Calling All Mental Nomads

Show Notes

Dan and I opened this one already a little raw. He told me volume and traffic were down at his shop, that the marketplace had gone opaque, and that Howard Lutnick had wandered uninvited into his dreams — which, honestly, is the most 2025 sentence I can imagine. We swore we wouldn't touch politics, and then we touched politics for the better part of an hour, because the tariff and trade picture is now baked into both of our jobs. He has zero industrial capacity and no way to build a seven-and-a-half-million-dollar factory to chase a million in revenue; I'm on the manufacturing side, watching us model what a 30, 40, even 200 percent tariff does to where we make things and how we shape the next year of projects.

The thing I kept circling back to is that the math doesn't close. You can be competitive domestically at a high enough tariff and still watch the end market shrink, because the whole pie got smaller and everyone's working capital just exploded. We talked through the cruelty of the timing too — the orders that should be going to China right now for Christmas aren't being placed, which means the pain is delayed and invisible until it isn't. I think you just won, and then the American consumer — who is also the voter — has a fit in the not-too-distant future. Murky. Hard to see the future. I said that word murky more times than I can count.

I floated my "asymptotic society" idea, which is just my armchair-quarterback way of saying we have a habit of getting things cooking and then jamming a stick in our own spokes — that meme of the kid crashing his own bike is the meme of the year, and Dan agreed. Then we got to the part I actually love, which is the willingness to be wrong out loud. We talked about how people will happily say I don't have an opinion about horizontal drilling but will go to the mat on tariffs they've read zero history on. The cure for that, as the line goes, is remembering it's not what you don't know that gets you in trouble — it's what you know for sure that just ain't so. (I attributed it to Mark Twain on air; turns out Twain almost certainly never said it, which is a very on-the-nose way to get a quote about false certainty wrong.)

That's really the heart of the episode, and the reason for the title. I told Dan I want fellow mental nomads — people willing to move from idea-space to idea-space, to go to the Jehovah's Witness lecture without becoming a Jehovah's Witness, to sit in the Buddhist monastery without converting, and to walk out having taken the best of what suits them. I'm not chasing agreement. I'm chasing a way through. The desert sands keep changing the shape of the landscape, and I'd rather travel light with a curious group than plant a flag and defend it forever.

We also got around to why we do this show at all, and landed on entrepreneurship — the practice of it and the aspiration toward it, mine from the corporate-manufacturing side and Dan's from the small-business side. The honest version is that building something is lonely, and talking it out loud is how I process; I've talked myself out of bad ideas mid-sentence on this very mic. If we can trigger a little more creativity and agency in even a few people, that's a big enough thing to be worth doing. On the macro front we leaned on the credible voices — Ken Griffin, one of Trump's own megadonors, out there saying the tariff moves are eroding America's brand and making us poorer; the slow decade-long climb out of the last financial crisis as the cautionary tape. None of this is set in stone. I'm willing to change my whole view tomorrow if one person changes their mind.

So we left it where we always seem to: it's not all bad, it's just murky, and the best thing you can carry into murky is a willingness to wander. We know that we don't know — and on a week like this, that's the most honest thing I've got.

Go be a mental nomad, everybody.

— Sean