SPEAKER_02: 0:20

Hi, this is Rosa Sanji Day. I'm here with another episode of Philosophy of Life podcast. Today I have a special guest. His name is Bob O'Brien. I know Bob for quite some time now. And he's an absolutely fantastic person. He's humble, never could never quite to claim he's right all the time. But his passion is timeless. And and most importantly, he has remarkable understanding of human relations, how people can connect, communicate, and truly understand one or the other. So thank you, Pop, to be here. So I want to ask you first um I always ask uh my interviewer or my guest uh to you explain a little bit about yourself, w how where you're coming from and so on.

SPEAKER_00: 1:19

You mean physically? Where I was born and where I grew up and sure. Yeah, I I was born in a place called Washington, D.C. which very few people have ever heard of. No, I'm kidding. But uh I been in the area basically my whole life, except for a few years of college and a hundred miles away in Richmond, Virginia. So I've been around this area my entire life. In fact, probably I grew up mainly about a mile away from where we're where I'm now sitting.

SPEAKER_02: 1:47

So you are native here?

SPEAKER_00: 1:51

I am a native Washingtonian.

SPEAKER_02: 1:54

Wow. So um how old are you?

SPEAKER_00: 1:58

I am uh I will I am 75 and I will be 76 next June.

SPEAKER_02: 2:04

Seventy-six? Wow. That's a long time.

SPEAKER_00: 2:07

I was born on the day that the Korean War started, actually.

SPEAKER_02: 2:11

Korean War.

SPEAKER_00: 2:12

The the day that it started. That was my birth real birthday. Yeah, 1950. But uh no, they say it started on the 25th of June, but I've the 27th of June is when the communist forces went south, and that was the day I was born.

SPEAKER_02: 2:27

So Wow. So why why you remember that? Did somebody tell you that? Because obviously you you could not remember this.

SPEAKER_00: 2:34

I don't know. I I uh attract trivia real easily and it just it sticks to me, and I remember little things like that. And you know, that's great.

SPEAKER_02: 2:42

That's great. And uh So um you born around here and who was your parents?

SPEAKER_00: 2:49

Uh my father was from Scranton, Pennsylvania. And um my mother was well, my mother was born in Denver, but she uh uh grope half of her life at that point in Kansas City and uh Missouri and in Denver, Colorado. And my parents met at American University in Washington. And that's that's that's why we're in Washington, I guess. That's why we're here.

SPEAKER_02: 3:17

So Wow. Obviously you remember them very well. How would you re how do you recall them?

SPEAKER_00: 3:25

Who are my parents?

SPEAKER_02: 3:26

Mm-hmm.

SPEAKER_00: 3:27

You know, it's interesting you say that because when we're younger, we don't respect our parents as much as we do when we're older. We're going, you know, you I I think growing up here we we all had a little bit of a rebellious attitude in the 60s and 70s, and that, you know, sometimes you people don't think right, you know, the parents. And you know, and and sometimes they're right and sometimes they were wrong, but it's it was kind of like very rebellious attitude we grew up with in the Vietnam era and you should go to war just because I went to war, and it's like, well, why should we go to war at all, really? I mean, we and of course I'm seeing a lot of this now where there's war going on, and war is something that seems to benefit the government more than the people.

SPEAKER_02: 4:18

That's true, that's true.

SPEAKER_00: 4:19

In most situations that I see, you know, that uh it benefits the people in power and the ones in government and whatever. And um it just uh I remember uh I have a degree in economics, and one of the things that really stuck on me was that we started out being very liberal, and then I went very conservative, and now I think I'm like in the middle of the road. And one of the things that John Maynard Keynes wrote the general theory of employment, interest and money, which is what he tried to get the tried to get out of the recession in the 1930s, was that John Maynard Keynes was spend the money for the government and everything will be great and wonderful, whatever. Well, his book before that was he was really upset about World War I ending. And he said, This is horrible for the economy. He said, What are you talking about? I said, War's great. He says, other than people getting killed, everybody has a job. They're building ships, they're doing this and that. And he said, if it weren't for the fact that uh they were if it weren't for the fact that people die, war would be a pretty good thing. I said, Well, I never thought of that. He said, so why don't we build ships and take them out to sea and sink them, and then no one will die and everybody will be employed and whatever. And I thought it seems like a huge misallocation of resources, but you know, it stuck on me as being something very inane and silly. You know, so why would we build ships and sink them? Why don't we figure out some other way to employ people and you know make it work?

SPEAKER_02: 5:44

So but uh no, I think I think that's how a capitalist system works. You have to build and you have to consume and build and consume and build and consume and continue to circle.

unknown: 5:56

Trevor Burrus, Jr.

SPEAKER_00: 5:57

And the socialist thing has never really worked anywhere. So it's kind of like I think the ideal system is kind of a little bit of everything together, and because the socialist system kind of misallocates resources too. You know, as opposed to supply and demand. It's just the government comes in and tells people what they do and how much it should cost and whatever. And that's why the there were a lot of shortages in the communist systems or whatever. At least that's the way I perceived it.

SPEAKER_02: 6:28

Um you know, a lot of unhappiness and um in any event, um maybe I'm jumping ahead here with many of the things that you you are at uh when you were young, you're on the I would say, link left side. Correct.

SPEAKER_00: 6:44

Well, we grew up with the thing with the I mean when I grew up things were a lot racially uh racially charged, you know. I mean they were really, really bad back then. You know, you couldn't black people couldn't go to a bathroom unless it was a black bathroom and whatever. I mean I've witnessed that. Even Old Town Alexandria, I've witnessed that at the G. C. Murphy's and a few other places were there. And uh ironically, in my neighborhood, several of the black people were wealthier than the white people.

SPEAKER_02: 7:18

Wow.

SPEAKER_00: 7:18

Yeah, one of them, my father helped him get into the junk business, and he's you know, he's not alive anymore, but he's, you know, he did very, very well in that business. And uh that's ironic that you would have that in the neighborhood. And uh, but in any event things were a little racially charged and they were and you know, and I think that but I will say that I went into a lot of bad neighborhoods in DC. I had my father was an insurance adjuster and he trained me to do a lot of that when I was like a teenager. I would go to these neighborhoods and take statements from people and from witnesses and uh pick up police reports and whatever. And things were a little bad. But they're not as bad as they are today. I think drugs and whatever the they've always had drugs, they've always had gambling, they've always had prostitution in a lot of these neighborhoods, but uh things are really, really charged today. It's it's worse than I've ever seen.

SPEAKER_02: 8:19

Wow.

SPEAKER_00: 8:20

Yeah. I mean I've seen a couple of murders and you know things of that nature, but that's um this is mind-blowing.

SPEAKER_02: 8:31

Yeah. So back then it was much better.

SPEAKER_00: 8:33

Everything was much uh We didn't think it was, but when I look back, it it it was better. It it was better that I could walk down one of these neighborhoods and have people coming picking on me, and now that doesn't happen.

SPEAKER_02: 8:46

How about job environment? Did you have an easier-to-find job and work?

SPEAKER_00: 8:51

Well, it's interesting you say that because my father always had this thing about working. And I will tell you that I am one of very few people in my high school class that still work. And you know I work more than 40 hours. I like what I do and I work. And he always said that he said two things. He said, if you if you work hard and keep working hard, he says you'll never have time to be depressed. That's right. And I'm looking I never really thought about it. I thought it was a lot of bunk back then, but uh he's right, because these people that are retired, you know, they sit around and they're watching television, they're going well they're they're even though they get into exercise and a few things that are really good, your father also said he said, if you really, really work hard, he says you will really appreciate your free time. More than you would if your free time is every day, you know, just stay. He was right, yeah. And so I'm work today's Saturday, I'm working pretty much most of the day, and I'm going back and I'm going to uh relax with some friends, you know, with uh friends and family. We're gonna get relax and but I'm probably not gonna do that till five or six o'clock. We'll do it. So those two things keep working, work hard, and try to keep keep a lot of interests. And I do that. And uh I had a lot of bumps in the road going through, but you know, things are are good now.

SPEAKER_02: 10:22

So do you remember any experience that affected you at the moment that shaped your understanding completely different from, for example, going from left side to now to the right side and then going backwards?

SPEAKER_00: 10:38

Um I I look at this one Republican friend of mine, and he just he just I said, Well, how did you do this? That was kind of a similar question. He said, Well, life has made me a Republican. You know, but no, I I I guess it's just going through life and looking at the political situation to me, uh I mean you have to you have to make a choice when you do it. But I'm just these people in this area are fairly wealthy, they're fairly well educated, and they seem to not having a problem with some of the things that, you know, that I think are wrong, you know, that just um I have no problem with immigrants. We're all children of immigrants. Uh and my back my family background is really very, very diverse. I mean you couldn't be more uh I mean my last immigrant ancestor came here in the 1880s, maybe. Wow. My mother's family, seven she's related to seven of the passengers on the Mayflower, and five related to Jamestown. Wow. Yeah, it's and and they're pretty far away. They as they went west they they joined at some point. But uh no, it it's very, very diverse. And uh I just think that's helped a lot to try to understand things, you know.

SPEAKER_02: 12:03

So you you mean that human behavior uh drive their logic and emotion all together?

SPEAKER_00: 12:10

Right. And it just had a good exposure. I mean if I just sat in a room like this and didn't go anywhere, uh I don't know, it seems like a setting for Twilight Zone of Rod Serling. You know, it's like you you just wouldn't learn anything. You have to go out into the world and meet different people and wonder why they're this way or that way. But no, I think I was fairly liberal when I was a young economist. And uh I just over time I just uh so uh one of the guys got me into one of the guys in my economics class, in fact his uncle was the was the uh the dean of the economic uh department, and he basically taught me a few things about reading different books. If you have one a little subject matter, read it out of different textbooks. Don't just read it out of your textbook, go read that little part. And he kind of got me into the the what the economists call the rules versus authority argument. And it was monetary policy in that instead of trying to fine-tune it, you can't really do that. So you just grow the economy's money, which is what the Federal Reserve does. They actually print money in several different ways. They do that. But let's not get into fine-tuning it, let's just grow let the money supply grow a certain amount every year and you know, base it on certain things, and don't sit and try to fine-tune it and government spend everything. And and and where I live, government spending is huge. It's really putting a hurting on this area now with the government shutdown. Oh, yeah. Because it's not just the people in government, it's people with government contracts, it's people with family members with government contracts. And, you know, people aren't spending, they aren't going out, there aren't I mean I mean they are spending still, but they're not spending what they were. Correct. Have you noticed that?

SPEAKER_02: 14:07

Yes, yes, I did.

SPEAKER_00: 14:09

Your customers aren't spending what they used to spend?

SPEAKER_02: 14:11

We didn't we we almost almost 30 percent down compared to last month, same time.

SPEAKER_00: 14:17

I've been very fortunate in what I do that uh most of my projects are longer term, but uh and I'm diversified. But uh no, I just think over time and watching the government spending and the things of the nature has just kind of made me a little a little more conservative. I am not ultra, ultra conservative. I like to I like to think that I'm more middle of the road, that I'm in favor of a lot of these programs, but I think we need to pick and choose what we're doing.

SPEAKER_02: 14:45

Well, I think if you talk to a conservative person, they're gonna mark you as a as a left side, and then when you talk to the left side guys, you do mark you as a right side. You we never know where we are standing.

SPEAKER_00: 14:57

Right, right. I can I can an old Irish saying is I can show you my scars, you know. I'm kidding, you know.

SPEAKER_02: 15:04

So you you have uh a sense of other people, you can connect them very well. You understand them right away, you can open dialogue with them. Where that coming from? How did you get that? How did you learn that?

SPEAKER_00: 15:19

You know, I I don't r well, I do know a little bit in that my father was very um he I don't want to say anything really bad about him, but he was really he was very opinionated. And he it was his way or the highway. I just this is the way you do things and whatever. And I just I just kind of learned to take it. Just sit back and take it, and it made me a little bit more mellow that I had the patience to sit down and listen to your side and somebody else's side and whatever. But uh no, and what I do, uh you can't like every one of your cu customers and your clients. You can't. That's not gonna happen. Sometimes you just kind of, you know, try to keep the subject matter to your business and move on and not get into a lot of these things because uh, you know.

SPEAKER_02: 16:11

But you keep always communication port open and you can dialogue with them, even though you don't you might not uh understand me each other very well, but you still very well communicate with them and understand them.

SPEAKER_00: 16:24

We do, I do, and and then I deal with a lot of different ethnic groups of people right now that uh you know they're in business and uh they're not it and I think that a lot of these things are just being inflamed by the politicians. You know, irritate. Let's take the minority people and let's just ir you know, let's irritate.

SPEAKER_02: 16:47

That's how they give benefit. If you politicians keep you together, they don't you don't vote for them. Right. So you ha they have to separate you and then say you are on my side, and the other guy says, no, no, no, you are on my side. So the politician strategy is just divide the section of people that can get votes, more votes.

SPEAKER_00: 17:06

And in in school, I mean I grew up with a Catholic education for 12 years, and I have no problem with that. And it was it's uh it's been very favorable to me. And moving onward, I was fortunate enough in school to have a very divided Galbraithan freedmanite economics program where I went to school because it it was and we even had one person that was a socialist.

SPEAKER_02: 17:33

Wow.

SPEAKER_00: 17:34

His whole theory was that everyone that came to America was an indentured servant, and that that was a bigger issue than slavery. He didn't want to demean slavery, but he said that and and he you look at the Mayflower, I would say probably fifteen, twenty percent of the people there were servants that had to come here and work, they had to work their way here. They had to work for seven years as basically servants. Uh not slaves, but servants. They had to work and then they got their their freedom or whatever and moved on. So but uh I thought it was interesting that he was kind of a socialist about government and whatever, but um it seems like now everybody wants to tear the walls down. This is a horrible place, and uh why are we why'd you come here? It's like, well, I don't know, you know, why I come here. It's like I I appreciate being here, appreciate being an American, and I don't agree with every politician, obviously.

SPEAKER_02: 18:33

And uh You should be, yeah, you should be happy to be here. Uh obviously I am here almost for 30 years. I'm quite happy I am in the US.

SPEAKER_00: 18:42

I mean, what's the alternative?

SPEAKER_02: 18:44

It could be much worse.

SPEAKER_00: 18:46

And I I do see these people uh saying, well, gee, we need to go to Uganda. And I'm going, why would you want to go to Uganda, you know? And uh a lot of them were of the ethnic persuasion that got thrown out of there twenty years ago by the Ugandans, and it's like uh no, we we have more I thought the world was gonna fall apart during the Vietnam War, but it didn't. Things worked itself out, our democracy survived and you know, and a lot of people died in that. Maimed, yeah, they died in Vietnam. Oh a lot of a lot of people died. I was just looking at the list the other day of all the people I knew that were in there and so you you think it's it wasn't worth it to fight those for? No, because uh you know, but you have to understand that coming out of World War II, we, the United States, thought that this communist thing was just gonna take over the world. Well, they didn't because they didn't do a good job. That's why they didn't do it.

SPEAKER_02: 19:51

But they thought that we were So you're particularly talking about Russia and China. Aaron Ross Powell, Jr.

SPEAKER_00: 19:56

Right. They fell apart because they they weren't successful as we were talking about misallocations of resources. You you know, people were having problems getting food and the government was sending them off to Afghanistan, all these different places, and you're talking about Russia, particularly.

SPEAKER_02: 20:10

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 20:10

Well the USSR, wasn't it? That's what it was called. And and uh uh any place that you have to fence it in to keep people in is is not doing a good job in what they're doing.

SPEAKER_02: 20:22

But take a look at the Russia today, they are now basically capitalist system. We still don't like them.

SPEAKER_00: 20:30

Are they?

SPEAKER_02: 20:31

At least uh they that's what they claim. They you can go open business there, you can you can invest in Russia, even though I know the government does not support it, but as a person you can go invest and open business as that's what the capitalist system is. When you when you're a socialist system, you can. The government has to approve you. But when you in a capitalist system you can open business, you can do whatever you want to. Yeah. And that's always going on. You know, the second place in the world who people can work is after America, they can come to America. After America, which country is it?

SPEAKER_00: 21:07

After America.

SPEAKER_02: 21:08

After America. This is the first place in the world that people want to come to work in America. But the second place, what is this? What do you think? I have no idea. It is Russia. Really? People going all over the world to Russia to work.

SPEAKER_00: 21:21

Well, God love them. For doing that. No, everybody wants to I there seems to be something going on with our school systems now where people are growing up hating America, and it's like that's not really I mean, it's good for you to voice your opinions, but we all have to get along in this world, you know.

SPEAKER_02: 21:40

We can't sit there and So you think that Russian people teaching their children they hate American? To hate America?

SPEAKER_00: 21:49

No, I think Americans are teaching Americans. That's what I that's what I see. And we had a little bit of saber rattling during the Vietnam War, and I thought the whole country was gonna fall apart, but it didn't, because we had politicians that came in that were in the middle of the road, and as they said in Abraham's Lincoln's speech, uh they bound the nation's wounds is what they did. They bound them. And the problem is with the with the youth. I'm sitting there, this is a horrible country, and we need to do this and we need to do that. Some place uh I saw this happen in Ireland, I saw it happen in Yugoslavia. Eventually, middle of the road people take over when you have democracies. And that's what's basically happened. And uh they've uh I don't know, I just I just eventually eventually sanity takes over.

SPEAKER_02: 22:47

Yeah, has to. Because obviously there's no other way, unless we're gonna be in endless war together.

SPEAKER_00: 22:53

Yeah, yeah, I know. And we just need to learn to get along together. And there are a lot of people coming here and they're going, well, this is just a horrible place. Well, you know, unlike where you came from, there's open door for you to go back and go do what you want to do, you know. Correct, correct. You know, and uh uh yeah, I just I don't know.

SPEAKER_02: 23:14

I but I still you can, I mean, even though you may not like a lot of things here, but a lot of things are quite right here.

SPEAKER_00: 23:22

Right.

SPEAKER_02: 23:22

So you can you can even complain. I I I would not close the column complaint doors. You you should be able to complain, even though you may be worth where you where you're coming from, but when you you you see something is wrong, it is wrong here, that you can complain. This is it could be better. You can that's how you can make it right.

SPEAKER_00: 23:43

Well, the the politicians are exacerbating the problem. They are coming in and this is horrible and this is horrible and this is horrible. It's like, well, why don't we look to get something that's good instead of horrible? Why don't we work on that? And why do why is it always your way or the highway? You know, why is it that way? You know, and uh I don't know. That's that's what I don't like. It ever and I don't disagree with people protesting in the streets and whatever if they have something they want to protest, but uh let's try to get along. You know, let's try to get along. Let's not be anti-Semitic, let's not be anti-Arabic, let's not be, you know, let's try to find some common ground.

SPEAKER_02: 24:27

And what do you think about the people who saying first, America first? Well they there are movement between Coco Carson and a lot of other people who basically saying America first and the agenda what Charlie Kirk or other people was trying to do, that America first agenda, is not really uh America first. It was like uh Israel first and then America. So now they are thinking America first, we should even though they want to be Israel flourishing, but they they want to focus on America because America is in debt. America needs help.

SPEAKER_00: 25:06

Well, you know, they're saying America first because I'm just looking at it from their perspective. They say America first because they feel America hasn't been anything close to first. That we're just we're gonna turn things around and we're gonna make America more important than everything else. That doesn't really mean that we need to forget about the rest of the world. That doesn't really mean that that uh we're against immigrants. We're not against immigrants. We're against people that break the law. There should be a procedure. And, you know, when my ancestors came here in the 1800s or whatever, they, you know, they they went didn't have the immigration regulations that they did, but they also didn't have the drugs, they didn't have the problems that we have today. Uh there's a lot of people that want to tear America apart. Uh the whole world's getting inflamed, and I just think that's wrong. I think we need to work on ameliorating the world's problems. And let's instead of telling everybody how bad it is, maybe we could see how we can maybe make things a little better. We're not going to make everything the way that everybody wants them. And that's what I've had to live with in my life. I didn't get everything I wanted out of everything. I've had to make compromises. You've had to make compromises. Everybody has to make compromises. And nobody wants to make a compromise.

SPEAKER_02: 26:27

That might make the life very interesting because obviously you have to make compromise to understand the other side. If you don't do that, you wouldn't never understand the other side.

unknown: 26:37

Trevor Burrus, Jr.

SPEAKER_00: 26:38

Yeah. Yeah. I know. And we're we're looking at this thing in New York now, and it's kind of like it's just gonna inflame things even more and more. It's and you know, everybody wants to have a free bus ride. Everybody wants to have a free this and a free that, but in the economy we have, we can't afford that. The economy is running on a deficit now.

SPEAKER_02: 26:56

We what we need to do is But don't we don't we uh spend billion of dollars in th third world countries of like a uh Israel, uh Ukraine. We we spend so much money on those countries, the money we can spend it here.

SPEAKER_00: 27:11

Well, you you know, I look at that and I think that's part of our system that we need to correct because you look at some of these areas and say, well, why do we have a naval base here? There's no water here. Well, the answer is that some congressman that was needed for a certain vote got that naval base in his district because he helped out with some other vote that had nothing to do with the Navy. You know. It was a lot of horse trading that goes on in Congress. And uh most of it's a pretty good idea, but I think I think that the the allocation of funds to certain districts just to get somebody to vote, it's I don't know if it's the right way to do things.

SPEAKER_02: 27:48

But uh So uh I I think um a lot of things go is goes wrong these days, as you said. But then uh we we have a Republican presidency, we have a Republican Congress, and we have a Republican Senate. But still things doesn't ru go as we expected. So why?

SPEAKER_00: 28:11

And I don't know. And you know, when President Kennedy was elected, he was the first Catholic, Roman Catholic president in the United States, people really thought that the Pope would be sitting on his cabinet. I'm serious. That's what people thought. Oh my God. And when President Obama was elected, a lot of a lot of the black people that I knew, good friends of mine and whatever, they would go, well, we're gonna be running the country now. It's like, well, no, but I mean people thought that. It's like, no, he's he happens to be of a certain, you know, ethnic culture, and he is running the country along with Congress. So he's not controlling everything that's there. And it's good that these things happened, but I think people just overrate, you know. Nobody should be really running everything. They need to be, you know, handling things. I think I think things could be a little bit cleaner. It just seems like all Congress does is fight.

SPEAKER_01: 29:09

Mm-hmm.

SPEAKER_00: 29:10

Yes, you know, right now. All these people are uh I agree that we need to cut back on government, but we don't need to cut these people out of jobs. Maybe we don't replace jobs when people retire and die and whatever, maybe we don't do that, but I just think it's devastating kind of what's going on right now, particularly in our area, and you're in this area too. And um I don't know. But uh I'm sorry, I do have some opinions about that.

SPEAKER_02: 29:39

I know you have a lot of opinions. That was nice. I didn't expect it, to be honest. Uh what gives you hope the most in this circumstance?

SPEAKER_00: 29:49

Well, the things that I've seen before, you know, I mentioned the Vietnam War and all all the things that have happened. Eventually, this ship called the United States. States writes itself.

SPEAKER_01: 30:01

Mm-hmm.

SPEAKER_00: 30:02

You know, eventually it writes itself. And I think a lot of the problems now are educational, that they're being taught all these things in school that uh we shouldn't really be teaching. We should be teaching how to do mathematics. We should be teaching how to be an engineer, how to be a doctor. We shouldn't be uh trying to sway all these social things that, you know, when you get older you change. Look, I changed.

SPEAKER_02: 30:30

And then I I'm against that. Once the this people are going to school, they shouldn't have so much debt. Right. Because they come out of school, they don't they don't know what to do with so much debt. There are some of them my son-in-law has uh almost$500,000 you have to pay his school.

SPEAKER_00: 30:46

Why not? Well, you know, part I hate to say it, but part of the problem is all the all the salaries for all, you know, if Reza or Bob were the best teacher of physics in the United States, why don't you put me on a podcast and we'll have a class? Right? Yes, yes. And then you don't have to pay thousands of physics teachers, you know. Maybe not you, but maybe the top ten or something. And I think we're kind of headed to that. And one of the fields I'm into, you know, I'm into real est I'm a real estate and construction consultant, and one of the things that uh in the praiser, and one of the things that that we were into was student housing. I thought that would be declining. I thought really I thought it would be really declining because people were going more to more to to uh podcasts and online education and whatever, but when I was in school, I couldn't just go sign a note for student housing. Somebody had to be qualified to borrow the money. Like my parents. Did you know that?

SPEAKER_02: 31:55

I did not know that, no.

SPEAKER_00: 31:56

No, when my son was going to school, he could sign anything he wanted. So what are the young students doing? Are they going into a two-bedroom apartment with five guys? That's what I did. We had a two-bedroom apartment, five guys, and uh we had three in one room, two in another.

SPEAKER_02: 32:15

For how long? Four four years? Yeah. Wow.

SPEAKER_00: 32:18

One was four years. The last two years in college, it was uh it was um four guys in one place. And uh yeah, one of them actually lived in the living room, so we were there. But nowadays people think of their love lives and their party lives and whatever, and they say, Oh, I want this, I want this fancy, fancy apartment. Well, that's not all of the cost of education, but that's a big part of it. If you if you sign a note for a fancy apartment, then you know, I I think it's gonna continue a while, but the fact that it's so easy to get see, my my day it wasn't easy to get the money, you know. And a lot of people were struggling just to get to their I put myself through school basically. And um I just I just uh even though I'm involved with a lot of some student housing projects and whatever, and we've, you know, we're getting paid to the consulting that I do, we're getting paid to complete a job to help them do a job. But I just the long term I thought it would be I thought it would be waning by now just due to the fact that you have that podcast and and online classes and whatever, but it doesn't seem to be stopping student housing. It's still going.

SPEAKER_02: 33:34

Still going, yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 33:35

Still going strong. And they're still building more and more of them, you know, that they're there. And um what else could these buildings be besides student housing? Well, they could be apartments, they could be a lot of things. That was a problem in the savings loan crisis in the 90s when they built all these hotels with all this money, and they figured there was real no real demand out in the middle of a desert for a hotel. What else could it be? Well, it could be housing. That's what they did. They switched to that after, you know, bankruptcies and whatever. But in any event, I thought that that would wane a little bit. I thought there'd be more. You're talking about why student uh why education is so expensive? Because people are expensive, and I think they need to find better ways to teach.

SPEAKER_02: 34:22

And uh So if if you find, for example, all those classes automated online through the audio system, what happened to the oldest professor of the s school teacher? They're gonna be jobless?

SPEAKER_00: 34:40

Well, th well, this would be a gradual thing. They would be doing something else. Okay. You know, it's interesting that I graduated from high school in 1968. My goal was to be a mathematics major. Okay. And at the time that I did that, not only was the Vietnam War going on, but what was going on was NASA was starting to lay off people. They had already projected to be on the moon in 1969. They started their layoffs. To get an engineering degree was not going to be worthwhile.

SPEAKER_02: 35:18

Wow.

SPEAKER_00: 35:18

So I stayed in mathematics, thinking either I'll switch back to that or I'll find something else. And what happened was I kind of like statistics and economics. So I have a bachelor of science degree in economics, what I did. But uh today what I'm doing is a lot of work is I'm not an engineer, but I'm doing engineering reviews of their work and the construction, because I have a construction background with the uh that I you know, in between summers and colleges or whatever, I kinda like construction, I like mathematics. It would have been right just to be an engineer, but um I went off in a different direction and I hated writing reports. I hated English. I like was a mathematical scientific type person, which I think by the way the country needs to get more and more into that and less into some of these other fields, you know. Uh but and I hated writing reports. But what do I do for a living, Reza? I write reports. I I write a lot of reports. And uh actually I've become better at that. You know, I wasn't one of those uh what what do you call them? I was more of a technical I like to read technical books as opposed to uh fictions and novels and things of that nature. But uh I've gotten into so I hate reports, I write reports. That's what I do. That's how I make a living, you know, doing that.

SPEAKER_02: 36:46

So I I didn't look at it that way. But I think you were right. You're writing you're writing a lot of reports every single day.

SPEAKER_00: 36:54

Aaron Powell Yeah, it's something. It's a valuation, it's uh I do construction plan reviews for lenders, I work for architects, for engineers, uh, for contractors, I do I'm a kind of a one-man show. I do and I do valuations. I do a lot of work for lawyers. Um you know, family law, partition cases, uh uh I used to do condemnation cases.

SPEAKER_01: 37:19

Wow.

SPEAKER_00: 37:19

Yeah, so anyway, uh at least I'm pretty diversified. You are you know, and the government shut down my projects are still going. You know, things slow down, I get into another field and we start doing different things.

SPEAKER_02: 37:33

So But nevertheless, I think uh everything happened to other people can affect you one way or the other.

SPEAKER_00: 37:41

Well, it's eventually going to. It's uh uh trying to rent one of my properties now is a little bit difficult because people if they're not in the government in this area, they're uh working for a government contractor, someone in their family works in government. So you know what I mean? There's somebody somewhere that's putting the brake on spending money right now.

SPEAKER_02: 38:01

Exactly. So if you want to give one genius genius advice to someone to build a connection between people, and I'm I know you are good at it. How would you what would you give it to them?

SPEAKER_00: 38:17

Well, I mean it depends on what we're trying to do here. Um some of these political arguments are very, very hard. You know, just for instance, if you're against abortion or for it, it's hard to find a middle ground there. You're either one way or the other, right? Correct. You either think it's murder or you think it's your I don't want to say God given right, but you think it's your right, your constitutional right to uh, you know, to have an abortion. Uh but I think some of these other political things, I think I think we need to have some politicians find some middle ground and defuse some of the radicalisms that are going on with the I think uh and you know that will happen. We have a free economy here, that will happen. Um and they're talking about New York and we're gonna have free buses.

SPEAKER_02: 39:10

So do we have a really free economy? Because the the the this word free economy is very controversial. When when we are in control, for example, these days, uh Trump controls the tariff, they put everything tariff to the China and everything, this is not anymore free.

SPEAKER_00: 39:25

They can control the control that's uh and you know, you're absolutely right. I have a degree in economics. Um I have a degree in economics and some master's work in economics, and uh no one, no one has ever told me that it was good to have tariffs. No, it was never good. It was always a misallocation of resources. Of course, when you look at President Trump, I think one of his good things about him is he shakes people up, he makes people mad, and he does this not to have tariffs permanently, but to negotiate a deal. He's looking to negotiate something. He's good at that. Now, you if you're the other side of the deal, you probably don't like that, but he's good at that. I think that uh this thing with China that came off the other night, uh one of my customers orders a lot of stuff from there. I talked to him the next day, he said everything is being packed and shipped. We were trying to figure out a way around Trump's tariffs.

SPEAKER_02: 40:28

So the people uh s was saying that um if it continued going like this, the Walmart would be empty. Nothing would be on the shelves.

SPEAKER_00: 40:37

It could be, yeah.

SPEAKER_02: 40:38

Yeah. If there's tarif ongoing, how they can make money is 100 percent tariff, it just was incredible.

SPEAKER_00: 40:46

Well, you know, I one of the things I do is I disagree with tariffs and I believe in a free economy. And one of the things that Sam Walton that when he came up, it's interesting you mentioned uh Walmart. Sam Walton was the founder of Walmart, and he basically originally, we buy all of our goods from America. I was a retailer, you know, I was in the retail development businesses, shopping centers, and whatever, and I've been in a lot of different types of uh real estate construction type things. And uh one of the things that he did, we you know, we always have this this business needs a certain mileage radius. You know, if you want to do sell mufflers or something, you need to go five miles, you need to have this many people. What he did was he went to these areas that had no people and put this store there, and people came from not five miles, but a hundred miles. Wow. Because it was a store, right? So he outsmarted the retailers when he did that. And one of his things was we're only gonna sell goods made in America. Well, sometimes it's not good to do that. It's more expensive.

SPEAKER_02: 41:57

A lot more expensive.

SPEAKER_00: 41:59

And sometimes it's good to buy from some of these people, and sometimes they're tyrants, and you don't want to buy the cheap goods from, you know, tyrannical countries and whatever, because the the the the uh the tyrants that are running that country, they're the ones putting the money in their pocket, not the people. In fact, you'll find that a lot of these tyrants are doing drugs and whatever, you know, and it's it's bad. They're they're uh, you know, it's good and it's bad that we're we're dealing with international stuff, but I I think the long and the short of it is if the product is much cheaper and the same quality or better, why not buy it?

SPEAKER_01: 42:38

Exactly.

SPEAKER_00: 42:38

I'm gonna show you some stuff that just came across from overseas that when we get through. That's uh sure. I'm gonna show you some flooring and a couple other things that were that were very, very inexpensive because they were made somewhere else, and I don't see any problem with the quality.

SPEAKER_02: 42:54

So if you don't the the quality wise that are good, then it should be respected, obviously.

SPEAKER_00: 43:00

Well, the one caveat is when it comes to construction, you can't um if you're in some of these countries, you can just go buy some lumber and start building your building or whatever here. Everything has to be approved.

SPEAKER_01: 43:11

Correct.

SPEAKER_00: 43:12

It it's not just approved from the county, but they want to see an underwrited laboratory UL approval, they want to see engineering approvals. You can't just go put a roof truss up, they want to see the one with the seal on it that's guaranteed by someone else, you know, that's you know. So getting a cheap product, you have to get it in here and you have to go through the approvals. You want to sell a car from Europe, it has to come through to Port of Baltimore, and they have to they have to make it all the environmental things. In fact, that's what they do, they put them on the here before they release them.

SPEAKER_02: 43:45

So Yeah. I see uh a lot of Chinese car in Europe, but I don't see any Chinese car here in the US yet.

SPEAKER_00: 43:52

You don't?

SPEAKER_02: 43:53

I don't see. I don't see any Chinese car. Yeah, I don't I don't know, but it's it's I don't think it's uh they get certified to get imported.

SPEAKER_00: 44:03

Yeah, what's interesting, my my customer was building a hotel and he just said, I've got this. We're watching the we're watching the the the meeting with Mr. Trump and and uh China and uh the next morning he told me everything's being packed. It's being shipped, it's right. He already bought it, you know. He wasn't gonna pay those tariffs, you know, was there.

SPEAKER_02: 44:24

So obviously.

SPEAKER_00: 44:25

Yeah, but tariffs I think are a bad thing. And I think it's good to have international trade, and I think if that trade is free. You know. If it's free. International trade is very, very good. And um I think that having uh one thing I have noticed in my life is that when we have a bad economy, a lot of the politics gets worse with the people. We have a good economy, people aren't worried about as much because they're living a good life and whatever, and I I think that's the key to happiness. Plus working hard, remember?

SPEAKER_02: 44:59

Yeah, yeah. It's amazing a journey. You come you come from so many years, you see everything, you see up and down, and uh you have an overview of what really happened here, I guess. So better than a lot of people.

SPEAKER_00: 45:13

Well it is, and it's strange what's happening here today with a lot of the people are not seeing the other side at all. They're not seeing the other side. And we have all these wealthy people that live in this county in this northern Virginia, and they're they want to have uh they want to have everybody illegal. It's like, well, wait a minute. It's not just giving them a job. Yeah. Some of these people are banditos, as they say. They're criminals, and they came from somewhere else.

SPEAKER_02: 45:41

But it's I don't think it's an Evan is right. Even they're not banditos, they're normal people. Well, there's a lot of but you let you let them come and then they suppress the cost. Yeah. Which is not really true, obviously, because they work live in one apartment with ten people, and they can subsidize a lot of things for us, but that's not true economy.

SPEAKER_00: 46:04

Well, you know what's interesting is that in Europe and like in Central America, with people working remotely, they're they're moving into Mexico. They're raising the rent levels. The poor people in Mexico can't afford them. That's what they're protesting. They're doing the same thing in Europe. Except for except for England. England's more expensive than us.

SPEAKER_02: 46:29

England is more expensive.

SPEAKER_00: 46:31

Yeah, th I think it that's of course, y yours truly really doesn't travel outside the U.S. I've no I'm 75 years old, I've never had a passport.

SPEAKER_02: 46:41

Wow.

SPEAKER_00: 46:41

Never. I've been to the Bahamas on vacation, I've been to the Virgin Islands on vacation before they had passports, before they required them. And I've been to Mexico on two different occasions before they had passports required. But uh no, I I don't I don't want to I don't want to go anywhere where there's trouble. You know. And that's one of the reasons why we took some uh Gulf Coast vacations years ago because everybody hated Americans so much, you know. It's just uh I don't want to go somewhere to have people expectorate on me.

SPEAKER_02: 47:17

You know, it's uh Wow, no not even Hawaii. Did you go to Hawaii? Wow.

SPEAKER_00: 47:23

I I was been invited there. I have some friends of mine have places there, and I've been invited there, but I've I love Hawaii.

SPEAKER_02: 47:29

Hawaii's beautiful. Yeah. I was there once and everything's about Hawaii, it's beautiful. And Caribbean is nice too. They're not far away and they're part of partially America.

SPEAKER_00: 47:40

But you still needed a passport, I think, to go to the Virgin Islands.

SPEAKER_02: 47:44

Oh, you can you need a passport, yes. If you don't have a passport, I think if you're American citizen American, you don't need it. Puerto Rico at least.

SPEAKER_00: 47:53

Well, I thought you did now, but you didn't used to just have a a birth certificate, which was an experience me getting my birth certificate because they had the that was the same building where you had to collect uh welfare. It was the line was so big you couldn't even get into the building, which kind of told me we need to we need to do something about these people that need welfare because it's bad, you know, to have all these people out of work and whatever. But uh no, I I've never I've never really done that. I've never I've never had a passport, so they're gonna be stuck with me here. And I haven't been everywhere in this country. I mean country. Well, you know, my mother's family, the Mayflower, Jamestown, they went all the way across the country. And and her her grandfather and her uh her grandfather and her great uncle, they came up with an idea, they made a lot of money in the Midwest. They were just entrepreneurs. They came out of the Chicago fire, and they figured out that people in the Midwest needed needed lumber because everything was flat. And uh they went to the West Coast in Seattle. The railroads had come in. They put they bought the Seattle lumber and started selling them in the Midwest. And that's true. He was a f famous uh state senator actually, who did a lot of things like that. But uh I'm into the economy. I'm into getting things rolling, and I'm into less government. I don't I don't think we should let people do whatever they want to do, but I think we have too much government interference on uh in business. Too much, way too much. I mean we've had some problems and some issues, but I I don't I I think you need to be able to run your business.

SPEAKER_02: 49:45

That's true.

SPEAKER_00: 49:46

That's true. And no, you can't have uh bars open twenty-four hours a day. You can't do that, but um but you need to have less government interference, I think.

SPEAKER_02: 49:56

Yeah, I agree at some partially, obviously. Um the way the government works here, they they really want to be basically controlling everything in detail and then they don't really do it the right way.

SPEAKER_00: 50:14

No, you're right. Yeah, yeah. You're right. And um but this government, this these l local governments, what I do is a lot of consulting work and I'm checking on this permit and that permit, and they're like, oh, this is freedom of information. What do you mean freedom? What's you know, they said, Well, this is private. I said, Well, why is it private if my neighbor is building an addition on his house? Why am I not allowed to see that? I'm next door. Why am I not allowed to see well because it's private. It's like, well, wait a minute, your government, you're public. We're paying you to bring make everything public. Why can't I see what they have? And they tell me this is the Privacy Act, which I've never read before. Uh, you know, it's just uh I I think that they should be respon more responsive. But they're all out to just sell some political um, you know, hoopla about uh we did this and we did that, and you know, avoiding all the the main issues that um bringing up, you know, that's the they need to be more conciliatory, they need to be more helpful, and some of them aren't, some of them aren't, you know.

SPEAKER_02: 51:23

So especially with COVID time, I I remember that we have to expose a lot of information about us to the government in order to, for example, go in somewhere. Right. So it was not I think it wasn't right at all.

SPEAKER_00: 51:37

Well, two things. One is I never never got COVID, I think, because I worked a lot with mold. You know, I'm inspecting properties and doing all these different things. I never really thought about it. Because, you know, we did plumbing stuff, we've cleaned out sewers, we've done all kinds of different things in construction. That's my grew up doing different things. And COVID, before I got to COVID, did a lot of mold work. I mean, it was it wasn't green as uh the this this mold was like white, it looked like cotton. A lot of it when it really grows, irritates your sinuses, your eyes, everything. Never got sick. I mean, I didn't go out and have lunch right after that, but I'm just talking about I wasn't as everybody was in the washing area. We weren't, you know, we didn't do that as much. We'd go back to work, we'd go on another one, whatever. But when it came to COVID, I never got COVID. I inspected a lot of properties, I went into a lot of properties to do things, and um I guess what I'm trying to say here is that the biggest problems I had with people were the tenants. If I was there to help the the owner of the property or the landlord, no problem. But if I'm there for the tenant, it's like, we're let me see your inoculation uh proof and all this kind of stuff. It's like, you know what? If it were a hot day in July and I needed to come fix your air conditioning, you would have no problem letting me into the landlord's property, would you? But but no, but the I'm coming in and they're being offended with COVID and uh they just needed to grow up. I wasn't there to pollute the property, I was there to do my job, you know, which was help the landlord.

SPEAKER_02: 53:24

Bob, um thank you for being here. I I really have fun talking about your life, your experience and everything. But uh one thing I think I want to ask is what give Bob in this age to the Bob when it was young, was eighteen, seventeen years old, what would you advise to that Bob if you would could access to him?

SPEAKER_00: 53:54

What would I advise them?

SPEAKER_02: 53:56

Advise Bob when it was young.

SPEAKER_00: 53:58

I'd advise them to generally listen more to their parents, not be as rebellious as Bob was, you know. I mean I wasn't breaking windows or anything, but I was rebellious. We had different attitudes than our parents. And I think you uh appreciate your parents more when you get older. And the chips on your shoulders that you had about your parents, they kind of they kind of go away after a period of time. Uh two days a week, Reza, I think you know that I spend two nights a week with my mother.

SPEAKER_01: 54:34

Wow.

SPEAKER_00: 54:35

She's 94. She has dementia. Okay? Sometimes she knows who I am, sometimes she doesn't know who I am, but there's two things she does know is she knows all the words to New York, New York, and I did it my way. You know? She she knows the w she'll sit and sing away with you the songs.

SPEAKER_02: 54:56

Wow.

SPEAKER_00: 54:56

You know what I mean? It's it's uh not a cure for dementia, but it's kind of like it's one of those things you never really forget, you know.

SPEAKER_02: 55:03

It's amazing.

SPEAKER_00: 55:04

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02: 55:05

Yeah, yeah. So again, thank you for being here. Thank you for your time. Spending with us. Oh, you're welcome. So hopefully a lot of people like your this episode. Well and they come back to us to listen more. Well, hopefully. So next week we have another guest here. So yeah. Good. Frank Price coming for an interview. Hopefully we're gonna have another good episode.

SPEAKER_00: 55:32

Oh, well, good, good. I hope I hope it's helpful for somebody, you know, that's here. But uh I don't want to sound like an old fuddy duddy, but uh No, you you advise your your opinion was nice.

SPEAKER_02: 55:43

I I love it. I I think it's was good for our listeners. Thank you for being here.

SPEAKER_00: 55:50

Okay, well take care.