obviously, there are problems that the Democrats have to fix before the next election. And they're sort of not doing it so far. But at the same time.
|
Ivan:
[1:25:07]
| Well, it's only been three months, Sam. I know it feels like it's been six years, but by the way, it's only May!
|
Sam:
[1:25:14]
| Yeah, four months. But yes. Well, and more since the election. But the thing is, and now I'm the one losing my train of thought, but you have to... Not like it was close. Yeah. You know, our system of government exaggerates the difference because look, it's winner take all. You lost the house, you lost the Senate, you lost the presidency, you lost the Supreme court years ago. So you are completely and totally out of power. And that is a huge ramification, but you only needed to flip a few votes and it would have gone the other way. So it's not it's not like we're in a 70 30 country. We're in a 50 50 country and everything is right on the edge. And so, you know.
|
Ivan:
[1:26:06]
| You don't necessarily like the difference is only like three house seats. Yeah, it's like three Senate seats. So let me and Todd.
|
Sam:
[1:26:14]
| You had mentioned earlier sort of how like AOC and Bernie are getting out there and having attention without compromising their values. And I think that's one thing that's actually key because you see a lot of Democrats and you see this in some of leadership saying, OK, the way we react to this is we're not going to talk about Donald Trump's corruption. We're not going to talk about the risk to democracy. We're not going to talk about trans rights and civil rights and more broadly.
|
Sam:
[1:26:46]
| You know, OK, the economy is what mattered. Then the only thing we'll talk about is the economy. And I don't think that's the right way to do it either. You don't, it fundamentally like one of the things that, well, all voters, but especially this group in the middle can see through for miles away is people being phony and compromising and all of this kind of stuff. The fact that, you know, okay, maybe you lost some voters on the trans issue, but the right answer to that is not avoid the trans issue. It's defend your position on the trans issue and convince people and bring them over to your side. It's like lay down the line on what your values are and stand by them and be honest about them and push them and make people understand why you're right and they're wrong. When you just say like, oh, this position is polling a little bit weaker than that one. So we're going to sort of hide our position on that one or worse, back off from our position on it. People smell that from thousands of miles away and it seems phony and it seems dishonest and oh you're just another politician whereas the people who like stick to their guns like you know, AOC and Bernie were getting lots of reactions in red parts of the country, not because they were moderating their— And Buttigieg.
|
Ivan:
[1:28:16]
| By the way.
|
Sam:
[1:28:17]
| And Buttigieg, too. He's doing great. But not because they were moderating their positions or saying, oh, okay, we can work with the Republicans on this one and, you know, be—we're not going to worry about this part as much.
|
Ivan:
[1:28:30]
| Basically, the Schumer-Fetterman approach.
|
Sam:
[1:28:33]
| Yeah.
|
Todd:
[1:28:33]
| So I'm more and more intrigued every year by AOC. I think that she has a truly authentic story, right? She doesn't come from wealth. She had a very blue collar life before she got into politics. She happens to be very talented at resonating the right message with these kind of voters. I am also very gun shy now because we've had two other women run.
|
Sam:
[1:29:07]
| Yeah.
|
Todd:
[1:29:08]
| And I don't want to draw the wrong conclusions, but man, there's that sense of kind of sexism both times.
|
Sam:
[1:29:16]
| Sexism and racism.
|
Todd:
[1:29:17]
| Oh my God, the sexism and racism. And I want to say that in, in my adult lifetime and in the whole, since I've been voting, I, I'm not sure there have been two better qualified candidates for president than Clinton and Harris, right? You look, they've both been in the Senate. Uh, Hillary Clinton was secretary of state. Um, they, uh, Harris was a DA has this long legal history and law enforcement prior to politics. Trump sells branding to hang his name on buildings and little else has been successful, but man, he, he makes things. I don't want to lose the threat. The 10%, right, that we were talking about earlier, I want to come back to the same, because I had a follow-up question that I was going to try to get to. And now I understand the vibe of this podcast. And I'm like, okay, well, just give up on follow-ups, right? Let's just...
|
Ivan:
[1:30:13]
| Yeah, yeah, fuck the follow-ups. Follow, follow, what follow?
|
Todd:
[1:30:17]
| Yeah, I write the letter wherever it takes me. But there's still that set of voters who either don't participate or the summaries of polling that I read that probably you have more detail is there's people that just decided I'm not motivated enough. I don't want to vote for Trump, but Harris is just not exciting me. I'm going to stay home or I'm not going to mark anyone on my ballot. You know, I'll vote who I want in the others and I'm just not going to check anybody for president or whatever. Like, aren't there still reachable people there?
|
Sam:
[1:30:46]
| I think there are. And that's, it's the thing that it's really, really hard though, which is why people have always had trouble with that. Because the people who don't vote are very stuck in not voting. And so political scientists have come up years and years and years of research saying that you're more likely to be able to swing that medium voter who does vote, but who makes up their mind in the last 24 hours and doesn't really pay attention in between than you are to get the person who's never voted before. However...
|
Sam:
[1:31:31]
| Even this last election shows that going after those people does matter. And in this case, and actually Trump, all three elections has shown that. He has managed to bring out non-voters, and that has made a significant difference to him. There's just been recent analysis just in the last few weeks because they've started to get access to what's called voter files, which is like who actually voted last time. So not a poll, but who actually voted. It doesn't say who they voted for, but you can see who voted and who didn't and what the demographics were and all this kind of stuff. And then you can combine that with polling data and do some analysis. And academics have all kinds of techniques to do this that, you know, I'm not one of them, so I don't know those details.
|
Sam:
[1:32:21]
| But they have determined that, you know, people have been trying to put like, what was the one cause of Harris's loss? And I think to a large degree, that's futile, because it was close enough that any one of dozens of things could have gone differently, and it could have gone the other way. Because even though it was like, you know, she lost all seven swing states, yes, but she lost all seven swing states by this much, a tiny little amount, right? But no, the recent research that I saw a couple weeks ago was that, you know, people talked about sort of Biden voters that stayed home. Would that have made the difference? And the answer is, it would have helped, but it wasn't quite enough. But the thing that was clear was first-time voters. And that includes both young people who are eligible to vote for the first time and also people who haven't been voters who are older but voted for the first time. And those tilted towards trump i i want to be careful how i say this trump didn't necessarily win those groups like trump did not win the under 20 voters but he did better with under 20 voters than republicans typically do by a decent amount and and specifically that difference was all with men in that age group.
|
Sam:
[1:33:45]
| Trump has also significantly increased the gender divide in voting, blown it open much wider than it has been before. But it was those new voters, both the young ones and the ones that were brought in, where even if Trump didn't win all of those groups, all of the subgroups of new voters, in general for new voters, he did better than Republicans usually do. And that was enough to make the difference in the election.
|
Todd:
[1:34:13]
| I, um, I, I, I, you didn't ask me anything. I've just been thinking of some other things about, uh, on this topic. Cause it's been on my mind a lot that I say I, I, in my own, whatever, whatever tiny little audience that I have on social media or talking to friends or.
|
Sam:
[1:34:31]
| And this audience is tiny too, by the way.
|
Todd:
[1:34:34]
| So, but even like, you know, whenever, whenever I'm feeling comfortable enough, even to discuss politics with colleagues, which I rarely do. I really do try to keep personal life, professional life separate.
|
Sam:
[1:34:45]
| Separate.
|
Todd:
[1:34:45]
| Yeah. I live out in the eastern suburbs of Pittsburgh these days. And you go a little farther east, a little farther from town, it becomes more rural.
|
Sam:
[1:34:55]
| Yep.
|
Todd:
[1:34:56]
| And, you know, you can just, you could, well, you can tell by looking at the election result maps and you can tell by the political signs that are still out today, six months after the election, this is a very favorable Trump area. yet. It's also lower income, higher rate of poverty. I don't have data. This is just my anecdotal observations, higher prevalence of disability. I think there are people who obviously have trouble getting around, maybe are not working even though they're still working age and yet voted for him. I think there's an opportunity there to demonstrate what the Democrats used to be. What I talked about when I was a kid and the blue collar side of my family almost universally voted Democrat because they were union steel workers or they were union railroaders or iron workers or whatever trades people. And they recognize that the Republicans want to tear down all of the gains we've made in workers' rights and the Democrats want to protect that. And people don't feel that way today. If you can bring that back and let these people know the social security disability benefits that you're depending on, even if you don't realize that's what your disability check is, it's social security, right?
|
Todd:
[1:36:08]
| Obamacare, the slightly less expensive access you may have to medical care now, or perhaps you're also benefiting from Medicaid because of disability or whatnot. Maybe you don't even realize that's what it is. Maybe you don't realize that's what's under attack, but we want to protect this because we recognize that your quality of life gets worse without these kind of unglamorous public services. I think the messaging to win back some of these people who would have voted Democrat if they voted at all 20 years ago if you're going to win them back it has to be about their quality of life and i'm convinced that trump's policies are going to improve people like that i don't.
|
Sam:
[1:36:45]
| Policies are.
|
Ivan:
[1:36:46]
| Actively it's the worst.
|
Sam:
[1:36:48]
| Trump's policies are actively.
|
Ivan:
[1:36:50]
| Making their lives worse.
|
Sam:
[1:36:52]
| Yeah and well the and the thing is and this ties back to people addressing cause and effect too and And, you know, one of the problems, and this ties to calling woof as well, is that some of the worst possibilities of what Trump could have done last time around were stopped. Because of effective congressional resistance to implementing his policies in the first term. But that ended up with people saying, you know, oh, well, it wasn't that bad. But they don't get the message that it wasn't that bad because the Democrats stopped X, Y, and Z. Not just the Democrats.
|
Ivan:
[1:37:30]
| But the people that he had in his first ministry.
|
Sam:
[1:37:34]
| Yeah, yeah. The people who, the Republicans who were the adults in the room that stopped him. But also what we have this time around, and some Democrats are actively encouraging this as what we do. Like, I think James Carville explicitly said, don't do anything. Just wait. Let him do the damage. And because, you know, and don't try to stop it. Like if he wants to shut down the government, shut down the government, let him do his worst, because the only way that those kind of marginal, not paying all that much attention voters will get the message is if you let Donald Trump actually hurt them.
|
Todd:
[1:38:17]
| Yeah, I hate that. And I know it's probably true.
|
Ivan:
[1:38:23]
| Stay here, by the way.
|
Todd:
[1:38:25]
| But so so how how far then do you let it go again?
|
Sam:
[1:38:29]
| Well, and the problem is the further you let it go, the harder it is to come back from it anyway, especially if some of these things are the anti-democratic moves that make it harder to win in the future anyway.
|
Todd:
[1:38:40]
| So I'm imagining, well, I don't know, maybe it won't feel so absurd. What feels absurd right now, I've never been politically active in my life, not to the sense that I would go out to a demonstration and make a sign, but I've done that a couple of times in the last month or two. Because i i i i can't keep like old man shouting a cloud i can't keep ranting to like-minded friends on facebook right it's that's not going to do anything so okay i'll go exercise my first amendment right what if it gets to the point where trump just decides well okay we can identify you with facial recognition out there holding a sign at the anti-trump demonstration so you know maybe i accidentally get deported to guatemala like is it going to come to that And I realize that that's probably carelessly racist of me to say, he's sending people to El Salvador and not Guatemala.
|
Sam:
[1:39:31]
| Or all kinds of other things to harass.
|
Ivan:
[1:39:33]
| By the way, I spent a lot of time the last year and a half in Guatemala. By the way, it's not that pretty.
|
Todd:
[1:39:40]
| Yeah so i thought it was worse i look like does it have to get that bad and then is that too late right so i understand i understand the carvel idea of let your enemy bury themselves or whatever that you know art of war phrase is but at the other hand like if you let them go like in this case my enemy has all of the power and i have not my political opponent let's say has all the power and i have none so i don't know hey guys thanks for letting me hang around yeah at.
|
Sam:
[1:40:12]
| You know it's time for us to wrap up anyway.
|
Todd:
[1:40:15]
| Okay right.
|
Sam:
[1:40:16]
| But uh so if if we're almost at the end stick with us a couple minutes.
|
Todd:
[1:40:21]
| We'll wrap it up right now i was gonna say you guys carry on without me but it's about Yeah.
|
Sam:
[1:40:30]
| So right around this time, we switch from our real topics to, like, saying goodbye, which takes us a few minutes, but we'll do it. So first of all, thanks for joining us. One personal note before we get to the end that I just want to throw in there. I'm not going to do the whole segment on it. Those of you on Necromedians Corner Slack know this, but for those of you who are just listeners, my mom had a major health event this week. And she was, she's doing well now. On Monday night, she had a fall at home and being the stubborn person she is, she didn't call us for help until Tuesday morning, like nine hours later. We took her in to be seen. They did imaging. She, from a fall a month earlier where she had hit her head, but decided that all she needed was a couple of band-aids. She had a bleed in between her skull and her brain that had been over the course of a month, building up more and more and more pressure.
|
Ivan:
[1:41:32]
| That's what you want.
|
Sam:
[1:41:33]
| And so basically once we had her in the ER and they did imaging, they're like, you're going into surgery now, you know, to relieve the pressure and all this kind of stuff. They did emergency surgery Tuesday night. She was out of intensive care Thursday. She's in a regular hospital room over the weekend. They're planning to release her to a rehab facility Monday. She's already doing much, much better. I will add one additional piece of color without getting into detail. Additional complications were added to the surgery because she also admitted that That about a month ago, when walking the dog with my son, she had seen a bat on the sidewalk, decided to pick it up and put it in the grass. It bit her. And so they had to take anti-rabies precautions as well. All the CDC was called in. The surgeons had to wear extra PPE, all this kind of stuff. They don't think she actually has rabies, which is good because it would be fatal having waited this long before treating it. But she had to get all the rabies shots, too. So anyway, she is doing fine now. So I just wanted to throw that out there. After we're done here later today, I'll go visit her at the hospital again. I've been spending a lot of time just hanging out, sitting at the hospital next to her. But she's doing well now.
|
Todd:
[1:43:00]
| Sam, I'm glad to hear that. and I'll just share that I have had similar misadventures with elderly parents over the last 10, 11 years or so.
|
Ivan:
[1:43:07]
| Yeah, me too. They're all very stubborn. Oh, yeah, no, it's fine. Your face is destroyed. What do you mean? You're mine.
|
Sam:
[1:43:17]
| Yes. Yeah. Okay, with that personal note up.
|
Ivan:
[1:43:20]
| Before we continue, I am very intrigued as to what is that thing that you have right behind you, I see on your left side This little square with like some Lights on there what the heck is Oh.
|
Todd:
[1:43:35]
| That's it's it's a laptop Stand right it's got some cooling.
|
Ivan:
[1:43:39]
| Oh it's just a laptop stand Yeah yeah I've had my work.
|
Todd:
[1:43:43]
| My work docking station.
|
Ivan:
[1:43:44]
| Is behind me That's why I plug the laptop.
|
Todd:
[1:43:47]
| In So then I have the you know two monitors.
|
Ivan:
[1:43:49]
| It looks like you know what it looked like And look what are these like these old style Calculators because it's got a little thing On the top and it looks like the screen I'm like Like, wait a minute. Is this like, well, it's just a, damn it.
|
Todd:
[1:44:00]
| Yeah. What I thought you were going to do was ask me about my cat.
|
Ivan:
[1:44:03]
| Oh, ask me about your cat.
|
Sam:
[1:44:04]
| Because he's got a fine. Says that.
|
Ivan:
[1:44:06]
| No, well, yeah, well, no, it was not the cat. I was more enthralled by that. Yeah.
|
Todd:
[1:44:13]
| It's just a laptop stand. Nothing top secret.
|
Ivan:
[1:44:16]
| Nothing that exciting.
|
Sam:
[1:44:17]
| Okay. Okay. So let's wrap this thing up so we can all go elsewhere. For everybody, you know where to find all the information about us. Go to curmudgeons-corner.com. You'll see the archive of our shows, transcripts of recent shows, links to our social media. I have not, I still have not yet linked to the TikTok. I'm waiting for a final resolution on TikTok before I bother doing that. But I am.
|
Ivan:
[1:44:40]
| You'll get final resolution when you get final resolution in a tariff.
|
Sam:
[1:44:43]
| Yeah, exactly. Never. Maybe I'll go ahead and add the link at some point. But yeah, we are posting clips on TikTok too. There's a link to our YouTube, link to Facebook, all of the ways to contact us, all of that. very importantly we do also link to our patreon where as you heard in the break earlier you can give us money we love it if you give us money we will you know right now todd, We make a grand total. This makes a huge difference for our lives.
|
Ivan:
[1:45:10]
| It's a shocking amount.
|
Sam:
[1:45:11]
| $27 a month.
|
Todd:
[1:45:13]
| That is outstanding.
|
Sam:
[1:45:15]
| Outstanding. A shocking amount.
|
Todd:
[1:45:18]
| Is that $27 each?
|
Sam:
[1:45:21]
| No, no, no.
|
Ivan:
[1:45:23]
| $27 total.
|
Todd:
[1:45:24]
| $13.5 apiece.
|
Ivan:
[1:45:25]
| Yeah, exactly. I mean, it's part of my retirement plan. I already added it in there. Yes.
|
Sam:
[1:45:31]
| But at various levels, we will mention you on the show. We will ring a bell for you. We will send you a postcard. We will send you a mug. All this kind of stuff you can see on our Patreon. And importantly, at $2 a month or more, or if you just contact us and ask us, we will invite you to the Commudgeons Corner Slack, where throughout the week, Yvonne and I and various listeners are chatting and sharing links and all this kind of stuff. We would love to have more of you on there. So, you know, let us know if you want on the Slack and we'll send you an invite. So, Yvonne, go ahead, Todd.
|
Todd:
[1:46:07]
| Tell me something about my business. I'm genuinely curious. What's your average listenership each episode?
|
Sam:
[1:46:14]
| We get between right now. Let me bring up the chart. Let me bring up the chart.
|
Todd:
[1:46:21]
| Okay.
|
Sam:
[1:46:22]
| As of right now, we're averaging around 80 downloads a week.
|
Todd:
[1:46:29]
| Yeah.
|
Sam:
[1:46:30]
| So, and sometimes that dips a little bit lower. Sometimes that dips a little higher. Our all time, our all time maximum was a few hundred, a number of years back when we actually ran advertising for a few months and we boosted it up to like 300 a week. And then it's, it's declined now. So like, and a year ago it was more like 50. So we're up from a year ago.
|
Ivan:
[1:46:51]
| Yeah.
|
Todd:
[1:46:52]
| I mean, this is the podcast universe is an extremely crowded marketplace. And but that's a pretty good number guys i gotta say because 80 is clearly beyond now just close friends and family well.
|
Sam:
[1:47:06]
| We don't know well yeah we don't know a download does not equal a listen.
|
Todd:
[1:47:10]
| Yeah but.
|
Ivan:
[1:47:11]
| Listen but but regardless listen we listen we think not and then we keep being surprised all the time by some random person we have no idea who's listening.
|
Todd:
[1:47:19]
| So that sends the message and feedback so so yeah i i because we we have this shared college radio heritage I am accustomed to speaking to very low numbers of people who are very engaged in whatever hyper-specific things you're doing.
|
Sam:
[1:47:36]
| We did this for years. We've been going since 2007 on this podcast. And probably the first seven or eight years of that, we never broke 20. You know? Right, yeah. So we're doing good at 80. Now, would I have fun and be glad if it was 1,000? Sure.
|
Ivan:
[1:47:57]
| And a thousand Patreon people giving us $10 a month But listen.
|
Todd:
[1:48:02]
| If you're having fun regardless Why the hell have you been doing this since 2007?
|
Ivan:
[1:48:07]
| Because we basically have fun And it's a good thing There's a way that Sam and I actually keep in touch We would not otherwise, Yeah, probably. Well, we would, but not as frequently.
|
Sam:
[1:48:19]
| Not as much. Because we did before. Sort of. Yeah, but we do more so now than we did.
|
Ivan:
[1:48:24]
| Yes, exactly.
|
Sam:
[1:48:25]
| And we have a few listeners that are on our Slack that we talk to all the time and keep up with what's going on in their lives as well. And I've got one previous, and a bunch of those folks have guest hosted sometimes when Yvonne is out. And there is one listener who finally guest hosted on the show like last year sometime who has actually listened to every episode since 2007 and who's a former co-worker of mine from 20 plus years ago. And so, yeah, it's fun. It's fun. It's a way to keep up with people. And when we get new listeners from out of the blue, that's always awesome.
|
Ivan:
[1:49:02]
| We have listeners from the – we have like one listener I know from the UK. We've had listeners from Columbia. Yeah, we've had listeners, probably some people I know. I know that downloads from all over the place, really. You know, like, yeah.
|
Todd:
[1:49:14]
| I mean, I enjoyed this and I don't want to make empty promises. I have a pretty regular queue of podcasts that I try to get through each week. But I should add you guys. This was a hoot kind of catching up. It's truly been decades.
|
Sam:
[1:49:29]
| And you're welcome to come back anytime, too.
|
Todd:
[1:49:32]
| I'm not going to wear out my welcome, but if you ever want to talk more about electric power industry or the terrorist effects, or if you just, you know, you need a third voice, let me know.
|
Sam:
[1:49:43]
| So, Yvonne, what I was about to ask you before that, that we always ask.
|
Ivan:
[1:49:47]
| Yeah, I'm ready.
|
Sam:
[1:49:48]
| You got the sample of something that we've talked about on the Slack that we have not talked about on the show.
|
Ivan:
[1:49:53]
| Yes, and it's a very important thing. Okay, all right? I shared this, and my caption was, these fucking morons. Okay, all right? Max, once known as HBO Max, is calling itself HBO Max again. You know, got it? Listen, the stupidest ever marketing move, which when it happened, I came on the show and said, what the fuck are these people thinking? Nobody knows the Max brand. It doesn't resonate anywhere. How in the hell do you take that name off the damn thing to market your fucking streaming service? Are you just this stupid? So apparently, it finally dawned upon them after quite a while. Hey, shit, we've got this great brand. What the fuck are we doing? And so they put it back on TV. To the streaming service, by the way, which got made so much fun on social media this week. The fact that they came to their senses and said, hmm, maybe we should call this HBO Max again.
|
Sam:
[1:51:02]
| I'll add, including themselves, their own social media put out a lot of stuff with a lot of big-name stars making fun of the move themselves.
|
Ivan:
[1:51:11]
| Yes. So, at least they had that sense of humor about, at least they had a lot of sense of humor about their security. Okay.
|
Sam:
[1:51:19]
| With that, we are done. Thank you very much for Todd. Thank you very much for Todd. Thank you very much, Todd, for joining us. It was a lot of fun. Great to have another voice and get your insights about the industry as well.
|
Todd:
[1:51:34]
| Thanks for the invitation, Sam.
|
Sam:
[1:51:36]
| Oh, absolutely. And thanks to our listeners as well. We'll be back next week with another episode.
|
Ivan:
[1:51:44]
| Now that I realize that you're also in the Pittsburgh area because one of our listeners Pete Berger, who also is on our Slack, he listens. He's also in the Pittsburgh area. Damn it, Sam, now we have a reason why the hell we have to go, because he's been saying about us, go back to a reunion or something. Fuck.
|
Todd:
[1:52:03]
| I remember Pete. That's another guy I haven't seen probably for 20 years or more.
|
Ivan:
[1:52:08]
| Well, he listens to it. He's on our Slack as well. So, yeah, he's very active on our Slack. So, yeah.
|
Sam:
[1:52:14]
| Okay. So, I'm trying to say goodbye. I'm trying to say goodbye here. All right. We'll let you say goodbye. Stay safe have a good week all of the stuff i usually see we'll talk to you next time now everybody say goodbye goodbye bye you too todd goodbye there we go, Okay, I'll hit stop in just a second. And like I said in the chat earlier, stay on until it says it's finished. Okay, thanks again, Todd. Goodbye.
|
Todd:
[1:53:11]
| Thank you, guys.
|
Sam:
[1:53:11]
| Oh, yeah.
|
Ivan:
[1:53:12]
| All right.
|
Sam:
[1:53:13]
| Hit and stop, Sam.
|
Ivan:
[1:53:14]
| I'm hitting stop.
|
Sam:
[1:53:15]
| I'm hitting it.
|
Ivan:
[1:53:16]
| Hit it! All right. Hit it!
| |
|
