Automated Transcript
Ivan:
[0:00]
| Hello?
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Sam:
[0:01]
| Hello?
|
Ivan:
[0:02]
| Oh, fuck.
|
Sam:
[0:03]
| You got echo.
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Ivan:
[0:04]
| Yeah, I got echo. Ah, fuck. What the bloody hell?
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Sam:
[0:10]
| It's not on your headphones?
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Ivan:
[0:12]
| No, but I was just on the headphones. What the fuck is wrong with you, you piece of sh— It says AirPods connected. What the—what is this thing doing? Speaker. No. Is that like an op? No. Okay, let me try this again.
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Sam:
[0:34]
| Okay.
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Ivan:
[0:35]
| Leave. Okay, hello? Okay, now I hear you on my headphones, but okay.
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Sam:
[0:40]
| Okay. And I'm all good?
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Ivan:
[0:45]
| Okay.
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Sam:
[0:47]
| Shall we just start then? Okay, here goes. Transcription by CastingWords Hello. I should do the intro. Welcome to Curmudgeon's Corner.
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Ivan:
[1:20]
| Oh, the intro. Yes, that helps.
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Sam:
[1:22]
| Yes, the intro. My dog's getting excited too. Welcome to Curmudgeon's Corner for Saturday, May 3rd, 2025. It's just before 1930 UTC as we're starting to record. I'm Sam Minter, and Yvonne Bow is here. Hello, Yvonne.
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Ivan:
[1:41]
| Hi.
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Sam:
[1:42]
| So, yeah, I can hear you. Your picture is frozen, but, you know, whatever.
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Ivan:
[1:49]
| You know, I see that. I don't know. okay well and especially i love the the the the way that it froze it's a fantastic look for me it is this what the fuck i'm gonna take a screenshot of that.
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Sam:
[2:02]
| Before that disappears.
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Ivan:
[2:04]
| Exactly which is like you know the right i i totally believe that that is the right face to be having for everything every day just be.
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Sam:
[2:13]
| Your thumbnail forever.
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Ivan:
[2:14]
| Yes like you can change You can add all.
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Sam:
[2:16]
| Your social media to that right now.
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Ivan:
[2:18]
| Exactly. And that's like an accurate take on how I feel on a regular basis right now.
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Sam:
[2:24]
| For those listening who cannot see, Ivan, he's got his lips sort of pursed. He's scowling.
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Ivan:
[2:34]
| Right.
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Sam:
[2:34]
| He looks sort of a mix between anger and confusion.
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Ivan:
[2:38]
| Yes, that's exactly right. And that's like standard every day now for a lot of people.
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Sam:
[2:45]
| Yeah. Yeah, perfect.
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Ivan:
[2:47]
| Because every time you look at your phone, you get an alert and you're like, what the, what?
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Sam:
[2:53]
| I hear the next Pope is going to be Donald Trump.
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Ivan:
[2:56]
| Yes, I saw that. Yes, he wants to be the Pope.
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Sam:
[3:00]
| Anyway, so the agenda as usual is we're going to do but first, lighter, non-newsy stuff first. And I don't know what Yvonne has planned, but I'm going to do a movie. And then we'll do a couple segments of, you know, things that have actually been in the news lately. Or, you know, whatever comes to mind. Like, I'm actually looking at, like, yo, I've got a few things that aren't newsy that I might bring up. I don't know. I won't make the decision until the last instant. We'll see. We'll see. But, so, Yvonne, you want to start us out with something non-newsy?
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Ivan:
[3:34]
| I don't know. What the fuck is going on? Let's see. I, I, I, I'm just, Jesus. What day is today?
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Sam:
[3:42]
| Today is Saturday.
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Ivan:
[3:44]
| May, uh.
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Sam:
[3:45]
| May 8th. or no no may 3rd may 3rd i got confused for a second because you know a three is like an eight with the left hand side erased and so it's easy to confuse those especially.
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Ivan:
[3:55]
| At this age i guess you can't really see very well.
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Sam:
[3:58]
| Yeah exactly i just it's all trying to.
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Ivan:
[4:02]
| Figure out what the hell you know happened this week i i mean in terms of you know i i.
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Sam:
[4:11]
| Stuff.
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Ivan:
[4:13]
| It's been the blur.
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Sam:
[4:14]
| You can just pick a regular topic.
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Ivan:
[4:16]
| No, but I think that it's been a blur, but it's a blur of.
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Ivan:
[4:25]
| I'm talking to people that are at around this age. You've got jobs, you've got a child, you've got, you know, every day seems to be packed with something happening right after the other, right after the other, right after the other. It's like there is no, no, no, no break, you know, right. Anymore. It used to be, you know, we're not married and you don't have kids, you know, whatever. I mean, I still remember, you know, talking to there's a whole bunch of like much younger people that I work with. Right. And it's like, you know, I remember like back then, I don't know, I worked so many hours. And, you know, we go out, I would, I would go out regularly during the weekdays and somebody the other day went and like told me how they wanted to have some kind of like a work meeting. And they said, well, can we talk about this Sunday? I said, I hear you fucking mind. I, I, I, there is, listen, unless, you know, there is an apocalypse of some kind. Okay. I am not getting on a fucking call to discuss something work related on Sunday. I hear you. There is just no effing way. I was reading the other day about some of these people working at this junior bankers at this investment bank.
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Ivan:
[5:52]
| They were working 120 hours a week at this place.
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Sam:
[6:01]
| That's nuts.
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Ivan:
[6:03]
| Some guy I came in as a whole bunch of them were at work at four in the morning, mind you. OK, I'm guessing there's an investment bank, probably some trading, trading in Europe opened at that time or something, you know, which makes them, you know, it's one of those things where you're trading investments in Europe is open at that hour. You're probably have to be somebody's got to be looking at what the fuck is going on. And the guys were a bunch of them were talking about how burnt out they were and stuff or whatever. And some executive came in at four in the morning and told him, you know what? We're not pulling our weight. We're not working hard enough here. He's giving this speech at four in the fucking morning. You know, like, what the hell? I'm sorry. You're telling these guys that are in the office at four in the fucking morning that they're not working hard enough? What the fuck is wrong with you?
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Sam:
[6:58]
| Yeah.
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Ivan:
[6:59]
| So, you know, you know, this is one of my job does not demand anything of a sort. And actually, the one thing that the people that wanted to have discussion, it wasn't actually related to my my job job itself. It was related to something that happened at the condo association. OK. All right. Which is kind of like a job. OK. When I had it. And, you know, the people from the property management or whatever, they wanted to discuss it. They said, hey, what do we meet on Sunday? And I'm like, that's all right, out of your fucking minds. I'm not meeting on a fucking Sunday. My job, you know, the only times that we've had something like come up on a weekend is, you know, I mean, we have systems that we manage 24 by 7. OK, so, hey, you know, somebody, you know, something went down hard.
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Ivan:
[7:44]
| You know, something I mean, we've got a customer in a crisis. Yeah, that that would, you know, that wouldn't fail. And I get that. That's something that's not planned, unexpected. And you've got a customer that's on fire. And yeah, you got to do something. OK. But other than that, I mean, you know, you know, it's just, you know, that's what I said. You know, something's got to be apocalyptic. You know, something really bad has had to happen. And a lot of the systems that we service are critical, you know, to customers, you know, I mean, like one of them is like, you know, for a public utility for electricity, you know, so it does the service calls and stuff like that. So, you know, or a telephone company where our systems also do the service calls or something or whatever. So if that goes down, you know, you can see how that would impact, you know, a lot of people at the same time as something that is of critical need, you know. So, yeah, I get that. But other than that, I mean, I don't know. You know, this whole thing where we've gone from... We went from whatever the work-life balance that was before the pandemic, which I think was, you know, for most people, it wasn't bad. I think that our, well, I'm going to take that back. I think companies were, my experience had been working at about three different companies that most employers were pretty reasonable about that. Okay?
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Sam:
[9:09]
| Although this is the kind of thing that varies a lot from place to place, company to company.
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Ivan:
[9:13]
| Right. No, no, no. I get that. But at the three different companies I spent, like before then, it had been pretty reasonable. Okay. All right. You know, what do you get to happen and so forth? You know, there were no hard and fast rules. Like, you know, I had employees that most of the time were tasked to an office, but they said, hey, you know, I got something going on the next couple of days. Can I work from home? It's like, sure. No problem. It's not like me telling somebody to work from home is violating some corporate edip of some kind.
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Sam:
[9:39]
| Right.
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Ivan:
[9:39]
| You know, you know, and now to where all of a sudden you've got executives and chief executives mandating, you know, how many days and what, you know, exactly when they need to be in the office and micromanaging this in a level.
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Sam:
[9:52]
| Yeah, and I think part of this is that for the people who got to work at home over the pandemic, and obviously this does not apply to all jobs. If you're in a factory making something, you could never work from home.
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Ivan:
[10:06]
| Right.
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Sam:
[10:07]
| But for the people who did get to work from home, pandemic time was a realization of the amount of freedom you could have. So even going back to sort of where things were before would have still been a constraint, but because management is really wanting to control it and really force the issue, they're putting all these additional constraints which make it seem more like kindergarten than it was before. Yeah like yeah even even when they say the right things like like even when they say look look if you if you have a dentist appointment and you have to work from home no problem just tell us like fine but like, All of those things were very informal pre-pandemic. And now it's like, oh, yeah, you have to be sure to tell us. You have to put something on your calendar to block off the time. You have to do this. You have to do that. And even if it is fairly informal, even if it's still just, oh, tell your boss, it now feels like you're being watched at every moment.
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Ivan:
[11:22]
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think that for a lot of people. I will say that for me, you know, and I think that I'm reading that I'm talking about from other people, not not me.
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Sam:
[11:34]
| You in your role, you're you and your company, you're still at home when you're not traveling.
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Ivan:
[11:41]
| Right, right, right. I think that the one thing that did change is that my my kind of like I guess that my kind of like office time really was travel time. That's really what it boils down to in the essence. And the reality is that it's made me have to go back to traveling a lot. But at the same time, that was still a lot more flexible than most work arrangements that anybody else had in the first place. I mean, it's not the same thing. I mean, the one thing is, you know, you've got customers that are in the office and they're expecting you to come to visit them instead of doing a Zoom. And so, you know, that's that's, you know, that's fine. I mean, it is what it is. OK, so but I guess the thing is, it's just reading that. I'm like, oh, and I'm like, you know, how the hell some guy go. It's just the extreme insane of you've got people that literally are working 120 hours a week and you're bitching that they need to double down. I'm just like, You know, and honestly.
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Sam:
[12:43]
| The thing is, and you know, I know people are pushing for get more and more done with less and less resources, but with technology and automation and everything else, we should actually be going to other direction. The humans that are working should be doing less. You know? Yeah. Things should be a little bit more relaxed. You look at these curves they do of per capita productivity comparing decade over decade, and each individual is getting so much more done than they did a few decades ago. Come on, let them some slack. Let's work at 1950s levels again, okay?
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Ivan:
[13:24]
| Well, think about farmers, for example, right? I mean, they talk about small pounds and whatnot. I mentioned this before in the podcast. You see how the productivity per acre is so much higher than it's ever been. And, you know, how farmers now have all these automated tools to help do farming. You know, they don't need, you know, they don't need like people like out there, like picking the fields. They've got these damn combines that are robotic, that are GPS, you know, that could be driven by GPS. That they can pinpoint where the hell they have to be on the on the damn field and like you know that the systems and like they they pull and they automate they measure and they do all of this all this stuff it's amazing shit and i'm like you know but what that means is you definitely don't need as many people to do like i mean one person can do so much more than they used to be able to and right and of.
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Sam:
[14:21]
| Course what everybody what the tech industry right now is gambling on is that as ai continues to advance the same thing will be true of knowledge workers very soon.
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Ivan:
[14:31]
| I mean i i and i think that that's you know like i was talking the other day and i and i and i saw a couple of other people like uh in the news talk about in the news talk about this and i i had thought this myself that a lot of the things that ai does is enable a lot of us to do work faster not necessarily remove the work. Not, I mean, not at least in this current iteration. And a lot of times, you know, what technology that we've done, Okay.
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Sam:
[15:02]
| Well, and again, and again, the gamble is that you can't judge it based on what it's doing now because it's moving so fast in another year, two years, three years.
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Ivan:
[15:11]
| But still, I mean, it's like, you know, I still remember like, you know, come on 30, 40, 50, look, 50, 60 years ago. Okay. If you were doing, say, for example, one that is was so people intense that I remember reservations, travel reservations, airline.
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Sam:
[15:28]
| Right.
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Ivan:
[15:29]
| Okay. Dude. You know, if you ran a big airline. And you were trying to do reservations back then, which was on paper. The amount of manual labor required, okay, to be able to track all of these things, okay, and to do so. And how, when they first came up with the first computers, ah, we won't have any employees doing this, blah, blah, blah, you know, we'll remove the humans from this. And that was the fear. It was like, oh, my God, who's going to work and whatnot?
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Ivan:
[15:59]
| And, well, yes, we didn't remove a whole bunch of people that were doing a whole bunch of manual shuffling and paper and stuff and whatnot. But in the end, you know, they were put into a whole bunch of other things that actually people figure out. We want to figure out, oh, we're really not doing all this other stuff, you know, because we didn't have time because all of this stuff took. It was so manual that it didn't let you do any of this other stuff. Um you know it's just we even today with all the tools that we have all the computer whatever there are so many things that i do like for my job or for my previous jobs that are so manual even with all the computing that we have that i know that there's a lot of things that probably would be able to drive more sales that that would do that but look it's estimated that a lot of salespeople spend 70 and 80 percent of their time actually doing admin work not really selling okay that's just the fact i mean imagine if you take people and you you know and that in a lot of instances we cover so few of the accounts that are assigned that if you actually were able to reduce that admin time down where things could be done a lot a lot easier it would actually allow people to be able to do far more in terms of the actual selling.
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Sam:
[17:24]
| Well, and I think that is true for many jobs, if not most jobs.
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Ivan:
[17:29]
| Most jobs are like that.
|
Sam:
[17:31]
| There's like so much that's overhead. And if you look at what portion of the workday is actually spent doing something that, isn't just documenting or tracking or writing a report or whatever, but is actually pushing the ball forward.
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Ivan:
[17:51]
| Right.
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Sam:
[17:52]
| It's a small percentage.
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Ivan:
[17:54]
| Yes.
|
Sam:
[17:55]
| For like lots of jobs, not all jobs. There are some jobs that are structured that, you know, 90% of your work actually is productive. But, and I use the word productive. Look, I just want to say this. I use the word productive lightly here because some people actually, consider sort of those things like status reports to actually be very valuable in communication so people know what's going on etc etc but that's the kind of thing that is ripe for automation.
|
Ivan:
[18:25]
| I'm going to tell you something that one of the things that happens with so many status reports of my life is like so many people no one reads them well no it's not that it's you know maybe people won't read them the problem is that you know it's turning that actionable one of the It's like, I mean, you know, I still remember that there's this one guy, there's a story when I joined HP, a long time ago, talking to me about this guy that had been in charge, I believe, of service levels. Okay. All right. And he had all these metrics. He was like the master guru of measuring, you know, the service levels and how, you know, how long to take a call, how long to repair. He had all these stats. Okay. But he was in charge of delivery, not just of measuring. The problem was that they were all ready. All of them. and the question was like yeah great so you can measure every yeah so you're an expert you're better than everybody else at measuring all this shit and all you're saying is you know really well you know really really well.
|
Sam:
[19:21]
| How screwed you are.
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Ivan:
[19:22]
| Right but but you you have you either you don't have the time or don't know how to take any action on any of that shit that you mentioned that's wrong So yeah, you know, that's just, I think that every technology always imparts a high level of fear. In people and what their job will be, okay? You know, and it has had impact on jobs, okay? We've seen this, you know, before. But I do think that the problem is always how to deal with a dislocation and how to deal with a change. Because, okay, great, so now people are not doing this, so what are we going to do? Or what are we going to do with, you know, with the money? You know, sometimes you go, hey, you're making more money, but you don't need as many, you know, the economy is bigger, but sometimes, hey there's certain labor you don't need so how do you help people but i don't know it gets into another day but anyway my whole point was like man you know people are out there yeah my point is you know it goes back to what kind of an asshole goes and bitches to fucking people that are working 120 hours a week that you've got to work harder that really takes a special level of asshole And I think that we are in an era of high-level assholing.
|
Sam:
[20:41]
| Yeah, I think so. And we've said, you mentioned earlier, the pendulum has swung.
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Ivan:
[20:46]
| Yeah.
|
Sam:
[20:47]
| Well, the pendulum always eventually swings the other way.
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Ivan:
[20:50]
| Yeah, at some point. It's just a matter of time. I saw a bunch of air traffic controllers that walked out in New York or something, forcing United to cancel a whole bunch of flights. You know that's the kind of like pushback against a whole bunch of this shit that that keeps happening in different places so.
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Sam:
[21:06]
| Well and and sometimes it's just a matter of time and the economics go through a couple cycles or whatever or people adapt to the technology but like right now we are in an era where lots of companies feel free to push really really hard on their employees because they know the employees don't have a lot of other options. Eventually, things will turn, and there will be lots and lots of options. And then people will be competing for those employees again and trying to offer all kinds of perks and benefits and work-life balance and, you know, whatever in order to get those people who are good. And letting them work from home again. You know, all of this other stuff.
|
Ivan:
[21:59]
| And it's eras. I mean, it's eras. Look, I still remember how I worked an entire era where I joined HP when it was really a company that – I mean, my work career is born in the South. And it was – it had a reputation for being one of the – if not the best, one of the best places to work in the world. And my later life has shown that that wasn't hyperbole, okay? All right? Because it really, truly was that. and from everybody that I work with who is now in other places, we all talk about, holy shit, I mean, were we you know, we, you know, where we worked and how the company treated us and everything, it's just I'm like, I don't think I appreciate it, but we said we didn't even appreciate it enough how good the.
|
Ivan:
[22:47]
| Treatment of people was at HP and their respect for employee and all of that stuff, and I lived through that transformation into complete assholery, you know, because it went from that into, you know, having Mark Hurd, who's dead, okay, you know, and I'm not really shedding a tear for that asshole, okay, who goes, and like, I still remember, like, every fucking time was, hey, what the fuck do we take away from employees, you know, every, I mean, it was like, every fucking announcement, every six months, as he announced that our profits were ever higher and higher and higher, it was just like, hey, what do we take away from people, what can we take away, you know, what's the next thing i'm like you know i'm like motherfucker you keep saying we're making more and more money and all you you know you're making more and more money and everything you're doing is trying to figure out how to fuck us over more yeah.
|
Sam:
[23:34]
| You know and and mentioned this these things come in cycles but part of the problem is the cycles are long you know.
|
Ivan:
[23:40]
| Yeah it's.
|
Sam:
[23:41]
| Not like oh next year it'll be better it might be better in five or.
|
Ivan:
[23:45]
| Ten five years yeah i mean they are long you know they are along but but you know but but that's that's where we are and so you know we are in the era of assholery in general yes.
|
Sam:
[23:56]
| It is not limited to employer employee relationships.
|
Ivan:
[23:59]
| No you know if you just.
|
Sam:
[24:03]
| Look at uh you know the current administration that just is.
|
Ivan:
[24:08]
| Exemplar of everything about just even in general daily life you know yeah well.
|
Sam:
[24:13]
| It all flows from the top down like because if you demonstrate that a certain type of behavior is acceptable, then more people will engage in that behavior. Like if there are prominent people, who not only are assholes, but seem to get ahead by being assholes.
|
Ivan:
[24:34]
| Yes, yes.
|
Sam:
[24:35]
| Then more people will strive to be assholes themselves.
|
Ivan:
[24:39]
| Yes! I strive to be an asshole! I want that on a shirt. You know, let's put that on some t-shirts. You know, they probably sell very well right now.
|
Sam:
[24:48]
| I bet you there is already a t-shirt that says that. yeah i'm gonna strive to be an asshole t-shirt you.
|
Ivan:
[25:00]
| Know kids growing up right.
|
Sam:
[25:02]
| Now oh yeah what do you want to be where you want to grow up i want to be an asshole it's my dream let's see i've got i'm not always an asshole just kidding go fuck yourself um stop asking why i'm an asshole i don't ask why you're stupid let's see i never dreamed i'd grow up to be an asshole but here i I am killing it. I'm the nicest asshole you will ever meet. There are more, but Alex is throwing things at me for saying asshole too much. Oh, so I'm going to stop.
|
Ivan:
[25:35]
| Okay.
|
Sam:
[25:39]
| So your, your precise one isn't out there yet. No, you could go set it up on like one of the sites that lets you set up random t-shirts.
|
Ivan:
[25:49]
| Oh, wait, don't we have like a commercial merch site we could be you know don't we have like you know we could set that up as an option we.
|
Sam:
[25:55]
| We at the moment it's not set up as a merch site that people can just go buy.
|
Ivan:
[25:59]
| It's just set up as a place where i can order stuff and you know we should set up you know because there are all these really cheap like ways to set up like a merch site you can just set up like and it's all you know right.
|
Sam:
[26:12]
| Now right now for the stuff i use zazzle And actually, Ed has received his new mug.
|
Ivan:
[26:18]
| Yes! All right!
|
Sam:
[26:20]
| I saw the delivery confirmation notice come in recently. And it's an I hate curmudgeon's corner mug, not a regular curmudgeon's corner mug. But Alex did insist on changing, on adding one line somewhere. Uh, I think he said, he said it had, it had to say it was a specimen. So I think I have a note on it that says, you know, Alex says specimen or something. So it's different than the one we made for him.
|
Ivan:
[26:49]
| So like, oh, so like when you get those fake bills, you know, like whatever, that's a sample. It says this is a specimen.
|
Sam:
[26:55]
| Yeah, except it doesn't like a specimen.
|
Ivan:
[26:57]
| Like a urine is specimen.
|
Sam:
[26:58]
| No, no, no. But it, so, but it doesn't have like the word all over everything. I just have it in like a corner.
|
Ivan:
[27:04]
| No, no, no. But usually there are certain events that you see that it's like a small little thing somewhere that it says, this is a specimen. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay. So there you go.
|
Sam:
[27:12]
| Yeah, but anyway, the point was I set all that up with Zazzle, but Zazzle's like shop view is actually kind of sucky. Like it wasn't, I haven't looked in years, so maybe they've improved it. But like you could set it up so anybody could buy the thing you created. But it was hard to make it a controlled experience. like, hey, you're in the curmudgeons corner shop and here's all the curmudgeons corner stuff and I've constrained it in a certain way so you can only buy the things we want you to buy, you know?
|
Ivan:
[27:43]
| Okay, okay.
|
Sam:
[27:45]
| But there are other companies that do that too. So yeah, we could look up into it again. I'm sure the demand would be astronomical. But maybe not for the regular curmudgeons corner merch, but for the curmudgeons corner, I strive to be an asshole shirt.
|
Ivan:
[28:00]
| There you go. Talk about it. Talk about it.
|
Sam:
[28:02]
| We could take the image of you from this podcast, have a giant version of your face on one side with a caption of the, I strive to be an asshole, right under.
|
Ivan:
[28:14]
| That sounds actually great. That sounds like a fucking great idea.
|
Sam:
[28:20]
| Alex keeps throwing things at me, so I'm going to stop saying that word for now. Okay, are we ready for my movie?
|
Ivan:
[28:28]
| Yes, we're ready for your movie.
|
Sam:
[28:30]
| Ready for the movie. So, I had mentioned before we've been going through the Ghostbusters series. The next one that I've watched, and actually the last one I've watched, watched it back in August, is Ghostbusters Afterlife from 2021. There's one more movie after this but i haven't seen the last one.
|
Ivan:
[28:48]
| Once again i you know i have no idea.
|
Sam:
[28:52]
| Yeah and and see last time we talked about like one of the ghostbusters franchise we talked about the one with the women i mentioned you know it was worthwhile it is people criticized the one with the women but most of the criticism was just because they were women and it did like it wasn't a great movie it was an okay movie but people made it out like it was a horrible movie and it was not a hard movie. It was just people being sexist assholes. Oh, oops, I said it again. Oops. Yes. And I suddenly started getting the Britney Spears song going through my head, even though it wasn't said it. Okay. My head is starting to become injured. I'm going to get a concussion from all the cups being thrown at me. They are plastic cups, just to be clear. He's not like throwing your mugs then yeah right yeah no mugs no hammers yet but you know i wonder if i continue anyway ghostbusters afterlife is 2021 unlike the one with the women it's in the original continuity of the first two movies okay okay so what you actually get is the what is it uh is it, Like the main character you follow is the granddaughter of Egon Spengler from the first movie.
|
Ivan:
[30:20]
| Okay.
|
Sam:
[30:22]
| And her brother's there, too. Her mother's there. A couple other things. They end up, I'll read you the beginning of the plot summary, so no big spoilers. In Somersville, Oklahoma, Egon Spengler captures an entity in occultist Evo Shandor's mine outside the town and lures another to his farm. He activates an elaborate setup on his property, but the power fails. Egon manages to conceal the ghost trap in his home before being attacked by the entity and suffering a fatal heart attack, and the entity returns to the mine. Egon's estranged, financially struggling daughter, Callie, inherits the farm and moves there with her children, Trevor and Phoebe, after being evicted from their Chicago apartment. Trevor becomes infatuated with carhop Lucky Domingo, and the scientifically-minded Phoebe enrolls in a summer science class taught by seismologist Gary Gooberson, whom Callie later dates. Phoebe discovers the farmhouse is haunted, and the poltergeist residing in it leads her to the ghost trap, which she shows to Gary and her new friend.
|
Sam:
[31:32]
| Her new friend podcast. Gary, a fan of the Ghostbusters, helps her learn more about them and her grandfather. He, Phoebe, and podcast tamper with the trap, releasing Vins Clortho, key master of Gozer the Gozerian, which escapes to the mine. The farm ghost leads Phoebe to Egon's underground laboratory, and I will stop there. Okay. Because then it starts to get spoilery after that. Anyway, it does have cameos from the original Ghostbusters later in the movie. Obviously, there was a bit with Egon at the very beginning. But to be clear, this was filmed after the actor for Egon, who was Dana—no, not Dana Hecker. Dana Hecker is still alive. yeah a yvonne reitman is that right i even right um i haven't reitman uh yeah it was already dead when they filmed this movie or he died while it was filming or something something like that so so anyway yo so he appeared he appears in cameos anyway through the magics of magic of cinema but i look, Thumbs up. I actually really liked this movie.
|
Ivan:
[32:49]
| Okay.
|
Sam:
[32:49]
| I'd say it gives the original a run for its money. It is different. It's definitely a modern 2020s movie, not a 1980s movie. But I think that actually makes it better. It's still got its comedic elements, but it's not so much a straight-up comedy as the original Ghostbusters was.
|
Ivan:
[33:16]
| It was Harold Ramis. I'm sorry.
|
Sam:
[33:17]
| Oh, Harold Ramis.
|
Ivan:
[33:18]
| I thought it was a director that actually died as well.
|
Sam:
[33:21]
| Yes, Harold Ramis. Sorry. Right.
|
Ivan:
[33:23]
| It looked like one of our college looks Dead Ringer for Al.
|
Sam:
[33:31]
| But anyway, I really liked it. Like, it's a different style than the original, but I think it's just as good. I mean, if I had to say which of the Ghostbusters movies would I want to see again, I would pick this one over the original now. Now, having said that, that's partially because I've seen the original quite a few times at this point. I've only seen this one once. But yeah, I liked it. It was funny. It was sort of heartwarming at the right places. It had just enough of the lore of the original so that, you know, you felt connected to the original but it was moving the story onward and bringing in new characters to continue the story which by the way is the way i i prefer continuations after a long period of time you know sometimes and we've talked about this on the show before but sometimes complete reboots work and the new version is good in its own ways and i'll point to for instance battle star galactica oh yeah they're the newer and they're they're apparently redoing a new reboot of Battlestar Galactica well by.
|
Ivan:
[34:43]
| The way I love the reboot of Star Trek.
|
Sam:
[34:47]
| I know a lot of many reboots of Star Trek at this point.
|
Ivan:
[34:50]
| But the last one.
|
Sam:
[34:52]
| The last one.
|
Ivan:
[34:54]
| So that was the three movies that were that were by what's his name?
|
Sam:
[34:58]
| You're you're talking movies, not because there there have been like five new Star Trek series in the last couple of years.
|
Ivan:
[35:04]
| Well, yeah, yeah, not not not so much the TV series, but more enough, you know, because in a movie era, I mean, you had like that series of movies that was by J.J. Abrams that he did that a lot of people like criticize. But I actually thought, yeah, but I thought they were great. I actually enjoyed them.
|
Sam:
[35:19]
| Yeah, I haven't even watched all of them. I think I watched the first two, maybe. But, like, I was not impressed by them. I thought they were okay. But, like, you can tell how little impressed I was that I didn't bother seeing the last one.
|
Ivan:
[35:32]
| I liked them very much. You see? But there were a lot of people that shared.
|
Sam:
[35:36]
| But also, even that one, by the way, they actually made a connection to the original series. It wasn't actually a real reboot. correct because they had like spock fall backwards in time and create a new timeline correct and he was in it like with the older spock so yes so they they maintained the continuity with the original sometimes like the the battlestar galactica one was completely yeah.
|
Ivan:
[36:01]
| Completely rebooted yeah.
|
Sam:
[36:02]
| Although at the very end of the series they sort of did hint at connections to the original.
|
Ivan:
[36:10]
| I'll tell you one thing. The Battlestar Galactica, the second one itself, compared to the, first series was, Jesus, was so much more dystopian. I mean, I mean, not that the first one wasn't like it in that sense, in the sense of, I mean, Jesus, you know, all the all the humans were almost annihilated. They had to escape on ships. Right. I think that the that the tone of the second one was far darker. And I think that the other thing that they did is that they visualized and like presented a lot more what actually happened during the attack uh a lot of the suffering oh yeah yeah yeah yeah and so yeah it's like because on the on the first series that got very little play it was just a little bit of you saw that the you know the planets were attacked that they escaped that's it boom right and.
|
Sam:
[37:05]
| This is also a thing where you know after so many decades pass it's a difference in you know what the style of television is right like is it the original premiered in 1978 you know and the new one was 2003 you know.
|
Ivan:
[37:21]
| There's a substantial difference.
|
Sam:
[37:23]
| In how things are done but yeah my my point that though is just that you know sometimes people do complete reboots, wipe the slate clean, brand new cast. They reset it perhaps in a different time. They make different assumptions about the characters.
|
Sam:
[37:43]
| And it really is a whole new show that just takes some of the same premises and does it again. That's one way of doing it. And I'm always a little wary of those. Sometimes they work, sometimes they don't. And then the other way is you actually like say we're going to pick up the same story 20 years later and so the original characters are older but they're still around or at least they're in the history of the show even if the actor is not available and you know and you refer to the events of the first series and you continue the story for there that also sometimes works and sometimes doesn't work but i generally prefer that second approach to the first i feel like it gives more respect to the original and it may like whenever you do the complete reboot i kind of feel sad that you really and truly are burying the old version whereas the new version whereas if you continue it it's more like a celebration of the old version it's all part of the same thing and so i like it when they do the second, better than when they like the first. And anyway, the point is even within the Ghostbusters franchise I think the one where they rebooted it completely was the one with the women and it sort of fell flat on its face and again part of that was people being sexist and jerks.
|
Sam:
[39:06]
| But you know, part of it was like you get less of the, you don't get the nostalgia effect if you don't connect it to the original. In this one, in Ghostbusters Afterlife, they connected it to the original two movies. They connected it to the original characters. The original characters made cameos as themselves. Like the one with the women, the original characters did make cameos, but playing different people. You know, in this one, the original characters made cameos as themselves. And it was like, oh, that's great. It's good to see what they're up to these days, you know? Anyway, I liked it. Big thumbs up to Ghostbusters Afterlife. There's one more, Ghostbusters Frozen Empire. I have not seen that yet. Eventually, I will see that.
|
Ivan:
[39:52]
| No, I haven't seen that yet.
|
Sam:
[39:53]
| Maybe I'll see that soon. I don't know. But anyway, this is one, Yvonne, where I recommend you go ahead.
|
Ivan:
[39:57]
| Sam beating me to the punch on watching some movies, which is stunning.
|
Sam:
[40:02]
| I recommend you go ahead and watch all the Ghostbusters movies. Start at the original and work your way forward. Don't skip the one with the women. It's not awesome, but it's not horrible. But give it its due service to sort of counteract the jerks. See, I'm using the word jerk now. And watch the new ones too. And I don't know, maybe the very most recent one sucks. I don't know, I haven't seen it yet. But I liked Ghostbusters Afterlife. There you go. Okay, with that, we will take a break. And after this break, I don't know, Yvonne will pick something to talk about. We'll talk about it for a while. Then I'll take a break and I'll pick something. Or we'll take a break. I mean, I guess I could take a break and Yvonne could keep going.
|
Ivan:
[40:49]
| Yeah.
|
Sam:
[40:50]
| But that would be weird.
|
Ivan:
[40:51]
| That's possible. That would be strange.
|
Sam:
[40:52]
| You could talk straight through the spot, like just giving your thoughts on something or other.
|
Ivan:
[40:58]
| Yeah, it's possible. Yeah.
|
Sam:
[41:00]
| Anyway, here's a break. We'll be back in a moment. Okay, we're back.
|
Ivan:
[41:47]
| We're back. And we're bad.
|
Sam:
[41:50]
| So I kept looking over to see what Yvonne was doing during your break, but it's still his big frozen face.
|
Ivan:
[41:57]
| Yeah, I'm still, you know, frozen.
|
Sam:
[41:59]
| So anyway, what do you want to talk about? What do you want to talk about? There's been stuff going on. It's been longer than normal since we recorded the show early last time. Oh, I guess I should mention my surgery went fine. It went well. I had the thing cut out of me, and then the next day I had plastic surgery to patch up the big open wound that I had. It was like, I don't know, the size of a dime across and several millimeters deep in my nose, maybe even slightly bigger than that.
|
Ivan:
[42:34]
| Well, I mean, given your lobotomy, it doesn't sound like anything. You don't sound very different.
|
Sam:
[42:38]
| Yeah, and then they patched it up. They didn't have to take skin from my forehead. They described it as they rotated the skin on my nose to cover up the injury. But apparently it was big enough that it would never have healed properly on its own. So that's why they did the plastic surgery. I got the stitches out a week later.
|
Ivan:
[43:00]
| Why do we even call this plastic surgery? It's not like they put in plastic.
|
Sam:
[43:04]
| They did not put in plastic.
|
Ivan:
[43:05]
| Yeah, because it would be very weird.
|
Sam:
[43:07]
| Okay, cosmetic surgery. Reconstructive surgery.
|
Ivan:
[43:11]
| But they do call it plastic surgery. And I'm just like, you know, what the hell? You know, we're not patching people off with plastic. Okay.
|
Sam:
[43:18]
| Sometimes they are.
|
Ivan:
[43:21]
| Rarely at this point, I'm assuming. But for the most part.
|
Sam:
[43:24]
| Sometimes plastic, sometimes silicone, sometimes other things. But yeah, you're right. It's not usually actually plastic.
|
Ivan:
[43:29]
| Because that would be very weird. And we were just, you know, all of a sudden, hey, I just came back from my plastic surgery. Your nose is made out of plastic.
|
Sam:
[43:38]
| Yes indeed that might look.
|
Ivan:
[43:41]
| Like a clown.
|
Sam:
[43:41]
| Well it depends they can make some like you know realistic look like.
|
Ivan:
[43:47]
| A like a permanent clown nose.
|
Sam:
[43:49]
| Well alex alex did a image edit of me with a muppet nose and has been sending around to people he didn't send it to the curmudgeon score slack maybe you should do that now alex but yeah yeah so he's but yeah yeah like no i mean you know they make they make like the madame tussauds stuff that look realistic they make the animatronics at disney that look realistic you're right you you could you could substitute a brand new oh i've i actually saw yvonne moving instead of the freeze frame again hey.
|
Ivan:
[44:22]
| I am moving again what the hell okay all right.
|
Sam:
[44:25]
| Back and anyway for those of you listening to the podcast later this means nothing to you anyway it looks fine my i i still have a little bit of swelling i still I'll have to like put Vaseline on it. And I'm supposed to be careful about sunlight for a full year.
|
Ivan:
[44:40]
| You're not supposed to be using that for sex.
|
Sam:
[44:43]
| I was putting it on my nose.
|
Ivan:
[44:45]
| Right.
|
Sam:
[44:46]
| And okay.
|
Ivan:
[44:48]
| I mean, what are you doing? Okay. Anyway.
|
Sam:
[44:51]
| Anyway. Yeah. I still, I'm supposed to like wear sunscreen and a hat for like a full year. Like to keep the sun.
|
Ivan:
[44:59]
| I should always wear sunscreen and a hat.
|
Sam:
[45:00]
| Well, that's what they told me actually, is that you be sure to do this for a year and actually forever. because you should have been doing it anyway.
|
Ivan:
[45:07]
| Yeah. I usually try to like, I mean, I'll say that I do a lot of times when I know that I'm going to be out in the sun, I do put up sunscreen on my face more than anything. And actually on the, I mean, on the back of my head where it's a little bit bold. I always try to make sure that that doesn't get, but you know, I mean, I do try if I'm going to be outdoors, you know, to wear a hat. I mean, not just walk into the car, you know, that just seems like a little bit.
|
Sam:
[45:34]
| Right. So anyway, there's still a little bit of swelling, and I think the shape is slightly different than it used to be, but whatever. Like, you know, it doesn't look too bad. There's going to be a small scar, but whatever. Anyway, so I was giving the update since I was reminded. What I was saying is it's been longer since our last episode than usual. It's been like a week and a half instead of a week. So stuff has happened. So what do you want to talk about, Yvonne?
|
Ivan:
[46:03]
| Okay, so, Sam, Trump has only been in office for little more than 100 days.
|
Sam:
[46:10]
| It doesn't seem like so much longer.
|
Ivan:
[46:13]
| It seems like it's been a year. Jesus Christ. How's the approval doing, Sam?
|
Sam:
[46:23]
| Oh, great.
|
Ivan:
[46:24]
| Okay.
|
Sam:
[46:25]
| He's the most popular president ever.
|
Ivan:
[46:28]
| According to Trump, yes. How's he doing?
|
Sam:
[46:32]
| Oh, it's been horrible.
|
Ivan:
[46:35]
| I mean, right now, he has the worst. I mean, if you track almost every metric in terms of stock market, you know, economy, like just about anything, he is performing at a rate that's worse than any time that we've ever tracked this shit pretty much.
|
Sam:
[46:54]
| Yeah i mean look people have generated all kinds of charts i'm looking at approval right now there are a whole bunch out there i'm looking at the one from the economist right now uh if you google economist trump approval tracker you'll find it but there's like a half dozen of these there's rcp there's there's a whole bunch nate silver has one the silver bulletin 538 doesn't exist anymore, but there are all these others out there. Anyway, Trump had already been the lowest net approval of any president since they started polling other than his first term. That had been true almost since the day one of his presidency. A couple of weeks ago, he is now doing worse than his first term for the first time.
|
Ivan:
[47:39]
| Congratulations. Yay.
|
Sam:
[47:41]
| Yeah. And so now it's just straight up the worst net approval of any president since there was regular polling of this question and like you said all kinds of other metrics too in terms of how the stock market has done in the first 100 days worst ever start for presidency yeah um yeah hell in terms of how much legislation congress has passed like i i think i read they pass they have passed and had signed six bills in these hundred days.
|
Ivan:
[48:10]
| And in comparison, how is that?
|
Sam:
[48:12]
| Oh, I think it's usually in the mid double digits, like 50 or 60 by this time. You know, I don't have those numbers ahead of me, in front of me, so I'm going by memory, but much higher. Even by the standards of recent congresses.
|
Ivan:
[48:29]
| Which have been very low on the productivity scale, yeah.
|
Sam:
[48:33]
| Yeah. And of course, number of bills isn't a really great measure anyway, which is why I stopped tracking it myself. Well, also because it was too much.
|
Ivan:
[48:41]
| I mean, but it is a measure. I mean, you know, look, I mean, if you're Congress and you're not passing bills, the fuck are you doing?
|
Sam:
[48:48]
| Now, the one metric that he has blown away every previous president is executive orders. He has issued more executive or he's like, I believe he's more than doubled, maybe even more than tripled the previous record for the number of executive orders in the first hundred days.
|
Ivan:
[49:06]
| I mean, yeah, I mean, everything is every other week they come up with some fucking executive order on something. And it's like, you know, like on some something, just on whatever the fuck it is. I mean, you all of a sudden you read the news, you're like, wait, he's doing what? You made an executive order on what? I mean, what, a fucking showerhead.
|
Sam:
[49:30]
| Yes.
|
Ivan:
[49:30]
| A fucking showerhead.
|
Sam:
[49:31]
| That's been pissing off Donald Trump for years. I remember him talking about it in 2016.
|
Ivan:
[49:37]
| Yeah, but come on, man. I mean, showerheads. I mean, you know, I don't know. Like, it's just there's always an executive order on something, okay? Targeting individuals.
|
Sam:
[49:48]
| Okay, so let me, I think there have been more since then. This is through April 29th, which is the first 100 days. For the last, going back through Clinton. No, going back through Reagan. Although they don't have George H.W. Bush on this list. I don't know why. Anyway, so Trump had, I'm going off a graph, so I'm estimating the numbers, about 85 in the first 100 days. Next highest was Obama at about 65. So I was wrong about the doubling, but still significantly higher. Next above that was about 55 for Reagan, about just over 50 for Clinton, just under 50 for George H.W. Bush. No, for George W. Bush. For some reason, George H.W. is missing here.
|
Ivan:
[50:42]
| Or maybe he just didn't do many.
|
Sam:
[50:44]
| Or none. I don't know. I should look that up, but I'm not going to.
|
Ivan:
[50:49]
| Okay. so i mean 100 days one of the things that happened is the tariffs so we're tariffed you know uh peter navarro had gone on tv and said that we are going to be negotiating i screwed up.
|
Sam:
[51:04]
| I did not properly look up that graph.
|
Ivan:
[51:07]
| Okay sorry uh-huh yeah yeah yeah correction that.
|
Sam:
[51:10]
| Was the first hundred days of his first term.
|
Ivan:
[51:13]
| Oh, so what's the current term?
|
Sam:
[51:15]
| Well, now I'm going to have to go find it because apparently I failed in finding it the first time.
|
Ivan:
[51:21]
| Oh, my goodness.
|
Sam:
[51:24]
| I have seen this graph, but now I'm not going to be able to find the stupid thing. Let me add.
|
Ivan:
[51:30]
| Well, just ask how many executive orders, you know, here, let me see. Hey, Siri, how many executive orders has Donald Trump signed in his current presidential term? Do you want me to use chat gpt yes do okay here we go which i figured it was gonna do looks like 102 working with chat gpt okay so as of may 3rd 2025 president donald trump has signed 89 executive orders in his current term from yo 14 147 through yo 14 235 that was from chat gpt Check important info for mistakes.
|
Sam:
[52:08]
| Yeah, I've got, he has signed three today. So that information is out of date. I have an executive order tracker. It's the executiveordertracker.com. It lists 43 in progress because after he signs them, it takes a couple of weeks for them to get into the federal register and be in effect. He's got 43 in progress, three that have been blocked by the courts and 69 total. So whatever and three with an unclear status so.
|
Ivan:
[52:38]
| If you add up nine plus 43 70 so no oh my god 113 112 69 plus 43 is 112 plus what else plus.
|
Sam:
[52:47]
| Plus six more.
|
Ivan:
[52:47]
| So 118 118 okay so that is a a record pace by by a lot.
|
Sam:
[52:54]
| By a lot yes.
|
Ivan:
[52:55]
| Yeah okay well and the people are people really liking all this stuff.
|
Sam:
[53:02]
| No. We went through his approval rating before being the lowest ever. I mean, you still, the diehards of the diehards, they're never going to give them up no matter what. But all of these people who were sort of like, oh, I don't know, I'll vote for Trump because I liked the economy in his first term, forgetting the second half of his first term. And because, like, Biden's old and Biden hasn't done all the things I want to do. And I want change, damn it!
|
Ivan:
[53:33]
| Change!
|
Sam:
[53:34]
| Change, Sam!
|
Ivan:
[53:36]
| Change!
|
Sam:
[53:37]
| Yeah, those people are like...
|
Ivan:
[53:38]
| Well, you could go to National Change.
|
Sam:
[53:39]
| This isn't what I meant.
|
Ivan:
[53:41]
| Oh, this isn't what you meant. Well, yeah, that's a reference, but, you know. But, yeah, the change for... I always find...
|
Sam:
[53:53]
| Oh, and now I find the damn chart. Ah. Okay, so I will give you a reference to not only this chart, but a bunch of others. This is from the New York Times, published on April 29th, which was the 100-day mark. Trump's astonishing 100 days in eight charts. So the very first one is the executive orders, shows how much higher he is. The next closest, which our previous chart did not go back to, is FDR in 1941, who also was over 100.
|
Ivan:
[54:22]
| Okay.
|
Sam:
[54:22]
| Um, the next chart was lost war go.
|
Ivan:
[54:26]
| Well, there was world war two going on. So I'm like, okay, I'll give FDR a pass.
|
Sam:
[54:32]
| Yeah. The next number two and number three are FDR 1941 and FDR 1937 followed by Truman in 1945, then Biden in 2021. Those are the top five. The next chart is how much he's been sued in federal court against the president.
|
Ivan:
[54:50]
| Uh, and he, He's got to break a record of some kind.
|
Sam:
[54:54]
| He has got, I'm eyeballing from the chart, like around 250 lawsuits so far. The next closest was Trump in 2017, who was only at like 115 or something. And then after that was Bush in 2005 and Obama in 2013. The next chart, revenue from tariffs. He's actually number one. Number two is Biden.
|
Ivan:
[55:22]
| No, get out of here.
|
Sam:
[55:24]
| Then the dollar plunged. The dollar has plunged more than any of these other comparison presidents there. And it's weird here. Like, yeah, yes. The next worst was Nixon in 1973. Then markets.
|
Ivan:
[55:41]
| Of course, Nixon's 73. Okay. The main thing, 73 was the year of the oil shop, if I remember correctly. So that's why the dollar plunged. I'm pretty sure that that's what happened in 73.
|
Sam:
[55:55]
| Speaking of markets, Trump 2025 first hundred days was not the worst ever, which I believe I said before. Nixon 1973 was actually worse. And Ford 1974 was worse as well. They're close.
|
Ivan:
[56:10]
| So by the way, for those that don't know, just because I say that oil shock like everybody knows what it is. OK, but but, you know, in October 1973, OPEC announced that it was implementing a total oil embargo against countries that supported Israel at any point during the 1973 Yom Kippur War, which began after Egypt and Syria launched a large scale surprise attack. And that was, you know, a massive shock. The price of oil rose by nearly 300 percent. OK, from three dollars per barrel to nearly twelve dollars a barrel globally. Prices in the United States were significantly higher than the global average. Okay, so it was even higher than that. After it was implemented, the embargo caused an oil crisis, oil shock, which very short and terminally affects the global economy as well as global politics. So think about this right now. Current price of oil being at $70 a barrel. Imagine if, like, overnight, it went to, what, 200-plus dollars a barrel? What the impact on the economy would be?
|
Sam:
[57:17]
| Mm-hmm.
|
Ivan:
[57:20]
| Hey yeah you know that was so that was a brutal one a 73 with nixon but uh but this one here's a funny thing but here's the thing that was an external shock trump managed to do the same thing by doing it himself yeah.
|
Sam:
[57:36]
| There you go the rest of the charts on this one fewer state department briefings than all these other presidencies significantly.
|
Ivan:
[57:44]
| Lower budget his budget request for the State Department. His budget request cut the budget for the State Department by 85%.
|
Sam:
[57:51]
| Federal funding for medical research, the lowest of all of these other recent presidents. He's almost half the level.
|
Ivan:
[57:58]
| Medical research. We need some medical research.
|
Sam:
[58:02]
| His approval.
|
Ivan:
[58:03]
| We got RFK Jr., man. What do we need that medical research for?
|
Sam:
[58:07]
| Yeah. So then approval. This chart, we talked net approval before. This is just approval. So straight approval-wise, Trump 2017 is still worse than 2025 if you don't take the net and you just take the approval number.
|
Ivan:
[58:21]
| Okay.
|
Sam:
[58:21]
| But it appears to be dropping faster than it did in 2017. And that's the last year.
|
Ivan:
[58:27]
| To be more effective.
|
Sam:
[58:29]
| Yes. And it's important to keep in mind, the people who do still approve of Donald Trump, many of them think he's doing awesome and all this stuff is great.
|
Ivan:
[58:41]
| No, no.
|
Sam:
[58:42]
| Not all of them.
|
Ivan:
[58:43]
| No, no.
|
Sam:
[58:43]
| Not all.
|
Ivan:
[58:44]
| Wait, wait, wait. No. I've heard a whole bunch of them actually, no, no, no, say, oh, this really hurt me, this is so bad, but I still trust them anyway.
|
Sam:
[58:56]
| Right.
|
Ivan:
[58:58]
| Which is even dumber. It's just ridiculous. They're like, oh yeah, I lost my job because of him and I can't afford anything and you know we're economically hurt but hey, I still trust him. Damn it. He's my guy. Sounds like I'm right. You know, this sounds like honestly, and I'm not minimizing this in any way, like the victims of like spousal abuse.
|
Sam:
[59:24]
| Yeah, very much so.
|
Ivan:
[59:26]
| This is like daughter, spouse you know, behavior. I mean, because the reality is that everything he has done, the people he has fucked the worst, for the most part, are people that voted for him.
|
Sam:
[59:42]
| Yeah.
|
Ivan:
[59:43]
| Think about Wall Street. Now, Wall Street, okay, wind up on Elia, we're going to go on the Trump bandwagon because, you know, he's going to cut regulations and stuff and whatever, going to cut taxes. Everything's going to be great. First guys that got fucked Fucked, fucked, fucked Wall Street. Both completely, you know, just absolutely annihilated them. You know? Farmers, okay? Farmers are getting killed by the tariffs. Killed, okay? This whole tariff trade is fucking screwing them. And they're still going around saying, Oh, Trump's my guy. Yeah, I can't sell my soybeans, but, you know. but hey you know Trump's still a genius.
|
Sam:
[1:00:32]
| Right of course he is okay you know obviously this segment is the 100 day mark so what else do we want to say about how the first 100 days have been going anything um.
|
Ivan:
[1:00:46]
| I think the one thing on immigration, and do you have any stats there on deportations? How are they tracking versus?
|
Sam:
[1:00:53]
| I did not. Like, one other chart.
|
Ivan:
[1:00:55]
| That would be a good one to look up.
|
Sam:
[1:00:57]
| I will look at, while I'm talking, though, I have seen, by the way, one of, like, the whole Dodge thing is, like, to cut federal spending.
|
Ivan:
[1:01:05]
| Oh, yeah.
|
Sam:
[1:01:06]
| And I have seen charts that, now, future spending may still be affected, but there are charts of the actual dollar outlays from the federal government for these first hundred days are higher. Are higher.
|
Ivan:
[1:01:21]
| Yes.
|
Sam:
[1:01:22]
| Are higher than, well, I don't think they're comparing from four years ago, but compared to last year, 2025 compared to 2025.
|
Ivan:
[1:01:29]
| Compared to, exactly. They're higher.
|
Sam:
[1:01:31]
| Yes.
|
Ivan:
[1:01:31]
| They're higher. Yes.
|
Sam:
[1:01:33]
| Yeah.
|
Ivan:
[1:01:35]
| So Doge is costing money and even like when you, you know, but also, even if you take that out, The savings that were realized, okay, in terms of savings realized versus savings promised, it's about, I guess it's the standard, like, Elon Musk promised to delivery ratio, which is over 90% less than what he promised, okay, all right? So that's, you know, par for the course for Elon in everything that we've seen the last decade at this point. So that part is there. And I think also that if you probably measure the cost of the economy of a lot of the things that he got rid of. In the end, even though you save the money, maybe technically for the second year after severance or whatever for that, the cost of the economy is probably going to be higher. I mean, people, you know, yeah, you're getting less federal spending, you know, and the return is that you're going to have more costs across the board from eliminating programs that actually helped. In many ways, like in terms of climate forecasts, in terms of, say, I'll give you an example, one that always adds cost. That's simple, okay?
|
Ivan:
[1:02:49]
| FAA understaffing, okay? All right? For example, say you save a few billion on that. The cost of the airlines, from airline delays, okay, that they, again, far outweighs whatever you spent there. Another great example. Oh, we're cutting, you know, people at the IRS, left and right, okay? Cutting people in the irs usually whatever you cut the multiplier in terms of lost revenue is way higher so the savings are bullshit because you're saving you know oh yo we're gonna save a few billion here and people expecting tax returns well that means that a lot of people that are you know are skating without paying their taxes because we got rid of the people that make sure they do so that right so many of these okay and and those are short-term costs as a matter of fact Stats are showing already the tax, you know, receipts outside, you know, outside of the stupid tariffs. They're down. The deficit is way higher than it's been. So so they haven't saved the damn dime. OK, from any of this. So that's that's a savings. You're getting any close on the deportations there?
|
Sam:
[1:03:57]
| Yeah, I have one number. This is from Forbes, which we've discussed before.
|
Ivan:
[1:04:03]
| Yeah, shaky.
|
Sam:
[1:04:03]
| Not shaky as a source, but they say that so far during Trump's first 100 days, he has averaged 660 deportations a day.
|
Ivan:
[1:04:15]
| Okay, so 660 a day.
|
Sam:
[1:04:16]
| The average for all of last year for Biden was 742 a day.
|
Ivan:
[1:04:22]
| So bottom line is, once again, what he's done is be more cruel about them, but not more effective at removing people.
|
Sam:
[1:04:30]
| Right. Right.
|
Ivan:
[1:04:32]
| Yeah. Let's be arbitrary. Let's be unfair. You know, and all we want to do, because of course they're trying to do what the heck is this thing they keep talking about.
|
Sam:
[1:04:40]
| Now, I will say the same Forbes article indicates that the Trump administration disputes those numbers and that the actual deportation rate should be higher because they are reporting numbers that also include deportation by the Coast Guard and Customs and Border Protection. Like, I guess, turning people away at the border and counting those, as well as counting people who self-deported using the CBP app. So they're counting those. But I figure if it's apples to apples, then, you know.
|
Ivan:
[1:05:16]
| You're not deporting as many people, you know, and it's just, you're making it more cruel and arbitrary. That's all you're doing.
|
Sam:
[1:05:23]
| Right. And it's been pointed out too that like this is not you know the the worst of the worst we're getting the horrible criminals and kicking them out oh most of these are just normal people that the only thing the only thing they've done wrong is the actual immigration offense that's it and.
|
Ivan:
[1:05:44]
| Or you know like all of these that marco rubio is threatening all these people that if you've got a visa and that we're going to revoke your visa if you did some kind of like, fuck, he's trying to revoke visas for people that got like speeding tickets.
|
Sam:
[1:06:00]
| Yeah. Or, you know, the big example of was people like the woman who wrote an editorial on Gaza. But yeah, they're trying to do speeding tickets. They're trying to use any possible excuse.
|
Ivan:
[1:06:15]
| But again, the reality is that it goes back to, like I said, the numbers are not at anywhere near the pace that he's wanted to do it. All they've managed to do is, is because they're focusing so much on, they are so focused on the show more than the effectiveness as usual, okay? That is all that counts. You know, you have the photo op with Miss $3,000 purse, purse for $3,000, you know, in front of a jail wearing her $50,000, $60,000 Rolex, you know, in front of the fucking jail. Down there at the photo op that they do. That's the shit that they like. By the way, aside from that, for her being such a publicity fucking dog, the other day as I was crossing through TSA, all of a sudden, I hear her. I'm like, what the fuck? So they replaced this video that as far as I recall, I think it may have happened.
|
Sam:
[1:07:15]
| Oh, okay, a video. For a second, I thought you were going to say she was right there in person.
|
Ivan:
[1:07:20]
| Oh, fuck, Jesus Christ. Yeah, no, thank God, no. I'm like, you know, and they, on all the TVs now, when you're crossing DSA, they have a video showing her face, you know, telling you, you know, about the procedures to cross through security. And i was just like i am man i don't think that the last one had a video of the face of the homeland security secretary right but but she's such a fucking publicity hound that i guess she was like no like like trump give me a video oh by the way another cost saving thing did you see that trump apparently somehow has managed to finagle himself a new air force one i.
|
Sam:
[1:08:01]
| I saw uh what he's doing yes i wouldn't call it quite that but yeah i mean i guess it will be if he flies in it it's air force one period.
|
Ivan:
[1:08:11]
| Right you know tell the story is that is that save a lot of money not as far as i can tell here's the thing about it and the worst thing is that he's going out is that there was the qatari government i many years ago had purchased a brand new 747-8 which is the latest version of the 747 passenger one, okay? And it outfitted for VIP trap, okay? It's an extremely, extremely posh, over-the-top, ridiculous interior, okay?
|
Ivan:
[1:08:47]
| And I know that the government, they've been trying to sell it for a long time, okay? They're just not using it. And they're like, eh, don't sell this thing. It's ridiculous, okay? So they've been shopping it, and apparently Trump went and saw this. And so somehow they managed to, I guess, acquire this aircraft in some way. And they're doing this conversion where they're adding all of this stuff to this aircraft so Trump can travel on it. And what they said is they're going to add it as a third aircraft to the fleet of Air Force Ones right now. Because they said that the air force had been looking to make sure that they could get a third aircraft because you know the other aircraft are old and they are old okay you know they're they're delivered in the 90s okay and that you know for reliability and whatever to make sure that we could have an aircraft that that can serve as a third aircraft okay you know i i really think that, this is bullshit. Trump is just obsessed on getting a new fucking airplane. Okay? He wants this new airplane. It looks a lot more luxurious than the current Air Force.
|
Sam:
[1:09:55]
| He wants his new colors.
|
Ivan:
[1:09:57]
| And he wants his new colors, okay, as well. He's insisting on changing the colors, okay? But I have a feeling, I have a feeling that because how complex any of these renovations, that need to be for him to be able to really use it, he's going to wind up again we're going to have three fucking air three fucking air force ones that are going to be under construction and none of them will be flyable anytime soon.
|
Sam:
[1:10:24]
| Okay didn't didn't they say also that like some of the things they wanted to some of the requirements for air force one that aren't in the stock planes can't be retrofitted if you're not building it from scratch to be this?
|
Ivan:
[1:10:40]
| I mean, it's very difficult to do so. You're basically having to fucking strip apart the whole fucking plane to do so.
|
Sam:
[1:10:48]
| And that's the problem. Are they going to let him fly it without all those things? Because that's a safety concern too, but this administration doesn't seem to care about that shit.
|
Ivan:
[1:10:57]
| I mean, you know, look.
|
Sam:
[1:10:59]
| And the national security.
|
Ivan:
[1:11:00]
| Can I just say this? If Donald Trump puts himself at a security risk where he gets shot down because, you know, he's an idiot because he wants to fly a new fucking plane, I'm not going to be crying over it. Because he's such a fucking asshole.
|
Sam:
[1:11:18]
| And he doesn't put in, like, you know, whatever extra classified security stuff that Air Force One has.
|
Ivan:
[1:11:26]
| Air Force One has fucking military countermeasures, you know, that are a secret, you know, on that fucking plane. I don't see how they're going to take a fucking stock 747-8.
|
Sam:
[1:11:37]
| And we know this because of the movie with Harrison Ford.
|
Ivan:
[1:11:41]
| No because i have not seen i've.
|
Sam:
[1:11:44]
| Seen clips of it but i've not seen the.
|
Ivan:
[1:11:45]
| Movie it's on the list i i some speculate that there are some things that are shown in that movie that it has i think i'm guessing most not but i i am guessing you know things that they have said is like stuff that blocks like laser aiming and your radar jamming other kind of stuff like that I mean, the plane, you know, you know, you're carrying, you know, the it's he's not the leader of the free world anymore. You're carrying this, you know, the president of the United States on the thing. And so he's a target. And so obviously you want as many security measures. Look, the biggest mistake in this whole procurement thing with the fucking Air Force jets was this whole thing where they decided to try to instead of building two new airplanes to start with fucking refitting two. built.
|
Sam:
[1:12:34]
| So the plan was to refit them anyway.
|
Ivan:
[1:12:37]
| Well, not the Qatarian one.
|
Sam:
[1:12:41]
| No, but I mean the other ones that were part of the existing contract.
|
Ivan:
[1:12:44]
| They took two, because they were bitching about how much it was going to cost. And so they had, Boeing had produced two 747-8s for this Russian airline, okay, that never took delivery of them because they went bankrupt, okay? This was even before the same age and whatever, okay and they decided that those are the fucking place that they were going to refit those so that way technically supposed to save money and in the end it's it's they haven't saved any money the project's been you know it's it's made the project so go so much slower and right now there was a message said the speculation is that boeing won't be able to deliver these aircraft for another 10 years, I mean, 10 years, they said 2035, which to me seems crazy because this thing has been already going on for almost 10 years.
|
Sam:
[1:13:36]
| Trump's going to have to fly commercial.
|
Ivan:
[1:13:38]
| That would be great. You know, I'm sure that I will go, you know, you know, I'm sure that will go perfectly fine. He won't be bothered by anybody.
|
Sam:
[1:13:48]
| No, no. I mean, honestly, push comes to shove. The Air Force has lots of planes.
|
Ivan:
[1:13:53]
| The Air Force definitely has quite a lot not all of them are.
|
Sam:
[1:13:56]
| Like super comfy like Air Force One.
|
Ivan:
[1:13:59]
| But there are a lot of comfy ones I mean you know there's 757s that are VIP configuration there's other aircraft I mean you know there definitely are there are a number of aircraft that we have private jets, Gulfstreams 757s, 737s I mean the Air Force has a big ass fucking VIP fleet of aircraft, okay? But, you know, he wants this guy, you know, hey, I'm gonna make everybody, like, eat cake, but I, and have only two dolls instead of 30, because apparently kids get 30 dolls for Christmas, okay, as we found out. Of course. And I realize that they got, you know, most kids, you know, got 30 Barbie dolls, okay, but now they're gonna get two. And, you know, he's gonna get his, he wants his new, shiny 747. painted in its color.
|
Sam:
[1:14:53]
| Right, of course.
|
Ivan:
[1:14:55]
| It's the most ridiculous fucking thing ever.
|
Sam:
[1:14:59]
| And it'll have a big copy of his face and striving to be an asshole on the side.
|
Ivan:
[1:15:05]
| Oh, we'll get those shirts, yeah, for that, yeah. I like, yeah, that's a great idea, yeah, yeah, good, good, yeah, I like it.
|
Sam:
[1:15:14]
| Your 747 will have your face.
|
Ivan:
[1:15:16]
| Yes, yes, we're going to get a 747 for Dicker Muggies' quarter, 747. There's going to be a Dicker Muggies' quarter, 747, yes. You know, that sounds like just, you know, yeah. I mean, we need a 747. You know, I think there was a band, Iron Maiden, that had bought some old 747-400s that were using for a tour. But they did crash one of them. So I don't think, I really, you know, it's not a good omen, you know, to see that they crash one. I think it was in Chile or something that they crashed one. I don't, I think we can, I think we can just stick to commercial.
|
Sam:
[1:15:53]
| Okay. We can do that.
|
Ivan:
[1:15:55]
| We can do that. We can do that.
|
Sam:
[1:15:57]
| Okay, let's take a break, and then it's my side, my side, my turn, unless you have more. You have more Trumpy first hundred days stuff that you're anxious to get out?
|
Ivan:
[1:16:07]
| Uh, no, no. Let's, let's go.
|
Sam:
[1:16:12]
| Okay. Here we go, then. Here comes the break. Now, remember, you do not get to take this break. I am taking this break. During this break, you need to recite Hamlet's soliloquy. Got this? You got it, Seth? Okay, here we go.
|
Sam:
[1:17:07]
| Okay, so Yvonne had to step away for a second during the break, so I will read Hamlet's soliloquy while waiting for him to get back.
|
Sam:
[1:17:20]
| To be or not to be, that is the question. Whether it is nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune or to take arms against a sea of troubles and by opposing end them, to die, to sleep no more. And by a sleep to say we end the heartache and the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to. Tis a consummation devoutly to be wished, to die, to sleep, to sleep, per chance to dream. Ay, there's the rub.
|
Sam:
[1:17:51]
| When we have shuffled off this mortal coil, must give us pause. There's the respect that makes calamity of so long life. For who would bear the whips and scorns of time, the oppressor's wrong, the proud man's contumely, the pangs of dispersed love, the law's delay, the insolence of office, and the spurns that patient merit of the unworthy takes, when he himself might his quietus make with a bare bodkin. Who would Fardal's bear to grunt and sweat under a weary life but that the dread of something after death, the undiscovered country from whose born no traveler returns puzzles the will and makes us rather bear those ills we have than fly to others that we know not of thus conscious dust make cowards of us all and thus the native hue of resolution is sickly door with the pale cast of thought and enterprises of great pith and moment with this regard their currents turn awry and lose the name of action.
|
Sam:
[1:19:00]
| There we go and yvonne is back, wow there you go stunning simply stunning hamlet soliloquy not from memory i did read it, yeah i i only know like the first couple lines of it i do i do know to be or not to be that is the question whether it is nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune or to take arms against a sea of troubles and by opposing end them i only get to that's as much as i don't know that's as much as i.
|
Ivan:
[1:19:29]
| Only get to the part where it says that is the question.
|
Sam:
[1:19:33]
| Okay alex is covering my eyes to be or not to be that is the question whether it is nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune or by opposing end them did i miss something there.
|
Ivan:
[1:19:47]
| You go did.
|
Sam:
[1:19:48]
| I miss something or to take arms against a sea of troubles i did miss one line i missed one no well anyway better.
|
Ivan:
[1:19:55]
| Than what i could do.
|
Sam:
[1:19:55]
| So it's my turn I don't know. And I don't feel like talking about Donald Trump. I have a thing on the list about talking about trade and tariffs and all that kind of stuff. I don't feel like it either. We did have elections in Canada and actually Australia, both of which did not go the conservative way. We have some tech stuff with Apple and Meta. But no, what I feel like talking about is blue sky. We haven't talked about the social media landscape in a long time.
|
Sam:
[1:20:26]
| And recently, like in the last few weeks, you know, for a long time, I've had, I've had a blue sky account. I had a threads account.
|
Sam:
[1:20:35]
| I obviously, you know, I didn't actually cancel the X account, but I haven't logged in in years at this point, I haven't logged in in forever. And I've mostly been using my Mastodon account, but I was hearing more and more activity around Blue Sky. Like, when Threads first launched, a bunch of sort of the journalists and celebrities and academics and such, they were all going to Threads. But threads sort of plateaued and they threads also made a very conscious decision. They said as much where they did not want to be a platform for breaking news. So they were not optimizing it in a way to sort of surface those. Now I was always just looking at the following feed anyway, not the recommended algorithmic feed, but, but threads sort of seem to have plateaued for that kind of stuff. And we got to a point where it seemed like all of the.
|
Sam:
[1:21:30]
| News organizations and reporters and scientists and all of those kinds of folks, all of the internet personalities that once upon a time I followed on Twitter, who had left Twitter and not ended up on Mastodon, it seemed like they were all going to Blue Sky. So I decided to give it another try. I mean, I'd still, both threads in Blue Sky, I'd been logging in every once in a while and just sort of looking at it. But I wasn't taking it seriously. I wasn't spending a lot of time there. I wasn't taking time to make sure I was following the people I wanted to follow. So a couple of weeks ago, I started doing that.
|
Sam:
[1:22:09]
| And also, I was prompted, like, you know, on Mastodon, I use Ivory as my main client. The people who make Ivory, Tapabots, announced like a month ago that they are going to be making a blue sky client as well okay it's not okay you're not it's not actually going to be out until sometime in the summer and even then only in like alpha or something some sort of developer preview and so probably late this year by the time it has general availability but i'm like okay i'll try it and and for now i'll use the official client so i've been i've been playing with blue sky more i've and and i've i've been And the main thing also, when I was using Blue Sky before, I was only looking at it. I was not posting. I was not replying. I was not favoriting. I was not engaging anyway on Blue Sky. I was only looking.
|
Sam:
[1:23:00]
| I've started to do all those things. I've started to make sure I'm checking Blue Sky on a regular basis, make sure I'm following more and more people I'm interested in. I've been, one of the things that Blue Sky allows is it lets you subscribe to custom feeds that are created in a few different ways. I subscribe to a few of those. So I have like, I have my regular following feed. I have another feed that's just mutual followers, like people who I follow who also follow me back. I have a feed that's my following feed, but only original posts, not reposts. I've got some for news and for science and a few other things. So I've been trying to make use of it. I also, by the way, I set up the wiki of the day, Blue Sky, and set up the automation for that. I also have set up a curmudgeon's corner, Blue Sky, but I haven't set up the automation for that yet. We'll see it. I'll do it at some point. And so it posts new episodes when they come out and stuff like that. And by the way, I set those all up with my domain. So I'm no longer ablesmay.bsky.social on Blue Sky. I'm just applesmay.com on social and the wiki of the day one is wiki of the day.com on blue sky and curmudgeons corners curmudgeons hyphen corner.com on blue sky. So go follow us even though there's nothing on the curmudgeons corner one yet.
|
Sam:
[1:24:25]
| Bottom line, my initial, I don't yet think I have a full experience that I want there. I'm not following enough people yet. And I probably want to have a few more rules. Like one thing I haven't found on blue sky yet. Maybe I just haven't looked hard enough, is the equivalent of lists. I make heavy use of lists, and I guess maybe I could make my own feed. That would essentially be what a list is. But in the previous platforms, in Twitter and then in Mastodon, I've made heavy use of lists. Specifically, I'll have all of the people I follow, and there's that feed, but I make another feed that's just people who post about the news. Yeah. And I actually spend most of my time on that list.
|
Sam:
[1:25:12]
| And so I don't quite have the equivalent of that yet. I did subscribe to a news custom feed on Blue Sky, but it's not the same. Because mine is people who talk about the news and post about the news a lot, not just news stories from news sources, which is what that news feed is. But the main thing is just, yeah, I'm finding a lot of the people who I used to follow on Twitter, that I have not seen much of for a couple years now because they weren't on Mastodon and I wasn't checking the other places on any sort of regular basis. And I'm finding them now on Blue Sky, which I'm like, oh, that person. I haven't seen them in a long time. And it's kind of refreshing to see some of those people again. And, you know, I'm still building up my experience there. And, you know, I think, you know, So since I, and I guess Blue Sky is all the following feed. I mean, some of these custom feeds are algorithmic feeds. Like there's a Discover feed and there's a best of your followers. There are a few different algorithmic feeds you can follow. But the default is here's a chronological feed of the people that you follow. And for that kind of feed to be good, you need to be following a lot of people. And I'm still working on building up.
|
Ivan:
[1:26:27]
| Well, one of the things is that, I mean, I have been, and I guess maybe the reason why I think, I mean, you started jumping more Blue Sky because I had been using it more in the last six months, maybe a little bit more around there than I started using it, more than I had been using Mastodon. And, well, I must admit that at first I avoided Blue Sky because you remember how originally it was invite only.
|
Sam:
[1:26:54]
| It was invite only, and I had someone who was offering to give you an invite, and you were like, I don't want it.
|
Ivan:
[1:27:00]
| Well the main reason I didn't want it is because to be clear I mean it was really like Jack Dorsey was one of the driving forces at fucking Blue Sky Jack Dorsey is another fucking, well that's the one thing that changed significantly because he was originally one of driving forces at Blue Sky and Jack Dorsey is a fucking asshole and I'm like no man I'm just you don't want to just trade one asshole for another exactly I'm like I know that it threads at Meta well I mean You know, yeah.
|
Ivan:
[1:27:33]
| Meta is complicated because, you know, Zuckerberg is a fucking grifter. But but now he's gone like full, you know, well, I don't know. I don't know if he believes any of his own bullshit, you know, Trump won. And he's like, oh, yeah, listen, here's my I'm taking my shirt. I'm a new shirt. I'm back. I know, baby. I'm like, oh, for the love of God, he's like, you know, ah, that's it. Zuck is like Marco Rubio. That's who he is. Fucking like exactly like him. He may not believe any of this bullshit or whatever whatnot, but he'll fucking put whatever shirt gets of money, he'll put that fucking thing on. Okay? And, you know, all these things with the moderation, and when Zuck and I saw this shit with the moderation changes and whatnot, I was like, oh, maybe we should go back and fucking look at Blue Sky. Especially since Dorsey left. Okay? And so I've been using it, and that's the one thing that I noticed. Like you just noticed, there's a lot of people that actually have been on Twitter that definitely have not jumped the threads that are there.
|
Sam:
[1:28:42]
| Or Mastodon, yep.
|
Ivan:
[1:28:44]
| Or Mastodon. And so, yes, it has been quite refreshing to see these people there. And I will tell you this, that I've still been using threads significantly. And look, there's been a lot of... At this point, almost everybody that I used to follow in Twitter regularly, or stuff that I was interested in, is available in these other places. There is only one thing that I will say that I miss, and it's many times when we're watching a sporting event, a live sporting event. So Twitter had these easy-to-follow threads related to the events. I haven't seen neither Blue Sky or threads have replicated that experience, that it works in the same way, where you're seeing people comment on real-time on what the fuck is going on. And Mastodon does have that. And actually, it does work decently. The thing is that there just aren't as many people there following those things. And so it's just not as engaging.
|
Ivan:
[1:30:03]
| But there definitely are. That is something that is far more workable in Macedon. But it's just the critical masses in there. So that is the one thing that I will say that is a little bit. But other than that, for the rest, I'm, you know, I've gone on Blue Sky. There's definitely a lot of people there that weren't on threads that are there. I mean, I only have like one list or one of these like featured like, you know, feeds that I'm following. I'm not following more I haven't found like more than I that I really like I for the most part what I did is I do think that I did start following a lot of people and I'm getting a lot of what they're posting which is interesting to me so I did take care take time to do that and so that's been so that's been the way that I've been using it but you know look I think that these will evolve yeah, positively uh in some way i'm thinking uh the lady who leads uh blue sky i see her face i can't remember her name she seems trying to not replicate the same mistakes done at at shitter.
|
Ivan:
[1:31:25]
| Um and so you know for now it's a much better place to be than at that than definitely at shitter, that's for sure.
|
Sam:
[1:31:35]
| You're thinking of Jay Graber, by the way, the CEO of Blue Sky.
|
Ivan:
[1:31:38]
| Jay Graber. Okay, there you go. I don't remember her name. I can see her face, but I don't, you know, I'm terrible with names and faces. Like, but fucking Jesus. So that's, yeah, I mean, I am using it quite a lot in recent past.
|
Sam:
[1:31:52]
| The one thing that's getting me, though, and to be honest here, is the split. Like, using more than one is a pain.
|
Ivan:
[1:32:02]
| Well, yeah. I mean, That is the one thing that happened with, with, with, with Elon's takeover that, that the audience has been fragmented significantly, you know, you're not on one place following, you know.
|
Sam:
[1:32:14]
| I mean, I feel like at this point I'm, I'm checking, I'm checking Facebook itself. I'm checking threads. I'm checking Mastodon. I'm checking Blue Sky. Now I had been in a mode of like Mastodon was where I was all the time. And I would check the others like once a day or twice a day or something. Whereas, whereas Mastodon, I'd be checking like at least hourly, you know?
|
Ivan:
[1:32:39]
| Right, right, right.
|
Sam:
[1:32:40]
| But whereas now it's more like. I'm checking both blue stick, blue sky and Mastodon on sort of a roughly hourly basis and the others may be daily and then tick tock. It's a different kind of thing, but then, then tick tock. But, um, well, well.
|
Ivan:
[1:32:57]
| Well, you say that it's different. It's different because it's video form, but the reality is a lot of people are getting the information, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
|
Sam:
[1:33:05]
| It still takes time and it's a different format, but like if you, if you talk about what sucks up more of my time, tick tocks right up there with the rest. But if you, but for this kind of stuff, it really is the text-based platforms I'm talking about. But even then it's like, okay. And if I'm going to participate, if I'm going to repost something, or if I'm going to answer something, do I, if I post something, do I post it in both places? Do I post it in one? Do I reply in one? Do I reply another? And for the most part, I'm thinking like wherever I see it first is where I'm going to interact with it. But that then splits my presence too. And yeah, I don't, I don't know. it's it's like.
|
Ivan:
[1:33:43]
| Well look and i i was checking to see what i'm using like on my uh screen time oh yeah let me check my screen time and this confirms what i what i was what i was pretty confident of okay i am using threads a lot okay but almost about the same amount the place where i'm getting most of my news is actually the apple news app okay yeah i i am like the the reality is that there are a number of reasons why that is. Apple has actually improved. One thing that was annoying about the Apple News app in recent time is that it's being far...
|
Ivan:
[1:34:24]
| Far faster at displaying to you recent news events, okay? Because it used to be that when you scrolled, it wasn't unless you dug down into latest news in certain areas or whatever, it's gotten way better at, hey, something's happening like right now, and boom, it's right there on the feed. It's right there on the feed. And it's a place where the great thing about the news app is that, look, I follow all these different publications, okay, for news, and it's consolidating like into for you for example i got bloomberg story npr story espn story a guard guardian story palm beach post washington post reuters you know you know all these news on and and on the things that i selected for me that are you know relevant and timely okay and it's not just from one source of news okay yeah i've never.
|
Sam:
[1:35:19]
| Taken the time to like figure out how to use apple news effectively.
|
Ivan:
[1:35:24]
| I spent a lot of time figuring out which was to follow law whatever so like when i look here like you know stories that came out in the last you know recently for example multiple stories on what warren buffett spoke about is this morning on tariffs for example that's something you didn't want to talk about you know a story nine minutes ago from here palm beach county you know something about what to know about alligator mating season. Okay. Very critical for us to know, like over here, you know, but, but number of timely stuff here, something that Trump just said a little bit ago, Trump draws criticism after posting an AI image of himself as the Pope, you know, that that's been going around. That's a, it's a good one. Global factories over struggling to overcome Trump tariffs. So, you know, the F1 races are on right now. I've got this. There's a number of stories about what's going on in the racing in the last few hours. I took a lot of time picking which ones, subjects, doing that and whatnot. In order for me to get news, it's better. I will say that the one thing that I also like, that I realize that Apple News Plus, is they expand a lot which magazines are included. You get the Atlantic. you get the new yorker you get new york magazine you know all of these that have to have a separate subscription no they're all included in the.
|
Sam:
[1:36:50]
| And this is this is something by the by the way like i think it was new york magazine that had the profile on fetterman a couple days ago and yes exactly and i got.
|
Ivan:
[1:36:59]
| And they got new york magazine and i read.
|
Sam:
[1:37:01]
| A lot and and here's well my story is like i saw that reference several times i clicked the link there was the paywall so i couldn't read it and i was like oh well i guess i'm not going to read it but and then i realized I said, I did say to myself, you know, you probably have this in Apple news and can probably read the whole article, but I was like, oh, but that's a pain. I'm not going to bother.
|
Ivan:
[1:37:22]
| Didn't I share the link on the Fetterman article?
|
Sam:
[1:37:25]
| I don't think we shared that on the Commudgeons Corner Slack. Like, I was going to share it, but I didn't find one without the paywall, and I didn't bother to look at Apple News.
|
Ivan:
[1:37:33]
| Okay, well, I know I did read it, and I realize I'll make it easy for you because I didn't read it.
|
Sam:
[1:37:39]
| So for anybody who doesn't know what we're talking about, there was an article on Fetterman's mental health, which is apparently not good.
|
Ivan:
[1:37:46]
| Right.
|
Sam:
[1:37:47]
| That's the subject.
|
Ivan:
[1:37:48]
| And that it's been deteriorating over the last couple of years. Significantly and there was like and.
|
Sam:
[1:37:53]
| His staff is seriously concerned about his condition and whether.
|
Ivan:
[1:37:57]
| And there was an incident there was an incident recently there was like also on what the heck where the heck was it on on it was like on some social media here it is john fetterman struggle here it is there we go there see so this is the thing i'm getting you know all of this shit i'm getting through here right and you know and i'm not having to pay seven i'm not having to go through seven different sites and subscribe to seven different subscriptions.
|
Sam:
[1:38:21]
| You pay for the one bundle to Apple. It's not like you don't pay, but you pay Apple the one price and you get a whole bunch.
|
Ivan:
[1:38:27]
| You pay Apple the one bundle and you get I mean, that's the one thing. It's like we're talking about cable bundles and the non-bundling, whatever. Fuck. You know what? I'm getting the bundle here. I'm not having to subscribe to each one of these damn publications separately. I'm going to Apple. I get my News Plus. I get all these really good publications. You know, so I just shared the Fender Runner article for you so you can go like read it. So, but, but yeah, so, so I also, by the way, here's another one. That's a big one that's in here. Wall Street journals included no extra chart. Okay. All right.
|
Sam:
[1:38:55]
| Okay.
|
Ivan:
[1:38:56]
| Wall Street journal in, in, in Apple news plus. And that's the reason why I share a lot of journal articles. It's included in there at no extra charts. And that in and of itself is 300. That's a subscription of $300 a year that I don't pay anymore because I realized, Oh, it's free at Apple news. Fuck this. I'm not paying. I'm not paying for the wall street journal subscription. It's in here for free. So, you know, so that's, that's the one that I've been using. I did spend, I will tell you that I did spend quite a lot of time in, in the section picking what are my favorites, what things I want, not blah, blah, blah, the channels and topics, you know, and blocking shit that I didn't like, you know, it's not the best interface for that. I will say that they should, they need to work on that. And one thing that I, that I've said before is that they should have a way to block certain subjects.
|
Sam:
[1:39:45]
| Is there a single feed where you just get all the magazines you followed?
|
Ivan:
[1:39:49]
| Yes. Okay. Yes.
|
Sam:
[1:39:51]
| You'll have to show me how.
|
Ivan:
[1:39:53]
| That's in the News Plus tab. That's where you get that.
|
Sam:
[1:39:57]
| It's not in the following tab.
|
Ivan:
[1:39:59]
| No, it's in the News Plus tab. The magazines are in the News Plus tab.
|
Sam:
[1:40:02]
| In my magazine? Where is that? Where is that?
|
Ivan:
[1:40:05]
| Yeah. If you get in the, no, there is the, well, you get the best of News Pluses selected, the magazines that you select, and it'll show you the ones that are, you know.
|
Sam:
[1:40:14]
| Okay. I'll experiment later. But I did, by the way, look up my... So this isn't entirely representative because last week was the week I had surgery, but whatever.
|
Ivan:
[1:40:30]
| They don't have the best interface. I will say this, but the thing is, they need to approve this. But everything that you want is there, and you don't have to pay for 15 fucking different subscriptions, okay?
|
Sam:
[1:40:43]
| Okay.
|
Ivan:
[1:40:44]
| And it does learn from what you read.
|
Sam:
[1:40:46]
| Okay. Excellent. So let me give you, I was just going to give you my screen time report for the last complete week, which again is not representative because it's the week I had my surgery, but whatever. And these, I'm ignoring all the other apps. These are just the social or communications related apps. The order. TikTok was number one last week. Then messages for like texting back and forth with family and stuff. Then iCatcher, which is the podcast app I use. Then YouTube TV for watching live TV.
|
Ivan:
[1:41:18]
| Well, yeah, yeah, yeah.
|
Sam:
[1:41:20]
| Followed by Ivory for Mastodon and Blue Sky for Blue Sky. And looking, by the way, they are so close together last week. Ivory, six hours and 53 minutes. Blue Sky, six hours and 47 minutes. So last week, I was pretty much splitting them evenly. Then Slack at six hours, 31 minutes. And then mail, YouTube, then Facebook, and now we're really, and then threads, LinkedIn.
|
Ivan:
[1:41:52]
| Yeah.
|
Sam:
[1:41:52]
| We're getting to really small amounts of minutes now, but yeah, so that's it. So anyway the social media world.
|
Ivan:
[1:42:00]
| Is continuing to evolve it's very fragmented i mean and the news world is continuing to.
|
Sam:
[1:42:06]
| Evolve as well yeah.
|
Ivan:
[1:42:07]
| I mean everything is very fragmented right now we talked about this about you know overall you know that that how people consume everything is so fragmented and unfortunately to a certain to a certain extent it's also a reason why, people to a certain extent now what the facts are becomes so difficult to to discuss with people because of what they what they what they watch and consume and because a lot of people are i think people are so susceptible to just propaganda as i've mentioned before and it's like you know they they go to i mean they hear bullshit and so many of them are just so open to, not even questioning, without question believing it. I will say, we do, you know, I mean, how many times have you and I not seen a story that we, something that is fake, but that is something that we would like to be true.
|
Sam:
[1:43:07]
| Okay?
|
Ivan:
[1:43:08]
| That's fake, that we look at it and we say, nah, man, that can't be true. Yeah, yeah, yeah, it would be great, but it's like, nah.
|
Sam:
[1:43:16]
| Well, having Having said that, both of us have occasionally been fooled.
|
Ivan:
[1:43:22]
| We have been fooled.
|
Sam:
[1:43:23]
| Last week on the show, you brought up an example, and I'm like, that's fake. And you're like, oh, damn it, it is fake when you looked into it.
|
Ivan:
[1:43:32]
| Yeah, but that's my point. My point is you point out to me it's fake. It's not like I go and I start getting into a fucking argument with you telling you how it's true. You're a fucking liar, you know? You're part of the fucking mainstream media, blah, blah, blah. No, you're like, point out. that's exactly my point i go and i share it i'm like that's fake and i'm like oh man i wanted that to be true but okay no it's it's not it's not true and i i think that's that you know we try to you know if you show me how it's not true i'm very open to understanding how even it may be something that i really really want to be true oh fuck it's not true so i still remember the one that we love the most, but we knew it had to be not true. The Alpha server. Alpha Bank.
|
Sam:
[1:44:18]
| We knew from the moment that came up, we were like, that's nonsense.
|
Ivan:
[1:44:22]
| It's ridiculous.
|
Sam:
[1:44:24]
| Especially when they started listing details, it's like, that's just stupid. No.
|
Ivan:
[1:44:29]
| Right. No.
|
Sam:
[1:44:32]
| Alpha Bank.
|
Ivan:
[1:44:33]
| Sounds great, but no, it's not true.
|
Sam:
[1:44:37]
| But I'm sure they are selling children for child prostitution out of the basement of a pizza parlor in D.C.
|
Ivan:
[1:44:47]
| You're sure about that?
|
Sam:
[1:44:48]
| I'm sure about that. I went to that pizza parlor with my dad and stepmom a few years back. After this, it all happened. I went to that pizza parlor. And I can confirm there are pages full of children all over the place.
|
Ivan:
[1:45:02]
| Ah, so that's part of the experience.
|
Sam:
[1:45:05]
| Actually, there is no basement at all. It was good pizza.
|
Ivan:
[1:45:08]
| Yeah.
|
Sam:
[1:45:09]
| It was good pizza.
|
Ivan:
[1:45:11]
| I mean, I know that I've been in the area many times, but I don't know. I don't know if I went to that place.
|
Sam:
[1:45:18]
| It's sort of like It's, it's, it's like, it's Comet Pizza, by the way, if I remember the name correctly.
|
Ivan:
[1:45:25]
| It's Comet Pizza.
|
Sam:
[1:45:27]
| It's just a hole in the wall pizza place. It's not like some high end fancy place.
|
Ivan:
[1:45:31]
| Oh, I know, I know.
|
Sam:
[1:45:33]
| It's just, it's just like.
|
Ivan:
[1:45:34]
| But you, but you, okay, but there were no cases, but you met with a cabal, right?
|
Sam:
[1:45:38]
| Oh, yes. Met with a cabal, had all kinds of other things.
|
Ivan:
[1:45:41]
| Well, that's good. As long as you meet with a cabal, then you.
|
Sam:
[1:45:44]
| Okay, I want to say one other social media related thing before I wrap up. The the other thing about social media that i've noted like some of the sites like like blue sky is not you know facebook almost alone out of these was actually intended for you to keep up with friends and family originally yeah they they've moved on from that but all these other sites like twitter blue sky mouse no whatever that's not what they're built for they're built no no that not at all they're they're meant for individuals broadcasting to the world and for you to consume content from people broadcasting from the world it's not meant to keep up with like i'm not going to expect to find out what's going on in yvonne's life by looking on blue sky yo that is just not where i'll find it okay.
|
Ivan:
[1:46:34]
| I see what have i reposted or like because i maybe there are some i wonder what have i posted so based on my blue sky profile or what i've posted let's see what would you conclude that up doing if this is what you thought. Okay, posts. Let's see. I mentioned something about primary Democrats. Okay. The next one was, I reposted something about ICE. There was a story about how Mr. Seymour Wiener, and by the way, this is the true name of this person. Okay. This is actually a real name. New York Men's announced Tuesday that noted fan and World War II veteran Seymour Wiener has died. So, yeah, the guy was actually i i got to try to check picture of me with my son was a baby something about kilomar abrigo and back from this thing you would see me sitting in there at an office like actually going to an office you would think i work in an office and you know i don't think you'd get much out of, knowing anything about me on blue sky other than a pair of like do you like the movie stripes because what I said was about Mike Waltz was named to the instead of like being fired Trump does this thing where.
|
Ivan:
[1:47:48]
| Puts people in, like, I don't know, like, who was it? Don Jr.'s ex-girlfriend sent her as ambassador to Greece. I guess it's kind of like he dispatches them somewhere, okay? He doesn't get rid of you, but he puts you in some job just very far away. And so I guess Mike Waltz is going to be now a U.N. ambassador, which, you know, knowing how much he cares for the U.N., he basically might as well have put him in Siberia. And so the one thing is that I was, like, remembering this line from the movie Stripes where it told, like, the captain of the movie that if he screwed that up, he was going to assign him to a weather station above the Arctic Circle. And that would be like, you know, what in the past, somebody, if you did something like Mike Waltz did, that would be the right, that would be the thing that I would expect. They were probably in a prison, probably, in the Arctic Circle. But, you know, we're talking about Air Force One security, signal, and all of this stuff right now, apparently. I mean, by the way, one thing that we didn't talk about, before we go.
|
Sam:
[1:48:48]
| I still have a thing to finish on social media, but go ahead.
|
Ivan:
[1:48:51]
| Did you see that Mike Waltz getting fired and they had a screenshot. They took a picture of what the fuck he was looking at in the stupid cabinet meeting and he was still using Signal!
|
Sam:
[1:49:03]
| Well, and also people discovered that's actually not Signal. It's a Signal clone on the Signal interface who is built for the purpose of archiving the messages. Which means by definition, it is also sending your messages to a third party to save. And the company who makes the signal clone for this purpose is tied to Israeli intelligence.
|
Ivan:
[1:49:31]
| Why are these guys so stupid? Why are they so stupid? In their zeal to avoid actual scrutiny here, they're basically just giving everything away to the Russians, to the Israelis, to whoever the fuck wants that.
|
Sam:
[1:49:50]
| Uh-huh.
|
Ivan:
[1:49:51]
| I saw Marco Rubio using it on there. They had, I mean, yeah, fucking everybody on that damn thing.
|
Sam:
[1:49:59]
| Right. Anyway, the thing I was going to say about social media is that everything is moving away from actually like keeping up with friends and family. Like these other platforms aren't meant for it. Facebook was originally meant for it, but long ago moved away from that. So I just wanted to mention, one of my personal projects right now is intended as a low volume, longer form way of specifically keeping in touch with friends and family. Now, I want to be clear. This is something I'm sparing maybe like an hour a week to work on. So it won't actually be ready to show.
|
Ivan:
[1:50:39]
| It won't be ready by the time I'm done.
|
Sam:
[1:50:41]
| Exactly. Like it won't even be ready to show like in an alpha version to interested parties for like many, many, many months, probably. But for anybody who's interested, I have a splash page only with the basic information of the concept. It's on Robin letter.com. R O B I N L E T T E R.
|
Ivan:
[1:51:01]
| You know, you could share a link on, you know. This thing we use.
|
Sam:
[1:51:05]
| The Slack?
|
Ivan:
[1:51:07]
| Ah, that's it. Yes, we have this thing called the Slack.
|
Sam:
[1:51:10]
| I was bringing it up on the show because of the fact that we were sort of talking about adjacent stuff. But it's not ready. It's just a splash page. I can share it on there. You can share it on there. Whatever. But I was going to wait to share it until I actually had functionality to share. All I have is like a bad.
|
Ivan:
[1:51:26]
| Nobody told. Well, of course, nobody, you know, probably nobody listening at the end of the show anyway.
|
Sam:
[1:51:30]
| But there you go. But like I have bad pixel art of a Robin that I did myself and I have a couple of paragraphs. That's all that's there. A couple of paragraphs about the concept. I have built some more behind the scenes, but it's all just like infrastructural crap. There's no actual functionality to share yet. Like I said, it'll probably be months before that. But the basic idea is you have a circle of friends that you share updates with sequentially when it's your turn instead of just a free for all. And it emulates a really old way of communicating that people had. And I thought it was interesting, so I'm spending some spare time on it.
|
Ivan:
[1:52:09]
| Well, one thing that I did here, and I haven't seen this yet, but I thought that they said that in Facebook, and oh, there it is, they have a friends tab now.
|
Sam:
[1:52:19]
| They have a friends feed now again. Now, what they did, they have added back in a friends tab. And what it is, is it's still an algorithmic feed, but it's an algorithmic feed of only your friends.
|
Ivan:
[1:52:31]
| But without knowing, but that's good because it's really, you know, that's, yeah, I mean, that works because it does the part.
|
Sam:
[1:52:37]
| I just wanted to share, though, and the instructions I'm going to give are the iOS mobile app. But there was a way to get this anyway, non-algorithmic, just actually like chronological, reverse chronological only. If you are on the iOS Facebook app, bottom right-hand corner says menu. You click that. And then you get a page. On that page, there's a button that says feeds. If you click feeds, then the top bar has options, all favorites, friends, groups, and pages. If you click the friends one, then you have a reverse chronological feed of everything your friends are posting. So like the algorithmic feed, even the friends tab, is trying to selectively choose from what your friends post for the things that are most interested, that might be most interesting. It's not reverse chronological.
|
Sam:
[1:53:29]
| They're cycling it and bringing things to the top based on what they think you'll most likely respond to. The instructions I just gave, menu, feeds, friends, will take you to a proper reverse chronological feed of everything your friends have done. There's an equivalent on desktop. But this is several clicks deep. It's kind of buried. But for a couple years now, whenever I do go to Facebook, that's what I do. Sometimes I use the menu feeds all to also get things posted in my groups and my pages. And that's fine too. But I get the reverse chronological feed. I get to see everything. And if I want to filter it down to friends only, I just click over to friends. So it is there. It's just buried. The new friends tab is an improvement though. You can at least go to just your friends. It's still not reverse chronological, which bugs me a little bit.
|
Ivan:
[1:54:27]
| But hell, it's better than, you know, being cluttered with all this other shit.
|
Sam:
[1:54:31]
| You know. You could say there are advantages to that, too, because it surfaces sort of the thing from a day and a half ago that you missed that is getting a lot of traction from comments and such that you might miss if you're only doing reverse chronological and you're not diligent to go back down to the last thing you saw. So there are advantages of algorithmic feeds there, but being just friends is good. Now, of course, Mark Zuckerberg was on TV saying, you know, most people only have three friends, but there's demand for 15.
|
Ivan:
[1:54:59]
| Oh, fuck that.
|
Sam:
[1:55:01]
| So we can make up the difference with 12 AI friends and that'll make everyone happy. Right?
|
Ivan:
[1:55:09]
| Okay.
|
Sam:
[1:55:10]
| Anyway, we'll wrap it up. Go check out RobinLadder.com. If you are at all interested in the concept, send me an email and I'll include you whenever I do get to the point where there's something actually to see. Like I said, I only have like an hour a week to work on this stupid thing, so it's going to be a long time, but whatever. Email me if you're interested. Okay, let's wrap this sucker up. What is it? Oh, yeah, curmudgeons-corner.com. Which, by the way, we have curmudgeons-corner.com because somebody a long, long time ago actually took curmudgeons-corner.com without the hyphen. And it had some sort of placeholder page. The domain without the hyphen is now officially for sale for $2,695. So if any of you out there want to buy it for us feel free, you can get curmudgeonscorner.com is available for purchase for $26.95 and we can start using that instead of curmudgeons-corner.com for my own purposes, let me just say right out there I would pay a little bit for curmudgeonscorner.com without the hyphen, not $26.95, I could see going up to $100 or $200. Yeah.
|
Ivan:
[1:56:35]
| Do they have an offer button?
|
Sam:
[1:56:38]
| No. They do let you do a payment plan where you can pay $225 a month for $12.
|
Ivan:
[1:56:43]
| No, no, no, no, no. Fuck them. No, no, no.
|
Sam:
[1:56:47]
| There's a 30-day money-back guarantee. No.
|
Ivan:
[1:56:51]
| Yeah, no, no, thank you.
|
Sam:
[1:56:52]
| No. Anyway, we're at curmudgeons hyphen corner. And by the way, there's at least one more curmudgeons corner. There's a curmudgeons corner podcast on YouTube. That is not us. That, that has been, you know, been around a while, get some viewers. I've never watched an entire episode of their show, but you know, it's out there. So we're not the only one. So maybe they'll buy the 2695 domain name.
|
Ivan:
[1:57:17]
| Oh God.
|
Sam:
[1:57:19]
| They're they're only on youtube as far as i can tell right now and there there are a few others but anyway we are at curmudgeon's hyphen corner.com and there you can see our archives you can see all the ways to contact us you can see links to our our facebook our youtube etc i still have not linked to the tiktok and i i'm getting further and further behind point posting the tiktoks like i haven't posted the tiktoks for last week yet i'll post them before i put this episode out but I'm getting behind because they're not getting many views lately. So maybe I'll stop. I don't know. Anyway, you can find all those things. You can also find a link to our Patreon where you can donate the $26.95 to us or anything else you would like to. At various levels, we will send you, we will mention you on the show. We'll send you a postcard. We'll send you a mug. And I mentioned earlier that Ed got his mug. The postcards are not out yet. However, I have written the two postcards for Pete and Brett.
|
Ivan:
[1:58:19]
| There you go. I've made progress.
|
Sam:
[1:58:21]
| I took the week off after the surgery. And I haven't felt too bad, so I've been able to do stuff. And I'll tell you, I didn't need to take the time off, apparently. Apparently, there was a risk.
|
Ivan:
[1:58:32]
| It was the best thing to do. It was the best thing. It was the best thing to do. They said take it easy for a week. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
|
Sam:
[1:58:39]
| And I have taken it easy for a week. I've just, I've watched a bunch of TV and movies with Alex. I've just laid around the house. I've done some work on my personal projects. I've done, I've done some laundry, you know, and, and honestly, like completely independent surgery or not the mental health break of like just relaxing for a week, very much needed. It was, uh, and so, so anyway, I wrote the postcards, but the next step is to send them to Yvonne for him to add his comments, and then he'll send them out to actual people. And I haven't done that yet, but I hopefully will by the end of this weekend. Anyway, I am eventually getting to these things. It took a while, but I'm getting to them. It took me having surgery to have time to get to them, but you know, whatever. Anyway, importantly, on the Patreon at $2 a month or more, or if you just ask us, we will invite you to the Curmudgeon's Corner Slack where Yvonne and I and others are hanging out throughout the week, sharing links, all of that kind of stuff. So Yvonne, What's a highlight for the curmudgeon's quarter slot from the curmudgeon's quarter slot?
|
Ivan:
[1:59:44]
| I'm going to give you two quick ones. Two quick ones. One was $800,000 in dimes spilled onto a North Texas highway. Somehow there was a truck that had, I mean, this is 8 million dimes. I'm trying to understand, how the fuck were you hauling? Where the hell did you get 8 million dimes from? How the fuck were you hauling them? It's like crazy.
|
Sam:
[2:00:09]
| Well, presumably it was a shipment from like the Mint.
|
Ivan:
[2:00:12]
| From the Federal Reserve to the Mint, I guess. But geez, man, 8 million dimes, 8 million dimes. I don't even remember the last time I saw a dime. I got to admit.
|
Sam:
[2:00:22]
| Right.
|
Ivan:
[2:00:22]
| It's been so long. Okay. So that was like one that was interesting. And then there was this thing where I'm not sure which stores are the ones that have like this Amazon kitchen brand. Okay. But they had this thing at the store. Okay. It said, it's a rap, and it said, Lorem Ipsum Duller and Cheddar. With Lorem Ipsum Duller, I am, no mummy, no mummy, nim osimod tinsidunt, perishable, keep refrigerated. So, you know, I mean, I think the one thing is, well it's you know obviously somebody forgot to uh complete uh fill out their template but you know that lorem ipsu door thing has been around like i i remember this is like being like a random like scribble on like microsoft word in order to show you where the word of words went and it has no meaning as far as i know whatsoever i looked it up there is no meaning to this but for some reason automatically you know that it's somebody that you you know that this is like somebody typed this out. Somebody went and they had a template, they were supposed to erase something and put it in, and boom, you wound up with So according to Wikipedia.
|
Sam:
[2:01:42]
| The lorem ipsum text is derived from sections 1.10.32 and 1.10.33 of Cicero's De Finibus Banorum et Malorum. The physical source may have been the 1914 Loeb Classic Library edition of that thing, where the Latin text presented on the left hand, even pages, breaks off on page 34 and continues on page 36 with Lorem Ipsen suggesting that the galley type of the page was mixed up to make the dummy text today. So it's not actually a quote from that text. No, it's not. It's from that text and then scrambled in some way.
|
Ivan:
[2:02:23]
| Yeah.
|
Sam:
[2:02:24]
| And so the the relevant section of Cicero is printed in the sources reproduced below with the fragments used in lorem ipsum highlighted. So lorem ipsum doesn't even like lorem starts in the middle of a word. It's del lorem ipsum in the text.
|
Ivan:
[2:02:39]
| Yeah, I know. It's not exactly not even a word. Yeah.
|
Sam:
[2:02:42]
| Right. And so it's like it's if you look at the highlighting here, it's just it skips a whole bunch of words. It's whatever. But it's apparently taken from that source. there you go so so so very tasty all.
|
Ivan:
[2:02:54]
| Of some it'll learn of some dollar and cheddar rack.
|
Sam:
[2:02:56]
| Alex is requesting that i give one other thing for people to take a look at which is i shared on the curmudgeon's corner slack a few minutes ago but is also posted on youtube i've been trying to post it on tiktok but tiktok's been giving me trouble so it's not on tiktok yet so i don't know if it'll show up there but alex entitled it daddy torture video so if you go to YouTube and search on Abulsme, A-B-U-L-S-M-E. Don't search on Samuel Minter because there are lots of Samuel Minters. But if you search on Abulsme, one of the first things that comes up will be the Samuel Minter channel that you can click through and see everything on the channel. But also, if you're listening to this soon after I post it, probably the second video or within the first few videos is going to be daddy torture video anyway. I just posted it a couple hours before recording. Basically, the bottom line here is we needed Alex to sign a medical form because legally here in Washington state, if you're over 13, there are certain things that your parents cannot do for you. And there are certain things that the doctor's office isn't even allowed to talk to the parents unless they have written permission from the child. So we needed to get the form that gave us written permission to talk to the doctor in addition to Alex. And Alex did not, well.
|
Sam:
[2:04:13]
| Alex demanded extortion. I don't know. He, he would, he would not sign without us giving us something significant. There were a couple, there were a couple of things he asked for first from his sister. Her, his sister did not give him what he wanted. So when we were at a diner, he indicated that he would sign the papers. If I drank slash ate a concoction, he made it the diner. Made out of all the random shit that's on a diet on a diner table he's hitting me because i said shit mixed all up together so we've got creamer we've got french fries we've got hot sauce we've got salt we've got pepper we've got butter you.
|
Ivan:
[2:04:58]
| Have to give it a try you have to drink the whole fucking thing i.
|
Sam:
[2:05:01]
| Have to drink the whole thing and you can see the video you can see me do it i i did it. He signed the papers, but it is a 10 minute long video of me forcing myself to consume this absolutely disgusting concoction and to try to do it without throwing up spoilers. I did not throw up, but I make quite a few funny faces while I'm, while I'm eating this stuff or drinking, eating, drinking slash eating. Cause like there was a bunch you could drink, but then there was stuff left at the bottom that you had to eat. Like I ate an entire like sphere of butter straight, you know, things like that. And the concoction itself was absolutely disgusting. Anyway, he wants everybody to like watch the video. So there you go.
|
Ivan:
[2:05:52]
| Okay.
|
Sam:
[2:05:53]
| And with that, we are out of here. Thank you for joining us for yet another at Curmudgeon's Corner. Have a great week. If all goes well, we'll be back next time. Stay safe. Be good. Blah, blah, blah. Goodbye. Say goodbye, Yvonne.
|
Ivan:
[2:06:09]
| Bye!
|
Sam:
[2:06:10]
| There we go. Here comes the music.
|
Ivan:
[2:06:12]
| That would help.
|
Sam:
[2:06:40]
| I was actually worried that YouTube and TikTok and these places would block it just because the name is Daddy Torture Video.
|
Ivan:
[2:06:48]
| That could be a problem.
|
Sam:
[2:06:50]
| Torture. I mean, it was kind of torture.
|
Ivan:
[2:06:53]
| Well, the torture right now is very popular in this country anyway.
|
Sam:
[2:06:57]
| There you go. Okay, I'm hitting stop.
| |
|
