Automated Transcript
Ed:
[0:00]
| It's hovering at close to 90. There it is. No. Hit 90.
|
Sam:
[0:05]
| There we go, 90. Okay, let's just do this. It is warning me your connection is unstable, but we'll go and do our best. Okay, here we go. I got the music ready, and here we go. Welcome to Curmudgeon's Corner for Saturday, October 3rd, 2026. I'm Sam Minter. Yvonne Bowe is not here right now. He's on vacation in the wine country of California with his brother. And according to the pictures that I have seen, he's apparently having fun. So good for Yvonne. And I've got Ed here again. Hello, Ed.
|
Ed:
[1:12]
| Hello. How are you?
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Sam:
[1:14]
| I'm doing good. So we're going to try to do our usual sort of thing when we have a guest, which is that the guest will determine most of the topics and drive the show. I've got a few things. If Ed wants me to, I have a TV show and a movie prepared, but he could go in a completely different direction. We could do something amazingly different and unheard of on this show. Who knows? We'll probably still start lighter and move darker. Not darker. Start lighter and move darker. It kind of sometimes works out that way. But, you know, we usually start with less newsy stuff and move towards more newsy stuff. But really, Ed, it's up to you. What do you want to talk about today?
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Ed:
[2:04]
| I can't think of anything that would be earth-shakingly new. So we better just go with the traditional, which means that both of us have something light to start with.
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Sam:
[2:15]
| Yep. So what's your light thing to start with? What's going on with you?
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Ed:
[2:21]
| You messaged me that what time this was going to be, and I didn't respond for two reasons. One is that my phone, for whatever reason, doesn't notify me when I get messages on Slack. And so I didn't see it. I hardly ever checked that on my own. But then I was also all morning when you kept trying to get hold of me again, I was in our garage working on building a dog crate for one of our grandkids. dogs. I had built one previously and she liked it so much for the other grand dog that she said, how about one for my dog? And so I've got it just about done. Has to be done in a hurry because that dog is on his last legs. He's pretty old and not doing well. So hopefully he'll get to spend a day or two in it. But that's about it. Everything else in my life is very boring.
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Sam:
[3:10]
| Well, notification wise, you can go into your phone notification settings. It's probably a setting for slack and you probably have it turned off, and once that's on within slack there are also notification settings to tell you like what you want to be notified of, like do you only only direct messages or do you also want to be notified say every time someone posts in one of the groups and you can set that, on and off per individual group so it that's probably where that's probably where.
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Ed:
[3:43]
| I'm failing because I haven't, I wouldn't want to hear all the messages, but the direct messages make sense. I'll have to check that.
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Sam:
[3:50]
| Yeah, no, it's, uh, it can get quite noisy depending on where you go. Like I actually do have mindset for the curmudgeon's corner slack to notify me on pretty much everything, but yeah. And you know, the curmudgeon's corner slack is not crazy volume compared to some. Like, I mean, they'll be like... Like hours will go by with nothing sometimes.
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Sam:
[4:19]
| And now other hours will go off where it's like people are talking and it's going off every two minutes or something. And so that could be annoying really quickly. But, you know, there are other like back at my previous job when there was Slack for work and I was in like dozens of different Slack groups for different things. And some of them were specific projects, and I really needed to be paying attention to those. And if anybody said something, I needed to be on top of it and whatever. And then there were more general Slack groups, and there were conversation Slack groups, and there were things like, you know, what's going on in Seattle Slack groups and things like that. And you did not want to have notifications on for those because they'd be like, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, like nonstop throughout the day. And so those were ones that you would like, you know, occasionally like dip into and see what people were talking about, not things that you would like, you want your phone to go off every time something happened.
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Sam:
[5:21]
| And certainly I had it set so that like, if people messaged me directly, it would go off. But, you know, it's one of those things is just in terms of attention that's needed for all of these kinds of things. I think for, for most, like Slack is sort of a weird hybrid. Like I was about to compare it to like social media stuff. Like for the most part, like if you're on any of the social medias at this point.
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Sam:
[5:51]
| You, you don't want notifications. Maybe you want notifications for a specific subset of things. Like, okay, if somebody direct messages you, maybe, if you're a normal person like me, If you're like a celebrity or something that has your DMS open for some reason, and most of them shut them down. So it's only like people who you fall, who you mutually follow. But like.
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Sam:
[6:16]
| You could easily see that becoming overwhelming if you, like, are a person with, like, hundreds of thousands or millions of followers. But, like, you know, for a normal person like me, okay, DMs are on. They're good for notifications. Maybe I have notifications set for a handful of specific people where if they post, I want to know about it. You know, I'll do that occasionally. Like, you know, for the, the two socials, the two text-based socials I'm on all the time at this moment is I check both blue sky and threads fairly regularly. I, I, I don't really look at my Mastodon anymore, like maybe once a month or something, I'll open it up and check it. But like, you know, and I think on that, I, so small a portion of, who I follow are people I actually know in person, that I pretty much make it so that if anybody I know in person posts, I, I do get a notification of that so that like, I sort of automatically like, oh, Yvonne just posted something. Cool. I know Yvonne just posted something because otherwise it would be completely lost because, you know, I follow hundreds of people and there's new stuff every minute. And so I definitely treat those things as not something that you, because, you know.
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Sam:
[7:43]
| In the original days of even, even Twitter, when it was brand new, people tried to quote unquote, keep up and like read everything from everybody they followed and stuff like that. It long ago has transformed into a media, all of these like text-based ones anyway.
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Sam:
[8:00]
| Are ones where you sort of dip into and see what's going on. And of course, like most of them, like threads, unless you change it, which I have, but unless you change it, the default is an algorithmic feed. So it's going to guarantee that you always have new stuff in front of you, not just from people you follow, but from anybody it thinks might be interesting to you.
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Sam:
[8:22]
| And so like the mode is really much more you dip in and you look and see what's going on and you leave. So, like, if you do want to follow specific people and know everything they post, that sounds like being a stalker. That's not my intention. But, like, then you set up either a separate feed for them or notifications or something and you can follow them. And, yeah, I don't know. Facebook has settings for this kind of stuff, too. They bury the people that you are actually directly friends with. You can get to them. They move it around periodically. But let's see. At the moment, I'm looking at my Facebook app, and there's a tab on the bottom on my phone called Feeds. And within Feeds, there are several categories. One of them is Friends. And so if you click feeds and then friends, then you get an actual chronological reverse chronological feed of only your friends, nothing else and everything they post, you know, but I don't know.
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Sam:
[9:33]
| But they all it's all about like demanding your attention and finding your attention.
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Sam:
[9:39]
| Which, I don't know. Some of them aren't algorithmic, like Blue Sky isn't algorithmic, it's just things you follow unless you go to a feed that's specifically algorithmic. But it's still like, you have to manage your notifications is what I'm saying. And I'll do my Robin Letter plug. Robin Letter is intended to be a slower form of communication, not like this, blah, blah, blah. I'm working on adding notifications to even it, though, and thinking about like, well, right now it sends email. But like actual push notifications and stuff what are the options you want what do you want to be able to turn on and off because you want to manage what level of engagement you you have with these things but like notifications can be like.
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Sam:
[10:22]
| And not just across social media now but across all apps like, there's so so many things that want to try to get at you and like my notification center on my phone is almost always full, and because i never i i rarely delete them not never i rare i rarely go and clear them out it just fills up some are things i actually want some are things i don't like, disney plus is now telling me because i watch certain shows maybe i'd want to watch other shows and no i don't want to know that from you and so here right now options, turn off notifications for disney plus there is no reason for disney plus to ever send me a notification, i've got alerts.
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Sam:
[11:13]
| Is that an email no it's a it's a phone push notification i see now emails are separate they also spam you like i you know all of these things spam you unless i.
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Ed:
[11:24]
| Get i get about a hundred emails a day and one or two of them are of interest to me.
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Sam:
[11:32]
| Oh, yeah. Like all of this is a problem with all communication channels is that, it seems like at first they start out, you know, person to person, one to one. I still remember as my cranky curmudgeonly voice comes on the early days of email where 99%, plus of my email was actually me talking to my friends.
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Sam:
[12:03]
| You know, I would actually go back and forth and write things to them, you know, and sometimes it was short paragraphs, but sometimes I would write like a whole long, real like letter or something where I'm like, you know, here I'm writing, I'm writing like a, you know. 10 paragraphs about what's going on right now and what I'm feeling about X or, and we're going back and forth and having a real conversation where I send something and then they respond to it with their stuff. And then I send, and you know, going back and forth on this all the time. That's what email used to be. And then you got businesses using it and then you got spam and then you got, oh, this is where all your receipts go now. And then this is where, you know, and now, you know i i force myself to periodically go through my email and i make it worse by the way too because i have, i i have all kinds of status stuff generated by me about my various projects and stuff that email me and i'm i'm, especially newer projects i have lots and lots of those and then i gradually cut them back down but like my email i even even an email like i have i use Apple mail has a VIP.
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Sam:
[13:20]
| Feature where you can set certain email addresses as VIP. And basically, if you are a human being who corresponds with me, I mark you as VIP. And then I have a VIP folder, which is basically, here's all the human mail.
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Sam:
[13:37]
| And even there, I've allowed a few exceptions into it for some automated things that I want to get noticed right away. But like most of the time that's the only part of my mail I'm looking at is the VIP folder which looks for the humans. If I click over to my, all inboxes it's just got tons and tons of stuff apple also by the way has a, automatic like you know filtering into primary transactions updates promotions as well as looking at all, yvonne loves those i never have really gotten into them they they don't like match my workflow what so i haven't even used them enough to know how accurate they really are i think you, you can train them too so they get better over time but like i don't use them i just have my vip folder which is.
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Sam:
[14:30]
| Mostly this is the humans plus one or two things that i've specifically designated to go in there, and that's where i spend most of my time because most of the mail isn't, most of the mail is just crap and and that's that's even counting that's not even counting the true drunk mail this is talking about like mail from companies that i actually have relationships with and theoretically want their mail because they're sending me something that's, in some way relevant to me. But the reality is I don't want most of that mail either. You know, I hesitate to market as spam because I'm like, yes, I really do have a relationship with a, with my bank. And I guess, thank you for telling me my new statement is ready.
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Sam:
[15:15]
| Whatever, you know, but I don't really care. Like if I want to go look at my transactions at my bank, I'll open up the app and go look at the transactions. I don't need them to send me.
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Ed:
[15:26]
| Yeah, they tell you every time they let a fart, I think.
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Sam:
[15:30]
| Yeah, I don't know. Anyway, it's, everything everywhere is about trying to get that one little sliver of your attention. And yeah, so anyway, that was a long rant over you saying something that was only tangentially related to everything I just said. Your main point was you built a crate for your grand dog. Oh, that's right. And, you know, and you happen to mention that that's why you missed like a message from me. And off I go into the, you know, wherever for like 20 minutes.
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Ed:
[16:09]
| I'll post a picture of it on the Slack thing later today or tomorrow. It's not completely done, but it's getting close.
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Sam:
[16:17]
| Okay. Very good. Anything else for your light and frothy?
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Ed:
[16:22]
| No, I think that's enough. Let's hear about your movie.
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Sam:
[16:26]
| Well, first I've got a TV show. Modern Family, which was on from 2009 to 2020. It was a pretty big show. It's a sitcom. Have you ever seen this?
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Ed:
[16:42]
| We watched it a lot. We both liked it and made sure to catch most of the episodes.
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Sam:
[16:48]
| Okay. Well, then first, give me your—I mean, you just gave me the high level. Give me your thoughts on Modern Family. What's the premise of it? Instead of me reading the premise, what's the premise of Modern Family?
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Ed:
[17:01]
| Well, that's a good question. It was basically, let's say, a sort of a merged family. The main couple are a remarriage with a child from the previous, two children from the previous marriage and then one they've had. And then one of the older children is actually gay and married to another man. And the other one, I've forgotten. What's her doing? Anyway, all of this kind of goes together. And the wife is from Colombia, as I recall. And so they bring in the aspects of the interracial, inter-conduct, whatever. People from Columbia have some social aspects that are different than the others. The other guy is kind of a curmudgeon, not as old as I am, but probably I would think in his 50s. But altogether, they all sort of interrelate.
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Sam:
[17:54]
| Is that all?
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Ed:
[17:54]
| They have great battles and they mend those battles. Yeah.
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Sam:
[18:00]
| Yeah, so they have three core families. There's like, the grandfather, who, as you said, is remarried to a much younger Colombian woman. And then they've got his daughter and his son, both of which are married and have their own children. Like the son, as you said, is gay, has a same-sex marriage, and they adopt someone.
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Sam:
[18:29]
| And yeah they're uh basically hijinks ensue there are a whole bunch of personalities they have variety of family drama and as this goes from 2009 all the way to 2020 you basically watch the kids grow up as well like in the early seasons they really are children, and then you see them go their teenage years, and then you see them as adults, essentially, as young adults in the end, graduating college and going off to their own lives, et cetera, et cetera, depending on which kids, because they're younger kids too. There's like another, you know, so they've got multiple generations and multiple ages at all times.
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Sam:
[19:12]
| And, you know, you said you liked it and made sure to watch it. Yeah, I like it. I enjoyed it. I think, I don't remember. Let me, I need to check. I think this is one of the ones that I started early enough that I didn't record when I started. Let's see. Modern Family. I'm looking it up on my little wiki oh no no I do know I started it in 2014 and I finished it in 2025 so it took 11 years, for me to watch it from beginning to end, did I do my math right 2014 to 2025 yes 11 years whereas it was on for 11 years 2009 to 2020.
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Sam:
[20:11]
| So there you go i i guess i i watched it delayed by a few years but i guess i basically watched it in real time it took me 11 years to watch an 11 year show um, and and yeah i like generally speaking comedies are not my favorite genre of tv show like i you know i mean some sitcoms are okay. There's some that I've liked in the past, but it's not the genre I'm most immediately drawn to. And I think it took me a little bit to get into Modern Family. But by the time I was a bit in, I was like, okay, this is cool. And I got, You know, involved in the characters and how what's happening in their lives and, you know, all of this kind of stuff, because this is one of the ones where, you know, there's some sitcoms.
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Sam:
[21:09]
| Especially older style sitcoms were really, you know, episode of the week, the funny thing happened to them. And then you reset and you start over for the next episode. For ones like this, it really is, there's some of that, but then, you know, if you run in 11 years, you know, it's going to evolve somewhat, especially if you're sticking with all the same characters and they're aging. So the things you can do with a character when they're 10 years old are not the same as the character when they're 20, you know? And so you they you know they they go through adventures they evolve there's things that continue from episode to episode and season to season so like you know the, the kids get boyfriends and girlfriends and they break up with them and they meet new ones and you know they they make decisions about what they're going to do with their lives and i don't know i, i i you know I liked it I had fun thumbs up and what else is there, it's funny you know like most sitcoms sometimes sometimes the humor hits and sometimes it doesn't for me but overall I enjoyed it.
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Ed:
[22:25]
| Yeah yeah I agree.
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Sam:
[22:29]
| Okay. Yeah. Thumbs up. I recommend Modern Family if you like those kinds of sitcoms.
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Sam:
[22:37]
| Oh, also, I should say the premise in the early years, at the very beginning, they had, I shouldn't say the premise, but, they have an overarching thing where someone was doing a documentary about these families. So they would sit on their couch and be interviewed. And they did maintain this to some degree through the end as a format where you would have these interstitial scenes where one or two of the characters is sitting on a couch talking about what's going on in the episode. And it's like, well, why are they sitting on the couch talking about this? And the initial idea was there was a documentary crew going around following them, interviewing them about their lives. But then as it stretched out, you know, if you start to think about this, wait, this documentary crew is following them for 11 years? And you never actually, like, you never actually hear them give a question. You just hear the people talking. And at some point they seem to have given up on the idea of oh okay there's actually, we don't actually care about the documentary crew idea anymore it's just part of the format that sometimes the characters sit on the couch and talk to the camera you know and break you know but you know, anyway good show.
|
Sam:
[24:02]
| Before I hit another movie, do you have any other TV or movies you've seen recently that you want to mention?
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Ed:
[24:09]
| No, but my wife controls most of what we watch on television. I am waiting with bated breath to see the East of Eden series that I've heard a lot of good things about. In fact, to the extent that I went out and I got the e-book of East of Eden and just finished rereading, because it's like a thousand-page novel, and I knew I'd forgotten a lot. I didn't realize I had forgotten almost all of it except for a couple scenes that stuck with me. Well worth reading, and I'm looking forward to the movie.
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Sam:
[24:44]
| The screenplay was written by— It sounds like it's—I'm just looking it up. It's a new miniseries for 2026.
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Ed:
[24:51]
| Yes, I think it's five episodes. The screenplay is written by Elia Kazan's granddaughter. He was the one who directed the first movie made from East of Eden.
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Sam:
[25:04]
| There was a 1990—sorry, 1990. So, the history is a 1952 novel by John Steinbeck. And then there was a 1955 film. That's the one you're talking about by Elia Kazan. Then there was a 1981 miniseries. And now there's a 2026 miniseries.
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Ed:
[25:27]
| Yeah. There may have been one more movie, too. I don't know. It's been done a lot because it's kind of an...
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Sam:
[25:33]
| These are all the ones I can find looking for it real quick.
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Ed:
[25:36]
| The concept of it is that he was fascinated by the biblical story of Cain and Abel. And so he writes through these three generations, and there's a Cain and Abel in each one of the three generations. And then threw in the wife of the middle generation man is an evil woman. I mean, just really evil. I read recently that talking about there was just, there was nothing that they could find good in her. However, I heard an interview the other day with the actress and I'm wondering if they've modified that a little bit. We'll see. But I'm looking forward to seeing that. As I said, we mostly watch things that my wife picks out, and I tend to mostly be reading or doing crosswords while we're listening, so don't pay that much attention.
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Sam:
[26:26]
| Okay. I have just added all the variants of East of Eden to my various lists. Oh, there was also a 2008 South Korean East of Eden series.
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Ed:
[26:38]
| Ah, okay.
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Sam:
[26:40]
| And a 1988 documentary named East of Eden. I'm not sure if that's related or not, but yeah, this is, this is also a thing, by the way, I say I added all of them to my list because as folks who've listened a lot know, I do all my television and movie watching with my son now, and I have my massive list that we do. But one of the things that he is now making sure we do properly is that whenever there is a set of related media—, We do them in order. Now, this makes, you know, for things like, you know, a series of movies where there's a movie, it's sequel, and then it's sequel. Okay, that makes sense. You watch them in order.
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Sam:
[27:33]
| But we first expanded that to, okay, if they're films in, like, you know, a cinematic universe, like the Marvel Cinematic Universe or whatever, we have to watch those in order. Oh and by the way if that cinematic universe has both movies and tv, we still have to watch them in order so like movie movie television show movie movie television show movie movie television show and then it expanded to oh okay well if, it's a if there's like the marvel cinematic universe is only a subset of all of the movies and television shows that have been made based on marvel properties, So now we have to do the whole thing in order, going back to the early days of movies and televisions. So, like, you know, for instance, in the Marvel Universe, the very first thing ever made on movies or televisions are some 1940s movie serials of Captain America. So like so we have to do that first and work our way up through the decades that's world.
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Ed:
[28:44]
| War ii isn't it.
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Sam:
[28:46]
| That's right and even when.
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Ed:
[28:48]
| I was a young child then.
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Sam:
[28:50]
| And then it's expanded further to okay if there's been a movie or television show that's been remade we have to watch those in order. So, for instance, at one point, we randomly picked one version, before we had this rule, we randomly picked and we watched one version of Les Miserables. Les Miserables has been made like dozens of times. Literally, I looked it up.
|
Sam:
[29:24]
| I'm going to look it up again right now and continuing on. Let's see. Okay. So films and television. Les Miserables. 1909, 1913, 1917, 1925, 1934, 1935, 1943, 1944, 1948, 1952, 1958, 1967, 1978, 1982. 1998, 2000, 2026, oh, I missed a couple, 2007, 2018, 1995, and then a couple others that are out of order for some reason, 1995, 2019. All of those are remakes of Les Miserables, either as films or television series. And so we are going through them. one by one by one.
|
Ed:
[30:29]
| Have either of you read the book?
|
Sam:
[30:31]
| No, not in French or in English. It is on the list, but he is not insisting, that we read the source materials for movies and TV series in order, first, whatever.
|
Ed:
[30:48]
| We saw the stage production of Les Miserables in New York. when it was, you know, freshly out there. And I was fascinated. So I bought and read the book, again, the e-book, and loved it. There are rather long stretches that you just almost have to skip over because they're very dry discussions of poverty in France. And while they're educational, 100 pages of that is beyond my ability to concentrate. But a wonderful, wonderful book.
|
Sam:
[31:19]
| Yeah, I'm watching and I'm realizing, wait a second here, did we get this wrong? Like, which one are we doing? We are currently watching a 1934 version. But we apparently, like, the 1934 version, by the way, is a trilogy of movies. So we watched the first of the three movies. We had to order like a Blu-ray of this special blah, blah, blah, whatever. But we have missed 1909, 1913, 1917, and 1925. So we're going to have to go back and find those.
|
Ed:
[32:02]
| Are they available?
|
Sam:
[32:04]
| Good question. Like some of these are harder to find. So far, we haven't failed to find.
|
Ed:
[32:09]
| Well, not all those have been put into new formats, and the films have by now, you know, depreciated and can't be used. So unless they were copied somewhere before that film became unusable.
|
Sam:
[32:21]
| There are a lot of missing films from the early days of stuff, but most of like the big ones exist. I mean, if they don't exist, we don't exist. They don't exist anymore. But, yeah, most of them, I'm just looking at the 1909 version, their Wikipedia page. It doesn't make any reference to it being lost. So I'm assuming it exists, but it might be hard to find. But, yeah, the 1909 was American. And, by the way, we watch these, like, in original language. So the 1934 one we're watching is in French, but with subtitles.
|
Ed:
[32:58]
| Oh, okay.
|
Sam:
[32:58]
| We couldn't do it without subtitles. But, yeah, like... Going through the list that I gave before, some of them are American, some of them are French. There's a Mexican one, there's an Egyptian one, there's an Italian one, there's a British one. There's all kinds of, you know, there's a Japanese anime television series. There's all kinds. So yeah, so like for a lot of these things, we're now like, okay, it's nice that Marvel exists and they've got this whole Marvel Cinematic Universe that's going out, but we're going to watch all the 1940s and 1950s versions of this before we get to even the 2000s. You know, we've, we've got like, you know, 80 years of content to get through, you know, so it'll be a while till we catch up with any new things that are releasing.
|
Ed:
[33:58]
| Well, enjoy.
|
Sam:
[34:01]
| Okay. I'm going to say that's good enough for movies and stuff. We've been going long enough on that. The next on the list for me is Do the Right Thing from, I believe it was 1989. I had it up a second ago, but I went and searched for Les Miserables, so I don't have it up anymore. There we go. Do the Right Thing from 1989 with Spike Lee. I'll save that for next week. And we'll take a break. And when we get back, we'll try to figure some news stuff to talk about. Okay, here's a break.
|
Break:
[34:46]
| Alex, Emsala is awesome, its videos are fun, and today, once again, we have one of our most loyal subscribers here to tell you how awesome Alex Emsala is. I'd say on a rate from 1 to 10, Alex Emsala is awesome at, I don't know, 37, 82? too. He's pretty radical. His videos are phenomenal. They're full of creativity. And they're so funny and exciting to watch. Wow, what happened to your voice then, Amy? Was that dad pretending to be you, because the audio was distorted when it really wasn't because I told him to? Yes. Good job on remembering, dad. Do, do, do.
|
Sam:
[35:39]
| Okay, we are back. So, where would you like to start?
|
Ed:
[35:47]
| Oh, that's right. You want me to do something. Okay. Well, I have a couple things written down. The first one was kind of interesting. I thought Trump has never been bothered with the legalities of whether he can spend or not spend money. But just in the past couple weeks, he's had several episodes in which he's using Trump. Basically taxpayer money for campaigns, events. And then this week, he said he's going to give $90 to each of the 90 million, Medicare recipients to somehow make them more whole, which really looks to me like it's basically a bribe. And instead of using his own money to bribe me to vote for the Republicans, he's using my money to bribe me to vote for the Republicans. I find this a bit offensive.
|
Sam:
[36:38]
| Yeah.
|
Ed:
[36:38]
| In fact, I...
|
Sam:
[36:41]
| Does it look like this? He said the checks are being cut right away, but he's made all kinds of promises. Yeah. So maybe these will actually go out because they're smaller amount. Because remember, he's promised to give everybody $5,000 as well just a few weeks ago. And a year ago, he was promising everybody would get a couple thousand dollars from Doge. And, you know, there's the tariff kickback, the doge kickback, the this, the that. Most of them have disappeared into the ether and never actually happened. This is a much smaller number. This is like $100 for a limited set of people, not for everybody.
|
Ed:
[37:22]
| However, since it's for 90 million people, that 90 bucks, by my math, comes out to $8 billion.
|
Sam:
[37:29]
| Yeah. Well, I mean, some of the other things that he was proposing would have come out to over a trillion dollars. So this is cheap in comparison.
|
Ed:
[37:38]
| Yeah. But on the other hand, he says the money's coming from a fund that was specifically funded by Congress to improve benefits for seniors. That fund is $2 billion. So he's exceeding it by $7.1 billion, just out of interest. So, you know, I don't know if he's going to do it or not. If I get it, and I talked about it with my wife, if we get it, we're going to immediately take it down and donate it to Robert Harvey's campaign coffers. He's our local Democrat running to replace Fitzgerald.
|
Sam:
[38:14]
| Yeah. Look, he's, he's, he's doing all this kind of stuff. Right. And it's not just that, like in the last few weeks, he's been pushing and promoting projects for swing, states that are now swing states for the Senate that by all rights shouldn't be. Like he was promoting some project in Iowa that was going to bring jobs to Iowa and something in Alaska as well. Now, both of them seemingly are vaporware, like where he's hyping up something that looks like the chances of it actually happening are low, but that's par for the course for him anyway. Right. You know?
|
Ed:
[38:57]
| Yeah, absolutely.
|
Sam:
[39:00]
| But it's all, you know, it all comes down to the fact that we've talked about this before. Donald Trump to his very core is transactional. He doesn't understand how anything could ever be anything else. You know, so he's like, I will give you this and then you will vote for me.
|
Sam:
[39:23]
| And, and of course, like even then, like he is transactional and a crook. So his goal is to promise you something, get you to do your thing and then renege on his side so that he doesn't actually have to deliver whatever it was he said. But, you know, because he can't imagine anyone thinks any other way. It seems to be beyond his comprehension, or at the very least, he thinks anybody who acts out of any other reason is stupid. Okay? This is how he talks about, you know, veterans who get injured or lose their lives in American wars. You know, they're stupid. Why would they ever do that? This is how he talks about anybody who does a, public service job simply because they believe it helps society, because almost anybody who works in the public, sector or nonprofit sector makes a lot less money than they could in the private sector, and they make that trade-off intentionally. And you know there are some other things like supposedly at least those jobs are more secure and have a pension in in things like that although trump has been gutting that security and such as well, but most of the people who do those things do those things because they feel compelled to help the public interest in some sort of way.
|
Sam:
[40:48]
| You know and he just has no conception there's no conception of a politician who might actually be trying to, I'm here because I want to make the world better and I want to help people. And I think like, this is one way to do it. No idea. It's like, well, how do you get rich doing this? What's in it for me? That's it. That's all. That's the whole thing. You know? And.
|
Sam:
[41:13]
| And, and what, what can you do? And again, he's going to like send out checks with his name on it. This happened during COVID as well, by the way, which of course, like, there was good reason, by the way, for some of what was sent out during COVID. And I actually, I wish some of it had continued and become permanent because it had an overall positive effect. You know, like some of these, like the money that was being sent to parents, the unconditional money being sent to parents, just like you get so much per kid per month, here you go. You know, we saw, you know, demonstrable, significant drops in the child poverty rate while that was happening. And then we let it all expire and we're right back to where it was. Oh, well, you know, but, you know, even those like he took advantage of that and he put his damn name on it. And there were a lot of people who thought the checks actually came from Donald Trump personally.
|
Ed:
[42:13]
| Yeah, right.
|
Sam:
[42:14]
| You know, right. and and of course even even when like biden was doing things to like help the general public he wasn't slapping his name all over it it's just.
|
Ed:
[42:25]
| Not a.
|
Sam:
[42:25]
| Thing he did you.
|
Ed:
[42:26]
| Know he issued one of those one of those big checks too i always thought that was a mistake i didn't think it needed to be done but he did and that's three trillion between the two of them that they spent giving us money oh Oh.
|
Sam:
[42:39]
| Yeah. Yeah. I mean, you can argue about some like some of them, I think, were warranted and actually deserve to continue. Some of them, maybe not. You have to draw the line somewhere. You have to start or stop or determine how much. And there's all kinds of things there. And if you're going to make anything into an ongoing program, you have to figure out how that's going to work differently than a one off. And of course, and in the end, you do have to balance it with taxes. You have to pay for it somewhere. Like when you pay for it out of the deficit.
|
Ed:
[43:11]
| They stopped doing that a long time ago, Sam.
|
Sam:
[43:12]
| I know, I know.
|
Ed:
[43:13]
| They haven't balanced cuts with taxes in the past 40 years, as far as I can see.
|
Sam:
[43:18]
| I know. Well, the last time was like, yeah, during the Clinton administration.
|
Ed:
[43:23]
| Yeah.
|
Sam:
[43:24]
| You know, and I guess that's 90s, 30 years, not quite 40.
|
Ed:
[43:29]
| Even then, when they did that and they were running a budget surplus, and my thought was, my God, they'll pay down some of the debt. And within a month or two of publishing that here was a surplus, our congressmen started saying, well, how can we spend that money?
|
Sam:
[43:45]
| Right.
|
Ed:
[43:46]
| Because they wanted to put it right back to an egg. So the surplus went nowhere because they immediately got rid of it.
|
Sam:
[43:53]
| Yeah.
|
Ed:
[43:53]
| Building bridges to nowhere.
|
Sam:
[43:56]
| And as I believe you've brought up on the show, there are like monetary theories that say you don't need to worry about the deficit. I kind of think at some point it'll catch up with you, no matter what. At some point it'll catch up with you. You have to figure out some way. What I get upset about is the fact that people feel like they can solve these problems.
|
Sam:
[44:19]
| You know first of all people only care about deficits when the when the democrats are in office if the republicans are in office no one's even talking about it whatever and that's like, It's asymmetrically unfair. And, you know, because if you look historically, the Republicans have been worse for the debt and deficit than the Democrats ever have been. But, you know, if if you are worried about it, it seems like everybody only ever talks about cuts. Whereas like look you have to acknowledge part of the equation, is taxes too and you can make this work better, with some changes on the tax side as well we could and now now some some some democrats like to pretend and say oh tax the rich well, that's not enough either honestly like you can tax the hell hell out of all the billionaires and it's not enough so yeah you have to do more than that. But you have to look at both sides of the damn equation. And yes, you have to look at government efficiency and blah, blah, blah, and blah, blah, blah. But that's not as big of a chunk as you think. Now, if you want a big chunk at this point, it's always going to be defense. Defense, and now the interest on the damn debt, are the two biggest things. Figure out how to deal with them.
|
Ed:
[45:41]
| You can't.
|
Sam:
[45:43]
| You could also, and I suppose this is a radical thing, you could just go skip issuing more debt and go straight to actually issuing more money. Like right now we issue more money by issuing debt. You could skip that middle step and just literally print more money. Yeah, just inject it directly. Give it directly. Now, of course, all of that's horribly inflationary.
|
Ed:
[46:09]
| I'm not sure that would make a huge difference.
|
Sam:
[46:10]
| That's inflationary. It would change the stakeholders. Like with debt, you have someone holding that debt. With just issuing money, it's inflationary and you deal with things that way. But there's no one specifically, like, that has the leverage of, like, we're the ones holding the debt. Anyway, there's all kinds of interesting things you could do. Or, of course, eventually, you could just default on the debt. Of course, there's all kinds of negative consequences that come from doing that. But, you know, at some point.
|
Ed:
[46:45]
| There's a reason why some of the foreign countries are beginning to shy away from U.S. debt, because they think we might just do that.
|
Sam:
[46:53]
| Well, Donald Trump has specifically said, why don't we do that? Which is part of the reason for the fear. Like, you know, and we haven't, obviously. And, you know, I'm joking about all these different possibilities, but the, you know, we could go back to the minting the platinum coins as the way to inject money. I was thinking about this the other day, too. Just like, you know, just declare that the U.S. government must pay all bills in coins. That's it. So, like, we're buying a new fighter plane. Here's a pile of million-dollar coins. Have fun.
|
Sam:
[47:35]
| You know, that we meant just for that purpose. You know, anyway, but... And I'm joking about all these possibilities, but the problem, of course, is that when it gets to the point that you actually must deal with it, because if you wait until it's a crisis point, then, when you actually are dealing with it, it will be a crisis. You'll have very limited options. They'll all be bad. And you'll have significant negative consequences. The way to avoid that, is to make gradual changes over the course of decades that set up for, a controlled way of dealing with all of this through some combination of managing your spending and taxes and all this kind of stuff, and you're smart about that. But all of those things are hard. They require long-term thinking. They require, you know, all kinds of things that our system is just not set up to do.
|
Ed:
[48:37]
| Well, not only that, let's assume that they somehow implemented that and said, this is how we're going to do it. And they get close to or even into a balanced budget. Within two years, the Congress would change that. They would say, well, we don't need to do that anymore. And, you know, we've been down that road.
|
Sam:
[48:55]
| Like you said, in the 90s. No, the problem is you need not only long-term thinking, but sustained ability to stick with something for decades.
|
Ed:
[49:08]
| The original guys, when they wrote the Constitution, were very concerned about giving equal power to poor people as wealthy people because poor people would just pass laws giving themselves stuff. It turned out that what we did is we have ended up giving all the power to the extremely wealthy, and they have indeed done just that. They've given everything to themselves. The poor get poorer, the wealthy get wealthier. Those of us in the middle are sort of, at the moment, hovering, but likely to get poorer pretty soon.
|
Sam:
[49:38]
| Well, and as Yvonne and I have discussed a few times, you know, increasing income inequality or wealth inequality, even more specifically, is one of those things that, if you look at the vast expanse of history is a really good predictor of massive societal upheaval, if it gets bad enough.
|
Ed:
[50:02]
| I think we're very close to the imbalance that existed in France during their most famous revolution. So, you know, who knows? There comes a point where the poor people say no more.
|
Sam:
[50:17]
| Well, and the question is, does it happen violently or does it happen in a controlled way? I mean, this is where we have, like, you know, we had, you know, the robber barons and all that. and we had a reaction to it of FDR and the New Deal. And so we had the pendulum swing radically in the other direction. It took a, you know, a stock market crash and a great and the Great Depression to get us there. But then you had the pendulum swing the other way. So I don't know. Okay. What were we even talking about? What was going on?
|
Ed:
[50:56]
| Talking about how Trump uses our money to bribe us.
|
Sam:
[51:00]
| Oh, right. Yes. And once again, I've gone off into the distance. And another example of that that's been in the news this last week is Donald Trump using taxpayer money to buy campaign commercials for himself.
|
Ed:
[51:14]
| Essentially.
|
Sam:
[51:16]
| Where he's— And that's illegal.
|
Ed:
[51:18]
| By the way. That is prohibited by law. But I'm going to not hold my breath until the Department of Justice comes for him.
|
Sam:
[51:26]
| Exactly. You know, and yes. What could you say? And by the Supreme Court's decision on presidential immunity that basically takes official acts off the table, basically what you've allowed is any abuse of power cannot be handled by law. It can only be handled by impeachment.
|
Ed:
[51:53]
| Although, interestingly, I did see one guy who posited that campaigning is not an official act, and therefore this really could be a punishable act.
|
Sam:
[52:04]
| Well, no, but yes, yes. The thing is that the laws that specifically... Yeah, you know, you are right. If this was determined to be a campaign for him or whatever, but the ad is carefully construed, it does not talk about a specific policy. It does not talk about a specific election. It does not talk about a specific candidate. It just talks about how great Donald Trump is. Well and specifically specifically how he's doing all these great things for the country supposedly um, and that his justification for it is that this is not a campaign thing this is just sort of a rah-rah america thing, and he compares it to things that previous administrations had done for instance to advertise the availability of the covid vaccine, or to you know advertise that a new program was available that people could take advantage of when some new program launched. And this is just like that. It's not a campaign thing.
|
Ed:
[53:13]
| Right.
|
Sam:
[53:14]
| You know, any of that. But look, I think there are facts on the ground in this case because literally the specific commercial that was run, Apparently, they made a bunch of these, but one had gotten out there and gotten initial attention. Is essentially a rehash of a commercial that he did use as a campaign commercial a few years ago.
|
Ed:
[53:42]
| Absolutely it is, yeah. Yep.
|
Sam:
[53:44]
| And so, you know, again, the problem is, and with all of this stuff, is who exactly is going to make the case and how? When you've got this kind of structure and this kind of president, the people who would need to take action for this all work for him. And we're all selected by their loyalty. So they're not going to do it. Now, somebody is going to take it to court, and it's going to go through the court. And if what typically has happened recently happens again, then the lower courts will all rule against him. It'll eventually get to the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court will do their best to delay making a call on it for a long time to sort of slow roll everything. And let it keep going in the meantime, potentially, And then eventually make a decision. Every once in a while, they go against him on one of these. But they've delayed it out so long that by the time they get there, it's kind of a moot point anyway.
|
Ed:
[54:53]
| I see that Alito is toying with retiring, which makes me wonder if maybe the reason is so that Trump can appoint another Alito justice before his term expires.
|
Sam:
[55:05]
| Here's the thing. Well, let me talk about Alito. Let me finish my point first. They they they drag it out and and sometimes they go against him sometimes they've, been affirming him lately and you know the presidential immunity says you know no criminal liability regardless, at best they stop him from airing more of these commercials but in the meantime he's already aired a bunch yeah you know and then this is his mode of operation over and over and over again, which is just do the thing and keep doing it until they stop you. And the one good thing so far is that when it has finally gotten to the Supreme Court and they say stop, for the most part, yes. Now, he'll immediately go and try to find some other loophole to send it, start all over going up and down the courts. Like you've seen that with tariffs. They rule one way of doing tariffs is unconstitutional. So he tries another and then that gets him a couple more years of tariffs again before he gets back to the court and whatever, you know, but so far he hasn't now he has him and his administration have indeed outright defied lower courts already.
|
Sam:
[56:23]
| And the way it's supposed to work is the lower court rules something, you do that. You can appeal if you want, but you do what the lower court said. And he has on numerous occasions now, they have defied lower courts already. Not always, but they have in certain occasions. There's one still working its way through where the judge is trying to hold them in contempt for something they did like a year and a half ago. And that's going up and down whether he has the right to hold them in contempt and it's still working its way through.
|
Sam:
[56:56]
| But you know they have outright defied these lower court rulings on a number of occasions just oops oh well we just know and we're appealing and and sometimes the supreme court has backed them up sometimes not but if the supreme court has actually said no, they have stopped the specific thing they were doing as i said they didn't try to work around it but you know.
|
Sam:
[57:24]
| Okay now alito you mentioned that alito it's it's been, it has been rumored for a long long time now that both thomas and alito would try to would resign relatively soon and try to time it to make sure Trump is in office when they resign. More recently, it seemed like Thomas isn't ready, but Alito, in an interview this week, confirmed he did think about it this year, and he will think about it again next year. The key to that wording is that it looks like the Democrats are probably—well, they're definitely taking the House, but that doesn't really matter for Supreme Court appointments. They have a decent shot and are now favored by some analysts to take the Senate as well. So the question is, if Alito is going to resign, what he's said so far is he'll think about it again next year.
|
Ed:
[58:32]
| Yeah.
|
Sam:
[58:33]
| But if the Democrats take the Senate in November, then his choice changes. His choice changes to resign right now and let Donald Trump shove someone through before January. So they would have November and December to get someone through, which they've proven they can do, because, you know, that's how RGB was, Ruth Bader Ginsburg was replaced. She died right around the election, and they got her through before January when the results went through. They could do that again. Or he gambles that Donald Trump will be followed by another Republican, you know, and he's going to hang on two plus years and stay on. Now, if the Republicans win, he can relax a little bit, maybe resign next year, whatever. But I think that timing of his choice will be affected by election results.
|
Ed:
[59:43]
| I fully agree.
|
Sam:
[59:46]
| You know, he, he is, he's, He absolutely does not want to end up being in a scenario where he retires or dies and a Democrat gets to replace him.
|
Ed:
[59:59]
| Well, there's at least two senators.
|
Sam:
[1:00:01]
| And by the way, I mentioned the Democrats taking the Senate. This also relies on the Democrats holding firm on not agreeing to anybody Donald Trump appoints. Because obviously Donald Trump will still be president, even if there's a Democratic Senate. And in the past, the norm has been, you know, the president gets to appoint their Supreme Court justices and you would get a significant portion of Democrats voting for, you know, whoever the Republicans nominated for the Supreme Court. I am hoping that a current Democratic Congress, if the Democrats take the Senate this coming term, that they would act more like Mitch McConnell did and say, absolutely not. There is no way that we are going to let this man nominate a Supreme Court justice.
|
Ed:
[1:01:02]
| Two years is a long time to do that, though. Thank you.
|
Sam:
[1:01:07]
| I think the new norm, honestly, sat by Mitch McConnell, which if the Democrats, had the balls to do it, is that the new norm is, I'm sorry, the only way you get to appoint anybody to anything is if you have both the presidency and the Senate. Done. End of story. Otherwise, it stays open.
|
Ed:
[1:01:33]
| Yeah.
|
Sam:
[1:01:34]
| Done.
|
Ed:
[1:01:35]
| Don't know that I like that, but it may be.
|
Sam:
[1:01:38]
| And I would certainly apply that for all judges. I'm tempted to say, hell, they need to do it for cabinet officials too, except for the fact that Donald Trump has basically figured out for cabinet officials how to use acting officials to do things without even bothering with Senate confirmation to begin with.
|
Ed:
[1:01:59]
| Quite a few of them are acting at this point.
|
Sam:
[1:02:02]
| Well, not on the actual cabinet level at this moment, but at the sub-cabinet level and below, he's using lots and lots of actings. So, anyway. Shall we take a break and come back for one more set of stuff? Okay. Here we go. Break, break.
|
Break:
[1:02:23]
| Okie dokie. Here it comes. It's just my internet being stupid. My internet being stupid is a new song we will make. BABRO BABRO BABRO BABRO BABRO BABRO, BABRO BABRO BABRO BABRO BABRO BABRO BABRO BABRO BABRO BABRO BABRO BABRO BABRO BABRO BABRO BABRO BABRO BABRO BABRO BABRO BABRO BABRO BABRO BABRO BABRO BABRO BABRO BABRO BABRO BABRO BABRO BABRO BABRO BABRO BABRO BABRO BABRO BABRO BABRO BABRO BABRO BABRO BABRO BABRO BABRO BABRO BABRO BABRO BABRO BABRO BABRO BABRO BABRO BABRO BABRO BABRO BABRO BABRO BABRO BABRO BABRO BABRO BABRO BABRO BABRO BABRO BABRO BABRO B, Come on, come on, come, on, come on, come on, come on, come on, come on, come on, come on. Come on, I'm tired. What's wrong? I'm really tired. You, you, you, it's, it's amazing. To get the show on the road. There's a road? There's a road? Oh my god, there's a road!
|
Sam:
[1:03:29]
| Okay, we are back. So, Ed, how about another topic? What's something that's happened this week that we want to talk about?
|
Ed:
[1:03:38]
| Oh, something that happened this week. Oh, I was going to see if you had any predictions on the midterms. Not so much who's going to get elected, but what will be the reactions. For instance, if a House is a remarkably strong Democrat after the midterms? Will the votes be discarded and thrown away? Will Johnson refuse to seat them? Or will they just move in and we have a Democratic House of Representatives? And I'm curious what you thought on that.
|
Sam:
[1:04:05]
| Okay. Let's talk about those. So specifically on that question, let's start there. I don't know if you guys can hear my dog is barking. Sorry about my dog. I'm just going to keep going. Usually the noise reduction software run after this eliminates some barks, but not all of them. I don't know what he's after. It's probably somebody delivering something or something. Who knows? Anyway, I'll start with the specific question you asked and then maybe talk, more generally about midterms. You're asking about shenanigans to try to avoid Democrats actually taking power in January if they win in November. So first of all, I absolutely positively am expecting shenanigans of various sorts starting. Well, shenanigans have already started. Let's let's be clear about that. We've already got things going on like. Hold on. I was seeing something weird in the background there, um, Kif.
|
Sam:
[1:05:26]
| Give me one second. Yep. There was something in our neighbor's driveway, and I'm like, what's going on over there? I'm being nosy for a second.
|
Ed:
[1:05:40]
| Dog doesn't like whatever it is.
|
Sam:
[1:05:42]
| Yeah. Well, my wife was apparently here a second ago, and I thought I saw her go over to the neighbors. And so. Hello. Oh. That's what it is. Okay, so I'll actually include this. I will not cut this out. What apparently happened to cause my dog to go crazy and what I was seeing in the yard was that a loose dog came into our driveway. And my wife Captured it And took it over to our neighbors Because it might be our neighbor's dog, So that's what's going on right now. So anyway, drama. Drama, neighborhood dog drama in the driveway. Okay. Back to what I was saying. Predictions.
|
Sam:
[1:06:46]
| I think there will be shenanigans. And the shenanigans have already started. Things like, you know, tens of thousands of people being dropped off the voter rolls in Texas. And, you know, and doing all that kind of thing where, you know, people are having to check their registrations, get re-registered because, you know, some minor trivial thing that normally would not result in you expecting your voter registration to be dropped. You know, people doing all kinds of efforts to do those kinds of things. We've already heard them talk back and forth about, well, you know, we're not going to say we're not going to have ICE agents hanging around at polling places in certain places.
|
Sam:
[1:07:35]
| We had all the attempted shenanigans with gerrymandering, which seemed like they might actually end up backfiring. But we had that. We've got the attempts to make further restrictions on, vote-by-mail, which appear to have basically failed at least for 2026. Some of them are still very live as potentially problems for 2028, but it looks like they've failed for 2026. So we've already got shenanigans going on, and I don't put it past the Trump administration at all, to do further things pre-election in terms of voter intimidation, voter confusion, voter whatever, you know, things to basically make it to discourage people from voting by making it harder or whatever.
|
Sam:
[1:08:30]
| And then that'll happen. Then the next thing is on the counting. And once election day is done and people are counting votes and all of this kind of stuff, I fully expect the whole Republican legal ecosystem that did this for 2024 is going to spin up again, and 2020, for 2020 and 2024.
|
Sam:
[1:09:02]
| Especially 2020, I guess, where they're going to challenge all sorts of things for all sorts of crazy reasons, and go to court all over the country in all kinds of different districts, in all kinds of different states, for the Senate, for the House, for the whatever. They are going to battle everywhere where they can battle and keep things in court for as long as possible. I suspect they're going to lose all of them or almost all of them, just like they did in 2020, where there was like one court case they lost. They actually won where they said the observers had to stand 10 feet away instead of six feet away. But everything else they lost. Everything else they lost almost always because they didn't have any actual evidence of wrongdoing at all. They pointed at things that are completely normal in every election and were like, oh my God, look at this. They had a box with the ballots in it. Oh, they can't have a box. Oh no, that's not allowed. Or, you know, oh, let's challenge every possible, like, you know, oh, there were your signature, the stuff that came in by mail after the deadline or whatever, you know.
|
Sam:
[1:10:21]
| And basically, the courts reaffirmed existing rules and said, this is fine, this is fine, this is fine, or this is not fine, but basically reaffirmed the existing rules. And they didn't get anywhere with anything. I fully expect that, though, that they will do that again all over the place. And I will add, especially if it's close. I mean, duh, especially if it's close. But right now, we've got a sort of expectation that the polling is leaning towards, you know, the Democrats are going to win and win fairly strongly in a whole bunch of places. However.
|
Sam:
[1:11:06]
| Let's not forget that the big numbers that you see being racked up in the polling are, A, in a whole bunch of places that are likely to be close, where it's like, yeah, the Democrats are ahead, but they're ahead by a little bit in the polls. And that's close enough to allow for challenges. Also, though, and I was going to mention this separately later, but I'll throw it out now. Thank you. They're close enough that if the polls are systematically underestimating the Republicans, then the picture changes dramatically very quickly. And we move from, oh, the Democrats have a real good shot of everything to, oh, oops, the polls were wrong by 3%. That's enough so that the Democrats are fighting for their lives in the House, to actually take the House after all, and they don't get the Senate. You know so and three percent is a perfectly normal polling error you know people are like yo the polls got it wrong, if the polls are showing a race that is you know one side or the other is only winning by three percent.
|
Sam:
[1:12:22]
| That's a perfectly normal error if the poll that's a dead heat that's all that's a dead it's not quite a dead heat one side is still favored for the other It's all this probabilistic stuff. I keep going back to what I said all the way back in 2016 when they said Donald Trump had a 14% chance if you averaged out all the people who were giving odds. 14% is not zero. 14% is relatively close to rolling a one on a six-sided die, which is bad luck, yes, but it happens all the freaking time. So you shouldn't act like it's a situation where the odds were like one in a million. No, it was one in six, one in seven, something like that. You know, so anyway, yes, if you're ahead just by a handful of percent, it is still a close race and it could still go either way. So keep all that in mind. But assume, assume we get out of election night and all of the challenges with it looking like the Republicans will take the House and the Senate.
|
Ed:
[1:13:31]
| You mean Democrats?
|
Sam:
[1:13:31]
| So there are a couple things we should—sorry, the Democrats, yes. Let's talk about both. First of all, remember, on the Senate, this has actually been done before. Mitch McConnell did not give up control of the Senate on January 3rd. You know, on the year he was—first of all, you know, there were a couple senators waiting to be seated because they had won in special elections runoffs or whatever. The two from Georgia.
|
Sam:
[1:14:08]
| But he used various tactics to delay and delay and delay the seating of the new senators and the handing over of the gavel and the vote that would determine new leadership. He didn't stop it, but he managed to slow it down by longer than anyone thought. It was like a couple of weeks before, like, you know, control of the body actually switched hands. And, you know, just because of delaying tactics. And I certainly think that that could be done again. Now, some of that depended on the specific situations. You had a few senators who weren't ready to be sworn in until later, until their, you know, elections were certified and all this kind of stuff. But there was still, you used every one of those delays that you could, Whereas you could just as easily use judgment to speed those things up and make it happen quickly. Where there's discretion, they made it take as long as possible.
|
Sam:
[1:15:14]
| Now in the House, there have been people saying, well, Johnson could just decide, not to let them in. Because, you know, the Constitution says that the House of Representatives is the final arbiter of its own membership. So, for instance, the House could say, well, none of the Democrats were legally elected. We're not letting them in.
|
Sam:
[1:15:37]
| There are some difficulties with this. I would not be surprised at them trying in one way or another. But there are some difficulties and some loopholes. First of all, as of noon on January 3rd, there is no House of Representatives. Unlike the Senate, which is a continuing body, they only replace one-third of their members every session. And so the Senate is a continuing body. So there is a leadership that continues until the new one is elected, etc. With the House, that is not true. As of noon on January 3rd, there is no House of Representatives. Everybody's term ends. The determination of a new Speaker and all of that is run by the Clerk of the House, who is not an elected representative. Speaker Johnson is no longer in charge at that point. Someone hired by the House is in charge of the procedures and running the vote of the.
|
Sam:
[1:16:45]
| Of the members to be, because they are not even actually members yet, because the procedure that's generally been followed is the members to be elect a speaker. Then the speaker gavels them in. Then the clerk swears in the speaker, and then the speaker swears in the new members, and then the house exists properly. And then they begin, you know, their new thing. Now, most years, this is purely ceremonial. The order of operations doesn't actually matter at all. People just do what they do and they behave. If you wanted to misbehave, however, the person who has to misbehave is the clerk of the house, not Speaker Johnson. Now you'd say, well, okay, well, then who is this guy and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Traditionally, this is a nonpartisan professional role. However, they are hired by the Secretary of the House. So the person who's there right now is, I am pretty sure, a nonpartisan whatever. But there's nothing stopping Speaker Johnson from firing the clerk of the House on December 31st and bringing in whoever he wants into that role.
|
Sam:
[1:18:13]
| And that's how you would do shenanigans if you were going to try to do shenanigans. However, I think that.
|
Sam:
[1:18:22]
| And the kinds of things that you could see them do, if you were going to play out the maximal, this is bad scenario, specifically for January 3rd, there are other bad scenarios that we can talk about, like, you know, but, if you're specifically talking about January 3rd, the maximal bad scenario is you combine this with all of the lawsuits that I mentioned I'm sure will be happening. And basically, Johnson's saying any House member where there is a lawsuit that is still going through the appeals process, which means you could potentially have all of them, if you had a concerted effort to take every appeal possible on every lawsuit possible, and the Supreme Court was willing to be slow on those. Rather than trying to act expeditiously.
|
Sam:
[1:19:21]
| You could have the new clerk say, any place where there is a lawsuit with appeals still ongoing, we will not seat any House member. And then you have sort of a rump house that is missing, like, who knows how many number of close seats. And presumably the Republicans would have done these lawsuits only in seats where the Democrat won. And the Democrats most likely would not have done corresponding lawsuits on seats where Republicans won, where the Republican actually clearly won because they're not being pathological about this. And so, therefore, the rump house would be a Republican rump house. That's sort of the worst case scenario you could see on this. Now, I suspect if this actually happened—first, I don't think Johnson would actually do this or try to do this, to be honest. I think that what you would be seeing there would—the public outcry over that. I mean, we'd have a January 6th scale event in the opposite direction in reaction.
|
Ed:
[1:20:45]
| If not worse.
|
Sam:
[1:20:47]
| If not worse. Like, these are the kinds of scenarios that start civil wars, you know, where you take the lawfully elected party that should be taking control and the other party refuses. I mean, which is what January 6th was back then. But, you know, luckily it was thwarted. But that's exactly the kind of scenario that can start civil wars. And if you want to talk about the even worse scenarios, they're things like, you know, Donald Trump declares a state of emergency before the election and tries to cancel it. He has no actual legal authority to do so, but we talked about in the first segment how his modus operandi is do things and then wait for somebody to stop him. Whether it's legal or not. So he could try to do that. He could try to, like, you know, we're declaring an emergency. We're not going to have the election after all.
|
Ed:
[1:21:47]
| Yeah.
|
Sam:
[1:21:47]
| You know, I think that would fail because the state, the elections are controlled in the states. And I don't think he could bring enough federal power to bear to stop it everywhere. But maybe he could disrupt things in a few critical purple states. I don't know. He could try to do that. Or after the election, he could say, fuck it, I'm dissolving Congress. We don't need a Congress anymore. And again, these are all clearly illegal, extra-constitutional things. The question is, how desperate will Donald Trump get? Now, honestly, though, based on his own words, you know, I hear people being alarmist about all of these worst-case scenarios. I don't think we're heading to any of them, because Donald Trump himself, unlike what you heard coming up in 2020 when he lost then, what we hear now from him is resignation. Not like resigning the presidency, but he seems to understand that he's probably going to lose the Congress. And he's given interviews where he's like, well, you know, I guess my next two years, my job is just to stop the Democrats from doing stuff.
|
Sam:
[1:23:06]
| That's going to be my job. And, yeah, they're going to investigate me and they're going to do whatever, and I'm just going to stop them as best I can. But, you know, he seems to recognize that, you know, he has talked about scenarios in which he loses, whereas in 2020 he did not. He really didn't.
|
Sam:
[1:23:30]
| He was talking about his loss being impossible, essentially. And how to react to that. And so I think Donald Trump is, like, I don't think he'll do the crazy stuff he did in 2020, because also it isn't him. He is very, very, very self-centered. It is not him that's losing. It's Congress that's losing. And I don't care. I mean, he said in another interview when he was asked how hard he was going to work to help the republicans running for election in congress he's like yeah i'll do some stuff, am i going to work as hard as i did in in 2024 no no because that that was about me this is about other people he said that yeah yeah, so so i honestly think that it's much more likely that it plays out. We have the election normally. The Democrats win the House and quite possibly win the Senate. And that we have a normal handover from one Congress to the next on January 3rd. And then the Democrats start doing their business. And then the other thing that gives him is it gives Donald Trump two years where he can spend every day complaining about how everything is the Democrats' fault, and it's not his fault.
|
Ed:
[1:24:54]
| Ha ha ha.
|
Sam:
[1:24:57]
| Yeah and i think he's fine with that and i think he's also yeah then people start bringing up the well that's the same question in 2028 is he going to be willing to leave is he going to run for a third term, i don't think he's going to i don't think i think the only reason he ran in 2024 is he thought he was going to run go to jail if he didn't, and and honestly this is one of those things where yeah, we probably did this in the worst way possible if we were going to put him in jail If we were going to arrest him, try and put him in jail, we needed to do so quickly, get that done and out of the way. The fact that we did it slowly gave him a chance to run for president and get out of it all. And I think that if, on the other hand, if we just left him alone, I think that would not, I think that would have been a miscarriage of justice because of all the bad things he's done. But honestly, if we'd just left him alone, he probably would not have run for president in 2024. And he would probably not be president again now. We'd have some other random Republican. We'd have Ted Cruz or somebody. Which, as bad as that would be, would be better than Donald Trump. Anyway.
|
Ed:
[1:26:16]
| Depends to what extent the people who come up with all of Trump's ideas would influence that one, too, because Trump is not smart enough to think of 90 percent of what he does.
|
Sam:
[1:26:27]
| Well, I think. Well, no, I mean, yes. But certain things, certain of the most destructive things are clearly him. Like tariffs is all Donald Trump. He's been obsessed with tariffs for decades.
|
Ed:
[1:26:41]
| He has a tariff master who I heard interviewed him. That guy takes credit for it. Trump wanted the tariffs. This guy made them.
|
Sam:
[1:26:50]
| Donald Trump has been obsessed with tariffs for decades, and he wanted to do that. Donald Trump has hated immigrants for decades, and he wanted to do that.
|
Sam:
[1:27:00]
| And, of course, for any of those areas, you have people who actually are a little bit smarter that can actually implement things and do things beyond the level of detail Donald Trump is capable of. Of. But Donald Trump is still the instigator of some of those things. Others, however, are clearly like he's implemented. I forget there was a tracker. I haven't looked at it in a long, long time, but there's a tracker on the Project 2025 stuff. And like 60 percent of it was already implemented in the first year. You know, they have and more was partially implemented. And, you know that was put together by heritage as a think tank effort and they have been producing one version or another of that document for decades and were ready, to hand it off to a republican president who was willing to actually do it absolutely in a way that like.
|
Sam:
[1:27:58]
| George W. Bush wasn't like, hey, I'm just going to implement Heritage's agenda. He implemented some of it. He agreed with them on some things. But George W. Bush was not just a, oh, whatever, I don't care about policy. I'll just do whatever these guys say. Donald Trump absolutely is. Like, he may care about a few high-level directions, but he doesn't care about detail at all. And so, yeah, he's happy to outsource that stuff. I don't think the same would be true of other Republicans who might have run for president.
|
Ed:
[1:28:33]
| Could be.
|
Sam:
[1:28:35]
| I think they would have had their own agendas. I think I would disapprove of almost all of their agendas. But if I look at Ted Cruz, would he have done all of the—I think most of the worst excesses of the Trump administration would not have been done by Ted Cruz. For instance would not have been done by ramashwami if he had won or or by jd vance or or any of these other folks i forget who even, was originally running against donald trump last time around because it was so clear so fast that donald trump was obviously going to win again rubio you know, ruby a president rubio would not be doing the things that donald trump did i mean he'd be doing other things that I disapprove of, but it would have been a very different presidency, you know?
|
Ed:
[1:29:30]
| Yeah.
|
Sam:
[1:29:31]
| Um, And I think that that's, yeah. And we'll see. But I think Donald Trump will not do any attempts to stay in power after this cycle because he thinks he's not in danger anymore, assuming he even lives. Because his health, you know, people have stopped talking about his health as much as they were six months ago, but it's still clearly not great. And also, he's just clearly, like, he's done with this job. Like, all he cares about is his stupid, like, ballroom and arch and all of those kinds of things. He doesn't really care about the policy stuff. He's happy to outsource it to other folks. He didn't really want to be president in 2016, let alone 2024. It's just, you know, he wants some of the trappings of it, but he doesn't want the actual job.
|
Ed:
[1:30:25]
| She loves the gold.
|
Sam:
[1:30:27]
| He loves the gold. Did you see this week, just as another aside, he is now trying, he's, talking about having the Oval Office declared a national monument so no one can take down his gold after he's gone.
|
Ed:
[1:30:43]
| All right. He could even accomplish that and it all takes is the next guy to reverse it and tear it all down. But they may like it too.
|
Sam:
[1:30:56]
| Yes, exactly.
|
Ed:
[1:30:58]
| Who doesn't like gold all over the room?
|
Sam:
[1:31:01]
| Oh, right. I see all the gold behind you in the room you're in right now, clearly.
|
Ed:
[1:31:06]
| The books behind me, the printing on them is mostly gold on the covers. It's a gold leaf.
|
Sam:
[1:31:11]
| There you go. You know, I'm not kidding. I actually see a couple gold things behind Ed, you know. So there you go. Ed is obviously a gold enthusiast.
|
Ed:
[1:31:21]
| Not really.
|
Sam:
[1:31:22]
| No, but the other thing, and just while we're on the pure speculation kind of things, is once we get past January 20th, we pass a constitutional threshold for J.D. Vance, where he can finish out Donald Trump's term and still have two terms of his own. And so I figure if there are ever going to be any shenanigans where Republicans start agreeing to efforts to remove Donald Trump early, they happen after January 20th. So, you know, people are talking about, oh, Donald Trump is declining physically and probably mentally as well. There are all kinds of—he's doing things that more and more Republicans disagree with. You know, his approval rating, even amongst Republicans, is plummeting. At some point, do Republicans get on board with impeachment for something or other? Yvonne seems to think that, yes, they might if things get bad enough. I kind of think still no. But after January 20th, you can start thinking about that.
|
Ed:
[1:32:42]
| It would probably be easier for them to remove him with the 20th. Is it the 25th Amendment? Is it he's disabled and therefore out of office?
|
Sam:
[1:32:52]
| So, no. Actually, impeachment is easier than the 25th. Because the 25th, the initial removal can be done by the vice president plus half of the cabinet, which is itself an insanely high bar. This is essentially a coup. If it happens in any situation other than the man is actually in a coma, that is a coup. Okay. But you start with the vice president and half the cabinet. But then if the president disputes it, so if the president submits a letter that says, no, actually, I'm fine, I can continue to be president, then it goes to Congress and you need two-thirds of both the House and the Senate, in order to override the president saying, oh, actually, I'm fine. So it's actually harder to do the 25th in terms of the amount of congressional support you need to make it stick. And so you would, honestly, I don't, for the 25th scenario to actually happen, you either need to have the president so disabled that he actually can't dispute it. He can't submit something to Congress to say, no, actually, I'm fine.
|
Sam:
[1:34:16]
| Or. You need him to be so not fine that a majority, of Republican senators and Republican House members and the cabinet and the vice president all.
|
Sam:
[1:34:35]
| Are saying, no, he's done for one reason or another. And the 25th is, you know, theoretically for disability, but the way these things are structured, as always, just like impeachment, what defines a disability? Having enough votes. You know, so, like, you know, they could declare that he's disabled simply because he won't stop talking about the ballroom, you know, if they wanted to. There doesn't have there's no sort of actual like oh there needs to be a medical certification of disability or no no no no no it's just you have enough votes in the right places but the bar for that is exceptionally high for a reason, you don't want this being used just as a coup because we don't like somebody, and it's it's really it's set up to be really really really difficult Now, could I see Republicans attempting this if it got bad enough, quote-unquote? Define bad enough. I mean, sure.
|
Ed:
[1:35:48]
| If they did, I could see them threatening him that if you fight this, bad things are going to happen, and that we remove your immunity and your ass goes to jail. And then he might not fight it, but I don't know. It's hard saying what's going to happen.
|
Sam:
[1:36:04]
| Yeah, well, the thing is, all of these scenarios are the crazy scenarios, right? And I mean, the reason we talk about crazy scenarios is they're kind of fun. But, you know, less so now than they used to be, because January 6th was a crazy scenario.
|
Sam:
[1:36:22]
| January 6th was one of those scenarios that we talked about and like, well, what if you had the situation where Congress was seriously thinking about not certifying the electoral results on January 6th? And how would that play out? Well, we kind of saw how that would play out. Congress didn't have the votes to actually not certify. So Donald Trump brought in more people. And Donald Trump's actual plan was to have Pence refuse the certification outright through his own power as president of the Senate. The only reason we didn't have that play out is that Pence just said no. He's like, no, no, no, I'm not doing that. You lost. And you know if pence had acted differently we would have had a much worse january 6th oh yeah yeah it's called insurrection, it just shows how delicate all of these steps are but it's still the unlike it unlikely maybe even isn't even strong enough for it these are all scenarios that are like, These are the crazy talk scenarios you talk about when you want to talk crazy talk scenarios. Like no one in their right mind would predict that any of this would play out this way.
|
Ed:
[1:37:41]
| And if it does.
|
Sam:
[1:37:43]
| The country's in a very, very, very bad place. It's already in a bad place to be clear, but much worse.
|
Ed:
[1:37:51]
| Yeah, but ultimately, republics and free societies depend upon leaders who are, whatever you agree or disagree, are basically men and women of integrity who don't do things. And so there are no laws governing the president's conduct because we assume that presidents would have at least a modicum of integrity. They haven't all been great or decent human beings, but all of them have had enough integrity not to do what this guy does.
|
Sam:
[1:38:21]
| Yeah. I mean, fundamentally, the problem with all of these systems is, any system based on rules rather than just the strongest person wins. Relies at its absolute core on the fact that people will submit to the rules, even if it's bad for themselves, they will recognize, okay, I lost this time. I will try again next time. I'm not going to try to do things to disrupt the fact that I lost. You know, the point of a democracy is people have to fundamentally feel that, yeah, if I lose this time, it's not the end of the world. I will compete again next time. And maybe next time I'll win.
|
Ed:
[1:39:17]
| We depend on people following the rules.
|
Sam:
[1:39:19]
| And people following the rules. And once people decide the rules don't matter, once people decide that there's no point in participating because they're going to lose anyway, once people decide that winning is a life or death matter, and if they don't win, they're going to die. And so, therefore, they have to do whatever it takes to win, no matter what. Once those things are true, the democracy is in deep trouble. And that's the problem we're in right now, is that, you know, we had a situation for a while that, you know, for the majority of the people, the majority of the time, they were willing to play by the rules. And they thought that, you know, there was value in the rules and that doing it this way made some sense. And if they lost this time, they'd win next time. And this was the right way to compete. There were obviously always exceptions and always people who were willing to be violent. And, you know, we had multiple assassinations in the 1960s. We've had, like, militant groups and militias throughout the entire history of the United States. But for the most part—.
|
Sam:
[1:40:36]
| Those things were true. Right now we've got, basically the group that's in power now is the group that's decided, might makes right, we don't care about the rest, we're going to win no matter what it takes. And that's just incredibly dangerous. And we've now had it, you know, we had his first presidency where he was stopped by a bunch of people who still believed in the system around him. This time around he has no such people around him. He made sure to get rid of them, and that's why it's incredibly dangerous. And even—and this goes back to what I was saying about, like, Democrats promising too much as well—even if Democrats end up with a trifecta after 2028—, They can't snap their fingers and bring things back to where they were. We've got an entire generation who has now grown up with Donald Trump being what's normal. And so, like, to build trust, you can't just put back the institutions as they were. You have to build something new, and you have to build trust from the beginning. And that's really hard. And, you know.
|
Sam:
[1:41:51]
| It's trite to say, but it's easier to destroy things than it is to build them. And we've had Donald Trump and his cronies systematically destroying, you know, institutions, confidence in institutions, confidence in the system, for the entire time they've been in power. And the Biden administration did not help restore that confidence very much because it was so concentrated on let's get back to normal that it didn't actually concentrate on, let's fix what, you know, let's fix it. And not that they necessarily could have anyway, because it is hard. You know, maybe they did as much as they could. But like, so things are very precarious and, you know, If we can get back to a good place, it's not going to be, oh, Democrats get a trifecta in 2028 and two years later, everything's great. It's not how it works.
|
Ed:
[1:42:55]
| That's not going to happen. Hopefully, we will resist the temptation to use the techniques that he's used, you know, to do things right, to do it by the rules and regulations and not just go in and say, okay, we're going to write a bunch of executive orders doing the way. You know, if we follow the same methodology that he's used, we're doomed. But there's a lot of Democrats out there who say, well, we just need to do it the same way, but for our side. That's not going to cut it.
|
Sam:
[1:43:26]
| Yeah. Unfortunately, you're in a hard place where if you do that, you cause one set of problems. If you don't do that, you cause another set of problems. And, you know, we may be into a period of time where we're bouncing back and forth between the two extremes. But I'm actually hoping that Trump, too, is actually bad enough, that the backlash is strong enough that, you know, the most—there are lots of pessimistic scenarios. I've just talked about a few of them. The most optimistic scenarios, end up with the backlash to Trump too ends up similar to what ended up getting us FDR. And we end up with an era of massive reforms that end up defining what the next century looks like.
|
Ed:
[1:44:38]
| We can hope.
|
Sam:
[1:44:40]
| We shall see. That depends on quite a lot. You need just the right people and just the right scenario. And it's probably just as unlikely as the bad unlikely scenarios. And we'll probably end up middling through somewhere, somewhere in the middle, muddling through somewhere in the middle. There you go. That's better. We'll see. Anyway, I think we're done, Ed.
|
Ed:
[1:45:02]
| I think we're probably done.
|
Sam:
[1:45:04]
| So let me do the let me do the stuff at the end while I do the little prequel stuff find something on the slack you want to highlight like Yvonne usually does.
|
Ed:
[1:45:14]
| Alright got it.
|
Sam:
[1:45:15]
| Okay well let me do the thing here go to curmudgeons-corner.com you can look at all our old episodes to actually look at old episodes you have to go to YouTube. We do post our live streams on YouTube. You can go there completely unedited raw, uncut, you know.
|
Sam:
[1:45:35]
| Messy stuff at the beginning before the beginning of the show where we're just trying to make sure our microphones are working, things like that. If you want that, go to YouTube. Find Curmudgeon's Corner on YouTube. Find the right Curmudgeon's Corner. There are multiple Curmudgeon's Corners on YouTube. You'll recognize ours because it's got my face on it and Yvonne's face on it. But anyway, you can go to YouTube for all that. On our website, you can see transcripts of our old shows, listen to our old shows, all that kind of stuff. You can find all the ways to contact Yvonne and I, And if you want to contact Dad, just contact me. I will relay the message. That's the best way because he's not on social media and stuff very much. And then importantly, we also have our link to our Patreon where you can give us money at various levels. We will mention you on the show. We will ring a bell. We will send you a postcard. We will send you a mug. And we will, at $2 a month or more, or if you ask us and we like you and we feel like it, We will invite you to the Commudgeons Corner Slack, where Yvonne and I and a bunch of others are sharing links, chatting, doing things throughout the week. And Ed has a highlight from the Slack this week to make you want to join. Go ahead, Ed.
|
Ed:
[1:46:46]
| Okay. Well, I got two, actually. One was there was an interview with Ezra Klein that I think is really well worth listening to. It covered a little of everything with, not Zuckerberg, the... Oh, shoot.
|
Sam:
[1:47:01]
| He was talking to Bill Gates.
|
Ed:
[1:47:03]
| Yeah, yeah. The founder of MS, of Microsoft. Bill Gates, yeah. Wonderful interview, and they covered a little bit of everything up to and including Gates' relationships with Epstein. So kind of an interesting interview. Anybody who's interested might want to go to it. The other thing, as you mentioned just today, that our solar system only has about 6 or 7 billion years instead of 10 billion before it collapses.
|
Sam:
[1:47:31]
| Well, they thought it was going to be hundreds of billions.
|
Ed:
[1:47:34]
| Yeah, yeah. But it's much, much closer, only a few, you know, 7 to 10 billion at this point.
|
Sam:
[1:47:40]
| Now, I will note that the hundreds of billions was for the solar system, not necessarily for Earth. Because there's a certain point the sun swells into a red giant and people think Earth will be right on the edge where it's probably going to be absorbed by the sun but even if it's not absorbed, it'll be cooked. It'll be cooked, right? And apparently this analysis showed and the rest of the solar system would continue after that so the outer planets and such but what they determined was at that point where the Earth was getting swallowed, the outer planets would also become unstable. And so the whole solar system would apparently, like, cease.
|
Ed:
[1:48:28]
| Well, fortunately, we won't be around to see that happen, probably.
|
Sam:
[1:48:30]
| Oh, speak for yourself, Ed. I intend to be here a few billion years.
|
Ed:
[1:48:35]
| I've only got a few more.
|
Sam:
[1:48:39]
| Well, surely that's a few billion, right? A few million, at least?
|
Ed:
[1:48:42]
| I don't think so.
|
Sam:
[1:48:44]
| No?
|
Ed:
[1:48:45]
| Okay. I think it's next week, or shortly after that, it's my 85th birthday. The statistics show that very few of us die after 85 but 100 die sometime after before.
|
Sam:
[1:48:59]
| Well congratulations on your upcoming birthday, and uh you know i i guess i probably won't be around to see the end of the solar system either but you know still you know it's somewhat disturbing You know, that's a lot less billion than they said before. Yeah.
|
Ed:
[1:49:21]
| Well, billions used to be big number, trillions, it's now, you know.
|
Sam:
[1:49:26]
| Now it's nothing. And you think about, like, although you think about the entire history of the Earth, well, the universe is only supposedly around 13 billion years old. The, you know, the Earth is only, like, half that or something like that. And humanity is only, what, a couple million, if that?
|
Ed:
[1:49:52]
| Oh, well, it depends on how you define Homo sapiens, but yeah, a million to two at the outside, probably 100,000 as a civilization type of thing.
|
Sam:
[1:50:02]
| Well, yeah, only a few hundred thousand civilization. The species, about a million. Things that you could roughly say are human, but not homo sapien a little bit further than back than that. But yeah, we're talking a blip, you know, in these timeframes. So it's like, Oh, we've only got 3 billion instead of a hundred billion. Well, human beings have been around a, you know, a tiny, tiny fraction of a billion anyway. So like, you know, will we even be around in a, in a million, let alone, $1 billion, let alone $3 billion to see the end of the solar system. Well, at the rate we're going, we're of course going to be replaced by our AI systems within the next, what, they said within three, five years?
|
Ed:
[1:50:58]
| That was in today's news is that Mr. Hegseth has created a department of autonomous weaponry where weapons will go out and fight their own battles. So yeah, that's kind of scary. Yeah. Especially run by this administration.
|
Sam:
[1:51:17]
| So, yeah, we're not going to have to worry about the $3 billion. Our robot ancestors will worry about the $3 billion for us. So, there you go. We're done. Thank you for joining us again, Ed. Always appreciate it when you fill in. I should mention it as well that I had given Emily first dibs to co-host the next time Yvonne was out. But she was not able to do so this weekend. She had a very busy weekend. I also still owe her a Curmudgeon's Corner mug because I'm stupid and lazy and keep forgetting. I may have to make her mind pretty soon if you don't get that done. No, no, no. Then I'd owe you one. Then I'd need to get you one. No, literally, it would take me five minutes to do the clicks to order her a new mug and get it going. I just keep forgetting, except when I'm recording the show. You'll get a mug eventually, Emily. I promise. Someday. Anyway. Anyway, she still has first dibs. Next time Yvonne is out, I'll ask her again. We'll see how it goes. But Ed jumped in this time. So thank you very much, Ed. Always good to have you on the show. And it's time to say goodbye.
|
Ed:
[1:52:33]
| Goodbye.
|
Sam:
[1:52:35]
| Goodbye, Ed.
|
Ed:
[1:52:36]
| Goodbye.
|
Sam:
[1:53:08]
| I'm hitting stop. Goodbye.
|
Ed:
[1:53:10]
| Goodbye.
| |
|
