Around the Horn in Wholesale Distribution - Episode #163

Sa saming today, no dancing, just drumming.

All right.

A little different, you know, got to keep.

You're a smart man wrapping up your travel right before all the air traffic is going to be shut down.

Yeah, I, I've heard that from a handful of people and thought that myself. Although I did just read this morning that my local airport here in Orange County, California was not impacted by all of that, but LA and Ontario and Burbank and all the other ones were, so. But that doesn't mean that going through Denver or Chicago or it'll carry it.

Over because the smaller airports all connect to hubs that are impacted. So.

Yeah, no, no.

So you might be able to get out, you just wouldn't be able to get back.

So many reasons to not be on the road again. So we'll talk about all that in a minute before we dive in. I'm Kevin Brown, this is Tom Burton. We get together every Friday morning here in the around the Horn and wholesale distribution and manufacturing podcast and live show and we chat about the excitement going on in the week. So Tom, today we talk a little bit about the economy. We've got some supply chain stuff, lots happening regarding tariffs and economic data and so forth. So we'll chat about that a little bit. We're going to talk some more about some M and A activity. We'll talk about some technology, some cybersecurity things. So we're looking forward to kind of today's show and we're glad that the folks that have joined us live are with us. I was looking just at some of the folks coming from LinkedIn today. And by the way, as a side note, we're live this morning. It's 9 o' clock Pacific at 9:03 on the 7th of November in 2025. And we're live on LinkedIn live, YouTube live and Facebook Live. And the show will be available on all the podcast formats later in the day today as well. Spotify, Apple, Odyssey, all of those. But I was looking, we've got, I think eight countries of people represented Latin America, three countries there, I think three or four countries in Europe. So it's kind of exciting to have a much broader group with us today and hope we get some good comments coming in as well. But to just kind of wanted to before we dive in and chat a little bit, share with people what we're going to be doing today and what we're talking about. But as mentioned, we do this every Friday morning. We've been doing this. Today is number 166. So coming up on what, three and a half years, roughly. I think that's about right, if the math plays out. And so we get together and we discuss the newsletter that we send out. That newsletter is called around the Horn and Wholesale distribution and Manufacturing. If you don't get that newsletter and you would like to, we'd love to get that to you. You can simply reach out to us one of three different ways. The simplest way is helloadsmartech.com hello@lead smart Tech and request the newsletter. The second simplest way is likely if you're active on LinkedIn. Just search for the podcast there. You can look up Tom or myself as well and you'll see a link to the show as well as the Lead Smart Technologies page. We'll have a link to the show as well. So you can request that newsletter there. We're happy to get it to you. And then we have a website for the podcast. The website is www.aroundthehornpod.com. and what we try and do with the newsletter is gather the relevant news of the week and the economy and supply chain. We look at things regarding manufacturing and distribution, we look at e commerce and marketing, sales and mergers and acquisitions, AI technology, cybersecurity, robotics, and a number of different things in that category. And we bring all that news together and we get together on the show here with Tom and I and sometimes with our guests and we talk about that, how, how that impacts wholesale distribution and manufacturing. So, couple of requests, if you like that what we're doing here each week, please follow Lead Smart, the Lead Smart page and the show page on LinkedIn. If you're listening in on YouTube, which is growing, probably one of our biggest audiences right now for the show is there. And if you're listening there, please hit the subscribe button. They sometimes say smash that subscribe button and then you'll get alerts about the show being live. You can see previous episodes there. And if you're listening on Amazon, Podcasts, Apple, Spotify, any of those podcast platforms, please subscribe. And even more so, leave us a review and that'll help us get out to more people by those algorithms, jumping ahead and helping us out with things. So again, we couldn't do this each week if we didn't have the sponsorship of the company that Tom and I work for, company Lead Smart Technology. We've developed a product there called the Lead Smart Channel Cloud solution, which is an AI enabled, what we describe as smart CRM, customer intelligence platform for wholesale distributors. What we do with Lead Smart Channel Cloud is we gather Silo data from around a business, erp, marketing automation, e commerce, other structured data that's available within the business, we bring that together in a single unified data platform. And what we do with that is now that allows us to use smart technologies and AI to look at really what's happening with customers, with your teams and your overall business to. To gain deep insights that have never been seen before. How we work with that is we provide push notifications that come just to a smartphone, just like it would if you were getting a ESPN or a stock update or a text message from your significant other that reminds you about important things that need to be handled in the business. Maybe open quotes that are closing that week or customers that have stopped buying a particular category, but things that move the needle in the business. So if your company is looking for a platform where we can bring siloed data together and to digitally transform further, we would love to talk to you about what we do. And you can reach out to us again at that same email address. Hello, leadsmartech.com or our phone number is 833. Tom, you took the phone number away, remember?

What is it, like an infomercial?

Yeah, it is.

Oh, now, 833-532-3832.

But don't wait, don't call yet.

Yeah, there's. But, yeah, there's.

If you take action today, you can get a Ginsu knife.

That's right. But there's more to Lead Smart channel clouds for the price of one.

That's right. Well, good morning, Mike Hockett. We're happy to have you with us, Mike. I owe you an email. It's on my to do list. Mike has invited me to be on his popular podcast with the good folks at MDM and naw. And we have got to get Mike scheduled again before the end of the year to be with us. Maybe do a little recapping on the year. So appreciate Mike's friendship and support.

But.

But yeah, you know what's funny, Tom? As you talked about that, it was kind of jokingly about the little promo for what we do at Lead Smart. But it's interesting that I hear constantly in my travels from people you don't talk about what you do at Lead Smart enough. And these are major thought leaders from the industry, both on the association side and the distribution side. And so that's why we're here. We couldn't be here. It's expensive to put this show on. There's two people besides us involved, and so we got to talk about that.

Sounds like we need to do then more webinars or more things that talk about the product because obviously that's not what we're here to talk about. But maybe we should, we need to let people in on the secret a little bit more.

Maybe we should hire a senior marketing person to manage all that. What do you think?

Oh, we already got one. Yeah, yeah. Isn't that you?

That's what I'm saying. Maybe we should get. Maybe we should get somebody that's a little better. The. That's. I joke about that because if you were to look at my LinkedIn profile, there's the hiring banner on that and we've got interviews starting next week to support some of the work that our.

Good friend looks like candidates too. I'm impressed.

Yeah, yeah, we're growing. That's fun. We're growing right now. We got about three spots open and five or six more coming in the next couple months. So exciting time. So. Hey, you know, you had mentioned earlier about the travel. I'm just coming back from five weeks of back to back to back events and shows and so forth. So before we dive into the news, I wanted to thank the good folks at the Industrial Supply Association, Brendan Breen, who was on with us a few weeks ago, and his team. Great event this week. Great turnout, really fun. Memphis is a fun town to be in. We were at the hotel that Elvis Presley did his high school prom at and signed his first music contract in. And just a historical place in a good town. So great conversations with the Brendan, his team and John Gunderson was there and Steve Levy from Infor and just tons and tons of great conversations. The hallways were as busy as the speaking sessions with deals being made and deep conversations being had. So great event. 3 weeks with affiliated distributors prior to that and just a busy, busy, busy five weeks on the road. So happy to be home for a bit. A couple trips in December, but I think we're home for the rest of November, it looks like. So good stuff. So what's happening?

Government shut. Not no longer shut down by December. Still shut down in the September. Probably no one will be traveling.

Yeah, well, you know, it's interesting actually now I think about it. My travel in the. The only confirmed trip right now, although there's another for sure, another one pending. The only confirmed trip right now is in Las Vegas and the likelihood is of driving to that anyways. So I didn't, I haven't told you about that event in Las Vegas because I figured you would maybe want to come.

I might Come with you? Yeah, I might do that.

Darlene's coming.

Okay.

Yeah. That the Win it's for. Well, look, let me just hit pause there for a second. Let's promote that event. It's our good friends at Hardy, the Heating Air Conditioning Refrigeration Distributors International. Talbot Ski and his team and. And Alison Green, the marketing side of that. Just a great, great group of folks. And so that is their national annual meeting. We did had an opportunity to do a longest presentation I've ever done. They did a two hour presentation at their marketing, called it their focus event. And in September, I think in New Orleans. So that was a wild one. It was a one hour session followed by a follow up session with that. That was. We had a 15 minute break in it. But we love the developing relationship we have with Hardy. So it's on the news letters event, that list that we publish. So you'll see that there. So that'll be December at the Win in Las Vegas. We're looking forward to get some great customers and some prospects for Lead Smart that are going to be there. So it should be really solid. So. So yeah, we're going to talk a little bit about this article from CNBC about federal workers face growing hardship in the longest shutdown ever. We talked about this as the. I think we were just in our first week or so of the shutdown and we wondered what the longest one was and how long this might go. But this is a, this is a difficult spot folks are in now.

Well, I think it's start. Obviously it's starting to have real impact. I mean if you took. And I've been surprised, right. For the first two weeks of this, it was kind of like no one. Not even really news.

Yeah, good point.

Next couple weeks. Oh man. Okay. There's a few impacts here and there and. But now we're what, well over a month. And you know, to the point of the article, I think it's, I think, you know, even employees. Right. Will go, okay, I, I'm willing to maybe do a month without pay. Yeah. Or maybe I can, you know, figure out how to work around that. But now you start to get into the second month and you know, you start to get a bit antsy. Maybe more than a bit antsy, of course. Yeah. So I think now is really where the, where the impact begins, if you will. Because it was almost like a month of nobody really seeming to care, I guess. And now there's going to be real impact, obviously. We just talked about the airports. They're going to reduce flights 10%. 10% to reduce the flight traffic. 10% across. What are the top, top airports in the country? You know, all the big, you know, Chicago, Newark, Denver, Louisiana. Yeah, they're there. I mean, that's massive. They were saying they've never done anything like that before. I mean, other than when they shut, you know, 9, 11 and stuff. But they've never had that sort of reduction or cut right along the way. Yeah. So now think about this, right? We have Thanksgiving coming up. We have what in three weeks, probably the biggest travel week of the year coming up along the way, I mean, it's starting to be real. This is starting to be real to a lot of people. Not just people that are employed by the government, but people that are utilizing services that are provided by the government.

Well, almost 800,000 people are impacted with it right now.

Right.

And I think what's interesting is your time at the airports with what's going on. There is, and I heard this last week what was already going on, in fact, when I landed in, I guess it'll be two weeks this Sunday, I landed in Chicago for the Affiliated Distributors Electrical Division event. And as I landed in Chicago, because so many people are changing planes there. I get that now I'm getting off to grab my bag and get to the hotel, but I had a text message from United Airlines talking about delays. And I was listening to the rate the news later that night in the hotel. And one of the things they were talking about is that, you know, these air traffic controllers are still working, but they're not getting paid. And what they were starting to feel, and this was almost two weeks ago, they were starting to feel, is that some of them were working but then calling in sick because they were starting to drive Uber or grabbed another job somewhere and that they had to work somewhere else. So they, you know, called in sick or they use their vacation or whatever it was to, to go try and get some real cash coming in versus a voucher, you know, for we'll pay you later.

So big impact rumor that, you know, there are, there is nothing, I guess, as part of the negotiation and all of this, it determines who gets back pay.

Yes.

Not everybody automatically gets back pay. And I don't, there may be some know, areas that automatically get back pay, but it's not a foregone conclusion for a lot of the government workers to get back pay. Yep.

Did you, you notice that in this article again, this from cnbc, it, it mentioned the impact that this has on GDP by a weekly basis. It was Astounding to me. I didn't, I just, I hadn't correlated those things together. But it said weekly GP GDP growth loss is estimated at 1%, 1 percentage point per shutdown week.

Yep.

So it's a, you know, I'm sorry, it's a tenth of a percent per shutdown week. But I mean, that, that's impactful. So, you know, you go 10 weeks, you have a single percentage point in GDP. They're trying to, you know, keep that number around three as a growth standpoint for that. And that's, that's meaningful with the impact on GDP that it has as well. So I, I, let's take a look.

At a couple things here. Question for you. But I, this is the latest poly market.

Great.

That's here. So the, if you look at this, this is 57% of the people on the poly market are saying that the shutdown will end after November 16, which again is kind of like taking the field of. Well, I don't. So if you look at between now.

And like a no bet. Right.

That's, that's like, yeah, I'm taking the field. Right. I don't, I'm not going to pick anything, but I think it's going to be longer. So about what does this come out to be? 30, 44, 43% are saying that they think it'll be ended before the end, before the 16th. So that's. Yeah, but that's still not an overwhelming, overwhelming vote for, for what?

Oh, no. I mean, just look at the other side of it in the fourth line there. Right, right. So that, from that standpoint, that's pretty substantial that 57 says. What does that say after the 15th?

After the 16th, yeah.

16Th, yeah. I mean, and that, so that's meaningful. And really what that's saying is from that standpoint is that's as coming right into the week before Thanksgiving. Right.

Two weeks. Thanksgiving. Yeah. I think right before the Thanksgiving travel week. Yeah.

Right. For sure. Yeah. Yep. So that, that's meaningful. You know, Tom, I should have asked you prior to the show, sent you a note about this. What I wonder if there's a poly market. And by the way, if you're, you know, this is one of those times where we need to remind people, if you're listening to the recorded podcast on Apple or Spotify, wherever it may be, and you're not seeing us live, you get to look at these two handsome faces each week and see comments coming in, if they're coming in, and so forth. But we also share things like Obviously the newsletter is up as we're describing this, but additionally with that is we're able to show things like this. We're looking at polymarket right now and Poly Market right now is a online, what started off as a betting resource but really has turned into an online. What's the term they use with polymarket, Tom?

It just slips the trends, you know.

Yeah, but it's a, there's a great term that goes with, it'll come to my mind as soon as we move to the next topic. But basically it's, it's, it the simplest example is it called the presidential election a week, I think roughly in advance. And it's using real time data versus you know, traditional polling that we see where people are standing outside a shopping mall or a Chipotle or something like that. So anyways, this is, this is great that we're looking at that. Tom, I was, I'm wondering, is there, is there a poly market on what the sentiment is? Prediction market is what this is.

Prediction market. Yeah.

Prediction market is the term that goes with this. And if you so choose, if you live somewhere outside of the United States, you can place bets here. But I wonder if there is a poly market on what the sentiment is on which party is at fault.

Well, I don't know if it would be a. What's at fault. I think it would be which party is going to kind of acquiesce first. Yeah, right.

Somebody's got something.

I didn't see one. Didn't see one. Looking for this doesn't mean it doesn't exist. But that is a question. And I, I actually. So I think there's a couple things going on. I think that probably sentiment wise, I think that there is a lot of frustration with both parties.

Yeah.

Right now. Right. I think there's just a lot of frustration with politicians. I'm just hearing that in conversations in my sort of immediate circle. Not that I have a large immediate circle, but I hear that frustration is like, okay, just get this over with.

Yep.

I think again, if I were to, if there were a prediction market for this, I think the Republicans will actually acquiesce a little bit first. And I think that there the reason and I'm not suggesting this is right. I'm just saying this is what it is. I believe the Democrats think this is the only, only leverage that they have and they don't have any other leverage. So if they don't take advantage of this, then they really weren't going to be able to, you know, take it get any of the things that they're looking to get accomplished.

Yeah.

So I do think that the Republican aspect of it will probably acquiesce first. I think there's also a bigger political risk right now to the Republican. I think the Republicans are in the spotlight, Right. Of, you know, trying to hold on and be thinking about holding on next year with the midterms. And so I think they actually have more to lose than the Democrats and letting this go on and on.

Well, earlier this week's elections wouldn't suggest that. Right. There was a. Every Democrat candidate won, basically. Right. So there's.

Yeah. I mean, not that those were important elections from the federal level, but they were, they were certainly at the state levels. Right. So. So, yes, maybe that's a foreshadowing of some of the things that. So anyway, I just think there is a. If there was something that was going to give in first, I think that. But that all said, when and how, it's a whole different story.

Well, it's interesting the, when I said what I describe it, it's almost pick your news source, right. And then you'll get to define and see what, you know, whose fault it is.

Right.

I mean, I walked in the door the other night and my wife said, you know, something about, look what Trump is doing. And you know the reality if you look at that, it's that if you pick one news source, you're going to see that it's a Democrat's fault. And if you pick most news sources, you're going to see that it's the Republicans fault. And at the end of the day, both of those parties are choosing to hold this country hostage currently.

Right.

And it's impacting people more and more every day. And we're gonna, you know, we're gonna start hearing about, you know, people that we might know that get some benefits or whatever. I, I don't have anybody in my immediate circle that's a direct government employee. But the longer this goes on, the more impact it's going to continue to have. And, but when you see them, both parties, you know, nobody is at this stage, from what I've seen, is discussing the idea that says we need to sit down and work on this. Right. Let me rephrase that. One party is saying we want to sit down and negotiate this, open the government partially, and the other party is not until you give me what I want. And, you know, at this point in time, it really, it really just shows you how poorly run things are. I guess at the end of the day and what people are willing to sacrifice to get their agenda across.

Yeah, well, so anyway, I mean, I think in kind of wrapping this topic up.

Yep.

The frustration level to the general population is rising, right? Yeah, the frustration level certainly I don't believe was there in the last month other than maybe in some acute cases it was not a widespread thing. Well, November will continue to rise if this has more impact on air travel and other services that we all take advantage of, especially going in here to the holiday.

I think to go with that, Tom, it really ties to, you know, you had talked about it not have being as big of it an impact or as big as a news source per se, you know, early on. But now as we saw this, this major impact on the air traffic controllers and the risk of flights happening and then as of November 1st, there being this reduction in these SNAP benefits and so forth, that's where the rubber really started to hit the road.

Right.

And why it became even more prominent in that setting. So I think there's one other thing.

Here that is concerning to me that's not being talked about because there's no reports coming out, right. There's no date now like the job report was due today, didn't come out for that. You're seeing the, the market being moved by independent reports and that are not government type reports because they're looking for any data. Right. To put their head around. And to me that opens the door to a lot of potential market manipulation and you know, who wants to has the agenda to drive them markets up or down based around their reports and their bias of their reports and not to mention the sort of political bias that can be created on that as well. So I think this is another area that, because we've never dealt with this this long. Right. We've never done this long. The longer this drags out, the potential issues that can start to creep in, which I think we're already seeing. If you look at the market this week, I think the NASDAQ's down over 5, 6%, predominantly driven off of reports that are, well, all reports that are not government related reports. And certainly the Fed and all that stuff, you know, saying I don't have the data and things like that. So I think there's a lot of other risk here that we're not, we're not really confronting or talking about outside of just the inconvenience that it's being created.

Agreed.

Yep.

The. And it's interesting you just talked about the Fed and their data and so forth, which is I Think, you know, an interesting component of this is that I saw an article earlier today. I didn't, I missed it yesterday when we were curating this. But it's a Reuters article. It's actually I missed it yesterday because it came out this morning. It said fed and economic data hunt turns to the tried and true and also the new. And it just says because, you know, two weeks before the last meeting with the government's data spigot closed, they called it. The Atlanta Fed staff backstopped their view of the economy by analyzing how past surveys of business executives had aligned with employment, spending, output and other data captured in federal reports. And so the article just kind of talks about using traditional data where they can get it, but looking for other types of. They call it tech data scraping that offers directional proxy for absent jobs and inflation data. So they're starting to look at other resources outside of what they, which maybe, maybe something good comes out of that that they find that they get some good data from looking at, you know, other, other than the tried and true as it's described.

Yeah, I just think you have to be wary of manipulation and even more bias potentially than normal. And I think when you get a vacuum of data, which is what we've had, then people start looking for any data. And whether that data is accurate or relevant or that's a whole different story. But yeah, I think on the other hand, I do agree. Yes. Maybe this would potentially modernize some of our approach.

Okay, well, let's shift out of this economic piece and jump into the tariff issue, which is still there. So with your, with your poly market tool that you have there, have you looked at anything regarding what the Supreme Court's going to say?

Yeah. So the Supreme Court is, you had it already cool at 29. Again, this is the prediction market on poly market.

Yep.

The prediction is a 29 that the Supreme Court rules in favor of the.

Tariffs, the, the methodology and let's, let's be the one of the sources that actually call this of what it is. This is not about tariffs. This is about the methodology and the statute that was used to create tariffs. This is not about the Supreme Court.

Right or wrongness of terrorists. It's how the vehicle of how they got there.

This is not about tariffs being implemented or not. It's how we got there.

That's right.

So I think it's, and I just think that that is so important to discuss because it's just you don't see this on the news and it's, it just really tells you The, I mean, the bias, bias, bias of the news. It's like let's, let's, you know, if you turn on CNN or cnbc, it would make you. And I don't, I'm guessing that, you know, this is probably not as much of a followed issue on, on, on Fox right now as it is on the others. But this is about, you know, Trump getting squashed by the Supreme Court and getting rid of tariffs. And some of this is about this about just was the mechanism in the statute that was used. Okay, agreed. I'm going to throw this out. Just, you know, get your thoughts on this. I, I wonder. To me, it's every day that this goes on. Every day that this goes on. Further that the Supreme Court doesn't rule on this is a higher likelihood that they support it and allow it.

Well, so, so yes, I did a little homework on this. So let's unpack that a little.

Oh, here's a softball for you.

Yeah. But yeah, so anyway, I just wanted wrapping up this poly market piece, though, back in September. Right. It was pretty much a crapshoot or a, you know, roll the dice. Right. Flip coin one or it, it was 50, 50 basically. So it's dropped significantly in the last week based on when the, the piece started. So for whatever that's worth, right up until this week, it was more or less 50, 50 given in the prediction market. That's there. But so here's what's a little, I don't know, interesting, but potentially a concern is that Supreme Court started the hearing arguments this week, from what I can tell, at the earliest. Now they're saying that a ruling will come in early 2026. They were originally hoping for something in 2025. They are now saying a ruling will come in early 2026 at the earliest. But it could be, it could even be later. I mean, it could be in the first quarter of 2000.

I didn't, I didn't realize that. Thanks for looking at it. I thought this would be something that would move pretty quickly.

Well, I think that is quickly for them.

Okay.

But it's not, it's not like quickly like, hey, a week or two and we're done. So, so what does that mean? It means we're going to sit here with a bunch of what's the news of the day, the flavor of the day. Did the judge roll their eyes? Did they look up at the ceiling? Did they, you know, you're going to get all this kind of stuff that's trying to describe the sentiment. Yeah. But I agree with you that, that there's a long road ahead before a ruling is going to be made. And I don't know that I, I would say that it the length of it would him and greatly improve the odds, but I do think it will improve the odds a favorable ruling. But I still put it at 50. I personally put it at a 50. 50. I certainly wouldn't that one way or the other.

Yeah.

Now here's another interesting point. We've touched on this on previous shows. So let's say that it does get ruled as illegal. Then when that happens and you and I think we have an article coming up on this here in a minute.

We do. Yeah.

Right. There are other ways that new tariffs could come into play or the tariffs could be implemented. There's other laws and sections. The two primary though. And again I'm kind of jumping ahead to the other article but we can kind of.

No do. Let's just roll right ahead to that.

Right. So there's two real other section 232 and section 301. Those are basically the alternative strategies, if you will, for implementing tariffs. Both of them require investigations which I believe have started in some cases. Okay. But as soon as.

I'm sorry to interrupt you, Tom, but as soon as that first lower court struck down and said that you can't use the Emergency Powers act basically for this and then it was going and that was appealed and then it was pushed to the Supreme Court, they started using these other options.

Right, Right. They started leaning into them. Right. And looking at them. But I guess from start to finish from 232, it's about a six to 12 month process, assuming everything goes well. So it's not like a hot swap. Right. Like hey one's done and we can just move tomorrow to the next one. The section 301 could take a lead time of 12 to 18 months to actually get implemented again based on the homework that I've been been doing here. So neither of these are a snap of the finger. So our. So let's kind of play this.

Right. Can I interrupt you for just a second before. Let's not move past that yet.

Okay.

So is that your re. So you appreciate of you doing that research, but is that basically saying though in that setting that that's historically when somebody's tried to do it before or is that somebody's guess. Best best guess, excuse me, of what it would take to do the research, do the applications and then apply them?

Yeah, I think it's looking at, you know, what are the steps that have to be gone through, what are the approvals, what are the, what are the hoops you have to jump through along the way to get those to all go through. And the 301, because the 301 section hinges on foreign fair trade with foreign, foreign fair foreign trade practices. And so they said that in that case evidence gathering, the evidence for that generally takes more time and it will take more analysis from the legal perspective to get that to potentially go through. So there's just hoops you have to jump through on either one of them that take time. Now, could they be accelerated or could they be fast tracked? Possibly. But again, it's not a hot swap. It's not like, oh, the court rules that tariffs are illegal. Let's just say January 1st for sake of discussion and January 2nd, we're now, oh, the tariffs are continuing under 301 or 232 or whatever. There will very likely be a gap between those time periods. And the other thing we had talked about on a previous show, while it's not practical, there is grounds for all of the tariffs that have been collected under the current thing to be potentially, potentially open for refund, which they say is not practical. But you don't think that there aren't going to be people trying to figure out how to get their hands on billions of dollars that they've spent. I mean, come on. Well.

Treasury Secretary came out and said this will be, would be, if this is struck down, it would be extremely problematic to the US Both GDP and budget constraints. And these dollars are moving towards doing very good things for the US at this stage. Right. For the whole country. Right. So the other side of that too is in. And I'm just, I'm just, maybe there's a poly market about this, but I would just say I, I'll go on record and say this, that there is a slim to none chance that those dollars are going to go back because one of multiple things are probably going to happen. Right. Where we've been collecting a lot of these tariffs for a number of months now. Right. It's being impactful in helping the economy. Right now you've got the Supreme Court sitting on this. So now for we're, you know, it's what, November 7th is all it is. Let's just say you said from what you had researched, likelihood, you know, early in the New year's best case scenario. So let's say it's middle of January. We have December, January or November to December. December to January. Right. So two full months of additional dollars coming in. You know, for a fact that that as soon as the let's just make the assumption that it gets struck down appeal is first of some sort.

Right.

Even though, you know it's the Supreme Court, there's still wrangling that will go on with that. And then but the other side of it is I could almost guarantee you, I think if I remember correctly, only one of those statutes. I think it was for the 338 or whatever it was. 338. I think only one of them has to go to Congress. And I think you have an administrative.

301 and 232 do not go to Congress.

Yes.

And other approvals and other those those.

Are tied to the to the Commerce Department doing an investigation. Well, guess what. I would assume those investigations we've already seen some things where they've been bringing that has was a 301 and 2. 232 have already been instituted that they're looking at in particular instances. So you know, that work is already going on in the background. I mean this, this is not dumb people working on this. Right. And so I think that's we. I don't want to debunk the length of time that you were describing what you read. I believe what you read. I don't believe those things are necessarily reasonable when you look at one, this administration. And two, the fact that they've probably already done a lot of the work.

I agree. But I think the point being is whether it gets shrunk in half. Let's just say those timelines get shrunk in half. It's not like January 15th. And yes, I don't. That's another interesting point is if the court rules against it on January 15th and then they file an appeal. Right. Do they still stop the tariffs at that point while the appeal is being dealt with? Right. That that was what happened before and they said, well, you can continue while we deal with the appeal process. So the question that's a question that's unknown at this point. But regardless of that, if it happens on January 15, the point is it doesn't mean that they will have the approvals to continue on January 16th collecting tariffs. So there will be some gap. Some gap. Whether that's a week or two weeks or a month or six months or whatever. That doesn't it's just not a hot swap.

Great. Absolutely good point. By the way, I just looked this up real quick. There's no direct appeal against this Supreme Court decision. It's the final court of appeal in the American legal system. However, if a party is dissatisfied, they can petition the US Supreme Court further. So there's a petition process that can go with that right to review this and have them look different. So my, here's, here's my point. Maybe I didn't articulate this well. We might go a period of time, weeks, month, two months where we're not collecting any more tariffs while these other things fall into place. But if that's coming, I can just, it just seems uncompletely unrealistic that there would be any possibility that would say one because of the cost that goes with it. And there's no, there's no track record of how and why you would do it or methodology behind it. We've got a government shutdown right now with the people that would have to be working on trying to return those dollars aren't even at work. Right. So how would the likelihood of dollars being returned and you're going to get all of these lawsuits, right, that, that you're going to get more and more lawsuits even if there's any inkling of what, you know, the poly market goes up of the likelihood of that the initial powers act being used being, you know, unfounded. I don't know if illegal is the right word. It's just that its use is in, is inaccurate. But anyways, regardless of that component of it is getting to that place where the likelihood of those tariffs being returned. And let's boil this down to the audience that we talk about, right. I mean I've spent the last few weeks talking with manufacturers and distributors and I had a really lengthy conversation with a European manufacturer that does business all over the world, I should say, on Tuesday, great conversation. And as a global manufacturer, but with a huge operation here in the US and they're in the industrial segment, what they've done is from the tariff standpoint is they are doing a balancing of the increases across their product lines. Right. And we've talked about this before on the show and I think this is very common is look, we have higher margin products and lower margin products and on the, you know, we'll just do the balancing of where we need to adjust our prices so we stay organized whole where we need to be. So there's, I don't say whole saying whole. So what they, this one gentleman I was talking to, great, great guy, great discussion. I don't want to spill the beans, so to speak, on who they are or their process. But what he was describing to me was, look we're going to eat a component of this and we're going to pass a component on. But the component that's being passed on is being balanced across a broader product line. But what he shared with me is that not all, but the vast majority of their distributors are just taking those increases, fully passing them on. Now, I've talked to quite a few distributors who are. It's a. It's a mix. If I had to do a percentage, I'd say it's probably 70, 65 or 70% full pass on. Right. I get something from the manufacturer. Tom, you're an H vac contractor, a bearing power transmission distributor. You're getting that, right? You're getting that full. Or you're a user, you're getting that full pass on. But there's others that are doing some balancing and helping their customers that are making commitments to them. And, and so it's a good opportunity actually to align. I mean, it's unfortunate, but it's a good opportunity to align closer with your customers to see if you can work closer together.

Well, and I'll take one more step on this. Let's say there is a gap, right? So let's just say. Let's just say then this, I think, is not an unrealistic situation. They rule on January 15th that it's illegal, that all tariffs must stop.

Okay.

Let's say there's a gap of a month before. One of the other things. If I'm a manufacturer, I buy, get everything I can shipped into the country. I empty out those warehouses that we're using to, you know, kind of store things to avoid terror. Think about the immediate boom that will be everybody trying to take advantage of the notes. No sales tax weekend. Right. For a period of time to jump on that.

It's a new liberation day.

Pardon?

It's a new liberation day.

Yeah. So I think, you know, I mean, if I'm a manufacturer or, you know, particularly, or anybody who's getting products from overseas or parts from overseas and that are subject to tariffs, I'm looking at this going, right? How do I plan my supply chain so forth to take advantage of that? Because I think there's a high probability you will have at least a short period of time where you will have no tariffs.

Yeah, I wouldn't, I wouldn't argue that. So let's, let's. We always like to do this with each other. Give me your likelihood or percentage likelihood of there being any tariff dollars returned.

Oh, there'll be tariff dollars returned. It's too much money. It's too much money. There's too many. Too many. Well, it's. It's the problem, right? Logistically. But there'll be something. They'll. There will be something.

Who's gonna. Who's gonna require that and enforce it?

Well, it's. By law. It is required. It's. Is it practically and logistically possible? But there are probably. It'll be large companies, right? It'll be companies that have spent, you know, hundreds of millions of dollars on tariffs, like 3M's of the world or something like that that have, you know, spent large, large dollars that have the resources to go negotiate something with the government through legal means to get some of that money back. It will happen. No doubt.

Okay? We could not be farther apart on this.

You think people are going to walk away from billions of dollars and just.

Say there's no mechanism to get the money? So will they request it? Will they sue? Absolutely. Will they get much and how long will it take?

But you have to say, then you end up settling, right? You settle and you end up getting something. Is it an actual refund? No, but you're basically, you know, suing something for. It's like suing a car for a lemon car and going, okay, we'll give you, you know, $5,000 or insurance company to go away to get this out of the way. Right. Will it be a tit for tat, sort of, here's a refund on. Exactly. No, I don't think so. But I think there will be money exchanging hands. Okay, it's too much money.

But I mean, if the government says, right, we don't have the money, we don't have the capabilities. It's very different than a tax refund. Right? I mean, think about if there's a problem with your taxes, how long it takes the irs, where there's a full process in place. There's full process in place to get the money back. You don't. There's no process for this. So you can sue all you want, but how do they do it?

Well, they have to figure that out, because legally, they have to figure it out. They have to figure something out legally. Like I said. They said it would be a real pain in the butt, and it'll be very difficult, and there's no methodology for it. I understand. I agree with you on all that. That doesn't mean they can just sweep it under the rug and ignore it.

So just to get clarity here, and I'm not suggesting this is right and you're wrong, because there can be challenges with AI. But Gemini is saying that if the Supreme Court strikes down tariffs, it is not automatically required that refunds are issues. The court has discretion to structure the remedy. However, in specific case of the Trump era efforts, government lawyers have acknowledged that refunds would be likely be due to. But that doesn't mean that it will happen. And the process for receiving these funds is likely to involve a lengthy administrative process that may be complex and potentially delayed. And the Supreme Court could also limit the remedy to the parties in the case. So it's not required. It doesn't have to happen. It's up to the Supreme Court of what the.

I believe that would be part of their ruling. Yes.

Okay. So, but you were saying earlier, if I understood you correct, I didn't say it.

I said that if it's ruled in that direction, right. That there are refunds or there is to open the door for refunds, there's just no way people are going to walk away from that. But I guess, yes, the Supreme Court could rule, hey, we're calling this illegal, but there is no legal ramification for providing the refund.

So the most insightful comment to this entire discussion was just made by Wes, and I think he's right on with this. Right. It's not the large companies that are out the money on the tariffs. It's the consumer. Wes works for a large distributor, good friends of ours at dsg. And you know, if you're passing that on. Right. So I think the reality is the manufacturer that's impacted, Right. May want to try and file some claims or do whatever, but the likelihood is the Treasury Department's going to throw up their hands and say, we don't know how to do this. We don't know what the, what the process is. If somebody gets money back on this, I'd say it's in 2027 or later.

I wouldn't argue that. I wouldn't argue that. I didn't say it was going to be fast. I just said that people aren't going to say, ah, forget it, you know. No, I don't think people.

I don't think people are going to, you know, if I'm, if you're a large manufacturer, you're going to be looking for something. But I think it's important that we say here that this goes with this. And we need to. We have so many other things to talk about today, but this is becoming an economics show versus a, related to distribution versus all the other stuff that we used to talk about. But I think it is important to say that it is not a foregone conclusion or a legal requirement that if the Supreme Court says that the statute that was used to apply to the current tariffs is struck down while the other statutes are being used to implement tariffs. And to your point, I agree there's likely a window, whether it's weeks or months. Don't know that the Supreme Court and that ruling does not automatically require that the money is returned.

Don't believe it's automatic.

No, it is not a part, it's not a statute or anything.

I'm sure that'll be part of their ruling one way or the other. So.

Yeah.

Yeah. Ambiguous. It will.

Which could be why. Which could be part of the arguments and why it's going to take a long time. Yeah.

Yeah.

Good. Why don't we, why don't we kind of jump in and kind of. We've got talked a lot about the economy and there's some good articles we had here about statements from the Treasury Department about the current state of the economy, a little bit about job reports. But again, if you don't get our newsletter and you would like to see these other articles that we're going to bypass moving forward today, just reach out to us@helloadsmart tax tech.com and we'll get the newsletter to you. Or jump on our website for the show www.aroundthehornpod.com and you can request it there. Anything you see in the manufacturing distribution segment you'd like to chat about.

One thing before we leave here about the job market and we'll talk more about this, I'm sure, between now and the end of the year for sure. But I think 2026 is going to be the year of the job market and that is going to be the biggest news, one of the biggest. I mean, obviously there's no shortage of news and things, but one of the biggest things economically in 2026 will be the job market.

What about the job market?

Weakening of the job market.

Okay. What's that going to do to the Fed, then it's going to cut.

Well, that's, this is what's interesting without us going back to a whole nother economic discussion, but we're already there. One of the things they said, well, if the, if the tariffs are ruled illegal and then we don't have tariffs for a while, then that's going to, you know, this is, to me, this logic is stupid. This isn't my logic. This is just some of the logic you hear from the, from the market people.

You know, this is being recorded.

Okay.

Okay.

But you don't have tariffs for a while. Inflation's going to come down. We have. We have weak job market. The Fed's going to cut rates like crazy in 2026. Right. That's sort of the. One of the extrapolates with.

With a new Fed head.

With a new Fed head, yeah. In. In May. But no, I just, I, I don't. Obviously it will be balanced with some of the inflationary aspect of things, but I do think the job market in 2020 and, and here's why. And again, I know we need to move on from this is it's not just AI and cutting. Because of AI, efficiency is in vogue. Right. Everybody wants to be more efficient. And almost every company is looking at how they can be and how they can cut waste and how they can become more efficient.

Right size.

Yeah, I mean, I guess so. I guess you could say it's right sizing, but. But I think it's even beyond that. I think it's going maybe right size plus and really looking at maybe cutting more than they normally would in a traditional right sizing scenario.

Because we can get by with.

Yeah. Because of the belief that I can backfill some of that with technology and AI. And so I don't think you're going to see that's what this article was talking about is the largest, some of the largest job cuts in a long time. And I don't think you're going to see those recovering in the next year. And I think people are going to be cutting before they're hiring. And I think that's going to be the story of 2026.

The opposite of our company.

Yes. Oh, that's why we're getting such good candidates.

Yeah.

Right. You know, it's like we had our HR person. Oh, this was a few months ago, and we started. Oh. Candidates are hard to find, and if you don't jump on them right away, they're going to be taken. And we've been slow and deliberate and. And so forth, and none of them, not one of the candidates have found another job. And these are good candidates.

Well, they're all waiting around because everybody wants to work for you.

I guess so. Yeah.

You know, I mean, you can't, can you?

Yeah.

I mean, if I could work with Tom, I. I'll wait forever.

Yeah.

You know, I waited for 55 years. Wow.

You see? So. So good things come in time. It's like fine wine.

Yeah. Yeah, exactly.

All right, let's. Let's move on before I can this is starting to smell.

Where are you gonna go?

Do you want to talk about next distribution or what?

Let's, let's just scroll. Let's. This, that would all the stuff that all the articles about manufacturing shift to serving driven, serve service driven growth, more tariff driven price hikes. A handful of good articles there. But that's just going to take us right back into talking about the economy or tariffs. Let's move to E commerce and marketing in that next segment there. What do you think of that?

All right, let's do that.

I want to talk a little bit about this article about. Let's see, where are we at? Bypass that one. The navigating 2026 key predictions for B2B leaders. That was a Forbes article.

Yeah, I mean the big takeaway or the big thing they were saying in there is that influencer marketing is becoming the thing in 2026. Or in other words, companies using quote unquote influencers as a way to build trust and credibility with their company. Which is, you know, coming back to something we've talked about over and over. Right. Is, is the, the brand and the trust element of that and sort of the affinity element of the brand and the people that are there. So, you know, and then you balance that with sort of some of the AI things I think they're looking at, hey, okay, we can use AI for a lot of our marketing, but we have to also have that human element of it to be balanced with some of the, you know, and again the influencer aspect of it is a way for us to do that. Good.

There's another segment of this. There's three kind of key points about this, but the one that struck me highly was this. It talks about ungoverned gen AI and commercial apps will cost B2B companies more than $10 billion. I'm just going to read this because it's really interesting and I'll give it.

That from the beginning. Just read that again.

It says and this is just one of the three key topics in this article. Right. So this is again Forbes navigating 2026 pre key predictions for B2B leaders. And it says there's. So there's three areas you had addressed. The one about find budgets, B2B companies finding budgets for influencer relationships, which is kind of unique because historically that's in kind of the B2C world. Right. The next one was employees outside centralized content teams will create two thirds of content, which is good. But this says ungoverned gen AI and commercial apps will cost B2B companies more than $10 billion. So here's what goes with that. It says AI is everywhere in sales tools, marketing workflows and product development. The pace of new and untested functionality combined with lagging AI user skills will result in the loss of more than 10 billion in enterprise value, such as through declining stock prices, legal settlements and fines. It says. Just a few weeks ago, a global consulting firm refunded its client hundreds of thousands of dollars for a project deliverable that contained AI hallucinations and AI slop.

Interesting.

So I mean, here's how I take this. And by the way, I was just in an event this week. We've talked about a lot of the travel that I've just been doing. This is, I think it's important discussion. There is no shortage of companies being minted in Silicon Valley and all over the world every day that have AI tools.

Right?

For those of you listening and not seeing, I just put the, the ghost quotes up with my fingers quotation marks there. And the reality, I think is what you're seeing is you've got untested products folks who figured out that, hey, this is a good market to jump into. I'm not suggesting this is all of them, but there is lots and lots of Silicon Valley money being thrown at manufacturing and distribution from tons and tons of startups. We're going to see lots of them. Again, their AI is maybe questionable or unproven at this point. And you've said this for years, right? I've been in the wholesale distribution and manufacturing world for 35 years. You've been on the other side of things in the technology world. And you said wisely. Here's my compliment for the day. Wisely, you said probably in. Our company is roughly seven years old. You said wisely probably five years ago. You can't buy your way into this market. Right? The wholesale distribution world is. It should all be centered in Missouri in the show me state. Right? And prove this to me. And I think this really, this article from Forbes that is pointing out is that companies are just kind of getting ready to set some AI plans in place if you don't have guardrails on it and you have unproven technology and it's not used correctly in your business by the right people understanding how they're using it. And the good news is our company and the work that you and your team have done can check all the boxes about how we can support our customers in this setting. But I think this, the $10 billion number is astounding. To me. But you know, there's some research behind it and there are challenges out there with Johnny come lately trying to bring a solution to a market that they don't understand. Right?

Yeah. Well, there's no short and there will be no shortage of shiny object products. Right.

As I said, I've had this discussion with three or four people earlier this week. I had a lengthy text thread back and forth with a thought leaders from one of the media companies out there a couple of weeks ago. And, and I said, and it's great news. Right? So with our media company around the horn and wholesale distribution, which is just Tom and Kevin and getting together talking during the week, this is not a for profit company. Right. We get together and chat about this. But there are other companies that are hosting podcasts.

We're at dot org.

There you go. Yeah, exactly. The. But you know, there are other companies that are publishing newsletters and doing a lot of content and so forth and it is a gold rush for them. Right. And I was talking to one of these guys a couple weeks ago. We were having a great text thread back and forth. It's like you know, these. And you see it right? Where at a lot of the events that you go to is you've got, you know, a company that was founded in, you know, January of 2024 or June of 2025 and they're, you know, throwing money at sponsorship stuff, which is great. It doesn't mean that their company, that their onboarding team, that their sales people or that anybody within the organization understands wholesale distribution. And I'm not trying to throw rocks at those people because there are some great new solutions coming out. But this is kind of interesting when you look at back taking us back to this articles about, you know, it says AI is everywhere, right? Sales tools, market, marketing workflows, product development. But when you don't have the skill set of the people yet, you don't have a plan internally of a company and you don't have a desired outcome. Which is why at Lead Smart, every one of our customers, when they go through their implementation process identifies key success criteria of what they want to accomplish with the software. Because buying software is easy. Getting outcomes from it is not easy. And so I this, this is what triggered for me in this article.

Yeah, I don't know and I don't know if that $10 billion is talking about wasted investment or if it's talking about, you know, potentially legal things or, or other, you know, I don't, I don't know what makes up that that amount, it would be interesting to understand.

Well, it says right here, it addresses that.

Right.

Result in a loss of more than $10 billion in enterprise value, such as through declines, declining stock prices, legal settlements and fines.

Okay, so that's not wasted necessarily, you know, money that we're wasted money on technology.

I don't think it's about buying the technology. I mean, let's think about this. Right. Let's just say, and this might be a good use case to evaluate with this. Let's just say that your hiring manager decides that they want to use ChatGPT or Gemini or pick the tool and run all of their job applications through it. And they don't have any parameters of why, how they're going to do that and how they're going to make sure it's not discriminatory or whatever. Think about the lawsuits that can come from that. Right. Sure, you're not going to get a lawsuit of a company suing an applicant for using AI in their application. But the reverse of that is there's a risk of those things. Right. So there's, I just think so many, so many things. And when you're relying on AI that could be hallucinating or as this article describes it, there's a common term now used called slop in that setting. An interesting time. Right. So I think that's where we, you know, it says claiming stock prices, legal settlements and fines.

Okay.

So anyways, that's what struck me.

All right, let's move ahead.

All right, you pick the next one. Want to talk about Amazon Genic Commerce or what floats your boat there?

We kind of hit on Agenda Commerce. I think it was last week if I'm not mistaken. So you know, this is from distribution strategy is, you know, us and Amazon is really investing in these sort of agentic commerce shopping type tools that will. Again, I'm not, I need to dig into this more. It's not an area that I feel like I have a really good grasp on on exactly how this is going to be rolled out or deployed or, or utilized. But I can get the concept, conceptual aspect of it is right. Something that's out there on, on my behalf looking for products, pricing, best, negotiating all of those things to find the, the right deal at the right time. Yep.

So you've got lawsuits now going on with Amazon and Perplexity. Amazon is saying they're suing Perplexity, saying that it's, it's a Comet agent.

Is did they sue them or did they just give them a cease and.

Desist I think, well, what I just looked up is that there was, yeah it's Reuters article from two days ago that they sued them. So that basically it's saying that they are now covertly accessing its website to make purchases on behalf of users violating Amazon's terms of service. Yeah, you've got OpenAI that is suing perplexity in there. Because look at the end of the day, right, and this is where I just. We were on a call with a European company the other day that's in the AI world as well and having a great discussion about some of this and it's a, it's a big, big conversation that I've been having very consistently in my travels and in conversations with people is if you were to just take and hit pause for a moment in your life and go even ask OpenAI to go do the research or anybody else or just literally do it. An old school Google search. If you were to look at the roadmap of what you've seen of what OpenAI, the, the developers of ChatGPT and looked at what they, where they've been from a open source nonprofit to a closed source and for profit company and then the shifts that they're making and they're going and what they're doing with their data and now when you can see the shopping tools and so forth. If you're a wholesale distributor or manufacturer, you should be extremely cautious about what your or least, the least case scenario would be. Have an absolute plan and an understanding of what their goals are in this setting because they have every intention to overtake Amazon in this setting. And when you release your data to them and upload anything to them or share with them, what you are allowing them to do is now control and manipulate every bit of data that you share with them. And you will be hearing from them as well as others I'm sure about, hey, come shop, put your shopping, you know, solution with us, upload this, that or the other, your pim, your, your pricing and everything loads would allude that they're doing right now would focus or point towards the dominance that they're looking to have. And it will not be, there's nothing that would suggest it would be to your long term benefit as a distributor or manufacturer.

So how is that, how is that different than somebody you know as a manufacturer deciding to sell on Amazon?

Well, yeah, Amazon doesn't have a language model that's going to use that to make their language model better is point number one right now they will, but.

They use it for Their search to make their search better, historic.

Historically they have. Right, but, but at this point in time, right, you, you have. And, and the percentage of distributors that do E commerce that are also utilizing Amazon is just minuscule. Okay, right. I mean there are people out there and I, this is a conversation I try and have pretty regularly engaged.

You should get Brian Beck back on here. This would be an interesting conversation to have with him.

Why don't you send him a note?

Okay.

Yeah, be great. So I delegated there. Fantastic.

Yeah. So I'm your new marketing vp.

No, you're just a co host of a show and, and you're gonna send an invitation out to a friend.

That's all.

That's all, that's all. You, you stay over in your bucket over there and go make product. But I'm was excited about our Monday meeting that we have about some agent opportunities. I'm just, I've been all excited about that since we got some new, new word on some of that yesterday. But anyways, I think the point here is in these conversations that I have in my travels, it's, you know, the vast majority of people still, I don't want to say look at Amazon as the enemy, but are not mixing in Amazon selling with their own online selling. And the abundance of data that, you know, trade associations have, buying groups have, and distributors and manufacturers themselves have is pretty astounding. And nothing that open AI and you know, no offense to them. Right. I use their, their product every day. Whether it's them or it's Claude or it's somebody else. They are so incredibly focused on the domination that they want to do. And if you've been, I guess my, my thought and I would welcome anybody's comments or arguments about this but. Or your thoughts obviously, but if, if you've had concerns about Amazon, be really concerned about those. Those concerns are probably 10x of the risk that if you have those concerns about risks, those are magnified greatly with what OpenAI's intentions are.

I agree with you. And then just to wrap this up, I think we have to. What's that?

We just stop with I agree with you.

Now we can agree with you. Yeah, is. And I think just for everybody listening, I think it's important though that we separate out agentic search, which we've talked a lot about. Right. Is how do you, you know, when somebody goes to a AI tool to search for something, how do they find you and your website or your thing or whatever. That is one thing. Right. It's another thing when it's Agentic commerce. Okay. And what I mean by that is that now these, these sites are actually selling, either selling your products or making the sale or controlling the sale on your behalf. Right. So that you become fulfillment and not just, you know, not controlling the sale. Those are two different things. Agentic search is one thing which is again driving people back to you so you can control the sales process. But as soon as they take away the ability for you to control the sales process, even if you're doing the fulfillment, that's where the risk is. Right. And I think that's where you have to be very agree with you. Is that very cognizant of any sort of. And I don't know that they're doing this yet, but it's likely going to happen where there is, you know, deals and OpenAI trying to reach deals where they have access to proprietary product information, product lines, things along those lines, sales information, all of that stuff. Because yes, they do want to, I won't say take over Amazon, but they want to make a dent in Amazon, they want to make a dent in Google, they want to make a dent in Apple, a serious dent in Apple, but they want to disrupt all of those. Those, those different.

They're, they're way ahead with their models, right?

Yes.

And so everything you do now in this setting is feeding their model. And you know, I can guarantee you that these, you know, I mean, we talked about this two, three months ago. You know, OpenAI has a office in Washington D.C. with lots of people. Right. They are looking to that. And that's not lobbyists necessarily all of them. That is them looking to go out and capture the data. And if you ever. I guess one of the risks is. And so we've been talking mostly here about shopping. The other component of this, and this is ties to a project that, you know, we've been talking a lot about, related to different types of models out there that we'll talk more about in the, the near future as we understand these things a little bit better. But the other side of that is all of the data that you have in your business, the structured and unstructured data, the trade associations and buying groups and their deep data that in theory. Right. The approach would be from any of these large language models or foundational models would be the request to, hey, share some of this with us so we can make your members search better. You've just given up every opportunity that you have to monetize or do other things with that data for the future.

Sure. Right.

So that when I Talk about risk. I think there's the agent of commerce risk and there is what's happening with my data risk. There's two components to, to that.

But I think again there's agentic search and there's a agentic commerce. And from an agentic search perspective, you want to be intelligently using your data on your website and so forth to optimize for that. But there's a line where it crosses over where it starts to become the risk that.

You're right. That's a good point.

Y. So I just want to make sure we're separating those two out. Yep. Okay.

Where are we headed? Let's, let's.

We only got one technology.

Cyber security. Yep. The world's lowest cost humanoid robot will be in your warehouse soon.

Yeah. So nobody believes me. Right. It's like a three foot robot, 1500 bucks. Yeah. It weighs about 26 pounds I think it is that it said. Yep, yep. So I don't know if we have a picture of it. I could probably bring it up here. Yeah, there it is here. So they're kind of cute.

You know, Go ahead.

How are. Have they. You know, what were they talking about as far as application and, and how are these. Are these more for a consumer perspective or.

There, there's. I, I just use this one because there's more and more of this coming and we've. I've got a bet. Good going with our friend Max Meister in Bavaria and what the timing is on this. I've been saying 18 to 24 months that we'd be able to have a affordable one that is doing applications in our home. I think what it would be great to do, I just got to put. Set the time aside would be to do a little a recap of, you know, three to five of them that are out there and that are available already and what they, what their functionality is, what they can do and what they can't do. I think my point of sharing this in this week's article or newsletter was that it's moving so fast.

Right.

And AI is getting better. You know, we, we showed even a video three, four months ago about a humanoid robot that, you know, now it still has the big claw like grasping. But someone walked into a kitchen, set a bag of groceries on the counter and walked away. And we looked at that robot that was able through its vision and AI understand that the apples were fruit that went in the fruit basket and that the eggs were perishable and went in the refrigerator and it went through that whole thing and I just, you know, as I've been telling the lovely Mrs. Brown consistently, that we're in a place where in the not too distant future that our garden is going to be weeded by a humanoid robot that will be able to identify every green thing in the garden that's growing. Is it a weed or is it a plant? Because it'll have access to the database that shares that with it and it will know how to clean our house because it'll have sensors that will know what's dusty and what's not dusty. It won't be the current housekeeper that looks at something and says it's test deal. Sensors will tell it all about that.

You know, so I agree with that. Two things are related to this that I think are worth talking about. One is Elon Musk got approval on his pay package at Tesla.

Yeah, you got my note that I sent to our board yesterday, right?

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Your trillion dollar paycheck or pay package will be discussed at the next meeting.

To reference that, that comment is our December board meeting and year end wrap up and dinner together. I sent a note to our board of directors yesterday about Elon Musk's trillion dollar pay package that was approved and that I would like to review my package. Astounding. There has been no response from anyone.

I think it'll be an easy vote.

Yeah. Okay, great.

Thank you.

Looking forward to that.

But it did his approved, his pay package, which I think is over 10 years or something, got approved and he also has much more voting rights in the company, which is what he wanted and so forth. But you know, he's come out and really then started really, really promoting the Optimus robot again, talking about literally they'll be everywhere and there'll be no crime because there'll be a robot everywhere to you know, stop crime and stop, stop criminals and burglars and all this kind of stuff. So you know, I don't know that 20, 26 is the year of the robot. I think the next five years might be the year of the robot if we were looking at the next five years. And, and I think this is where to me when I keep hearing all this, oh, we're overspending on data infrastructure or data centers and you know, we're not going to get, you know, all this is over capacity. Nobody is thinking at all about the physical AI aspect of things of these robots. And it will probably, the, the capacity will probably be much, much greater for the use of physical AI than it is for how we're using AI. Today with technology and agents and all of that kind of stuff. So I, I don't think we're in any, I don't think we're going to see a slowdown of, you know, even OpenAI said they have features that they're not releasing that are ready to be released because they don't have the capacity, the infrastructure capacity to release them. Right. So we're being hindered by, as we've talked about, power and resource capacity on these things. So anyway, I think that we will see lots of physical AI, whether it's Optimus, whether it's these, whether it's, you know, the other companies really coming, I hope they don't become like, remember those scooters that came out for a while and we're on every, you know, every.

Corner or whatever, a lot of places. Right.

But I kind of unfortunately sense that it could be similar like that with, with robots. Before too long, it's like you'll be able to rent one at the corner, you'll be able to turn it on like the scooters and things like that. And they'll be waiting for, for, you know, lease and things like that. I kind of picture that. I hope it doesn't come to that.

But I don't know if you, you're aware of this, but a industry friend of ours that we have one of our partnerships with has the plans to develop a whole company where he will be leasing out and renting out humanoid robots.

Okay.

So. And you heard it here first. And when he's ready to roll it, we'll announce it. But you know, robots make sense, right?

I mean, if you what it's like Rosie self driving cars, you won't need to own a car. You can just use a car when you need it, right? If you need a robot to, to mow your lawn, go get the robot to mow your lawn and then it can go mow the next guy's lawn.

Well, Darlene and I were talking about this, you know, kind of for fun a while back and we were just talking about use cases and I said the, you know, it will always be doing something unless we tell it not to. Right? It will be doing, you know, and I think this might be a little bit longer down the road because the biggest issue with all of these, right. Is dexterity. That's the biggest challenge there. I watched the thing on 60 Minutes and I've seen a few other things similar to this recently is the issue is not getting it to walk or jump or run or do whatever those Things have kind of been taken care of. Finding the balance points. It is basically from the elbow to the tip of the fingers is the challenge. Right? But they're getting better and better at that every single day. And the coolest part of that is as they get that figured out, look at what that does to prosthetics for people, right? The value that that's going to bring to people's lives is fantastic. But if you stop and think about it, right? The, the humanoid robot in your home doesn't sleep. It goes and changes its own battery, right. And it puts, you know, it literally. I saw a video of one that really was. Literally was. And I'm for those of you listening versus watching, reaching over the back of my head right now and it, I saw a video of one literally reaching back and hot swapping its batteries and putting it into the wall pack to charge and then went about its work. So now we got warehouses. We've got, you know, talk about security and fire sensors and carbon monoxide sensors in your robots that are walking the perimeter of your warehouse and, and inside your warehouse. And when you, you know, if I was in, if I owned an industrial cleaning business, you know, or a commercial cleaning business, I'd be concerned because why wouldn't, you know, and this might be five, seven years, whatever it is, out, but we're just looking at office space for our company and expanding that greatly. We need somebody to clean it. Well, what if we, for $2,200, we could buy, rather than spending $600 a month, for $2,200, we could own a robot that when people leave it empties the trash and dusts and cleans and I mean, that's where we're going with this.

Yeah. I do think there'll be an opportunity, on the other hand, for, let's say you are a cleaning service to have your fleet of robots that are much more trained right around and tune to be experts at cleaning versus a generic robot that can clean and cook and all that stuff. So I think there's, you know, I.

Mean, so we'll have generalist and generalist and then super refined skill sets.

That's right.

Yeah.

And, and I think that's where you'll end up getting a lot of opportunity to lease robots is maybe a generalist. You do have a generalist robot around your house or whatever. Yeah. But when you need something that's going to go do plumbing or go into your house and fix your plumbing or in your attic to, you know, I have rats in my Attic. And I would like to have a robot go up there and kind of scare all the rats away. Right. So it's, it's something that, yeah, I think we'll definitely have generalized and specialists and. But I do think the next five years you're going to see a predominance of these. And like I said, I hope it's not like a scooter on every corner that we're running into, but I think it could go, it could go that way before it levels itself out.

Do you like to drive?

Do I like to drive or do I like to go places?

Do you like.

I don't like to drive, no. Whenever we go places, my wife Lauren always drives. I sit in the, in the passenger seat because I don't like to drive.

Okay.

I like to go places. I don't like to drive.

Okay. I love to drive.

Okay.

But you know what? I would love to do even more and I think this will, I don't know, I don't know where we're going and I'm not in tune enough with this, this marketplace and I'm not sure if this is why people tune into this show or not, but the, these tangents we go on. But you know what I like. So the good example is as you know Tom, because you've known her our whole lives together as friends since kindergarten. But you know, my mom is in a nursing home now and lost my dad last year. And I drive every week at least once I drive over a beautiful two lane mountain pass. It's, you know, 45. The overall drive is about an hour and 20 minutes, but the mountain passes over half of that and it's gorgeous. There's a river, small river that runs through it. Oak trees, big cliffs. It's gorgeous. I, I enjoy that drive. What I don't enjoy is sitting in traffic driving. And I would love an experience where when we're in traffic coming back from visiting you in, in Ventura or Santa Barbara and I'm sitting in LA traffic to literally voice command or push a button that then pushes my seat back and out comes my laptop and I can work.

That's not far away.

No, I would, no, absolutely. I mean, yeah, so that, and I would guess that Tesla actually already has that, but it's not released.

So anyway, the Tesla cars, because they upgrade all the firmware and the software regularly will have the same capabilities of the cyber cabs that are going to be entirely self driving here. Not for the first of the year.

He talked about that on the all.

In podcast available I don't know legally if you'll be able to use it or whatever, but the technology is there.

Yeah, that's good. Good.

All right, we gotta wrap up here.

Yeah, let's jump down to our people in leadership. Sorry, our people on the move section. We'll go past people in leadership wanted to mention it's got. We've got our channel leaders on the move section. Our friend Bob Williams who's the president at McGuire, the plumbing component manufacturer in Connecticut. Bob is a friend of ours. They're a good company, a good customer of ours as well. Bob was received the manufacturer's reps golden eagle award for the plumbing industry. It's aiming AIM R. So it's. It was an event in. I think it was in Scottsdale. And then Bob, part of his team was at the ad meeting I was at and then he came to the ad meeting. So shout out to Bob Williams at, at McGuire's and his great team there as well. So good for them. And then if we go down into our scuttlebutt section kind of more friends of the show. Our good friends at uh, DSG formerly Dakota Supply Group, uh has acquired a pump distributor in southern Wisconsin. So they're continuing to grow and expand. It's pretty funny I mentioned this is. I think this was announced Monday of this week and last Thursday I spent about an hour and a half with Paul Kennedy, the good friend of our show and multi time guest chatting about everything under the sun related to manufacturing and distribution. We spent hour plus in the booth chatting and just always, never, never don't leave smarter after conversations with Paul and didn't mention a word about this. So I texted him on, on Monday said hey me kind of giggle. So good news there and then our friends at Affiliated Distributors are a great partner there. Reported some record sales growth for the third quarter of 2025. So they're you know, merging, acquiring other groups, doing some really, really cool stuff. Had a great three weeks. I'm exhausted from the three weeks there and then with AD at their different division meetings. But I survived Tom. I didn't get sick, didn't bust up a knee or an ankle on a stairway in a hotel anywhere or you know it was, it was a good, it was a powerful few weeks. Now just trying to get through all the follow up. That's neither good. Hey, good show today.

Appreciate it or whatever. I'm sorry, don't bust an ankle going to the office to follow do all the follow up.

No, I'm you know a home office this morning but in our, our current office. But plane flight home the other night, I was looking at expanded office space. So it's good, it's good to have a growing company, it's good to be in the industry that we're in and it's good to do this show with you every week. And we appreciate everybody that tunes in. Whether you're listening with us on the podcast, recorded podcast that John Taylor, our producer and editor puts together, or you're with us live today, we appreciate you being with us each week. As I mentioned as we started the show, if you like what we do, the one thing that you could do that would benefit us would be to share an invitation that you get. Maybe share it with your network. If you get a LinkedIn invitation, if you're listening on the recorded podcast, just hit that subscribe button. And probably the most valuable component that would be beneficial to us to get the podcast out in front of more people would be to leave a review as well. So we appreciative of that. Again, if you'd like to get the newsletter and you don't just you can look at, look up around the horn and wholesale distribution on LinkedIn. You can go to the podcast website aroundthehornpod.com or just send us an email at T. Bert, I'm sorry, Hello. AtLead smart tech.com. so I made you laugh, so that's good. All right, what's, what's the weekend hold for you?

I gotta just get ready to come down there.

Yep, I'll see you Monday. Look forward to that. USC plays Northwestern at 6:00 tonight, so we have Friday Night Football. So I am headed to the office momentarily, but Mrs. Brown and I are going to enjoy a meal that I've prepared for us and probably a nice bottle of wine.

All right, sounds good.

All right, my friend. Well, I'll see you, see you Monday when you get in. And we will wish everybody a great weekend, appreciative of our sponsorship from Lead Smart as well. And we'll wish everybody a great weekend, a safe weekend. So be kind, do good things and have some fun.

Take care.