Automated Transcript
Sam:
[0:00]
| Greetings.
|
Ivan:
[0:02]
| Salutations.
|
Sam:
[0:04]
| Okay, shall we start?
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Ivan:
[0:07]
| Yes.
|
Sam:
[0:09]
| Okay, here it goes. Transcription by CastingWords Welcome to Curmudgeon's Corner for Saturday, August 9th, 2025. It is just seconds after 2UTC as we're starting to record. I am Sam Menter. Yvonne Boas here. Hello, Yvonne.
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Ivan:
[0:48]
| Hi.
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Sam:
[0:49]
| You sound so enthused today.
|
Ivan:
[0:52]
| Hi. Yeah.
|
Sam:
[0:56]
| You having a great time? You're, you're, you're pumped up.
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Ivan:
[1:00]
| You're, you know, I, I'm, I'm a little bit of loss for words to describe how I feel. Not sure exactly why I even feel like this at this moment. It's not, well, a lot of things have happened, but I, I don't know. No, it's just, there's just, is the life thing, news things, just general. Everything, everything. It's just, but we've had this, I think here is the main thing.
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Sam:
[1:38]
| Yes.
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Ivan:
[1:39]
| That we have, you know, our days sometimes can get very lengthy with a lot of things going on and so forth and so on. And they get kind of tiring. I mean, if I, last Friday, I felt exhausted, like by noon. I also, well, one thing that's not helping is that I strained, I have an abdominal strain. It's a muscular strain.
|
Sam:
[2:09]
| Okay.
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Ivan:
[2:10]
| Not, okay, which at first I thought that maybe could have been diverticulitis or the pain was. I wasn't sure. Because you had that before. Or intestinal, right. But I thought for a bit, but then I realized this pain is not the same. This is not intestinal. I'm noticing that the pain is in the same location, but it's only happening when I'm like standing up. And standing up in a way that I'm using my abdominal muscle, like when I'm in bed. Okay. That was like the worst. And so I noticed that if I stood up very gently, it wasn't happening. I went to the doctor. My doctor was a little bit out of sorts. I realized after, I mean, but he did, you know, check me and he said, look, this doesn't feel like the verdiculitis, but I'm going to send you to get a CT scan anyway. Thing is my CT scan wound up getting canceled because they, the doctor hadn't sent the notes. They didn't get the approval, blah, blah, blah. But he was doing that as a precaution because it felt like it was muscular. We felt, you know, it looked like I did it where I felt like I had a little twinge there in my lower abdomen. And then on Saturday, the workout that I did at where I go to Orange Theory Fitness involved quite a lot of sit-ups, a lot of sit-ups which aggravated.
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Sam:
[3:37]
| Whatever issue you had.
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Ivan:
[3:38]
| Yes so make doing quite a lot of sit-ups and i just the problem is i thought it was gastro my my soreness there so i'm like eh whatever i'll do a ton of sit-ups right wrong that was bad really bad not good okay so i've had this underlying like malaise and pain, which has been getting better. I've been resting. It's all I can do. It's all I can do for this. Rest. Not much else to do. And then it's just that we live right now in this era where there is just this constant drumbeat of annoying shit happening in the news every fucking day. And it's every fucking day.
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Sam:
[4:27]
| So what you're saying is your body is reacting badly to the general stress of life in 2020.
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Ivan:
[4:34]
| Well, no, I don't know if it's, no, I'm not saying that that was my body's reaction to it. What I'm saying is you're asking me, why am I feeling like blah? And then some other annoying shit. Exactly. You've got this constant drumbeat underneath. I've got my abs that I got my damn lower abdominal that's like hurting. And then some annoying shit happened. and whatever and so it and then i'm tired because i feel i mean i like you know this afternoon i got to like two o'clock and i'm feeling fucking just exhausted already um so it's just so by the time i'm getting now to like 10 o'clock eastern i'm just feeling, And then I just saw some guy that had a football game on, and apparently they suspended the football game because some guy apparently got really badly hurt. Like, you know, bad enough that, you know, they stopped the game. Bad enough.
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Sam:
[5:34]
| Right.
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Ivan:
[5:35]
| So that wasn't uplifting.
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Sam:
[5:37]
| Yeah. And, you know.
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Ivan:
[5:39]
| I mean, look, which part is worse, okay? Hey, you know, the ice raids, the alligator Alcatraz, the stupid president that we've got that's just tariff this tariff that I had, uh, you know, my, my, you know, somebody was telling me a story about ice showing up at some condo, like, uh, you know, like about five, 10 miles away and how they were worried. Well, actually, I'm not even sure it's totally ice. It was a big police presence. The suspicion was it was ice. I don't know. They were arresting. It looks like they were trying to arrest some maintenance guy or some stupid shit. And they show up with, like, 15 police cars. Like, you know, they're arresting. You know, it's some nonviolent dude. And they're going at it like, you know, we're picking up Osama bin Laden or something.
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Sam:
[6:32]
| Mm-hmm.
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Ivan:
[6:34]
| You know, and I'm sorry to tell you that that whole thing about that shooting in Atlanta wasn't exactly uplifting either. You went and you actually you got ahead of me. I was like, I was thinking of texting our.
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Sam:
[6:45]
| So just for our listeners, Friday evening, early afternoon, evening, whatever. There was an active shooter on sort of Emory University slash CDC. They're right next to each other.
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Ivan:
[7:00]
| They're right next to each other.
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Sam:
[7:01]
| And it, as it turns out, I think it's all like settled now, but they, uh, the shooter's dead. The shooter's dead. It's all taken care of whatever. But apparently he was specifically targeting the CDC seemingly because he thinks the COVID vaccine made him sick. Something like that.
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Ivan:
[7:19]
| Yeah. Great. You know, and anyway.
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Sam:
[7:21]
| A friend of ours, Kathy, who, uh.
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Ivan:
[7:24]
| Her husband works at the fucking CDC.
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Sam:
[7:27]
| She used to work there. Her husband still works there. She's got a bunch of friends that work there. And so I saw the news alert and I like pinged her and her like, is everybody okay? Her husband had left like 15 minutes before this had happened, but a whole bunch of other people she knew were still in lockdown over there. So great.
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Ivan:
[7:46]
| I mean, it's just all very annoying, Sam. Irritating. Yeah, this is all of it. It's Peter actually said it best on the Slack today. I can't believe Americans elected this motherfucker again. Yep.
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Sam:
[8:04]
| Yep. Yes.
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Ivan:
[8:07]
| I mean, I'll bet.
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Sam:
[8:09]
| What else can you say?
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Ivan:
[8:11]
| What else can you say?
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Sam:
[8:13]
| Yeah.
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Ivan:
[8:14]
| I mean, fuck. You fired the IRS guy. Apparently, I guess he was too nice or something.
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Sam:
[8:21]
| It's unclear why. But this is like the sixth one so far since Trump has been president. So, like, they don't last very long.
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Ivan:
[8:30]
| I mean, the sixth guy. It's only been eight months. What the fuck? this guy was just confirmed by the Senate two months ago, right I don't know he's going to go meet Putin in Alaska you might fucking explain you know explain to me this horse shit well they're going to meet in Alaska I'm just very very you.
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Sam:
[8:52]
| Need part of the Ukraine deal to be giving back Alaska right.
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Ivan:
[8:57]
| Yeah I'll probably sell it back at something you know when he's up there or claims a great deal or something. And by the way, look, another thing, I tried to buy a new suit. I failed at buying a new suit.
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Sam:
[9:15]
| Okay. You went to buy a new suit. Like, and like.
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Ivan:
[9:19]
| Okay. Now, yeah, I realize that I am in the minority.
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Sam:
[9:24]
| Okay.
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Ivan:
[9:25]
| In terms of buying suits.
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Sam:
[9:28]
| In that you do it at all.
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Ivan:
[9:30]
| Yeah.
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Sam:
[9:31]
| Okay. Yeah, I bought a suit, like, what was it, last year sometime? Because I was going to some event and my size had changed. So like I couldn't wear, I mean, I could have worn the one I had before, but it probably, I don't know, it wouldn't need to be cleaned.
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Ivan:
[9:48]
| So I, here's the one thing I, I, I, I, my number of suits, I haven't bought any new suits in a while. Okay. And my number of suits has dwindled. There were some older suits that I got rid of because I didn't fit in very well. The one thing about it is that, and the problem was that I bought suits a lot that were tailored. And so usually if it was, if it was, I gained weight, like my waist, they could be adjustable. The problem isn't that the problem is that because I've started lifting weights about 10 years ago, the size of the jacket right now that I need is bigger. Okay. There, there is, and there, and there is no, there wasn't any fixing that. Okay. It was significantly bigger.
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Sam:
[10:33]
| Your massive muscles you now have.
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Ivan:
[10:35]
| Because I have more muscles than I used to have. Yes. Okay. There is no way of me fitting in the old jacket. It just won't happen.
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Sam:
[10:47]
| You could do that Incredible Hulk thing. You put on the jacket and then you go, and it like wraps.
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Ivan:
[10:52]
| Yeah, that would have been great. So I had to get rid of some suits that I just could not fit in because of that. And then I had one of my favorite suits, which is a Hickey Freeman suit, which are American-made suits. and not just that look Hickey Freeman is a brand, Made in, they were made, not anymore, in Rochester, New York, okay, in upstate New York. Presidents wore them regularly. Barack Obama is a wardrobe of suits consistent mostly of Hickey Freemans, okay? So this is a suit that was a brand that was recognized as the, I mean, the gold standard of a suit that was made in America, okay? And they were expensive, okay? All right, they're, you know, a Hickey Freeman suit was. over $2,000, okay, a pop, okay? And you got a custom-made one, it could be $3,000, $4,000, but it was, you know, the one thing is that a Hickey Freeman was the American suit, the best one that you could really get, okay? Unfortunately, that suit, the pants I had damaged by sitting in a couple of places that wind up ripping the pants. I had repaired the pants a couple of times, but they got to a point that there was just no more. They couldn't be repaired. Taylor looked at it and said, it's done. It's over.
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Sam:
[12:19]
| You're done.
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Ivan:
[12:19]
| And so that suit died, and I'm like, damn it. The store where I bought suits in the last 15, 17 years, I'd say, has been Nordstrom. Okay? So I go to see, okay, you know what? But I really liked, I had that one. I have another Hickey Freeman sport coat, which is really nice. Her stuff was really nice. I think I'll try to fly a Hickey Freeman. Well, Nordstrom's not carrying Hickey Freeman anymore. And I'm like, well, why the hell happened? And then I go and I find that the only place that has Nicky Freeman is Dillard's. Look, Dillard's is not high-end clothes. Okay? And I noticed that the prices on the suits are about a third of what they used to be. And I'm like, what the fuck is going on? Well, whoever owned Hickey Freeman, by the way, that have been in business making those suits up there in Rochester for over 100, I don't know how many years. got sold to some company that decided to offshore the making of the Hickey Freeman suits to China.
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Sam:
[13:27]
| Okay.
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Ivan:
[13:28]
| And now they're sold exclusively at Dillard's for, you know, six, seven hundred bucks. They're not the same suits. It's a cheap Chinese suit now that they just took the fucking brand and slapped it on. So that's so fuck. I can't buy a Hickey Freeman. Well, you know, I could, but I would be a cheap piece of crap. so i'm not buying that i'm like fuck i'm not no i'm not buying the other thing is look nordstrom does the alter listen nordstrom when you buy a suit they will properly fit the suit for you, they they will do it and one thing well i had the nordstrom credit card which for some reason my credit limit is very small i was gonna have to figure out what the hell to do i don't know think they lowered the credit limit i'm like i can't buy buy a suit i got but it includes an alteration credit. So the alterations are free. I want to take advantage. Okay. Well, I got, I got free alterations. Well, you'll go, you go get that done. Okay. But, but there's no more Hickey Freeman suits. So I'm like, okay, at Dillard's, they won't do a custom fit like that. So they, they don't do that there. You buy it off the rack and you know, people wear it that way. I, you know, I, no, I, I, okay. So I can't do that. Okay. Then they used to sell at Nordstrom also another American brand, Joseph Abood. And I like those suits and I got a couple of those.
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Ivan:
[14:50]
| Another brand that also, because the suit market is going to shit, that brand also gone. The only place that you can get them now is some shit at Men's Warehouse that is not made at the factory because that was also American made. That was made up there. Nope. No go. That's also disappeared. I'm like, fuck me, what the hell? Okay, so the other suits that I had, which I got rid of a couple, the ones that I couldn't fit because of my because of my, because of your massive biceps. My massive biceps, yes. I couldn't fit. They're canales, which are Italian. Okay. And I like those and I've had a number of those over the years. Okay, great. Okay, well, they do have canales. Okay, great. But that was about, but I figured out.
|
Ivan:
[15:33]
| I looked through the brands and the brands of suits that I bought over the years. They're all like gone. They have very little inventory. I went to store, you know, I was looking at even the high-end stores like Neiman Marcus, Saks. Well, Neiman Marcus, here's a problem. These stores are all go bankrupt. Saks, Neiman Marcus and all of these basically were not being able to pay vendors. They had almost no inventory of suits either. Okay. Another thing is my size. Look, I'm not, I'm a weird oddball size. Okay. You know, I'm, you know, I'm short, I'm wide. I need, you know, I need a suit. Look, I didn't fit into, but listen, you know, short and wide. I couldn't fit in a fucking MRI machine. Okay. Well, you know, last year, because my shoulders are, I have shoulders that are so broad that I couldn't fit in a fucking MRI machine. could get through my shoulders. I'm like, what the fuck? I had to go to another MRI place that had a bigger machine to get in.
|
Sam:
[16:35]
| Right.
|
Ivan:
[16:35]
| So, yeah, so my dimensions are odd, okay? So I need a specific size. And so I go to, oh, let me find some discount places online. Maybe they have some Italian suits at a discount online. Yeah, they got, I found, oh yeah, this place has it at a discount. Only on one size that, I don't know, maybe my son could fit in it. I don't know. And I'll like, or, you know, so bottom line that I concluded, nobody's buying fucking suits. Nobody.
|
Sam:
[17:06]
| Yeah.
|
Ivan:
[17:07]
| Just nobody it's not easy to go out there to buy a suit even at like places like men's warehouse or whatever is supposed to specialize very few you know what what they had.
|
Sam:
[17:18]
| Was a lot of the number a lot of sport coats yeah the number of situations where it is expected that you wear a suit has reduced dramatically over the last few days i mean it's it's just like it's now i mean there are a few businesses industries where it's still sort of expected but they are dwindling i mean even the politicians aren't always wearing them right you know and actually a.
|
Ivan:
[17:49]
| Lot of politicians now just maybe they're not wearing ties but many of them are still wearing a suit just without a tie.
|
Sam:
[17:55]
| That's what you see a lot but you see a lot of that but you're seeing you're seeing more casual stuff even but you're.
|
Ivan:
[18:02]
| Seeing a lot more casual yes.
|
Sam:
[18:03]
| Even there and so So it's starting to be like, you know, weddings and funerals and not even those.
|
Ivan:
[18:11]
| Not even those. Listen, I showed up in a black suit for a funeral lately and I was, you know, we were in the minority. Not the only one, but we were definitely in the minority. Okay.
|
Sam:
[18:22]
| Right.
|
Ivan:
[18:23]
| And so I look, I have this thing. I'm in sales. I'm going to people sometimes, not just asking for hundreds of thousands, millions of dollars. Okay. You know, a number of my customers are in a sports coat jacket or maybe a suit still. Okay.
|
Sam:
[18:46]
| So you match your customer.
|
Ivan:
[18:47]
| I, yeah, I'm not going to a customer, you know, wearing fucking jeans and some dumb, you know, whatever thing I'm fucking, you know what? I'm, I want somebody that I want to, get like a million dollar deal from i i'm you know what i'll show up in a suit i mean that's just you know yeah i i i i'm not i see other people that do it that way i'm not comfortable with that i'm just not comfortable with that and maybe it's just a habit it's just whatever but i'm just not not presumably that presumably.
|
Sam:
[19:24]
| It depends at least a little bit on the client right like if If you went to a client that was 100% casual and they're like, don't show up in a suit, you would.
|
Ivan:
[19:31]
| Oh, the thing is that none of my customers are like that.
|
Sam:
[19:34]
| Right.
|
Ivan:
[19:35]
| None of my customers are like that. So it's just none of my customers are like that. And I will tell you that even some of my customers that tend to be more casual, I do see that they expect that the vendors are not.
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Sam:
[19:49]
| We want you to put on your little show, monkey.
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Ivan:
[19:52]
| Yes. Yes. Dance, monkey. Dance. Here we go. Yes. So, you know, but yeah, I found it that it was far more challenging to, I mean, look, I'm telling you, almost... all the American brands that are gone. The only one that I saw that has left, I guess, is Brooks Brothers. Because apparently Brooks Brothers is making suits at that same factory where they used to make the Hickey Freeman suits. But I will admit that I have an extreme disdain for Brooks Brothers. I don't like their clothes. I don't like their suits. I don't like their shirts. I don't like anything they sell. And the last time I bought something there, I got into a very... I, I, I, I, I got into an argument because they sold me something that I didn't realize had a grease stain. Okay.
|
Sam:
[20:44]
| Okay.
|
Ivan:
[20:45]
| And it was a sweater. And I, I went and I got home and I, I, I, I, you know, I guess I had, I tried it. It didn't look. And then all of a sudden when I went to put it away, I'm like, what the fuck? I went back and I said, guys, I'm sorry, but this suit had to stain. And they tried to say that I, that I did it. I literally came back like an hour later. I'm like, what the, I, look, I took it out of a bag and it looked like this. They gave me a fucking hard time about it. I was like, Jesus Christ, fuck this store. Okay. All right. I'm not. Yeah. But I, so, and even by the way, Brooks Brothers also had gone into bankruptcy.
|
Sam:
[21:22]
| Yes. So, so the moral of the story is that this is a dying industry and you should not invest in it.
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Ivan:
[21:28]
| That's for sure. Don't invest in the suit industry. That's, that, that, that definitely, if, if there are suit stocks out there, like, I mean, I guess men's, men's warehouses and financial dire straits as well. So I, you know, I will tell you one curious thing that I saw in the industry where it's doing fine in terms of like more formal attire. The wedding, like, tuxedo wedding businesses?
|
Sam:
[22:04]
| Okay.
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Ivan:
[22:04]
| Those are actually doing pretty good.
|
Sam:
[22:06]
| Because it's one of the few things where at least the wedding party wants to dress up.
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Ivan:
[22:11]
| Exactly.
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Sam:
[22:12]
| Maybe not the guests, but the wedding party themselves, they still want to dress up.
|
Ivan:
[22:18]
| Yes. Yes, totally. And so that industry seems to be doing pretty well, okay, from what I could tell. Those guys. But, you know, All the other stuff, they're doing like shit. I mean, I, you know. So...
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Sam:
[22:35]
| Okay, my turn.
|
Ivan:
[22:36]
| Yeah.
|
Sam:
[22:37]
| So I should have said this at the very beginning, but I didn't. We are, of course, doing our butt first where we talk about non-newsy stuff, then we'll take a break and we'll do news stuff. Although the first thing Yvonne started talking about was adjacent to the news. It was, you know, everything going on. But so as usual, I'm going to do a couple of movies, movies, movies, movies, movies. We are now in November of last year, by the way. so the this yeah second half.
|
Ivan:
[23:08]
| We're not listen november last year means we're not like 10 years off.
|
Sam:
[23:13]
| That's right i'm still.
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Ivan:
[23:14]
| Behind but this is why i'm doing two perhaps i mean this is not that bad i mean you've you know i still remember sam had these to-do lists that he used to have when we were in college when he kept reorganizing every week reorganizing shit and there must have been shit on that to-do list that was on there for years and years and still not done.
|
Sam:
[23:35]
| You talk about this as if it was past tense. I still have lists like that.
|
Ivan:
[23:39]
| Wait, you still have the to-do? I mean, I remember you used to print up and add organize and add timestamps and shit.
|
Sam:
[23:46]
| The form has changed. I no longer have like a single document with the to-do list that gets printed out on a regular basis, blah, blah, blah. But I've actually got multiple mechanisms whereby I use random number generators to determine which project I'm going to work on at a particular time.
|
Ivan:
[24:07]
| So I have, of course, of course, this is how to prioritize stuff. Hey, hey, do, do I, hey, do I turn off the bomb or do I, or do I change the oil? I'm like, ah, I'll do the oil, the bomb, whatever.
|
Sam:
[24:20]
| Yeah, so I have things where I have multiple layers and random numbers that get you one category and then you go into another. I did have a system a few years back where I had a Google spreadsheet that automatically adjusted the priority based on how long it had been since I'd last done the thing.
|
Ivan:
[24:40]
| That was, yes, that was like, you know, you kept doing it. That's right.
|
Sam:
[24:44]
| But that one ended up getting like, well, here's what happens with all of my to-do lists. No matter what, I always have more to do than I have time to do. So eventually.
|
Ivan:
[24:55]
| Oh.
|
Sam:
[24:56]
| Yeah, yeah. Yeah. So eventually what happens is that there's something that I feel like I really should be spending more time on that isn't coming up enough in the existing system. So I layer on top of it, another system that gives more precedence to that thing, but still all the old things are there. so like right now for instance i the first thing i do is roll a one to six number and if it's a one then i fall back to the older mechanism i had before and roll from that, and and and like the other items and i am simplifying slightly actually the other items two through six only two of them are actually single item items the others like if i roll a four for instance there's actually something like 25 different tasks within the four so if i roll the four then i roll a one through 25 and determine which of those i do and oh.
|
Ivan:
[25:58]
| My god this is the most hilarious thing.
|
Sam:
[26:02]
| I've heard in a while and so yeah so i have i i have sort of a a tiered level of priorities and a random number picks the first thing and then when you're in the second thing there's another system that picks what you do there and of course random numbers are are a key part of this system at all times of course of course randomization has.
|
Ivan:
[26:24]
| To be part of It.
|
Sam:
[26:25]
| Has to be part of it. Now, I have various things to make sure the randomization, not everything is equal. Some things are more important than others, so we're more likely to come up than others, but it's still randomized. And then things happen like, you know, the system breaks down. And so I realized, you know, it's been four weeks since I've done laundry or something.
|
Ivan:
[26:44]
| Down. What a shocking development. No, no kidding. Really? Wow.
|
Sam:
[26:48]
| You know, and I'm like, you know, I can't just keep buying new socks when I run out of clean socks. I have to actually do laundry sometimes. You know?
|
Ivan:
[26:58]
| Ha ha ha! Yes, I can see all that randomization. Oh, just buy underwear. Oh, buy underwear. Oh, buy underwear. Oh, shit, I need socks. What am I doing?
|
Sam:
[27:12]
| Exactly. So, anyway, I could spend a half an hour on the details of this, but I think this has probably been enough.
|
Ivan:
[27:22]
| No, it's been enough. We need to make sure we catch up on some of these movies. Okay.
|
Sam:
[27:26]
| Okay, okay. Two movies from this time. first was i i watched a whole lot in november of last year because you know holiday thanksgiving right like there was time yes so this was november 17th but then like i'm looking ahead today i'm going to do one from november 17th and one from november 21st but there were actually two movies on the 21st and one on the 23rd and one on the 24th and one on the 30th because you know wow it was that kind of time you know there's lots of tv watching at the end of november because there's holidays and there's home time and you know sports.
|
Ivan:
[28:01]
| Right you watched all the football games of course.
|
Sam:
[28:04]
| What there's football games football yeah i have no idea what you're talking about okay anyway the november 7th 17th movie was from the year 2015 the second movie in the divergent series called insurgent oh.
|
Ivan:
[28:24]
| God this stupid divergent series i got this the whole divergent series kind of like just pissed me off.
|
Sam:
[28:30]
| Did you watch all i don't.
|
Ivan:
[28:32]
| First of all no i think i watched parts of the first one i know shylene woodley is in it i know that.
|
Sam:
[28:39]
| Yes yes it's been a while.
|
Ivan:
[28:41]
| About 10 years first of all the name pisses me off.
|
Sam:
[28:44]
| Divergent yeah.
|
Ivan:
[28:47]
| I don't know what the hell it is that a movie called Divergent sounds to me like it's stupid. I don't know why. I don't know why. To me, it's like some guy was trying to make the movie different. Oh, well, call it Divergent.
|
Sam:
[29:04]
| Well, it was based on a book that was also called Divergent.
|
Ivan:
[29:08]
| I know. There's three movies, if I remember correctly.
|
Sam:
[29:12]
| There's three movies. I think there's four books.
|
Ivan:
[29:14]
| My wife was... Five books now, actually. All right. I have not. This is another one that I have not watched in its entirety. This was a time also with linear TV. When this happened, my wife happened to be watching it. I watched a part of it. I came away with thinking this thing is stupid. And I left a room. Something along these lines.
|
Sam:
[29:37]
| Let me tell you where I was. I believe I gave the first movie a thumbs up. I really liked it. And it basically, the title Divergent actually comes from the fact that there are some individuals, the society has been broken up into sort of cases by like what kind of jobs they do. So there's like the intellectuals, there's the politicians, there's the soldiers, there's the whatever. Each of them have different names, but it's divided up into these casts. And then the divergent people are essentially people who don't fit into any of those categories well. Okay.
|
Sam:
[30:14]
| And I liked the first movie. I thought it was like some interesting, and I have not read the books, by the way, but I thought there were some interesting ideas. I thought it was well executed. I liked the actress. I liked sort of the situations they put her in and how it played out. I felt like the second movie, I'm only going to give a thumb sideways to, it was sort of like it doubled down on the action part of things as opposed to the interesting ideas part of things. Like the first movie I found interesting because, you know, they had the factions and how was this society structured and what was the divergent person and why and stuff. And there was still some of that in the second one because you sort of evolved the idea and found out a little bit more about why the factions existed and how that came about and blah, blah, blah. But it really sort of doubled down on being, hey, it's an action movie. There's a war, there's a battle, there's people running around and jumping on trains and shooting and blah, blah, blah. And I just find that aspect of it less interesting than the ideas part. And it felt like the ideas were explored in the first one.
|
Sam:
[31:37]
| And the second one was more just about, okay, now let's have everybody run around and fight and, you know, this kind of stuff. And that was just less interesting to me. It was okay.
|
Sam:
[31:49]
| I'm giving it a thumb sideways. Again, I reserve the thumbs down for the worst of the worst. But I give it a thumb sideways. It was okay. It was an entertaining couple hours. How long was this thing? 119 minutes, so almost exactly a couple hours. And it was fine. It was a fine little movie. It did not bore me. It was interesting. It covered the couple hours, but it didn't feel like, oh, wow, this is a good movie I will remember.
|
Ivan:
[32:16]
| Amazing, yes.
|
Sam:
[32:17]
| Whereas, I mean, the first movie wasn't going to be like... It wasn't like going to, I'm going to say it wasn't award-winning, but I don't know. Maybe it did win some awards. I don't even remember. But like, but I like. I have to look this up. The first one, I was like, that was a good movie. I really enjoyed this. This second one was more like, it was a movie. It was okay. And nothing. That's it. But you hated the first one enough that the second one wasn't even in your radar.
|
Ivan:
[32:46]
| I think it may have been. I'm thinking now.
|
Sam:
[32:48]
| I think I remember you saying you fell asleep in one of these.
|
Ivan:
[32:52]
| It's very possible. I fall asleep in a lot of movies. It's, you know, so that, that's, that's a distinct possibility. I think, I think that the one that I hated, the, where I, I had not watched the first one. My wife's watching the second one.
|
Sam:
[33:08]
| Okay.
|
Ivan:
[33:09]
| I'm pretty sure about this, that it was the second. Okay. Because of the.
|
Sam:
[33:13]
| Moving on. Let's, let's, let's move it on. The second movie for this time around, which again, I watched on November 21st, 2024, is Kubo and the Two Strings from 2016.
|
Ivan:
[33:28]
| Kubo and the what?
|
Sam:
[33:30]
| The Two Strings.
|
Ivan:
[33:32]
| Okay.
|
Sam:
[33:33]
| It's a stop-motion animated fantasy film.
|
Sam:
[33:38]
| And it gives you some of the people who are in it. Charlize Theron, Ralph Fiennes, Rooney Mara, George Takai, Matthew McConaughey. so it's got it's got some and and art parkinson i don't know who art parkinson is but like anyway thumbs up i really liked this movie like i really enjoyed this movie let me give you the the first paragraph of the plot in uh from wikipedia of course in the in the early feudal Japan era, a 12-year-old boy with only one eye named Kubo tends to his ill mother, Sarayatu, in a mountain cave near a village. He earns their living by manipulating origami with music from his magical shamisen, a Japanese stringed instrument, telling the tale of his missing father, Hanzo, a samurai warrior. Kubo is never able to finish his story, as he does not know what happened to Hanzo, and his mother cannot recall the end due to her deteriorating mental state. His mother warns him not to stay out after dark, as her sisters Karasu and Washi, as well as his grandfather, the Moon King, who took his eye when he was a baby, will find him and take his remaining eye.
|
Sam:
[35:08]
| Obviously, at one point, he stays out after night. after dark and things happen and adventure ensues and a whole bunch of stuff happens and he finds out this is as spoilery as as i'm going to get he finds out more about what happened to his father and to the history of what happened to his eye and all this kind of stuff and blah blah blah he he discovers some of that in any case i really liked the movie there i didn't think i was at at first I was like, what the hell is this? This is kind of goofy. But like, as it went on, it drew me in. I really got it. It, it, it hit some emotional notes.
|
Sam:
[35:48]
| It, it, it was the kind of thing where by the end it was tugging at your heartstrings. And that's the kind of movie I end up liking the most. Like it, it, you know, I, I'm pretty sure I ended the movie like crying, which I like it when a movie makes me cry, you know? And yeah, I, I, I, I liked the movie. It, it, uh, it was not one I'd really heard of before I watched it. I don't know how it got on my list. I'm sure somebody mentioned it. Like I put movies on my list. If, if, if I ever see anybody mention a movie in anything, even remotely like a positive way, I add it to my list. Also, it's, if it's ever a wiki of the day, I add it to my list, you know, things like that. Um, anyway, big thumbs up for Kubo in the two strings. It is animated, but, you know, it's an all-family movie. It's not like a kid's movie. It's got some, like, themes that will hit you as an adult as well. But it's also, like, it's not going to be bad for kids either. Kids will also enjoy it. Anyway, let's see.
|
Ivan:
[36:56]
| 97% in Rotten Tomatoes rated, so it got really good.
|
Sam:
[37:01]
| There you go.
|
Ivan:
[37:02]
| So by the way.
|
Sam:
[37:03]
| I was nominated for best animated feature at the Academy Awards as well as best visual effects, but it lost to Zootopia and the Jungle Book.
|
Ivan:
[37:13]
| Oh well but you.
|
Sam:
[37:15]
| Know i have not seen either zootopia or the more recent jungle book i think i once upon a time saw the original from like whatever it was the 60s or 70s whatever that was but but yeah no big thumbs up.
|
Ivan:
[37:31]
| So i went back yes i went back and checked on diversion i still remember the one thing that these were like multiple movies here so i i think i started getting annoyed because the first one is divergent the second one was divergent series insurgent it sounds like something that a car that actually annoys me too that it's not like just.
|
Sam:
[37:54]
| Insurgent it's the divergent.
|
Ivan:
[37:57]
| Series insurgent and you know it sounds like it sounds like a made-up name that a car company would give a car like acura with the integra okay this is what this sounds like Then the third one was Allegiant series. Allegiant.
|
Sam:
[38:10]
| Yes.
|
Ivan:
[38:11]
| Okay. You know, sounds like Allegis. They made up a name that was sort of a corporate name for some travel company, whatever. I don't, by the way, they went, according to this, they kept going really downhill. The third one was very poorly received. It was so badly received that there was supposed to be.
|
Sam:
[38:29]
| It was supposed to be a two-parter. I have seen the third one at this point too, but I will save it till when we get to it in order. but I will agree this is one of those trilogies where each one is worse than the one before.
|
Ivan:
[38:41]
| Yes. It was really bad. And not just that I'm supposed to be two parts. It was so bad that they canceled the second part. There was supposed to be a TV spinoff and they canceled that too.
|
Sam:
[38:53]
| Yes.
|
Ivan:
[38:54]
| But Kubo and the other thing, I, I, as a matter of fact, I, I honestly, I don't even remember it. This happened. So, but yeah, Like I said.
|
Sam:
[39:04]
| I hadn't really heard of it. I mean, it somehow got on my list, but like, yeah.
|
Ivan:
[39:09]
| And you liked it, and I saw the reviews, and it's a very big thumbs up as well from other people who have watched it.
|
Sam:
[39:15]
| It is worth looking up. I'm sure it's on one of the streaming services, or you can buy it on Apple or something, but it's worth it. It's a good movie. I enjoyed it. Now, if you like that sort of, you know, kid goes on an adventure, there's family dynamics and it pulls on your heartstrings kind of movie, then you'll like this. Okay. Okay. With that, let's knock this sucker out. Let's take a break and then we'll come back and talk about the news. Back after this. Okay, and with that, Yvonne, your pick. What newsy thing shall we start with today?
|
Ivan:
[41:54]
| Thank you. Yeah, I, uh, shit.
|
Sam:
[42:00]
| Tough choice? Nothing exciting you?
|
Ivan:
[42:03]
| I hate all of it.
|
Sam:
[42:08]
| We could just do more movies.
|
Ivan:
[42:10]
| Okay.
|
Sam:
[42:11]
| Yes.
|
Ivan:
[42:11]
| Wait, it's not on the list, but... So, Trump was on the roof of the White House.
|
Sam:
[42:17]
| Right?
|
Ivan:
[42:19]
| This was this week.
|
Sam:
[42:20]
| Right? That was real. That did happen.
|
Ivan:
[42:22]
| What the fuck is going on, Sam? I mean, what the... What in the fuck? I mean... Sam!
|
Sam:
[42:29]
| Sam! So, wait.
|
Ivan:
[42:30]
| Sam! The President of the United States, out of the blue, all of a sudden, is walking around yelling at the roof of the White House.
|
Sam:
[42:40]
| No, no. So there's the joke answer, and then there is a real explanation as far as I can tell. So the joke answer is, like, he shot up on the roof, and the reporters down on the ground were like, Hey, sir, why are you on the roof?
|
Ivan:
[42:55]
| Right.
|
Sam:
[42:55]
| And he's like, I'm taking a walk. I'm just going for a stroll. Yeah, that is what he said. And then he yelled back and forth at the reporters for a while. but if you listen to the continued conversation after that it looks like this is yet more donald trump looking at remodeling the white house stuff he's like he he's talking about like building some additional stuff up there on the roof like he made some hand gestures like maybe he was going to build a dome of some sort up there um is this still crazy.
|
Ivan:
[43:28]
| Shit sam we're in I mean, I'm sorry. I'm sorry.
|
Sam:
[43:34]
| And he wasn't by himself. He had the Secret Service and other people with him up there.
|
Ivan:
[43:38]
| Yeah, there were some people there that looked not too pleased about him being on the fucking roof, by the way. Those people were not looking like, oh, yeah, this is a great idea.
|
Sam:
[43:49]
| Uh-huh. Look, he wants to build a giant golden dome on top of the White House roof.
|
Ivan:
[43:55]
| Oh, my God. There keeps more gold in the fucking Oval Office.
|
Sam:
[44:00]
| Every time you look at the Oval Office, there's more gold.
|
Ivan:
[44:02]
| It's like a fucking... I mean, what the hell? And the mirrors...
|
Sam:
[44:06]
| Did you see the patio that they replaced the Rose Garden with?
|
Ivan:
[44:09]
| Oh, God. Yeah, with the fucking...
|
Sam:
[44:11]
| It's also got the gold umbrellas. golden umbrellas, I yeah so yes he was around on a roof but he had a purpose, sort of although it's unclear for real what he was like there's no real information about oh yeah he's considering building X or whatever it was just, bullshitting while he was talking up there and like who knows what was serious and what was a joke and what wasn't and whatever but I mean.
|
Ivan:
[44:42]
| Of course, he keeps saying that he's paying for with donors for this fucking golden fucking ballroom.
|
Sam:
[44:49]
| Well, but now let me understand to build this ballroom. They basically have to demolish a huge portion of the existing White House to replace it with this thing, right?
|
Ivan:
[45:00]
| I that's not what I understood. I understood that.
|
Sam:
[45:03]
| Are they squeezing it in between the existing?
|
Ivan:
[45:06]
| They're squeezing it in. Yeah.
|
Sam:
[45:08]
| Oh, sort of where that long hallway is that goes off to the east wing or whatever.
|
Ivan:
[45:12]
| Yes. Yeah. Yeah. Something like that is my understanding. Yeah. They're just going to squeeze it in.
|
Sam:
[45:17]
| I thought they were going to actually like gut the existing building.
|
Ivan:
[45:21]
| Nah. But my whole point about this is, this is the shit that is just in his head. And then, then he was there the other day with a whole bunch of charts. about the economy about the economy and i don't know with a whole bunch of but but but he didn't even he started showing these charts he doesn't even know what the fuck they say and he's just saying look look at these numbers they're great numbers wonderful numbers you don't even know what the fuck's on the charts yeah the line went up right and then we were tariffing gold, and then they're trying to clarify we're not tariffing gold because.
|
Sam:
[45:59]
| The swiss were upset.
|
Ivan:
[46:00]
| Well, the Swiss were here this week, and I don't think Trump even talked to the president of Switzerland, which I'm guessing is because he didn't talk to her because she's a woman. And he's just a sexist prick as well.
|
Sam:
[46:14]
| Okay.
|
Ivan:
[46:16]
| Aside from a pedophile.
|
Sam:
[46:18]
| Yes. So is our theme here Trump's mental health and competence? I mean. Because we've talked about this before. I mean, he was never very good, and he's been getting worse.
|
Ivan:
[46:31]
| Worse? And then, you know, I don't know. I'm going to give—listen.
|
Sam:
[46:39]
| Oh, and of course, we can't hear about anything else on TV other than Trump's mental decline, right? Because that's what happened to Biden when he had a couple missteps.
|
Ivan:
[46:50]
| Right. Look, I know that—I'm pretty sure that Jake Tapper is working on his book right now on Trump's mental decline. Yes.
|
Sam:
[46:57]
| Yes, and non-stop coverage about how he should resign because he clearly doesn't know what he's doing anymore, right?
|
Ivan:
[47:06]
| Right, yeah. I got a fucking lunatic president walking through the fucking roof in the middle of the day in the White House. And I'm like, oh, what the fuck is going on? And yelling at reporters up there.
|
Sam:
[47:21]
| Well, if he didn't yell, they wouldn't have been able to hear him.
|
Ivan:
[47:24]
| That's true. Yes. Yeah. Good point.
|
Sam:
[47:27]
| And they were yelling at him.
|
Ivan:
[47:28]
| Yeah. And then apparently now he's trying to insert himself into the New York City mayor race. that he's trying to endorse everybody. You know, so he's trying to endorse the supposed Democrats that are against Madami. Oh, God. Let me butcher his name.
|
Sam:
[47:47]
| Madami.
|
Ivan:
[47:48]
| Madami.
|
Sam:
[47:49]
| I'm sorry. Madami.
|
Ivan:
[47:50]
| Oh, fuck.
|
Sam:
[47:51]
| See, now you got me having to check.
|
Ivan:
[47:53]
| Oh, God. I'm sorry. I should know this by now.
|
Sam:
[47:59]
| Did you find it? Did you find it? Did you find it?
|
Ivan:
[48:01]
| I'm working on it. Mamdani. Mamdani. Sorry. Mamdani. Fuck, Jesus.
|
Sam:
[48:09]
| There he is. Zoran Mamdani. Okay. Yes. Continue.
|
Ivan:
[48:18]
| He's scheming with Cuomo for the New York mayor's race?
|
Sam:
[48:25]
| Well, there were reports they had a call. Cuomo denies it was about the race at all, but he didn't actually deny there was a call. Meanwhile, Mom Downey is, of course, running with it that, you know, clearly a vote for Cuomo or Adams is really a vote for Trump.
|
Ivan:
[48:43]
| Yes.
|
Sam:
[48:43]
| Yeah. This like.
|
Ivan:
[48:45]
| Is that, I mean, it's true. I mean, Eric Adams cut a deal with him.
|
Sam:
[48:50]
| Yes.
|
Ivan:
[48:52]
| So he's in his pocket. And it seems like Cuomo, for some reason, also is like playing, you know, for Trump, too. Yeah, that is what that is what it seems like right now.
|
Sam:
[49:06]
| Well, I think the thing is, I mean, at various times.
|
Ivan:
[49:09]
| Here's the problem, Cuomo just wants to win. He doesn't care.
|
Sam:
[49:12]
| Yes, I was going to say that at various times in the past, Cuomo has positioned himself as anti-Trump. He's also positioned himself as like, hey, I can I can work with whoever I can get things done, blah, blah, blah. He's positioned himself a whole bunch of different ways. the whole Cuomo thing just pisses me off.
|
Ivan:
[49:32]
| Oh my God. To no end.
|
Sam:
[49:34]
| You know, like after what happened to you go slink away and disappear.
|
Ivan:
[49:39]
| Right.
|
Sam:
[49:40]
| You know, like you've got plenty of money. You'll do fine. Just go retire. Kick your feet up.
|
Ivan:
[49:48]
| Watch some TV. Like, like, like fucking like what's his name? Giuliani. He could be collecting a couple of billion bucks a year.
|
Sam:
[49:55]
| There's a bunch of things he could do. He does not have to go back and run for office again. I mean, you resigned in disgrace. Come on. Of course, the lesson all of these people have been having, I mean, the lesson from Trump himself getting reelected and everybody else is never resign, double down and screw it.
|
Ivan:
[50:18]
| Okay. Here's one thing on the New York race. I looked up to see if there was any recent polling. Recent polling right now, this is about five days ago that I found here on The Race, a new poll found with a significant lead in the current field of five candidates, attaining 50% of the vote, regardless of his opponent.
|
Sam:
[50:37]
| Now, unlike the first round, this isn't any funky runoff, multiple choice, whatever. This is just like whoever gets the most votes wins, right? There's not even a runoff.
|
Ivan:
[50:48]
| Let me see. The combined little support for... Let me see. Actually, I'm not sure, so I'm checking to see if they got ranked choice polling for the...
|
Sam:
[50:58]
| I think that was only for the primary.
|
Ivan:
[51:00]
| My number is going to... misconducted, 2.0, I support never dips below 50% and only increases in a thinner field of candidates. For example, in a hypothetical four-way race without Cuomo, Mamdani's support rose to 55%. In a four-way race without Adams, his support rose to 51%. Mamdani is the only candidate of five that the majority of respondents, 58%, said he would consider voting for in November's election. In comparison to the 37%, they were voting for Cuomo, 27% they were voting for younger Adams. It's a very like the Republican doesn't exist in this election, basically.
|
Sam:
[51:37]
| Essentially, yeah. I mean, Republicans have been mayor in New York many times before. You mentioned Giuliani. Yeah, but this is... Bloomberg was a Republican before he was a Democrat. But, you know, it takes a certain situation for that to occur.
|
Ivan:
[51:55]
| Yeah, and it's not happening right now. But it's looking like it doesn't matter who he's trying to, like, support.
|
Sam:
[52:03]
| I have answered my question in New York City. Primary elections are conducted with rank choice voting while first past the post is used for general elections. So that means whoever, whoever has the plurality, they don't even have to get 50%.
|
Ivan:
[52:20]
| Oh, beautiful. So he's got the edge. Like, like, you know, yeah, he's got, he's got a, he's got a total edge. So. Okay. So, yeah. So it's looking like he's, you know, he's looking like he's definitely way ahead. So.
|
Sam:
[52:38]
| And by the way, there's still all sorts of leadership Democrats hedging their bets on this guy.
|
Ivan:
[52:42]
| By the way, they're idiots. Okay. I just went and I went to this, I searched on the, on this and I got ads. CBP is hiring officers now. Serve your country while earning a competitive salary and benefits with a CBP. Apply today. so there's a career option for you sam.
|
Sam:
[53:00]
| Border patrol yeah you.
|
Ivan:
[53:04]
| Could go and like they could partner you up with dean kane you met you guys are the dream team.
|
Sam:
[53:09]
| For those who didn't see see dean kane who's one of the actors who played uh superman in a tv series a while back who's basically hasn't had a active acting career lately and came out as a rabid mega conservative type has said he's joining ICE.
|
Ivan:
[53:27]
| He must be doing really well since he's joining ICE.
|
Sam:
[53:31]
| Well, and ICE apparently said, too, he'll be there sort of in a symbolic fashion.
|
Ivan:
[53:37]
| Yeah, yeah, yeah.
|
Sam:
[53:38]
| It's not like he's actually going to be out on the street doing stuff.
|
Ivan:
[53:41]
| I mean, so he's lying, really, because I figured he just signed up to be a fucking officer. But, well, to help all these guys lie about everything.
|
Sam:
[53:49]
| Well, this seems like a natural segue into the South Park episode on...
|
Ivan:
[53:54]
| Oh, you know, the one thing about this, this whole thing, the South Park episode where they, they had Kristi Noem on shooting every puppy that appeared on TV.
|
Sam:
[54:11]
| Which by the way i have not seen the whole episode but i have seen multiple clips yvonne shared on the curmudgeon's corner slack the the first clip where she was shooting puppies which apparently she was like shooting a commercial in a south park episode she was shooting a commercial to recruit for ice and it was basically like you know the theme of it is no qualifications anymore we don't care who you are you can join but she kept getting distracted by having to shoot puppies, that wandered by or whatever. But apparently, from other clips I've seen, this was a recurring theme throughout the entire episode. And the closing credits had her running into a pet store and just shooting up the whole place and killing everything in there.
|
Ivan:
[55:01]
| Ha ha ha! And the thing is that, you know, while she's doing this.
|
Sam:
[55:08]
| By the way, apparently she's all this.
|
Ivan:
[55:10]
| Yeah. Well, I was going to get to that. And while she's, you know, motivating all these people with all this Nazi sloganeering and shit, whatever, whatnot, and shooting puppies in front of them. The one thing is that her makeup starts falling apart. OK.
|
Sam:
[55:25]
| Right.
|
Ivan:
[55:25]
| And then an entire coterie of aides come in to try to fix her. And her whole takeaway from this was that they were ragging on her looks. That's what she took away from this. And I'm just like, wait a second. Not that you're shooting the puppies. Not that you're being basically a Nazi on TV. And by the way, what they were mocking wasn't the looks. What they were mocking was her obsession on the looks, which basically trumped, pun intended, everything else, okay, because its image is everything for this woman.
|
Sam:
[56:05]
| Well, it's more than that, too. They were also mocking the general tendency, if you look at women in Trump world.
|
Ivan:
[56:13]
| Oh, fuck, yeah. They're all, holy shit.
|
Sam:
[56:17]
| You can see, if you Google this online, you can see before and after.
|
Ivan:
[56:21]
| Yeah, it's a Mar-a-Lago look.
|
Sam:
[56:23]
| Where before, they looked like normal women.
|
Ivan:
[56:26]
| Yes.
|
Sam:
[56:27]
| And then the after, they've had, like, in some cases, it's just makeup. In some cases, there's plastic surgery. There's whatever. But there's a specific look.
|
Ivan:
[56:37]
| Oh, shit.
|
Sam:
[56:39]
| And as far as I'm concerned, they universally look worse.
|
Ivan:
[56:43]
| Oh, my God. So much worse. Holy shit.
|
Sam:
[56:46]
| It's like you looked like a normal, like, attractive woman. And now you look like some sort of, I don't even know what.
|
Ivan:
[56:56]
| Some kind of Frankenstein, you know, experiment is what they look like afterwards. Holy shit. Yeah. So they're mocking that, not the way that she actually looked, but their obsession with this look and the obsession with the looks. I mean, you know, she was standing, like I mentioned, she was standing in front of a jail in El Salvador. Okay, a jail. A gulag, basically, that they created in fucking El Salvador wearing an $80,000 watch. You know, and I'm not like going, and again, as I said, tell me where the fuck this money's coming from, Sam. Because this woman never made more than a hundred and some odd thousand dollars a year. Okay? Before she got to this job. And somehow she was wearing an $80,000 watch. You want to explain that one to me?
|
Sam:
[57:45]
| Trump coin.
|
Ivan:
[57:46]
| Ah! Trump coin. Yeah. Forgot about that. Now you can hold it in your 401k.
|
Sam:
[57:53]
| I, I've, I've heard.
|
Ivan:
[57:56]
| Yeah. Now, you know, we, we could, we could buy the Trump coins into our 401k. Prepare for a retirement. Excellent.
|
Sam:
[58:06]
| Okay. Also, any other general ranting about the Trump administration you wanted?
|
Ivan:
[58:12]
| Yes. Tim Apple went to the White House.
|
Sam:
[58:15]
| Okay. Yeah, I was going to bring that up if you didn't. Go ahead. Tell me about Tim Apple.
|
Ivan:
[58:21]
| Look, first say what he did before you talk about it. He went to the White House. Look, he has been the company's getting hit from all sides on all these tariff announcements and all this shit, you know, move production to India. Then there were tariffs on India. They were talking about tariffs on chips. They're talking about everything. And because Apple, unlike a lot of their competitors right now, the other, you know, big Silicon Valley companies, okay, you know, the only two that really move massive amount of goods are Amazon and Apple. Okay. The rest are which is, you know, advertising, software, whatever. They don't have, they're not, they're not, the impact of this shit isn't hitting them. But Apple definitely is, looking at this, and it's problematic. And so they went with an olive branch to the White House to formally declare, that they were going to invest $100 billion in certain specific manufacturing that they figured that they could do in the U.S., basically to try to get that in exchange for not having to bring fucking iPhone production to the U.S.
|
Sam:
[59:33]
| Wait, wait. Don't forget the little...
|
Ivan:
[59:35]
| Wait, wait, wait. But part of the whole thing was the presentation of this, because they were manufacturing glass, Corning Glass factory, and one of the things that they were doing is this presentation of this glass plaque with an Apple logo with a commitment to it with a base made out of 24 karat gold. Yes. Hey, anybody worried about gift limits to the White House anymore?
|
Sam:
[59:58]
| No. And I hadn't heard, like, traditionally gifts like this officially belong to the government. It's not a gift to the individual Okay.
|
Ivan:
[1:00:10]
| Do you think that's staying in the White House?
|
Sam:
[1:00:12]
| Here's what I think Like, it may officially be a gift to a government But just like everything else, Donald Trump will just take it Like, he did that Didn't he take, like, some sports trophy a couple weeks ago?
|
Ivan:
[1:00:22]
| He took, yes, he took the fucking trophy From the damn FIFA tournament And he kept the damn thing They had to make a replica to give it to the fucking winners Yes.
|
Sam:
[1:00:35]
| So, yeah, he's going to take the damn thing. I mean, he, you know, remember there was a whole thing about stuff he took to Mar-a-Lago that he wasn't supposed to take. He got invited for that shit. Of course he's going to take things like this. I will say, before we talk a little bit more about Tim Apple, and we're calling him Tim Apple because Donald Trump called him that once. But the thing is, from what I've read after this, is it not true that basically everything Apple promised that they were going to do, they were already doing anyway?
|
Ivan:
[1:01:17]
| I believe that the previous—you know what?
|
Sam:
[1:01:21]
| Like, they talked about making this glass in Kentucky. They already are making that glass in Kentucky. Now, they may be committing to make more. I don't know. But like it seems like a common theme, a common theme in all of these deals with Donald Trump is whether it's whether it's Apple or whether it's other countries is to dig up things they were already doing or planning on doing anyway and serving them up on a silver platter and saying, OK, we're going to do this and let Donald Trump claim it as a way.
|
Ivan:
[1:01:54]
| Silver, silver, gold platter. What are you talking about?
|
Sam:
[1:01:56]
| Gold platter, sorry.
|
Ivan:
[1:01:56]
| Is that a gold platter?
|
Sam:
[1:01:58]
| Yes, it has to be gold. Sorry.
|
Ivan:
[1:01:59]
| Yes. My bad. Well, so is that right? I did not look into the details of this. I did not whether that was already in the plans or not. However, what I will say is that it is in most of the cases, like you've mentioned, that has been the case. The reality is that, you know, that Trump didn't know any. It wouldn't have known about it anyway. And so, therefore, in large part, you know, just going up there and showing him, hey, we did make a commitment to build. This is what it is. don't fucking tear off my goddamn phones and chips.
|
Sam:
[1:02:32]
| Right and.
|
Ivan:
[1:02:33]
| He said yes.
|
Sam:
[1:02:34]
| Yeah yeah so apple got the exemption that you know they're like we're throwing these massive massive thing on chips but not you guys because you said you would do this and and part of it is also again it is the optics it is coming to the white house yeah it is kissing the ring it is telling donald how wonderful it is. It is giving him the golden glass thingamabob and saying, we're going to do all this stuff. Again, whether or not you are going to do it anyway doesn't matter. It is the physical act of sucking up to Donald Trump that gets you your exemption. And so then I've seen a lot of criticism that says, this is really disgusting. Tim Cook, see, I used his real name that time going and doing this stuff but at the same time he got his company the damn exemption.
|
Ivan:
[1:03:28]
| Exactly you know he's looking for out for his shareholders and his employees he's like you know the fuck am i gonna do and let us get fucked by this guy look i i'm gonna say this probably, most of you know if you had told me like say 10 years ago hey ivan do you want to be ceo of apple I would have been like, absolutely. I'll take the job. I want that job. I would have loved to take that job. I would have taken that job. You ask me right now, do I want to be CEO of Apple? Having to deal with this shit? I would be like, fuck no. I don't want to be in Tim's shoes. This is, you know, some people have been talking about replacing him, whatever, Weld or behind whatever. Let me tell you something. This fucking nightmare, fucking scenario that as executives of many companies are having to deal with, with this fucking Trump administration, which operates like a mob enterprise, okay, that you're getting shaken down by Donald Trump every time you go over there is a fucking nightmare for anybody who has been a ceo of a public company during their during their lives it's the worst fucking environment to to to fucking have to operate no i wouldn't want the job right now no because.
|
Sam:
[1:04:44]
| Nothing's about like hey here are the fixed rules that you have to play in and then figure out how to do that instead it's all 100 about can you suck up enough to donald trump that he doesn't.
|
Ivan:
[1:04:57]
| Go after you. Yeah, basically. Like you did Intel CEO this week.
|
Sam:
[1:05:02]
| Tell that story.
|
Ivan:
[1:05:04]
| Apparently, I don't know what the Chinese ties that he have and Intel's problems. All of a sudden, Donald Trump started demanding that Intel fire CEO.
|
Sam:
[1:05:13]
| Now, what Donald Trump and company have said is all sorts of conflicts of interest with China.
|
Ivan:
[1:05:21]
| Right.
|
Sam:
[1:05:21]
| But is there truth to that?
|
Ivan:
[1:05:24]
| I have seen no basis for that.
|
Sam:
[1:05:27]
| Or is it just like...
|
Ivan:
[1:05:28]
| This is just racism as far as I can tell.
|
Sam:
[1:05:30]
| That's what I was going to say. Is it just flat out racism?
|
Ivan:
[1:05:32]
| The guy's Chinese. It seems like it, yes.
|
Sam:
[1:05:36]
| Is he going to go after every CEO that's not white?
|
Ivan:
[1:05:39]
| I don't know. He hasn't gone after a Microsoft guy, Satya.
|
Sam:
[1:05:45]
| Yeah. Yet.
|
Ivan:
[1:05:46]
| Yet. I don't know. But look, it wouldn't be... I mean, it wouldn't surprise me if he does it. I mean, you know, the guy is a rampant racist.
|
Sam:
[1:06:00]
| Yeah. Okay. Anything else on this or should we take a break? I promise not to bring up Donald Trump in the next.
|
Ivan:
[1:06:07]
| Uh, I see if there's anything, you know, nah, there, there's nothing, there's nothing else. I had made a, I had, I had left an item from, no, from previously talking about reshoring and I was not going to happen anytime soon. And it, it, and, and really this whole thing with Apple, the whole thing was affirming. It was, it was precisely affirming that. but they're like dude we can't bring this fucking production here it's just we could bring this, but that the the rest of the shit you're talking about impossible that's what this is all about, everybody else is getting killed look the automaker i don't know why the automakers can't get a can't get a break from him okay because gm and ford are getting hammered by by the the tariffs they're getting hammered and they haven't been able to go and like get some kind of like way of presenting him a golden tire or something i don't know whatever so he could get him off their backs, right now the current trade deals favor you making a car in japan and bringing it over versus making one in the u.s.
|
Sam:
[1:07:17]
| Right it's it's insane because of high tariffs on raw materials and a relatively low tariff on Japan after the latest deal they gave.
|
Ivan:
[1:07:27]
| Correct.
|
Sam:
[1:07:28]
| Yes.
|
Ivan:
[1:07:29]
| It's nuts.
|
Sam:
[1:07:31]
| Because once again, the theme on all these tariffs, which by the way, all of the tariffs that had been put off over and over and over again, most of them went into effect this week as well.
|
Ivan:
[1:07:41]
| Yes.
|
Sam:
[1:07:42]
| Now, who knows if they'll last, what the deal is, but we now basically have this baseline 15, 16% across the board worldwide.
|
Ivan:
[1:07:51]
| The average that was calculated by some people is 18%, but even some guy today on Bloomberg said, look.
|
Sam:
[1:07:57]
| There's a lot of ups and downs and differences.
|
Ivan:
[1:07:59]
| It's so complicated.
|
Sam:
[1:08:00]
| Yeah.
|
Ivan:
[1:08:01]
| And that he's still, look, I don't understand how some of the people are even getting to that number.
|
Sam:
[1:08:06]
| It's complicated. Because there's a lot of rules.
|
Ivan:
[1:08:08]
| Exemptions, things, certain materials don't apply, blah, blah, blah.
|
Sam:
[1:08:12]
| But also, and again, no rhyme or reason to it either.
|
Ivan:
[1:08:15]
| No, there's no rhyme or reason.
|
Sam:
[1:08:17]
| Like it's all over, it's all about who has sucked up to Donald lately. Yeah. You know, basically. basically and so it's not like there's some sort of coherent philosophical tariff worldview that you apply and get this other than tariffs are cool and they're something i can use to like beat people over the head of it.
|
Ivan:
[1:08:42]
| I would never imagine that somebody would ever utter the phrase tariffs are cool can i can i just say that that is just the you know that was a phrase that i I never expected in my whole fucking lifetime to hear. By the way, but how complicated it is.
|
Sam:
[1:09:00]
| Okay, go.
|
Ivan:
[1:09:01]
| You know that Trump said Brazil 50% tariff, right?
|
Sam:
[1:09:04]
| Yes, yes.
|
Ivan:
[1:09:05]
| Well, apparently there are so many buts in it that it really isn't the 50% tariff.
|
Sam:
[1:09:12]
| OK, tell.
|
Ivan:
[1:09:14]
| I'm not I'm not sure which ones, you know, here it is. It was an economist article today. Donald Trump's tariffs on Brazil are more barked than bite. The Latin American giant may have avoided the worst for now. And it said here that let me see where the detail are of it. But it's saying here that there is there's the tariffs now in place against Brazil, except nearly 700 products, including planes. So the biggest worry first, Embraer. They export a lot of aircraft. Guess what? They're exempted. Oil also exempted. Wood pulp, orange juice, exports of coffee, beef and fruit were not so lucky. But but still, the exemptions were so big that in the end, it's not a 50 percent tariff.
|
Sam:
[1:09:56]
| Right. So, yeah. And as we said from the very beginning, watching these exemptions is probably more important than looking at the top level.
|
Ivan:
[1:10:08]
| All you got to do is follow the fucking money trail to figure out who's getting exempt, basically. I would like just a report of who the fuck, the company, and who's donating. You're going to find, predict, who's getting a tariff exemption.
|
Sam:
[1:10:22]
| Yeah. I would bet money that you are correct on that.
|
Ivan:
[1:10:27]
| You know, in the Godfather movies, they had this part where guys from, you know, I guess this is from from the telephone, you know, I can't remember which telephone company they were portraying there. I think it's probably ITT probably at the time show up in Cuba and they give this golden telephone to the dictator. OK. All right. In the thing. And it's just amazing how exactly it is working right now. Just like that in the Trump White House.
|
Sam:
[1:10:55]
| Right. One other Trump administration-related thing, although it's not as directly Donald Trump, is a long string of things RFK Jr. has been doing in the health area. Yeah. The most recent was canceling $500 million in research to mRNA vaccines. And look, I've seen so many posts on like Blue Sky and Mastodon and other places from, you know, health-related people, specialists in the field, talking about how incredibly stupid this is and shooting ourselves in the foot like everything else. And in this particular case, It's like now some people have said, you know, people are going to die because of this lack of research. But I feel like it's it's more complicated than that because other countries are going to do this research.
|
Ivan:
[1:11:51]
| Right.
|
Sam:
[1:11:52]
| You know, it will get done. It's just we're going to be behind.
|
Ivan:
[1:11:56]
| We're going to be behind. Exactly. Other and here are going to be the ones that are going to control this and that that we're going to need at some point. And we're going to be behind. Yes.
|
Sam:
[1:12:05]
| Well, and here's the thing, like of all. If you look at Donald Trump's first administration, the one thing that he did that was probably really good was the goddamn Operation Warp Speed on the COVID vaccine to really push it, push it hard, and use some of this mRNA technology that was really cutting edge and resulted in a vaccine that worked really, really well. Multiple vaccines using this technique across the world. But the thing is, the technique involved in that, which, by the way, it was not brand new for the COVID vaccine. They had been working on researching mRNA vaccines for a decade plus.
|
Sam:
[1:12:48]
| And this was just the first one that was like, OK, we'll use it on this one right away and we'll fast track it and blah, blah, blah. But this stuff has shown extreme promise, like for an actual HIV-AIDS vaccine is in the final stages and was one of the things canceled. The tests on it were canceled on this. It's been showing promise for all sorts of cancer vaccines as well for certain types of cancer. there it's it's a really really promising technology that has all kinds of potential applications in different areas that's been showing that it's been working really well now a lot of this stuff is still in the research phase and that's what they're canceling is like it's really super promising technology with the potential to save you know millions of lives potentially and it's like okay we're not going to do that research anymore sorry you're on your own And again, I, I've, the research will get done, but the fact that it's not by us is, is just hurting ourselves for no reason.
|
Ivan:
[1:13:55]
| I mean, we're, we're just, we're just idiots.
|
Sam:
[1:13:59]
| And it probably will set things back. Like, you know, even if other people will pick up the slack, if we were the ones that were running ahead on this point, it's going to take a while for other folks to catch up. You know? And this is just one of many things that RFK Jr. is doing to really decimate our health infrastructure in this country, and it's really sad. And Donald Trump was asked about this, by the way. He's like, you know, the mRNA vaccine was one of the major successes of your first administration, and now all this stuff is being canceled. What do you think about that? And he says, like, that was the past. We're moving on. was basically his answer.
|
Ivan:
[1:14:43]
| He doesn't give a shit.
|
Sam:
[1:14:45]
| Okay, shall we take a break? I'll come back with some non-Trump, non-politics thing. We'll be back right after. I was about to say, I don't think this will take very long, but every time I say that, it ends up taking so long. So we'll be back. We'll be back.
|
Sam:
[1:15:55]
| Okay, here we are. Okay, so the topic I have in mind for the rest is just we had more AI stuff this week. And the big headline news was OpenAI released GPT-5, which is their latest version for chat GPT, has a number of improvements. They had hyped this as like major game-changing new thing. The initial reviews in the first couple days have been like, eh, maybe not so much. But then OpenAI also said the rollout hadn't gone smoothly and some things that were turned off that should have been turned on. Like apparently the thinking mode was not working for a significant portion of the first 24 hours this thing was out. But people have been posting their usual sort of AI fails of, like, AI doing really stupid things, like not being able to count the number of bees and blueberry, generating maps of the U.S. or lists of presidents that are completely wrong, things like that.
|
Ivan:
[1:17:01]
| Well, the great thing is that, look, the list of presidents that you shared, you know, showed that apparently our past presidents time traveled because they served in backwards time order.
|
Sam:
[1:17:16]
| Most of them did. Some of them served in frontwards time order, but for hundreds of years.
|
Ivan:
[1:17:21]
| For hundreds of years, yes.
|
Sam:
[1:17:22]
| Yes. Like, I believe FDR began his presidency sometime in the 1500s. You know. Now, he was president a long time, but not that long.
|
Ivan:
[1:17:34]
| But not 400 years.
|
Sam:
[1:17:36]
| And, of course, the name was wrong. They screwed up all the names.
|
Ivan:
[1:17:40]
| Yeah, the names, the names.
|
Sam:
[1:17:41]
| In really amusing ways.
|
Ivan:
[1:17:44]
| You know, I don't know. They just released a new AI program. the model for us for internal use just announced like yesterday as well i mean like i like i've mentioned actually our engineers are using it more than than me in order for solution you know in order to put together solutions and stuff we had a couple of internal models but i i i do think that well it was like this whole thing the other day the whole thing the other day that i shared about this girl that got thrown out of a trivia competition, okay? Where they were in the trivia competition and she got thrown out because they found out that she was like searching for the fucking answers. She was looking up the answers. She was looking up the answers and she got all pissed off and started screaming, this is bullshit. This is impossible. Nobody can know all these answers without fucking searching. and i'm like sam look i've already i've heard i can't remember who the hell, blurted this out to me the other day and i've seen this from and now i hear it from so many other people so many people are just admitting to me right now that they could not write an email without using chat gpt period they can't write an email well.
|
Sam:
[1:19:07]
| Well look i will tell you like at my place of work, Everyone is being encouraged to actively use AI for like everything. Now, internal AI is not like these external.
|
Ivan:
[1:19:21]
| Yeah, it's like, yeah, same thing as ours. Yeah.
|
Sam:
[1:19:24]
| And it's like, you know, everything from writing an email to writing a report to coding to whatever. It's like explore what's out there, figure out how you can use it effectively. Now, it's still expected that, you know, you as the human are reviewing it and making sure it makes sense.
|
Ivan:
[1:19:44]
| But this is my problem. Most of these people aren't reviewing anything that this shit is generating. OK, if the you know, so many of these people, the ones that I that I've heard from more not inside the company, but from other places. The main thing that the main thing that I see is that these people are using it and they don't they don't have no clue about what they said. They don't understand the subject matter.
|
Sam:
[1:20:07]
| I joked about this when this first started happening a couple of years ago, that we are now in a situation where somebody is given the assignment to send out a summary email or an email talking about whatever's going on, right? And so they give the AI like three or four bullets and say, write me a status report based on these three or four bullets. and the AI expands that out to like a one-page document or something. And then they send it out. And if anybody reads it at all, which may not even happen, but if anybody looks at it at all.
|
Ivan:
[1:20:44]
| They probably ask for it to summarize the EA back to them so they're not even reading the fucking thing. So what the hell's the point of a stupid thing anyway?
|
Sam:
[1:20:52]
| They have the AI summarize it back to three or four bullets and you could have just sent the three or four bullets.
|
Ivan:
[1:20:57]
| Four bullets!
|
Sam:
[1:20:58]
| To start word.
|
Ivan:
[1:20:59]
| That's the one thing. I don't understand why you're making, using the ai just to make tons of filler.
|
Sam:
[1:21:04]
| I i mean the the on a lot of these things it's like if if if it really matters that little then why are you wasting the time on it anyway i don't know at the same time like i i will fully admit both at work and at home the ai is saving me all kinds of time the ai is letting me do things that i would not have done And I get it.
|
Ivan:
[1:21:33]
| But I'm not talking about that. What I'm talking about is people not being able to answer simple questions anymore or do simple things because they can't. They can't think anymore.
|
Sam:
[1:21:54]
| And there was a study that came out like a few weeks ago as well, talking about they had one group of people write like your old traditional like five paragraph essays themselves about some topics that they had to research. And then they had another group who were encouraged to use AI to write the paragraphs. And then they tested both groups on something theoretically unrelated, but that still exercised your brain in some way. And they found that the people who'd used the AI did worse on the other tests afterwards.
|
Ivan:
[1:22:37]
| Yeah, no kidding.
|
Sam:
[1:22:39]
| Simply, I guess the theory is simply because they weren't exercising their brains for the other activity. so they got lazy or whatever i don't know you know but but at the same like i said i have to admit like i am i am getting things done that i wouldn't even have attempted without ai assistance here but.
|
Ivan:
[1:23:04]
| But you know what and and i guess you know maybe the one thing that i'm seeing and it's something that even other tools have shown in the past we've had google searches or whatever.
|
Sam:
[1:23:15]
| Is that.
|
Ivan:
[1:23:16]
| It really depends on.
|
Sam:
[1:23:18]
| How you use it.
|
Ivan:
[1:23:20]
| Yeah you know because there's just so many people that just they they they will be they don't care about understanding what the hell is behind it and they will just go and like just you know whatever.
|
Sam:
[1:23:33]
| Well the thing is the people are right who say like if you are in a situation where you can just copy and paste the output of the ai and it is perfectly acceptable and the people who receive that are fine with it and don't, and any problems it has are just like, oh, okay, that's fine. Then you really are redundant. You know, the AI could just do that without you. Like if you are adding value because you are, you are using the AI as a tool to go back and forth and refine something and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And you're actually putting a decent amount of yourself into it. Okay. Then maybe you can make the argument that you plus AI is better than you alone. But if all you are doing, if all you are doing is, oh, copy and paste the output, move it over here, done, then you are useless. And maybe you served some function in the past, but the argument that says your job is not actually needed anymore becomes very, very strong at that point.
|
Ivan:
[1:24:39]
| I think that it's just really, you know, it's the application. I, you know, for example, I'm working on something, applying AI, in which what the net result should be. is that I've got a call center that's overwhelmed. There's just too many fucking calls coming into this call center. And this AI will offload a significant burden of some of the calls that are coming in.
|
Sam:
[1:25:13]
| Basically handle all the simple ones and the more complicated ones.
|
Ivan:
[1:25:17]
| Exactly. Right. That's basically what you're trying to do.
|
Sam:
[1:25:22]
| And if we do that.
|
Ivan:
[1:25:23]
| Right.
|
Sam:
[1:25:23]
| We've had, by the way, we've had systems to do that for call centers for decades now.
|
Ivan:
[1:25:27]
| It's just it's getting better. Exactly. You know, so this is to make it even better, okay, in that way, that it can do more than what a simple menu prompt system with automated stuff can do.
|
Sam:
[1:25:41]
| Which people hate, by the way.
|
Ivan:
[1:25:43]
| Which people hate.
|
Sam:
[1:25:44]
| They're always like, how do I get to a huge...
|
Ivan:
[1:25:45]
| I'm like, agent, agent, fuck you, agent. What the hell?
|
Sam:
[1:25:49]
| Exactly.
|
Ivan:
[1:25:49]
| I don't want to fucking... Listen, I don't want you to repeat my balance. I don't give a shit. Give me the damn agent. Agent.
|
Sam:
[1:25:56]
| I was on a customer service call as recently as a few days ago where I was like, yeah, zero, zero, zero, agent, agent, agent, whatever. Exactly.
|
Ivan:
[1:26:09]
| And then for some reason, the voice recognition on there keeps being distracted by noises, strenuous noises in the room. So I keep saying, you know, I keep having to wind up muting the line and pressing zero, because if I'm sitting there, it says, I'll just hold on the line. It will. Did you say something? No, I didn't.
|
Sam:
[1:26:33]
| Right. Anyway, just getting back to this for a second, and I will I am going to give the examples of the presidents in the states a little bit more just to close it out. But before doing that, you know, I feel like the bottom, people are making some fun of GPT-5 for not quite living up to the hype. But I think once it settles down a little bit, people will find that it is yet another significant improvement over where we were before and that we have not like leveled out yet. One of the big things they said, by the way, is OpenAI, ChatGPT used to have like a whole bunch of different models that you could select from that said like, you know, oh, are you going to use the 4.0 model or the 0.3 model or the 0.3 mini or whatever? And to really make the best use of it, you really had to understand the differences between all of those and pick the one that was most appropriate for what you were trying to do. One of the big things they've tried to do with five, apparently with mixed success, is try to have a layer that takes your prompt and figures out which underlying model to use. Like they've...
|
Sam:
[1:27:50]
| Tried to market it as, okay, now there's only one model. But from the experts I've seen looking at it so far, there really clearly are multiple underlying models. They've just added a layer that tries to figure out which is the right one for you and routes you the right place based on what you've set. But people found out fairly quickly, like, you know, for instance, if you wanted it to do a deep analysis, you had to specifically tell it in the prompt something along the lines of, now, please think about this carefully, you know, and then it would take more time. Whereas if you left out those words, it would be much more sloppy about whatever it gave you, but a lot faster. Apparently, OpenAI is backing up and saying, okay, for our paid users, we will give you back the way to manually select which one. Another thing, you know, so I think they've got some growing pains, but this probably is significantly better. Apparently on standardized benchmarks or whatever, it is better. We shall see. This is still a race and they still haven't plateaued yet. But apparently a lot of people got upset because they felt like... The other thing OpenAI did is they shut off version 4 and moved everyone to 5.
|
Sam:
[1:29:08]
| But a lot of people started complaining that its personality was different because they had specifically done things like make it not flatter you as much, make it not agree with you all the time, make it not whatever. And they also added some protections in, by the way, where they were finding in version 4.0 that people were getting dependent on the AI and where people were spiraling into like various, like, I'm going to say conspiracy theory, but it wasn't exactly conspiracy theories, but they were spiraling into like, there was one case where there were a couple of cases, actually, there are a bunch of cases where people started.
|
Sam:
[1:29:50]
| Thinking that they were super grandiose important because of the way this thing was flattering them and telling them how important their idea was and how really like they were going to revolutionize the world or whatever. So in chat GPT-5, they've scaled back on all of these things intentionally, But then people who'd built up these relationships with ChatGPT4 were like, you know, you've completely changed its personality. My relationship, like, is gone. Like, what have you done? You've killed my friend kind of things. So apparently they're also going to let people in the paid tier go back to version four if they want to. So they can continue their unhealthy relationship with ChatGPT4.
|
Sam:
[1:30:36]
| So anyway, this stuff is still moving forward. It's still like, if you compare now to six months ago, to six months before that, to six months before that, we're still, these systems are getting more and more capable every time. We have not flattened out yet. So we'll see where it goes. But in the meantime, they're still messing up the president. So let me read you some of this. The prompt people asked was, show me a diagram of the U.S. president since Herbert Hoover with their names and years in office under their photos. Okay. So we start out with Herbert Hoover. And by the way, it's got pictures of all these people who are clearly, you see, maybe some resemblance to the real person. It's like a caricature that's a bad caricature of sort of that person mixed with other people. Like, the Bill Clinton person looks like a mix of Bill Clinton and Ross Perot, you know, for instance. You know, Ronald Reagan looks like the spitting image puppet of Ronald Reagan.
|
Ivan:
[1:31:42]
| Remember spitting image, the little puppet shows?
|
Sam:
[1:31:44]
| Anyway, but Herbert Hoover was apparently president from 1929 to 1539. Okay? Then the names start getting messed up. We have Franklin D. Rosanet.
|
Ivan:
[1:32:00]
| Rosanet, yeah.
|
Sam:
[1:32:02]
| Yeah, he was president from 1539 to 1946.
|
Ivan:
[1:32:08]
| It's a nice long presidency.
|
Sam:
[1:32:12]
| Harry S. Truman, they got his name right, but he was president from 1848 to 1523. Dwight D. E. Fishworth. Yveshwar. Yveshwar.
|
Ivan:
[1:32:26]
| Yveshwar. Yes, Yveshwar. And he was president from 1983 to 1991. I didn't realize we had Yveshwar as our president. Look at that.
|
Sam:
[1:32:36]
| Yes. And all of these years are messed up, so I'm not going to give those anymore. But just a few more of the names. John F. Catwady. Lynn Dunn B. Johnson. Richard Ninnon. Gerald Yard, They got Jimmy Carter right They got Jimmy Carter right, thank God Ronald Bagan Bagan George V. W. Bixar, Bill Churton Bill Churton.
|
Ivan:
[1:33:10]
| Yes G.
|
Sam:
[1:33:11]
| R. W. Bush, Um, Abrak Ufawani.
|
Ivan:
[1:33:19]
| Sounds like the way that I would expect, like, Donald Trump to pronounce it or something.
|
Sam:
[1:33:25]
| Donald Trome.
|
Ivan:
[1:33:27]
| And the picture, the fucking picture of Trump is just, oh my God.
|
Sam:
[1:33:35]
| And then we have Joe Biden. They got his name right, but he looks like, um, Orrin Hatch or somebody.
|
Ivan:
[1:33:42]
| Something. And what year did he start? as president?
|
Sam:
[1:33:45]
| The year, it says two zero and then they're not even numbers. Yeah. It looks like it might be 2066 with some lines through it.
|
Ivan:
[1:33:54]
| Let me tell you something. Donald Trump, it says he's president from 2017 to 2,431.
|
Sam:
[1:34:02]
| I hope it's wrong.
|
Ivan:
[1:34:04]
| This better be fucking wrong. That's all I'm saying.
|
Sam:
[1:34:09]
| And similarly, where'd it go? I won't do all 50, But there's somebody who also asked it to generate a map of the USA with each state named. It got Washington and Oregon right. California is California. We've got Montana, Teneho, Nevada, Mezmico for New Mexico.
|
Ivan:
[1:34:37]
| Mezmico.
|
Sam:
[1:34:38]
| Mezmico. We got Dakota and Sonota for North and South Dakota. Okay, I'm trying to read Minnesota. Mahim and then some things that aren't ladders. Yes. Wisconsin is Wiscubsgia.
|
Ivan:
[1:34:59]
| Yeah. Miss Fronnie?
|
Sam:
[1:35:04]
| Yes. We got Lundus for Illinois.
|
Ivan:
[1:35:08]
| Ohio. Oco. Oco.
|
Sam:
[1:35:11]
| West Virginia is apparently Russian or something.
|
Ivan:
[1:35:19]
| Georgia is the CEO of COLA.
|
Sam:
[1:35:24]
| Yeah. And Pennsylvania, female pohamp.
|
Ivan:
[1:35:29]
| Yes.
|
Sam:
[1:35:30]
| Anyway. That's enough. You could look these up. So, you know, so AI has all the typical AI problems. They haven't solved them all yet. Apparently, some of these may have been gotten by not remembering to tell the AI to think carefully about it. It might have done better if you told it to think carefully. So you got to remember. Think carefully. Anyway, that's it. Shall we wrap it up, Yvonne?
|
Ivan:
[1:35:57]
| Yeah, let's wrap it up.
|
Sam:
[1:35:58]
| Ah, okay. Go to curmudgeons-corner.com. You can find all the ways to contact us. You can find our archives. You can find transcripts of shows. Importantly, you can find a link to, oh yeah, all the ways to contact us, except I have not linked to the TikTok yet. I still have not linked to the TikTok. I still have, I opened a Blue Sky account for Curmudgeon's Corner, but I haven't done anything with it yet. It's not populated. It's not doing anything. I'll finish that someday. Anyway, and of course, you can go to our Patreon as well to give us money. At various levels, we will mention you on the show. We will ring a bell. We will send a postcard. Have you sent the postcards yet, Yvonne?
|
Ivan:
[1:36:43]
| No, I have not.
|
Sam:
[1:36:45]
| I would yell at you, but I like had the postcards on my to-do list for something like four months before I sent them.
|
Ivan:
[1:36:51]
| Exactly. So give me a fucking break.
|
Sam:
[1:36:52]
| You know, I told you at the beginning of the show how my to-do list works. One of the things on that list was send those postcards. So.
|
Ivan:
[1:37:01]
| Explains a lot.
|
Sam:
[1:37:04]
| Anyway, postcards, mugs, whatever, at $2 a month or more, or if you just ask, we will invite you to a curmudgeon's corner of Slack, where Yvonne and I and others have been chat every week, throughout the week. We share news stories. We talk about whatever. Yvonne and Peter and a bunch of other folks were talking about investments. earlier today. I did not partake in that particular conversation. I looked at it, but I did not contribute. I was busy at work and I didn't care. But sometimes there are things that are of interest to me. It is a variety of conversation and there's interesting news stories every day. So Yvonne, what is the highlight this week from the Curmudgeons Corner Slack that we have not mentioned on the show? I got two for you.
|
Ivan:
[1:37:52]
| I got two for you. First one, will wheaton is now older than patrick stewart was when star trek the next generation piloted you're welcome this is.
|
Sam:
[1:38:02]
| Another thing that's clearly a lie it's.
|
Ivan:
[1:38:05]
| Not uh and uh the second one is dial-up internet to be discontinued aol routinely evaluates its product services and has decided to discontinue dial-up internet the service will no longer be available in AOL plans. As a result, on September 30th, 2025, this service and the associated software, the AOL Dialer software, and AOL Shield browser, which are optimized for older operating systems and dial-up internet connections, will be discontinued. This change will not affect any other benefits in your AOL plan, which you can access at any time on your AOL plan dashboard. To manage or cancel your account, visit my account. For more information, if you have any questions about your account, please call.
|
Sam:
[1:38:50]
| It's amazing AOL even exists still.
|
Ivan:
[1:38:54]
| I'm like, how the hell? I mean, who can dial up? How do you dial? I mean, how? I mean, what can you do doing dial up right now in the modern internet?
|
Sam:
[1:39:07]
| Not much.
|
Ivan:
[1:39:08]
| Who has a modem? Who the hell has a modem?
|
Sam:
[1:39:11]
| I'm sure there's still some people out there.
|
Ivan:
[1:39:14]
| Well, I shared on the Slack also a picture of what I thought was the coolest design of any modem from the 80s and 90s, which is the Hayes smart modem. I really like the, metal case of it.
|
Sam:
[1:39:30]
| It's got the blinking lights on the front.
|
Ivan:
[1:39:31]
| It's got the row of blinking lights on the front.
|
Sam:
[1:39:33]
| And they still made the noise when you dialed up.
|
Ivan:
[1:39:36]
| Yes, yes, yes.
|
Sam:
[1:39:37]
| It's important.
|
Ivan:
[1:39:38]
| This one is a picture of a Hayes smart modem 1200. I mean, I know that the last one I had was 5600. kbps but you know this is i.
|
Sam:
[1:39:48]
| Think i might have even had a.
|
Ivan:
[1:39:49]
| 128 at some point yeah i had a probably i did not what's my my my slowest was 300 that that was my lowest i.
|
Sam:
[1:39:58]
| Think i think my first was actually a 1200 i don't think i ever had a 300.
|
Ivan:
[1:40:03]
| I had a couple i had a 300 that was slow let me tell you about slow you could see the letters just it was like a teletype with the letters i remember The 300 baud modem. Yeah. This is not blazing fast by any stretch.
|
Sam:
[1:40:19]
| We should get some of those modems, Yvonne, and record the next show on a 1200 baud modem.
|
Ivan:
[1:40:29]
| I don't think that will work. I have a strange feeling.
|
Sam:
[1:40:32]
| Oh. Oh. Well, you know.
|
Ivan:
[1:40:34]
| According to the file size that I am like right now, we have used 3,898 megabytes on my end and counting. Let me see. I'll ask ChatGPT, hey, how long would it take to transmit 3,907 megabytes at 1,200 BPS? All right. Let's see. Let's see if you can give me an answer. I know it's terrible at math, but here we go.
|
Sam:
[1:41:05]
| Yes. Well, this is the kind of application where a simple calculator is actually better. Go ahead.
|
Ivan:
[1:41:11]
| Well, but I don't have the, you know, I'm not sure how to do that, that mathematical. I got to add a lot of zeros. It did give me a quiddick answer. 301 days.
|
Sam:
[1:41:23]
| I don't see why that would be a problem.
|
Ivan:
[1:41:27]
| There you go. It'll only take 300 days for me to upload the file. It's fine.
|
Sam:
[1:41:32]
| Yeah. Yeah. And of course, like actually having the conversation at that speed as well. Yeah, we'd have to do that.
|
Ivan:
[1:41:43]
| So we'd spend like the next 300 days working on our next episode.
|
Sam:
[1:41:47]
| We could go back and forth by typing at the 1200 bond.
|
Ivan:
[1:41:52]
| Yes.
|
Sam:
[1:41:54]
| And then feed that into text-to-speech or something.
|
Ivan:
[1:41:57]
| Yes, there you go.
|
Sam:
[1:41:58]
| But it would have to be 1980s text-to-speech.
|
Ivan:
[1:42:03]
| Oh, Jesus Christ. Sound like a rope. Yes, the entire robotic voice. Yes, there you go.
|
Sam:
[1:42:09]
| Yeah, okay. Anyway, so AOL does apparently still exist.
|
Ivan:
[1:42:14]
| It still exists somehow. I don't know. Who owns AOL?
|
Sam:
[1:42:16]
| I have gotten email from an AOL address within the last year. Our friend Chad still has an AOL address.
|
Ivan:
[1:42:24]
| Ah, yes.
|
Sam:
[1:42:25]
| He let us know he was getting married.
|
Ivan:
[1:42:28]
| Oh, that's right.
|
Sam:
[1:42:29]
| We watched the wedding online. Not via AOL, I don't think.
|
Ivan:
[1:42:33]
| No, we don't.
|
Sam:
[1:42:34]
| So who are they on by now?
|
Ivan:
[1:42:36]
| Yeah, I got to look this up.
|
Sam:
[1:42:37]
| Verizon? Oh, Verizon.
|
Ivan:
[1:42:39]
| Oh, yeah, it was Verizon a while back that bought them, yeah.
|
Sam:
[1:42:42]
| Wait, that was through 2001. No, no, it's now Verizon sold 90% of the Verizon media division, which apparently included AOL, to Apollo Global Management.
|
Ivan:
[1:42:55]
| Oh, the hedge fund? Okay.
|
Sam:
[1:42:57]
| And which also bundled with that was not just AOL, but also Yahoo.
|
Ivan:
[1:43:02]
| Yahoo, right. It was Yahoo, yeah, because I know they own Yahoo too on that, yeah.
|
Sam:
[1:43:07]
| Ah, anyway. Okay. That is it. Thank you, everybody, for joining us. Have a wonderful, wonderful week and do amazing things. And make sure to, whenever you're thinking about texting your spouse or significant other, Just say what comes to mind. Ask chat GPT 50 first what you should say.
|
Ivan:
[1:43:36]
| Yes, I've seen that trend.
|
Sam:
[1:43:39]
| You know, God, I've seen people recently talk about how, like, they're asking chat GPT, like, hey, I'm going to be late to this thing that I was supposed to do with my wife because I was doing this other thing instead. Dad, give me an appropriate excuse to text her that won't make her mad. And then doing whatever it says.
|
Ivan:
[1:44:03]
| Yeah, great idea.
|
Sam:
[1:44:07]
| Okay.
|
Ivan:
[1:44:08]
| How could that miss?
|
Sam:
[1:44:09]
| I don't know. It seems perfect to me.
|
Ivan:
[1:44:12]
| Yeah.
|
Sam:
[1:44:13]
| Okay. Goodbye, everyone.
|
Ivan:
[1:44:15]
| Bye. Oh, God.
|
Sam:
[1:44:46]
| Okay. Good night, Yvonne. Go to bed. And I'm going to have dinner.
|
Ivan:
[1:44:52]
| Oh. Oh, good.
|
Sam:
[1:44:54]
| Okay.
|
Ivan:
[1:44:54]
| Okay.
|
Sam:
[1:44:54]
| Hitting stop.
|
Ivan:
[1:44:56]
| Stop.
| |
|
