[00:00:00] Speaker A: Foreign.
[00:00:05] Speaker B: You're listening to casual talk radio, where common sense is still the norm, whether you're a new or longtime listener. We appreciate you joining us today. Visit
[email protected] and now here's your host. Ler.
[00:00:21] Speaker A: On January 20th, of course, we celebrated Dr. Martin Luther King Day as well as the inauguration of the president, United States Donald Trump for the second time, only the second president to serve non consecutive since Grover Cleveland 1872, I believe it was.
And there's already been some fallout. Vivek Ramaswamy is apparently out of the Doge plan. The rumor is that he was not getting along with Elon Musk behind the scenes. And the rumor is that Elon, or excuse me, Vivek is going to be running to be governor of Ohio. That's an intriguing choice. I'm not down on it, but it's an intriguing choice and it's an interesting fallout. I know Vivek has been kind of shoved to the back, which is unfortunate because I don't think much of Elon. So I'm curious to see what's happened that caused it. I don't know that I'll ever figure out. But meanwhile, Donald Trump, first day signed a whole raft of executive orders. I mean, I, I, I lost count of exactly how many that he signed. They were stacked and ready to go for him to just sign and sign and sign and sign. And I was, I was shocked at how many that I saw because it seemed like there was just he already knew what he wanted to do when he got in there and he had them ready to go for a signature and he had forgotten all of the different things that he had asked for because when he, you know, he's getting ready to sign, what isn't him saying? He didn't even remember a lot of these different things that he would eventually sign. I'm interested there, I'm interested in, I was interested to watch how everything played out. The, hey, I've got, I've got these agenda items that were my front and center that I want to make sure I get done day one. And he was true to himself. He did exactly what he said he was going to do. And a lot of them, except for one which was, you know, cryptocurrency and where he talked about he was going to focus there and everything else, he absolutely went nuts with, with the executive actions. And some of them were rescinding some of the Biden ones. And I was disappointed not all of them were accounted for, but he did ones about the border Straight away and to the point that the border patrol sent out an announcement on Insta scam that said that basically they were revoking the ability for undocumented immigrants to schedule appointments, which pissed off a lot of people. He signed one about reducing inflation and the. I want to talk about the reducing inflation one ever briefly before I get to the rest of them. But the summary about this one is around the push for climate control things, things that NASA necessarily were going to increase all of the prices on people because it was for a climate so called climate crisis as well as extending emergency price relief. So price relief is the idea to, you know, we'll subsidize some of this, you know, impact on you business but we want you to pass some of that savings along to some of the homeowners during this time while we're realigning where budgets go basically is what it is. Things like increasing housing. There's been a housing crisis in many places. Getting rid of administrative expenses. So this is just administrative overhead that's been talked about multiple times.
Rent seeking, rent seeking and ties to health care costs. But rent seeking is. You're trying to find basically the rent that works for you. But the reason that there's a connection to health care costs is because in some healthcare you have to have a place to stay or a place to be, you know, taken care of and then there's a cost burden on whoever's going to pay for it. So they're trying it into healthcare costs overall to say we'll offset some of the spend that it's going to incur upon you if you need health care, however you needed health care or why ever you needed health care. This is one of those low hanging fruit ones.
The other one which I was very interested was there was a lot of turmoil around home appliances varying. I just installed a two stage furnace as well as a tankless water heater. The two stage furnace, the part you know was probably about I think it's like a $2,000 unit and then of course you have to do the work. And then I last year I installed a new air conditioner. It's a single stage and I don't know how much the part was. I can look it up, it's probably about 1500 dollars but it cost me 6000 to get it installed because it's a whole new frame. They had to take away the old, they had to recharge, do all this wiring and piping and all, all new hardware for this.
And then I got the tankless water heater and the tankless water heater I know for a fact was probably about 1800 bucks. What this is talking about is a lot of the home appliances, not just these, but also kitchen appliances, et cetera.
There were going to be necessary increases in the price of them because of the cost of manufacturing as well as the cost of internal supply like air conditioner and refrigerant changes. We're going to mandate an increase in those prices for these supplies as well as the tariffs that I'll talk about later. The tariffs are going to increase the price of different things that you purchase as well. So what this is trying to do is stave off any sort of short term damage to price to help people kind of weigh it as we kind of get settled and calm down.
Part of the big thing on this piece, specifically with the climate over in California, you know, there's the fires and everything and of course that's just jacking up the, the atmosphere, the pollution like crazy. So all of the progress they were trying to make on the forced EVs and all the nonsense that they were doing out there is for not. And for those that don't know, this is a quick lesson for you. California's frequency of wildfires is because they passed laws a long time ago that got rid of all the different steps necessary to mitigate wildfire spread. You're supposed to do like controlled burns, cutting down excess, removing excess brush, maintaining these areas and pruning them instead of letting them get overgrown. What California was trying to do is basically tell people to yank out their lawns and tell people to cut down trees. And like Irvine, Irvine is a stone garden because they just ripped all the stuff out thinking it was going to help. It didn't help. You still have to maintain all of these forested areas. And California again passed laws that basically minimized how much maintenance was being done. So we can start, we can try to sit here and blame client climate change. It's not climate change. In almost every situation it's a lightning strike, some sort of power line damage or something else, or arson, kids out there playing fire, somebody tossed a lit cigarette, whatever. It's, it's infrequently something just randomly triggered by climate.
So because of that and because they don't maintain it, the frequency of fire is going to continue to increase to the point that they'll learn and eventually they're going to get tired of the leadership and hopefully vote out these, you know, Democrat governors and get back to some sanity. Remember, California was the one state of very few that still voted against the president and they don't seem to learn. And then this fire is the fallout of those bad decisions. They don't understand that your leadership has failed you, bottom line. I don't say that to trash you. I'm saying it because I care and I want you to be smarter. That your leadership has failed you, that the fires have nothing to do with climate change. It's because California is not taking care of that. Remember, we didn't have anywhere near this when there was way more trees back in the 90s and the late 80s. There was way more trees out there and you didn't have anywhere near this many fires. But an increase in population, a substantial increase in population correlates to an increase in wildfires unless you maintain them. That's all I'm saying there.
Speaking about tariffs, Donald Trump was going to focus on Canada and Mexico on February 1, 25% tariffs. He's talking about tariff on China.
If China and this is around TikTok, he did a thing saying, I'll give you 70 something days to divest. So I'm buying you some time. But ultimately you got to do something. You can't do what you're doing, you're going to get shut down. I would love to see TikTok banned. That's personal opinion. But he's talking about leveling, levying a tariff on China because of the association on TikTok and then some of the other countries he talked about, he's held off on those and he's just doing the big ones mostly to stem off illegal immigration, withdrawing from the World Health Organization and some people saying, well, how can you do this? Crazy.
The reason that he wants to get away from the World Health Organization is because of what he feels is an unfair balance of how much the United States pays towards it versus other countries that other countries, they all, they don't pay their fair share. Same with the climate accords and United nations and all these other NATO. He's saying, yeah, but we're footing the full bill for this. And then you got like with the climate accords, China's the grossest polluter, which is fact, they're the grossest polluter, but we pay the most. And China's got tons of money and they have way more citizens, but they're not paying their fair share. Why are we paying the bulk? We want everybody to pay the equal. We're not going to do it. That's what he's coming and he doesn't see that ours and I agree with this that our contribution is going to make a significant dent and it shouldn't just be what we should do our part.
Even though it's 0.1%. We know pollution in the oceans, we are not the gross polluter. In the air, we are not the gross polluter. It's coming from China and India primarily. Do the research, you'll see it for yourself.
Trump withdrew again from the climate pact, the Paris climate agreement, as he did before that, Joe Biden rejoined. So he's already withdrawn from that again and that's pissed a bunch of people off as part of some of this energy push. Then he declared a national energy emergency, which essentially is saying we need to drill for more oil and fossil fuels because there's been a crunch down. Now, Biden did open up some of the coffers, but he was minimizing access to those and trying to push for wind and solar. And that's not done any good in a world where you're pushing for EVs and everything. Everyone knew our grid was not ready for that kind of level of impact that we were imposing upon it. And we still depend on fossil fuels. California tried to ban diesel trucks and they backed off of it because they realized we can't run these heavy rigs and towing, all this power is necessary. You can't do that on battery power things. You're going to have to have fossil fuels and there's nothing wrong with it, but we can minimize the impact by embracing hybrids. Many of the car manufacturers, because of Biden's EV mandate, rushed away from hybrids and rushed to full EVs, which people don't. Can't afford. People are not going to afford 50, 60 thousand dollars. That puts them in debt. They default on the debt, nobody wins. So Donald Trump's going to get back to the middle and say we should embrace fossil fuels and we need to see no more EV mandates. Let's get back to some regular sanity. And I completely support this hundred percent inflation reduction Act. This is about tax credits, low interest loans, grant programs, different things to help the inflation that's been imposed on us and getting rid of the Green New Deal garbage that AOC was pushing hot and heavy. Love seeing that the doge I talked about no government censorship. This is digging into what the government actively did under the Biden administration and the latter part of the Trump administration. Near the end when they basically muted the sitting president, he's trying to dig in to try to figure out how was their censorship happening from the government. Why was the government involved in threatening big Business. And Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook went on Joe Rogan and basically said, yeah, they were threatening us and they were yelling and screaming and forcing us to do it. We just did. Now, he didn't have to bow down. He's a coward. But Jack Dorsey, same thing on Twitter. Same thing. They're cowards. They bow down. They could have just said, screw you, we're a private business. Sue us if you think you got a problem. We didn't do anything wrong. We're not gonna do what you're not going to be strong armed. But the big businesses are cowards. They're led by cowards, which is why your rights were violated during COVID He's trying to figure out, first of all, why did that happen? Second, put an end to it. He did a bunch of pardons on some of the January 6th folks.
Of course people got off. Well, let's look at what Biden did. Literally minutes before he was leaving office, he pardoned his entire family, even people that weren't up on a crime. When this is the same Joe Biden that went on interviews saying he would never do that and saying that anybody and other people said, anybody that asked for a pardon is probably guilty. We know what it is.
Security clearances stripped from people that were, you know, part of this whole witch hunt that was happening upon him. And the Hunter Biden situation, the dei, he's targeting getting rid of DEI and the government, he's targeting transgenderism in the military. He's targeting anything that weakens our position. The whole Secret Service, you had a bunch of inept women out there trying to protect the president of the United States. They were not going to be effective at the job, which they weren't because the guy almost got killed. He put out an official policy, said the United States government's policy is that there are two genders. This was misrepresented as two sexes. He didn't say two sexes. He said two genders because it was important that he clarify. Male and female are the only two genders. And this is the official policy. United States government. I'm glad he did this. And what he did is he defined a female. He did not define a male, but he defied, because the predominant risk is when you have a male that is pretending to be female walking into female bathrooms and raping and all this other stuff. But he defined a female as, quote, a person belonging at conception to the sexual that produces the large reproductive cell, referring to eggs. So if you were born basically at conception, a person belonging at conception at Conception, A doctor can determine. As you came into this world, were you producing a reproductive cell? Now, I know that some of the loophole on this one is going to be ones that were born with a defect, with a defect where they're not able to reproduce, which has happened to some. And then that's a loophole. I still like that he took a stab at doing it and put the foot down on it, but he's already getting attacked on that one. Because of the gender identity. They're getting rid of the whole gender identity, Title x or Title 9, rather, protections, and making sure that intimate spaces are protected and getting rid of enforced pronouns, which I'm. I'm absolutely a fan of enforced pronouns. I have no problem. If somebody asks, you can ask. I can ask somebody to refer to me as Mr. They're not required to, and I can't sue them. And I'm not gonna lose my job because somebody doesn't, you know, they're not gonna lose their job because they don't call me mister. Same thing. Somebody can ask. I have the right not to honor those based on what I was taught in school. And that's how it should be, is free speech goes two ways. I can choose whether or not to respect your pronouns. I don't have a pronoun or whatever it is. You're gonna default. Call me the pronoun that you see with your eyes, and that's perfectly fine. So I'm perfectly cool with that one. Absolutely cool with that one. Name changes. So this is the Gulf of Mexico, naming it to the Gulf of America, renaming Mount McKinley back. Barack Obama, if you didn't know, renamed it to Denali. This was during his presidential reign, and it was to honor Native Americans. And Donald Trump's not a fan of just renaming, just for the hell of it, which I'm 100% on that one. And then again, just rolling back a bunch of the stuff that, you know, Joe Biden had done in his tail end. He had done a lot of executive orders. So all of this is. All of this happened in the last day. All these executive orders he's already pushing. And. And then people are like, well, how can he do that? Well, we need to be consistent, because Joe Biden did the same thing. He rolled up in there, he cut the Keystone pipeline, he started threatening Americans on the COVID stuff. He did all. And then, pardon Dr. Fauci. So if you took the vaccine and something were to happen to you, like what happened with asbestos, where they didn't know any better or lead where they didn't know any better. And then later it turns out, oh, mesothelioma because of the asbestos. Oh, too bad. So sad. If something like that happens because of the vaccine later, you have no recourse. You can't. They have some bureau set up that's supposed to try to remunerate people. But the bottom line is you can't just sue Fauci for that. You can't sue, you know, the government or anybody for something where they damaged you because they forced you to take it for your job, for example, which is the hesitancy. The hesitancy is being forced to do something against your will. And when we talk about my body, my choice, we don't extend it to something like that. That's what Donald Trump is basically wanting to expose are all these situations where somebody was suppressed because they had a voice. And then there was a Chewbacca they tried to deflect by pointing at. January 6th when. January 6th, there's alternate video showing it was largely a peaceful thing. Now, with all the Donald Trump stuff out of the way, we have a new president in there. The, the economy did not react as positive as we'd like in the short term, but that's because he didn't talk about more of the economy related things. You know, the housing market, talked about building more houses, but talking about rates, you know, the Bitcoin reserve and all the things designed to help reignite the economy didn't talk about any of those. And as a result, the industry did not respond as positively yet as we might hope that it would. Time is going to tell what that's going to look like, and then we have to see when Congress gets in session how that looks with some of these new laws that are going to be talked about and hopefully passed. Since Republicans control the branches, essentially they have control of all three because the Supreme Court, the judicial branch, although they do not lean politically, for the most part, they lean conservatively. And so there's a theory that most of the stuff that would ever want to go through, with the exception of stuff that Mike Johnson would block, because we believe that there would be that, but for the most part would go pretty smoothly. There's going to be disruption on the military side for sure because of the whole, you know, getting rid of transgenders in the military. At no point did he say, from what I saw, that it was against gay folks, bisexual folks, lesbian folks. He, he seemed to not have an issue with any of that. He seemed to have an issue with transgenderism. And most Specifically using taxpayer dollars to support those surgeries. That's what he had a problem with, and I would argue you should have a problem with that, too. If somebody wants to transition and they're an adult, as long as they pay out of their own pocket, who cares? But once you start using taxpayer money, the government's going to take notice, and I think you should, too. And I think it's a good thing to start with, and we'll see how that all pans out.
Last point on this. Some people were really pissed off. I'll just call it like it is. Some people were really pissed off about TikTok. If you have a kid and you allow your kid to be on TikTok, first of all, shame on you. If you're on TikTok, shame on you.
I'd like you to consider is my call to action. I'd like you to consider what TikTok really is. TikTok purpose built. It's purpose built to waste your time. It's purpose built to lower your attention span. It's purpose built to dumb you down. It's purpose built to mislead you. It's purpose built to cause you to be lesser of a person. You think I'm attacking you, and I'm not. I'm educating you about what's happening to you. The whole thing has algorithms that are designed to waste your time. They're designed to. To cause you to spend more time on it. They feed you what they want you to keep paying attention to, which limits your ability to be effective in other avenues. So my call to action to you is simple. I would like to recommend either a book or a movie, whatever your fancy is. It's called the Phantom Tollbooth. You may or may not remember such a booth, such a book from your childhood, but it's a really good book.
The book is about, you know, Milo, this. This kid.
And he's ineffective. He's just a slacker. He's wasting time. And it's all about time wasting and being effective. And then there's educational pieces about math and words and. And it's a good. I think it's a good movie for all ages, frankly. It's a children's stuff, but I think it's good for all ages. I think everybody should take time to check out at least the book, if not the movie. I think the movie is trimmed down too much.
But I do recommend checking out the book if you get a chance. But there's a section in the book and essentially what the kid, he's climbing a mountain and he reaches this. Essentially it's a phantom type guy. And the phantom type guy saddles them with pointless tasks. You know, you're having to scrub something with a toothbrush, you gotta scrub a bunch of stuff or picking at something with a, digging with a toothpick and all these things that are wasting time. And the intent is to highlight that. Well, yeah, you're wasting time, but you're doing something right. You're, you're, you're being effective and you'll just sit here and do it forever because why not? That's what's happening to you on TikTok is you are being encouraged to waste your time with pointless nonsense. So my call to action to you, number one, is consider the book. I know some of you don't like books, so you can do the movie, it's on Amazon Prime Video if you want, consider the movie or read the book and just understand about time wasting and time usage and, and more importantly, language and math and things. But the time waste is the key. I want to call out that TikTok is encouraging you to waste time and be ineffective. And I don't want you to be ineffective. I want you to be effective. I want you to be a strong contributor. It's going to be more important now than it ever was. Because when Donald Trump starts cleaning house on some of this garbage that's been out there, I suspect you're going to find job opportunities that were not, were not there before. I suspect that some people will get into these positions that will encourage stronger contributors in the workspace. If you're just a blatant slacker and you know who you are, you're going to get left behind and I wouldn't want to see that happen to you. Which is why I'm encouraging you to wean yourself off of the garbage. Wean yourself off the TikToks, wean yourself off the insta scams and, and the X even wean yourself off that garbage. Pick up a good book, go to your library and check out something that's interesting that you never even thought of and then just sit and read. And I understand you feel like you don't have time. I guarantee you, you have time to read for an hour a day. You do. It'll enrich you and it'll highlight. Okay, there is actually a different world in books. If it's a good book, there's a different world that you can find. It's more, it's first, it's slower paced, right. Slow down, time Relax a little bit and embrace that good book and learn something too along the way. Even if it's a biography type book, I don't have a problem with that. There's plenty of good biographies. There's plenty of good books out. I just would like to see as a call to action. People get away from the garbage of social media that is now is, I think more important. Why? Because I think you're going to see more opportunities that are going to be looking for those solid contributors and you're going to get left behind if you don't take the advice of Mr. Leister, who's trying to help you out. That's, that's my contribution to you here on Martin Luther King's Day and the inauguration of Mr. Donald Trump for the second time. And by the way, we should check in on that lady screaming bloody murder when Trump was. I didn't see that she was out again. So I hopefully she didn't kill herself because she was pretty bad off. Now I know some was a, was a stunt, but hopefully there's people out there. I saw it was a little bit less, less frantic. There's still some, you know, nut cases like aoc, but it's less frantic. So I'm, this is my time to try to encourage things like book reading and calmness and relaxation and taking the time to enrich yourself and improve yourself. Oh yeah. By the way, you may or may not have heard that MBAs are becoming less popular. Some of you heard the story, you heard the narrative, you saw the scam that was college. The scam was there was a time high school diploma is all you needed to work a lot of these jobs. Then all of a sudden it became associate's degree as the requirement even for jobs where the high school diploma was perfectly fine. Then it became that the bachelor's degree was acquired. Then it became that the liberal arts bachelor's degree ain't good enough. Then it became that the MBA was the top of the line. We are now at the point we're seeing that MBAs are not being accepted or at least they're not being favored by a lot of these companies. Do you know what's happening? What's happening is that you had a lot of people in high power positions who are using their own bias to discriminate against low to middle income, against low middle income folks as well as minorities because they knew those groups were not likely to get the mba, so they were using it to discriminate. Now they're being exposed in the DEI world because The DEI world is trying to tell them not to focus on things that are discriminatory. So then it goes to the extreme left. They hire pretty much anybody simply because the race, creed, color, him or her or both. And then those people are incompetent and then you end up trashing and burning. Now they're trying to realign back to the center. So when I tell you that you should enrich yourself and learn these things and understand and get away from social media, it is because I see the way that everything reacts, especially with the Zuckerberg interview. When they get caught with their pants down and Vaseline off the side, this is what they do. They back down and they keep shifting because they don't understand, because they're too afraid to simply take a risk. Taking a risk is you simply level set. This is the task stuff I'm going to be expecting you to do. And as long as you do it, you'll have a job, you know, a paycheck. When you don't do it, you will not have a job and a paycheck. And you strike the fear of a deity into them and you expect them to show up. That's how I was brought in, in the workspace. They don't do that these days. So as a result, they can't rely on the college kids because they know the college kids will wash out because they don't have the skill sets. They can't trust the ones who didn't go to college, even though they should. They don't because they understand those people were never taught some of the fundamentals because they never worked for a boss like I did.
Summary is simple. My call to action is based on that. It's based on what I see, it's based on what I can forecast is coming down your way. It's coming. We're coming to a world where there's going to be opportunities and the opportunities are going to, I believe, align back to the center, where there's going to be more of a focus on people who show up to work and get the work done with quality time and integrity. And it's not going to be about DEI and it's not going to be about social media. So if you want to get not washed away, I suggest that you help enrich yourself now. Get into the groove now. Retrain yourself away from the garbage that's been. Turn off your text messages, get on the horn with your best friend, actually voice talk with them, get away from the text messages, get away from the screens and get back into the solid fundamentals. All I'm recommending. It's up to you. Disregard me if you choose.
