 Welcome back to another Rational Politics. I'm joined at the table today by a new face and an old face. Let's do a few quick introductions. Talus, welcome back to the table. Thank you, Nigel. I appreciate being back. Reagan, good to see you down here. Welcome for your first time at the table. Hey, great. Thanks for having me. Nice to meet you. Talus, why don't you start off? What did you discover when you tried to run for council? That's a lot to unpack in that question. So I'll start off at the very beginning. I approached running for office similar to starting a business, and I started in many businesses. And, you know, you get your paperwork in, then you try to build your team, you understand where you're positioned within the market. All those things apply directly into politics. However, the customer acquisition is very different. In business, you know, there's plenty of models for customer acquisition, but in politics, none of the models that I tried to use seem to work. That could be a bit of a hindrance. So, Reagan, yourself, what did you discover when you were trying to run? You know, I guess similar to what Talus was saying, when you start with something you don't know, you haven't done it before, you don't know what you're doing. And I guess a couple of things I learned after the fact is, when they say that you can announce and run and get your paperwork, if you announce then, so let's say it's May or June of that year, that election year, you're already five, six months behind. People are not announced yet because you can't do it, but they're putting out the, I may be considered running, then they build up their team, they're starting to already do that groundwork. In our case, you know, when I announced, I felt there was a lot of support from the business community and people I've known over time. But at the same time, it's funny because they support you, they say good things, but it's getting that volunteer, it's getting out in canvassing neighborhoods, and that kind of fell on me and my wife and my three kids. And a lot of well wishes, but not a lot of help, and there's a lot of work that goes into it. Oh, absolutely. You probably heard the same thing, when people were encouraging me and talking about, the thing that they talked about was raising money. Here's the amount of money you have to raise. Would they tell you? Ten thousand dollars. That's what I raised, and it didn't work. They don't talk about the amount of, like, oh, you're going to have a lot of work, it's going to be really hard, and in some cases, those people that want to help you have their own, you know, even like City Council Longmont's nonpartisan, the first question we get is, Well, party are you? Right. And I've never been affiliated. I have friends and supporters that are D's or R's or G's or whatever. So it's this weird, it took me back to junior high and high school in some aspects where some people support you, but they can't do it publicly. Oh. And, you know, even things as simple as, can you put flyers on your block for me? Here's 20 flyers. Can you at least hand them to your neighbors or post them on a door? So there's a lot of work getting that team put together. Like you said, when you start your business, you have to get your team first before you start the business. What Regan said was super correct. I mean, it's not when you file your paperwork. That was one of my biggest mistakes, is I started building a team after I officially declared. Regan's right. I mean, it's a year commitment, not just the last six months. Right. Don't you think that's, there's something a little bit wrong with that? And I'll give you an example in Great Britain, which, of course, I know quite well. There is a limit on the amount of time. Now, for a general election, six weeks, and that's for all the MPs, everyone has to work on exactly the same time scale. There's also, you know, you say $10,000. That is just under what a British member of parliament is allowed to spend. A British member of parliament, last time I looked it up, could only spend about $15,000 to $16,000 on his whole campaign. I also heard like the $10,000 to $12,000 number for what I would need in order to pull the election off. I raised the money and I matched money coming in. So I raised about, you know, $6,000 and then I put in a little over five of my own. The person who won put in $40 into her own campaign. The machine that she was being supported by helped her raise $20,000. To run for council. To run for council. It sort of sums up everything that's wrong all the way through American politics. You should not have to spend that amount of money to run for council and be successful. For a little long month, right? For a little old long month. Yeah. And people recruited, you know, like she told me she was recruited for this. She had never thought about running prior to them coming to her because they thought that she'd be a good candidate. So I mean, I think that getting the vested interests out of politics and making local city council truly not partisan would lead to better representation because the very first thing that she did when she was elected was cut the city council meetings by half because she didn't have enough time. Okay, so you run for council but you don't have enough time to do council work. That doesn't seem to be correct. That's what I'm saying. Like when someone only puts 40 bucks into their own campaign, like what's the opportunity cost there? What sort of frustrations did you run into because I mean, were any roadblocks put up? I'll take that one real quick. I'll let Reagan go and because I'm sure he has his own but it's frustrating for me because the same person was running, so there's three, there's two seats open for my city council at large race. The two people who won and the mayoral candidate who won were all represented by the same group. They had the same campaign manager and the same people who were canvassing handed out all three people's fliers. Yeah, I think there's something similar to that too. I know when I ran in 2019, my opponent and I were generally unknown overall. Like the people that knew us knew us really well but overall in our ward, I found it really interesting how many people would ask people that don't know me about me and I could see it online and they were just announcing things. I had been a financial advisor. I had my series seven and 66 license and started from scratch in office here just helping normal people learn about finance and build a retirement but a friend of mine had people canvassed three times for my opponent and you can't control what your volunteers say but you can start to sort of feel pattern. So if I was out with my family and we would knock on doors and meet people, I would say my opponent's name correctly, I would say what her job is and then I would say the reason I'm running is this, and a friend of mine had three canvassers come by and one time they told him, he knew who I was and he just kind of played dumb and said, oh, who are they running against? They made an emphasis to mispronounce my name. Some Regan got, I don't know. He was told that I was a greedy Wall Street investment banker. I guess they took that from financial advisor. I have a real estate license and one time they told him that I was a greedy out of touch real estate developer. I'm not like normal people, I'm a rich developer and the third time they came by, I've got three boys, but they told my friend that I don't know much about that Regan guy but he's got three kids with three women and doesn't pay child support. So that was one of the things I had is this, just fake information, disinformation and just other things that happen that you don't expect because for me, I feel like I ran a campaign like I would run my business, legal, ethical, how I would want to be treated, I would want someone to treat my mom. Those kinds of things that I grew up, those sort of rules of life, so many signs stolen, even though you could see what is paid for and I was as big to do about it, it wasn't big enough font and one of our final debates, other candidates were telling me how my opponent was asking them to sort of team or complain about me or just different things that you don't really expect when you're grown up. It's something you would expect and there you go. You know, it's either little kiddies or Trump. It's interesting that you say that because that playbook that he has of just say it over and over and over and over. And eventually they'll believe it. Some council members, past or candidates, you see them sort of say the same like, wow, that's straight from the Trump playbook. I'm finding it so hard to believe that they would just lie through their teeth at this level. At one point, you get beyond frustrated and I started taking it as a compliment and I must be doing well because they're just grasping at straws and a friend of mine is in different meetings where they're talking about these council positions and she was saying they're nervous about your award three. They feel good here and here and here but they're like, how about that? What's going on there? So I just kind of took that as hey, I came out of unknown, I announced later in the spring, opponent had a head start and we came really close by the end. 200 votes, right? Something like that, yeah. A lot closer to mine. It's interesting because you were told to stand a chance, we won't say to win, to stand a chance. The winner raised 20,000 and that puts running for city council out of reach for a lot of people in this town. They would not have a clue how to do that. We were talking off air about what a British MP is allowed to spend on their election, something like $18,000, $19,000 for an MP to raise, have to raise 20,000 for a city council seat. Hold on a second, something's wrong. Yeah and they're only compensated like a thousand bucks a month. So it's like, why so much money? Like it's not even a paid position. It's not like Denver where they're making like hundreds of thousands of dollars a year. Right, it has become their profession in Denver. Yeah and so I mean, there's an argument to say that we should compensate city council members higher so that people who are more serious than people our age, it's easier for them to run because if you're retired then you have your nest egg, your house is paid off, it's a lot of money. You don't have a job to balance because you need a job to pay bills. Exactly right, we both had flexibility of owning our businesses and we were able to do it, but not everyone has that flexibility. Yeah, that was something that came up a couple years ago in council discussion. I think it was council member Christensen had brought it up. It was in the times call and some people are saying yeah, they should get more money. Some people are saying no, they already get too much. Some people are saying she just wants to pay a raise. But it was minimal, it was like $200 a month or so, I forget the details, but I remember then Mayor Bagley was saying if we're going to raise it, make it a full-time job. So people, I was in council that night, it was during the campaign and I think he kind of pointed me out and he said so people that have a family or other people that can afford to do this because where it is now, it's almost like paid volunteerism. Like I was saying being a substitute in state rain district, it's like you feel like you're volunteering, you're an employee, they pay you but it's like paid volunteerism. So there's more beyond it. Like they're not doing this for the job of it. Is it for the power? Is it because like you said, the people that are recruiting you, they want to have someone there that is going to help push buttons and pull levers or... It was also interesting because I learned something new. We had a council person in here a few weeks ago. She actually made the statement that really the city council is a toothless tiger. They're more a suggestion group rather than an actual planning group. It's all up to the town manager what he listens to and what he doesn't listen to. Do you have any thoughts? Yeah, they give guidance to the city manager, Harold Dominguez. I know him. I've met with him several times during the campaign. He's a very level-headed person. He seems to really know what he's doing. So I mean, you want someone who has like the logistical knowledge and like the institutional knowledge of like how things actually happen. Yeah, how it works. Yeah, especially if you have like these part-time retirees who are on the city council who don't necessarily, you know, that's not their profession. You know, they're doing other things. I mean, some of them are very intelligent and very bright and I respect them greatly. But I mean, it's different than if it's your full-time job. You just reminded me of something he said. He talked about the city of Longmont as like a huge company, a conglomerate. And he was starting to describe it and I thought of Pepsi because you get Pepsi, they've got sodas, they own Quaker, they own Gatorade, they own Frider Le, they used to have the fast food before that was young foods and split off. But in Longmont, you've got a power company, you've got a water company, you've got an internet company, you've got a street maintenance company, you've got all these different companies like you're saying. So you've got to be able to manage that and if you take the makeup of a council and you've got retired superintendent of schools, you've got someone that's, you know, an elementary teacher, you've got someone who's an appraiser of homes and they're experts in what they do and what they've done before but have they ever managed an internet company? Have they ever managed a water treatment plant? So I think they have like the idea they give guidance to the city manager and then their feedback and then review with them. Right. Talking of housing, that raises an interesting point. I believe Longmont is trying to hit 120,000 residents. That's the plan. The trouble is with what's happening in Boulder, everyone that cannot afford a second Boulder, which now is 99% of the country. Yeah. They decided they'd come and live in Longmont. Longmont is rapidly becoming a second Boulder. What are your feelings about local housing? How we can improve the situation? Especially, you know, low-cost housing, which we seem to be having less and less of. Well, that's a lot of questions in there. I feel like, you know, growing up in Boulder, I felt that happening. Probably in 96, like I never will be able to live here Louisville kind of sucked up some of that and became, like, outrageously expensive places that, you know, I rented a house out there when I was, like, 20 and it's been scraped and rebuilt. It looks like an office building. Mm-hmm. And so you see it just kind of emanate out. I remember my dad saying something about the billionaires have pushed the millionaires out of Aspen. We were talking about, like, Avon and Edwards and you just see this sort of like, kind of like, I'm picturing a sound wave just kind of moving out and Longmont is sort of the last, you know, the last stats it came out was affordable in Boulder County. But it's exponentially getting, like, more, so there's some market cycles, natural market cycles were disrupted with COVID to where, like, let's say someone's getting older, maybe they need more medical or day-to-day help or whatever, they might transition to assisted living or something like that and then that house is sold and needs updated. It could be someone's new starter home. Well, in COVID hits, people aren't going to let mom or dad go to the isolation of an assisted living. So you saw that cycle sort of break and then there's people moving around, working more remote like we were talking off-air. You know, if you don't need to live in San Francisco to have that job, then you can come here and so there's a lot of money from other places coming in. We're perceived values, I think, are different. Like, growing up here, I see a house and I think it's worth, you know, maybe let's say 500. Well, someone sold a place that's in San Francisco for a million and a half. They show up, see it's 500. They don't want to lose the house. They're fine with throwing 700 at it because they still have a million in the bank from their other place and it's bigger than they had before. They had more square footage but the people, like everyday people, first-time buyers, people with just normal day-to-day jobs, like they just see it like I remember San a few years ago, I make a dollar more, things cost $2 more and so there's definitely market disruption that is really out of whack. There's some things I think the city can be doing as far as making a process less expensive and quicker on the supply side. We're talking to a lot of people that are just local builders here in town, not like KB homes and not these publicly traded companies but normal people here and they talk about the red tape, how much time it takes, how much money it costs. They've built a job and they've planned it out and designed it and by the time they get approval, costs have changed so much that it's no longer, like there was one project that was completely canceled that was going to have beyond the permanently affordable units, they were going to have about 20% and it's 12% is the requirement. They didn't afford the project with that 20%. They ended up doing 5% and paying a fee in lieu instead. So they'd lost the units of housing and I don't think they need to update too because I find clients of mine that can qualify it for the income for some of these, they don't necessarily qualify for the loan and some they are qualifying for the loan, make too much money to qualify for that particular house. So there's some things out of bounds there too. See I was in the reverse situation to your San Francisco example. I was living in Huntsville, Alabama. So the company I was working for at the time bought a company out here in a gun barrel and they asked me to move out here. To me it was the total reverse of somewhere moving from San Francisco because the mansion and I kid you not that I had in Huntsville would sort of get me a double wide. Here. My son works his heart out. He's having trouble living. Yeah. Here in town? Here in town. Yeah. It's very difficult. I mean luckily there's organizations like Eric Wallace's Prosper to Longmont that's designed to help people get into homes and there's obviously Habitat and during my campaign I talked to you know the head of Habitat locally as well as people who use their services. My dad was a general contractor so you know I'm very familiar with construction and you're right. A lot of my supporters work contractors and developers not the big ones but the local ones and they have little to no opportunity to build because of the red tape that is preventing them from doing developments I've heard three years as being delayed in terms of timeline and that's it's hard to cover the capital costs if you're you know a developer because you have you know the land and the equipment you have the things that are going to be required to build those properties so I mean I think that there's things we can do in order to make it easier like 3D printed homes we should look into that we should look in modular things we should look at ADUs making it easier even help subsidize some of the costs of building ADUs and some of the larger property ADU additional dwelling units so like a small rental on your like converting your garage into a exactly like little cottage home like all the homes in prospect have one basically so I mean it's especially with you know baby boomers getting older and you know people are age getting into the housing market it makes sense for people to have an ADU so that you know mother-in-law suite the other thing I wanted to address is free movement of people I think that well just my personal history my grandfather left Ukraine when he was young to Canada for economic opportunity my father left Iran to escape persecution but also for economic opportunity family moved from Canada to Southern California for economic opportunity my dad started construction company and we were able to build some wealth there I then moved to Northern California for education opportunity moved to Boston for my MBA for education opportunity and then moved here because I fell in love with the opportunity so you know it's typical for some people to perceive the opportunity of moving somewhere new because they this is all that they know but that's one of the great things about having you know the United States be so big and with so many different places is that if you maybe not finding a place here there's other places like Tulsa, Oklahoma was paying people $50,000 to move there to buy a house I think I'd like to discuss because we've mentioned education in the past what do you feel about this revisionist history that they're trying to teach in schools as if they don't want to actually admit that this is the racism that they did well I think there's two ways to look at it I think that to revisionist history especially in Southern States is not good like talking about trying to glorify the slavery period of time in the US history that should be not done however in San Francisco they're renaming a lot of schools even people like Abraham Lincoln I saw that there's I think we should all kind of focus on being moderate in the middle and not either of the extremes I'm not a fan of safe spaces because like in college campuses you can't have a intellectual discourse with people because you might offend them like thoughts and concepts should be open otherwise how are you going to be exposed to new ideas even if they're a vulgar I think that freedom of speech is important politicizing education is kind of like what you made me think of again too people like if you feel like you're taking too much away from someone's cultural history like changing the names of schools Abraham Lincoln I saw that and I was like wow for me I always think if you're going to make a policy you're going to do something I think what is the outcome that you want what do you want to have here do you want to deal with these people it's funny most of the TV news I see is when I'm at the gym reading titles and it's funny because they'll have Fox and CNN and bounce back and forth I feel like there's some people that think you're trying to make us feel bad for something we didn't do in the past don't teach us this and then there's a group of people that say hey you're just ignoring what happened in the past so I think somewhere in the moderate like you know I've grown up in Boulder I heard anybody just throw down the N word. I was like, wow, that's so weird to me. Well, and I did interviews with the candidates for council last time. One of the, at large candidates, Jeremy Johnson, he was talking about in Alabama, his grandparents ordered their Burger King at the back door and they gave him an unmarked paper bag because they didn't want other people to know they were serving African-Americans. They didn't want like no black people are getting served here. So like, which to me is so foreign, right? I couldn't, I was like, wrap my head around it. So I guess that being said, like we all have our own experiences. We all have our own background, you know? I think people need to know what was really going on. And maybe that compromises like, you know, I don't know why you're renaming Abe Lincoln School, but the compromise is like, if people feel like you're, you know, dragging us through the dirt of something we didn't do versus you're just polishing a turd, right? Like, like, there's a business book and so it is like not eat the frog, but it's in sales. It's like, and we're talking about pricing and they're just like, here it is. Like, this is what happened. And then have conversation about it. And maybe it's the age that they're starting it or like the content that they're bringing out. But I mean, history is history, right? History is history. I mean, I'm a Brit. The British Isles has done a lot of bad things in the past and not just in one place, all over the world. Opium wars in China, India. Look what we did there. The Southern Irish potato famine. Look what we didn't do there. But it was taught to us just like that. It was given to us straight as a history lesson at school. Kids have to know the truth. If they're not told the truth right up front, why should they bother? Oh no, we can just have alternative facts whenever we want them. It's funny to say that Anise, I remember, she was saying something on social media and I forget what the question was, but there was someone from history and slavery in South and civil rights and she's like, why didn't I know this? And I'm like, I don't know where you went to school, but I knew that one. And then there's also differences in where we're going to school and if there's homeschool and people can pick what they want. I know, talking with a college professor of mine, she was talking about grading papers and saying this is wrong. And stuff that's like chemistry. So it's like, this is what it is. The molecule is this. And students would not say, oh, can I do it over? Let me give a chance for makeup. They'd say, well, not in my opinion. And she's like, organic chemistry isn't an opinion-based thing. Like that's maybe literature. Like read something and then write your opinion of it. I think that's because. And there's some things that are just like, this happened. On this day in history, this happened. This happened. Growing up as a kid. I know that, you know, we dropped atomic bombs on Japan. It wasn't like something that was shiny or fluffed up. You know, like you're saying, talking about British history, we did this. And that's how we did it. End of story. Just teach kids the truth. Because what are they going to think when they get a bit older and discover all of a sudden that what they were taught at school was an absolute bullshit? Being a Brit, I think all Americans should stop talking about the war of revolution. Because us Brits are getting really pissed off about it. I mean, we don't want to hear it anymore. So stop teaching it in schools. Totally wrong. Anyway, that's just me. Gentlemen, thank you so much for joining me here at the table. Taliesin Reagan, it's been an absolute pleasure. Thank you, Nigel. I'm Nigel Eaves, your host. I'm signing off. Thank you once again for listening on watching another Rational Politics. Thank you.