Automated Transcript
Sam:
[0:03]
| Okay shall we go yeah okay here it comes.
|
Ivan:
[0:09]
| Oh come on you.
|
Sam:
[0:11]
| Stupid i'm trying i'm trying not you, Welcome to Curmudgeon's Corner for Saturday, November 9th, 2026. It's just after 19 UTC as we're starting to record. And I'm Sam Minter. Yvonne Bo is here. Hello, Yvonne. Hi. He's looking very puzzled on the video screen here. He's looking very puzzled.
|
Ivan:
[1:01]
| I'm just living the dream, Sam.
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Sam:
[1:04]
| Living the dream of puzzlement and confusion.
|
Ivan:
[1:09]
| Yeah.
|
Sam:
[1:10]
| That is a dream that sometimes happens.
|
Ivan:
[1:13]
| Dream. The impossible dream.
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Sam:
[1:17]
| Uh-huh. So obviously we had a week that was eventful. Some things happened. So Ivan's just going to sing this whole episode, so I will be quiet and let him sing.
|
Ivan:
[1:32]
| Esto es vivir. Esto es soñar. never heard man from la mancha.
|
Sam:
[1:39]
| I i've i've heard i recognized the song i probably would have taken if you'd asked me where is it from i probably would have struggled to answer correctly but as soon as you said it i'm like oh yeah of course that's what.
|
Ivan:
[1:54]
| I mean it is a good song for this week to be honest with you.
|
Sam:
[1:58]
| Okay yes i.
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Ivan:
[1:59]
| Because it is living the impossible dream look there we have have a black senator, from mississippi about to win.
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Sam:
[2:10]
| About to win it's not officially called.
|
Ivan:
[2:13]
| Yet looking like it's going that way since reconstruction yep i mean if that's not the impossible dream dream i don't know what the fuck is because if you if i would have asked you sam, I'll bet you $1,000 we have a senator, an African-American senator from Mississippi, in the Senate in this election cycle. Would you have taken me up? You know, I'll bet you $1,000. Would you would you have taken me up a bet saying easy money?
|
Sam:
[2:49]
| Well, it depends how long ago. I mean, last.
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Ivan:
[2:52]
| Week I said six months ago.
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Sam:
[2:55]
| Six months.
|
Ivan:
[2:55]
| No, you would have been. Yeah, you're a psycho. Here, easy money. Here, let me just steal your money.
|
Sam:
[3:05]
| Yes, so obviously...
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Ivan:
[3:07]
| So that's how impossible that was.
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Sam:
[3:10]
| Yes.
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Ivan:
[3:10]
| Well, let me go further.
|
Sam:
[3:12]
| Okay, go ahead.
|
Ivan:
[3:12]
| If I had said six months to you ago, Sam, every statewide race in Texas will be won by Democrats in a landslide. You would have said Listen, you would have said, dude We need to get you Interned into a psychiatric institution Yes You would have said, Am I wrong? You would have said I'm completely insane.
|
Sam:
[3:42]
| Six months. Well, hell, even a week ago.
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Ivan:
[3:45]
| Three months ago.
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Sam:
[3:45]
| No, no. Even a week ago when we talked.
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Ivan:
[3:47]
| Even a week ago.
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Sam:
[3:48]
| Like winning was within the realm of possibility.
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Ivan:
[3:51]
| Right, right, right.
|
Sam:
[3:52]
| But we expected if there were wins for them to be close.
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Ivan:
[3:55]
| It's going to be tight. It's going to be close. The error, the thing. We're undercounting the MAGA support. And you know what we undercounted, Sam? We didn't undercount MAGA support. What we undercounted is how fucking pissed off the entire country is at Donald Trump.
|
Sam:
[4:14]
| And to be fair, when we spoke last week, we talked about the odds of it going the other way. We did not speak about the odds of a blowout, but there have been, a number of the people who do the odds and the stats and have talked about that and actually put it in terms of the average result here that we probably expect is a decent Democratic win. But there's a good chance, you know, the Republicans may pull off an upset. But that's about equal to the chance of the Democrats having an absolute blowout.
|
Ivan:
[4:52]
| Right.
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Sam:
[4:52]
| That's where we ended up.
|
Ivan:
[4:54]
| I mean, but yeah, but Sam, when we said blowout, this exceeded what you and I expected to be a blowout. If you if you would have if I would if I would ask you, Sam, what considers a blowout? Well, Tallarico wins, and we get, you know, Kansas, and, you know, we get North Carolina. You know, that's that's the extent of the blowout, really.
|
Sam:
[5:26]
| I think the upper end of the Senate range, as people were saying, was 56, which is what it looks like it might be. However, the part that is less. The way the part that was less anticipated, like that was the very, very upper end of the Senate.
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Ivan:
[5:42]
| But that was exactly that was like. But what is like what is the dream scenario?
|
Sam:
[5:47]
| That's what the absolute that's what the absolute blowout on the Senate was. But I think what was completely underestimated in places was state and local stuff, like all the governorships, all the state legislatures, all of the, you know, down ballot things in a variety of states. You mentioned Texas, all the statewide offices, plus they took the state house. They almost took the state Senate. You know, this is the level of blowout.
|
Ivan:
[6:15]
| None of the gerrymanders for the Republicans worked.
|
Sam:
[6:18]
| I think there was one that worked. Out of all of them nationwide. But that's a tiny percentage.
|
Ivan:
[6:24]
| Exactly. In many cases, they backfired.
|
Sam:
[6:28]
| Well, and this is what people, back when they were originally doing it, people said they are increasing the chances of a dummy mander, which is essentially what happened here. Which is when they did the redistricting, it assumed that their gains in 2024 would hold. Not only did their gains in 2024 not hold, but they went the other way. And so they did a lot of places where in order to get another district, they borrowed from heavily our districts. Yeah. And to try to make another district more R and more competitive. But in the process, they took that heavily R district and made it a less R district, which was then easier to flip. And again, it takes this kind of blowout to do that kind of thing. I mean, they are increasing the risk, but, you know, we had shifts of 20 plus percent in some districts. And if you look at certain demographics, like young white men moved like 50 percent.
|
Ivan:
[7:48]
| 50 points. Yeah.
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Sam:
[7:50]
| And it's like.
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Ivan:
[7:53]
| I guess they're not that stupid. They were stupid, but not that stupid. These young, low-information people, that many of them didn't were probably what maybe in high school like when trump won the first time right because think eight years right they're like 12. Think about it you're a 20 year old you're 12 years old right yeah so you vote the first time and you're like thinking ah you know we're gonna screw blah blah blah we'll vote for this guy he'll make everything better right and then you vote for him and he, actually as i wrote in my sub stack two weeks ago and i i calculated how bad, he really made it especially for lower income people okay.
|
Sam:
[8:41]
| I just have to help you on the self-promotion here.
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Ivan:
[8:44]
| Every time.
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Sam:
[8:45]
| You mention my sub stack give the actual way to get to it.
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Ivan:
[8:49]
| Oh fuck give the name I don't even remember how to get, I mean, I have to look it up every time. Okay. So my, I have to, okay. I have to, I know I see all these people. They do it every time they mention it's data plainly. Okay. All right.
|
Sam:
[9:05]
| Dot substack.com.
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Ivan:
[9:06]
| Yes. Correct. Let's see. It's substack.com slash slash add data plainly. Okay. So.
|
Sam:
[9:16]
| So I had it reversed. You don't have a sub domain. Yeah.
|
Ivan:
[9:19]
| Yeah. Hey, go ahead. where I calculated and showed why Trump 2 feels different than Trump 1, okay? So I did a very detailed analysis trying to explain, because everybody talks about, oh, inflation, blah, blah, blah. It's just a couple of points. It's no big deal. Listen, it may be no big deal to people making $150,000 plus a year, okay? But the reality is that if you're in the lowest 20%, of income, okay? It was a butt-fucking, okay? Of epic proportions, okay? You went from, really, in your budget where you were, In 2024, you know, I had done this calculation where, well, let me go back to 2020. After, when the pandemic started, one of the things that happened, all this aid arrived to the lowest 20%, okay? It made them flush with money. Compared to where in 2018, maybe after covering everything that they had to pay for, you know, basics, food, gas, whatever.
|
Ivan:
[10:28]
| With assistance, they had $1,000 left over. That's with assistance, okay? Because one of the things that a lot of these surveys show is that, well, they spend more than they make. And that's true because they get assistance or they're retired. They're using their savings, okay? One or the other, okay? But that went from $1,000 to $4,000 in 2020. And hell, 2021, with the bills that Biden passed, it was Build Back Better is $4,695. But what happened? Hey, you know what? Manchin pulled the rug out from Build Back Better. Okay? Number one thing. Okay? That dropped people from $4,695 to $883. You got to remember one thing that we forget. But don't you remember that we had reached a point in 2021 where child poverty had reached the lowest it'd been in, I don't know, since we kept track?
|
Sam:
[11:28]
| Yeah.
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Ivan:
[11:28]
| We had the lowest rate of child poverty. It was that damn child tax credit that Biden passed. Okay?
|
Sam:
[11:34]
| Yeah. It dropped it in half instantly.
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Ivan:
[11:36]
| Yes. And you know what Manchin did with that vote? He fucking fucked them all back again. And then you add the Ukraine war impact. You know, that that killed with fuel and everything. People wound up going from having, at the end of the year, 4,600 bucks after spending everything down to having 800 bucks in one year. From 4,600 to 800 bucks. When you're making $20,000, $30,000 a year and you went down to that, okay, that hurt, okay? And that was a big reason why you look at the surveys. Why did Biden get hit? That. That hit hard, okay? And it did get better, okay? A little bit, all right? It improved to about 1,200 by the end of the year because the economy got better, because Biden did a lot of things. But it wasn't great, okay? So vote him out, right? So what does Trump and the Republicans do getting in charge? They take that 1,200, first year 2025, they drop it down to 100 bucks.
|
Ivan:
[12:51]
| And then you think 2026, they're in the red. Sam, they had not been in the red in this entire decade plus. They're in the red. They are worse off now than ever. This is why so many people got fed up. It causes all these low information voters to wake the fuck up because all the other time, whatever, I'm working, we can ignore all this shit, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But, dude, when all of a sudden you are, they put these people, Sam, at the economic breaking point. Literally, 2026 put the lowest third of Americans at the economic breaking point. And that's what broke MAGA fever of all the fucking things, Sam.
|
Sam:
[13:41]
| Yeah.
|
Ivan:
[13:42]
| That's it. There's no other explanation because you can't tell me that it was like, ah, you know, the, the, the immigration or this or that. Dude, they did all this shit before. They did all of this before. They telegraphed all this before. You knew about the trans rights of this and that and whatever. No. But what changed is that in Trump's first term, he coasted into an economy that Obama had set up and left in really good shape. Number one. And the second thing is that he had a lot of people around him that clawed back his worst instincts. Two things. They knew that they just couldn't act like idiots and fuck everything up, okay? And launch like a stupid war with, you know, those people really reeled him in. This time around, none of those people were around. None of them. So everything that anybody with normal political instincts would hold him back and say, yo, dude, yeah, yeah, that sounds great, you know, in the campaign where you're talking about it, But you actually do it, and everybody's going to be angry. No, nobody held them back on any of those. None of them.
|
Ivan:
[15:00]
| I mean, because they all added up. Hey, let's go out and send thugs on the street and fucking murder people on the streets. Okay? To arrest, you know, for immigration. Hey, let's go out and just launch a war against Iran, which we have no idea how to end. Hey, let's remove temporary protected status from the Venezuelans that were one of your key constituencies that helped you drive support. These are some of the seats in the house that they were trying to turn. Listen, the Venezuelans, which originally in Miami helped them carry Florida by like, you know, one of the groups that helped them carry by a ton, they barely squeaked out Florida. And the biggest mistake the fucking Democrats did is they didn't invest a single fucking dime in Florida because they would have flipped Florida too.
|
Sam:
[15:47]
| Right.
|
Ivan:
[15:47]
| That is the biggest fucking mistake.
|
Sam:
[15:50]
| Yeah. And the first few hours of election night, I was thinking it looked like there were going to be three super close states that, you know, we would have said that about Florida, Mississippi and Alabama. Alabama turned out not to be that close. The Republican won it handily in the end. Mississippi, it looks like the Democrats pulling out.
|
Ivan:
[16:10]
| I'm going to win. Yeah.
|
Sam:
[16:11]
| And win after all.
|
Ivan:
[16:13]
| Because another thing, you know, the thing about the bad, bad political instincts that these people have no shield. Listen, these people got so conditioned by Trump that they could say anything and it had no impact. OK, look, I 100 percent believe that that that idiot in Mississippi lost over that pick another protein fucking comment that she made.
|
Sam:
[16:36]
| It's close enough. Absolutely. that was a big factor and more than enough to make the difference.
|
Ivan:
[16:43]
| I mean, how the fuck could you tell your constituents in the United States that they can't afford beef and you tell them, ah, pick another protein? Are you fucking out of your mind? I mean, anybody that had a sane political advisor around them, would have, would have, would have told them that they're out of their minds. But these people got so used to just saying anything and it having no impact. Okay.
|
Sam:
[17:20]
| Well, we talked about this last week, too. It's saying anything with no impact, but more specifically, they have never in their lives in many of these red states been in a situation where the general election mattered. It was only the primaries that mattered. And that's a different way of appealing to people.
|
Ivan:
[17:42]
| Yes.
|
Sam:
[17:42]
| You know, just fundamentally from top to bottom. It's different.
|
Ivan:
[17:47]
| Sam, even if you are in a primary.
|
Sam:
[17:49]
| For the love of God. Oh, I know. The protein statement is the stupidest thing in the world. And from what I understand, too, it was not, just to be clear, it was not a planned thing. It was an off-the-calf answer to a thing.
|
Ivan:
[18:01]
| Okay, but Sam, this is the kind of shit that you cannot do. You cannot do. To not be saying that kind of shit.
|
Sam:
[18:08]
| Yes.
|
Ivan:
[18:11]
| I mean, for the love of God, if you want to win at least, you can't be saying that kind of shit.
|
Sam:
[18:18]
| Yes.
|
Ivan:
[18:20]
| So, Republican after Republican. Look at Ramaswamy with fucking dragging out from apparently living homeless in a car, Amy Acton's mom, to record a commercial that was so despicable that even the Republicans said, Fuck you. This is just disgusting.
|
Sam:
[18:43]
| Indeed. Yes.
|
Ivan:
[18:45]
| And then getting his ass blown out, you know, getting the doors blown off at the election.
|
Sam:
[18:50]
| Well, you know, another part of this is, you know, we've talked in the past, about sort of people living in liberal bubbles. What you see here is the opposite of that. A lot of these candidates on the right have been so insulated in their own bubbles that they can't imagine, the world outside, you know. And so I believe Ramaswamy and his team actually thought this would help, for instance, you know. They put together the commercial. They went out and sought this person. They reviewed it. They vetted it. This wasn't like, you know, an accident. I mean, even compared to the protein comment, like the protein comment was she was asked a question and she gave a bad answer. The commercial in Ohio was planned and money spent on it.
|
Ivan:
[19:46]
| It was planned, money spent on it. And not just that. Apparently, every advisor to Ramaswamy told him, kept trying to tell him to not do it.
|
Sam:
[19:56]
| Well, at least the advisors had some sense.
|
Ivan:
[19:59]
| Yes. but not him but.
|
Sam:
[20:03]
| Well, similarly, there was that that doctor who made the last minute ad, defending himself for sending his patients to collections for like fifty dollar bills and things like that that got some of them in trouble with the law as well, like which had been, a contention in the race. And but then he just he put it on ad like i mean his purpose was to defend himself and say this was actually good but the result is you're highlighting one of your weaknesses in the last five minutes of the campaign, it's like what are you doing you know so yeah, so shall we back up and talk about some of the i mean we've talked about some of the particulars already i mean the bottom line was across the board blowout. There may be so many examples in so many places, Senate governor state houses.
|
Ivan:
[21:00]
| I was looking at the governor's map. And this is the one thing, you know, we kept, you know, we, you, you made the comment about, you know, and we've made the comment repeatedly about the, the 50 state strategy. Right. Okay. And, you know, shit, all of a sudden, Sam, we got the fucking, we, We have the damn governorships.
|
Sam:
[21:25]
| And I heard an interview with Howard Dean just in the last couple of days talking about this because people were asking, does this vindicate your 50 states strategy? And instead of just a flat out yes, he was like, yes, but they have to follow up properly. Because the important part is we're taking advantage of that. There was a wave here that was fueled by the factors that you listed earlier. Bad economy, the Republicans in charge acting like they didn't care about that, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. There is a moment here that we have to take advantage of. And part of this is the 50-state strategy is not just, hey, we're going to pay attention at the senatorial and House level in all 50 states. It's no. You have to build that bench up from the bottom every year, all the time. You have to be looking at school board races and mayors and city councils and all of these guys, dog catcher. You know, you have to be looking at all of these all the time and building your benches. And you can't go dormant in between elections either. You can't be like, okay, well, we won. We're going to, we'll worry about communication again in two years. You know, you, you can't do that. You have to constantly be, be pushing your stuff all the time.
|
Sam:
[22:52]
| But, but yeah, no, I think it is a, it, One of the keys here that people have pointed out, too, in terms of the South, and the Democrats had given up the South for dead for decades.
|
Ivan:
[23:09]
| Right.
|
Sam:
[23:10]
| And it turns out that, okay, yes, you have the macro things in play as well, and I'm not going to diminish the importance of them. But you also add to that the fact that you legitimately go and recruit good people for it. And we'll probably talk a little bit later about like the whole Democratic leadership, Schumer and Jeffries and all that. But one of the things that they apparently did do and was part of the effort this time around is they very actively recruited people in these states. And we're like, we want people who aren't politicians. We want doctors. We want scientists. We want like, you know, farmers, whatever. We want people who have, you know, legitimate careers in the community, not politicians. And we want to recruit them and get them going and push them in these in these states.
|
Sam:
[24:01]
| And it worked. It's a recruiting effort to like, hey, let's compete and let's compete for real in all of these places. And that was important. And like you said, a little bit more of a push in Florida, they could have gotten there. A little bit more of a push in Alabama, they might have gotten there too. A few other states that—and there's demographic changes also at play here that are slowly catching up to the white male Republican establishments who've been in charge there for a long time. But you have to put all these things together. And you have to be in there to play. And they were, for the most part. And I think what they're clocking on to now is, hey—, This can be true next time. This can be true in 2028 for the Electoral College, too.
|
Ivan:
[24:54]
| Right, right.
|
Sam:
[24:56]
| You know, we just have to play the game right for next time around. You know, I mean, frankly, I mean, getting a governor and a senator in Texas is one thing. But if you get Texas in the Electoral College, it's kind of game over.
|
Ivan:
[25:14]
| It's game over. Totally. It's game over. It's totally game over. It's totally game over. I mean, it's like the Republicans don't have a shot, period. And here's the thing, given Trump's instincts, I think he will actively sabotage whoever is going to try to be his successor.
|
Sam:
[25:35]
| You can definitely see that.
|
Ivan:
[25:37]
| He's going to actively sabotage it. I mean, Sam, this drubbing, what is his first act?
|
Sam:
[25:45]
| He shut off the ballroom.
|
Ivan:
[25:47]
| Okay but but what was his first exact change in his team in order to better miller deal with this oh yes you put in you put in the angel of darkness now, in place of you know suzy wiles who's just a well-polished gopher.
|
Sam:
[26:07]
| Well suzy wiles stated opinion was like i'm not going to be gatekeeper to Donald Trump. He gets what he wants. Period. That's it. The difference, I think, and my wife was arguing this morning that swapping in Stephen Miller won't make that much of a difference because he was already deputy chief of staff. He already had the ear of the president. And I can see that to some degree. But also, unlike Susie Wiles, he's not going to be a neutral conduit. He's going to very actively manage what gets to Donald Trump. You know, so... I don't know. Like, are we shifting from the drubbing to, like, what this means for the next two years? Or is there anything more we want to say about actually what happened on election night first?
|
Ivan:
[26:59]
| I mean, I don't know. But it, I mean, let's summarize. I mean, we've talked about it around. But let's let's what was if you go back into and you summarize, hey, what was the what was the expected case? OK, versus what actually happened. OK, if you have to you have to summarize it, what would what would you what would you say that you thought was what you expected versus what happened?
|
Sam:
[27:33]
| The expected case. and i'm trying to remember because i don't have it in front of me sort of the the the, mathematical models and curves and blah blah blah but was, you know we talked about the odds last week sort of 80 ish chance that the democrats would take the house 60 some percent chance they would take the senate so it was expected that the most likely, result was that they would take the house and Senate. But it was expected to be a lot closer. I mean, on the Senate, maybe 53 seats, maybe 54. I don't think, you know, like I said, 56 was at the outside range. It wasn't considered impossible, but it was considered sort of the best possible outcome. And it looks like we're hitting the best possible outcome. On the House, it was like, okay, they'll take a majority. They'll probably take a decent majority, maybe gain 30 seats, something like that. So they end up in like, you know, 520 something, 530 something seats, something like that. They're over 560 now, it's looking like.
|
Ivan:
[28:42]
| Right.
|
Sam:
[28:42]
| With a possibility of 570. You know, and you mentioned these other things like governorships and stuff like that. They were expected to do pretty well there, but they did better than anybody expected there as well.
|
Ivan:
[28:57]
| Oh, yeah. We got the Iowa governor.
|
Sam:
[29:00]
| In state houses, they've gained more state legislature seats than even in the 1974 post-Watergate wave.
|
Ivan:
[29:13]
| We've got the majority of governorships, right? Right now. Correct?
|
Sam:
[29:17]
| Yes, I believe so.
|
Ivan:
[29:18]
| If I remember looking at them back. Yeah.
|
Sam:
[29:19]
| Yeah. And we gained trifectas in a whole bunch of states. We broke Republican supermajorities in a couple other states.
|
Ivan:
[29:29]
| Even in Florida, the supermajority is broken.
|
Sam:
[29:32]
| Here in Washington, the races aren't entirely final yet, but it looks like the Democrats are going to gain a supermajority in the House, which will change a bunch of things about how they operate. So gains everywhere, dramatic gains everywhere. I think that the biggest overall takeaway or the biggest overall, I guess, surprise was that there was no bright spot for the Republicans anywhere. Well, Florida, Florida, they managed to hold on in Florida. But even in Florida, they lost ground. Yeah.
|
Ivan:
[30:13]
| And it was and it was bare. They squeaked it out.
|
Sam:
[30:16]
| OK, right.
|
Ivan:
[30:17]
| I mean, that's the reality. They squeaked it out. They thought they were going to gain seats in the House with the gerrymander, and they got none of them. And they lost ground in the state House and Senate.
|
Sam:
[30:29]
| Right. Yeah. I mean, Florida is a bright spot for the Republicans only in the sense that they didn't actually lose everything. They still lost some. They lost ground, but they managed to hold on by the skin of their teeth just a little bit. And that also, you know, Democrats got to be looking at that saying, hey, next time around, you know.
|
Ivan:
[31:01]
| It just look and I said this before that it really pisses me off with the attitude that national Democrats took to Florida because they keep misunderstanding Florida, by the way. OK, which is the biggest problem. One of the things that I shared on Slack is how, especially in Florida, that the Hispanic vote is not a monolith, okay? You know, you've got a very big split between what is the vote from the Cuban-Americans, versus the rest of the Hispanic groups. But even more so, like, the split between how the Cubans vote and Puerto Ricans vote, okay? In which even though I know that I know the Puerto Ricans turned out a lot more than usual, but the reality is that the Democratic Party doesn't have a good strategy to really drive turnout for, those groups that really could be the ones that really drive the vote. I think as much as I personally like Angie Nixon, okay, probably for this state, she was too on the left okay to win uh.
|
Sam:
[32:16]
| Again though she came damn close.
|
Ivan:
[32:18]
| She could probably have won.
|
Sam:
[32:19]
| With the right support.
|
Ivan:
[32:20]
| Even but but but but but but it could have been easier.
|
Sam:
[32:24]
| To win with someone else.
|
Ivan:
[32:26]
| Exactly okay and by the way that's no diss on mg nixon i think she did great and i i personally like her very much this isn't you know sometimes people it's like well you're no no i'm trying to get a democratic candidate who, you know, you know, pick a person that amongst the group, the constituent groups would get the most support. Okay. That's all I'm saying. And, you know, I, I don't know why we keep not putting Hispanics like, Texas did at the top of the ticket where you've got Gene Ina Hossa as the damn governor. We don't do that in Florida. I mean, which makes no sense whatsoever. We put by the way, again, nothing against David Jolly, but another damn white guy that we put up over there that is on our side. So I really appreciate him. But the reality is that's not going to fucking excite anybody to vote for him, okay? You know, we wound up with Gina Hinojosa as governor of Texas. And my God, is that not one of the things that makes me, saying that just made me just smile to say that.
|
Sam:
[33:46]
| Well, and along those lines, along the representation lines, one of the things that I, you know, this whole week, first of all like.
|
Ivan:
[33:56]
| My wait let me correct something okay Gina Hinojosa okay Jesus Christ just fucking you.
|
Sam:
[34:03]
| Know well this is like El Saeed pronouncing his name the full correct Arabic way in his acceptance speech laughing, Which I'm not even going to attempt. I have no— I'm not even going to attempt.
|
Ivan:
[34:16]
| And I loved it when he said so.
|
Sam:
[34:17]
| Yes, exactly.
|
Ivan:
[34:20]
| Maybe we could have Trump try to say it like, you know, it's trying to pronounce it.
|
Sam:
[34:26]
| In terms of representation, though, one of the things I would say— first of all, my TikTok feed for days was just people celebrating and being happy and all of this kind of stuff, and it was just very emotional. But one particular variety of that in Georgia.
|
Ivan:
[34:43]
| Yeah.
|
Sam:
[34:45]
| See, I'm choking up just saying it. Was black women going, my governor's name is Keisha.
|
Ivan:
[34:53]
| Yes. Yes. Yes.
|
Sam:
[34:58]
| And and basically talking about how their entire lives excuse me, their entire lives they were getting told that because of their black sounding names they could never be a success and if you wanted to be successful you had to have a name that would pass as white.
|
Ivan:
[35:21]
| Of course i got a russian name so what the.
|
Sam:
[35:23]
| Fuck my.
|
Ivan:
[35:24]
| Teeth fucking christ the hell my parents have lost their marbles.
|
Sam:
[35:29]
| Well i was the.
|
Ivan:
[35:30]
| Fourth i was the fourth kid they were like they were kind of like grasping at straw so okay we'll pass.
|
Sam:
[35:36]
| But yeah like i i've saw dozens of these videos, It makes a huge difference to people.
|
Ivan:
[35:44]
| Yeah. Yeah. Oh, yeah. It's so great. It's fucking great.
|
Sam:
[35:52]
| Yeah.
|
Ivan:
[35:53]
| I noticed that for whatever reason, my at-rest heart rate dropped during my sleep, dropped to the lowest it's been in six months. I mean, Sam, I think it was on Wednesday. It dropped down to 59. And it's a 59. I mean, I had never had a reading under 60. It dropped to 59.
|
Sam:
[36:19]
| Good job. Good job. Yeah, the mood swing was palpable. Palpable?
|
Ivan:
[36:27]
| Palpable?
|
Sam:
[36:29]
| Whatever that word is. Palpable. And, you know, it was similar when Biden won a few years back.
|
Ivan:
[36:38]
| Yeah.
|
Sam:
[36:39]
| But, you know, you could tell.
|
Ivan:
[36:41]
| This is bigger.
|
Sam:
[36:42]
| I think so. This is bigger.
|
Ivan:
[36:45]
| This is bigger.
|
Sam:
[36:46]
| You know, you could feel the weight lifting off people and the stress lifting off.
|
Ivan:
[36:51]
| Because even that win wasn't as convincing, you know?
|
Sam:
[36:57]
| They still kept a lot of... It was a lot closer than people wanted. Yeah. Because people, if you remember that time around, polls once again underestimated Donald Trump and Biden was expected to win pretty easily. And instead, it was really close. He still won, but it was much closer than people had hoped. And yeah, so... Yeah, there was a vibe shift that was instant when this happened. And, of course, I'm perceiving this from the point of view of, you know, a left-leaning, left-er-leaning person.
|
Ivan:
[37:40]
| Well, Sam, okay, speaking of that, how were the conservatives feeling after this? How were the ultra-maga feeling after this, Sam?
|
Sam:
[37:51]
| They seemed kind of upset. Well, shell-shocked, actually, is most, there was a lot of, like, they absolutely could not believe this was happening kind of thing, you know, was the vibe overall. I saw a lot of denial.
|
Ivan:
[38:07]
| Hey, we spent all this time fucking over everybody and giving an F you to them. Having our president campaigned, our President Trump campaigned at the end where his closing argument to the nation was a rambling speech about the reflecting pool. So and how, you know.
|
Sam:
[38:34]
| First of all, let me be specific. I said denial. One thing that was absent was the actual kind of election denial we saw in 2020.
|
Ivan:
[38:45]
| True.
|
Sam:
[38:47]
| And let's talk about that more in a second, but on the reactions, The, I saw, I've seen a number of montages of this. I only actually turned on Fox for myself for a few minutes, but like the few minutes I did turn on Fox for myself, there was some lady, I don't even know who it was, trying to put this down to Trump's advisors, pushed him in the wrong direction, you know, and you know this is not the real Donald Trump this is not like you know it was clearly people you know, anyway she was just trying to blame it on anything other than Donald Trump but then you know in these other montages of people well first of all there was like shock there was, one person one of the Fox News blondes I don't even know was saying so whatever it's like they're you.
|
Ivan:
[39:48]
| Know What are those.
|
Sam:
[39:50]
| From the clone factory for the production? Was like, so it turns out people actually don't like war.
|
Ivan:
[40:02]
| Oh!
|
Sam:
[40:03]
| And they don't like when their gas price goes up. And this really mattered to people.
|
Ivan:
[40:11]
| You know, and like I've said before, and also on my substack at that substack slash at Plainly, data Plainly, where I can't pronounce it, I'm going to have to fucking write it. I noticed that people that promote their sub stack have it written down in front of them so they can say it. I'm going to have to start to. Where I talked about the fact that the difference between the price increase back with Biden versus this one, the big difference is Trump hasn't given a shit. And then he's trying to blame, you know, imaginary animals, whatever the fuck he can blame. Oh, it's the Ukraine war. No, asshole. Ukraine war has been going on for four or five years and nothing to do with it. Look at the graph. The graph is you went to war against Iran, price of gas went up. Simple. It's not fucking Ukraine, you dumbass.
|
Sam:
[41:04]
| And then, he decided.
|
Ivan:
[41:07]
| Hey, oh, he thought this would go over well. I'm going to go buy diesel from Putin.
|
Sam:
[41:14]
| Right.
|
Ivan:
[41:15]
| To fix the problem. Another brilliant idea that you're like, what? You know, the only guy I am pretty confident. I know he has a lot of yes men around, but there is no way any of them told him this was a good idea. OK, the only fucking guy that thought this was a good idea, obviously, was Putin because it was going to make him look. Oh, I convinced this moron, to go out and say this. I'm like, I'm like, I can't. Oh, perfect.
|
Sam:
[41:50]
| Yeah. So, so anyway.
|
Ivan:
[41:52]
| Can you imagine how much, how hard Putin have to be laughing after that meeting? Can you imagine you hang up the phone? You're Putin. And this guy agrees to this. You hang up the phone. He's with the staffers over there. They're all like. This idiot, we got him again.
|
Sam:
[42:13]
| So we also had a number of folks like Ted Cruz out there talking about the ass whooping. I think DeSantis talked about this being existential.
|
Ivan:
[42:27]
| Well, he's angling now to be president.
|
Sam:
[42:30]
| He's going to run for president again. Yeah, yeah. And then a number of... It was just when you see these clips on Fox, there are just so many people sort of just shaking their head, looking sad. Yeah. Looking like they can't believe what just happened, talking about, you know, having to reassess X, Y, or Z. And what you see also is the beginnings, like some of them are actually outright blaming Donald Trump, and yelling about the things that Donald Trump has done wrong with the war, with tariffs, with his obsession over the reflecting pool. Others are not. And what you're seeing...
|
Ivan:
[43:12]
| The Cheesecake Factory.
|
Sam:
[43:13]
| And what you're seeing, though, is, of course, okay, now we really are fighting about who gets to take over in the destruction after the absolute implosion of Donald Trump's MAGA movement. And so maybe that's a good time to take a break and then come back and talk about what the next two years might look like. Does that sound good, Yvonne? Yes.
|
Ivan:
[43:39]
| Does that sound good?
|
Sam:
[43:40]
| Okay. Now, I will say, before I hit the break, this break will not be one. But Alex has produced another one of the old Sam and Yvonne dialogues. I told him that if they're over four minutes long, I'll put them at the end of the show. So I'm going to put this one at the end of the show. Okay. He's sad about this, but I will put it at the end rather than now and do a, yeah, he's sad.
|
Sam:
[44:11]
| Yvonne, should I give in to him and do the video now? It's four minutes. Four minutes and eight seconds. Yvonne says, no, I'm sorry. It will play at the end of the show, at the end of the show after the credits. There's another dialogue and there's another video that goes with it.
|
Sam:
[44:27]
| But in the meantime, here we go. here's a quick break and we'll come back and obviously i'm not doing movies this week this is a very newsy week we're going to do news the whole show and we'll start talking about, what the next two years can potentially look like based on this, since we you know, we have this blue tsunami but we still have donald trump so here we go.
|
Sam:
[45:48]
| Remembering dad do do, do okay we are back I will say I'll put that at the end but he has been putting lots of effort into these he pulled another all nighter last night preparing this one and it was ready like you know 10 minutes before we were getting ready to start anyway, I'll put it at the end for now the next two years.
|
Sam:
[46:14]
| There are quite a few different aspects of this to talk about. But sort of the fundamental is, at least at a national level, obviously there are all of these different states that are doing different things, and maybe we'll talk about that in a little bit. But on a national level, you're going to have Democrats with sizable majorities in both houses of Congress, but not big enough to override vetoes. And not big enough to override a filibuster in the Senate, and you've got Donald Trump still president. So what's the right strategy for what they should do? And there's been lots of talk about sort of the balance between, you know, doing investigations, should we impeach Donald Trump again, all this kind of stuff, versus trying to push legislation, because lots of people are saying, hey, we got to, quote unquote, get things done. The Democrats have been given a chance, but we have to get things done. We have to prove ourselves to go forward. But getting things done is actually hard when you've got the Republican president. So what's the right strategy? Because the expectation has got to be like, hey, you passed something, Donald Trump's not going to Now, there are some possible exceptions to that we can talk about.
|
Ivan:
[47:39]
| Here is the thing, right? Donald Trump is so transactional and that, you know what? Right now, he's not going to give a fuck about, he has never given a fuck about traditional Republicanism or any of this shit. He will do whatever he feels is convenient right now for him.
|
Sam:
[47:59]
| For him.
|
Ivan:
[47:59]
| Right.
|
Sam:
[48:00]
| And he actually wants a legacy of getting things done.
|
Ivan:
[48:03]
| Right.
|
Sam:
[48:04]
| Now, of course, mostly he wants his arch and his ballroom and stuff.
|
Ivan:
[48:09]
| But, you know, if I would say that, I'll tell you this, let me throw you a deal. Hey, hey, Trump, listen, I know you want to finish that fucking ballroom. Let me throw you a bone here. All right, we'll give you the money, but we're going to get back the ACA subsidies. And we're also going to throw in that child tax credit thing that we talked about. Yeah. Yeah, we're going to add that. But you know what? We'll fund your ballroom. That's the transactional shit that he loves.
|
Sam:
[48:41]
| I think you could even go further than that.
|
Ivan:
[48:44]
| Honestly. I think you can go further. But that's what I'm saying. That's how you approach it. I'm like, hey.
|
Sam:
[48:50]
| No, I think this is a question of how you play this. And I think there are a couple of different possibilities there. And one of the, like, people have been talking about, hey, we want, I think these people are wrong, but there are people out there who are saying this shows that people want sort of back to normal, work across the aisle, get things done kind of stuff. I don't think that's the message that anybody should take out of this. On the other hand, they should take opportunities where they arise. And sort of where I'm where I'm thinking of that, is like, I don't think if the Democrats start out in January, by let's open negotiations with the Republicans to see what we think we can do together, then I'm like, I'm going to be banging my head against the wall. I think that is completely wrong. They should instead be like, hey, let's figure out what agenda we as a Democratic caucus want to push through.
|
Sam:
[49:55]
| We've got Democrats, significant majorities in both houses. Let's see what we can push through, knowing that it may not become law, knowing that Donald Trump may veto it. But I don't think they should be negotiating with Republicans. I think they should be saying, hey, here's our proposal. If any Republicans want to get on board... You're welcome. But we're not going to water down our proposal in the hopes of getting one or two Republican votes. Let's not do that.
|
Ivan:
[50:25]
| No, no, no, no. And forget about those assholes. We don't need them. Okay?
|
Sam:
[50:29]
| Right. Exactly.
|
Ivan:
[50:31]
| We don't fucking need them. No.
|
Sam:
[50:32]
| But what we need is Trump. But for Donald Trump specifically, we can say, hey, we've just wrote this wonderful universal health care law. Maybe it's Medicare for all. Maybe it's something else. Maybe it's just Obamacare plus. Who the fuck knows what it is?
|
Ivan:
[50:48]
| Right, right, right, right.
|
Sam:
[50:50]
| But just say, Donald, here it is. It's done. If you sign it, it can be called Trumpcare.
|
Ivan:
[50:58]
| Trumpcare. Yeah. Trumpcare. And we'll give you a billion for that ballroom. Okay.
|
Sam:
[51:04]
| And we'll give you a billion for the ballroom. And maybe we'll let you build your damn arch.
|
Ivan:
[51:09]
| Maybe we'll even build that arch.
|
Sam:
[51:11]
| We'll promise to leave the gold in the Oval Office for a couple years.
|
Ivan:
[51:15]
| Right yeah that's it sure and i, do you realize that i that is more important to him than anything else yes you could fucking leverage that shit to the hilt and just give him that shit and he might just sign anything.
|
Sam:
[51:36]
| You'll get another fife of peace prize.
|
Ivan:
[51:39]
| Yeah sure well.
|
Sam:
[51:42]
| We'll we'll give you a congressional medal of honor something you know.
|
Ivan:
[51:45]
| Yeah there you there you go yes this is the kind.
|
Sam:
[51:49]
| Of thing that could potentially get donald trump's signature on a bill because he wants to show he if he can sign the bill and be like i did this he doesn't give a shit about.
|
Ivan:
[52:02]
| What you gotta listen if i'm the democrats i'm going you know who i'm meeting with first i'm going to talk to tim cook, I'm fucking meeting with Tim Cook because let me tell you something. If there is a guy during both Trump terms that has gotten everything that he has needed from fucking the Trump administration, it's been fucking Tim Cook. Okay? I'm going to Tim's office. Like, Tim, just lay it out for us. We think we know, but just lay it out for me. How the fuck did you manipulate Trump into all of this shit? Boom, boom, boom. Just take his notes. You know, go. All right. Let's go. Come on. Let's go. Just just whatever. But I think the fucking golden orb, the golden orb of this stuff.
|
Sam:
[52:49]
| Though. Yes, yes. The golden orb. The key to all of this stuff, though, is there should be not one ounce of negotiation on actual policy that matters. Fuck that shit. Nope, nope, nope, nope, nope, not one thing.
|
Ivan:
[53:05]
| By the way, and we're impeaching Hegseth just because, you know what? I don't want to impeach Hegseth and Kennedy. Both of them. Like, right away. These two assholes need to be impeached.
|
Sam:
[53:17]
| Yes. I'm getting slow. It took me a second to figure out which candidate you meant. But yes. Anyway, but yeah, no. But if you want to flatter Donald Trump up and down to get him to actually lend his signature, that's fine. And actually, you don't even need to do that. But remember, just a few months ago, Congress passed that housing bill. Donald Trump did not like that housing bill. He lobbied against it. He tried to get them not to pass it. He did not veto it. He let it become law without his signature, which is what happens if the president just waits. They don't sign it and they don't veto it. It becomes law by default.
|
Ivan:
[54:01]
| It just becomes law.
|
Sam:
[54:02]
| And you could have that in a whole bunch of other places. So the Democrats can play this right, potentially. Right. You know, now I'm not saying that'll definitely happen. Let's say it doesn't. Let's say Donald Trump vetoes every single fucking thing. Well, you still, then you can point to, hey, we tried to do this. And, and by the way, you have to do this right as well. Like you can't be passing some big ass omnibus bill with thousands of millions of things in it and lots of compromises. No, you pass short, understandable bills on individual topics, and then you make Donald Trump veto them. Now, there's also the question of the filibuster. Like, if the Senate filibusters them and you don't get rid of the filibuster, you don't even get that far. So, and I know there's an argument, like, I've made the argument for a long time about getting rid of a filibuster, but do you really get rid of a filibuster in a year that you don't have the presidency either? So even if you pass the filibuster, you still can't get it into law? Maybe.
|
Ivan:
[55:11]
| Maybe.
|
Sam:
[55:12]
| Because then you make the veto happen as opposed to the bill dying in an obscure congressional process that people don't understand.
|
Ivan:
[55:22]
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. You make the veto happen, which is actually advantageous. You know, look, getting him to veto stuff that people want is actually advantageous.
|
Sam:
[55:31]
| Yes. And so, yeah, kill the damn filibuster.
|
Ivan:
[55:35]
| Yeah.
|
Sam:
[55:35]
| And I know this is still going to be controversial in the Senate and they may not do it. But hell, at a time when you potentially have 56 votes, this is the time to do it. I mean, it would be even better to do it when a time you had a veto proof or filibuster proof majority anyway. We're not quite there. But, you know, last time, pretty much, the end of the filibuster didn't happen because of Manchin and Sinema and because Joe Biden didn't really want to end the filibuster either. You don't have any of those anymore.
|
Ivan:
[56:07]
| Right. We don't have any of that shit.
|
Sam:
[56:10]
| And the majority is big enough that you don't have Fetterman gumming up the works either.
|
Ivan:
[56:14]
| Yeah, yeah.
|
Sam:
[56:14]
| I was worried about that for a while.
|
Ivan:
[56:15]
| Fetterman could go fuck himself. Yeah, whatever.
|
Sam:
[56:18]
| Yeah. Like, there was worries.
|
Ivan:
[56:20]
| I'm worried. No, I'm not worried. But I do think, by the way, Fetterman is going to try to pull a Costanza.
|
Sam:
[56:29]
| Oh, just stop showing up.
|
Ivan:
[56:31]
| No, no, no, no, no. Costanza one time, like, resigned.
|
Sam:
[56:34]
| Right.
|
Ivan:
[56:36]
| And then showed up like the next day like he didn't.
|
Sam:
[56:41]
| Okay, yes, I remember that. I never watched Seinfeld regularly, but I remember that.
|
Ivan:
[56:46]
| Yeah, but the clips are around. So there was this one time that Costanzo went and like he went and said, fuck you, I quit, blah, blah, blah, or was fired, I can't remember. But then it was Friday, then Monday he just showed up like nothing happened. And I think, I fully expect Futterman to show up in the Democratic caucus like, hey, what's up you know we're going going liberal huh yeah and everybody's going to be looking at him like excuse me what.
|
Sam:
[57:14]
| Right so i i don't know we'll see how we'll see how that plays out, and part of this of course let's hit the jeffries and schumer part of it is who leadership is going to be now odds on bets are it's going to be jeffrey and schumer, and and like there's there's no serious opposition to Jeffries in the House. Even people like AOC are like, yeah, it's Jeffries.
|
Sam:
[57:41]
| And in the Senate, there have been a couple people saying that they might contest it, but pretty much everybody thinks in the end it's going to be Schumer. Like, you can debate whether or not you think this should be the right thing to do, but it almost certainly is what it's going to be.
|
Sam:
[57:59]
| And I've said before, I don't think either of these two men are the right men for this job at this time, but it's who we have. Now, people have also said, well, you've got to understand what this job is. And it's not what people sometimes want it to be. Like, it is about like, helping pick candidates for the next time around. It is about raising money. It is around, you know, herding the cats of the caucus and trying to get through the best thing you can given who you have, etc. It's not about necessarily the communication things that people always criticize the Democrats about. People look at Jeffries and are like, he's a horrible communicator. People look at Schumer and I'm like, he's prioritizing the wrong things. To some degree, they're driven by their caucus, though, and their caucus is going to be different this time around than it was last time. I still think that in an ideal world, Schumer would be replaced by somebody who's a bit more with it and active, and Jeffreys would be replaced by somebody a little bit more charismatic and more able to communicate. But it seems like that's not what we're going to get.
|
Ivan:
[59:11]
| Yeah, the thing about Jeffreys isn't like what he's for. The thing about Jeffreys is he's not very charismatic. Okay, I'm not worried about Jeffreys in terms of positions. Yeah, with Schumer, well, I think one thing. Schumer's probably going to get, yeah, he may be there as the leader, but he's going to get slapped around by people basically saying good with the fucking program.
|
Sam:
[59:35]
| I think you're right. You're going to get that. And actually, just to be clear, officially, he has not yet said he's in the running this time around, I believe. But it's fully expected that he will be. And all of this, by the way, although it won't officially be decided until January, in real life, it will be decided within the next two to three weeks. Because the way this works is that.
|
Sam:
[1:00:09]
| The caucus of the majority party meets and votes on who they collectively will support long before you get to the official votes in the new Congress that make it real. Now, and we don't anticipate, obviously we had like the Republicans craziness on picking a speaker last time around. That is not normal.
|
Sam:
[1:00:33]
| Normally you know what's going to happen months in advance here because in mid-november the caucuses are going to meet they're going to decide on who they're going to support and then the votes in january are just the official everybody in the caucus votes, and does what they do and sometimes there are a few protest votes but generally speaking that's trivial and not important and, You don't have, like, a real contest in January, except, again, the Republicans last time around were a complete mess. That's not supposed to happen, you know. So that all is going to be determined in the next couple weeks, and it's fully expected to be Jeffrey and Schumer. So I think the right battle isn't like, let's fight and try to get somebody else in place. It's try to influence them to be the best they possibly can in those roles. And I think the main thing, first of all, what we were just talking about, about legislative strategy, I think that's a big part of it, is like, hey, let's start passing things. Let's start passing things and making the president veto them. Or maybe we can get them on board on a couple things. But don't compromise the policy in order to get it passed, because you don't need one fucking Republican to pass anything.
|
Ivan:
[1:01:56]
| Nope.
|
Sam:
[1:01:57]
| Other than Donald Trump. You don't need Donald Trump to pass it. You need Donald Trump to make it into law. And getting it into law is a success, but getting him to veto it, a popular bill that does good things is also a success.
|
Ivan:
[1:02:12]
| It's also a success. Yeah.
|
Sam:
[1:02:13]
| As long as you can get him... As long as you can communicate it properly, which has also been a problem for the Democrats. But the new batch, the new batch of people they got includes some very good communicators.
|
Ivan:
[1:02:27]
| Yeah. So this is the thing that you've got in this, man, this group, that is the one thing, damn it, that this group has that we really haven't had from the from the most. How do I say public Democrats like in in in a group we've had like one we had AOC as one but she didn't really have that many around her right right shit man, there is such a strong batch of between the governors the the the senators and the new legislatures that damn, these guys could really, really.
|
Sam:
[1:03:05]
| And they're all young.
|
Ivan:
[1:03:07]
| And they're all young.
|
Sam:
[1:03:08]
| You know, but yeah, we've got Tallarico, we've got El Saeed, we've got Ossoff. Ossoff's been there a little while, but he's really been showing his chops lately.
|
Ivan:
[1:03:18]
| Oh, yeah.
|
Sam:
[1:03:19]
| We've got a bunch of these folks who are really, really good at communicating in the modern way.
|
Ivan:
[1:03:27]
| Yes.
|
Sam:
[1:03:28]
| They're not sitting there making a speech on the floor and then going off and having a little press conference in the halls of the Capitol.
|
Ivan:
[1:03:37]
| Let me tell you something. I'm still shocked today to find out that there was a video, that I saw a while back of some dude just casually going out on a skateboard and drinking juice.
|
Sam:
[1:03:52]
| Yep, yep.
|
Ivan:
[1:03:54]
| Bottle.
|
Sam:
[1:03:55]
| Yeah, he's imitating the TikTok thing from a few years ago, but yes, the politician just did that this week.
|
Ivan:
[1:04:01]
| Yeah, but, Shit, I mean, it's not like, you know, some people imitate stuff, and it's kind of, it doesn't pass.
|
Sam:
[1:04:13]
| It looks stupid.
|
Ivan:
[1:04:14]
| Yeah, exactly. Not in this guy's case.
|
Sam:
[1:04:18]
| Who was that?
|
Ivan:
[1:04:19]
| It's the Iowa governor.
|
Sam:
[1:04:20]
| Iowa governor, yes. Sam's, right? Rob Sam's.
|
Ivan:
[1:04:23]
| Rob Sam's.
|
Sam:
[1:04:24]
| Who, by the way, was a runway model. Yeah, he was a runway model.
|
Ivan:
[1:04:30]
| And some people were passing around some pictures of him that weren't the best and he went on his oh no no that's not my best picture these are my best pictures I was like whoa shit whoa yeah.
|
Sam:
[1:04:45]
| I've been seeing videos today of.
|
Ivan:
[1:04:46]
| Like him on the runway.
|
Sam:
[1:04:48]
| You know swaggering and all these outfits and all this kind of stuff.
|
Ivan:
[1:04:52]
| Yeah yeah shit I was intimidated I was like Damn. I'm like, yeah, no, I was intimidated a little bit and impressed at the same time. It was like, fuck, Jesus. Like, dude. Okay.
|
Sam:
[1:05:11]
| Yeah.
|
Ivan:
[1:05:13]
| And let's just say that he actually, he looks like Donald Trump thinks he looks like.
|
Sam:
[1:05:22]
| Right. But yeah, no, we've got some good communicators. So I've got like, I'm crossing my fingers that between the new blood in both the House and the Senate and the good communicators that have been added to the team, that we'll be able to actually do something effective in Congress rather than, you know, like the worry is always like everyone's saying, we got to get things done. We got to get things done. We got to get things done. But you have, you know, a president who can veto things, and there are certain previous Congresses that were reluctant to push the limits and would be like, well, this can't get past a veto, so we might as well not even try, or, this can't get past a filibuster, so we won't try unless we can water it down so we can get like 10 Republicans to agree to it too, you know, or whatever.
|
Ivan:
[1:06:19]
| The veto can work both ways, okay? And I think, you know, I think that the Democrats have, if Trump is going to be vetoing shit, they have to use that their way. Look, FDR used that effectively in the opposite way. FDR, you know, vetoed so much shit. You know, the numbers are staggering. It's staggering to think that actually a legislator, that they could pass that many bills. We don't do that shit anymore.
|
Sam:
[1:06:49]
| And he had a democratic congress most of the time.
|
Ivan:
[1:06:52]
| And he had a democratic, exactly Yeah.
|
Sam:
[1:06:55]
| Now, we talked about the legislative side. The other half, of course, is the investigative side. And, you know, the question about investigation and impeachment and all of this kind of stuff, I replied to a thread that Yvonne was on, actually. Like, my take on this, because people are like, well, what's the point of impeachment? It's just going to fail in the Senate anyway, right? You're not going to remove him from office. Now, we've talked on the show before. There are a few scenarios where maybe you actually could even remove him in the Senate, but those are still kind of wild. So let's talk about the more realistic scenarios first. I think the right balance is you do the aggressive investigations. And people have been saying, well, you know, do you concentrate on the legislative stuff or do you concentrate on investigations? No, you fucking do both. You do both.
|
Ivan:
[1:07:50]
| You walk and chew gum at the same time, assholes.
|
Sam:
[1:07:54]
| And you do both aggressively.
|
Ivan:
[1:07:55]
| Jesus fucking Christ.
|
Sam:
[1:07:57]
| From day one, you do both aggressively. But I think the investigations have to be done with the eye towards, what you're doing is you're putting a public spotlight on the corruption, on the abuse of power, on the incompetence, on everything along those lines. You're not necessarily going after, hey, we want to queue up a criminal investigation, although, If we've got the goods on that and we get a Democratic president in 2028, then absolutely we should go full-fledged, go for it on anything where the crimes were committed.
|
Ivan:
[1:08:42]
| But look, all the investigations of all these fucking people. But listen, I don't think that you should wait on impeaching Hegseth and Kennedy.
|
Sam:
[1:08:52]
| Well, the thing with Hegseth is there's already a motion on the table filed by a Republican that's going to hit in a couple weeks.
|
Sam:
[1:09:01]
| But let me go back toward my main point was, though, you have to focus the investigations on making the public case. And frankly, the January 6th investigations were a showcase of how to do that right. OK, like the usual congressional hearings where they have some witness in and, you know, they divide up time between the Republicans and Democrats and they ask questions. And it's mostly like this, the the the congressional people talking and not that much about the answers. And you sort of let the Republicans run roughshod over. Yeah. No, you have to make a show out of it. You have to properly make a show out of it. You have to properly make the case in a way that is compelling to the American people, and they can see what you're talking about. Polls said in this midterm that a huge percentage of people—, Corruption was their number one or number two issue. Okay, so double down on that. God knows there's so much of it. You know, show every bit of it to the full light of day and do it in a compelling way. And the compelling way is an important part of it. It's not just, oh, we did a six-month investigation and in the end of it we released a 500-page report. No!
|
Sam:
[1:10:25]
| No, no, no. You have to do it in a compelling way that reaches the public, that reaches those voters who aren't like news junkies, you know? And then in terms of actual impeachments, I think you have to play—we have learned that if you impeach in the House and send it to the Senate and the Senate acquits, then the way that reads to the general population is, oh, they were acquitted. What a waste of time.
|
Sam:
[1:11:00]
| So I think you need to have the situation. You have to watch what Republican votes do you or do you not have. For somebody like Hegseth, the goddamn impeachment motion was put in by a Republican to start with. There are a whole bunch of Republicans who are unhappy with him. You might actually be able to convict him in the Senate. I'm not sure they've got the numbers, but the whip count has to be part of the equation when you decide whether or not to even vote on it in the House. Like, if you don't have the votes to convict in the Senate, I think you make the case in the House. And you can have Senate investigations too, but maybe you don't pull the trigger on the actual impeachment unless you are at least very, very damn close to having the votes you need in the Senate. Because you can get all of the power of the investigations without the theater of losing in the Senate and failing to get the conviction. If you think you can get the conviction, it's a different story. But if you're not going to be able to get the conviction, the Senate trial is a loser. You know, and I think that applies to cabinet members as well as the president, you know.
|
Ivan:
[1:12:21]
| No, I think you have to do the math. But I do think, by the way, that on the Hegseth one, especially because Republicans are looking for two for scapegoats for for this law.
|
Sam:
[1:12:31]
| They're looking for scapegoats and they're looking to separate themselves as well to position themselves for next.
|
Ivan:
[1:12:37]
| Right. Exactly. I think that I think that this was a slam dunk. Like, this bastard better resign because otherwise he's going to be out on his ass, like, in an embarrassing way.
|
Sam:
[1:12:46]
| Well, and there is talk that Trump has been asking people, should I get rid of Hexa? You know, should I? And apparently the latest word is he's not, he hasn't flipped over to that decision yet, but he's wavering.
|
Ivan:
[1:13:02]
| He's wavering.
|
Sam:
[1:13:03]
| And we know, like, bottom line on Trump is what gets him to actually pull the trigger on someone. It's not that they're evil. He likes that. It's not that they're incompetent. That's normal.
|
Ivan:
[1:13:16]
| So they embarrass him. Or they didn't cut him in. They embarrass him or they didn't cut him into the deal.
|
Sam:
[1:13:21]
| Those are the two reasons. Those are the two reasons. And if so, if Hegseth starts being more embarrassing because, like, you've got impeachment hearings going on in the House.
|
Ivan:
[1:13:33]
| Then I'll just get rid of him.
|
Sam:
[1:13:35]
| Then I'll just get rid of him. Yeah.
|
Ivan:
[1:13:36]
| Yep.
|
Sam:
[1:13:37]
| Okay. Anything more particular, Congress? I have another couple things to hit, but... Anything more about how Congress should react, how people should react, or how Donald Trump himself—oh, Donald Trump himself. We'll do that. We talked a little bit about how he might be willing to deal with the Democratic Congress. He's actually already been telegraphing that for weeks. Like, he's been saying, my two jobs in the last two years—because he was assuming he was going to lose for, like, at least a month— are, A, defend myself against investigations, and B, see if I can make some deals with the Democrats. So he's ready to, like, try to make some deals. And I think, again, the key on deals is do deals that can make him feel good, but don't actually concede a damn thing on policy, which is fairly easy with him, as we discussed. But the other side of that is lots of people thinking, okay, he's actually just going to lash out. And this is going to be like the worst two years we've ever seen, because he's going to re-escalate in Iran. Maybe he'll say, well, I got nothing to lose now. Let's double down on sending.
|
Sam:
[1:14:52]
| Ice into the streets and even more militarized than they are before. We'll call out the National Guard on any protests, XYZ, blah, blah, blah, and basically just doubled down doing as much evil as he possibly can through executive orders for the next two years. What do you think, Yvonne?
|
Ivan:
[1:15:10]
| I think that Donald Trump is going to take up... Obama's offer and starred hgtv show.
|
Sam:
[1:15:21]
| You know honestly the the biggest vibe i get from donald trump lately and we're talking like, last basically ever since iran fell apart, the vibe doesn't give a fuck anymore he doesn't want to be there yeah he's done and i've said before he never wanted he didn't want to be president in 2016, he just wanted to make money off the deal and then he surprised himself by winning, and in and he didn't really want to run again in 2024 either he just felt like he had to to keep out of jail.
|
Ivan:
[1:15:52]
| Which he was right.
|
Sam:
[1:15:54]
| Which he was right i and because he felt he was wronged in 2020 and he really won in 2020 right wow whatever bullshit like he convinced himself of because sometimes it seems like he really did know he lost in 2020 sometimes it thinks he's deluded whatever, so he doesn't really want to be president. And so, you know, the scenarios run from, on the one hand, maybe he doubles down and is all evil, but I don't think so because he just doesn't care anymore. So he just lets his staff run things and basically continues to double down on the ballroom and the arch and the reflecting pool and tearing down that park to make his new pro-level golf course in Washington and all of this kind of bullshit. And he doubles down on that because that's what he cares about. By the time we're done, the entire Oval Office will be gold-plated, including the furniture and the rugs, you know? That kind of crap. That's one scenario. Or the other scenario is he actually gets bored enough and he's like, you know, J.D. can have it. And he just leaves.
|
Ivan:
[1:17:10]
| Listen, if he thinks that he may be instilling legal jeopardy, the solution is very simple. It's due to Nixon's deal.
|
Sam:
[1:17:17]
| Well, I joked, like, he'll pardon himself. He wouldn't trust J.D. to do it.
|
Ivan:
[1:17:23]
| Well, he'll pardon himself, but then actually ask them to do it again, just in case somebody challenges it.
|
Sam:
[1:17:27]
| Well, he also has potential state liability and other things too. But yeah, yeah, no.
|
Ivan:
[1:17:33]
| But he'll move to Florida.
|
Sam:
[1:17:36]
| Yeah. Yeah. Or Russia.
|
Ivan:
[1:17:39]
| Too cold.
|
Sam:
[1:17:40]
| Too cold.
|
Ivan:
[1:17:41]
| Not too cold.
|
Sam:
[1:17:42]
| Crimea?
|
Ivan:
[1:17:43]
| I don't think the Qataris want him anyway. Yeah, not any more. I don't think any of those guys. I think if the Qataris could fucking take the plane back, I think they would right now.
|
Sam:
[1:17:55]
| He can live on the plane.
|
Ivan:
[1:17:57]
| There you go.
|
Sam:
[1:17:58]
| No, but there's always been the ego question of Donald Trump would never, ever resign because it's like losing, and he would never do that. But if you if he figures out a way to frame it in his head as but hasn't he quit things.
|
Ivan:
[1:18:18]
| I mean he's quit things yeah right i mean i think he's quit things.
|
Sam:
[1:18:23]
| He just has to figure out a way to spin it as a as a win right, you know it's a question of spin not reality i mean how many times did he go bankrupt like yeah all of his failed businesses but every single one of those failed businesses, he has some sort of justification why it wasn't his fault and actually he did everything right and he was awesome. As long as he can spin it that way, then you could see that.
|
Ivan:
[1:18:50]
| He always says he won even when he lost. So what the hell is another go at it.
|
Sam:
[1:18:57]
| And of course this completely puts aside potential health issues or things like that that force the issue even more. Which, again, could well be like you know that that's a factor too he's clearly not the man he was even just a few years ago so.
|
Ivan:
[1:19:16]
| I mean look he he is sounding terrible he is having trouble putting any coherent sentence together in public, i mean he's just rambling on and saying just dumb shit i mean And I can't remember the one that he said the other day that was just like, fuck, you're like, what the hell? You can't even pronounce words.
|
Sam:
[1:19:43]
| Right. And as we've said many times, he's never been great at any of this stuff. He wasn't particularly coherent 15 years ago or 10 years ago.
|
Ivan:
[1:19:54]
| Yeah, but Jesus Christ.
|
Sam:
[1:19:54]
| But it's getting worse. But it's getting worse. Yeah. Okay. The other ramification of this, unless you have something else you want to throw in there real quick.
|
Ivan:
[1:20:05]
| No.
|
Sam:
[1:20:05]
| Um, is I, I, I, subsequently a lot of other people have said it too, but I think I was one of the first, at least one of the first I saw to note that with the additional states that the Democrats now have trifectas in, it puts into play something that's been seen as sort of like another pipe dream, that it was like, ah, okay. That's kind of gimmick. That can't possibly work. They're a long way from it. It'll never happen. The National Popular Vote Interstate Compact.
|
Ivan:
[1:20:41]
| Okay. Ah, yes.
|
Sam:
[1:20:43]
| For those of you who don't know, to actually get rid of the Electoral College, you need a constitutional amendment. The bar for doing that is very, very high. You need, you know, super majorities in both houses of Congress. You need a super majority of states to ratify it independently. All of this kind of stuff. It's very, very, very hard. As a way around that, a number of years back, people came up with this idea, that basically you have, each individual state has complete and total autonomy on how electors are chosen. They aren't even required to have elections.
|
Sam:
[1:21:26]
| As I've said before, like, well, originally for like a good part of the history of the country, electors were appointed by state legislatures. They could be appointed by the governor. I've said for a while it would be interesting if we appointed them by lottery. There are all kinds of ways you can appoint electors. We already have Maine and Nebraska doing it, not winner-take-all for the whole state, but instead— Right, apportion them. They apportion them. Some of it's by congressional districts. Some of it's by the whole state. So states can do whatever the hell they want. And so the basic idea of this was that any individual state could say, instead of appointing the electors by the election, by having an election in our state, we will appoint our electors by the result of the national popular vote. Now, no state is going to do this by themselves because that would just say, okay, our state isn't going to matter. Nobody's going to come to us. It's just weird to say like, hey, we're going to give our electors by national popular vote when everybody else is having elections in their state. Obviously, you'd still have to have an election in the state to contribute to the national popular vote. It just wouldn't be how you determine the electors.
|
Sam:
[1:22:47]
| So what this compact did was have states, agree to do this, but only if enough other states had already signed on to the compact that they have 270 electoral votes. So therefore, whoever wins the national popular vote would actually win the Electoral College, and you'd be done.
|
Sam:
[1:23:14]
| As of now, they have 220 electoral votes of states who have already passed the required legislation to do this. With the new states that gained democratic trifectas, we now have, there are enough of those states where if they chose to do so, they could push it over the edge. And so this gives the possibility, the possibility that by the time we get to 2028, we don't have an electoral college anymore. Now to do that you need and i was trying to real quickly let me let me get up my my post where i listed the states da da da replies there we go, you know this sucks okay hold on i have to find the stupid thing replies here we go here we go.
|
Sam:
[1:24:21]
| Okay the particular states in question. Arizona, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan. If those four states were to pass this out of their state legislatures with their governor's signing, electoral college is effectively dead. It would still exist in reality. Like, it's just all of those states would vote together automatically and make it so that the winner is really the winner of the national popular vote. This is probably the best chance to actually eliminate the Electoral College as a real mechanism of choosing presidents that we've had in many decades. Now, so far, I have not heard, you know, the incoming governments from those four states talking about this. So it's only a theoretical possibility. It may or may not happen, but it is possible. And I would argue that, You know, it is, I think at the moment, this probably would benefit Democrats, but frankly, come on, it's the right fucking thing to do anyway. Oh, no, Yvonne's mute again. Yvonne is mute, just like that other week where we couldn't hear Yvonne anymore.
|
Ivan:
[1:25:43]
| Well, but wait, wait.
|
Sam:
[1:25:44]
| Wait, this time you're back.
|
Ivan:
[1:25:47]
| Yeah, this time it was, I don't know, this time I'm not sure why.
|
Sam:
[1:25:50]
| You actually muted yourself.
|
Ivan:
[1:25:52]
| Not sure how. Oh, I know how. There's a track, okay, there's a trackpad here on my desk. I think I accidentally touched it.
|
Sam:
[1:26:02]
| Okay. So anyway, this is a possibility. And I'll say one thing before I get your thoughts on it, Yvonne. Excuse me. One thought on it. I have spent practically the last three weeks arguing with Claude about esoteric mathematical details about the models I want to do on ElectionGraphs.com. If they get rid of the goddamn electoral college, that is all completely wasted. And in fact, the whole reason for existence of ElectionGraphs.com goes away because it's all about the electoral college and how it does things. So like, you know, if they actually killed Electoral College, I may kill electiongraphs.com as stupid and irrelevant because every because, you know, following national polls is easy.
|
Sam:
[1:26:55]
| But, but it's still the right thing to do. Come on. The fact that we had two elections in the last 25 years where the president was not the person picked by the, or not 25 years, sorry, I have to go back a little further. In the last 30 years, 2000 and 2016, where the actual president was not the one picked by the majority of people, is ridiculous. It's not a situation that should actually be able to happen. And so, yeah, these four states should take this up and try to get this done. And it would completely change the thought how presidential elections work. We mentioned at the beginning of the show, hey, if Texas goes blue in the Electoral College, then it's game over. Democrats just win because Texas has so many electoral votes. That goes away as a factor, frankly. If you're a popular vote, it's not a state-by-state consideration. You actually have to campaign across the whole damn country, across all the constituents. Right now, every year, there's like seven states that matter. And the rest of the country is ignored, basically, because everyone knows they're going to be blue or they're going to be red.
|
Sam:
[1:28:15]
| If you don't have an electoral college, suddenly the whole country matters. Suddenly you have to pay attention to both cities and rural. You have to pay attention. People argue, well, then the only thing that would matter are the big states. Not quite. No. If you add up all the rural parts of the country together, there's still a very substantial portion of the country, you know. But, yeah, where there are more people dominates, yeah. But that's how it should be. I don't know. What are your thoughts? Do you think anybody's actually going to pick up on this and do it?
|
Ivan:
[1:28:47]
| I'm still a little bit like – I read about this, and I'm still a little bit, like, confused by the mechanism itself of how it works. Yeah. I mean, if it's possible, it makes sense to get it done.
|
Sam:
[1:29:03]
| The mechanism is quite simple. If more than 270 electoral votes worth of states have done this, then all of those states pledge that their electors will always go to the popular vote winner, even if their individual state goes the other way.
|
Ivan:
[1:29:17]
| Yeah, but what I don't understand is if it's—.
|
Sam:
[1:29:22]
| And if you've got 270 votes doing this, then what the other states do doesn't matter.
|
Ivan:
[1:29:28]
| So basically, those 270 would pledge their electors to whoever wins the popular vote, period.
|
Sam:
[1:29:41]
| Yes.
|
Ivan:
[1:29:42]
| And so that makes it that it doesn't matter. Yeah, but aren't you making it really that then the vote of those other... Well, actually, no, because you're pledging it that you're going to do it even considering the votes of the other states.
|
Sam:
[1:30:00]
| Yeah, you're not voting on the popular vote in the states that agreed to do this.
|
Ivan:
[1:30:04]
| What you're doing is those 270 will go and say whatever the national popular vote total is, that's who we're pledging the 270, and that's it, and it's done. And so it doesn't matter, even if you other assholes, you know, want to do whatever the fuck you want to do with your electors, we're going to make it relevant. It's going to be tied to the national vote.
|
Sam:
[1:30:30]
| Yeah. Now, the one downside that I could see in this that could cause a problem, but frankly, it's a problem with the Electoral College, too, so it's not something new, is that, first of all, you still have individual people that could still have rogue electors in play. But if a number of states have now outlawed that and the Supreme Court said that's okay to outlaw that, and so that's less of a problem than it used to be. The other problem is we have not yet litigated the situation through the Supreme Court of what if a state changes their mind after the election? So let's do a situation where, for instance, the national popular vote is Republican. California is in this national popular vote compact. But the nationwide goes Republican. California is still very blue. California gets really upset about this and says, what do you mean we're going to give our electoral votes to the Republican even though we vote a Democrat? And pressures their legislature and their governor to renege on the deal and flip California's votes between November when the election happens and December when the Electoral College votes.
|
Ivan:
[1:31:54]
| Because it could be done by legislation in that interim period.
|
Sam:
[1:31:57]
| Yes.
|
Ivan:
[1:32:01]
| Complicated.
|
Sam:
[1:32:03]
| Yeah. Now, obviously, they would say we wouldn't do that. But, you know, if you actually put the situation to a stress test, a, you know, most of the national popular vote interstate compact states are blue states, the Republican wins by a really, really narrow margin, and the Democrat would have won under the old electoral college system, that enough to break it apart the last minute. But, you know, I would like to think not, but that is one potential flaw. Now, and there are indications that maybe in that scenario, the Supreme Court would say, too late to change your mind.
|
Sam:
[1:32:46]
| But nothing like that has ever happened. So it would be brand new legal territory, to go through the courts. So I still think they should do it. Yeah, and even if it means I have to put my beloved electoralcollege.com to bed, Which, by the way, I have been, like I said, I've been arguing for weeks now on really esoteric mathematical things where, like, I want to do some more complicated things than I did four years ago. But, like, there are different choices you can make on the math and there are different arguments for and against. And I keep finding things that are like, hey, there's this one bit that bothers me about the math and Claude's trying to convince me it's okay. And do it anyway, and I'm like, I don't know, but I want the results, but I'm uncomfortable with little bits of the math, and there are other bits of the math where I'm like, do I really understand this math fully from end to end? I'm not sure that I do, so maybe I should only do things I fully understand. I kind of understand, but I'm not sure I fully understand, and is that good enough? Anyway, but if we switch to popular vote, none of that matters anymore, and I can just get back that part of my life. I guess. Anyway.
|
Sam:
[1:34:09]
| We still have a little bit of time in our normal time. I got two other things for you. I had said we would spend the whole time on politics, but I think, first of all, news alert came through while we were talking. The Israeli president taps ex-General Eisenkot opponent of Netanyahu to try to form a government. It is completely unclear whether he actually can form a government or not. He's got a certain amount of time, I forget how much time, in order to form a government. If he succeeds in that time, he becomes a new prime minister. If he fails in that time, then Netanyahu gets a shot at forming a government. And he's got a certain amount of time. And if he also fails at forming a government, then they have new elections again. And in the interim, Netanyahu is still prime minister.
|
Ivan:
[1:34:55]
| The vicious circle of Israel, it seems, forever right now.
|
Sam:
[1:35:02]
| And in the meantime, Netanyahu stays in charge. and actually delaying this and delaying this and then having another election probably plays into his hands. I mean, which is.
|
Ivan:
[1:35:12]
| Exactly, that's what I'm saying. I mean, it plays totally into his hands. I mean, he's like, you know, this is perfect.
|
Sam:
[1:35:17]
| Right. Okay, the one other thing, Yvonne, and this is in your area, so I feel, would feel bad not asking you. Talk to us about that Learjet crash in Florida.
|
Ivan:
[1:35:31]
| Oh, fuck. Yeah, I was, there was a video yesterday where her father is a pilot and taught her how to fly since she was very young.
|
Sam:
[1:35:42]
| This was the co-pilot.
|
Ivan:
[1:35:43]
| Yeah he was saying how he wished that he was there with her trying to help her, look we had some very crazy weather, here the last couple of weeks. And one of the issues in modern aviation right now in general, and this has happened in accidents both commercial and private, is upset recovery. What do I mean by that is you get into a situation where the aircraft loses control. How do you recover? Okay. In the past, we did a lot of stall training. Basically, look, When I was learning to fly, we would get repeatedly put in those situations in order for us to practice recovering from that so that it became automatic. Okay? For whatever reason, over the last few decades, that has been taken out of the aviation curriculum. Don't ask me why. I have no idea. I don't know why. And I think a lot of stuff is that, well, a lot of these aircraft are so automated or so modern or so this or so that. There's no need for that. And look, doing that training was, look.
|
Ivan:
[1:37:11]
| There's some scary moments. I mean, I was there, obviously, with a well-trained instructor. But I mean, I, they were a little bit, you know, look, we put it, I put the plane into a, intentionally into a stall at a spin and to recover. Okay? And I had it spin. And look, when the plane goes into a spin, it's a little.
|
Ivan:
[1:37:36]
| Bit, you know, let's just say, but the reality is if you're properly, if you train properly, it became instinctive, your reaction to it. Okay? And so the plane would not, you would almost instantly gain control. But we don't train on that anymore. There is a procedure on that aircraft to recover from that situation. It's complicated. If you haven't practiced it and you don't know it by memory, you don't have enough time to pull the manual and do it. Based on the fact that she was working the radios, she was not the pilot in command. She was a co-pilot.
|
Sam:
[1:38:22]
| Back up a little bit before recovery. What was the situation they got into? Could they have avoided the situation?
|
Ivan:
[1:38:30]
| The situation was that they mistakenly got into an area of bad, they flew into a thunderstorm by mistake. Okay?
|
Sam:
[1:38:42]
| Uh-huh.
|
Ivan:
[1:38:43]
| I don't think, you know, one of the things that is one of the most advanced skills that pilots learn, and this is something, well, I'd heard about it before, but it was reiterated by the guy that I follow regularly that does the best analysis of this stuff, was that you playing with the settings on that, working the radar, okay? The weather radar to make sure that you're looking at it correctly, is a skill that takes a lot of time to hone, okay? They seem to have mistakenly flown into this thunderstorm, okay?
|
Sam:
[1:39:27]
| And it created a situation— If I was understanding correctly, it was also a very rapidly developing storm that changed its character within the scope of a few minutes.
|
Ivan:
[1:39:38]
| Yes, but the thing is that, look, if you're looking at the radar properly, look, you're trying to—you're looking at this way ahead. Man, you don't ever get there. You don't, you don't fly that close. You try to avoid flying that close. I mean, you, you go a hundred, you go a hundred, you go, you're like, Hey, I'm, I'm, I'm DV, you know, I'm DV, how much I'm turning around. I'm like, whatever. Okay. You're not going in there. Okay. And the only reason I think that they may not have gone in there is because maybe the settings that they had on their weather radar were not the exact ones. They didn't really see the area, how bad it was. And so therefore they didn't pick it up until, until they wound up in it. What it seems is that they got icing on the wings, okay? Because they went into the storm where the conditions were exactly the right ones for that to form. You lose lift real quickly, and you go into a stall. I mean, that's it. This is a very high-performance aircraft. It's got swept wings, and because of the design, It just really Not a lot of icing would cause it to go Into that It would cause it to lose lift immediately, And then to go Into an overspeed situation Which is the problem Because the plane went and dove And went into this overspeed situation.
|
Ivan:
[1:41:00]
| It happened real quickly. Yeah. Very little time. They had less than two minutes. No moment. It started. I mean, she identified it and was talking to the pilot in command about it, but she wasn't the pilot in command. You mentioned that was the main thing.
|
Sam:
[1:41:17]
| She was on the radio. That indicates that was her job at the moment. The communication, the pilot was the other monitoring the instruments.
|
Ivan:
[1:41:25]
| You're, you're, you're working the radios. You're doing that. That that's, that's the job at the moment i mean that's why she was i mean she was reading i mean she was look a lot of pilots in these situations let me tell you something and this is the one thing listen she she was amazing, because a lot of pilots in this situation stop reading the damn instruments, i don't know what the fuck is going on but this air france crash should happen in the middle of the atlantic where they fucking stalled the plane into the ocean fucking fucking damn crew stopped looking at the goddamn instruments. And she didn't for one fucking second. In what had to be the most terrifying fucking situation you've ever encountered. So, look, they didn't they had very little time to execute a recovery maneuver in that aircraft. If the guy hadn't practiced it.
|
Ivan:
[1:42:17]
| They had very little chance. There's no way to pull a manual at that moment and fucking look at it. G-forces that were coming. A plane broke up before it crashed because of how fast it was going down. I mean, it reached 30,000 feet of descent per minute. I mean, the G-forces were insane. There's no way you could even reach for a book. She's from very close to my house. I don't know if they're going to hold a memorial service, but I'm going to be on the lookout to see if I go, because I saw her dad out bad. He felt, I just can't imagine. Yeah.
|
Sam:
[1:42:56]
| I've seen people saying both things, so you know a little more than I do. Like some people are saying that once they, that really the only thing was to avoid the situation to start with, that once they were in it, even really highly trained pilots might not have been able to recover.
|
Ivan:
[1:43:12]
| That's true. But it doesn't seem that from what you could hear that they were, it doesn't seem that they were, there is a procedure that is published in the, flight manual for the Lear 90 to try to get out of that situation. But it didn't sound like they executed any of the steps. And if you didn't have them memorized and practiced them, these are things that are counterintuitive. Yeah. I mean, one of the first things, drop the thrust levers to idle. One of the steps included even deploying the landing gear, just to slow down the plane, for example. Stuff like that. And if you didn't practice in the simulator, and this is, I'm telling you, airlines have actually been, because of some incidents, been bringing back...
|
Ivan:
[1:44:01]
| Been bringing back that training because of some of those incidents so it it's a thing that you have to practice, it's a thing that you have to practice and if you're not practicing it repeatedly in a simulator you're not going through it then you're you're not going to be able to you can't just go pull a manual and execute you have it has to be a reflex, that you practice.
|
Ivan:
[1:44:27]
| So and this is an issue with this is a, this is something that keeps creeping up in a whole bunch of these accidents where you see pilots doing stupid shit, flying a plane and you realize it's just that the basic aviation's the basic flying skills that are used to teach, just aren't taught anymore they're they're used to just fucking like you know running a computer instead of flying the plane, many times So, and 90%, 99.999% of the time, that's what you're doing. But the reality is, and why many airlines are bringing it back is, you know, the reason why we're paying, we've got you behind there is that because when shit goes wrong is so you instinctively immediately can react and take that corrective action. And that's what we were used to be trained at. So but she did you know people talking shit about her online fucking assholes, go fuck go fuck yourselves, not only was she from here you know that she was going that family was going to vacation where I went we went to vacation in July.
|
Sam:
[1:45:41]
| Yeah you mentioned that yeah and it was I mean most of the attention has been on her There was a, there was a family in there, including some kids.
|
Ivan:
[1:45:52]
| Yeah. Small kids.
|
Sam:
[1:45:55]
| And, yeah, and you mentioned the plane was breaking up before it hit. Basically, some of the control surfaces in the back, but most of the plane was intact when it hit.
|
Ivan:
[1:46:08]
| Yeah, but usually, like, with such an event like that, like, you'll lose, like, you know, like, the rudders and elevators and some of that stuff. They cannot stand, especially if you're, probably they were trying to actuate the controls the moment that you actuate them and they're going at that kind of speed. Those G-forces, they'll, yeah, they'll break. Yeah.
|
Sam:
[1:46:35]
| Yeah.
|
Ivan:
[1:46:35]
| So.
|
Sam:
[1:46:37]
| Now, I did see as well, there were some things about this particular jet that actually make it have a much tighter envelope for being able to deal with these situations.
|
Ivan:
[1:46:48]
| It's a high-performance aircraft with the swept wings. So that's the thing. So it's not as forgiving in those situations because of that. It's an older aircraft. It was part of the design. It's part of the design to make it, you know, be able to perform and fly the way it does. But it's one of those things that, while it makes it be able to fly fast and maneuver well at the same time, what it makes it is that the margin for forgiveness in those kind of situations becomes a lot smaller. But the aircraft is over 30 years old.
|
Sam:
[1:47:26]
| Right.
|
Ivan:
[1:47:27]
| Not, you know, yeah, it's not a new aircraft. But by the way, the guy that I watched the channel pulled up, how many times an incident like this has happened?
|
Sam:
[1:47:37]
| Give a plug for the channel. What's the actual name?
|
Ivan:
[1:47:39]
| It's Blanco Lirio Channel, Juan Brown. Okay. He was a commercial 777 captain for American Airlines. Actually, I didn't know the airline until recently. He just announced he retired officially from America. 777 captain for American Airlines, but he's also a pilot in the military as well. He's a military accident investigator as well. So, so yeah, so, and so he does, he's been doing this for, for years where he does it on his channels, a Blanco Lirio channel on Blanco Lirio channel on YouTube. And so anyway, so, so yeah, so he, he provided that information that it's just.
|
Ivan:
[1:48:19]
| You know, those aircraft just, the tolerance for forgiveness for those kinds of incidents is very small. It's just an older aircraft that that's just the way they are. Newer aircraft, I mean, geez, some of these newer aircraft right now, they're so docile. It's just, you know, and forgiving. Yeah, but not these older jets. But he had pulled all the history of incidents that this aircraft kind of had. Only once had an incident like this happen. There's other aircraft of similar, design that have tons of these. But this jet actually only had one. And it's usually because the aircraft is equipped with the radar, this and that or whatever. Look, this just happened to be being caught at the wrong place at the wrong time. And with the way that the flight training is right now, unfortunately not having the skills. But again, commercial pilots have done this as well. I mean, This, is a mistake that unfortunately has happened in aviation before, and it was, definitely not her fault in any way, shape, or form.
|
Sam:
[1:49:34]
| Right. So. Okay, let's close up.
|
Ivan:
[1:49:39]
| On that happy note.
|
Sam:
[1:49:40]
| Yeah, on that happy note. Sorry to take you down from all the positive blue tsunami stuff, but... Okay. First of all, folks, stay tuned. At the end, after the music, I will play the most recent old Sam and Yvonne dialogue. It's about four minutes long. But first, go to curmudgeon-corner.com. Find out all the ways to contact us. Please contact us. Send us messages. All that fun stuff. Listen to our old shows. Read our transcripts. You know, all that kind of stuff. and importantly, click the link to Patreon and give us money. Give us lots of money. We like money. If you join our Patreon 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, all that kind of fun stuff. At $2 a month or more, we'll also invite you to the Curmudgeon's Chorus Slack if we feel like it. We always reserve the right to not do it, but usually we would. And on the curmudgeon's core slack yvonne and i and a bunch of other people are listening through listening, exchanging stories chatting sharing links all that kind of stuff all through the week yvonne what's a highlight this week of the curmudgeon's core slack that we have not talked about on the show.
|
Ivan:
[1:51:02]
| Well uh one thing a story which i was like surprised so in in great britain apparently they're going to switch off landlines period okay, legacy public switch telephone network services to be retired on january 31st 2027 the u.s is not, on a course of doing that yet, but the one thing is that they said that apparently this hasn't been like announced that well and that there are a lot of services and systems and things that still depend on those damn lines.
|
Sam:
[1:51:39]
| Right.
|
Ivan:
[1:51:39]
| Okay. And so there's a lot of controversy around it. Look, I know that, for example, like things here, like we got these emergency phones that are for the pool that are required by law. Those run on that shit.
|
Sam:
[1:51:53]
| Okay.
|
Ivan:
[1:51:54]
| A lot of places, the fire system alarms, they run, they run on, on copper. Okay. In order to report, you know, if there's a fire in a building, for example, that kind of stuff. And some of the reasons why many times that they want to some places keep those instead of that there are some digital solutions instead of that is because, those lines are more reliable, right? That's a reality.
|
Sam:
[1:52:19]
| One of the things that is often true of old, simple technology is it may not do a lot, but what it does do, nothing will do.
|
Ivan:
[1:52:28]
| It's extremely reliable. Yeah. You got to remember that those lines, because of certain mandates and things, had to have like 99.999% reliability, whereas IP telephony doesn't require that.
|
Sam:
[1:52:41]
| Right.
|
Ivan:
[1:52:41]
| And so, yeah. That's there's a lot of things that still use and depend on on those communications, including some people answering the phone.
|
Sam:
[1:52:53]
| Yeah, there's still there's still people with landlines.
|
Ivan:
[1:52:56]
| Yeah. So, you know, there are people that we're talking about that. There are people in Great Britain that still their primary phone is still a landline. Not a lot, but they're still it. So they're like, what the fuck? So what am I doing? So. So anyway, yeah, they. They they're saying they're shutting down i i you know they're saying that they're not extending the deadline i've seen some of these deadlines like for certain things like this to get shut down that get extended many times but but right now they're saying, that they're not expecting shutdown and the other thing is i don't know if we talked about this hey what about this binance hack huh.
|
Sam:
[1:53:36]
| Oh right that.
|
Ivan:
[1:53:38]
| What about uh well well they had a lot of people that got their money stolen, well apparently binance is is paying them back and apparently for some reason but to be absolutely clear.
|
Sam:
[1:53:50]
| The way it works is they can't actually pull the money back that was stolen binance is covering it out of their own funds.
|
Ivan:
[1:53:57]
| Yeah exactly so you gotta take a huge loss right and apparently uh, it was some kind of like the usual the the you this was no like a hack like through finding like some code or whatever it appears it was some kind of like uh, social engineering type of hack.
|
Sam:
[1:54:21]
| Right which you know there's a place for the technical hacks but social engineering is usually far easier oh.
|
Ivan:
[1:54:29]
| Yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah, So there was this, there was this, there was this meme that I, that I, that I got. I'm like, this guy, I don't know what the hell all these people are bitching about all the systems down or all our data deleted. All I know is I clicked on this thing and I got a new free iPhone 18.
|
Sam:
[1:54:50]
| Okay. A nice, nice. Well, the moral of all this is to put all your money in crypto, right?
|
Ivan:
[1:54:59]
| Yes, absolutely.
|
Sam:
[1:55:00]
| Okay.
|
Ivan:
[1:55:02]
| Well, you know, aside from there's a bank, I shared this, that, look, there's this pro-Trump president of Parablight.
|
Sam:
[1:55:13]
| Oh, right, this thing, yes. I only saw the headlines. I didn't actually read anything.
|
Ivan:
[1:55:17]
| So let me see. The largest bank in Paraguay went under this week all of a sudden. Just boom, out of the blue. It appears that the pro-Trump president of Paraguay had owned a piece of it or whatever or something. And then out of the blue, it went under. Okay. And all of a sudden, apparently, this guy was involved in some way in the bank. So he resigned, okay, the president. Because apparently by resigning he could get on the senate and then he would have immunity from prosecution but apparently the senators went and immediately stripped him of his senate seat, and and immunity and arrested the president of paraguay why the fuck can a country like paraguay, arrest the president in like less than a week okay all right and we we we can't fucking arrest a corrupt bastard of a president.
|
Sam:
[1:56:15]
| Okay.
|
Ivan:
[1:56:16]
| In a week. Guys in jail already.
|
Sam:
[1:56:19]
| Other countries keep showing us up.
|
Ivan:
[1:56:22]
| Now, to be fair, if Trump had done something that 50% of the population of the United States had no access to their money in the bank, I do think that, I don't know, police forces from many states would have descended on the White House and grab them out there and put them in cuffs somewhere. If 50% of Americans could not access their money at the bank.
|
Sam:
[1:56:51]
| Well, as you said at the beginning when talking about reasons for the blue wave, people directly feeling pain.
|
Ivan:
[1:57:00]
| Number one reason.
|
Sam:
[1:57:01]
| Seems to like.
|
Ivan:
[1:57:04]
| Yeah.
|
Sam:
[1:57:04]
| Trump anything else. Yeah. Trump. Trump anything else. Yes.
|
Ivan:
[1:57:09]
| You know, pun intended.
|
Sam:
[1:57:10]
| There you go. Okay. Shall I say goodbye? Anything else? anything else from the slack no let's go okay thanks everybody for listening yet again uh stay tuned listen to the four minutes afterwards, after the music listen to the four minutes minutes even, minutes alex put in a lot of work on these he he's enjoying doing these and they're they they can be quite they can be amusing, anyway and i will once again put the video up on youtube and only the audio here on the podcast. So what am I doing? Oh yeah. Goodbye.
|
Ivan:
[1:57:49]
| Bye.
|
Sam:
[1:58:20]
| Okay, here goes. We'll be right back.
|
SamClone:
[1:58:43]
| Tonight. Hogs. That's AI tariffs, not etymology.
|
IvanClone:
[1:58:49]
| Same methodology mixed together and fed to pigs.
|
SamClone:
[1:58:54]
| Washing. But why wash?
|
IvanClone:
[1:58:57]
| Essentially, this is f***ing pig slop.
|
SamClone:
[1:59:02]
| International cover-ups. You are not asking questions. You have invented the hog theory of the English language.
|
IvanClone:
[1:59:10]
| Both are British sounding. Tonight on the old Sam and Ivan Dialogues. Hogwash, December 1916.
|
SamClone:
[1:59:20]
| So, what is something on the curmudgeons corner slack we have not talked about on the show, Ivan?
|
IvanClone:
[1:59:25]
| I was actually looking for this stuff. Let's see what we've got here. Oh, okay. Here's something completely f***ing useless. Hogwash.
|
SamClone:
[1:59:34]
| Hogwash.
|
IvanClone:
[1:59:35]
| Yes. Do you know where the word hogwash comes from?
|
SamClone:
[1:59:39]
| I do not. I mean, obviously I know what it means. Nonsense. Bullshit. But no, I have no idea where it comes from.
|
IvanClone:
[1:59:46]
| Okay, so originally it was literally wash for hogs, like garbage liquid. Kitchen scraps, leftover food, whatever they had, mixed together and fed to pigs. Hogwash.
|
SamClone:
[1:59:58]
| Okay, that makes sense.
|
IvanClone:
[2:00:00]
| And then, because it was basically disgusting slop, people started using hogwash to mean worthless garbage or nonsense.
|
SamClone:
[2:00:07]
| Okay, so far entirely reasonable.
|
IvanClone:
[2:00:09]
| But here's where it gets interesting. Hogwarts.
|
SamClone:
[2:00:13]
| Oh, no.
|
IvanClone:
[2:00:15]
| Hogwarts!
|
SamClone:
[2:00:16]
| No, you are not about to tell me Hogwarts comes from hogwash.
|
IvanClone:
[2:00:21]
| I'm saying, Sam, look at the evidence. Hogwash. Hogwarts. Both start with hog. Both are British-sounding. There's f***ing magic involved.
|
SamClone:
[2:00:30]
| There is no magic involved in hogwash.
|
IvanClone:
[2:00:33]
| You don't know that. Maybe you feed enough f***ing hogwash to a pig and eventually it starts casting spells.
|
SamClone:
[2:00:39]
| I am fairly certain that is not how Harry Potter works.
|
IvanClone:
[2:00:42]
| Hog wash. Hog warts. Clearly, there is an entire hog-based linguistic universe here that nobody has properly investigated.
|
SamClone:
[2:00:51]
| I think you have gone from actual etymology to making s*** up in approximately 30 seconds.
|
IvanClone:
[2:00:57]
| That's how etymology works.
|
SamClone:
[2:00:59]
| No, it isn't.
|
IvanClone:
[2:01:00]
| You start with some facts, and then you just keep going until you've created an international incident based on calculations pulled out of your s***.
|
SamClone:
[2:01:07]
| That's AI tariffs, not etymology.
|
IvanClone:
[2:01:10]
| Same methodology.
|
SamClone:
[2:01:12]
| So, to be clear, the Slack had something about the origin of hogwash, and you have independently decided this explains Hogwarts.
|
IvanClone:
[2:01:20]
| I'm just asking questions, Sam.
|
SamClone:
[2:01:22]
| You are not asking questions. You have invented the hog theory of the English language.
|
IvanClone:
[2:01:27]
| And nobody has disproven it.
|
SamClone:
[2:01:29]
| That's not how evidence works.
|
IvanClone:
[2:01:32]
| Hogwash.
|
SamClone:
[2:01:33]
| Exactly. CC973.txt, I understand the hog part. You're feeding it to hogs. But why wash? Were they f***ing washing the hogs with it?
|
IvanClone:
[2:01:46]
| No! That's the confusing part. Wash didn't necessarily mean you're standing there with a sponge going, Come here, piggy. Bath time.
|
SamClone:
[2:01:55]
| Because that's exactly what hogwash sounds like. It sounds like something you use to wash a hog.
|
IvanClone:
[2:02:01]
| Right. But wash could also refer to watery waste or leftover liquid. Basically, thin, crappy liquid slop. So hogwash was the watery garbage fed to hogs, not f*** used to clean them.
|
SamClone:
[2:02:15]
| Ah, okay. So it's not hog plus washing. It's hog plus watery slop.
|
IvanClone:
[2:02:22]
| Yes!
|
SamClone:
[2:02:23]
| That makes considerably more sense.
|
IvanClone:
[2:02:25]
| Which is why, eventually, calling an argument hogwash meant, essentially, this is f***ing pig slop.
|
SamClone:
[2:02:31]
| Okay. And this has nothing whatsoever to do with hogwarts.
|
IvanClone:
[2:02:35]
| Well...
|
SamClone:
[2:02:37]
| Nothing.
|
IvanClone:
[2:02:37]
| Hog. Wash. Hog. Warts. You're telling me you don't see...
|
SamClone:
[2:02:42]
| We're taking a break.
|
IvanClone:
[2:03:14]
| Learn more by subscribing to AlexMXL. Missing a disc? If seen, call 911-IN-LEA. That's why you take a lot of people.
|
Sam:
[2:03:37]
| Okay, there it was. Thank you, everybody. And we'll see you next week. Thank you, you're not Yvonne. Keep calling you Yvonne. Thank you, Alex, for that and we look forward to the next one. Right?
|
Ivan:
[2:03:55]
| Bye!
|
Sam:
[2:03:56]
| Okay. Bye, folks!
| |
|
