Automated Transcript
Sam:
[0:00]
| Hello there we go you sound wonderful mr bow let's see if the streaming starts up properly what's.
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Ivan:
[0:08]
| Up with the headphones.
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Sam:
[0:09]
| Oh battery was almost dead and i didn't discover it until like a few seconds ago so i used a wired pair that i have okay lying around explicitly to be a backup up when needed. Okay. That's up. Make sure. Okay. And then this a fi boom. Okie doke. Shall we just jump in as usual?
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Ivan:
[0:42]
| Uh huh.
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Sam:
[0:43]
| You sound awesome. Okay. Here we go. Welcome to Curmudgeon's Corner for Saturday, April 5th, 2025. It is just after 2 UTC as we're starting to record. I am Sam Minter, and Yvonne Bowe is back, the real Yvonne Bowe. Hello, Yvonne.
|
Ivan:
[1:24]
| Hi. Has anything happened while I've been gone?
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Sam:
[1:29]
| I talked.
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Ivan:
[1:30]
| I mean, if I went in a coma, like, for just two weeks, I don't even have to do two years. If I went in a coma for two weeks and I woke up today, I'm in the hospital, I was in a bad accident, I woke up today, what would be the mood of the people that are coming to me to talk to me today? Like, you know, say my brother's coming over, right? He's like going to be, hey, hi.
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Sam:
[1:53]
| He's going to be thrilled. He's going to be happy. We had liberation day. Everything is good. Everything is wonderful.
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Ivan:
[2:02]
| We had liberation day. Wow. Wow. It's good.
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Sam:
[2:07]
| Yeah.
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Ivan:
[2:07]
| Wow. Oh God. Yeah. It's great.
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Sam:
[2:10]
| So our agenda, as usual, we'll start with our, but first I'll talk about a movie. Yvonne will talk about whatever, and then we'll talk about newsy stuff after that. I am sure one of our topics will be liberation day and what followed. I, I, I, it's going to, it would be surprising if we skipped that.
|
Ivan:
[2:29]
| I mean, yeah, yes. Yeah. Well, I mean. i'm just you're stunned i don't know you you seem okay there is the thing i am i have i hurt my neck shoulder area oh.
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Sam:
[2:50]
| That's not good.
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Ivan:
[2:51]
| About three weeks ago i started physical therapy on this yesterday um it it hurt really really really bad this sunday and monday it was just very very intense how did you hurt sleeping wrong well that's definitely got a kind of injury someone.
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Sam:
[3:12]
| In their 50s gets.
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Ivan:
[3:13]
| Well but you know and listen i i have also no drawn no no no problems but listen i remember the first time i did this and i was like 11 or 12 okay i was and i remember that i woke up what what were you doing sleeping.
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Sam:
[3:28]
| Upside down on your head or something.
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Ivan:
[3:30]
| No i just kind of like, I, I, I didn't either put my head on the, on the pillow, right. I maybe put an extra pillow. So my neck was like twisted in a strange way for a long, long, long, long time. And so when I woke up, it was an excruciating pain. So I mean, that's, that's what I did this time. And that's what I did. Like the first time when I was little, I remember that I was like 11 or 12 and I woke up and I couldn't even go to school. I was like, Mom, I actually went to, well, you know, this is where we're living in Coruscant. I didn't have a physical therapist, but somebody that was like, I don't know. She used some... lotions of some kind to try to alleviate the pain okay and massage it and whatever i still remember this and they were look this look like you've seen these movies where you go to these like these tropical islands and they have these like local like witch doctors or something yes The movies with.
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Sam:
[4:36]
| The racial stereotypes, yes.
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Ivan:
[4:38]
| Well, listen, I'm sorry, but I showed up to a place like that.
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Sam:
[4:43]
| You went to the local witch doctor and they fixed you all up.
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Ivan:
[4:47]
| Listen, it's not that much of a stereotype. Listen, we had an entire section in our pharmacy that was, you know, all this weird stuff.
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Sam:
[4:59]
| Local folk remedy stuff.
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Ivan:
[5:00]
| Oh, my God. It was just an entire section of like, I don't know, like bears, nails, shark teeth. I don't know. Oh, oh, oh, oh, the one of the best shark oil, a shark oil, which.
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Sam:
[5:20]
| By the way, just to be clear, like like 95 percent of random folk remedies from across the world are bullshit. But every once in a while, there are 5% that works. And the problem is just that they haven't been validated properly scientifically to separate out the ones that are bullshit from the ones that work.
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Ivan:
[5:43]
| But I showed up at this shack, okay, all right, off a dirt road where some lady just applied all these things to my neck to make it feel better.
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Sam:
[5:56]
| Okay.
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Ivan:
[5:57]
| I'm not sure, If just time helped, I know at the moment it did give me some relief.
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Sam:
[6:04]
| But I will tell you that time and the placebo effect are often significant. But, you know, every once in a while, there's something.
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Ivan:
[6:11]
| Listen, we had these things called santeros. OK, this is listen, these are I will say this is not an exaggerated stereotype. We had a lot of these are called the santeros. OK, these were the witch doctors. OK, they would do these things in order to get rid of the bad juju, whatever. You know, it was just it's these people. They had all these different things they burned and rituals and shit or whatever. It's like, really? You know, so so that's not, you know, now to say that that's how we treat everything. Well, that's not true. But we did have a lot of those. it's not it's not a total exaggeration that those are a lot of them and that we sell did sell a lot of shit to those people we had an entire section to pharmacy dedicated for all of this shit okay that they used so so yeah and but i will say that that started dying down really a lot like in the 90s you know when i was little the 70s and 80s that was like really big by the 90s people weren't buying as much of that stuff so uh but yeah so so i that was the first time i got relief this time i don't know i've used taken medications whatever i i kind of fucked it up worse on on on on sunday.
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Ivan:
[7:34]
| It's better again now i went to the doctor i've been the physical therapist i'm taking pills and then i don't know if it's but i have a cold or my allergies but you sound congested as well yeah and then I got that going too and so I'm just you know, Not great. You know, and I slept also, it didn't help like during those two weeks. I slept like, I spent like, what, 12 days in a hotel?
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Sam:
[8:04]
| Right. Because you, you, you missed two weeks of this show. The first week you were doing work stuff and traveling for that. And the second week you were doing stuff with your family.
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Ivan:
[8:13]
| Right.
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Sam:
[8:14]
| Yeah.
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Ivan:
[8:14]
| And so, and so I slept like 12, I spent 12 days in a hotel and, you know, in two weeks. And I don't think that sleeping at the hotels helped for my neck because it started right at the beginning of my business trip. And then it just really got bad when I was at the hotel we were on for my son's spring break, which by the way, we did the mistake. We haven't done it in a long time. But we did the mistake that we didn't look at the calendar properly.
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Sam:
[8:42]
| Okay.
|
Ivan:
[8:43]
| And we came back on Sunday and we got ready to take them and we took them to school on Monday and there was no school on Monday.
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Sam:
[8:49]
| Oh, nice.
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Ivan:
[8:50]
| Tuesday.
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Sam:
[8:51]
| Yeah.
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Ivan:
[8:51]
| And I hadn't done that in a long time, but we wound up, yeah, we wound up waking him up. He was like, whatever. No, no, no. Come on. We gotta go. Whatever. We gotta, you know. And we get him to school and there's still school.
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Sam:
[9:10]
| That's fun. Very fun.
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Ivan:
[9:12]
| I mean, I gotta say, I've only done that like a couple of times. I don't understand. Listen, it I don't understand this thing. Why the hell do you have a whole week of spring break and then you don't come back on Monday? The fuck does that? What the fuck is that shit?
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Sam:
[9:29]
| Breaks should always line up with weeks, right?
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Ivan:
[9:32]
| Yeah. I mean, if you're going to go spring break week, what the hell is it that, you know, Monday there's, you know, you come back and there's nothing on Monday. Doesn't make any sense.
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Sam:
[9:42]
| Yeah. I think that that's fairly common here too. Like after breaks, they start on Tuesdays.
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Ivan:
[9:48]
| Well, we didn't.
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Sam:
[9:49]
| I mean. I guess I'm happy if that's an extra day, right? Like if I'm the, if I'm the kid or what?
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Ivan:
[9:55]
| Well, yeah, sure. I mean, you know, but, but, you know, we went, I mean, we went through the whole rigmarole and getting up and doing, and I mean, I, I wasn't going to stay an extra day. I mean, even I, I, I was like, I tried to get, you know, the six days of hotel and that was like, I was like, I was going to use whatever the hell the points I got. That's it. So I wasn't going to, and that was like that amount of time. and it lined up that it was like tuesday through sunday ideally i i didn't want a tuesday through sunday but that's the days that were available and so i was like no i i'm like i don't want to i don't want to pay it if i got the point i want to use the points i don't want to do it with money i don't want to use money i want to do with fucking points right so so so did that and you know so uh, I mean, shit's been happening, Sam.
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Sam:
[10:47]
| Yeah.
|
Ivan:
[10:47]
| I mean, this is, you know, one of the things about what's going on, like, right now, I'm not going to talk about specifics later.
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Sam:
[10:56]
| You're going to talk about your feelings about the issue now. It's not about my feelings.
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Ivan:
[11:00]
| It's more about, it's that this now has, you know, we talk about here. When they fire people at an agency or whatever, most people, they're not following the news closely. They don't know. Okay. But you crash the market like this and you hear that prices are soaring. This gets everybody's attention. You want to get everybody's attention? Well, you fucking got it now because nobody can talk about anything else other than this. Now he's completely, yes, he wanted to change the conversation. that that's one that i mean it i mean it just did this i think i kept talking all the time well what could cut through the bullshit right what could get you know through hey you know this is as simple as it gets and everybody's talking about it because i mean it's hard to ignore you know you got 70 million people 80 million you know 70 million households i think it is that have money in the stock market, even though the majority is with some higher net worth. So many people have money in our stock market.
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Sam:
[12:13]
| Through 401ks, if nothing else.
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Ivan:
[12:15]
| Through 401ks, through whatever. IRAs, whatever the hell it is.
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Sam:
[12:21]
| Robinhood. People playing around with that. Because the barrier in entry is much less than it used to be.
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Ivan:
[12:27]
| Exactly. A barrier to entry right now just doesn't exist. It used to be this was complicated.
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Sam:
[12:32]
| It used to be like, you know, So way back in the day, you had to have a pretty high level, balance to open any mortgage or mortgage any any brokerage account and there were significant fees associated with every trade and all this kind of stuff yeah now you can like open a robin hood account with like 50 or 100 bucks or something maybe even less i don't even know what the minimum is yeah probably and you can do whatever and you can do fractional trading with no fees you can do fractional.
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Ivan:
[13:00]
| Trading which is one thing that is so novel that you know yeah i mean you can.
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Sam:
[13:04]
| Buy so you You can buy, you know, pieces of shares. I can buy, I can go in there and say, I want $1 of this stock.
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Ivan:
[13:13]
| Right. And boom, you got it.
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Sam:
[13:15]
| And you got it. With no fees.
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Ivan:
[13:17]
| With no fees.
|
Sam:
[13:18]
| Because they're making money off selling your information and stuff like that and the float and all kinds of other stuff.
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Ivan:
[13:24]
| Also, like the float services, other stuff. I mean, they've got an entire ecosystem of shit that goes around this. I mean, you know, other traders will borrow your stock Yes, they got that, too. Whatever. You know, they got a whole bunch of shit going on. But, yeah. But this is... I've been trying to see what the fuck it is that's going to cut through the bullshit. And not even... I think that a lot of people did pay attention to Cory Booker talking for a while.
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Sam:
[13:53]
| That did get some attention. But then that got wiped right off.
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Ivan:
[13:56]
| But nothing compares to this spectacle, which everybody... I mean... Well, I mean, my high school, my high school chat groups, my brother, you know, my, my, my boss, I mentioned to him, like, you know, I mean, you know, I talked to a couple of my bosses, holy shit, the losses. I mean, you know, you know, it's just, you know, it's just, just nuts. Okay. You know, sports figures, you know, sport people, you know, like one of the guys talking about it was like the guy from Barstool Sports, for example. you know he mentioned yesterday for example that yesterday one day which kind of like gave away i kind of like how much money he's got in the market invested because he said how much he lost you know he said i kind of like made a made a quick math so dave portnoy said dude i lost seven million dollars in one fucking day right so i figure he's got about 100 million which i actually it's been reported that he sold barstool for 100 million or something so that that tracks he's got about $100 million invested. So he lost $7 million in one fucking day. I didn't lose $7 million in one fucking day. I mean, honestly, you know, if I had that kind of money, I mean, we would be at the Carmudge's Corner headquarters right now. But working from there. But, you know, but it's just one of these things that.
|
Ivan:
[15:18]
| And actually Richard, who's on our Slack, he texted me, said, shit, I made a mistake. And look at it. I log it in and looking at my investment accounts today. She was like, you know, was my wife. Listen, my wife. Okay. Who doesn't pay? All of a sudden I hear this scream from the other side because, you know, one of the accounts has a lot of money is in her name. So she logged into it. She said, I lost how much fucking money today? i was like.
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Sam:
[15:47]
| Yeah yeah.
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Ivan:
[15:48]
| Yeah well i don't well honey that's not all the money we lost, you know yeah that's not all of it so this is.
|
Sam:
[16:00]
| Well you know we we we said during the campaign and during everything else it's sort of like no matter all the other issues people kept coming back to i mean you know yes the trans issue yes some other things but people kept coming back to The economy.
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Ivan:
[16:14]
| The economy, Donald Trump was going to be, he's strong, he's strong on the economy. He's, you know, he's, he's going to be.
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Sam:
[16:22]
| You know. The thing, the thing is though, what you were saying about cutting through the attention, because there's so many people who the bottom line is if it doesn't affect them personally, it doesn't exist.
|
Ivan:
[16:34]
| Correct. Yes.
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Sam:
[16:35]
| Well, and, and, and so this.
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Ivan:
[16:37]
| Or if it doesn't elicit, or if it doesn't elicit hate.
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Sam:
[16:40]
| Yeah. Yes. Okay.
|
Ivan:
[16:41]
| These are the two things. Seriously. I mean, either you elicit, you know, their bigotry or it affects them personally.
|
Sam:
[16:51]
| Yeah. And so this is, this is the case where like during the campaign and everything, it was like, oh my God, groceries are expensive. Gas is expensive. Rent is expensive, whatever it is. And everybody.
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Ivan:
[17:03]
| It wasn't as expensive when Donald was, was here, you know?
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Sam:
[17:06]
| Yes.
|
Ivan:
[17:07]
| It was all Biden's fault.
|
Sam:
[17:08]
| Yes. And it was all, it was all about that. Cause those were things that were visible in your face to everybody. You would notice, hey, it costs more when I go to the grocery store. and all of these other more abstract issues like.
|
Ivan:
[17:24]
| Democracy you know yeah they couldn't give a shit about that and you know the other thing is that look like when the ukraine one of the biggest drivers of inflation during the biden administration was that we had a surge again with a war in ukraine yeah you know pandemic plus war yeah but but that thing is it had been coming Between those two.
|
Sam:
[17:47]
| It's almost everything.
|
Ivan:
[17:48]
| The inflation had been coming down. And then it went back up again after the day. Yeah. The invasion, you know, caused a big surge in inflation. Okay? And so, and part of it, you know, I was of the thought myself, I'm like, look, I mean, Ukraine is against Russia. I mean, fortunately, we got to suck this up. Well, nobody wanted to suck it up. But now we're getting, you know, now we're getting told we got to suck it up for the better in the country that the fact that you know this was like a little bit of inflation sam we're talking about back then right it was like a few you know relatively speaking we're talking about you know in in in the grand scheme of things it was like five percent ten percent here you know you had most items were something like that whatever um okay you know it happened over a couple of years you know we're talking you know we're talking crazy shit numbers right now we're talking insanity so this now this is what everybody can talk about and it's causing me to cough so.
|
Sam:
[18:58]
| Okay i would like to make a motion in this.
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Ivan:
[19:02]
| Meeting okay that.
|
Sam:
[19:04]
| Given how we've started here Let's just continue to dive right into.
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Ivan:
[19:09]
| This topic.
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Sam:
[19:10]
| I will skip my movie. We will talk about my movie some other time.
|
Ivan:
[19:15]
| Well, I mean, I will say that this week is one of those weeks where— Because you've.
|
Sam:
[19:18]
| Jumped straight from, like, light and fluffy, but first stuff into a real topic.
|
Ivan:
[19:22]
| Well, because it wound up being that this is one of those things that it wound up transcending—, I mean, I couldn't talk to anybody about anything other than this.
|
Sam:
[19:33]
| Well, and this is what your main point was. Like, when it's this kind of stuff, it affects many people directly. Yeah. Like, we got the stock market crash affecting lots of people's 401ks and stuff. And on the tariffs themselves, maybe people aren't seeing the prices yet, but everybody's talking about how the prices are going to go up any moment now because of this.
|
Ivan:
[19:54]
| Listen, you go to, like, I, I, I, what, I, I. copy so this on one of the on one of the websites where i went like i went to i want to see what car dealers were doing about this okay and i went to a website and they already it had hey the cars in stock right now will not be affected by the tariff i mean this is all right i mean it's this is what i'm talking about it's permeating every fucking discussion hell you can't even pre-order nintendo switch twos yeah they were they were about to order and then nintendo said listen we can't we can't put them on sale we don't know how much we got to charge right um okay let's back up you want to talk about liberation day yeah.
|
Sam:
[20:41]
| Let's because we we started with sort of the effects of it but let's go back what actually happened yvonne like you know shall you.
|
Ivan:
[20:50]
| Tell the story or shall i Listen, we knew for months, you know, ever since Trump had come in, he had first started with these saber rattling of tariffs to different countries. He had imposed tariffs on Canada and Mexico, then backed away from those at the last minute. And then, you know, we had some shit with Colombia where he backed away on those at the last minute. Then he had him post some on China. And those stayed... So we had those, but then he was going to end the loophole for Timu and Shine, but then he backed away from that. Basically, the loophole was like— Under $800 coming in internationally, those are not subject to tariff. It's called the minimus loophole. But we had had all of this, and then he started talking about all this shit about the reciprocal tariffs. And so he said that he's going to go and do this whole thing about the reciprocal tariffs, and we're going to go and do this and whatever, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And one thing is that reciprocal tariffs to anybody who has done international trade means one thing.
|
Sam:
[22:04]
| It means if they put a tariff on you of like 10%, then you put a tariff on them of 10%. Right, exactly.
|
Ivan:
[22:13]
| Maybe an equivalent product or something. Hey, if you sell me flower, you're Columbia, you sell us flowers at 10% and we export tractor, you know, I'm going to tariff your flowers and they tariff your tractors.
|
Sam:
[22:27]
| Right.
|
Ivan:
[22:27]
| For example, caterpillar tractors, say something, you know, something that we would export to Columbia for bringing up an example. So, so that's, that would be reciprocal. Okay. So that's what everybody was kind of like looking at. So you look at the tariffs and you look at, you know, what tariffs are around the world and you're thinking, for example, to give a good example, say Israel. I'll give a great example. Israel. Two weeks before the tariff announcement, Netanyahu trying to suck up Maximus to Trump.
|
Sam:
[23:01]
| And killed Israel's tariffs.
|
Ivan:
[23:03]
| Eliminated all tariffs on U.S. products to Israel. All of that. set him to zero set him to zero and he still slammed israel with tariffs yes okay well even though it set him all to zero okay so do we want to discuss no no no yeah so but this is the thing so all of a sudden well this is what happens he starts he spent the 30 minutes of meandering bullshit i heard a couple of minutes i was just like i can't listen to this shit i had to turn the sound back off. So I just let it, and I was like looking at the TV. And he's got everybody over there, and he brings out some guy who wasn't even UAW. It was like some union guy, auto workers for Trump, blah, blah, blah, some idiot dressed up, you know, their idiot MAGA garb, whatever. So they go through all of that. Then finally, he brings out these charts on the tariffs. And these are these two big charts, I start looking at the numbers, and then he says that, okay, so...
|
Ivan:
[24:08]
| Switzerland has us at a 67 percent tariff and i'm like switzerland has a 67 percent tariff on the u.s i'm like what the fuck is he talking about yeah i'm like you know switzerland has actually almost no tariffs so as i'm looking at this and i'm like and then he had a list of countries boom one after the other vietnam like huge tariffs also madagascar madagascar shit china japan, Well, Japan has tariffs, but all these numbers were just completely, completely, completely unrelated to reality of what's going on with tariffs. Unrelated to any reality. And then he says that he's calculated that that's the tariff. So he was going to do a 50% cut on, okay, so they're tariffing us. So my great deal is that we're going to impose a tariff that is 50% of that. Well, of course, the number you're looking at the first column looked completely nuts.
|
Sam:
[25:05]
| Well, and just to be clear, they also said that it wasn't just their tariff rate of those countries.
|
Ivan:
[25:13]
| But it was adjusted for currency manipulation and something else, whatever. I can't remember. But, you know, he said that it was basically unfair.
|
Sam:
[25:24]
| Trade practices of various sorts. We would adjust by factors for that.
|
Ivan:
[25:30]
| Yeah. So.
|
Sam:
[25:32]
| But is that what they actually did, Yvonne?
|
Ivan:
[25:35]
| No no sam no apparently because you know we can't afford anybody that is an expert well no no i'm going to take that back trump just wanted to just i'm sure that what happened is they probably asked some people that were pretty smart to go do tariffs because we i heard that there was a lot of fights over these tariffs leading up to the announcement and probably what i'm pretty sure is a lot of people that are pretty smart got asked, well, you know, calculate these. They were all saying, you're out of your mind. Those numbers are nuts. So I'm sure that even the most, you know, stalwart, well, they're all just looking at this is insanity. So what they did, they revealed all of a sudden this formula.
|
Sam:
[26:22]
| Yes.
|
Ivan:
[26:23]
| And the formula basically took what they exported to us, what we exported to them, calculated the difference and then they divided it by two you know they took that factor so they came up a percentage so hey you know i i export 700 you know a hundred billion but but i've got a deficit with you of because i only sell you 30 so the deficit is 70 okay and.
|
Sam:
[26:55]
| Well, let me interrupt the detailed explanation. It was so in the end, the formula was the basically the trade.
|
Ivan:
[27:07]
| If I listen, the trade deficit between Sam and I, I bought Sam over my life a lot more food than he's ever bought me. Yeah. So, so since there's a 80, 90% gap there, I would tariff anything that Sam was going to give me 90%, but I'm going to be nice. And then I'm going to divide it by two, going to be 45.
|
Sam:
[27:31]
| Yes. So look, so it's what, it's the, the trade deficit as a percentage of the exports to that country, right? That was how it ended up. Now the, the, the formula is okay.
|
Ivan:
[27:44]
| Let's be clear, which is complete nonsense.
|
Sam:
[27:47]
| Well, wait a second. There's more than that. The formula that they showed had that plus two other factors that were supposed to- But they never.
|
Ivan:
[27:55]
| But they never, yeah, but they never came up with- No.
|
Sam:
[27:58]
| No. What they did, the two factors were set such that when multiplied together.
|
Ivan:
[28:03]
| They were one. Well, then you didn't know anything.
|
Sam:
[28:09]
| And like in theory, those two factors could be different for every country in the world and you could adjust them. But they did.
|
Ivan:
[28:17]
| But if you, like I said, if you wind up with something that equals one that is the divisor, then you.
|
Sam:
[28:23]
| Right, right.
|
Ivan:
[28:24]
| You've divided by one!
|
Sam:
[28:25]
| Well, right. But if they actually had calculated those numbers for every country, they wouldn't have multiplied to one.
|
Ivan:
[28:31]
| Okay, Sam, but let's be clear about this. Okay, nobody with a brain sat to do this.
|
Sam:
[28:38]
| Yes, well.
|
Ivan:
[28:38]
| Somebody went to chat GPT.
|
Sam:
[28:41]
| Yes.
|
Ivan:
[28:41]
| Because nobody with a—listen, nobody.
|
Sam:
[28:43]
| I was going to break that up back.
|
Ivan:
[28:44]
| This is what I was saying. I'm sure they went to a whole bunch of people. They asked them to do this. They all looked at them. are you out of your fucking mind.
|
Sam:
[28:53]
| Well and so they probably they probably at some point in the process some real economists weighed in with some real reciprocal tariffs and they didn't yes and they looked at.
|
Ivan:
[29:04]
| Them and that's what i said the numbers were too low.
|
Sam:
[29:06]
| Yes because.
|
Ivan:
[29:08]
| Trump's saying that's that's that's it's too low so that's what i'm saying so then they went and they did with this calculation they asked chat gpt to do it and they asked for a list of countries to assess this too.
|
Sam:
[29:19]
| So so wait and then you wind up two things here there are two things here that are important one somebody on the internet did an experiment where they asked every major llm chat bot model out to.
|
Ivan:
[29:34]
| To try to see.
|
Sam:
[29:35]
| To basically say okay yeah.
|
Ivan:
[29:37]
| Give me give me this.
|
Sam:
[29:38]
| Yeah give me give me a way an easy way to calculate the tariffs i would want to do if i wanted to do reciprocal tariffs across the entire world. And every single one of the models came up with the same wrong answer.
|
Ivan:
[29:54]
| Same wrong answer. Yes.
|
Sam:
[29:56]
| Yes. This is not an answer that any actual expert in economics or trade or anything else would have come up with. This is a bullshit made up hallucination type answer. and but they all came up with the same thing so we don't know if they went to chat gpt or claude or something or or or whatever it was probably elon's model like x whatever brock whatever they call it whatever no fuck they probably used elon's but it doesn't matter but we know that it had to be an ai answer because no legitimate person would ever have brought up this formula for this purpose, Because it doesn't make sense for this.
|
Ivan:
[30:41]
| I mean, that's why everybody who had ever done this was looking at it, and they were like, this is nuts.
|
Sam:
[30:51]
| And so we'll talk about the list of countries itself in just a second. But also, you brought up me and you as an example, but let's do an actual country example that I've heard a lot. People have brought up Madagascar, which I mentioned earlier, and another poor African country. I forget which one. But let's talk Madagascar for a second because I remember the actual examples. Madagascar's major export is vanilla.
|
Ivan:
[31:19]
| Okay? Okay.
|
Sam:
[31:21]
| So Madagascar produces a lot of vanilla. It's exported all over the world, including the United States, which, by the way, the U.S. does not have a good climate for growing large amounts of vanilla.
|
Ivan:
[31:34]
| Or coffee. Or a whole bunch of other things.
|
Sam:
[31:36]
| Or a whole bunch of other things. But specifically in this example, we're talking vanilla. So the U.S. does not make a lot of vanilla. But we buy lots of vanilla from Madagascar. Meanwhile, Madagascar is not exactly a wealthy country. They are not importing a lot of American goods because American goods are expensive.
|
Ivan:
[32:01]
| Yes.
|
Sam:
[32:01]
| And so you have a major trade deficit where we buy a lot more stuff from Madagascar than they buy from us. And so therefore they get like slammed with high tariffs. But like, this is not because Madagascar is instituting super high tariffs on American goods. This is not because Madagascar is doing like trade practices that are drastically unfair.
|
Ivan:
[32:28]
| It's because it's the only fucking place we can get vanilla.
|
Sam:
[32:29]
| Yeah.
|
Ivan:
[32:30]
| The only fucking place.
|
Sam:
[32:31]
| And they're poor enough not to buy a lot of our stuff.
|
Ivan:
[32:34]
| It's like, look, it's like you getting, you know, arguing about the trade deficit you have with your supermarket.
|
Sam:
[32:42]
| Right. You know, I buy a lot more from my supermarket than they buy from me.
|
Ivan:
[32:49]
| That's right.
|
Sam:
[32:50]
| I'm just saying. Yeah.
|
Ivan:
[32:52]
| You know, and here's the other thing that this doesn't consider. Services.
|
Sam:
[32:58]
| They didn't count those at all.
|
Ivan:
[33:00]
| They don't, they're like, they're acting like this is 19, the 1800s. It's all goods, no services. And the United States runs a huge services surplus. Okay. Okay. And so that didn't even go into consideration. Look, the main thing about this is Trump must have looked at what some economists did that made sense. And from what I can see, said the numbers are too low. That's bullshit. We're getting screwed a lot more. And then wanted something to give them bigger numbers. And somebody went and asked the LLM to do the calculation. They got that. Make the list of countries. And so this is why we're tariffing penguins and other things.
|
Sam:
[33:42]
| And let's talk about that. The list of countries that the LLM came up with is the list of internet top level domains.
|
Ivan:
[33:50]
| Right.
|
Sam:
[33:51]
| So we've got uninhabited islands that only have penguins on them. We've got islands that only have American military bases. We've got we've got territories of countries that are also on the list as their own countries. So there's overlap. app.
|
Ivan:
[34:06]
| Oh, and it's like nobody actually fact-checked this in any way.
|
Sam:
[34:09]
| Yeah. And oh, we should add, we should add, there was a 10% minimum as well. So like, well, yes.
|
Ivan:
[34:14]
| They didn't go with a 10% minimum.
|
Sam:
[34:15]
| Even for the countries that actually have surpluses with us, and there are some, they still got hit with 10% because that was the absolute minimum, no matter what.
|
Ivan:
[34:25]
| Which is nuts. I mean, it's just, the whole thing is nuts. The entire thing is just, And, you know, there was a chart I shared about where our tariffs sit vis-a-vis the average tariff in the world, like with this proposal right now. It is off the charts. There is no country in the world, let alone one of the top, you know, OECD countries, you know, the top 20 that has this kind of level of tariffs. Yeah. It's bonkers.
|
Sam:
[35:00]
| So let me ask a question. Yes, yeah, go ahead.
|
Ivan:
[35:05]
| How did the markets take it?
|
Sam:
[35:07]
| Wait, wait, we will get to that. I want one thing first. People have been trying to play the game of understanding, like, okay, option one, Donald Trump just has no idea. But I mean, but but pretend for a second that there's some sort of actual logic or rationale behind trying to do this or something like this.
|
Ivan:
[35:36]
| Listen, OK, the logic that I can think of, OK, is because remember, he has right now, 60 days into his new presidency.
|
Sam:
[35:47]
| I think it's like 72 or something.
|
Ivan:
[35:49]
| 70, whatever. Yeah. So it's OK. Yeah.
|
Sam:
[35:51]
| 73, 74.
|
Ivan:
[35:52]
| He has decided that the U.S. has, he has decided that he does not need or want any allies.
|
Sam:
[35:59]
| Mm-hmm.
|
Ivan:
[36:00]
| No country. We need no allies. And so, when you start off from that premise, you've got no friends. I want no friends. Basically, what he did is kick everybody in the teeth and demand tribute.
|
Sam:
[36:19]
| Well, did he even? Because there's been some back and forth on whether or not, like, on the one hand, some of his staff were given talking points and went out to the media saying, this is not a negotiation. This is staying no matter what they do. We don't care what they do. Then Donald Trump himself said, we're making deals. But bullshit. Come to us with a good deal. And then he reversed himself again. And just a few hours ago, posted on Truth Social something about how these are permanent no matter what.
|
Ivan:
[36:51]
| I do think that his main thing is that he's looking for deals.
|
Sam:
[37:01]
| So he's looking for one-on-one, whichever country comes and grovels and offers all kinds of stuff. And if they do, he'll offer him a little bit of a discount on the tariff rate or something like that. He wants to do that. Obviously, he likes to think that way. He likes to force things into that transactional mode. But at the same time, they keep also talking about how, hey, look, yes, the goal here is to fundamentally, from the ground up, change the international order. I think, listen, they don't like free trade. They don't want free trade. They want everybody to be insular in their own country. I mean, how they could go a step further and just make importing things illegal.
|
Ivan:
[37:51]
| I mean, I don't know how we will live as a country. There are many things that we rely on solely imported. This is the whole problem with this whole damn thing. I do think that this is, he wants to use this as some kind of negotiating cruddle because he always wants, he always talks about how he's such a great deal maker. That's his shtick.
|
Sam:
[38:18]
| And he's talking about who has the cards and things like that.
|
Ivan:
[38:21]
| Who has the cards! That's always his shtick. So, and I do think that he's, like, right now... I... I do think here, I will say that I do think he's going to start negotiating with some countries. I do think that he doesn't want to back off on a big chunk of this, but I will tell you that the reality is that if he doesn't remove a big chunk of this, we're fucked.
|
Sam:
[38:50]
| Well, I've heard a lot of people. Yes. I've heard a lot of people say essentially we're fucked anyway.
|
Ivan:
[38:58]
| Because there's levels of fucked. Okay.
|
Sam:
[39:02]
| There are different levels. The point these people had is even if he takes them off, given the history, how does anybody know he doesn't just change his mind tomorrow and put them back?
|
Ivan:
[39:12]
| No, no, no. I get that.
|
Sam:
[39:14]
| But yes, keeping them on forever is worth. Well, there is the other thing. I just want to say one thing to our audience. I have decided at this point, like 40 some minutes into our recording, that I am not going to attempt to edit out Yvonne coughing. Like the automated system will either remove what it does or not remove what it does. Like he's coughing on average once a minute.
|
Ivan:
[39:41]
| I'm sorry.
|
Sam:
[39:42]
| I'm like, screw it.
|
Ivan:
[39:44]
| What am I going to do? Let me cancel again for another week. I was at whatever now.
|
Sam:
[39:48]
| No, no, I know. So I'm just saying, so if you've been hearing Yvonne cough in this whole time, I apologize. I just do not have time to deal with that when I edit this time around. If you are not hearing it, thank the wonders of my post-processing, like recognizing that it's a noise and getting rid of it. But either way, it's not me. So, okay, go ahead. Well, it's not me removing the coughing, if anything is removed. And if it's there, sorry, Yvonne's sick. What can I say?
|
Ivan:
[40:17]
| It's just well there is one thing that can there are that can stop this more decisively in terms of the tariffs yeah which is congress can act okay congress could and the reality is that at some point, Look, this is so recessionary.
|
Sam:
[40:38]
| I have seen more nervous looking Republicans in the last few days than I have in years.
|
Ivan:
[40:47]
| In years.
|
Sam:
[40:48]
| This is so recessionary. The last time even close to this was the Access Hollywood tape in 2016. Like when you had a whole bunch of Republicans go like, oh crap, maybe this isn't going to work. We have to ditch this guy. Now, they're not saying that quite that openly right now, but this is but you see them in the halls where people are asking him the questions and they're running away scared and not answering the question.
|
Ivan:
[41:18]
| They don't have any.
|
Sam:
[41:19]
| And there are there are a handful. There was a bill related to this that passed in the Senate with all the Democrats plus four Republicans.
|
Ivan:
[41:31]
| Right. You know, that was probably that was before this shit show. They got four Republicans.
|
Sam:
[41:37]
| Yes.
|
Ivan:
[41:38]
| Okay. And I can see how quickly, look, with what the market is happening.
|
Sam:
[41:43]
| I think it's useful. It was Rand Paul, Mitch McConnell, and the two women.
|
Ivan:
[41:50]
| Oh, Murkowski and Collins.
|
Sam:
[41:53]
| And Murkowski and Collins. That was the four. And it's sort of like if you had to predict four on this issue, that's who you would have predicted. But the fact that you could even do that, like it got to, they actually voted on it and it passed. It's like, whoa, who would, you know, and you see, you know, you see this hesitancy, you see people sort of in panic mode. And you can see, again, this is the kind of thing where, as we started this show, this gets people's attention in a way that nothing else does. You already had Republicans afraid of going to town halls because people were showing up.
|
Ivan:
[42:38]
| Can you imagine going to a town hall like in a month with all these tariffs in place? They're going to the supermarket. They're going everywhere. Prices are through the roof. They can't buy a fucking car. They can't, you know, they're shopping at cars. All the car prices go on, you know, because by the way, this is also driving up used car prices. Okay. It's not even just new car prices. Okay. It's driving all car prices up. Okay. you know how many people are going to show up basically you know burning these people in effigy like right now over this.
|
Sam:
[43:07]
| Well and and this is the thing that like it's not it's not just the democrats showing up for these things they're mad at this it's there it's it's it's die hard mega folks who are getting upset because this is not what they wanted now again if they paid freaking attention and actually believed what Donald Trump said, it should have been what they expected.
|
Ivan:
[43:36]
| No, because listen, I still can't forget this guy who was at the airport, who was some MAGA guy that worked a ramp at the airport. He was talking about how he's bringing in this genius. They're going to go through everything, and he's going to make the economy. He's going to cut our taxes, and we're going to be richer, blah, blah, blah. I'm like, what What kind of delusional bastard are you? I mean, they're all, I mean, they all, I, here's, you've got this one group in Wall Street, one group in Wall Street that was like, ah, he's going to deregulate and cut our taxes. And, you know, the tariffs left time, eh, they weren't so bad, whatever. He just got in a trade war with China. It's no big deal, whatever. Ah, we can deal with this. But if we get our tax cuts and deregulation, we're good to go. And then, You know, that's not what happened. I mean, this guy is an idiot. This guy is a fucking idiot. You know, this entire fantasy where he thinks, you know, they're saying that somehow, magically, what? In a year or two, we're going to get all this manufacturing back. No! No! No, by the way, it's never all coming back. You can get some, but not a lot.
|
Sam:
[44:51]
| Well, and people also point out, this is important too, people also point out. I mean, the Biden administration got some manufacturing to come back to the U.S.
|
Ivan:
[45:00]
| Well, they were doing it in a way that makes sense.
|
Sam:
[45:03]
| Well, because the key component is- Because it takes time. Well, it takes time. But also the thing that's completely missing that Biden did is like, okay, you also offer incentives- Incentives. For the manufacturing to be done.
|
Ivan:
[45:20]
| Right. You make it- Because it takes a big investment.
|
Sam:
[45:22]
| It takes a big investment. So you offer commitments and incentives and you're going to get tax breaks and we're going to subsidize and you'll get a loan at a good rate, whatever you or, you know.
|
Ivan:
[45:33]
| And there is no program for that. As a matter of fact, this administration has been killing.
|
Sam:
[45:38]
| Yes.
|
Ivan:
[45:39]
| I mean, the shit that Biden had done, which is helping to bring some manufacturer back. He's killing that.
|
Sam:
[45:44]
| That was a big part of both of those two big initiatives, the Inflation Reduction Act and the CHIPS Act.
|
Ivan:
[45:52]
| Right.
|
Sam:
[45:52]
| Both had significant components about encouraging manufacturing in the United States.
|
Ivan:
[46:00]
| And a lot of plants had been built, being built, and shit was moving and happening.
|
Sam:
[46:04]
| Now, a lot of the Republicans didn't like it because a lot of it was tied to, like, clean energy stuff instead of fossil fuels.
|
Ivan:
[46:10]
| But they were bringing fucking jobs. But here's the thing. You know, what are, what the fuck are we going to bring back? Making t-shirts? Is that what we're going to fucking bring back? What? Are we going to pay $100 for a t-shirt now?
|
Sam:
[46:24]
| They want to bring everything back, Yvonne. Everything.
|
Ivan:
[46:26]
| I mean, you know, what are we doing? You know?
|
Sam:
[46:31]
| Well, that's key to this, too, and why it ties to inflation as well is because, yeah, like, even if you brought the stuff back, it's going to be a lot more expensive.
|
Ivan:
[46:45]
| Listen manufacturing employment in the united states had dropped steadily since the 1960s okay this isn't the new thing it started flattening out somewhat you know but it had been it had been going down one part of the reason is it's not because automation okay that we you don't need that many people to manufacture a whole bunch of stuff like we used to okay yeah Yeah.
|
Sam:
[47:13]
| It's like even if you bring back the manufacturing, it doesn't mean bringing back all the jobs.
|
Ivan:
[47:17]
| Right. Same thing was with, you know, I hear people grieving for small farm towns. Well, here's the problem, too. You know, farming doesn't require as many people as it used to either. We have more farming output than we've ever had with a lot less people working the farms. And a lot of those people moved cities. That's why the small towns died because people decided that they didn't want to live in the, you know, out in farm country. They prefer to live in the city because that's also where there were jobs because we didn't need that many people to farm because technology changed. and so you know technology changed but you know it's like you want to bring it's like yvonne steel.
|
Sam:
[48:01]
| Is coming back to pittsburgh any day now.
|
Ivan:
[48:03]
| You know what that steel output has been flat in the u.s for the last 30 40 years but employment is down like a ton okay, again technology same shit whatever and people keep forgetting it's just the whole damn thing oh they're taking advantage of us or whatever we were much better after in the 1950s and 60s in terms of manufacturing employment yes you know why because japan was decimated the uk was decimated europe was decimated all their fucking factories are fucking flattened by fucking wars okay china didn't exist it was communist russia too you know none of those existed None of it. We, the United States, benefited outlandishly from the absence of that infrastructure post-World War II. That is how all of a sudden we became so dominant. But the reality is that those countries couldn't stay down like that for the rest of their life. What? Korea was going to stay poor? Japan as well?
|
Ivan:
[49:11]
| China? What? I mean, this is part of the economic development of the world. And the reality is, yes, it had an impact in the U.S., but at the same time, the problem in the United States hasn't been that during that time, there hasn't been economic growth and there hasn't been jobs because a lot of jobs have been generated over that time. The jobs are different. But the reality is that a lot of people without the skill sets that this new economy needed, well you know they didn't the republic especially you know the republicans didn't give a shit about helping any of these people okay let's be clear about this yeah they i mean i mean reagan couldn't give two flying fucks about these people he fired you know it's like the air traffic controllers like he fired them for example and like all these people mourning in america blah blah blah look the 1980s was was one of the worst eras for union unionized employees in america factories kept shutting down one after the other and it's not like i mean you know you had that documentary by what's his name roger and me for example uh the suffering of all the gm employees and the downsizing of gm and factories and how work was gone and the reality is that the gop didn't give these people anything what do you got tax cuts.
|
Ivan:
[50:23]
| We got more fucking tax cuts, okay? And, you know, it's just one of these things where our problem isn't about that the country doesn't have enough wealth. Our problem has been since the 1970s that wealth has started to be more unequally distributed than it's ever been. You know, in about 100 years, that's the fucking problem. It's got nothing to do about us having the money.
|
Sam:
[50:50]
| Yeah, I mean, you also mentioned the fact that, like, they pretend like services don't exist.
|
Ivan:
[50:55]
| Oh, yeah, they pretend like fucking, and that's the thing, because all the fucking jobs were created. You know, yeah, we don't make the fucking iPhones, but you have all the people that design them, that do the marketing, that do, you know, set up the sales structure. You know, a company like Apple, most of the, you know, the majority of their employees are in the U.S., but 60% of their sales happen outside the U.S., okay? I remember when I was at HB, same thing. HB, you know, we had like more than 50% of employees in the United States. Only like 25% of sales came from the United States. And you look at that across the, you look at the top 10 companies in the Fortune, Global Fortune 1000. Nine of them are American. Nine. Nine out of 10. Nine out of 10. And all of those make so much profit. It's insane. And that, yes, so we don't get, you know, yeah, we look at this merchandise deficit. But fuck, man, the capital. We're taking the fucking capital from everybody in the fucking world. Everybody invests here. That's where they, well, they used to.
|
Sam:
[52:08]
| Yeah, I was about to say.
|
Ivan:
[52:10]
| Everybody came here to fucking invest and put their damn money and put in American companies because they were the ones that, and oh, by the way, because putting their money in the U.S. was more secure than being anywhere else. Well, this asshole thinks that all of that is bullshit. Then we need to go back to making T-shirts.
|
Sam:
[52:27]
| Yep. And furniture.
|
Ivan:
[52:30]
| T-shirts and furniture. And pay people $6, $7 an hour.
|
Sam:
[52:33]
| Yes.
|
Ivan:
[52:34]
| No machinery. It's all manual. We'll just, you know, we'll just build a factory with a thousand fucking people paying $6, $7 an hour. Build sweatshops of people working 20 hours a week. That will, that will satisfy people. That will make people, that will make America great again. And what the fuck is wrong with these people?
|
Sam:
[52:51]
| Exactly. With that, why don't we take a break and let's pivot.
|
Ivan:
[52:56]
| Chat GPT Ivan cannot get angry like that. I noticed.
|
Sam:
[53:00]
| No, no. Yvonne GPT.
|
Ivan:
[53:02]
| He was very, very, he was very, very acquiescing of you. He would go and he would like go and you would say, he would pick a topic and then it would say, Sam, what do you think about this topic? And then you would say it, and then he would very pleasantly just agree with you, summarize everything you said in a very agreeable tone.
|
Sam:
[53:22]
| Absolutely. You know, Yvonne GPT knew who was right, you know?
|
Ivan:
[53:27]
| Yes! Totally!
|
Sam:
[53:31]
| Yeah, so I think that they have a little bit more work to do to properly simulate you, Yvonne.
|
Ivan:
[53:39]
| I will admit that At the end, the jokes he cracked were pretty good. I was impressed with the jokes.
|
Sam:
[53:47]
| Okay. Okay. Laughing about the camel or whatever. Yes. Skydiving camel.
|
Ivan:
[53:53]
| Yes. That was good. That was pretty good.
|
Sam:
[53:57]
| Okay. So let's take a break and let's pivot from sort of what Donald Trump did and what he was trying to accomplish, which is obviously failing, to the reaction.
|
Ivan:
[54:10]
| Wait, wait, wait. He doesn't think it's failing. He doesn't think it's failing. By the way, he's out fucking playing golf.
|
Sam:
[54:17]
| I said, which is obviously failing, not that he realizes is failing, but let's pivot to all the consequences.
|
Ivan:
[54:24]
| That motherfucker was out playing fucking golf as the stock market had its two worst days. I don't know, two worst consecutive days in the last hundred plus years?
|
Sam:
[54:39]
| Was it that? I thought there were some that were in early 2020 that were.
|
Ivan:
[54:43]
| The two worst consecutive days.
|
Sam:
[54:45]
| Oh, consecutive. Okay.
|
Ivan:
[54:46]
| Okay. Those were the two worst consecutive days.
|
Sam:
[54:49]
| Well, it would have had to been since 89 or whatever. Because that was a 25% drop in one day.
|
Ivan:
[54:54]
| The two others, the only two that were worse was 1929 and 1988. That's it. Yeah. Black Monday in 89.
|
Sam:
[55:03]
| I was a year off.
|
Ivan:
[55:04]
| It was Black Monday, 88.
|
Sam:
[55:06]
| Yeah. Yeah. Okay. We'll take a break. We will be back and then we'll talk all the consequences. We'll talk more about the political consequences. We'll talk about the stock market. We'll talk about in general, the economy, inflation, all this stuff. We touched on those, but we'll, we'll, we'll hit, we'll pivot more to that. Sound good. Sound good. Okay. We are one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight break. Number eight. Here we go.
|
Ivan:
[56:07]
| You know, so wait.
|
Sam:
[56:09]
| Wait, I just want to wait.
|
Ivan:
[56:10]
| Wait, wait, wait, wait.
|
Sam:
[56:11]
| Okay, go ahead.
|
Ivan:
[56:11]
| There was a joke that I was remembering that this whole thing reminded me of. There's this part in Good Morning Vietnam.
|
Sam:
[56:19]
| Okay.
|
Ivan:
[56:19]
| We're in a movie. Good Morning Vietnam. Robin Williams gets suspended, you know, for a joke that he made on the air.
|
Sam:
[56:24]
| I'm sure it's on my list. I'll add it.
|
Ivan:
[56:26]
| For God's sake.
|
Sam:
[56:26]
| I'll make sure.
|
Ivan:
[56:27]
| There is a scene where, where Robin Williams gets suspended from the radio station. His, his boss. Okay. Goes and takes over his show. Now, his show was hilarious, comedic. And this guy, his boss decides that he's going to do a comedy show instead in his style of comedy. And this was just the worst, the worst, just not funny, just ridiculously bad show. Okay, all right? And everybody that's producing him and whatever are looking at him doing this. And everybody is just aghast. just just you see people standing around the radios around yitnam or whatever listening to this just just just ridiculous thing and they're just like what the fuck and and they get to a commercial they get to a break you know they do little ads public service ads or whatever because it's armed force armed forces radio television service and the guys look at them are you planning on continuing with this show and that's what i'm i'm expecting isn't somebody you know somebody at some point, you know, she's going to show up in the Oval Office and as the stock market will drop again on Monday, probably, unfortunately. Okay, all right? I'm going to wind up with a fucking ulcer at this rate, okay? And I'm like, they're going to have that on there, and I'm like, Are we going to just keep doing this until we just crash into the ground? Is that your plan?
|
Sam:
[57:51]
| Yeah. So the one thing I was going to say, because the break was about a video channel, was that the one immediate consequence that has been reported of the tariffs is that apparently China was about to make the deal on TikTok, but then the tariffs came off and they backed out of the deal and Trump extended it another 75 days even though he's got no legal right to do so and so you know the tariffs saved TikTok sort of kind of well I don't really saved.
|
Ivan:
[58:26]
| It but not I mean I don't know if they're gonna make a deal I mean.
|
Sam:
[58:28]
| They were gonna make a deal and then they didn't make a deal but then it was.
|
Ivan:
[58:32]
| Not like it wasn't gonna.
|
Sam:
[58:33]
| And of course Donald Trump was saying that they were about to make a deal doesn't really mean they were. But anyway, yeah, no. So let's let you started with the market reaction. Let's the market obviously is tanked. As you said, the worst two consecutive days in like forever. So what are we seeing with like, let's answer the question that you just said, how long can this continue? Like if Donald Trump doubles down and says, no, I did fucking mean it. Yes, it's going to be painful, but all of these tariffs stay. Even if the countries come and grovel, it doesn't matter. They all stay. I'm not negotiating. This isn't part of making a deal. I just think this is the way the world should be, and leaves it this way. How does that play out?
|
Ivan:
[59:28]
| I, you know, we're on, we're on uncharted territory here, you know, because this is, I mean, this is self-inflicted. All right. You know, we've had other times when I still remember, like during the 2008, right, where the stock market would accelerate down because basically the policy prescriptions that they were saying just weren't going to do anything. But they were dealing with a crisis. OK, already. All right. I mean, there was a crisis.
|
Sam:
[1:00:08]
| Remind us what was going on in 2008.
|
Ivan:
[1:00:10]
| Well, in 2008, this was a moment that all of a sudden we started realizing that a lot of the big banks and investment banks were insolvent. Okay?
|
Sam:
[1:00:23]
| Right.
|
Ivan:
[1:00:24]
| They were insolvent because they had been...
|
Sam:
[1:00:27]
| Overextending on bad loans, basically.
|
Ivan:
[1:00:29]
| Well, not exactly. What happened was that they had, in the early 2000s, had passed a rule that basically said that there was no limitation in how much leverage an investment bank needed to hold. So what that motivated you to do is take lots of risks. Well, it's not just take lots of risk. It was like almost like, you know, you're instead of like, say, you know, you buy a house. They were most of these were on collateralized mortgage bonds. OK, you know, they were doing the CMBS. These were these were packaged bonds that packaged mortgages. So they were looking at them like the same way as the mortgage on your house, where we would go up to 95 percent in large part, because that's your primary home. We do underwriting. We're pretty confident. Most people don't walk away from their primary home. But back then, we were writing. A lot of it were writing shit. And they were saying that all of these were AAA rated. So, okay, they're AAA rated. So I can write as many of these as I want. And because of that, I can borrow.
|
Ivan:
[1:01:46]
| 99, you know, because what I'll do is, instead of like before, where maybe we do a few billion here, a few billion there, fuck this. We'll carry a trillion dollars. Okay. And we'll borrow 980 billion. Okay. All right.
|
Sam:
[1:02:04]
| Yeah.
|
Ivan:
[1:02:04]
| Well, okay. Now the thing is that at that level, you're going to be making a lot more profits supposedly because these things are like rock solid AAA. And instead of like just buying 10 billion, you're, you're doing a, you know, you're doing all of that volume. So you're, you know, you're, you're doing volume basically and taking the maximum risk because it's AAA rated. The problem is that people started digging through them and they weren't AAA rated. And so when all of a sudden you realize they weren't AAA rated, all you needed was those fucking, you know, securities to drop in value by 5% and they would wipe out a Wall Street firm. The losses would be so large that they did not have sufficient equity to cover them.
|
Ivan:
[1:02:51]
| And so that was happening... repeatedly, over and over. We had these... And then you had... The other thing was that some were selling... these default swaps okay basically it was like insurance you sold insurance on the default and well it's all triple a rated we'll never have to pay out on these so we'll write and we'll sell a hundred billion of this shit and the notional value behind it is a couple of trillion okay well guess what they started going bad so they started calling these and so all of a sudden AIG also got, AIG, GE had some of these on their books. I mean, so many of the bottom line.
|
Sam:
[1:03:38]
| Bottom line, I want to get us back. We were, we were, there was a bottom line is that this was.
|
Ivan:
[1:03:43]
| This was a real crisis because you had a significant number of the banking and financial institutions that were, that were there with basically that their, their equity was going to be completely wiped out they would be completely insolvent okay and that's what started precipitating the crisis because all of a sudden people started hitting the exits let's try to sell this shit and we started hitting the exits well guess what you think everybody wanted to buy those at 100 100 cents on the dollar no what started happening they started getting quotes 90 cents 80 cents 70 cents 60 cents 50 cents it it just bankrupted you know all of that so that's how that crisis started it It was deregulation under the Bush administration that started that. A lot of people blame supposedly low-income housing. That was very little of that. For the most part, the biggest problem was just, you had so many people that were going and borrowing 20, 30, you know, they were taken out. They were like mortgage moguls because the banks weren't even they weren't even underwriting the loans. They were just like, look, if you're you know, they said if you could fog a mirror, you borrow money. Literally, I heard this said if you showed up and you could fog a mirror, you'd get you know, you'd get a loan. That's it. That's all. That's the only requirement. And I'm sure they also load money to that people.
|
Sam:
[1:05:00]
| So now, of course.
|
Ivan:
[1:05:02]
| But but that was, you know, but but so so there was a crisis. It was a complex crisis that required a lot of, it required a lot of maneuvering in order to to get through that and you have to come up with a few different solutions but there.
|
Sam:
[1:05:18]
| Was a crisis that started and it still hurt quite a lot but they managed to sort of make it so that it was just bad instead of existential like people were worried that correct people were worried that if it didn't if it got completely out of control we'd be at something worse than the great depression in the 1920s and 30s yes um But instead, we got the Great Recession, or whatever.
|
Ivan:
[1:05:44]
| It was bad.
|
Sam:
[1:05:45]
| That was still bad. Just not as bad as it could have been.
|
Ivan:
[1:05:50]
| Not as bad as it could have been, yeah.
|
Sam:
[1:05:51]
| And that whole tangent was because you were saying, well, that time there was a real crisis. This time, we were doing fine.
|
Ivan:
[1:05:58]
| Listen, I had shared the cover of The Economist, October 2024.
|
Sam:
[1:06:05]
| Yes.
|
Ivan:
[1:06:06]
| The cover said, the U.S. economy, the envy of the world. The envy of the world. OK, seven months later, you know, the cover now is that basically, you know what? We just fucking like we fucked ourselves. This is the big I mean, Trump did this. Trump 100 percent without any reason perpetrated this on the American people, period. Period. There was no reason for this. This bastard, and I was hoping maybe, you know, he would do this, could just come in, just coast. You know, he likes Air Force One, and he was looking at trying to get into it. I know he was looking at the Qatari VIP 7478. He's getting pissed off. He wants to be on the 7478. He wants to make it more golden or whatever. I figured he'd be out playing golf and just doing this shit. No. No. No. Let's, let's, on purpose, start, a major crisis for no good reason whatsoever.
|
Sam:
[1:07:11]
| So let me ask a fundamental question here. Do you think, and it's hard to even try to get inside this guy's head, but do you think in his head, he really and truly believes, the tariffs will have an overwhelmingly good effect, even if there's a short-term minor thing?
|
Ivan:
[1:07:31]
| He thinks he's smarter than everybody else, yes. yeah.
|
Sam:
[1:07:33]
| Like like i do you think like he's not we don't think he's actually waking up and saying i'm gonna crash the economy today or do we like.
|
Ivan:
[1:07:44]
| Because he actually shared he shared a video today yes where basically he was saying but basically said that yes that he was on purpose crashing the economy i mean yes now i i i think that maybe maybe he was delusional and he thought that everybody just would say that this is fantastic and the stock market would soar maybe he was delusional on that now he's now he's obviously because he's always like attack attack attack and now he's switching tactics now he's thinking well if you've seen treasury rates.
|
Ivan:
[1:08:21]
| The 10-year treasuries finally started dropping, and the reason it started dropping is because, look, you got $5 trillion of money out of the stock market. It's got to go somewhere. So people have been buying treasuries, okay? People have been buying treasuries and actually moving it offshore. A lot of money has been leaving the U.S. right now, and the dollar went down. So maybe he was, like, all of a sudden today demanding that Powell lower rate. so so maybe he's thinking this is the way to get rates to to be lowered to force powell to lower rates but here's but you've got this is the worst of every world because you've got inflation that is these tariffs are inflationary the dollar dropping is inflationary you'll make them worse and just so if i put a 25 tariff and the dollar drops just.
|
Sam:
[1:09:17]
| To be clear given the amount we import if all of these tariffs stay in place without adjustment, we're not just talking a little bit of inflation. This is a big fucking deal.
|
Ivan:
[1:09:31]
| This is an insane, insane, insane amount of inflation.
|
Sam:
[1:09:37]
| I've also seen it characterized as the biggest tax increase ever in the history of the world. Of the world. Yeah, I was going to say the United States, but yeah.
|
Ivan:
[1:09:47]
| No, but I'm going to say probably the history of the world.
|
Sam:
[1:09:49]
| Yeah, and like, what happened to Republicans being anti-tax? I mean, this is...
|
Ivan:
[1:09:55]
| Fuck, didn't you see today that they were actually right now, because they know that their stupid tax plan is so bad on the fucking deficit that they were considering raising the tax rate on the top earners again?
|
Sam:
[1:10:10]
| I did see that before.
|
Ivan:
[1:10:11]
| The Republicans were actually... You didn't see that?
|
Sam:
[1:10:13]
| No, I did see that.
|
Ivan:
[1:10:15]
| It was... I mean, I'm like, what the fuck is going on now? Which I'm like, okay, I am all for that, but this is where the Republicans are. Not only do they want to pass the most regressive tax increase on Americans ever.
|
Sam:
[1:10:30]
| Well, and just to be absolutely clear, because the tariffs effectively act as a sales tax, where the percentage of your income that you spend on stuff is highest the lower your income is. Right. So these kinds of taxes, tariff kinds of taxes- Are super regressive. Super regressive. And some people are confused by the words regressive and progressive when it comes to taxes. But what it fundamentally means is the less money you make.
|
Ivan:
[1:11:03]
| The more these- I think our audience is not confused by this term.
|
Sam:
[1:11:08]
| Yeah, probably, probably.
|
Ivan:
[1:11:09]
| Okay, all right.
|
Sam:
[1:11:10]
| Then the, so, you know, your Elons of the world- I don't have Lauren Boebert listening to this.
|
Ivan:
[1:11:16]
| Asking whether we, you know, what the hell do you confirm or negate? Negate? Negate? I'm like, I want the fucking... Go to Congress and punch her.
|
Sam:
[1:11:32]
| Which person was that again? Bobert.
|
Ivan:
[1:11:34]
| Bobert.
|
Sam:
[1:11:35]
| Yeah, okay. Yeah. So, yeah, like, biggest tax increase ever under a Republican president. And now, like, yeah, they're...
|
Ivan:
[1:11:49]
| Worst stock market ever by any president being handed. the listen there there has been no president ever handed an economy like this that has managed to ever tank it like this.
|
Sam:
[1:12:03]
| Ever i i was looking at comparing to herbert hoover from you know the crash in 29 in 2029 just to see because i was like well how's donald doing relative to him and actually for like the first six months of the herbert hoover presidency the stock market was, not only fine it was going great i mean it was a bubble and that's what popped well that's what popped yeah but you know but yeah he's he's it's just come right in and like destruction but like and a few like a few weeks back maybe a month or two back i i asked you like because some people were speculating that of course they want to you know tank the economy tank the stock market etc et cetera, because the oligarch class, the Elon Musks and all of these folks- You know what the problem is with that bullshit argument? Let me just say it and then you can react to it again because last time you said, eh, that's plausible. But basically the idea was that everything gets cheap, they're rich enough so that they can survive no problem and buy everything up at pennies on the dollar for when the recovery happens.
|
Ivan:
[1:13:15]
| Well, let me tell you something, okay? There's a chart today that went and crystallized this, showing the top 10 billionaires and how they've fared so far this year. A number of these have been either pro-Trump, like Elon Musk, or cozying or trying to ingratiate themselves with us. All except one. And that guy is the only guy that's made money. And the guy that actually basically called out and said that this guy is a fucking moron, a fraud, and that nobody should vote for him. And that was Warren Buffett.
|
Sam:
[1:13:48]
| Right.
|
Ivan:
[1:13:48]
| And my whole point about this argument that those guys that say that are never that smart to go and, like, do that because they think that everybody else is the sucker. And, you know, and I'm not going to lose. But you know what? It's like Elon Musk and what he's been doing with Tesla. Okay. Listen, that, that, that, that finally it's looking like that horse is breaking. That thing is going to go so much down because, yep, he decided it. I'm the smartest guy and I just, Hey, you know, what do I care about the, you know, me going out there and being political and basically destroying my brand to everybody that really buys my fucking cars. and he's now he's going into a world of pain so I, you know none of those people that say that are ever prepared enough, to have the money to do that the vast majority of time it's very rare, you know two guys that I've seen that are very good at it is Warren Buffett but Warren Buffett was actually advocating actively for not to get this clown to be president because he thought thought it was going to be terrible for everybody. But he went very actively on the defense and he decided, I'm like, well, I'm going to hold the most cash ever.
|
Sam:
[1:15:10]
| So we've said before, Donald Trump is solely motivated by personal benefit to himself. What do we think the personal benefit to himself is out of these actions? Or is he really just so obsessed of like the tariffs of the late 1800s and early 1900s were awesome and that's what we want.
|
Ivan:
[1:15:29]
| Look, right now, he is in a position that I'm sure that he feels of unchallenged power. And I think that to him is more important than anything else. The second thing is that, look, He's he's got to be making money off of this shit somehow. I mean, he was.
|
Sam:
[1:15:52]
| Yeah, we've said here in Miami. We've said before, if nothing else, insider trading on the advanced knowledge that you're going.
|
Ivan:
[1:16:00]
| Oh, fuck. Yeah. I mean, Jesus, come on. And look, he was down here as the markets are imploding. He came down yesterday, flew down to Miami to go to that fucking like golf tournament at his place. The Saudis are paying him off for. listen the money gravy train of money coming into him for x y and z has got to be right now at at full tilt how many memberships how many expenses how many phantom hotel rooms how many every fucking way that they can line his pockets is happening as we speak yeah so right now to him in terms of him and money he is not a guy that's made money on being invested in the stock market He is a guy that has made his money. Well, what the hell? He's never made any money. What am I talking about? The only way that he made his money was on his name.
|
Sam:
[1:16:51]
| Yes. His TV show.
|
Ivan:
[1:16:53]
| And that's what he's doing right now.
|
Sam:
[1:16:55]
| Yes.
|
Ivan:
[1:16:56]
| That's what he's doing right now. This is his best time. It's my name. Who gives a shit? I'm going to get paid. I mean, Sam, the pardoning. Listen, as all of this is going on, as we've got RFK Jr. basically decimating, you know, the health institutions on one side, as we've got Elon running rampant all over the place. But it seems like finally his his time finally may be up. So that's probably going to trail off because he's in a world of problems. OK, which, you know, the one thing that I that I expected. So that's probably going to trail off to some extent at this point. But as all of this was happening, Donald Trump is pardoning criminals left and right for shit. I mean, all of a sudden, oh, this criminal for this, oh, it's pardon. You think there wasn't any, he didn't get any money from pardoning these fucking guys. Come on, man.
|
Sam:
[1:17:49]
| In some of the cases, it's been almost explicit. Like, they're not even hiding it.
|
Ivan:
[1:17:53]
| Right. I mean, he's literally just selling pardons left and right to fucking grifters and criminals. Every fucking week there's another pardon of some fucking criminal that was a fraudster that's unconscionable and he's like, oh, well, I'll just give him a pardon. And right now, with so much other noise, we're not even noticing that.
|
Sam:
[1:18:16]
| No. Yeah. I mean, I noted in passing a couple of those, but I didn't even bother sharing them on our Commissions Corner Slack or anything. I was just like, oh, there's another one.
|
Ivan:
[1:18:27]
| Yeah. There's another. Oh, another guy that stole millions and billions. Oh, well, he's getting pardoned.
|
Sam:
[1:18:36]
| Yeah.
|
Ivan:
[1:18:37]
| I mean.
|
Sam:
[1:18:37]
| So I want to return to a question I asked you before. I want to understand the worst case scenario, because then once we know the worst case scenario, then the next question becomes, at what point do even diehard Republicans decide it's time to do something about it? So what really is the worst case scenario here? I know you said it was uncharted territory, but everything that was announced this week stays and stays permanently. What happens to the economy?
|
Ivan:
[1:19:05]
| What happens to the market? It keeps going down. Look, it doesn't, it's not going to take long for the layoffs to start piling up for the recession to really kick into high gear.
|
Sam:
[1:19:20]
| I mean, some have already been announced in the last 24 hours.
|
Ivan:
[1:19:23]
| But you know what i was reading more specifically about how many small companies that depend on on imported products for them to manufacture stuff or whatever and all of a sudden they're getting hit by these massive increases that are costs okay just just just ridiculous here's one mark cuban shared this is a guy there's a guy a small company called days owl whatever you know the matter is the post on linkedin yesterday days old duties and tariffs were 17.6 today they are 63.6 the word from our government is that these tariffs are our liberation but in reality they are deeply damaging to regular working people tended to punish small business owners for not producing in the united states as if that somehow makes us less american i love my country and i recognize the profound privilege i have to be able to own a small business at all let alone here the reality is that making our goods in the U.S. has been prohibitively expensive for a long time, making our bag prices unattainable for regular folks. As of today, making them abroad is now also prohibitively expensive, which, not for nothing, is going to deeply damage the economies of our allies as well.
|
Ivan:
[1:20:30]
| I have one friend who has, I can't remember what kind of government loan for the government, but the tariffs, also by the government, are crippling. Does he owe the government money back if the tariffs are instituted to affect Crash's business? It's going to put me, my friend, and countless others out of business. If you're a small business in this situation like mine, or my friend's message me or comment below but this is what small businesses that hey you import say furniture for example the other day talking about furniture is a big.
|
Ivan:
[1:20:58]
| Restoration Hardware, which isn't a huge company, but the other day, I mean, they import all their furniture from Asia. I mean, in their call, when they set the tires on Vietnam, because so much of the furniture comes from down there, their stock to crash 25% in one hour. 25% in one hour.
|
Sam:
[1:21:16]
| Yeah.
|
Ivan:
[1:21:17]
| Okay. The CEO was on the call. He heard about the tariffs. He was trying to do an earnings call. You know, one of those things where you schedule an earnings call. I'm sure he probably wanted to find out what was going on but you scheduled this so far in advance you can't really do much about it. He was on the call and they asked him and he was like just the guy almost just choked on the phone. I mean he was just like shit.
|
Sam:
[1:21:38]
| He literally said oh shit.
|
Ivan:
[1:21:40]
| He literally said oh shit. Yeah. He literally said oh shit. And a lot of businesses are going to get hit like this. I remember when I was in Kodak a few years back. And he, you know, he started with this shit with the aluminum tariffs and it hurt bad. It really hurt really, really bad. There was no other place where we could source that aluminum that we, that, that, that we needed. That wasn't from China. And he put a tariff on it and we had asked for an exemption and he refused to grant it. It was a specific type, just nowhere else nobody else had it and you know nope no exceptions so i so like i mean we're.
|
Sam:
[1:22:26]
| Seeing the stock market crash already like.
|
Ivan:
[1:22:29]
| Look let me tell you something the ones that's getting auto dealers are going to get murdered auto dealers are going to get completely completely, completely obliterated okay car sales are going to tank like crazy okay there's just no getting around because in.
|
Sam:
[1:22:49]
| Addition to the national tariffs there's an additional like 25 on cars specific.
|
Ivan:
[1:22:54]
| There's a 25 car tariff but the one thing is that and it's difficult to avoid because it remember you know cars you know even if they're assembled in the u.s yeah exactly the.
|
Sam:
[1:23:04]
| Parts are from everywhere the and usually like things are assembled in units and then brought together and blah blah blah so.
|
Ivan:
[1:23:11]
| There is no.
|
Sam:
[1:23:12]
| Such thing maybe except some ultra luxury like custom car stuff.
|
Ivan:
[1:23:18]
| No there's no such thing as a car that's.
|
Sam:
[1:23:20]
| Made in a single country.
|
Ivan:
[1:23:21]
| There's no such no none of them hell it's totally the opposite of those ultra luxury custom cars because you know hey where are you going to get the you're not going to make specific electronics for them or yeah or a transmission or shit like that you're gonna you're gonna you know you gotta you'll make the engine and a whole bunch of the the seats and that kind of stuff but those components you gotta source them from somewhere the.
|
Sam:
[1:23:43]
| Only car that is truly made in only one country is if i like go cut trees in my yard and make one out of wood myself.
|
Ivan:
[1:23:52]
| Basically yes, You know, the biggest problem with this entire fucking thing is how Trump is so dumb that, as I mentioned before, that the United States has been the number one beneficiary from this global trade that that he is trying to append now. Now, this country has been the number one beneficiary. And, you know, the thing, the issue with, you know, blue collar workers that have been hit by free trade and globalization has to do more with the fact that even though our wealth has been increasing, we didn't address how to make those people whole because the country as a whole was benefiting a lot. Right.
|
Sam:
[1:24:45]
| And instead of doing something where, you know, we actually intentionally redistributed wealth and help out the people who were hurt and blah, blah, blah. Instead of that, we're just like.
|
Ivan:
[1:24:56]
| No, you guys are lazy idiots. Fuck you.
|
Sam:
[1:25:02]
| Yeah, you're damn sure.
|
Ivan:
[1:25:04]
| And now his fix is to try to bring those jobs, which, by the way, technology and a whole bunch of shit has made of that, they're not, you can't really bring them back.
|
Sam:
[1:25:17]
| And again, it keeps bringing up the question, like, You know, is he really dumb or is this on purpose? Is this what he's trying to do? And as you said, he posted something today saying, yeah, it's what I'm trying to do. Now, he it was it was a repost of a video by somebody else. You guys know how that worked. It wasn't still.
|
Ivan:
[1:25:37]
| But anyway, look, I got here. I found this. I wanted to see. I bought a couple of years ago a Volvo S60. And the final assembly for this car was in South Carolina because Volvo put a plant in the United States for final assembly.
|
Sam:
[1:25:53]
| Right.
|
Ivan:
[1:25:53]
| But car finished in the U.S. U.S.-Canadian parts content, 10%. Major sources of foreign parts content, Belgium, 20%. Sweden, 15%. You know, country of origin engine parts, Sweden, transmission parts, Japan. This is a car that was built in the U.S.
|
Sam:
[1:26:17]
| Right.
|
Ivan:
[1:26:18]
| Okay. And basically the U.S. Canadian parts content, 10%.
|
Sam:
[1:26:25]
| So let me ask you the question I was starting to ask a little while ago. We keep going in different directions, but the stock market is crashing immediately. How long before I, as a normal consumer, going about my daily business, not a big purchase like a car, but going about my daily business, is how long before I notice, oh shit, this costs more than it did a few weeks ago?
|
Ivan:
[1:26:51]
| It's going to be the next 30 days. It's not going to take that long. It's not going to take that long. It's going to be the next 30 days.
|
Sam:
[1:26:57]
| Assuming everything stays in place.
|
Ivan:
[1:26:59]
| Yes. It's going to be the next 30 days. It doesn't take that long. I mean, yeah. No, it's not going to take that long.
|
Sam:
[1:27:07]
| And just to size it, compared to the inflation that everybody complained about during COVID.
|
Ivan:
[1:27:15]
| Size was this is the thing is that this is going to be no this is going to be big and this is going to be noticeable it's going to be noticeable right away you're going to be going and then all of a sudden because the one thing is that we had certain items that would go up in price and not others or whatever you're going to be seeing almost everything going up in price just everything, everything everything doesn't matter what the fuck you're buying it's everything, yeah it's really nuts it's everything.
|
Sam:
[1:27:44]
| So what do we think? That whole scenario is based on the assumption that everything stays in place. What do we think really happens? Do you think there's an amount of pain where Donald Trump backs off on his own? Or do you think there's an amount of pain where, as you said, the Republicans in Congress actually act to constrain him? Because the only reason he's doing, by the way, just to clarify on the law, the law says that Congress determines tariffs generally, but under certain emergency situations, the president can make changes. And President Trump declared an emergency that, frankly, is somewhat bogus. I forget even what the excuse was for the emergency.
|
Ivan:
[1:28:26]
| I'm wondering if somebody could just go challenge this in court and get it struck down.
|
Sam:
[1:28:29]
| I'm sure they can. And the question is how, you know, you know how long the courts take.
|
Ivan:
[1:28:34]
| You know, I think that because of the scope.
|
Sam:
[1:28:37]
| The emergency, it could move pretty quickly. Yeah. So like, yeah. So here are the scenarios. Scenario one, this just stays in place and we spiral down the hell hole. Scenario two, at some point it gets bad enough. Trump backs off himself. Scenario three, the courts do something. Scenario four, Congress does something.
|
Ivan:
[1:28:58]
| Well, one thing is that at some point, at some point, well, the number one scenario that I, I, I always have to go back to is the classic Trump scenario, which is that he somehow figures out how to claim a victory.
|
Sam:
[1:29:15]
| Right. Like, and then just, you know, random country makes some random concession and he's like, oh, beautiful. You're back to normal. And then, and then a whole bunch of other countries do the same thing.
|
Ivan:
[1:29:27]
| I mean, that, that.
|
Sam:
[1:29:28]
| And it can be. It can be a meaningless little gesture that he uses to claim victory. But now, even then, like, I guess that's the way out of them.
|
Ivan:
[1:29:38]
| I mean, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's one, I mean, that's one possible scenario because, and I say that one because, you know, it's happened before.
|
Sam:
[1:29:46]
| Well, and you said earlier, there's different levels of fucked. That's the way to get out of the immediate level of fuckitude. But even then, you still have the issue that you've just destroyed the confidence in the whole system. You know, it's not like you're going to pop instantly back to where we were.
|
Ivan:
[1:30:04]
| Well, we're going to get tax cuts and we're going to get deregulation.
|
Sam:
[1:30:10]
| I mean, this ties to like, I mean, he's been destroying foreign policy as well, right? I mean, and we've already had the situation of Europe basically deciding, hell, we have to figure out how to go it alone, assuming that the U.S. isn't on our side. And so essentially you end up with the same situation economically that every place in the world has to figure out what do they do with the actual U.S.
|
Ivan:
[1:30:33]
| Listen, here's a reality. We're fucked. I mean, I'm not going to say fuck forever, but I'm going to tell you that right now. This next decade is a disaster. Okay, look, this is, I wrote this on March 30th. It's the new dark world order that Trump wants. No allies. You just bully everybody. Criminals can pay to wipe their crimes. His cronies will enrich themselves while inflation, unemployment, and poverty rise. He wants the old spheres of influence. Okay, back from like the 1800s, early 1900s pax americana is over yeah it's it's over it's over it's it's done it's over, that's the reality that we are in right now sam and by the way what i said now as a counter true.
|
Sam:
[1:31:19]
| This is true even like donald trump resigns tomorrow and and and vance undoes everything trump did which he probably wouldn't but let's say that happened it does not undo this.
|
Ivan:
[1:31:33]
| I would things have changed look trump dies tomorrow okay i was going with a reside but okay yes trump dies tomorrow i mean it limits the damage sam it does limit the damage but i don't know i'm not saying the reason why i'm saying the reason why i'm saying that well donald trump if.
|
Sam:
[1:31:54]
| He if he's alive will continue to do more and more damage what i what i'm saying is yes it limits the damage if if if vance comes in tomorrow and everybody immediately thinks he's a little bit more rational he undoes some stuff you undo some of the damage all i'm saying is you're not doing undoing all of.
|
Ivan:
[1:32:10]
| It well you're not undoing all of it but but you know yeah there is stuff that you're you're it's not coming back like right right trump broke certain things for good I mean this entire thing, in terms of the security relationship that, Europe had with the United States is over I mean the Europeans can't trust the United States anymore on that no matter who comes in no matter who comes in because they can't trust.
|
Sam:
[1:32:46]
| That will remain for whoever's next after that.
|
Ivan:
[1:32:49]
| Exactly so that's over and it makes it that it's A much more unstable world in a certain extent, because the reason is because you've got a lot more countries that are going to arm themselves to the teeth. And like the same thing is, you know, having more guns on the streets doesn't make the streets safer. So, so having a lot more countries, you know, even if they are countries that I aligned with and agree with just so many armed isn't, isn't, isn't great. I will say this.
|
Sam:
[1:33:24]
| That I was thinking about the same kind of thing economically as well. Like it's not going to be helpful to the world overall if every country decides they have to figure out how to maximize how well they'll do if they can't trade freely internationally. Yeah.
|
Ivan:
[1:33:41]
| I was also going to say that the Democrats need their own project. Well, I said 2026 and Bob said 2025 Q20 should be like right now. But but in terms of.
|
Sam:
[1:33:56]
| Well, I just want to say that here is one thing like I was I was saying like in 2021 that the Democrats desperately needed to do shock and awe themselves then while they had a chance. and of course they did not have.
|
Ivan:
[1:34:14]
| The right senate to do that joe.
|
Sam:
[1:34:17]
| Biden wasn't in the mood for it but i mean my god in.
|
Ivan:
[1:34:20]
| 2021 listen they should have.
|
Sam:
[1:34:22]
| Reformed the supreme court they should have added states they should have done voter.
|
Ivan:
[1:34:26]
| Legislation listen listen okay monday okay but monday morning quarterback right it's not monday.
|
Sam:
[1:34:32]
| Morning when i was saying it back then.
|
Ivan:
[1:34:34]
| Yeah yeah yeah but but look i i think that a lot of people including myself you know i was like look you gotta let biden you know do it his way and you know his way was hey maybe instead of continuing to antagonize we try to do something that works for everybody and we try to get this country back that way.
|
Sam:
[1:34:57]
| Than anybody expected.
|
Ivan:
[1:34:58]
| Exactly and it just you know and and let's be clear he got older people like you know what happened politically is what happened politically and the democrats weren't good at countering the messages and so and the economy was the economy and they want and and you know so it didn't matter that the economy was so what everybody just saw what's.
|
Sam:
[1:35:24]
| Your democratic project 2020.
|
Ivan:
[1:35:26]
| No my my thing is that i think it needs to start right now i'll tell you I'll tell you where things need to start. I think that, like right now, Richard had suggested that, and I thought at first, that's too early for that, but he's not wrong, that the Democrats need to figure out who the fuck their leader is and to create a shadow cabinet. And that is not a crazy idea. And I will tell you why that is not a crazy idea, because beside that shadow cabinet, you need to work with a number of NGOs and rich donors.
|
Ivan:
[1:36:01]
| To create structures okay like right now to cover for the shit that trump is destroying in government in terms of health care education and other shit to provide that guidance and to counter the stupid messaging that they are doing and to be able to provide resources to oh oh they took away your resources no here they are okay yeah and that needs to happen both at at a u.s level and at a global level and so but what you need is the democrats need to pick okay i don't know maybe they're not the president but somebody that needs to be the leader of this we need to have these people that who the fuck is our person who shadows rfk jr who shadows the treasury secretary who shadows these people and it's like okay rfk jr goes today and says well this is bad more like no fuck you this is our commission where all of that shit he said is wrong this is the way this should be and it's gotta be you have to be basically tit for tot every fucking minute every fucking thing they say you're up there on on a bully pulpit and you're fucking countering every single piece of no i i absolutely i.
|
Sam:
[1:37:05]
| Absolutely agree i mean i think the i don't know that the democrats are organized or unified enough to actually pull it off but i think you're absolutely right they should.
|
Ivan:
[1:37:14]
| They should be and.
|
Sam:
[1:37:15]
| And i i remember saying you know right after the election, you know.
|
Ivan:
[1:37:22]
| Hell, I saw Kamala and Obama come out of the woods.
|
Sam:
[1:37:25]
| Yes, yes.
|
Ivan:
[1:37:25]
| What the fuck? I'm like, hey, Kamala.
|
Sam:
[1:37:27]
| No, I mean, that's what we need. Look, I was like, look, there is no need to wait for after midterms. The 2028 presidential election should be going right now.
|
Ivan:
[1:37:38]
| Fuck that.
|
Sam:
[1:37:39]
| And I don't care. Like, they don't have to obviously actually pick the candidate it quite yet, but you need strong Democrats out there. Yes. With the visibility of running for president and making their case right now, right now, don't wait.
|
Ivan:
[1:37:59]
| Don't wait.
|
Sam:
[1:38:00]
| If, if Harris, you know, I know you're thinking about running for governor, but if you, if you have any thoughts whatsoever running for president again, start right now. AOC start right now, you know, right now. Buttigieg, start right now.
|
Ivan:
[1:38:13]
| Right now.
|
Sam:
[1:38:13]
| What's his name? The guy who just did the filibuster thing? Right. Booker. Booker. Start right now. Hell, even the stupid guy in California who I don't like. If you're serious about it, start right now. All of you people, start and use that to make noise. And it's really tempting to make it all about how bad Trump is, but it really has to be your vision too. It has to be your counter.
|
Ivan:
[1:38:42]
| And that's my point by having the cabinet, which is where you're having these people that know this is the vision that we should have.
|
Sam:
[1:38:50]
| And who know deeply about the specific areas.
|
Ivan:
[1:38:53]
| This is what we do in healthcare. this is what the you know you need to have that this is the plan and this is what we're doing this is how we're fixing shit as soon as possible and.
|
Sam:
[1:39:04]
| Like you said even on simple things like okay the cdc isn't gonna put out updates on xyz anymore because they.
|
Ivan:
[1:39:12]
| Fired everybody we're collecting the data we're gonna set up the website we're gonna call the data we're hiring those people we're getting you know we're getting donations we're gonna hire these people are gonna bring over here and we're fucking you know we're we're covering what the government is doing we.
|
Sam:
[1:39:25]
| We can't necessarily make up for everything that gets, you know, because the budgets are just.
|
Ivan:
[1:39:30]
| We can make up for a lot.
|
Sam:
[1:39:31]
| But we can make up for a lot. I mean, during COVID CDC was not the best source of COVID data.
|
Ivan:
[1:39:37]
| No, it wasn't.
|
Sam:
[1:39:38]
| You know, there were volunteer efforts who had more up to date, real time data that they collected from all sorts of places and brought together, you know, and those kinds of efforts could work in a whole bunch of different areas. But I think you're absolutely right. The messaging, the real time counter messaging has to be there and has to be strong. And it has to be none of this like, oh, we're going to wait a week and then we're going to do like Medicare day.
|
Ivan:
[1:40:07]
| No, no, no, no, no, no, no. This needs to be, we need to be out there. They need to be battling. And you know what Cory Booker did was the right approach. Fuck this shit. We need to do that every fucking week. The hell with this shit.
|
Sam:
[1:40:20]
| Now my one criticism like is is i i think absolutely got a bunch of attention and got a, energized who weren't before. But at the same time, it didn't actually block any business. Right after he was done, they fucking confirmed Dr. Oz. Like, could you have like maybe delayed Dr. Oz instead? Like there's another senator, I think it was Schiff, who's announced that he's doing that. You remember that one Republican senator who held up the promotion of generals for like months.
|
Ivan:
[1:40:55]
| Right. Right.
|
Sam:
[1:40:56]
| Because it was one guy blocking it. Freaking do that for everybody.
|
Ivan:
[1:41:01]
| They need to be for everybody. Yeah.
|
Sam:
[1:41:02]
| Pick a senator for every nominee. Who's willing to block that.
|
Ivan:
[1:41:07]
| Nah, we're blocking that. Nah, we're blocking this.
|
Sam:
[1:41:10]
| Exactly.
|
Ivan:
[1:41:11]
| This needs to be, we need to stop acquiescing to anything.
|
Sam:
[1:41:15]
| Right.
|
Ivan:
[1:41:16]
| Anything.
|
Sam:
[1:41:18]
| Yeah. I mean, I can somewhat understand the argument of, okay, shutting down the government would have been worse. Let that go. But like for things like nominating Dr. Oz and letting him take office as whatever the hell he's doing. No, there's no reason to allow that to go through. you know and and yes do you can he like do some temporary appointment in the meantime and still do damage of course he can but don't let dr oz in block it the senate rules are set up you the minority the one person can't block something forever but they can delay it they can stretch it out they can they can make a show of it they can do that stuff and and you know i i think Cory Booker was a good move in that direction. We need more. Another thing that's been brought up, apparently this weekend there's protests all over the country that aren't getting a lot of attention, but they're building up momentum and steam. I don't know if I can actually make the one tomorrow, so I feel like a hypocrite saying this, but, you know, start doing this.
|
Ivan:
[1:42:30]
| The only reason, we were going to go tomorrow to one here, but the thing is that I'm still, listen, my wife's Achilles is still an issue, okay?
|
Sam:
[1:42:39]
| And you're coughing all over everybody.
|
Ivan:
[1:42:41]
| And I'm coughing all over everybody, so I'm not, I don't know.
|
Sam:
[1:42:47]
| But even the little things matter. And people have pointed out, by the way, that the administration has actually backed off on a few things that have gotten a lot of negative attention. And maybe they'll end up backing off on some of the tariff stuff. But like they they have indeed on certain areas, certain limited areas, but where one particular thing or another has gotten a lot of attention and people have been mocking them over it. They've backed off. And so I mean.
|
Ivan:
[1:43:17]
| The negative attention does matter. I saw that fucking idiot, the total idiot, RFK Jr. Oh, we fired the people that were doing, you know, saving people from getting poisoned with lead pipes. Oh, yeah, we need to bring those back. I'm so sick and tired of hearing these assholes say this over and over.
|
Sam:
[1:43:39]
| I think RFK Jr. specifically said that probably 20% of the people we fired, we shouldn't have.
|
Ivan:
[1:43:45]
| What kind of a fucking jerk off does this? I mean, I, I, I, it's, he's fucking, if I, I, I better not bump into these people in person. I'm going to get arrested, Sam. If I fucking see RFK Jr., I'm going to fucking punch him.
|
Sam:
[1:44:04]
| Hey, hey, Yvonne, just to be clear, you would not just be arrested. You would be arrested, shoved in a dark plane and sent to a prison in El Salvador.
|
Ivan:
[1:44:14]
| Fuck.
|
Sam:
[1:44:16]
| Let's be clear on that. The fact that you are a citizen does not matter.
|
Ivan:
[1:44:21]
| Hey, hey, hey.
|
Sam:
[1:44:22]
| Like, your point, that doesn't really count anyway. You know.
|
Ivan:
[1:44:25]
| Well, listen, I do have some very high-powered attorneys on call that are connected. I'd probably be able to get some pull.
|
Sam:
[1:44:35]
| They won't even find you. You'll be disappeared. You'll be gone.
|
Ivan:
[1:44:39]
| Well, you know, I'm a squirrely little guy. I can, you know, look, look, if it happens like near here, I know where the NetJets place is. I'm fucking taking the, putting the Amex, my, my, my Amex, I, I can, I can charge a private plane on my fucking Amex. I'm like, fuck this shit. I'm like, you know, all of a sudden I'm, you know, Sam. Yeah. I'm on, I'm on, I'm on a jet on the way to, I'm not sure where yet. I got to talk to the pilot where there's no extradition treaty.
|
Sam:
[1:45:11]
| Ah, yes. Yes.
|
Ivan:
[1:45:13]
| So it'll be something like that.
|
Sam:
[1:45:15]
| On that note we should probably close it up Yvonne.
|
Ivan:
[1:45:20]
| God the fuck why why you know you know america you fucking morons why why.
|
Sam:
[1:45:30]
| Why ivan it's clear it's because kamala kamala sorry kamala would not make pro-palestinian statements and was too supportive as his assholes and so you know oh and and eggs and the price of eggs oh and oh yeah we we don't want those trans people playing college sports yeah yeah and yeah that that kind of stuff that's that's it and you know and we don't want a black woman because that would be definitely.
|
Ivan:
[1:46:08]
| Don't want a black woman definitely don't want don't want one of those that's for fucking sure.
|
Sam:
[1:46:13]
| Obviously not our actual opinions just to be clear well.
|
Ivan:
[1:46:17]
| I mean you married one you know probably one of the smartest things you did.
|
Sam:
[1:46:22]
| So um i mean okay weird i dated.
|
Ivan:
[1:46:27]
| I dated a couple i can get married to one.
|
Sam:
[1:46:30]
| Yeah there you go i.
|
Ivan:
[1:46:34]
| Mean women are fucking smart but our country hates them.
|
Sam:
[1:46:39]
| Yeah. You know, I, I've heard the argument stated usually as a joke, but like, I'm not so sure I'd be upset by this saying, you know, basically men got to run the hunt, the country for 250 years or whatnot. You know, why don't we just outlaw men in politics for the next hundred to even it up a little?
|
Ivan:
[1:47:01]
| I'd be good with that. You know, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm down for that.
|
Sam:
[1:47:06]
| You know, I remember saying when we were in the run up for 2020 and we did end up with Joe Biden, but like the thing that I kept saying is how about we just have a rule straight up, no straight white men, like whoever we pick, no straight white men, they've enough, you know, and I am one, but I don't care. We've had enough of those. Let's do something different.
|
Ivan:
[1:47:28]
| Exactly. Enough of you fucking guys. Seriously.
|
Sam:
[1:47:34]
| Okay. Hey, everybody. you know, the deal curmudgeons hyphen corner.com. You'll find out all our transcripts, all the way to, all the ways to contact us, our archives, going back to the beginning, all that fun stuff. Uh, no link to Tik TOK yet. I mean, they've kicked it off another 75 days. Maybe I'll add the link in the next 75 days, but you know, the second I add the link, it'll be banned forever. That's just how it would work, you know? Um, but yeah. And of course a link to our Patreon. So you can give us money. and at various levels we will mention you on the show we will ring a bell we will send you a postcard we will send you a mug i still owe stuff to pete greg and egg egg not not egg pete.
|
Ivan:
[1:48:17]
| Greg and egg egg.
|
Sam:
[1:48:18]
| Pete greg and ed i will make sure to send your stuff by the end of the month let's not, things are still crazy for me for at least another week but after that i'll be in seattle in july and ivan will be in seattle in july well assuming that you know the infrastructure still works to allow intercontinental travel or intra-continental travel.
|
Ivan:
[1:48:47]
| I should say yeah you.
|
Sam:
[1:48:49]
| Know like yeah you by the time we get to july ivan the only way to get to seattle might be to walk with a machete battling all of the people between here and there well.
|
Ivan:
[1:49:01]
| You know for for what it's worth. I have done the, you know, in Puerto Rico, I've had to go through, like, the whips, using a machete. So I've done that.
|
Sam:
[1:49:13]
| So you're prepared.
|
Ivan:
[1:49:15]
| I am prepared for that kind of, it's a long time, so I've done this, but I have some preparation for this.
|
Sam:
[1:49:22]
| So you are prepared, you will do the journey.
|
Ivan:
[1:49:27]
| From Miami to Seattle.
|
Sam:
[1:49:29]
| With a machete walking.
|
Ivan:
[1:49:32]
| I'm sure that won't draw any attention. Make sure I get a very big, rusty machete.
|
Sam:
[1:49:38]
| Oh, yeah. That won't get you to a pompadour.
|
Ivan:
[1:49:41]
| Yeah.
|
Sam:
[1:49:44]
| Okay. Yeah. Anyway, at $2 a month or more, or if you just ask, we'll add you to the Commudgeons Corner Slack, where Yvonne and I are chatting throughout the week about all kinds of wondrous stuff that would make you want to join us, and chat with us. And you're missing out if you're not there. Now, I'll be honest. Most of the talk in the last 48 hours has been about the exact same thing we've been talking about on the show. The tariffs and the impending economic disaster. But do you have something that's not that you want to highlight for them to come up? Yes.
|
Ivan:
[1:50:22]
| On April Fool's Day, I fell for one.
|
Sam:
[1:50:25]
| You fell for one. Yes.
|
Ivan:
[1:50:27]
| And i shared it on on on on on our random channel where okay i get this notification from flight radar 24 that fucking concord is flying from lhr to jfk and i'm like what the fuck and i i go and i open it and they've got this fucking they're tracking a concord from lhr to JFK. Now, the thing is, the reason why I didn't immediately just think it was April Fool's was because there had been a couple of people that had been trying to, actively get one of the BA Concords, the one that was more closer to being flyable to fly again. So I had read a couple of times that there were a couple of people that were obsessed, look, just go to get one of these to fly again. Okay. But then I, I go and I, I look at it and I realize I'm like, wait now. Oh, fucking April fools. You fucking bastards.
|
Sam:
[1:51:37]
| Now I really, I.
|
Ivan:
[1:51:39]
| I, I really, I really wanted that to be true.
|
Sam:
[1:51:42]
| I only realized just now that you were actually fooled. I thought you were sharing it just like, Oh, cool. April fools.
|
Ivan:
[1:51:48]
| I didn't realize you were actually fooled. I got fooled for a little bit. I went and I'm like, they had not done. I look, I've had flight radar 24 for, I don't know how long they never, I don't recall them ever having done this before. So, I mean, I just get, you know, they always have this thing about unique flights to track. Okay. So they'll pop up, Hey, this airplane, uh, you know, the first eight, three 51,000, you know, when that happened is making its maiden flight from, uh, whatever it's so, so, and so forth, you know, Hey, a seven, eight, seven. is making its final test flight you know stuff like that so you get a notification so so getting a notification like this of some unique flight you know isn't uncommon and so all of a sudden i see i mean you know concord is flying to lhr gfk i'm like wait what and then yeah it took me a minute or two and then i realized oh fuck you you assholes you fucking assholes i really wanted that to be true. And I believe that the tail number that they used yeah they used a real tail number from a Concord. And it's the one that I have a picture of in my son's room.
|
Sam:
[1:53:05]
| Okay.
|
Ivan:
[1:53:07]
| So, you know, because it's not like they fucking even used a real tail number for a fucking Concord that I know exists. So I'm like, what the fuck? So, yeah, but no.
|
Sam:
[1:53:20]
| Concord. You know, I don't think any April Fool's jokes got me this year. And I think, look, the other thing is, I think there was sort of a golden era in like the early 2000s where all kinds of internet websites made April Fool's jokes. And a lot of them were actually funny and they were amusing. And, you know, the one people always talk about is Think Geek making the Tauntaun sleeping bag from Star Wars. And so many people liked it that they ended up actually making it and selling it a few months later. But there were all kinds of others, and it was funny. And then all the brands started getting in and trying to do something, and then it got really overplayed. It got overplayed, it got dumb, and it wasn't enjoyable anymore.
|
Ivan:
[1:54:11]
| Well, this one isn't an April Fool's joke, but it kind of is okay okay newsmax at this something else that i shared on the slack newsback had its ipo and its ipo was on april 1st okay right away all right so but this was not a fool's this this was not an april fool's joke the initial price just these were priced at what i think it was seven dollars a share or something that was the initial price this the stock hit a high of 272 dollars wow and then and then and then proceeded to collapse to 45 dollars and 30 cents now it it just look so yeah so we had that going on during this week too where we had the only other other.
|
Sam:
[1:55:04]
| The only other April Fool's thing I want to mention to sort of tie into the theme of the show is that for several weeks prior to Liberation Day for the big tariff announcements, Donald Trump repeatedly said over and over that he actually wanted to have them take, wanted to have the announcement on April 1st, but he couldn't because of April Fool's Day. And so he pushed it to April 2nd instead.
|
Ivan:
[1:55:31]
| Nice. Well.
|
Sam:
[1:55:33]
| Okay but yeah.
|
Ivan:
[1:55:34]
| So you don't think you're not gonna buying any newsmax stock i take it i.
|
Sam:
[1:55:38]
| Mean it started.
|
Ivan:
[1:55:38]
| It opened yeah it's like.
|
Sam:
[1:55:40]
| Okay let me ask because right after like in our i think it was our prediction show in december one of the things we or maybe it was some other show but we talked about what were the right investment vehicles for a donald trump presidency and we said well obviously DJT. How's it doing? Everything else is crashing. How's DJT?
|
Ivan:
[1:56:02]
| Let me, okay. It's a great question. Let's, let's check this out. Hold on. Hold on. Uh, where are you? Where'd you go? Where'd you go? Okay. All right. Let's go back to DJT. DJT, DJT. Okay, here we go. DJT is at, it's down to 17 bucks. So.
|
Sam:
[1:56:27]
| How's that compared to its high?
|
Ivan:
[1:56:29]
| Yeah, I don't know. The peak of DJT, it opened, let's see. uh it had been at 62 dollars was its peak when.
|
Sam:
[1:56:46]
| When was the peak.
|
Ivan:
[1:56:47]
| This was about you know this is not supposed to be a hard question a year ago it was a year ago okay i'm just and so it it had it had collapsed to 13 dollars right before his inauguration it soared back up to right.
|
Sam:
[1:57:05]
| Before the election it looked.
|
Ivan:
[1:57:06]
| Yeah right it's short back up to 40 something dollars and now it's back to 17 it's worth 3.8 billion dollars okay it's worth 3.8 billion dollars it has earnings per share of, total revenue of 3.6 million dollars and it has an ebitda okay is that an ebitda of negative 183 million dollars but.
|
Sam:
[1:57:30]
| By the way i did also see news this week that some of donald trump's lockups expired this week as well so he's now free to sell a bunch of this stuff if he wants to.
|
Ivan:
[1:57:38]
| Uh yeah well i'm sure that at some point he's uh he's gonna cash out some of this shit but yeah right now it's worth 3.7.
|
Sam:
[1:57:46]
| I heard speculation that now that twitter has merged with xai they will buy djt well.
|
Ivan:
[1:57:54]
| I mean elon.
|
Sam:
[1:57:54]
| Not not for any monetary value of the actual stock but just you know to as you have said all of this stuff is vehicles to bribe donald trump up.
|
Ivan:
[1:58:04]
| I mean, it makes sense. I mean, look, that we had that. I mean, that was something that just happened this week to the X. Yes, that happened. I mean, you have the X, XAI.
|
Sam:
[1:58:15]
| The week before, I think, actually.
|
Ivan:
[1:58:16]
| But yeah, it was like, yeah, I was like, it was like while you were gone.
|
Sam:
[1:58:19]
| While you were gone.
|
Ivan:
[1:58:20]
| It was a week ago at most. We did the X, XAI merger. And again, number one thing. OK, and I double check this. OK, the the the price at which he did the the the the the deal that he basically gave shares to his other investors basically gave him a 25 percent haircut. OK, at that exchange. But but it was better than where they were before. It was seven days ago. Exactly. So, yeah. So so they got the 25 percent haircut. But here's the reality. Elon paid with his own money $33 billion for it, using XAI shares to buy X shares. But he had stuffed X with a whole bunch of XAI shares anyway. So the reality is that by diluting his partners 25%, he gets to own more of those XAI shares than they did. So he wound up fucking, you know, as usual, fucking his partners again.
|
Sam:
[1:59:26]
| There you go. Okay, now we're going to say goodbye for real, Yvonne.
|
Ivan:
[1:59:30]
| All right.
|
Sam:
[1:59:31]
| We are done. Everybody, have a great week. Have fun, but not too much fun. Stay safe, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Try not, you know, don't look too much at the markets. Don't jump out of any windows, you know, and we'll be here to talk again next week, hopefully, if all goes well. Goodbye.
|
Ivan:
[1:59:53]
| Bye. Thank you.
|
Sam:
[2:00:24]
| Thank you. Okay, here we go. hitting stop. Take care of yourself. Get better.
|
Ivan:
[2:00:30]
| Working on it.
|
Sam:
[2:00:33]
| Later.
| |
|
