Automated Transcript
Sam:
[0:23]
| Welcome to Curmudgeon's Corner for Saturday, November 15th, 2025. It's 1946, UTC, as we're starting to record today. I'm Sam Minter, and we did hope to have Yvonne Bowe back today, but he let me know a few days ago that he's still recovering. He's still not feeling great. Specifically, he can't sit for too long at a single stretch as he recovers from his surgery. So he's, he, he bowed out for another week and I asked for volunteers. And so we have Todd again, Todd joined us. What was it? A couple of months ago, a few months ago. Yeah.
|
Todd:
[1:04]
| I don't know.
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Sam:
[1:05]
| I have a list somewhere. It was back in May. Yeah.
|
Todd:
[1:12]
| I was thinking April or May. It was tariff season when I joined.
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Sam:
[1:16]
| Yeah. And so we, we talked about tariffs and all that, but Todd has volunteered to be with us again. As usual, when I have a guest, the guest controls the agenda. So I'm going to turn it over for Todd in a bit and we'll just have, you know, have a conversation about whatever Todd wants to talk about. And then hopefully next week, Yvonne will feel good enough to actually join us on the show again. So here we go.
|
Todd:
[1:42]
| Yeah. I'm so intrigued now, though, because I don't know the nature of his surgery and we don't need to talk about it now.
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Sam:
[1:48]
| Well, he's talked about it on the show, so it's okay. He had a hernia. Ah, okay. So.
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Todd:
[1:55]
| So if he cannot sit for long periods, does that mean he has to stand and walk around or does that mean he has to lay down? I'm just, I'm curious if I ever need to have this stuff.
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Sam:
[2:04]
| You know, I haven't asked all those details. He's been actively participating in our curmudgeon's core Slack. So he's obviously not like completely like knocked out, unable to do anything. I think it's just, he said he couldn't sit for long periods of time.
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Todd:
[2:19]
| So i think.
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Sam:
[2:20]
| It's probably more like he can sit he can sit for a while but then he has to get up and move around and do stuff i i don't think.
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Todd:
[2:26]
| He's like.
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Sam:
[2:27]
| Bedridden but you know yeah but clearly it's uncomfortable if he.
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Todd:
[2:32]
| Stays in the.
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Sam:
[2:33]
| Same position for too long and so you know these podcasts are usually like two hours long or so and you know we could have done a short one i could have been like yvonne we can do 15 minutes it's cool.
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Todd:
[2:44]
| But uh but.
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Sam:
[2:45]
| Yeah he was like dad out the you know i'm out so.
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Todd:
[2:48]
| Well that's too bad but it means we.
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Sam:
[2:53]
| It means we get you todd and.
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Todd:
[2:55]
| You know so so.
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Sam:
[2:57]
| What did you want to talk about today todd.
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Todd:
[2:58]
| I i had a few things on my mind that i wrote to you and we just go in the order that i put them in my stream of consciousness email curious because you've you as long as i've known you even though we've been out of regular contact for decades, you seem like a real wonk paying attention to political data and results and polling and things like that and i don't i rely on people like you to give me the big picture of the analysis so forth, very encouraged by the voting results in pennsylvania where i live and even in the county west moreland county where i live which is you know pennsylvania has become a purple state the last few elections and my county has been a red county for even longer than that.
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Todd:
[3:49]
| But we we saw encouraging results i think here locally and certainly statewide the statewide results were national news you know that we at pennsylvania has a strange way of electing supreme court judges they they get elected and then 10 years later there's a vote on whether to retain them okay yep no judge has ever been no judge has ever not been retained they may elect to retire you know step down whatever so the people were worried because there was a lot of pack money coming into the state to vote no on retention but they wound up winning with something like 69 70 of the vote and then like here locally i am in in my red county in my red town and school district a democrat won one of the school board positions that's not going to make national news but it's unusual you know and and i gotta say that our school board is not controversial right we don't have people out trying to push religious instruction there's no strong pushes to ban books or things like that they they're mostly republicans but mostly you know good old fashioned Republicans and not the sort of MAGA brand that you see too frequently now.
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Todd:
[5:09]
| And like one of the little towns here, Jeanette has been solid Republican. One of these old manufacturing towns in decline for decades, elected a Democrat mayor for the first time in a while as well. So this is, this is my, you know, local and Pennsylvania view of.
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Todd:
[5:27]
| I'm going on faith, Sam, that you're more aware of nationwide data or maybe other examples like mine. How did it look two weeks ago?
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Sam:
[5:39]
| It looked very good for the Democrats. That's the one-line summary. But let me give you some more examples. There's a person, the account name is Tanneel. They are even more of a wonk than I am. They have all kinds of tracking that they do for a website called BOLTS, B-O-L-T-S, that tracks all kinds of local races and stuff all across the country. And so they posted a multi-part summary of the results that night. And this was as of 3 p.m. Wednesday, so the day after the election day. And I'll read these to you in a second. I'll also mention real quick, before I forget, last week we didn't really talk about the election results on the show because we had guests on last week, too, and they chose other topics.
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Sam:
[6:32]
| But I will mention that this last week and next week, actually, I was a guest on another podcast called UMSUR, which I've mentioned on the show a few times. And in both of those episodes, one that's out right now and one that'll be out this coming week, they released on Wednesdays. I did talk about the local elections with the two hosts of that show. So I encourage folks to also tune in to UMSUR and check that out. Okay, in the meantime, here is Tanneel's summary. And this is somewhat long, but I think the length actually makes the point. Okay, so let me start. California's Proposition 50 wins. Virginia Democrats flip governor, lieutenant governor, attorney general.
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Sam:
[7:22]
| Democrats defend New Jersey governor. Democrats gain legislative seats in Virginia and New Jersey. Democrats win New Jersey and Virginia trifectas. Momdani wins in New York. Pennsylvania Democrats win state Supreme Court. Maine anti-male voting measure loses. Georgia Democrats flip two statewide offices. Coloradoans fund free school meals. Larry Krasner and Bragg win DA races. I'm not sure where those are because I don't remember the names. Seattle GOP prosecutor down big. Democrats flip Connecticut towns such as Bristol, Milford, New Britain, and Stratford. Charlotte approves a transit tax. J.D. Vance's half-brother loses.
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Sam:
[8:10]
| Conservatives lose seats on large school boards in Pennsylvania, Texas, and Colorado. Mississippi Democrats break the GOP's Senate supermajority. Minnesota Democrats successfully defend the state Senate. Democrats hold tough legislative districts in New York and Washington, miss out on a New Hampshire flip. Pennsylvania Democrats win two open statewide judge seats. Pennsylvania Democrats flip Erie County Executive, Bucks County DA, and Sheriff. Pennsylvania Democrats defend county executives in Lehigh and Northampton. Democrats flip boards of New York, Onondaga, and Dutchess counties, a first in decades, and Pennsylvania's Luzerne County. Progressives may flip the Aurora Council and keep the Spokane Council. Only Republican on the Orlando Council loses. Democrats sweep Tucson. Large bond tax measures for infrastructure housing approved in Columbus, Denver, and Knoxville.
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Sam:
[9:20]
| Minnesota Mayor Jacob Fry re-elected. Mary Sheffield wins Detroit Mayor. GOP holds Columbia and Manchester Mayor. This says Seattle Mayor unknown, but since Election Day, the more progressive candidate has actually won in Seattle. Albuquerque and Jersey City runoffs. New York City housing measures pass. Proposition 6 does not. And that's his long list. And then you can click through to his website and get even more. But it's win after win after win after win for the Democrats. And it's in some of these, the Democrats were expected to win, but they won by larger margins than were expected as well. So all in all, a very big, successful win for the Democrats that day, bigger than expected in most places. And of course, you know, the tea leaf reading is, well, what does this mean for midterms next year or even the presidency in 2028? And, you know, The real answer is, who knows? Lots can happen in a year, let alone in three years.
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Sam:
[10:31]
| But it's much better than the other way, as far as Democrats are concerned, for sure. And it definitely shows that as of right now, if you look into some of the additional reporting on this, there's a lot where Democrats are just fired up right now and Republicans are not. And so a lot of this may simply be Democrats bothering to turn out and Republicans not. A part of it may also be sort of the squishy folks in the middle who were voting Republican last year deciding that, you know, hey, this hasn't turned out quite the way I expected it to, so maybe I'll flip. And so there's some combination of those effects. But, you know, So you're not wrong. Your examples in Pennsylvania were not isolated to Pennsylvania. This was nationwide and moves in the Democratic direction all over the country.
|
Todd:
[11:32]
| I am not surprised by some of the things that you read. And you said that yourself already. It's interesting. You live in Seattle. The more progressive candidate won in Seattle, was it sort of like a Bernie Sanders running against Tim Kaine kind of race? Was it that sort of race or was it a genuine Democrat versus Republican?
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Sam:
[11:54]
| It was a centrist Democrat versus a progressive Democrat.
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Todd:
[12:00]
| Yeah, interesting. And, you know, Mom Donnie, I know there was the, how am I forgetting the former governor inserting himself as an independent candidate? Cuomo Cuomo yeah I don't know how I forgot that name Cuomo but, Mondani, maybe also surprising, but not terribly surprising that Cuomo, I don't know if Cuomo thought he was actually going to win or if he was just trying to give it to the Republican and to steal votes and give it to the Republican out of Spagano.
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Sam:
[12:38]
| Honestly, I thought he was, I thought he thinks, thought he was going to win. I thought he jumped in wanting this and figured he would actually run away with it and was surprised when that didn't happen. Yeah, because I think he has that kind of ego. And I thought, I think that as well, he thought, you know, well, of course, nobody's going to vote for this like crazy socialist over me. You know, I think if anything, he thought Adams was the competition that we would have to worry about. And that just turned out not to be the case.
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Sam:
[13:11]
| And uh new york fairly resoundingly rejected hey you know forget about you know there are a lot of things that have been said positive about mamdani and his policies and his attitude and his social media skills and all that kind of stuff i mean there have been negative things said about his policies as well just to be clear but yeah but i think there's a key element here i mean adams was corrupt and on the take and you know he was taking bribes and the only reason the charges were dropped was because he made a deal with trump to help trump you know and and get the charges dropped and meanwhile you've got cuomo who you had a whole bunch of sexual harassment issues which is why he was chased out of the governorship but also there was a lot of malfeasance related to covid that people uncovered.
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Sam:
[14:06]
| During that time period, he was doing things that arguably resulted in additional deaths that should not have happened otherwise. There's questions about how he dealt with long-term care, housing for the elderly, and the rules that were associated with those, and all kinds of other things. People were very unhappy with him. That's why he is not governor anymore. So, I mean, if anything I mean I was discouraged by how well he was actually doing but encouraged by the fact that he in fact lost I mean both Adams and Cuomo should have been like.
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Sam:
[14:44]
| Disqualified on the face of it. Like, if you didn't like Mandami, fine. Maybe there's somebody else out there. But these two in particular, you know, absolutely deserve to be ridden out of town on a rail.
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Todd:
[14:57]
| They, they are accused, certainly, and probably guilty, right?
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Sam:
[15:04]
| Yeah.
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Todd:
[15:05]
| Innocent until proven guilty and benefit of the doubt and everything else. But if they were just ordinary private citizens who did these things in a private employer, they'd be gone and probably criminally charged.
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Sam:
[15:17]
| Yeah.
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Todd:
[15:17]
| So, yeah, I agree with you. That should be disqualifying. And I didn't mean to go down the New York City rabbit hole, but I'm fascinated by your take because I know that you pay closer attention to these political details than I do. What I was going to say is, okay, a lot of these are unsurprising. Seattle mayor, New York City mayor, some Democrat was going to win New York City. But some of the other results that you ran down that I was not aware of, Erie County, Pennsylvania, Bucks County, Pennsylvania, Luzerne County, Pennsylvania, and Onondaga, I think you were trying to say. Onondaga, one of the Finger Lake, it's one of the Finger Lake counties in New York. D's are rural or like small town, you know, I mean, Erie, there is a city of Erie, but that's a pretty.
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Sam:
[15:58]
| It's not a big countywide.
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Todd:
[16:00]
| Yeah. Countywide. They're, they're red. These kinds of things from a Democrat point of view are pretty encouraging. And yeah, I also wonder, does this momentum carry through you validated one other thing that I was wondering was part of this kind of a matter of. Turnout and that the Democrats are just far more fired up right now than Republicans, that you and I are old enough to remember the Tea Party movement. This feels like a liberal sort of Tea Party movement right now. I have gone to several, not everyone, but I've gone to several of the protests this year at our county courthouse. First one I went to was admittedly on a weekday on one of the coldest days of last winter in February. So I was out at the street corner with maybe a dozen people. The last one I went to, the second No Kings rally that I went to maybe a month ago by now, over 3,000 people by most accounts, which is like three times bigger than the, oh, what was the first big one this year? It wasn't a No Kings, it was Hands Off, I think. The one theme was Hands Off maybe back in April or May or so. That one got about 1,000. the first no kings got about 2 000 this one got about 3 000 in my county right from those humble beginnings of a dozen people freezing and shivering on the street corner in february that.
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Todd:
[17:23]
| It takes a lot to get people out to protest like that for a couple of hours. Even if it's on a Saturday, even if the weather is nice, it takes a lot. Cause like I got kids, they, they have things to do. Right.
|
Todd:
[17:37]
| So are people who don't agree with me politically? We'll look at that and say it was only 3000 people. There's whatever, hundreds of thousands of people in our County. That's such a small percentage. Yeah. But the fact that people are willing to come out and make signs and put on costumes and, and, and, and peacefully express their concerns and their position for a couple of hours, I think is pretty meaningful. I said the same thing about these tea party protests. I'm like, these guys look ridiculous. They're out on the corner. They're dressed in their costumes. There's, you know, a few dozen or a few hundred of them, but look what happened. Like that was, that was wave that impacted the remainder of Obama's first and second term, as I recall. Right. It swung in the middle of his first term, and then I don't think Democrats ever got back majority of both houses again after that. Am I remembering that wrong?
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Sam:
[18:29]
| No, no, no. I...
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Sam:
[18:33]
| I'm not sure of the specifics about when Congress did what, et cetera, but I think you're right. But I think to the larger point that how these things can change the tone and what's going on are important. A few weeks back when Emily guest hosted on the show with me, we had a little bit of a conversation about whether there's a group that's out there saying protests like No Kings are meaningless because they don't make a specific list of demands that have to be met that would actually result in change.
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Sam:
[19:09]
| And instead, it's sort of performative because it's just a bunch of people going out and making themselves feel better by going and having a rally and shaking their signs or whatever. But it doesn't really do anything. It doesn't really change anything. And I think that's misguided because while you certainly can have the situation where you have, you have, political actions with demands and a, you know, you're, you're trying to get somebody to give in and give you something. First of all, you know, and I mentioned on the show when we, when I talked about this, the more specific you get with demands, the higher, harder it is to get people to join you because there will always be somebody who disagrees with, you know, you have five demands and they like four of them, but the fifth one, oh no, that's, that's no good. And you're getting very specific. The No Kings was a very high level.
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Sam:
[20:05]
| You know, hey, democracy is good. We're unhappy with the things that are happening that are diminishing democracy and diminishing the rule of law. That's what it was very high level. That's all it was. And it is so I mentioned that time as well that, you know, hey, at our local No Kings rally, the League of Women Voters sent somebody to speak. They are notoriously neutral, but they were able to speak for this because it was just promoting democracy. It wasn't an anti-Trump rally per se. It wasn't about any specific policy. It was just, hey, we're worried that democracy and the rule of law are threatened. And you do get, and even without those specific demands, like, look, if you made specific demands of the Trump administration through this kind of protests, they're just going to dig in further. They're not about to give in to those demands and say, oh, no, a few million people protested.
|
Sam:
[21:09]
| Let's stop ICE detentions. No, not even remotely. Even if the protests got like 10 times bigger than they were, they still wouldn't do that. If anything, they'd be like, oh, man, we've got riots on the streets. We need to shoot them all, you know. So, but I think the protests of this sort still have a significant purpose. They do let people know that they're not alone. They show the magnitude of the people who disagree. they show even to the people who like, let's say you're a MAGA person. You may see the numbers on the other side in a way that you haven't before.
|
Sam:
[21:55]
| And because it's scattered all over the country, it's not just in a rally in D.C. You know, the standard thing is like, you know, Fox News barely covered the No Kings rally. Even other major media like the New York Times famously didn't had just a small note on the front page. Like and the rest of the front page was other stuff, you know, things like that. But if, because they're scattered all over the country and even small towns, even small red towns had, had these rallies, you know, just then, then just the MAGA folks driving by like, see, oh, there are people around me that actually think this way. Because I've heard lots of reports, not just reports, anecdotal stuff, but the whole thing about our information environment right now and how things are separated geographically is that if you drop somebody in the middle of a rural red area, they very likely...
|
Sam:
[22:56]
| Think, nope, this, this liberal stuff isn't real. Like nobody I know thinks that way, you know, because they just aren't exposed to it because they're isolated from it. They only are around people like them. And, and honestly, there's a little bit of that in the other direction too. I mean, if you're, if you're in a heavy blue area, you're not going to run into somebody wearing their mega hat all that often, you know? And so just the, but the visibility lets you know It's out there and which it affects the tone of the conversation anyway. It affects the realm of what's possible. And yes, it affects enthusiasm for elections when they come about because realistically, short of like some violent revolution or something, that's what you got. You've got a situation right now where nationally the Democrats lost everything and there's not much they can actually do. I mean, we maybe I don't know if the end of the shutdown is one of your topics or not, but like, you know, absent like things like that, there's very little they can actually do until they win elections again.
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Sam:
[24:07]
| And so between now and then, yeah, most of it is performative. Yeah, most of it is messaging. Most of it is like, how do you get through to the general public what it is you would like to be doing if you could do something so that when there's an election, you might win, as opposed to like folks saying, well, the rally was useless because it accomplished nothing. Trump didn't change any policies, you know?
|
Todd:
[24:32]
| Well, it's all true. It is performative. It does make people feel good while they're there. It's a good feeling to be among like-minded people to realize that you're not alone. I'm repeating a lot of the stuff that you already said. It's all true. And also, I'm encouraged because it's representative of a larger amount of dissatisfaction with the federal government at the moment. And again, this is not data, this is anecdotal, but there was a surprising and really good feeling of being out there at a major intersection in the county seat, you know, Greensburg, Westmoreland County, many, many more people drove by honking and waving in support than, you know, cause you're going to, you're going to get the jeers and the laughter and you, you know, you lost and, and that kind of stuff.
|
Todd:
[25:29]
| Fine. But I'm amazed at how many supporters there actually were driving by, which tells me that there's people maybe who, if they were available or if they were aware, would have like, you know, maybe we would have had another thousand people up there on the courthouse plaza if people were aware. And to me, it's just a representation of the broader dissatisfaction right now. And it certainly showed up at the polls. So two of, yes, shutdown was one of my topics, but I wanted to get your point of view on a couple of other things related to, related to all of this. One is I, I think I have heard accurately that turnout in general and among Democrats in particular was encouragingly high this year. I think democratic voters are notoriously absent in off year elections.
|
Sam:
[26:20]
| The biggest example of this. And I think, yes, there's evidence of that across the board. But the biggest example was actually the redistricting proposition in California. Cause that was the only thing on the ballot. There were no candidates running. There was no presidential race, no governor's race, no nothing.
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Todd:
[26:39]
| It was, there's nothing on a local level.
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Sam:
[26:42]
| No, the, the, the really, the, the only reason there was an election in California. And please, if you're out there and there were actually some local races, please correct me. But my understanding is the only reason this was happening was the redistricting measure. That's it. And they had incredibly high turnout for that. And it won by much larger measure, margin than was expected it was expected to win so much so that both sides stopped advertising about it several weeks before the election yeah they they were both like it's a waste of money we know what's going to happen but the margin was still greater than anybody anticipated i think it won by like 60 60 40 or something and so yeah the the democratic enthusiasm is out there right now and whereas it does seem like republican turnout is depressed right now and i think that aligns with you know if you look at you know trump approval ratings but other but other things as well like right track wrong track you know republicans of course are much more likely to approve of what trump trump is doing than democrats but it's not not even the same universe However, even that number is dropping.
|
Sam:
[28:05]
| It's still high among Republicans, but it's dropping and it's continued on a downtrend. And I think what you have basically, and again, anecdotal, you hear all these things about Republicans who are like, okay, but this isn't quite what I wanted. You know, I wanted them to, like, round up the illegal immigrant criminals, not the grandmother who cleans houses, you know, or, you know, and I didn't want him to, like, tear down the White House, you know, and what's up with all these tariffs that we talked about before? Why are prices going up? He promised to make prices go down, you know, et cetera.
|
Todd:
[28:48]
| Yeah.
|
Sam:
[28:50]
| And to be clear, there's still lots of there's still lots of people out there who double down on everything. And like Trump's wonderful. All this is good. Anything where anything you hear about it being negative is actually liberal lies. There are plenty of those people out there still, too. But the numbers are going down.
|
Todd:
[29:07]
| Yeah. Yeah. So the last thing I'm wondering about the elections is. Because, you know, I've become very skeptical of Democrats' ability to win on a platform rather than opposition, right? I think Biden won in 2020, probably more for the opposition to Trump's first term than for Biden's awesome campaign.
|
Sam:
[29:39]
| Absolutely.
|
Todd:
[29:40]
| I think whether he would have run for re-election or what became the Harris campaign, you know, sort of abandoned their platform and focused on, we're not Trump. And that wasn't, people were so unhappy about inflation in particular.
|
Sam:
[30:02]
| Mm-hmm.
|
Todd:
[30:04]
| That, you know, it wasn't strong enough. Like, well, Trump's going to come in and fix everything. Well, sure enough, you know, inflation's been stubbornly not high, right? It's not like, you know, 9% or whatever it was a few years ago, but it hasn't gone below two like the Fed says they want it to be and they cut rates anyway. But people are noticing it at the grocery store. It's unavoidable. For crying out loud, there's some energy bar that my brother-in-law asks us to buy because we have a Costco membership and he doesn't. This is just my little anecdotal snapshot of, these things used to be like $21 a box. Now they're $28.50 just since like April. Now that's not representative of everything at the grocery store, but you know, you see it. People are talking about the, you know, I forget which publication put out the price of a Thanksgiving meal this year versus last year. They say, Hey, look, the price of Thanksgiving meal from Walmart went down this year versus last year. It went down because they switched from name brand to generic brand and they went from having like 20 items in the shopping cart to 15 like that's why it went down it's not a apples to apples thing we're a carnivore family price of meat is definitely up eggs somehow became a campaign issue right eggs are not as expensive as they were i think a year ago but they're not what they were four years ago either and on and on and on yet i think, People who voted for Trump are feeling this shit and we can curse on this, right?
|
Sam:
[31:31]
| Yeah. Oh yeah.
|
Todd:
[31:32]
| Okay.
|
Sam:
[31:32]
| Curse all the time.
|
Todd:
[31:34]
| And so, yes, I did want to talk about the shutdown, and maybe this is a good segue into that, that inexplicably, Trump fought against SNAP benefits, right? I don't understand that. And I'm bringing this up because, again, where I live, and I think that Westmoreland County is representative of many rural or semi-suburban counties all over the country, whether it's a red or blue state. I think you find a lot of counties like mine, there's a lot of people I know voted for Trump because they had the campaign signs in their front yard and also are getting some kind of public assistance because they have the handicapped blackguard in their car or just because I happen to know something about. And like, I know they're definitely getting assistance. They're getting disability. They're probably on SNAP. They're probably getting Medicaid or some kind of Obamacare-type subsidies. He inexplicably went after SNAP, and Congress is going after ACA subsidies. I don't understand how that is a winning formula for the Republican Party in the midterms coming up next year because they rely on, you know, the reason that Pennsylvania is purple now instead of kind of reliably blue, which I think we were for maybe 15 or 20 years.
|
Todd:
[32:55]
| Instead of being reliably blue, we're now purple because I think first Trump brought out a lot of people who ordinarily don't vote in every election or any election. And they happen to be those sort of voters who they feel like they can't get ahead. They blame the government. And Trump was speaking their language, right? It is the immigrants fault. It is the liberals fault. It is, you know, we've got to get closer to God and all these kind of things. He's appealing to these people who also rely on ACA subsidies and SNAP and probably other benefits as well. I can't imagine what the Republicans are thinking to go so hard after this stuff now, way harder than they did Trump's first term, and think that they're still going to win Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, the states that have been flipping back and forth for the last 12 years. Am i am i missing something like today because i know the doomsday i'm sorry sam the doomsday predictions out there are well they're going to do a variety of things to suppress the vote.
|
Todd:
[33:58]
| And they're going to win by cheating whether it's with the courts whether it's with poll watching whether it's in sending in the national guard and you know he i guess i guess he's trump allegedly sent i don't know law enforcement or national guard or something to poll watch in california in New Jersey. I never heard anything. I mean, I never heard anything from either side about that. It just seemed completely inconsequential. If it was some attempt at suppression, didn't work. Didn't even work enough to make the liberal news that comes across my social media feed, right? Just nothing. Nothing. How do they think they're going to win next year? And my answer to that question, because I'm so cynical about the Democrats, is, well, they're going to win because the Democrats will find a way to fuck this up because they won't have a coherent message.
|
Sam:
[34:40]
| Yeah.
|
Todd:
[34:40]
| And they won't be able to get aligned. And all of these swing voters who are out there open to persuasion right now, Democrats are just going to miss it. All right. I don't know if I really have a question or a statement or anything, Sam, but what do you think about all this?
|
Sam:
[34:54]
| So, you know, and when we, we'll take a break before we properly talk about shutdown, but to answer your election related questions, because we're an election topic now, I think.
|
Sam:
[35:10]
| What are the Republicans thinking? That's a good question, because there's different things at play right now, and you are starting to see cracks between the Republicans right now, because I think you've got several different kinds of things going. One is Donald Trump himself, who frankly is completely erratic, does not have a coherent set of ideologies or anything. He's just doing what he thinks will help him. And honestly, I think, you know, his mental facilities are declining rapidly at this point as well. So even then, he might not have a good idea even of what actually would help him. And so you've got him sort of just bouncing off the walls, doing whatever comes to mind that day. That's thing number one. Thing number two is you've got the Heritage Society Project 2026 plan where they've got like their wish list of anti-government, conservative social stuff that they've had for decades and decades and decades. And they are rushing to implement as much of it as they humanly can as fast as they can. And I think part of that is knowing damn well a lot of what they want to do is unpopular.
|
Sam:
[36:35]
| And so they want to get it in place as fast as they can and ingrain it as much as they can. So it'll be really hard to undo even if the Democrats win again. You know, because, you know, I mean, just to take some examples, I mean, you know, they've shut down entire agencies and entire programs. The international aid agency USAID, gone.
|
Sam:
[37:02]
| Gone. Everything they have done has been raised to the ground. And if the Democrats came back in and wanted to restart it, it would not be an overnight thing. It would take them a long time to get that up and running and doing the things it was doing before. And the damage to its reputation, you may not be able to fix in any reasonable timeframe. People won't trust it anymore that trusted it before. Same with the CDC. They've absolutely gutted CDC from the top to the bottom. They've, you know, most of the, you know, the reputation is gone. Like, a lot of the prominent scientists are there have left. Those who are still there, you know, and, you know, a spouse of a friend of mine works there, or they were fired, but I think they might have actually gotten their job back now that with the deal that actually did end the shutdown. But anyway, they're hamstrung anyway. Even the good scientists who are still there are operating under constraints that make life very difficult.
|
Sam:
[38:11]
| And make it and so like your reputationally your democrat gets in wants to restore the cdc again it doesn't it doesn't happen overnight i mean and it probably needed some reforms anyway it definitely needed some reforms anyway but raising it to the ground and destroying its reputation wasn't the right way to do so like that so let me finish answering your question and then we can discuss but like so you have the second group which is the heritage folks who really do have a specific ideological agenda and they also like they're going to want to do a few things to you know like the shenanigans the redistricting things to make it more likely that they'll win in the future but fundamentally i feel like they are making the gamble that if we make enough of these changes and make it hard enough to change it back then it's okay if the Democrats win next time. Because we've made changes that'll last decades.
|
Sam:
[39:08]
| And then finally, the third group that is starting to wake up right now, are the Republicans who are in Congress and elsewhere who are pure opportunists and are just there. Like they don't really care about the ideological stuff, or maybe they have some vague thoughts there, but ultimately their main goal is to be in power and stay in power and to be able to hang out with the cool kids and have influence and stuff like that. And they are starting to see the shift because in the Republican party, the way to do that for the last X number of years was to be all in on Trump and to be all in on MAGA. But now when you start seeing policies actually have negative effects, they start peeling off because they're like, wait, wait, wait a second. This is wrong. And I guess there's a fourth group too, the ones who are all in on the conspiracy theories like you've got the marjorie taylor greens of the world who are now splitting with donald trump over the epstein stuff because they're like we thought donald trump was going to come in here and expose all the epstein stuff which of course we believed was just all like rich powerful democrats in the pedophile ring.
|
Sam:
[40:27]
| And now it looks like Donald Trump himself is doing everything he can to avoid going in this direction. So what does that mean? It's like their minds are being blown because their whole worldview is being turned on its head because, oh, wait, maybe Trump was one of the bad guys after all. And so you've got these at least four different groups in the coalition who all have different motivations of what they're doing and whether or not they care about winning and what's important to them and what's not. And they had all been aligned directionally until fairly recently. Now, when we're seeing actual negative economic and other effects of Trump policies, and we're seeing the Epstein stuff, and we're seeing Trump's popularity plummeting, all of a sudden, the things that were holding these groups together are disappearing and they're starting to fray. And of course, with Trump, despite any random talk about running again, with Trump as a lame duck and clearly aging as well.
|
Sam:
[41:37]
| Maybe, maybe, crossing my fingers, that this fraying of the Republican coalition actually becomes more real as we go forward. Like we've had false starts before going all the way back to the Access Hollywood tape during the the 2026, not 2026, 2016 campaign, where for a few moments, a whole bunch of Republicans abandoned Trump and then they came back. And then after January 6th, a whole bunch of Republicans abandoned him and then they came back. So we'll see. But it feels like this time is different because it's not about like one particular thing Donald Trump did. It's instead about the reasons all of these people had to be in this coalition. Some of those reasons are starting to be less true.
|
Todd:
[42:30]
| One thought, and I know you want to take break, that just that you're reminding me to temper my enthusiasm and let's use CDC or Department of Education as a couple of examples, right? Let's imagine Democrats put together or, you know, whoever the equivalent is of the Heritage Foundation, right? Puts together their own project 2029, how to rapidly restore what's been deconstructed. If I'm a qualified person who worked for Department of Education or CDC and was terminated because of Doge or the budget or RFK Jr., whatever. Okay. In 2029, when Democratic White House and Congress comes to me and says, we are rapidly restoring the CDC and Department of Education. We need you to come back. If I'm that qualified person who got cut the first time, I'm thinking about longevity.
|
Todd:
[43:25]
| How do I know you're not going to lose again in two years or four years and this is going to happen all over again? I think there's some lasting effect there that the qualified people who were very enthusiastic about public service until this year, they're going to leave and never come back. They're going to find some other way to pay their bills and to raise their families in the private sector or in some other less volatile part of government, you know, or if they're close enough to retirement, they're just going to hang it up. And I, so I do think he, this one lasting effect I worry about is that qualified people who until this year would have happily been in public service, regardless of who's sitting in the white house, they're going to think twice before they do it again. Or I'm sure there are many right now thinking twice, whether they even want to stay in it. You and I have a friend from college, from the old radio station works at the department of energy right now. I won't name him because I know he's very sensitive about speaking publicly about this, But yeah, he's pretty concerned, you know, understandably so. And his wife works for an agency that is, I think also, they both are luckily in branches, departments, agencies that are, I think, far west of a political hot flashpoint, you know.
|
Sam:
[44:46]
| Right.
|
Todd:
[44:46]
| But yeah, I, but they're also these, I, I, I don't, I don't know about the guy's wife, but you certainly would know the guy that I'm talking about who works for the DOE. This is the kind of highly qualified, experienced person. You don't want him to leave the DOE. You want him to stay there until he's ready to retire. And there's tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of people like that in the government right now. If they haven't already been terminated, they're thinking twice about sticking with it, because who knows? You used to be able to count on this no matter which way the political winds were blowing, and suddenly you can't.
|
Sam:
[45:21]
| It was one of the, you know, generally speaking, the trade-off for government jobs was you get paid less, but it's more secure, and you have a good pension in the end. And you get to provide public service. You know, that was the trade-off. And you've destroyed that trade-off.
|
Todd:
[45:40]
| Yeah. All right. I think you wanted to take a break.
|
Sam:
[45:43]
| So I figure we've had all the election stuff. Let's take a break. And when we come back, we can talk. You'd mentioned government shutdown specifically. So let's talk about the shutdown and the end of the shutdown. Back after this.
|
Break:
[46:04]
| AlexMZilla.com By Alex and Dad Gaming videos and more From Alex Elementary School by Day YouTube by Night AlexMZilla.com, AlexMZilla is A-L-E-X-M-X-E-L-A And .com is period and then C O M, Okay.
|
Sam:
[46:35]
| We are back. So the government shutdown ended. And a lot of folks were upset about this on the Democratic side. Basically saying, and just to be clear, the way that it ended is eight Democratic, senators defected and said, you know, okay, we'll make a deal with the Republicans. The deal has been criticized as basically being nothing, but it did have a couple of things in it. So the biggest one that actually had a real effect was apparently undoing some of the reductions in force that happened during the shutdown. So famously, the shutdown not only sent people home because the government was shut down, but they also just started firing a bunch of people while they were at it, saying, you know, we don't need you for the shutdown, but you know, don't come back even after the shutdown's over. Some of that was undone. So, so awesome. A few people were rehired that were otherwise fired. There was also a moratorium on more reduction in forces until January, until the end of January. So that's not that long, but, and basically also just to put this out there too, this deal was to kick the can down the road 90 days until January.
|
Sam:
[48:04]
| It was not a permanent like, hey, we've solved everything, we've got a budget, we've got whatever. It's just another kick the can down the road. So we're going to repeat all this drama again come January. And so there was the moratorium on more riffs that was restoring some of those people who were laid off. And then there was a promise by the Republicans to have a vote on the Obamacare subsidies. So, importantly here, this was not a promise to do anything about the Obamacare subsidies. This was not a promise that such a vote would pass. This was just a promise to have a vote. And in all likelihood, such a vote would fail, you know, because you'd need a whole bunch of Republicans deciding to support it, which there are a few who've sounded squishy, but probably not enough. And even if it did pass, Donald Trump might veto it. So what most of the Democrats were pushing for was we don't reopen the government unless those Obamacare subsidy changes are part of the reopening of government. We do it now. Not a promise of a vote sometime in the future that we'll probably lose, but we do it right now. And they did not get that. But yeah, go ahead. Then we can talk more.
|
Todd:
[49:34]
| The promise of the vote, that's the condition that I was more aware of. I actually, I'm embarrassed to say I didn't realize there were additional permanent terminations during the shutdown. I knew that there were obviously furloughs or people working without pay. I didn't know about permanent termination. That's unfortunate. So I'm glad that, you know, one of the conditions was to bring some back. The one that I think got a lot more media attention was the second. The promise to have a vote on ACA. First of all, What if Republican leadership just decides, you know what, never mind, we changed our mind. We're not going to have that vote after all.
|
Sam:
[50:10]
| Nothing you can do about it.
|
Todd:
[50:11]
| What do you do?
|
Sam:
[50:12]
| What happens?
|
Todd:
[50:13]
| Right. So that's a very flimsy promise. The only benefit I could see by having the vote, the only benefit to Democrats is next September, October campaign season. You have all of these Republicans on record voting against health care, health insurance subsidies that people by September, October next year will have been feeling. Because, you know, I'm fortunate. I worked for a private employer who's covering a substantial amount of my medical insurance premiums. And I think the company's doing well enough. I don't have to worry about anything going away. Right. But there's a lot of people that rely on those subsidies. And I, and you hear these, I see these, see and hear these alarming figures of people's monthly premiums are going to double or triple. They're going to go up by, you know, low, low four figures, which if you need the subsidies in the first place is probably untenable. So there's that fear that, well, people are going to just go off of health insurance now and roll the dice by September, October next year. I think that's going to have a political impact. And perhaps the only benefit to Democrats, which is unfortunately at millions of people's expense, is we're going to get these vulnerable Republicans on the record as having voting against that. And in September, whenever you say, hey, your health insurance used to cost you $500, now it's $2,000.
|
Sam:
[51:40]
| Here's the thing. You had that anyway. The increases are because of the big, beautiful bill that passed earlier this year. What the Democrats were trying to do was to get them to undo those changes, but they voted through those changes already. You already have them on record for this along with other things. And, you know, you, you sort of, what, what. The people who are trying to spin this as good, as, you know, okay, ending the shutdown was good, was, first of all, we got our, quote unquote, we got our message across. We shut down the government for longer than it's ever been shut down before, and we talked about health care, and more people are aware of the ACA thing than were before. We got the message across. And meanwhile, by the way, the shutdown was starting to hurt. The airline travel specifically, lots but not all, the defecting senators, a good fraction of them were in places that rely on tourism and airline travel to get there or had airline industry stuff in their states or things like that. A lot of them got lots of money from that industry. So there were some of that also, by the way, is carefully coordinated. Those eight, none of them are up next election cycle.
|
Sam:
[53:10]
| Some of them are retiring outright. Some of them just have a long time till their next election, et cetera. That was very much intentional, leading people to speculate that even though Schumer was officially against this deal. Maybe he orchestrated it behind the scenes to sort of enable it to happen because the shutdown was starting to get painful. And one of the things that, you know, an argument that's been had is do the Democrats just throw their hands up and say Republicans are in charge, let them do all the damage they can? Because then the voters will see how bad this is and revert or do the Democrats actually try to make deals to make things better?
|
Sam:
[53:58]
| Now, in the position they're in, they can't make many, many deals anyway. But, you know, do they stop the Republicans in some way, shape or form from the worst possible results of their action? Or do they give them face saving ways out? Like, like in this case, do you let them reopen the government or do you just, you know, say we, we, we, we, we said we would reopen under these conditions and that's it. But it can stay closed all the way through to the next elections if it needs to, you know? And I think part of what, you know, and I think, and also thrown into this mix, by the way, is that the House was staying closed until the government reopened. Speaker Johnson made that clear, which was also holding up the Epstein stuff, and maybe they wanted to get on with that as well.
|
Sam:
[54:51]
| But, you know, I feel like, you know, the Democrats want to say, we care about the people. And so, of course, we're going to try to fight against the Republicans' worst stuff.
|
Sam:
[55:08]
| But ultimately in the end you know voters don't pay attention to the back and forth and details of you know this week versus that week negotiation on the shutdown and who gave up this or who gave up that you know in the end they're gonna start paying attention right before election day and for a vast for a, very significant chunk of voters, the entire decision is going to be, do I like how my life personally is going right now? If it's yes, then whoever's in office can stay. If it's no, then vote the bums out. Now, that's not necessarily a majority of people, but it's a key group of people in the middle. The majority on both sides are probably people who are going to vote party line no matter what happens. Yeah. There's the people who will always vote Republican and people who will always vote Democrat no matter what. And on the two edges, those stay the same. But this, this squishy group in the middle who votes based on, oh my God, the price of eggs are up. So I'm going to vote against the guy in charge.
|
Sam:
[56:22]
| And the thought process doesn't go further than that when things are close anyway which they have been for the last decade or so um yeah then those people make the difference and you know and and so in the end i don't know if all this back and forth matters what matter and so like is the best thing for the democrats actually to let the republicans do all the damage they want to do probably and if if democrats were in a position to stop some of it, I could at least see the moral argument of like, we can't hurt people on purpose if we can stop the Republicans we need to. But the reality is right now they can't really stop the Republicans. So it is what it is.
|
Todd:
[57:05]
| As a recently converted registered Democrat, because I was registered libertarian for almost 30 years, and I don't want to get into that. It really made sense to me in the 90s. It has made less and less and less sense over the years.
|
Sam:
[57:20]
| I also went through my libertarian phase. I was never registered, but I voted libertarian a few times.
|
Todd:
[57:25]
| So I, I was, I was always libertarian far more for their positions on social issues than fiscal. Well, I think that the federal government certainly has crept rightward over the last 30 years. The one place where it's crept leftward are the social issues, marijuana, gay marriage, women's rights. These things are far more acceptable now than they were in the 90s. I think that's where we've seen more leftward creep.
|
Sam:
[57:58]
| That's still true, but this is a conversation I had, and I've brought this up on the show before. I was having a conversation with a younger, a friend of my son's, so his age, teenager now, but the conversation was several years ago, actually. And they were talking about how bad things were now along those lines. Specifically referring to lgbtq issues and and i said no no they really were much worse in the 80s and 90s than they are today but then after the conversation after the conversation and i never circled back to to to talk to this person again but on this topic but after the conversation i realized that the key difference was not the absolute level of where we are but the direction in which we're going. And so, yes, I think you're probably right that we are still better off now than we were, say, in the 80s. However... Starting around, I don't know, pick a year, 2017, the trend has gone in the opposite direction. So we peaked and it's been getting worse now for nearly a decade.
|
Todd:
[59:11]
| And I have to realize and correct myself. Yes, there are significant steps backward, certainly in a couple of instances. And in one case, you know, up until this year, there were legal, abundant options for minors who were transitioning.
|
Sam:
[59:32]
| Yes.
|
Todd:
[59:33]
| You know, and those are gone.
|
Sam:
[59:36]
| And also, don't leave out the going the other direction on abortion as well.
|
Todd:
[59:42]
| Yeah. I don't know how to say this without sounding like a jerk. First of all, I'm not a woman. I never have to deal. I've never had nor never will have to deal with becoming pregnant. There are options for unwanted pregnancies. If prophylactics don't work, you know, there is not yet nationwide abortion ban, right? There's options. There's no option for a 16 year old who was born with male genitalia, but who is a girl. There's no good options for those people other than jumping through hoops finding specialists spending private money because insurance and hospital networks won't touch it anymore like that's it.
|
Sam:
[1:00:32]
| Well and you're you're absolutely right but i'll also i'll just say this is another thing where it is now significantly different state to state you know for both abortion and trans rights and expand out further to social, I mean, other social issues. And I mean, some people say, well, that's good. That's federalism at work that, you know, but right now we really are in a place where for all of these social issues and I'll say civil rights issues, It is remarkably different depending on if you're in Washington state or Mississippi or Pennsylvania. You know, it's in entirely different worlds in terms of how so many things are handled. And, you know, and look, I'm all for federalism in all kinds of different areas. It's good to experiment with different policies in different places. But I start feeling like that's not the right way to go when you're talking about like civil rights.
|
Todd:
[1:01:42]
| Yes, agreed. Just like the last time I was on the show, I'm realizing that we've taken a much longer tangent off of my original topic than I meant to.
|
Sam:
[1:01:52]
| It's fine.
|
Todd:
[1:01:52]
| I keep notes, so I want to try to get back to what I was, the direction I meant to go.
|
Sam:
[1:01:57]
| Yes.
|
Todd:
[1:01:58]
| But before I do that, correct me if I'm wrong, Um, wasn't during the first Trump administration or sometime in the last 10 years, didn't the Supreme court roll back some civil rights act protections specifically on voting in Southern states. Am I remembering that correctly?
|
Sam:
[1:02:16]
| Look, yes, there have been lots of rollbacks, you know, on the, on the, on the voters rights act, the Supreme court took major bites out of it a few years ago. There is currently a case pending that potentially, and everybody expects, will probably strip all the rest of the power out of the VRA once they rule on it in a few months. So, yeah.
|
Todd:
[1:02:41]
| But the reason... The reason I asked is the redistricting in Texas, would that have been allowed before the Voting Rights Act started getting peeled back?
|
Sam:
[1:02:55]
| Oh, almost certainly not.
|
Todd:
[1:02:57]
| Would that have stood?
|
Sam:
[1:02:57]
| No, no. No.
|
Todd:
[1:02:59]
| Yeah. And for that matter, I'm not sure if the California redistricting would have stood either. It's notable yet unsurprising that the DOJ is only going after California for their redistricting, which was put to a statewide vote. And not the other states, Texas, I think Missouri, maybe there's Ohio, a couple others who have done or are trying to do. You don't hear the DOJ going after them. It's just California, which is unsurprising, but I think notable for its obvious political motivation. The direction I actually wanted to go before we got into LGBT issues is, you know, I changed my voter registration because at least now I can choose. If I'm going to vote Democrat every time I live in Pennsylvania.
|
Sam:
[1:03:43]
| You can help you're not registered.
|
Todd:
[1:03:45]
| Exactly. I can't vote in the primaries, you know, unless there's something else on the ballot besides picking the candidates, you know, somewhat, I'm never going to vote for a Republican. I can't imagine that changing in the rest of my life. So I might as well just join that party and at least be able to participate in other, you know, in the springtime rather than just in November. So what you were mentioning maybe 10 minutes ago by now of maybe some Democrats are taking a look at this and deciding, let's let the Republicans fuck everything up. My words, not yours. And we'll run on that November next year. That worked in 2020 and it lasted two years. It is not sustainable. So maybe it'll work in the midterms next year and maybe it'll even work in 2028, but it is not sustainable.
|
Sam:
[1:04:38]
| Well, and also more generally, and I think that, you know, the tendency that I mentioned before of people who just vote for how are things going? If they're good, leave the people in. If they're bad, throw the bums out. Results in, you know, just this whipsaw back and forth because, you know, okay, let's say everybody's unhappy with the Republicans and votes Democrats in. Well, guess what? The Democrats can't fix everything in two years or four years anyway. So people will still be unhappy. And then they put the Republicans back in because now the Democrats failed to fix it.
|
Todd:
[1:05:15]
| They can only slow the damage by taking back the House and the Senate. They can't really affect anything until and if they win the White House again. And that's the part I'm worried about.
|
Sam:
[1:05:28]
| And even then they're limited because you still have the Supreme Court and you still have the filibuster potentially, unless they get rid of that, which they probably won't. And, you know, so, yeah, our system is intentionally designed to try to slow down rapid change. Now, what Trump has figured out how to do is to bust through all those barriers and say, I'm going to do it anyway. Just stop it. And nobody's stopping it. And the question is, and this is dangerous in its own way, like, do the Democrats come in and say, well, we're going to do the same damn thing. Screw all the rules. We're just going to do things and try to make them stop us. And if the Supreme Court says no, we'll say screw you and we'll do whatever. And then you basically, you've eliminated all the checks and balances that were actually good about the American system.
|
Sam:
[1:06:23]
| And you have a dangerous situation on both sides at that point. Or, I mean, and I think this is kind of what Biden's mindset when he came in was we have to restore normalcy. We have to go back to doing things the way we used to do them. And he did that to some degree. And he got much more done than anybody thought he would do with that approach, frankly. But in the end, because he sort of refused to recognize that the world had changed, he left all the doors open for Trump coming back.
|
Todd:
[1:07:02]
| I, I, the, the, my pipe dream or fantasy or whatever is we wind up at 2028 with some sort of democratic benevolent dictator who will come in and by the similar means as Trump undo all the damage and then quickly pivot to Congress to say, let's memorialize this into law that it doesn't happen so easily ever again. I'm not sure that there's a better way to do it than that. And then, you know, that makes me nervous because as much as I favor most Democrat policies these days, I am equally, that's not true, not equally. I am still a bit uncomfortable with a Democrat having authoritarian desires as well. Anyone having authoritarian desires. Like it's not the way it was ever supposed to work.
|
Sam:
[1:07:59]
| It's so hard to give up power once it's been taken. It has happened in history, but it's relatively rare. And oftentimes it takes something, you know, it really is something like, okay, we rip apart the Constitution and start over, you know, kind of event in order for that to happen, which, you know, has its own dangers.
|
Todd:
[1:08:22]
| Sure. One other note that I made, I don't know, 10, 15 minutes ago is about dealmaking.
|
Sam:
[1:08:27]
| Yes.
|
Todd:
[1:08:28]
| The democrats another reason that makes me cynical about the party i and i don't know i don't know whether this is my own uninformed bias or if this is demonstrably true my hunch about democrats is that.
|
Todd:
[1:08:49]
| Always willing to compromise when over the last 20, 30 years, Republicans have become less and less and less willing to compromise. So this latest shutdown, the end of the shutdown deal, I think is the latest example. You'll see the memes on social media. People will say, how come everyone says this is a Trump-GOP shutdown? Why then did it require eight Democratic senators to vote to end it. Well, when the government was threatening shutdown during, I did shut down during Clinton's, one of Clinton's terms, as I recall now, but like Obama and Biden, like they were able to head it off or make it last a lot less in duration because the Democrats were willing to make deals to say, okay, we don't want this to go on and either do you. So we're going to concede some things as a deal to get past the filibuster and reopen that. And the Republicans didn't. And I don't think they ever will in the foreseeable future. So there's no good options, man, because the longer the shutdown would have gone on, the more painful it would have been for everyone. And I certainly understand the political optics of.
|
Todd:
[1:10:02]
| And flights getting canceled or severely delayed because of shortages in the air traffic control system, I understand that that is political damaging for a lot of people. Well, as you pointed out, these senators who voted to end the shutdown clearly appear to be hand. I wasn't aware of this until you pointed it out. But yes, of course, handpicked the vote because they're not facing reelection next year and or they're in states that are particularly vulnerable to the most damaging aspects of a lingering shutdown. But man, they didn't get shit in return for those votes.
|
Sam:
[1:10:37]
| And also, it was just coming off that big election when we talked about.
|
Todd:
[1:10:41]
| Yes.
|
Sam:
[1:10:41]
| The Democrats had momentum. And thank you. And all of the polls about the shutdown were that people were blaming the Republicans a lot more than the Democrats. And you could see the Republicans starting to get nervous. You are starting to hear reports of certain Republicans being like, OK, maybe we should give them this ACA thing. You know, just a handful, just a little bit, just hints. But that was starting to happen. You had Donald Trump starting to talk about maybe we should just get rid of the filibuster to deal with this, you know, which. You know, we've talked on this show before on multiple times about the pros and cons of getting rid of the filibuster, but do a lot of, this would give a way to let the Republicans do that. And then the Democrats can take the benefits of it later, potentially. Again, there's debates on that. But the bottom line was the Republicans were starting to clearly get nervous about the political effects that they were getting because of the shutdown. And at that exact moment, that's when these eight Democrats decided, okay, now's the time to cave. Like, you know, even if you accept the possibility that, okay, eventually somebody would cave and do something and blah, blah, blah.
|
Sam:
[1:11:57]
| You had this happen at the exact moment where everything was going the Democrats' way in terms of both the elections and the shutdown politics. So the timing seemed particularly bad. Like, if you'd let it go another month, maybe the Democrats could have actually extracted more, you know?
|
Todd:
[1:12:18]
| Yeah well as long as the sentiment remained you know majority people blaming gop for the shutdown, then look my daughter's away at college right now and is supposed to fly home for thanksgiving but all right i'll just go up and get her if her flight gets canceled right but that would that would really ruin a lot of people's holiday which is a huge family event across the country right, Let the Republicans take the blame for that kind of social disruption. Because man, people are still talking. The social media discussion that I would see about the Supreme Court justice retention here in Pennsylvania, a lot of it was still around COVID lockdowns five years ago. There's a small minority of people still holding on to that because they couldn't get a haircut or, you know, they couldn't sit at the bar whenever things started to reopen. Or it's and right yeah people are like they weren't following the science and that's cherry picking right we were policymakers were erring on the side of caution because no one knew, how the fuck to deal with covid all we knew is that it spread really quickly and it killed old people that's all we knew.
|
Sam:
[1:13:25]
| Well and and a key element at the beginning parts and and people also i can't i'm dumbfounded every time people talk about like early covid restrictions and blame them on biden when trump was president yeah but but but despite that like we also we didn't have workable treatments yet we didn't have a vaccine yet we didn't have this we didn't have that so and and we didn't have good information yet because we were so yes we were we were erring on the side of being cautious but also even with perfect knowledge that we have today but we even now the knowledge isn't perfect, obviously, but even with the better knowledge we have today, you know, a lot of those restrictions probably should have been in place. They may even have needed to be more stringent than they were or better targeted. Some of the things we did were just wrong that we now know. Like the quality of masks really does matter. We really should have been talking about N95s from the beginning and not these like surgical masks and stuff. And it really was truly airborne. So when people put like these plastic barriers in between people, that did nothing and in some cases made it worse. But we were operating under the best information we had at the time.
|
Todd:
[1:14:41]
| I think best information and even sometimes just reasonable guessing. Like, I think if I put up a barrier, that'll reduce transmission. I think if I put something over my face, I clear. Yes. And 95. Okay. But surgical must be better than just everyone.
|
Sam:
[1:14:57]
| Yes, it was.
|
Todd:
[1:14:57]
| Wide open.
|
Sam:
[1:14:59]
| Flat out. The better the mask, the better. Something is better than nothing. Even, even putting your shirt over your mouth is better than nothing. But like it but the quality mattered a lot to how effective it was and and also like i hate to get back into the covet stuff but also a lot of at a certain level it protected it it took like an n95 to protect you from other people but lower quality masks would protect other people from you unfortunately nobody cared about protecting other people from you yeah.
|
Todd:
[1:15:31]
| Well i i i clearly looked at it both ways, right? I don't want to catch it, and if I have it, I don't want to give it to anybody else. But a lot of people did not feel that way.
|
Sam:
[1:15:42]
| The key being that people were contagious before they would know they had it. Sure.
|
Todd:
[1:15:46]
| Yes.
|
Sam:
[1:15:47]
| Anyway. But your point, getting back to that, is that people still hold grudges about those things from years ago.
|
Todd:
[1:15:54]
| Exactly. If the polling would have held and a majority of people blamed the GOP for the shutdown and that ruined Thanksgiving for a million families, they would fucking remember that next year. So, I'm not advocating for, you know, extending the longest government shutdown in history by another month plus, but it would have sent a message. Probably, I don't know, we'll never know, but maybe a stronger message than, okay, let's end out the safest eight Republican or the safest eight senators to seven or eight, whatever the number was, Sam, to wrap it up. Okay. That's the whole reason, by the way, I'm glad you circled back. The whole reason I wanted to talk about shutdown today is the Democrats had that momentum and a week later just threw it out the window. Like, okay, there, we don't need it.
|
Sam:
[1:16:45]
| Yeah, I mean, it seemed like such malpractice. I mean, I have read a few things of people arguing the opposite case, why now this was the time. I just haven't been convinced.
|
Todd:
[1:16:55]
| No, I'm also not convinced. It's they're, they're, they're playing by the old rules. This is, it's, I don't know. I can't, the sport I follow most closely is the NFL, right? So I don't know. I don't know if you follow pro football at all. Okay. Well, a couple of years ago, they changed the rules for kickoffs to reduce injuries, right? So they don't have 22 people running towards one another full speed. They changed the rules to, yeah, to make that one play less exciting, but like you're not Hopefully you're, you're not sending as many men to an early grave because of repeated head injury. Right.
|
Sam:
[1:17:36]
| Right.
|
Todd:
[1:17:37]
| Okay. Those rules changed a couple of years ago. You can't kick off the old way anymore. And the Democrats are still trying to run towards each other at full speed when like, that's not the way you do it. That's not the rule anymore. Now that I'm saying it out loud, Sam, I regret my choice. This is a horrible metaphor, but like the rules have changed and Democrats are playing by the old rules. I don't mean the rules that are institutionalized into law. I mean, like the traditions, the customary way of governing the country. Trump threw it out the window the first time. Biden tried to bring it back. Trump threw it back harder and faster the second time around. It's like those days are gone. They need to be more cutthroat. And the final thing, this is just more about me than about issues, but the big thing that did it for me to switch from libertarian to Democrat. And the reason more and more that I've been voting Democrat, like I have nothing against billionaires whatsoever. I would love to be a billionaire.
|
Sam:
[1:18:39]
| I would love to too.
|
Todd:
[1:18:40]
| Yes. I don't think I have the combination of skills and motivation and luck to become a billionaire at this point in my life.
|
Sam:
[1:18:49]
| Yeah.
|
Todd:
[1:18:50]
| Fine. I have nothing against people becoming billionaires. But the trouble I have now is, one party way more than the other willing to capitulate to a very small number of extremely wealthy people to get exactly what they want, to hoard more wealth that they will never, ever live long enough to spend. They could spend as much as they can and give it to their heirs for the next three generations, and there'd still be a billion dollars left in 200 years. And yet, their political approach is to dismantle social programs that benefit the greater good, which in my opinion, benefit everybody. Because if people are not worried about paying the rent, about feeding the families, about keeping the lights on and keeping the house warm, if they're not worried about any of that, you're taking away the desperation that leads to crime.
|
Sam:
[1:19:42]
| Right.
|
Todd:
[1:19:43]
| Well, the Republicans run on crime way more than the Democrats do, but their solution is more policing, right? More brute force. You want crime to come down, take away people's incentive of to do crime in the first place. I'm not naive, Sam, that's never going to eliminate crime, but there's a lot of crime that happens because people are at the end of the road. They're like, I need something to eat. I need somewhere to live.
|
Todd:
[1:20:10]
| So I can't find a job or I can't hold onto a job or, you know, because of some physical or mental illness they're incapable of and they resort to. Crimes and they wind up addicted and who knows what else. So, all right, let's give the least among us, take away that desperation and that need, and let's set a bare minimum. The country is never going to let you starve. We're never going to let you go bankrupt because of medical bills. We're never going to let you freeze in the wintertime or die of heat stroke in the summertime. Let's set that floor. Crime will go down and stay down. There's only one party advocating for that and very poorly by the way as well i i i until recently i was a believer that you need those kind of centrist democrats you need a like a bill clinton al gore kind of democrat and i really don't believe that so much anymore and it's partly because you see people like mom donnie and aoc and still bernie sanders today resonating, I wonder what would have happened if Sanders won the primary instead of Clinton in 2016. He was appealing to a lot of the same people that Trump was.
|
Sam:
[1:21:19]
| So I was doing the election analysis back then too. And, you know, in all the matchups where they were, you know, looking at Sanders versus Trump and comparing it to Clinton versus Trump, Clinton did do better in the end against Donald Trump.
|
Todd:
[1:21:39]
| Is that so?
|
Sam:
[1:21:40]
| Okay. You know, and so I remember looking through that primary process because, you know, Sanders kept making the argument that I'll do better against Trump, but the polling just did not back that up. Clinton did do better than Sanders in those head to head matchups with Trump in all the critical states. Now, that's not to say that the dynamics of it might not have changed after he got the nomination. It might have. But it's really hard to judge those counterfactuals. What is true along the lines that you said is there were a lot of Sanders support, and I shouldn't say a lot, there were enough that they were measurable and made a difference in the final result. There were a bunch of Sanders supporters who either went over to Trump directly for the general election because they were like, I hate Hillary so much, I'm going to vote for Trump instead. And there were a bunch of Sanders supporters who just stayed home and didn't vote in the general election. And I forget the exact numbers, but those two groups together, Sanders supporters who stayed home and Sanders supporters who went for Trump, they added up to it.
|
Sam:
[1:22:56]
| A small but significant percentage. I remember, I remember, and I interviewed on this show, I attended the 2016 Washington State Democratic Convention. And one of the people I talked to there was a Sanders delegate to the state convention, who after all the proceedings were over, like a bunch of us went to dinner and he was at that dinner. And I've told the show on the, I've told this story on the show before, but not for many years now.
|
Sam:
[1:23:28]
| He, he got out of, we were at dinner after the convention. Sanders had definitively lost. Clinton had gotten like the, the delegates from Washington state. This was not a surprise. Everybody knew this well in advance of the state convention. He opened his backpack, pulled out a MAGA hat and put it on his head. Well, since she lost, here we go. And I'm like, what the hell, dude?
|
Todd:
[1:23:53]
| Yeah.
|
Sam:
[1:23:54]
| Like, you know, completely different from a policy point of view, but somewhat similar attitude of like, we got to break the system kind of stuff. But I think to your point, though, like I also was always like, you know, hey, the centrists are the way to go. The centrists know how to compromise. We can get like moderate support. We can win that way. and anyway incremental change is usually better than dramatic change anyway because you get backlash to the dramatic change and all kinds of things get broken and you're more likely to screw things up with the dramatic change because you can accidentally do something and have all kinds of unintended consequences and so I was very much on like go for the moderates do gradual incremental change and let's just keep making things better over time but right now and you know and I'd always said, some of the progressive goals, hey, those are good goals in the long term, but trying to jump straight to that would be a disaster.
|
Sam:
[1:24:57]
| But now at this point, I'm like, look, I'm looking at where the energy is. I'm looking at where people seem to have some fight in them. And it's not the centrists. The centrists are just like, look like they're directionless, look like they are, you know, even if they got in power, like you said, they, at best, they'd be trying to restore us to where we were a few years ago and probably do a half-assed job at that. And I'm being more and more convinced that, like.
|
Sam:
[1:25:31]
| The folks who want to make more radical changes, even if they don't succeed in making the changes as radical as they would like to be, are more likely to get directionally correct results.
|
Todd:
[1:25:43]
| Yeah.
|
Sam:
[1:25:44]
| If they can get into power. I mean, and I am not ideologically bound on any of this. I am willing to see, like in the Sanders-Clinton example I just gave, if you show me 2028 polls that show your centrist type person who's trying to appeal to the middle and blah, blah, blah is actually got a better shot at winning against whoever the Republican nominee is than someone who I feel that I personally resonate more with their attitude and policies. I want to, I've said this like show after show for the last few weeks, I want to win more than I want to be right. And if evidence shows me that, you know, the approach that I prefer is not the winning approach, I'm going to change my mind.
|
Todd:
[1:26:37]
| Yeah i i i agree with you with the caveat that i've come to realize opposition lasts for one election cycle yeah and i'm i mean like a two-year you know from presidential to midterms like opposition will get you two years if you don't have an appealing policy that you follow through and execute well and this is.
|
Sam:
[1:27:03]
| And this is part of the problem too yeah i agree with you completely. You need to have a positive agenda as well. Uh, I've said on the show over and over again, you also have to have, have strong opinions and defend them is my view. Like you can't just shy away from immigration or LGBTQ issues because you think something might be unpopular. You have to like, you have to work on, you know, convince people that you are right and the other folks are wrong, you know, and do that strongly. But, and again, if I'm proved wrong by polls, I will change that view. But, you know, the thing is, even if you get into power, there are institutional obstacles, things like the filibuster, things like the courts, where even if you come in fully intending to pass your agenda, you may be blocked. And so that's where we come into, do you go full Donald Trump mode with, screw the way you're supposed to do it, I'm just going to do things and make them stop me. So... I think we've about exhausted this topic. Let's take a quick break. And when we come back, we'll pick one more thing to talk about through the end. Here we go.
|
Break:
[1:28:15]
| You're supposed to say do, do, do. Do, do, do. Alex Emzela! Alex Emzela is awesome. Its videos are fun. And today, once again, we have one of our most loyal subscribers here to tell you how awesome Alex Emzela is. I'd say on a rate from one to ten alex emsla is awesome at i don't know 37 82 he's pretty radical his videos are phenomenal they're full of creativity and they're so funny and exciting to watch wow what happened to your voice then amy was that dad pretending to be you because the audio was distorted when it really wasn't because I told him to? Yes. Good job on remembering, Dad. Do, do, do!
|
Sam:
[1:29:15]
| Okay, we are back. So, Todd, did you have a third topic in mind? If not, I got a list.
|
Todd:
[1:29:23]
| It's sort of a combination of topics, but I just wanted to add one more button on the last topic we were discussing. I listen to a podcast called The Dollop. Are you aware of it?
|
Sam:
[1:29:35]
| The Dollop. No, I am not. I'm going to look it up while you talk.
|
Todd:
[1:29:40]
| There are a billion podcasts.
|
Sam:
[1:29:42]
| I have something to say about that before the end, too. So go ahead.
|
Todd:
[1:29:46]
| Okay. This is, I call these book report podcasts. The, this is one of those podcasts where the host reads kind of a historical summary that he's done after research and he and his comedian friend sort of, have fun joking about it as they go through. These are very progressive liberal leaning comedians who host the dollop. They did one in the last month or so, a two parter, maybe a three parter.
|
Sam:
[1:30:14]
| Dave anthony and gareth reynolds.
|
Todd:
[1:30:15]
| Yes okay.
|
Sam:
[1:30:17]
| I have the right one there are actually several podcasts with dollop in the name but.
|
Todd:
[1:30:21]
| Really that's the right one yeah yeah this yeah this is dave anthony gareth reynolds they did a multi-part episode maybe two or three-parter about bill clinton a month or so ago and it is it was eye-opening because i remember all of this stuff happening because like the first election i voted in was bill clinton 1992 that's the That's the first presidential election after I turned 18. You and I were at Carnegie Mellon. I drove home with my buddy because I never changed my registration to whatever district that is in Oakland. I drove home to Beaver County to vote that day. And so I was an adult through the eight-year Bill Clinton two terms. I had forgotten all of this stuff. Whenever you sort of put it in historical context, the way these guys were summarizing it, Clinton was, and like I remember his presidency, but they were going back to his early political days and governorship and other failed campaigns. His entire career was triangulation. He was never a liberal. He was never a liberal. He would try to read whatever way the political winds were blowing, and that became his stump. And that's how he tried to win, and that became his policy. And it's how he wound up working together with— And nevertheless.
|
Sam:
[1:31:43]
| He was painted as the most liberal, socialist, communist that could ever possibly exist.
|
Todd:
[1:31:50]
| Yeah. Well, and this is a different topic maybe for if I come on a third time someday. The perception versus reality of what is actually leftist politics in the United States, we've never really given it a chance, certainly not in the White House. I think, okay, let me take that back. I don't know, FDR, perhaps. We haven't given it a chance in my lifetime. And everything that FDR achieved, the Republicans have been hell-bent on undoing all of it for the last 60, 70 years. So, different topic.
|
Sam:
[1:32:23]
| I didn't mean to get on this whole thing. If you needed to summarize the Republican agenda, it is undo the New Deal. Well, undo the New Deal and undo the civil rights movement.
|
Todd:
[1:32:35]
| Yeah. Yeah. So I'm bringing that up just because Bill Clinton was perhaps the most successful Democrat socialist of my lifetime. I'm sorry, socialist. I said socialist. That's a centrist.
|
Sam:
[1:32:49]
| Yes.
|
Todd:
[1:32:49]
| The most successful Democrat centrist of my lifetime. In the end, it didn't help us. You know, I think that his administration capitulated and retreated for most of his eight years to a point that it's going to take twice as long to ever recover. You know, and like I said before, I think socially we've made a lot of gains in that. You're right to point out that I'm not thinking about the last five or 10 years of maybe regression on some gay rights issues and other things. But in that, there's much better social policy today, I think, than in the 80s and 90s. But he's a good example of what's made me more supportive of more progressive Democrats today is we've done this at the expense of blue-collar working people. And for different reasons, well, for some similar reasons and for some different reasons, That's why Sanders was appealing to a lot of the same people as Trump. And the only other button I wanted to put on that is like, sometimes small numbers are insignificant and sometimes small numbers really fucking matter. What was it? Like 50,000 votes spread across Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin. That was the difference between Clinton winning and Trump winning.
|
Sam:
[1:34:08]
| Yes.
|
Todd:
[1:34:09]
| Sometimes small numbers really matter. And that's a case where they really matter. So, like, if Bernie wasn't polling as well as Clinton in the aggregate, but he was polling better in a handful of counties in Pennsylvania and Michigan and Wisconsin, that's all the Democrats needed to beat Trump in 2016.
|
Sam:
[1:34:27]
| Right.
|
Todd:
[1:34:27]
| We'll never know. The last topic I wanted to talk about, because this is what we were talking about the first time I was here, was tariffs. And part of it is, if you want to hear, I can share a little bit of what I've been experiencing in my professional life for the last several months. But part of it is I really just don't know. And I don't know whether you know or whether Yvonne would have known if he were here today. I don't know.
|
Todd:
[1:34:52]
| Don't know what the quantifiable effects have been so far. I know what the effects have been in my industry. So I'll start there. I sell equipment for utility scale solar power. These are the giant, you know, 2000, 5000 acre projects that you see more and more all over the country. They started out, they were very common in the Southwest and California and then in Texas, but you can build these everywhere. Now copper aluminum semiconductors a lot of things that impact my industry and many other industries as well they're way up this year and i think some of that is just commodities pricing that's going to happen anyway but i think it's very telling that if you look at the cost curves for those commodities the spike started happening this spring spring of this year and hasn't come back down the one that baffles me is steel steel's kind of where it was a year ago maybe even a little bit lower despite obvious, well-publicized steel tariffs. I don't know what to make of that. I also don't know what the global steel industry looks like. Perhaps there's enough capacity in the United States to meet demand that the tariffs have had less of an effect. But I know part of the effect on aluminum and copper has been, oh, well, we're shielded from competition, so American producers can afford to raise their prices now. And they did.
|
Todd:
[1:36:08]
| But semiconductors is a different story. Almost nobody makes semiconductors in the U.S. at all. Certainly not the consumer-grade stuff that goes into everything that you and I are talking to each other on right now. I don't think any of this comes from the U.S. It's all coming from South Korea, Taiwan, China, somewhere else. And you start to see these media reports. I might have wrote this to you in email that people are estimating the average, I don't know if it's the average family the average taxpayer is going to pay somewhere between like $2,000, $3,000 more since the tariffs began through the end of next year. That's sort of the extrapolation if tariffs don't change. That's how much it's been affecting consumer products and groceries and whatever else goes into these kind of calculations. But man, I am treading water because this is not my area of expertise. And when I'm consuming news media, this is not where I spend a lot of time examining data i know the anecdotes that are getting reported so i could like yeah in my industry yes it has made things more expensive and it's made some projects delay or cancel because they no longer pencil out there's no longer a predictable positive return on investment for the investors and so it's cheaper for them to fold up and cancel rather than to try to make it work thankfully in my industry utility scale solar power, Tariffs and even Big Beautiful Bill have been mostly inconsequential.
|
Sam:
[1:37:36]
| Okay.
|
Todd:
[1:37:37]
| And so, like tariffs, but also I want to talk about the tax credits that have helped renewable energy grow so rapidly for the last 20 years. Trump pitched this as a repeal of the Inflation Reduction Act. But that's not what it was. The Inflation Reduction Act added some additional incentives to establish apprenticeship programs. If you're a contractor building renewable energy projects, it set incentives, tax credit type incentives to reshore manufacturing for all the capital equipment and components that would go into wind and battery and solar manufacturing. Those, by the way, haven't been touched. If you are manufacturing inverters or solar panels or the racking, like what my company makes, you still have those tax credits today. They were untouched and unchanged by the big, beautiful bill. But it wasn't a repeal of the IRA. It was a repeal of all of the investment tax credits that go back to George W. Bush administration. These have been in place for 20 or more than 20 years, and they're all going away. I am grateful, personally, for my ability to make a living and for everyone in my part of the industry. I'm grateful that Trump didn't try to do this in 2017 because the industry wasn't ready for the tax credit repeal back then. But I think we are now. Um, and I can see it by the sustained demand for the stuff that we sell.
|
Todd:
[1:39:06]
| Beyond the safe harbor deadlines of the end of this year and then also July 4th next year, which we can get into the details of that if you're curious. But just, you know, after that, developers start losing the ability to recognize those investment tax credits that have been around mostly since George W. Bush. The one additional investment tax credit that the Inflation Reduction Act added was if you could demonstrate that you crossed minimum threshold of providing domestic content to build your project, you would get a bonus 10% investment tax credit in addition to the 30% that has been in place for like 20 years.
|
Sam:
[1:39:48]
| Okay.
|
Todd:
[1:39:48]
| Trump repealed all of it. Not just the 10 that came from the IRA, repealed all of it. So after July 4th next year, if you haven't demonstrated substantial construction work on a project, then you have to fund that project without tax credits. And I'm happy to report that many developers are still asking us to quote projects that won't be safe Harvard, meaning the industry is now ready to finance and build and commission and generate power.
|
Sam:
[1:40:20]
| Without the incentive.
|
Todd:
[1:40:21]
| You know, looking out a decade, without these tax credits. So, you know, the cynic would, and maybe I'm among them, the cynic would say, well, you know, why do you keep getting them? But you keep getting them for the same reason that every business everywhere claims tax credits because they're available, right? That's why. But this wouldn't have worked, in 2017 because today even with tariffs even in the united states with our labor market you can build new solar power generation for about a dollar a watt you couldn't do that in 2017 it was probably i don't know three or four dollars a watt and that doesn't sound like a big deal but you know if you want to build a 500 megawatt the 500 million watt project there's a huge difference between half a billion and two billion dollars like one of those is not financially viable.
|
Todd:
[1:41:10]
| So now, today, it is. I mean, economies of scale and efficiencies of the equipment and cost reductions that have come from, yes, economies of scale, but also just greater efficiency in manufacturing and construction. Yeah, my industry, thank goodness, is ready for all of this, but the tariffs are baffling to me because I know the effect that they have had to our bank account and to my industry, but I don't know. There's a lot of preamble to what i wanted to ask and talk about sam is like are you paying closer attention to the broader data than i am and like what what have been the real effect is it hasn't i have to admit hasn't been as catastrophic as i was afraid it was going to be when i was here in may but also we he rolled back right taco the taco acronym trump always chickens out came from trump deciding i'm going to roll back these ridiculous tariffs that i announced in april so i think so first.
|
Sam:
[1:42:05]
| Of all a caveat, Ivan would be able to speak better to this than I am. So maybe we can ask him to talk a little bit about tariffs again next week. But from things that, from my understanding, First of all, like the total amount that it would affect the average family number that you gave, you said like $2,000 to $3,000. The most recent I've heard is actually a little bit under $2,000. But here's the thing. This number has kept changing. And I've heard different numbers from different people because the uncertainty is so huge, right? Because they have kept changing. I mean, I don't think a single week has gone by since the big tariff announcement where there haven't been adjustments and changes to tariffs, sometimes fairly significant ones for one country or another or global or whatever. And so it's still changing all the time. So that makes it really hard to assess that. In terms of what's actually happened so far and what people are feeling, my understanding is that in the commercial areas, lots of companies.
|
Sam:
[1:43:14]
| First of all, stocked up on inventory to try to get all loaded up before the tariffs hit. And so there was that that slowly tapered down but also lots of companies are trying at least initially to eat some of the tariffs themselves and take it out of their profit margins to avoid hitting the end customer and there's a question of how long that will last right like part of that is just like we're not going to double the cost of product x overnight but maybe we'll ramp at 10 percent now and another 10 percent in a few months and another 10 percent in a few months, and eventually we'll get to recouping the whole cost of the tariff. Or maybe we'll, to some degree, accept a slightly smaller profit margin for a while.
|
Sam:
[1:44:05]
| Maybe that's not forever, but maybe we'll accept that for a bit. So basically, there have been a bunch of these things that have helped cushion the sort of consumer level impact of a lot of these things. Having said that, if you look at specific products, you are seeing high impacts in specific areas. One that Yvonne has mentioned on the show more than a few times is the price of the bag of coffee he usually gets, which is some premium brand that he gets, of course, of beans, has like doubled. Since the beginning of the year that's a significant change for that product now it's not the most expensive product in the world like you know i don't know the actual numbers but it's like you know 20 bucks instead of 10 bucks or something which adds up over time but it's not quite the same as you know your your rent or mortgage doubling right in terms of how it affects your life. There are some other areas I under, I believe toys have, have been increasing fairly dramatically there, but it's very spotty. It's like on a product by product basis, has it been affected and how much?
|
Sam:
[1:45:22]
| Um, so, you know, and so people talked about how they have seen effects at the grocery stores, but that's also impacted of, you know, well, but what about like eggs are still down from their all-time high even though they're up from their low right their recent low yeah and so people remember the high price and compare to that uh for eggs specifically on the other hand i believe beef is up you know so it really is like it differs on the product differs based on how much the industry has the ability to buffer in the first place also people are are sort of hedging and trying to average over time because because they have kept changing and you don't know what's going on you know you try to you know do what you have to do but not more because it could change next week you know and so this is another one of those things where i think you're right like.
|
Sam:
[1:46:20]
| And I believe when I was on, when you were on last, but I've mentioned other times, there's this thing of, you know, the anchor effect they talk about in psychology. People, when these first started coming aboard, everybody was talking about the worst case scenario. What happens if Donald Trump imposes these crazy high tariffs and keeps them on forever? And so people talked about these massive scenarios where you'd have empty shelves and the prices of the things you could get would be double and it would be like catastrophic across the board. Well, the worst case scenario has not happened. You do have taco over and over and over again. And you have the tariffs are actually more like Swiss cheese. We talked about from the beginning, like, don't look at the raw level that's being advertised. Look at the exceptions that get put in place, because Donald Trump is also out here handing out exceptions for companies that give him favors. You know, famously, like, you know, Apple gave him that little crystal thing and a promise of more manufacturing in the U.S. That they had probably planned anyway, but he promised a bunch of stuff. And so they got some exceptions. So iPhone prices have not doubled.
|
Sam:
[1:47:40]
| You know, as, as one example. And so it's, there's this Swiss cheese effect that every, every individual product is different. Sometimes within a product category, some companies are different than other companies because one got an exception and one did not. And so what's actually happened is a lot less than the worst case, but it's still not nothing. I mean, like 2000 bucks a month average for everybody is still, you know, that that's going to hurt a bunch of people. And the more time goes on, the more they're going to feel it. And yes, it's not as bad as it could have been. And so maybe, you know, a bunch of people are like, well, you know, they said it was going to be this and that didn't happen. Well, they're right. You know, the worst case scenario didn't happen. But that's not to say that what is actually going on isn't still bad and isn't unnecessary damage that could have been avoided outright, you know? And so I think part of the messaging case on it, I mean, again, going back to everybody doing the thumbs up, thumbs down based on how they're doing personally, you know, when we get to the election, we're going to see how people are feeling, you know, do they feel bad or not?
|
Todd:
[1:48:57]
| Yeah. I, you know, I'm clear about where I stand politically. I'm also glad that, and I often say Trump whenever it's sort of Trump in collaboration with Congress.
|
Sam:
[1:49:08]
| Right.
|
Todd:
[1:49:09]
| In this case, you could say Trump. I am glad Trump didn't wreck the economy with his reckless, in my opinion, horribly misguided tariff policy. And I don't think it's overstatement to say horribly misguided. He was imposing blanket tariffs on any import from any country.
|
Todd:
[1:49:29]
| And, okay, if the purpose of tariffs is to give protection to domestic manufacturing, then why the hell would you tariff coffee at all? You can't grow coffee here. Why would you tariff pineapples or diamonds? You know, stuff that you just can't grow or dig up here. The other, the one example that I recall, and I have to admit what you said earlier, the tariff policy keeps changing. So I'm not sure if this is true today, but it was true over the summer. It was more affordable to buy a car imported from Europe or Asia that was assembled there than a car that was assembled in the United States. Because, yes, we're not tariffing cars assembled in the United States, but we're tariffing the parts that are coming from Canada or Mexico or Asia or Europe. And that made the American-made cars more expensive than just buy a fucking Volkswagen or buy a Subaru. And what's the benefit of a tariff policy that winds up hurting the American manufacturing that you're allegedly protecting? I don't know if that got fixed or rebalanced or what, But I'm like, that kind of shit doesn't make sense. And it also doesn't get reported.
|
Todd:
[1:50:44]
| So, and, you know, not everyone is buying a car every year. So they may never notice that impact. Or even if you're buying a car this year, the last time you bought a car, it might have been three or five or 10 years ago.
|
Sam:
[1:50:55]
| Right.
|
Todd:
[1:50:56]
| You don't have any basis of comparison, you know. Yeah, I guess it could have been worse. It wasn't. Part of it was taco. Part of it was, like you say, companies, including my previous and current employer, deciding to absorb as much of that as we could and still be a profitable business. My last company really relied on nearly 100% Chinese supply chain. And we were not able to pivot quickly enough when those tariffs went from 20 to 40 to 65 to 145 or wherever they landed. We just quit importing until things changed, you know, which caused a loss of business and a lot of disruption for some of our customers. But I don't know. The other choice was, you know, sell at a loss or ask our customers to spend more. Like neither one of those are very appealing to either party. I don't mean political party I mean either party in that transaction I am finally after two and a half two hours starting to lose my train of thought Sam but yeah I had tariff on the agenda because I'm like okay let's follow that thread from the first time I was on the show, sounds good well I'm running out of steam man maybe we should go to your list.
|
Sam:
[1:52:15]
| Well we can start to wrap it up we've been going long enough I will mention before I start the close up the show stuff. Um, The one story we did not talk about significantly are the latest Epstein things, which started to move again after government reopened. And I guess that's one possible Democratic rationale for let's go ahead and get reopened is to break that logjam. We may talk about it next week. I'm not going to talk about it extensively now, other than to say there's been a lot of news this week with the discharge petition getting enough signatures and a vote scheduled for next week. And meanwhile, the House Democrats released a handful of emails they'd gotten from the Epstein estate. And in response to that, the Republicans said, those are cherry-picked. Here's 20,000 of those emails that you can go look at, see more context. And people have been pouring through those emails and finding all kinds of interesting stuff, not just in what the Democrats released, but in the 20,000 the Republicans released. And, you know, and it all looks bad.
|
Sam:
[1:53:27]
| I mean, which is to be expected from, you know, anything coming out of Epstein, but it's specifically a lot of it looks bad for Trump and he seems to be freaking out. And, And, you know, the Republicans who voted for the discharge petition, he pressured them really hard to rescind that and take it off. And they seem to have just doubled down. He's fighting with several of them. And anyway, that thing seems to be heating up. We'll have more on that with the vote on the law to sort of compel release of more documents next week. Even if it passes the House, of course, it has to go through to the Senate. It potentially has to survive a veto, all kinds of stuff. So this will play out over a long time. But it's... You know, it's looking messier and messier and messier for Donald Trump. I will have to mention of all of the things, the one that's getting the most traction in social media in the last 24 hours is the one email where Epstein's brother asks Epstein. Have you heard this, Todd?
|
Todd:
[1:54:36]
| I think I know where you're going.
|
Sam:
[1:54:38]
| Yes. Okay. Epstein's brother asks Epstein if he thinks that Vladimir Putin has copies of the pictures and video of Donald Trump giving Bill Clinton a blowjob. Now, it actually says Bubba, but everyone knows who Bubba is, right? You know, now I am not even immediately thinking that this is real. Like it could have been a joke. Like if you look at the context of the emails, it could easily have been a joke. I agree. But it's still hilarious. People are making jokes about it. People are making memes about it. People are saying that both Bill Clinton and Donald Trump should be asked about it. People are saying that whether it's true or not, Bill Clinton should just come out and say it is true because that would be funny.
|
Todd:
[1:55:27]
| And you know you know, This was on my mind. I didn't want to bring it up. I was going to maybe bring it up in a more vague way. But since you broke the seal, it's ironic to me that the thing that might be the most politically damaging to Trump of all of the nonsense that he's been caught doing and supporters have forgiven him or look the other way. The one thing might be this consensual adult activity yes in in a sea of pedophilia right they because you could see some you could see some talking heads starting to raise the the concept of well you know 15's almost 18 they girls look older now yes you know 15's barely legal megan kelly said 15's barely legal which it fucking is not i have a 16 year old it is not barely legal it's way off and everyone knows that right but like people are jumping to his defense but i think there's a lot more people who will not forgive him for number one a perceived perceptibly gay sex act and number two giving pleasure to bill clinton of all people that's the thing that.
|
Todd:
[1:56:47]
| It will be forgiven the least that you did gay stuff to make Bill feel good. It's like a double whammy that he's never going to win MAGA back, if it's true. And I agree with you. The context of that email, so you can kind of dissect it, ironically, the way that Bill Clinton may have on the stand once upon a time. The way it's written is not, oh, I wonder if Vladimir Putin has a photo of Trump blowing Bubba. Does he have the photo?
|
Sam:
[1:57:17]
| Right.
|
Todd:
[1:57:18]
| There's a difference between a photo and the photo. The photo suggests to me that there is such a photo. And then it raises the other questions of like all of these creeps, you know, taking advantage of these poor girls that Epstein rounded up for them must have known that this is illegal and amoral and awful. And you never want people to find out about how do they ever consent to photography or videography? Well, it makes me think that they didn't consent. And this is Epstein's way of carrying favor.
|
Sam:
[1:57:53]
| That's been the rumor all along, is that he had hidden cameras everywhere and basically was compiling blackmail on all of these people. And that was the whole deal. And some people add to that, oh, and he was sharing those pictures with foreign intelligence services. There hasn't been evidence of any of this publicly but that's the speculation, and yeah and the the whole thing is donald trump is just the way he is behaving is not the way you behave if everything is innocuous if everything is innocuous and you're innocent you say go ahead and release it all you'll see there's nothing there he he.
|
Todd:
[1:58:35]
| Never misses an opportunity to respond to a reporter, even if it's just some stream of consciousness bullshit that he's making up on his feet that, you know, isn't true, He's running away from microphones lately, which is uncharacteristic for him. And I know I could see that. I feel that I'm smiling. This is not fun, right?
|
Sam:
[1:59:00]
| It's the underlying acts here are horrific.
|
Todd:
[1:59:04]
| They are. They are horrific.
|
Sam:
[1:59:07]
| Not necessarily the consensual Bill Clinton one, to be clear. If they decided to do that, it is consensual. Fine. Fine. Good on them. No, but the underage women.
|
Todd:
[1:59:17]
| What I'm worried about, Sam, is because the context of, yeah, if that's real and if they consented to do that, they probably consented to do it in a room with one or two children who were not there consensually. So that's the that's the part.
|
Sam:
[1:59:34]
| Of it and another part of this that was made clear to me by some of the survivor's statements a few weeks ago is that in addition to people who actually, participated per se there are most likely hundreds of people who were present and knew what was happening and did nothing.
|
Todd:
[1:59:58]
| Yeah. They were there for the networking and the food and the drink and maybe also actual consensual sex among actual legal adults.
|
Sam:
[2:00:09]
| Maybe they were there for all that.
|
Todd:
[2:00:11]
| But they knew there were children there.
|
Sam:
[2:00:12]
| They knew there were children there. But in some of these cases that have been reported, there was more detail on the Matt Gates one, which is entirely different and did not involve him or whatever. But the situation there was he was having sex with the underage girl in a room in the middle of the party. Like everybody was all around him. It wasn't like they went off to a bedroom. They were right there in the middle doing it. So there were like dozens of witnesses, you know, of exactly what was happening. You know, it's just, It's just Donald Trump's reaction is just oozing guilt everywhere. These things, even, I think this, honestly, I would be surprised if he wasn't actually involved in the activities with underage girls. I mean, there's been enough circulating that points in that direction circumstantially that it would not be surprising in the slightest. But even if he didn't, I think it's absolutely clear. He knew in detail what was happening.
|
Todd:
[2:01:21]
| Oh, there's, there's been so much smoke around this fire over the years. He's talked about, you know, his friend, Jeffrey Epstein likes him young. He, he's on record talking about the Miss teen universe or whatever, whatever underage beauty pageant that he bought. He's like, but you know, the nice thing about that is I can just, I, it's my pageant. I own it. So I can just walk right into the dressing room.
|
Sam:
[2:01:42]
| Yep.
|
Todd:
[2:01:43]
| Dude dude's a creep and it's getting harder and harder to ignore that even if you're a supporter you know so yeah i wouldn't be surprised either but you know he deserves his i don't know i don't want to call it a day in court literally but i mean if there's a lot of raw data coming out right now like the blowjob email right we we don't know what's real what's corroborated what's provable and so forth but 20 000 emails is a pretty big set of data and i wonder what kind of patterns and trends and collaboration you're going to find in all of that what.
|
Sam:
[2:02:17]
| They're talking about eventually releasing like.
|
Todd:
[2:02:20]
| Sure this.
|
Sam:
[2:02:21]
| This is from epstein's estate handing stuff over to a subpoena this is not even the doj investigation stuff not even.
|
Todd:
[2:02:30]
| And they have lots.
|
Sam:
[2:02:32]
| Of other stuff.
|
Todd:
[2:02:33]
| It is unfortunate that he's going to be brought down by such a horrible, if, if he's brought down by anything, it's going to be this horrible thing that hurt so many girls. And he's not going to be brought down by like the 200 other shitty things that he did to make the country worse.
|
Sam:
[2:02:49]
| Right. That sucks. Yes, it does. Okay. Let's wrap it up. So first of all, I, as usual, go to curmudgeons-corner.com. You can find our transcripts. You can find all the ways to contact us. As of a few weeks ago, you can now actually buy one of these curmudgeons corner mugs directly without having to join our Patreon and all that stuff. And of course, we do have the link to our Patreon where you can give us money 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 that mug, all of that kind of stuff. It's fun. And at $2 a month or more, or if you just ask us, we will invite you to our Curmudgeons Corner Slack where Yvonne and I and a bunch of listeners are hanging out, chatting, sharing links, doing all that kind of stuff all week long. It's a lot of fun. The more the merrier. Join in.
|
Sam:
[2:03:41]
| And yeah, so I usually at this point, or Yvonne usually gives a highlight from the Curmudgeons Corner Slack. Todd, I don't think you're in there very often, so I won't ask you for that. But I will- It's been months. Yeah. It's been months. Yeah. It's okay. We've got some folks who are in every day, multiple times a day. We've got a few folks who check in, like, maybe weekly. We've got a few folks who checked in once years ago and have never been back. You know, we've got all kinds. But the more the merrier. It's a lot of fun in there. But I will mention something that one of my own things I mentioned, which is, as I've mentioned on the show the last couple weeks, I was laid off. I am in that unemployed period. And I haven't seriously started job hunting yet. I'm trying to sort of relax and do some of my own things for a little while. They gave me enough of a severance plan so I have a little bit of runway before...
|
Sam:
[2:04:38]
| You know, before I have no choice. Um, but so I've been working on some of my personal projects and none of them are yet at the, okay, I want to show this to everybody in the universe, but I'll give a preview again to some of you here on the podcast. This last week, I actually, one of the things I had been doing, by the way, is like, I'd been sort of, I'd work on one thing for a few hours, then another thing for a few hours, then another thing for a few hours, sort of just to spread my time out over a bunch of things I want to get done. Some of them like, you know, projects that I'll be able to show or talk about here. Some of them just like things around the house or whatever.
|
Sam:
[2:05:18]
| But last weekend, I decided to let myself actually concentrate on one thing and actually make some forward progress, which was a lot of fun. You know, you feel a lot more satisfaction if you work at something for like a whole day or two and actually see visible progress, as opposed to you work an hour and then you stop, and then you work an hour and then you stop, and progress is very, very slow over the course of weeks. So one of my projects, Todd mentioned earlier in the show how many billions of podcasts there are out there. One of my projects is for podcast discovery. My basic thesis is that they're like dozens and dozens of places where you can go and see like what the popular podcasts are you know almost every podcast player has an add new podcast and you can go into a directory and see like top 100 lists and a whole bunch of different categories and whatever there there's no shortage of that but i've i've been thinking about the long tail of podcasts because this podcast is the long tail of podcasts we're never going to show up in a top 100 list.
|
Sam:
[2:06:30]
| So I've been working on something where the basic idea is you put in some filters about what kind of podcasts that you're looking for, and then it shows you a actually completely random sample of podcasts that meet that criteria. So you can sort of surf the long tail. And within that, I've got mechanisms for you to sample the podcast too. So like if you just hit play on a podcast these days, 90% of podcasts start with an ad. And or and even the podcast that don't start with an ad may start with like five minutes of introductory nonsense that is not necessarily the best sample. So I've got like buttons that will sample, take a random first year randomly sampling podcasts in the in the filters you give. Plus, I've got a mechanism to just I want a quick sample. It'll pick a random segment from that podcast to play so that you may you may miss those ads. or you may get unlucky and you'll hit that ad depending on how many they have. I don't know.
|
Sam:
[2:07:35]
| Anyway, I'm not done with this thing. And I've also got a feature that will let you, you've picked your 10 random podcasts or whatever. Now I want to hear a sample of each of them and let you sequentially go through and do a minute of each or whatever. And I've got a way to like indicate that, hey, I like this one. I want to be able to come back to it later. Anyway, I've only built about half of the functionality I want to build and it's a little flaky still. There's some bugs and it may go down at a random moment if I decide to work on it again and break something. But anyway, I'm, yeah, To you, as a preview for Curmudgeons Corner listeners, please check it out. It's at jukepotter.com, J-U-K-E-P-O-D-D-E-R.com.
|
Sam:
[2:08:21]
| And check it out, play with the features, send me feedback. The address for feedback, well, you can send it to Curmudge Corner. I think I set up a feedback address for this specifically too, but I don't remember. So, you know, feedback at curmudgeons-corner.com will get me. And tell me what you think. Tell me if you like it, features you would like added. Like I said, I'm only halfway through my feature list that I want to add to this thing. If you hate it, tell me that too. Be nice, though. Don't be too cruel. Tell me if you'd use it or not. Anyway, it's one of my projects that I've been thinking about for years, but I actually have time to do something with in this short interval before I start hunting for real jobs again. And so, yeah, so check it out, please. And also the other one that is not as far along, but is more complicated when I get to it is something I call Robin Letter. It's robinletter.com. It's an alternative to social media to keep in touch with people that are not the folks you keep in touch with every day, but maybe you still want to know what's going on in their lives. Like, I don't know, cousins or, you know, old folks you knew from college or whatever.
|
Sam:
[2:09:34]
| All that's there right now in public is a brochure page, but I've also been working on that. I'm building the stuff to create accounts and all that kind of stuff right now, and I'll be doing more. So anyway, those are my two side projects that have gotten the most traction so far. I've got some others that are not as far along as these two, but take a look at both, and if you're interested, like them, give me feedback. I'd love to hear more. So yeah.
|
Todd:
[2:10:00]
| Can I just tell you quickly, Sorry, Sam. First, the Robin letter is very appealing because the whole reason I still use Facebook is this is how I know what old friends and family are up to, you know, and I hate it.
|
Sam:
[2:10:17]
| Right.
|
Todd:
[2:10:18]
| I want a Facebook alternative. I haven't found a good one.
|
Sam:
[2:10:21]
| That's the that's the inspiration for this is all the big social media uh sites end up being about like clout chasing and you wanting to get lots of followers and posting things that get seen by lots and lots of people the whole idea about robin letter is let's get back to you i want to keep keep up with what my family's up to or my friends and and it's at robinletter.com so and i all all All that's there right now is a brochure description of the idea, but also a link to email me if you want to be on the list for me to contact when I'm ready for beta users.
|
Todd:
[2:10:56]
| That's awesome. I'm going to do that. I'm going to share this with friends and family. You could be the next Mark Zuckerberg.
|
Sam:
[2:11:02]
| Who knows? You know, that would be awesome. We did say earlier, I wouldn't mind being a billionaire. Somehow, I don't think this is going to do that. But, you know, I figure right now, this is my best shot at trying some of these ideas. Like, before I run out of cash and I'm like, okay, I need a regular day job again, I can explore some of these ideas and try building some stuff. And I'll be honest, the, you know, AI assistance for coding makes a difference here. Like, I've been like, you know, I started messing with computers when I was like seven, eight years old. and I've hacked together random stuff my entire life, but I've never been a professional. I don't know all the latest and greatest new technologies. I don't care to know all the latest and greatest technologies. That's not what excites me, but with, quote-unquote vibe coding, as they're calling it, I can whip up some requirements and have the AI. I'm using Cursor for this, by the way, as my AI assistant.
|
Sam:
[2:12:12]
| It can whip up a prototype, put some things together, and it gets me like 80% of the way there. And then there are usually all kinds of bugs and problems, and it looks bad, and sometimes it does stupid things. But then I iterate, and it gets better over time and you know so like this juke powder i i have mentioned it on the show again but this is the first time i'm saying everybody come look at it because this is the first time it's sort of reached the point where you can actually at least do something useful with it like it doesn't have all the features i want but like you could actually use this to find new podcasts that you've never heard of before that might be interesting now the problem with the long tail is also there's lots of crap in the long tail so you might have to hit refresh a few times before you find something that you like but i i think it's useful to be able to explore and i i am thinking about doing something like this for books too it's just not as far along.
|
Sam:
[2:13:09]
| It kind of replicates the experience of going into an old-fashioned dusty old used bookstore, Where instead of going to a Barnes and Noble or an online retailer, I still shall not name, where all the bestsellers are pushed at you and things that are specifically recommended for you might be pushed at you. But instead, you're just going down the aisles and you say, oh, I feel like a mystery book. And you see all kinds of old mystery books that may or may not have been popular. And you pick something up that looks interesting. That's the idea here. So anyway, and Robin Letter, I've been feeling the social media has gone past keeping up with your friends for a long time. Like I first had the idea for Robin Letter more than 10 years ago, but now I actually have some time to try to actually build something.
|
Todd:
[2:14:04]
| Oh yeah. Juke Potter, I just want to say is appealing also. And it's funny, you and I met because we participated in the college radio station, which sort of specialized and prided itself on playing the long tail of music.
|
Sam:
[2:14:20]
| Right.
|
Todd:
[2:14:22]
| I'm sure you remember the days that there would be, I don't know how much you were playing music versus just you and Yvonne doing your show.
|
Sam:
[2:14:28]
| I played music only the bare minimum required to get my license and I was doing public affairs and news back then too.
|
Todd:
[2:14:34]
| Yeah.
|
Sam:
[2:14:36]
| But when I did do music, when I did do music, I used a random number generator to pick a room in the station, to pick a shelf in the station, and to pick a record for the station and to pick a track on the record. And so I used this random method even back then when I did play music on WRCT Pittsburgh.
|
Todd:
[2:14:54]
| Yeah. So it's, yeah, it's going from the long tail of music. That's how I know you to, I am kind of stuck in a rut of the same universe of podcasts. And whenever I discover a new podcast, it's probably because I heard a guest on one of the other podcasts mention it. And like, oh, okay, I'm going to, I'm going to go try that out. And over the, you're like, you know, I'll get tired of one and they'll fall out of my feet and the other one will come in. But it's like, I'm, I'm in the same kind of universe and it's, I listen to podcasts for entertainment i want to laugh so i listen to stuff mostly by comedians or comedy writers i could use a dose of something else so i'm gonna check this out too man because there's something i there's there's gonna be something out there appealing so that's cool man these are cool projects that you i don't want to say you get to work on sam because you get to work on you know at the expense of continuing employment but that's cool all right i didn't mean to drag this longer than you want It's okay. Yeah.
|
Sam:
[2:15:49]
| I'm pretty excited about both of those things. I get to promo my projects.
|
Todd:
[2:15:52]
| Yeah.
|
Sam:
[2:15:53]
| Nice. Okay. Thank you. Thank you, Todd, for filling in. We really appreciate it. Good to have you again. It was fun. So everybody, have a great week. Hopefully, Yvonne will be back next time. Stay safe. Have a good time. Not too good a time. All the stuff I usually say. And we'll talk to you next time. Here comes the music. Okay. Thank you again, Todd. Really appreciate it.
|
Todd:
[2:16:49]
| Yeah, my pleasure.
|
Sam:
[2:16:50]
| I'm going to hit stop in a couple seconds. And so we'll talk to you later.
|
Todd:
[2:16:56]
| Thanks, man. See you next time.
| |
|
