November 27, 2024 • 29 mins
Guest: Steven Sperier, LA office tower losing 2/3rds of its value // Why did many California Latinos vote for Trump? // Doug talks about his drunken-failed Turkey Thanksgiving story // Who answers the phones at the Butterball Hotline
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
It's k IF.
Speaker 2 (00:00):
I am six forty and you're listening to The Conway
Show on demand on the iHeartRadio app.
Speaker 3 (00:08):
Doug mcatar in for Tim Conway Junior until seven mo.
Kelly will be in right after us as always to
maybe back after the holidays and later on this hour.
The Drunken Turkey story, I will tell it in its
entirety and all the gruesomeness that was a Thanksgiving from
many moons ago. In my personal life, I used to
(00:28):
tell the story every Thanksgiving I worked when I was
over at KBC many moons ago, and folks who are
kind enough to note that I was filling in over
here for Timmy, I said, oh, come on Thanksgiving weekend,
you might as well. All right, Okay, So I'm going
to tell the story, no matter how embarrassing it is.
We got all kinds of other stuff to get you
(00:50):
through this hour as well, and I want to start
with this story. I saw this actually on KTLA that
there's a fifty five story Bank of America Plaza building
in downtown Los Angeles that ten years ago was appraised
at six hundred and five million dollars, and now it
(01:11):
is valued according to Bloomberg at one hundred and eighty
eight point nine million, which means that the building has
somehow lost two thirds of its value in ten years.
And what's odd about this? It's not like it's totally empty.
It's eighty percent seventy nine percent of it is least
at least as of July when the numbers were crunched.
(01:32):
So I thought, well, why would a building, a prominent
building like that, shed so much of its value? And
is this related to the overall downward trend of office
space post COVID and now that so many people are telecommuting,
working remotely, et cetera, et cetera. And when I have
(01:54):
a real estate question, the guy I turned to is
the guy who hosts his very own show. He's a
real estate attorney. You can hear them on Talk Radio one.
And it's a pleasure to welcome back Steven Spears. Steven,
how are you?
Speaker 4 (02:08):
I am well done, good evening, and thanks for having
me on.
Speaker 3 (02:10):
Well, I appreciate it. So I've seen the Bank of
America building in downtown LA. It's hard to miss. It's
fifty five stories tall. Eighty percent occupancy is not terrible,
So you know, why would a building like that lose
so much of its value.
Speaker 4 (02:30):
It comes down to the rent because commercial property, industrial property,
rental property, and specifically here office property is worth what
it can be rented for. So when you buy a house,
you love how the kitchen looks, you want the curb appealed,
the number of bedrooms and so forth, but you're just
living in it. But when you buy a property as
(02:51):
an investment, which is how this is being evaluated, it
depends on what money it can generate. You're buying a
money making machine. And it's the machine makes less money
because the rent is lower than the machine is worth less.
You just can't get as much for it.
Speaker 3 (03:08):
And is this is this an LA phenomenon or is
this happening everywhere?
Speaker 4 (03:14):
This is happening everywhere, particularly in top flight buildings building
like that Bank of America building that the luxury space,
the highline space where they have sweeping atriums and spiral
staircases and everything is paved in gold. This is the
place where the true where the largest rent drops have
(03:36):
been seen, and you're going to see more a lot
of entities that are doing businesses and renting space as
tenants are just waiting for an expiration of the lease,
so they can say, you know, we no longer need
twenty thousand feet, We think we can do better with
six thousand feet. And then to get that space rented,
(03:57):
the landlord has to offer it other office tenants for less.
That's why the building can be eighty percent full and
still now probably represents a drawn rent of two thirds.
Speaker 3 (04:12):
Now, this phenomenon was accelerated because of COVID, And we
did the story yesterday that Elon Musk, who of course
President Trump has tasked with once the administration has sworn
in with tightening the budgets and finding places to slash,
and he's saying he's ordering federal workers back into the
(04:34):
office and it literally is saying that the ones who
don't want to will be the ones on the termination list.
But the companies that have have been pushing to bring
people back into their brick and mortar locations are getting
are having a hard time retaining their employees. There are
people just they just got acclimated to telecommuting and they
(04:54):
don't want to go back to work.
Speaker 4 (04:57):
Supply and demand is to business and economics what the
law of gravity is to physics, it's immutable. So right
now while you have extremely low unemployment, you have the
employees playing the music while the employers dance, and with
(05:17):
that reverses. If you see a higher unemployment figure, then
you'll see employees saying, well, you know, I guess i'd
better come into the office. I'd better do what the
boss wants me to right now. We know, I could
tell you bunches of stories about people who are offered
six figure jobs and they say, yeah, it's okay with
me if I can work from home three days a
(05:38):
week or two days a week, and the employer has
to say yes or maybe not half them.
Speaker 3 (05:45):
You know this, this is sort of still in flux,
this whole dynamic. You know, we were tell twenty years
ago that that we didn't need to build we didn't
need to widen the freeways or build commuter rail because
everybody was going to be telecommuting. And it did sort
of happened, and as God knows, there's lots and lots
of people who are telecommuting or working remotely. But again,
(06:06):
these companies that are on the hook for very very
expensive leases of office space or physical plants, they want
to justify the expense of this, and we don't care
COVID's over, get back in here, and they may end
up having to hire new people or they'll surrender. And
(06:27):
I wonder if ultimately the remote working dynamic wins out
in mass, that that just becomes the new norm, and
widely so, even more so than during COVID, if it
starts to change how architects design workspaces. As you mentioned
these palaces that someplace is built in a lot of
(06:48):
small towns. You can go through small towns and you
can see these very very ornate buildings that were once banks,
that were built as edifices to inspire confidence in the
solidity and the stability of the institution. And now there's
one in Santa Monica that's a sketcher's store selling low
cost sneakers, you know. So I'm really wondering if at
(07:11):
some point, as you talk about these palaces that corporations
built to wow customers and to wow clients and to
wow the industry, have not now outlived their usefulness.
Speaker 4 (07:23):
They may have. I think it's going to be a mix.
There are a lot of clients who say, I don't
want to come to your palace, to your office. I
want to sit at home and do this on my computer.
I don't want to drive to your office. Are There
are others who say there's nothing like and in person meeting,
but those people tend to be older. So I think
(07:45):
over the next five to ten years, as the twenty
year olds become thirty, and as the seventy year olds
perhaps retire, I think you're going to see more of
this remote work. Employers have conflicting interests because they want
want to have people in the office for the interaction
and for the activity and the exchange of ideas. And
(08:06):
yet if people are working at home, they don't have
to provide coffee or food or foods, ball they can
have smaller phone systems, they don't have to have a receptionist,
they don't have to have as much space as much
office furniture, and so it is a push pull. But
I think over time we're going to see a leaning
toward more remote work. There'll still be offices for some architects,
(08:30):
for example, and others who really get something from standing
physically in the same room with one another, but a
lot of places are going to find that there just
isn't much call for it from either the bosses or
the clients.
Speaker 3 (08:45):
Steven what happens to all these big buildings.
Speaker 4 (08:49):
They're going to have to be repurposed. So we're already
seeing some like you said, the Sketcher's building. We're selling
shoes and what wasn't office you're going to see. We're
seeing buildings being repurposed to be a part and living
spaces to being restaurants. We're seeing all sorts of things.
But that's incredibly expensive. So what happens when this Bank
of America plaza, for example, drops to one hundred and
(09:11):
eighty million dollars? Somebody might buy it for that and say,
you know, I think at that I can put in
one hundred million dollars to remodel it and repurpose it
and replumb it and reelectrify it and change all the systems.
And now maybe I've got a hotel, or I've got condominiums,
or I've got an apartment building.
Speaker 3 (09:33):
Yeah, well this could be one of the solutions to
the housing shortage, certainly in this market. Steven Spear as always,
thanks so much. You can hear Stephen's show on Talk
Radio one dot com and it's always informative. Thanks so much.
Speaker 4 (09:46):
Have a great Thanksgiving, Happy Thanksgiving dog, Thank you.
Speaker 1 (09:51):
You're listening to Tim Conway Junior on demand from KFI
AM six forty.
Speaker 3 (09:58):
Coming up the after the bottom of the hour news,
the Drunken Turkey Story. You'd want to miss that seven
o'clock Moke Kelly and the fourteenth Daniel KFI Pastathon is here.
Chef Bruno's charity, Katerina's Club, provides more than twenty five
thousand meals every week to kids in need in Southern California.
Your generosity is what makes this happen. And there you
(10:18):
are a bunch of ways that you can help. Donate
or bid on exclusive KFI auction items now at kfiam
six forty dot com Forward Slash Pastathon. You can bid
until nine forty five pm on Tuesday and shop at
any Smart and Final store, and you can donate any
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California and donate five dollars a morning you'll get a
(10:40):
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Come and see everybody and donate on site. Drop off
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(11:01):
go to ketterin his club. Thank you for your support,
and all the details are at KFI am sixty dot com,
forward slash pasta than So, the New York Times has
finally started to ask a question why did so many
Latinos in California vote for Donald Trump? And they are
discovering what, of course, listeners to KFI have known for decades,
(11:25):
because we've talked about this issue for decades and they
didn't pay attention. By the way, the La Times hasn't
learned this yet, the New York Times has got it.
In Fresno, California, Democrats have assumed that Trump's a threat
of mass deportations would of course have everybody voting for
Kamala Harris, But as it turns out, that was not
(11:46):
the case. In Fresno, where residents are more moderate politically
than those on the coast, no party has a lock
on the electorate, and for the first time in twenty years,
Fresno County, which includes the city of Fresno and out
lying areas, supported a Republican for president. Latino voters expressed
frustration after waiting decades for Democrats to pass comprehensive immigration reform,
(12:10):
such as a pathway to legal status, so they said, well,
we're not getting anything. And the other thing that shows
up again and again again with interviews is resentment from
people who entered this country previously, whether legally or illegally,
that the people who came in in the post COVID
years got all this stuff for free. They got housing
(12:31):
vouchers and food vouchers, and they got all kinds of stuff.
They say, wait a second, we didn't get any of
that stuff. So that's part of the equation. But what
also has factored into this that no one wants to reconcile.
As we've been saying for a very long time, that
the Latino community is not a monolith any more than
(12:52):
the African American community or white people are a monolith
when it comes to politics and on these particular issues,
and specific with illegal immigration, because we've said it a
thousand times. Caesar Chavez himself was opposed to illegal immigration
on a very simple premise that a rising tide lifts
(13:12):
all boats and a receding tide lowers all boats, and
Caesar Chaves new back in the early sixties that if
the border is open and there's a flood of poor
people coming into the country, it what it does is
it devalues the price of labor and makes poor people
who are here have to compete with even poorer people
(13:32):
who just came in. This is why, by the way,
while the Irish immigrants in New York and other East
Coast cities during the Civil War were totally opposed to
and I'm sorry to say this as an Irish descendant,
as my grandmother was born in Ireland, but the Irish
were opposed to emancipation of the slaves because they feared
(13:57):
barely hanging on to the lowest rung of the economic ladder.
In the eighteen sixties, that the emancipated slaves would move
to the north and take their jobs. And there were
some really really ugly race riots the New York City
draft riots in the eighteen sixties. In fact, Lincoln had
to pull troops from Gettysburg and race them back to
(14:19):
New York City to quell the draft riots in the
eighteen sixties. So this phenomenon is not new, but Caesar
Schavez was talking about this in the nineteen sixties and seventies,
and the Democrats lost this message. They just assumed, well,
Trump is saying all this nasty stuff, but there's a
lot of people in the Hispanic community that support it
(14:39):
because they see it as an economic threat. Now will
that hold. I don't know. If he actually goes forward
and we see mass deportations of millions of people and
people's cousins are being hauled off of their their brother
or sister or their father gets deported, that may change.
But in this election cycle, there's no question that on
top of in inflation and all the other issues, the
(15:03):
border issue cut across the board, with people saying, this
makes no sense that we're just looking the other ways. Literally,
millions of people come pouring in and then the government
keeps throwing out this ridiculous notion that there's eleven million
people living in the country illegally, when in fact, how
does that magic number never change because we had millions
(15:25):
of people coming in the country illegally all the time,
and yet for some reason, the official statistic was always
eleven million people. So this is a problem going forward.
The Democrats are going to have to wrestle with and
step one for addressing the issue is to stop this
naive and wrongheaded thinking that Latinos all vote and think
(15:47):
the same way on this issue, because it's much more
complex than that. People vote for a lot of different reasons.
And if you're just going to try to stereotype people
as a block of vote of vot that always vote
the same way, you're gonna end up losing elections.
Speaker 1 (16:03):
You're listening to Tim Conway Junior on demand from KFI
AM six forty.
Speaker 3 (16:10):
Thanksgiving is one of the most beloved holidays. It's a
time of togetherness. I dealing with family and loved ones,
but a lot of people cobble together Thanksgiving with friends.
Especially in southern California, we have a lot of people
who moved here from somewhere else. That was my case
many moons ago. I'm talking about probably twenty eight years ago,
(16:31):
approximately twenty eight years ago, and I lived in Burbank,
in a little house in Burbank, and I was by
myself and feeling a little blue after a big night
of boozing, a long, full night of soaking up the sauce.
And by the way, this is one of the many
reasons why I don't soak up the sauce, and haven't
(16:53):
for over twenty years. But I was coming from whatever
the hell it was I was doing on Wednesday night
before Thanksgiving, and the sun was coming up, and it
was I'm gonna guess maybe six fifteen on Thanksgiving morning,
when I was struck by the notion that it would
be a good thing to cook a Thanksgiving turkey, that
(17:17):
my house should have the home aroma of a roasting
turkey in the oven. Now there were a couple of
problems with this. One I didn't have a turkey, and two,
I don't know how to cook a turkey. In fact,
I had never cooked essentially anything more than a microwaveable
hot pocket in my life. But that didn't stop me,
(17:40):
because this being the first World, stores are open twenty
four to seven even on that early Thanksgiving morning. So
coming back from whatever gin Mill an after hour event
I had been at, I stop in at the Vaughns.
Those of you who live in the Burbank Touluca Lake
area will know it well. It's the one on Pass Avenue.
And I pulled into the at Vaughn's about six fifteen
(18:02):
in the morning Thanksgiving morning and I'm the only person
in the store. There's a bunch of box boys, you know,
sort of recovering, panting from the Wednesday shopping orgy that
goes on in every grocery store in America. And they're
restocking the shelves with giblets and cranberry sauce for the
(18:22):
last minute people who need, you know, sour cream or
whatever it is they forgot. And I come in stumbling around.
I've got a shopping cart that I found in the
parking lot, and I'm pushing it around the store. And
I've got it not because I need it for groceries.
I need it to stand up. Basically, I'm using it
like a walking chair, like it's a walker. And I
get down to the meat department, where there is still
(18:47):
a selection of turkeys. But again, if you buy a
turkey on Thanksgiving morning, they've been picked pretty clean. The
one I chose was about eighteen pounds and frozen solid. Now,
these things, as I subsequently found out, need some time
to thaw out. I didn't have time. I was cooking
it that day. So I drive home, which I shouldn't
(19:10):
have been doing, and now I'm confronted with a problem.
I've got a turkey, but I have no idea how
to cook it, and I have no pots and pans.
I think I had a dish. I would go home
at that time and do the dish. So I remembered
that in the garage I had a paint tray that
I would use for the roller when you were going
to paint a room. Put the roller in the paint tray,
(19:30):
and I figured, well, I vaguely remember my mother throwing
some water in a big pan and sticking the bird
in that. So that's what I did. I put some
water in the paint tray, and I pulled the plastic
wrap off of the turkey, but I didn't take any
of the stuff out of it, or that little metal
thing that keeps the feet pinned together. I throw it
in the oven and I spin the wheel to about
(19:51):
four hundred, figuring that that'll defrost it. And I figure,
i'll uh, I'll thaw the bird and then I'll figure
out how to cook it. This is pre Internet, so
I figured I'll look up Thanksgiving in the Britannica and
see if it tells you how to cook a turkey.
I go into the bed and I figure i'll lie
down just for a minute. I take off one shoe
(20:13):
and I put my head down on the pillow, and
I woke up eleven hours later, eleven hours later, when
the smoke alarms went off, and the entire house is
filled with a thick cloud of acrid nostril, burning, tear inducing,
billowing clouds of burning bird With one shoe on and
(20:38):
one shoe in my hand, I had not moved. My
feet were on the floor by the way. My back
was on the bed with one shoe in my hand.
And it looks like it's midnight, but it's about four
in the afternoon, because the house is filled with black smoke.
So I wake up and I'm figure, oh, the house
is on fire, and I go the turkey. The turkey
(21:01):
has been in the oven at four hundred degrees since
six point thirty this morning. It's now four in the afternoon.
I stumble into the kitchen, weaving the cloud of smoke
out of my way as I make my way towards
the kitchen. I grab a towel or a cat or something,
and I use it to open the oven door, and
(21:22):
more just clouds of just come rushing out like a
tire fire. Just the whole house is filled with smoke.
And I grab the paint tray out of the oven
and there is a tiny little smoldering cinder. It looked
like a charcoal briquette. What was once an eighteen pound
(21:43):
turkey has been reduced to a smoldering lump of carbon
like it was maybe a cornish game hend size at best.
And now I've got this burning bird in this paint tray.
And I kicked the kitchen door open, and now again
I've got one shoe on. I've got one shoe on,
(22:03):
and I and I'm still in the clothes I was
wearing yesterday and I start so I stumbled out of
the house to the curb, and I've got this bird
still smoking, like we've elected a new pope. And as
I get to the curb, all the cans, the trash
cans are down at the street. And as I approached
(22:25):
the end of the block, my neighbors have their guests
arriving for Thanksgiving dinner and they're all Norman Rockwell and
they're nice, you know, Thanksgiving clothes, and they're getting out
of the cars and they're closing the doors and they're
kissing Ann Helen on the cheek and out comes the
neighbor with one shoe on, one shoe off, stumbling towards
(22:49):
the garbage can with a burning lump of bird in
a paint tray, and I lift the lid up and
drop the whole thing, and I do the big cartoon handclap,
you know, like you've got you're dusting off your hands.
And then I turn to my audience and say Happy
Thanksgiving and walk back in it. Because the thing is,
(23:09):
when you're busted, when you're totally busted that you're living
this debauched life, the only thing you can do is
just soldier through it. You got to power right through
it to the end. And that's what I did. I
go back a house and close the door and went
right back to bed and woke up the next day.
And that, my friends, is the reason why A. No
(23:31):
more booze, and B no more cooking, not of turkeys,
not of anything other than maybe a hot pocket occasionally.
Oh you know, there are some Thanksgivings that are more
memorable than others. And that's one that I have endeavored
to forget over many many moons.
Speaker 1 (23:49):
You're listening to Tim Conway Junior on demand from KFI
AM six forty.
Speaker 3 (23:56):
Now, Hey, my headphones are dead for some reason. I
don't know what happened here. I'm not hearing anything of
my headphones. A little unnerving, I mean, when I can't
even hear the show anyway, Ladies and gentlemen. The Turkey
story which I just told, of course, spawned other people
over the years telling me Turkey disasters, Thanksgiving disasters. And
(24:18):
one year I did the Turkey story on the air,
and I got a call from a guy. It's one
of the most la stories I ever heard. He worked
at a muffler shop and one of the guys in
the muffler shop was having a hard time. He'd been divorced.
He was having all kinds of problems. So Thanksgiving was coming,
and they decided to throw the guy a bone, and
(24:41):
they pitched in a couple of bucks, and they bought
him a turkey, and they gave him the turkey to
take home to his family. And he's walking because he
had lost his driver's license because of a duy or something.
He's walking to the curb to the corner to get
on a bus and he gets caught in again crossfire,
(25:01):
a drive by shooting between gang members on both sides
of the street. Bullets are pinging everywhere. He dives to
the pavement. He's trying to tunnel through the sidewalk to
protect himself. Rounds are ricocheting all around him. People are screaming.
The cops come around. Everybody's scrambling now, so the cops come. Miraculously,
(25:23):
this guy has not hit. But you know, the cops
are taking witnesses. He's obviously clearly an eyewitness to this event,
and they're putting all those numbers down where all the
shell casings are all over the street and the sidewalk.
And finally, after it seems like an hour of being
questioned by the cops, they finally say, okay, you can
(25:46):
go now. And he starts to grab for the frozen
turkey that his coworkers had given him to go to
the catch the bus, and he said, no, you can't
take the turkey. That's evidence. The turkey took three hits
and now been impounded as evidence. So you know that
your luck is exhausted, that your luck is completely exhausted
(26:07):
when your coworkers give you a turkey because of the
hard times you've been having and you get caught in
a gang crossfire and they impound your turkey as evidence. Hey, Steph,
does anybody know why the headphone stopped working on this thing?
Because I can't hear anything out of this. Well, oh
but I don't know what happened here, but for some reason,
(26:27):
my headphones went dead. Can you hear me? Anyway, So
hopefully you'll be able to gather with your family with
less trauma than I experienced all those years ago. Or
I don't know what's going on? Is it coming out? Okay?
Everything okay? Well then screw it. We don't need them anyway.
(26:48):
Headphones are nothing. All the black stuff is starting to
flake off under my ears. Anyway, I come back, I
look like I got leprosy. So anyway, hopefully you'll be
able to have less trauma associated with your Thanksgiving feast
than I had in the pastor that particular guy had
at that time. By the way, the butter Ball hotline
is still out there since nineteen eighty one. You know, realize,
(27:10):
had I called the butter Ball talk line helpline that
they've had since eighty one, I probably could have avoided
that whole incident with the paint tray. Of course, calling
the day of Thanksgiving with a frozen turkey. You're probably
not going to they're not going to be able to
help you a lot. But there are fifty volunteers that
(27:32):
start up in November through Christmas Day and they are
holiday veterans with all kinds of levels of experience, twenty
plus years of cooking big holiday meals, and they're volunteers.
I don't know if they work for the butter Bowl
Company or how they recruit these people, but they manned
the phones and they get phone calls from people all
over the country who have various cooking questions and cooking
(27:55):
crises going on in their lives, and they're there with
helpful hands on to avoid ruining the Thanksgiving meal. Now
we know there's always there's always pizza, right, I mean,
if you wreck it, there's always pizza. And after you
get over the initial disappointment, you know you can always
(28:17):
choke down a slab, a couple slices of pie and
you get on with your life, all right. I want
to thank everybody here at KFI for letting me squat
for the last three days for mister Conway, including mister
Conway who will be back on Monday. Richie. Great job, Richie, Quintero,
our producer, and Steph great job on the board we
appreciated so much, and also Brigeta di Gastino, who did
(28:39):
a wonderful job with the news. She'll be back on
Monday as well, I guess. And right now, don't forget
Moe Kelly coming up, and of course he's working them holidays.
He'll be here until ten o'clock tonight and then we
go into UFO land, right, nothing wrong with that, And
I'll be back at some point I think Leon for
(29:00):
John next time. I'm in here on one of those
Mondays between sometime in December.
Speaker 2 (29:04):
Conway Show on demand on the iHeartRadio app. Now you
can always hear us live on KFI AM six forty
four to seven pm Monday through Friday, and anytime on
demand on the iHeartRadio app.
It's k IF.
Speaker 2 (00:00):
I am six forty and you're listening to The Conway
Show on demand on the iHeartRadio app.
Speaker 3 (00:08):
Doug mcatar in for Tim Conway Junior until seven mo.
Kelly will be in right after us as always to
maybe back after the holidays and later on this hour.
The Drunken Turkey story, I will tell it in its
entirety and all the gruesomeness that was a Thanksgiving from
many moons ago. In my personal life, I used to
(00:28):
tell the story every Thanksgiving I worked when I was
over at KBC many moons ago, and folks who are
kind enough to note that I was filling in over
here for Timmy, I said, oh, come on Thanksgiving weekend,
you might as well. All right, Okay, So I'm going
to tell the story, no matter how embarrassing it is.
We got all kinds of other stuff to get you
(00:50):
through this hour as well, and I want to start
with this story. I saw this actually on KTLA that
there's a fifty five story Bank of America Plaza building
in downtown Los Angeles that ten years ago was appraised
at six hundred and five million dollars, and now it
(01:11):
is valued according to Bloomberg at one hundred and eighty
eight point nine million, which means that the building has
somehow lost two thirds of its value in ten years.
And what's odd about this? It's not like it's totally empty.
It's eighty percent seventy nine percent of it is least
at least as of July when the numbers were crunched.
(01:32):
So I thought, well, why would a building, a prominent
building like that, shed so much of its value? And
is this related to the overall downward trend of office
space post COVID and now that so many people are telecommuting,
working remotely, et cetera, et cetera. And when I have
(01:54):
a real estate question, the guy I turned to is
the guy who hosts his very own show. He's a
real estate attorney. You can hear them on Talk Radio one.
And it's a pleasure to welcome back Steven Spears. Steven,
how are you?
Speaker 4 (02:08):
I am well done, good evening, and thanks for having
me on.
Speaker 3 (02:10):
Well, I appreciate it. So I've seen the Bank of
America building in downtown LA. It's hard to miss. It's
fifty five stories tall. Eighty percent occupancy is not terrible,
So you know, why would a building like that lose
so much of its value.
Speaker 4 (02:30):
It comes down to the rent because commercial property, industrial property,
rental property, and specifically here office property is worth what
it can be rented for. So when you buy a house,
you love how the kitchen looks, you want the curb appealed,
the number of bedrooms and so forth, but you're just
living in it. But when you buy a property as
(02:51):
an investment, which is how this is being evaluated, it
depends on what money it can generate. You're buying a
money making machine. And it's the machine makes less money
because the rent is lower than the machine is worth less.
You just can't get as much for it.
Speaker 3 (03:08):
And is this is this an LA phenomenon or is
this happening everywhere?
Speaker 4 (03:14):
This is happening everywhere, particularly in top flight buildings building
like that Bank of America building that the luxury space,
the highline space where they have sweeping atriums and spiral
staircases and everything is paved in gold. This is the
place where the true where the largest rent drops have
(03:36):
been seen, and you're going to see more a lot
of entities that are doing businesses and renting space as
tenants are just waiting for an expiration of the lease,
so they can say, you know, we no longer need
twenty thousand feet, We think we can do better with
six thousand feet. And then to get that space rented,
(03:57):
the landlord has to offer it other office tenants for less.
That's why the building can be eighty percent full and
still now probably represents a drawn rent of two thirds.
Speaker 3 (04:12):
Now, this phenomenon was accelerated because of COVID, And we
did the story yesterday that Elon Musk, who of course
President Trump has tasked with once the administration has sworn
in with tightening the budgets and finding places to slash,
and he's saying he's ordering federal workers back into the
(04:34):
office and it literally is saying that the ones who
don't want to will be the ones on the termination list.
But the companies that have have been pushing to bring
people back into their brick and mortar locations are getting
are having a hard time retaining their employees. There are
people just they just got acclimated to telecommuting and they
(04:54):
don't want to go back to work.
Speaker 4 (04:57):
Supply and demand is to business and economics what the
law of gravity is to physics, it's immutable. So right
now while you have extremely low unemployment, you have the
employees playing the music while the employers dance, and with
(05:17):
that reverses. If you see a higher unemployment figure, then
you'll see employees saying, well, you know, I guess i'd
better come into the office. I'd better do what the
boss wants me to right now. We know, I could
tell you bunches of stories about people who are offered
six figure jobs and they say, yeah, it's okay with
me if I can work from home three days a
(05:38):
week or two days a week, and the employer has
to say yes or maybe not half them.
Speaker 3 (05:45):
You know this, this is sort of still in flux,
this whole dynamic. You know, we were tell twenty years
ago that that we didn't need to build we didn't
need to widen the freeways or build commuter rail because
everybody was going to be telecommuting. And it did sort
of happened, and as God knows, there's lots and lots
of people who are telecommuting or working remotely. But again,
(06:06):
these companies that are on the hook for very very
expensive leases of office space or physical plants, they want
to justify the expense of this, and we don't care
COVID's over, get back in here, and they may end
up having to hire new people or they'll surrender. And
(06:27):
I wonder if ultimately the remote working dynamic wins out
in mass, that that just becomes the new norm, and
widely so, even more so than during COVID, if it
starts to change how architects design workspaces. As you mentioned
these palaces that someplace is built in a lot of
(06:48):
small towns. You can go through small towns and you
can see these very very ornate buildings that were once banks,
that were built as edifices to inspire confidence in the
solidity and the stability of the institution. And now there's
one in Santa Monica that's a sketcher's store selling low
cost sneakers, you know. So I'm really wondering if at
(07:11):
some point, as you talk about these palaces that corporations
built to wow customers and to wow clients and to
wow the industry, have not now outlived their usefulness.
Speaker 4 (07:23):
They may have. I think it's going to be a mix.
There are a lot of clients who say, I don't
want to come to your palace, to your office. I
want to sit at home and do this on my computer.
I don't want to drive to your office. Are There
are others who say there's nothing like and in person meeting,
but those people tend to be older. So I think
(07:45):
over the next five to ten years, as the twenty
year olds become thirty, and as the seventy year olds
perhaps retire, I think you're going to see more of
this remote work. Employers have conflicting interests because they want
want to have people in the office for the interaction
and for the activity and the exchange of ideas. And
(08:06):
yet if people are working at home, they don't have
to provide coffee or food or foods, ball they can
have smaller phone systems, they don't have to have a receptionist,
they don't have to have as much space as much
office furniture, and so it is a push pull. But
I think over time we're going to see a leaning
toward more remote work. There'll still be offices for some architects,
(08:30):
for example, and others who really get something from standing
physically in the same room with one another, but a
lot of places are going to find that there just
isn't much call for it from either the bosses or
the clients.
Speaker 3 (08:45):
Steven what happens to all these big buildings.
Speaker 4 (08:49):
They're going to have to be repurposed. So we're already
seeing some like you said, the Sketcher's building. We're selling
shoes and what wasn't office you're going to see. We're
seeing buildings being repurposed to be a part and living
spaces to being restaurants. We're seeing all sorts of things.
But that's incredibly expensive. So what happens when this Bank
of America plaza, for example, drops to one hundred and
(09:11):
eighty million dollars? Somebody might buy it for that and say,
you know, I think at that I can put in
one hundred million dollars to remodel it and repurpose it
and replumb it and reelectrify it and change all the systems.
And now maybe I've got a hotel, or I've got condominiums,
or I've got an apartment building.
Speaker 3 (09:33):
Yeah, well this could be one of the solutions to
the housing shortage, certainly in this market. Steven Spear as always,
thanks so much. You can hear Stephen's show on Talk
Radio one dot com and it's always informative. Thanks so much.
Speaker 4 (09:46):
Have a great Thanksgiving, Happy Thanksgiving dog, Thank you.
Speaker 1 (09:51):
You're listening to Tim Conway Junior on demand from KFI
AM six forty.
Speaker 3 (09:58):
Coming up the after the bottom of the hour news,
the Drunken Turkey Story. You'd want to miss that seven
o'clock Moke Kelly and the fourteenth Daniel KFI Pastathon is here.
Chef Bruno's charity, Katerina's Club, provides more than twenty five
thousand meals every week to kids in need in Southern California.
Your generosity is what makes this happen. And there you
(10:18):
are a bunch of ways that you can help. Donate
or bid on exclusive KFI auction items now at kfiam
six forty dot com Forward Slash Pastathon. You can bid
until nine forty five pm on Tuesday and shop at
any Smart and Final store, and you can donate any
amount at checkout. Go to any Wendy's restaurant in Southern
California and donate five dollars a morning you'll get a
(10:40):
coupon book worth fifteen bucks worth of Wendy swag. And
you can also join KFI on Giving Tuesday at the
Anaheim White House, where KFI will be broadcasting all day
long from five am till ten pm. A bill handles sighting.
Come and see everybody and donate on site. Drop off
your pasta and sauce donations. One hundred percent your donations
(11:01):
go to ketterin his club. Thank you for your support,
and all the details are at KFI am sixty dot com,
forward slash pasta than So, the New York Times has
finally started to ask a question why did so many
Latinos in California vote for Donald Trump? And they are
discovering what, of course, listeners to KFI have known for decades,
(11:25):
because we've talked about this issue for decades and they
didn't pay attention. By the way, the La Times hasn't
learned this yet, the New York Times has got it.
In Fresno, California, Democrats have assumed that Trump's a threat
of mass deportations would of course have everybody voting for
Kamala Harris, But as it turns out, that was not
(11:46):
the case. In Fresno, where residents are more moderate politically
than those on the coast, no party has a lock
on the electorate, and for the first time in twenty years,
Fresno County, which includes the city of Fresno and out
lying areas, supported a Republican for president. Latino voters expressed
frustration after waiting decades for Democrats to pass comprehensive immigration reform,
(12:10):
such as a pathway to legal status, so they said, well,
we're not getting anything. And the other thing that shows
up again and again again with interviews is resentment from
people who entered this country previously, whether legally or illegally,
that the people who came in in the post COVID
years got all this stuff for free. They got housing
(12:31):
vouchers and food vouchers, and they got all kinds of stuff.
They say, wait a second, we didn't get any of
that stuff. So that's part of the equation. But what
also has factored into this that no one wants to reconcile.
As we've been saying for a very long time, that
the Latino community is not a monolith any more than
(12:52):
the African American community or white people are a monolith
when it comes to politics and on these particular issues,
and specific with illegal immigration, because we've said it a
thousand times. Caesar Chavez himself was opposed to illegal immigration
on a very simple premise that a rising tide lifts
(13:12):
all boats and a receding tide lowers all boats, and
Caesar Chaves new back in the early sixties that if
the border is open and there's a flood of poor
people coming into the country, it what it does is
it devalues the price of labor and makes poor people
who are here have to compete with even poorer people
(13:32):
who just came in. This is why, by the way,
while the Irish immigrants in New York and other East
Coast cities during the Civil War were totally opposed to
and I'm sorry to say this as an Irish descendant,
as my grandmother was born in Ireland, but the Irish
were opposed to emancipation of the slaves because they feared
(13:57):
barely hanging on to the lowest rung of the economic ladder.
In the eighteen sixties, that the emancipated slaves would move
to the north and take their jobs. And there were
some really really ugly race riots the New York City
draft riots in the eighteen sixties. In fact, Lincoln had
to pull troops from Gettysburg and race them back to
(14:19):
New York City to quell the draft riots in the
eighteen sixties. So this phenomenon is not new, but Caesar
Schavez was talking about this in the nineteen sixties and seventies,
and the Democrats lost this message. They just assumed, well,
Trump is saying all this nasty stuff, but there's a
lot of people in the Hispanic community that support it
(14:39):
because they see it as an economic threat. Now will
that hold. I don't know. If he actually goes forward
and we see mass deportations of millions of people and
people's cousins are being hauled off of their their brother
or sister or their father gets deported, that may change.
But in this election cycle, there's no question that on
top of in inflation and all the other issues, the
(15:03):
border issue cut across the board, with people saying, this
makes no sense that we're just looking the other ways. Literally,
millions of people come pouring in and then the government
keeps throwing out this ridiculous notion that there's eleven million
people living in the country illegally, when in fact, how
does that magic number never change because we had millions
(15:25):
of people coming in the country illegally all the time,
and yet for some reason, the official statistic was always
eleven million people. So this is a problem going forward.
The Democrats are going to have to wrestle with and
step one for addressing the issue is to stop this
naive and wrongheaded thinking that Latinos all vote and think
(15:47):
the same way on this issue, because it's much more
complex than that. People vote for a lot of different reasons.
And if you're just going to try to stereotype people
as a block of vote of vot that always vote
the same way, you're gonna end up losing elections.
Speaker 1 (16:03):
You're listening to Tim Conway Junior on demand from KFI
AM six forty.
Speaker 3 (16:10):
Thanksgiving is one of the most beloved holidays. It's a
time of togetherness. I dealing with family and loved ones,
but a lot of people cobble together Thanksgiving with friends.
Especially in southern California, we have a lot of people
who moved here from somewhere else. That was my case
many moons ago. I'm talking about probably twenty eight years ago,
(16:31):
approximately twenty eight years ago, and I lived in Burbank,
in a little house in Burbank, and I was by
myself and feeling a little blue after a big night
of boozing, a long, full night of soaking up the sauce.
And by the way, this is one of the many
reasons why I don't soak up the sauce, and haven't
(16:53):
for over twenty years. But I was coming from whatever
the hell it was I was doing on Wednesday night
before Thanksgiving, and the sun was coming up, and it
was I'm gonna guess maybe six fifteen on Thanksgiving morning,
when I was struck by the notion that it would
be a good thing to cook a Thanksgiving turkey, that
(17:17):
my house should have the home aroma of a roasting
turkey in the oven. Now there were a couple of
problems with this. One I didn't have a turkey, and two,
I don't know how to cook a turkey. In fact,
I had never cooked essentially anything more than a microwaveable
hot pocket in my life. But that didn't stop me,
(17:40):
because this being the first World, stores are open twenty
four to seven even on that early Thanksgiving morning. So
coming back from whatever gin Mill an after hour event
I had been at, I stop in at the Vaughns.
Those of you who live in the Burbank Touluca Lake
area will know it well. It's the one on Pass Avenue.
And I pulled into the at Vaughn's about six fifteen
(18:02):
in the morning Thanksgiving morning and I'm the only person
in the store. There's a bunch of box boys, you know,
sort of recovering, panting from the Wednesday shopping orgy that
goes on in every grocery store in America. And they're
restocking the shelves with giblets and cranberry sauce for the
(18:22):
last minute people who need, you know, sour cream or
whatever it is they forgot. And I come in stumbling around.
I've got a shopping cart that I found in the
parking lot, and I'm pushing it around the store. And
I've got it not because I need it for groceries.
I need it to stand up. Basically, I'm using it
like a walking chair, like it's a walker. And I
get down to the meat department, where there is still
(18:47):
a selection of turkeys. But again, if you buy a
turkey on Thanksgiving morning, they've been picked pretty clean. The
one I chose was about eighteen pounds and frozen solid. Now,
these things, as I subsequently found out, need some time
to thaw out. I didn't have time. I was cooking
it that day. So I drive home, which I shouldn't
(19:10):
have been doing, and now I'm confronted with a problem.
I've got a turkey, but I have no idea how
to cook it, and I have no pots and pans.
I think I had a dish. I would go home
at that time and do the dish. So I remembered
that in the garage I had a paint tray that
I would use for the roller when you were going
to paint a room. Put the roller in the paint tray,
(19:30):
and I figured, well, I vaguely remember my mother throwing
some water in a big pan and sticking the bird
in that. So that's what I did. I put some
water in the paint tray, and I pulled the plastic
wrap off of the turkey, but I didn't take any
of the stuff out of it, or that little metal
thing that keeps the feet pinned together. I throw it
in the oven and I spin the wheel to about
(19:51):
four hundred, figuring that that'll defrost it. And I figure,
i'll uh, I'll thaw the bird and then I'll figure
out how to cook it. This is pre Internet, so
I figured I'll look up Thanksgiving in the Britannica and
see if it tells you how to cook a turkey.
I go into the bed and I figure i'll lie
down just for a minute. I take off one shoe
(20:13):
and I put my head down on the pillow, and
I woke up eleven hours later, eleven hours later, when
the smoke alarms went off, and the entire house is
filled with a thick cloud of acrid nostril, burning, tear inducing,
billowing clouds of burning bird With one shoe on and
(20:38):
one shoe in my hand, I had not moved. My
feet were on the floor by the way. My back
was on the bed with one shoe in my hand.
And it looks like it's midnight, but it's about four
in the afternoon, because the house is filled with black smoke.
So I wake up and I'm figure, oh, the house
is on fire, and I go the turkey. The turkey
(21:01):
has been in the oven at four hundred degrees since
six point thirty this morning. It's now four in the afternoon.
I stumble into the kitchen, weaving the cloud of smoke
out of my way as I make my way towards
the kitchen. I grab a towel or a cat or something,
and I use it to open the oven door, and
(21:22):
more just clouds of just come rushing out like a
tire fire. Just the whole house is filled with smoke.
And I grab the paint tray out of the oven
and there is a tiny little smoldering cinder. It looked
like a charcoal briquette. What was once an eighteen pound
(21:43):
turkey has been reduced to a smoldering lump of carbon
like it was maybe a cornish game hend size at best.
And now I've got this burning bird in this paint tray.
And I kicked the kitchen door open, and now again
I've got one shoe on. I've got one shoe on,
(22:03):
and I and I'm still in the clothes I was
wearing yesterday and I start so I stumbled out of
the house to the curb, and I've got this bird
still smoking, like we've elected a new pope. And as
I get to the curb, all the cans, the trash
cans are down at the street. And as I approached
(22:25):
the end of the block, my neighbors have their guests
arriving for Thanksgiving dinner and they're all Norman Rockwell and
they're nice, you know, Thanksgiving clothes, and they're getting out
of the cars and they're closing the doors and they're
kissing Ann Helen on the cheek and out comes the
neighbor with one shoe on, one shoe off, stumbling towards
(22:49):
the garbage can with a burning lump of bird in
a paint tray, and I lift the lid up and
drop the whole thing, and I do the big cartoon handclap,
you know, like you've got you're dusting off your hands.
And then I turn to my audience and say Happy
Thanksgiving and walk back in it. Because the thing is,
(23:09):
when you're busted, when you're totally busted that you're living
this debauched life, the only thing you can do is
just soldier through it. You got to power right through
it to the end. And that's what I did. I
go back a house and close the door and went
right back to bed and woke up the next day.
And that, my friends, is the reason why A. No
(23:31):
more booze, and B no more cooking, not of turkeys,
not of anything other than maybe a hot pocket occasionally.
Oh you know, there are some Thanksgivings that are more
memorable than others. And that's one that I have endeavored
to forget over many many moons.
Speaker 1 (23:49):
You're listening to Tim Conway Junior on demand from KFI
AM six forty.
Speaker 3 (23:56):
Now, Hey, my headphones are dead for some reason. I
don't know what happened here. I'm not hearing anything of
my headphones. A little unnerving, I mean, when I can't
even hear the show anyway, Ladies and gentlemen. The Turkey
story which I just told, of course, spawned other people
over the years telling me Turkey disasters, Thanksgiving disasters. And
(24:18):
one year I did the Turkey story on the air,
and I got a call from a guy. It's one
of the most la stories I ever heard. He worked
at a muffler shop and one of the guys in
the muffler shop was having a hard time. He'd been divorced.
He was having all kinds of problems. So Thanksgiving was coming,
and they decided to throw the guy a bone, and
(24:41):
they pitched in a couple of bucks, and they bought
him a turkey, and they gave him the turkey to
take home to his family. And he's walking because he
had lost his driver's license because of a duy or something.
He's walking to the curb to the corner to get
on a bus and he gets caught in again crossfire,
(25:01):
a drive by shooting between gang members on both sides
of the street. Bullets are pinging everywhere. He dives to
the pavement. He's trying to tunnel through the sidewalk to
protect himself. Rounds are ricocheting all around him. People are screaming.
The cops come around. Everybody's scrambling now, so the cops come. Miraculously,
(25:23):
this guy has not hit. But you know, the cops
are taking witnesses. He's obviously clearly an eyewitness to this event,
and they're putting all those numbers down where all the
shell casings are all over the street and the sidewalk.
And finally, after it seems like an hour of being
questioned by the cops, they finally say, okay, you can
(25:46):
go now. And he starts to grab for the frozen
turkey that his coworkers had given him to go to
the catch the bus, and he said, no, you can't
take the turkey. That's evidence. The turkey took three hits
and now been impounded as evidence. So you know that
your luck is exhausted, that your luck is completely exhausted
(26:07):
when your coworkers give you a turkey because of the
hard times you've been having and you get caught in
a gang crossfire and they impound your turkey as evidence. Hey, Steph,
does anybody know why the headphone stopped working on this thing?
Because I can't hear anything out of this. Well, oh
but I don't know what happened here, but for some reason,
(26:27):
my headphones went dead. Can you hear me? Anyway, So
hopefully you'll be able to gather with your family with
less trauma than I experienced all those years ago. Or
I don't know what's going on? Is it coming out? Okay?
Everything okay? Well then screw it. We don't need them anyway.
(26:48):
Headphones are nothing. All the black stuff is starting to
flake off under my ears. Anyway, I come back, I
look like I got leprosy. So anyway, hopefully you'll be
able to have less trauma associated with your Thanksgiving feast
than I had in the pastor that particular guy had
at that time. By the way, the butter Ball hotline
is still out there since nineteen eighty one. You know, realize,
(27:10):
had I called the butter Ball talk line helpline that
they've had since eighty one, I probably could have avoided
that whole incident with the paint tray. Of course, calling
the day of Thanksgiving with a frozen turkey. You're probably
not going to they're not going to be able to
help you a lot. But there are fifty volunteers that
(27:32):
start up in November through Christmas Day and they are
holiday veterans with all kinds of levels of experience, twenty
plus years of cooking big holiday meals, and they're volunteers.
I don't know if they work for the butter Bowl
Company or how they recruit these people, but they manned
the phones and they get phone calls from people all
over the country who have various cooking questions and cooking
(27:55):
crises going on in their lives, and they're there with
helpful hands on to avoid ruining the Thanksgiving meal. Now
we know there's always there's always pizza, right, I mean,
if you wreck it, there's always pizza. And after you
get over the initial disappointment, you know you can always
(28:17):
choke down a slab, a couple slices of pie and
you get on with your life, all right. I want
to thank everybody here at KFI for letting me squat
for the last three days for mister Conway, including mister
Conway who will be back on Monday. Richie. Great job, Richie, Quintero,
our producer, and Steph great job on the board we
appreciated so much, and also Brigeta di Gastino, who did
(28:39):
a wonderful job with the news. She'll be back on
Monday as well, I guess. And right now, don't forget
Moe Kelly coming up, and of course he's working them holidays.
He'll be here until ten o'clock tonight and then we
go into UFO land, right, nothing wrong with that, And
I'll be back at some point I think Leon for
(29:00):
John next time. I'm in here on one of those
Mondays between sometime in December.
Speaker 2 (29:04):
Conway Show on demand on the iHeartRadio app. Now you
can always hear us live on KFI AM six forty
four to seven pm Monday through Friday, and anytime on
demand on the iHeartRadio app.
Tim Conway Jr. on Demand News
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