Automated Transcript
Ivan:
[0:00]
| You have a Pac-Man t-shirt with the sun eating all the planets. Interesting.
|
Sam:
[0:08]
| Yep.
|
Ivan:
[0:08]
| Now, where did you get that?
|
Sam:
[0:10]
| Brandy gave it to me.
|
Ivan:
[0:12]
| Ah, okay. So she shopped for it. You know, this wasn't some random...
|
Sam:
[0:17]
| Yes, she saw it somewhere and bought it.
|
Ivan:
[0:20]
| That's a very thoughtful one. Yeah, okay. I like this. There you go.
|
Sam:
[0:25]
| You'll notice.
|
Ivan:
[0:27]
| There's some kind of plant back... Oh, there you go.
|
Sam:
[0:31]
| Up here? Yeah, yeah, yeah. She painted that.
|
Ivan:
[0:34]
| Oh!
|
Sam:
[0:34]
| That's all the planets, but each one of them is a fruit of some sort.
|
Ivan:
[0:40]
| That's very cool as well. There we go.
|
Sam:
[0:44]
| Hello. Can you hear me? Yes, we can hear you.
|
Pete:
[0:48]
| I need a minute to get the sound actually routing correctly.
|
Sam:
[0:52]
| Yeah, no problem.
|
Ivan:
[0:53]
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, I hear you.
|
Pete:
[0:54]
| Let me figure out how to do that.
|
Ivan:
[0:55]
| Pete, you know what? I hadn't seen you in a while. I think you had more hair.
|
Pete:
[0:59]
| I had a lot more hair. So these are headphones I've never, ever used. They were from Verizon. They were like free for getting Verizon. And I have no idea why they're so quiet.
|
Sam:
[1:16]
| Wow.
|
Ivan:
[1:17]
| You got to like sometimes. Chuck, Chuck, Chuck.
|
Pete:
[1:20]
| Say something.
|
Sam:
[1:21]
| Hello, hello, something.
|
Ivan:
[1:23]
| It's tricky. Like which sound output volume it's picking. It gets, I don't know, you gotta pick the right... Not the right fuck. I meant the right volume slider.
|
Pete:
[1:37]
| I hope we're not recording yet because I'm going to be cursing a little bit while I get this work.
|
Sam:
[1:41]
| Oh, yeah. You're live streaming right now.
|
Ivan:
[1:43]
| Do you realize I'm on this show? I mean, seriously?
|
Pete:
[1:49]
| Do you get many people on your live stream?
|
Ivan:
[1:52]
| Not really. Just usually just every once in a while a straggler goes into the live stream.
|
Pete:
[1:58]
| Sam's mom.
|
Ivan:
[1:59]
| Yeah. Or Alex.
|
Sam:
[2:03]
| Sometimes Alex. Yeah. And we do get like a handful of like after the fact non-live views of the YouTube, but handful.
|
Ivan:
[2:16]
| Yeah. It's really mostly audio. I mean, do we get?
|
Sam:
[2:19]
| Yeah. And we are, our ongoing long-term average is like 50 downloads a week. We're actually slightly lower than that right now. We were slightly higher than that a few months ago. So that's also affected by how good my robot detection happens to be on my log processing at any given moment. But you know what.
|
Ivan:
[2:41]
| It's normal that after an election cycle, our downloads go down. It's been historically since we've done this podcast.
|
Sam:
[2:51]
| Yeah. So like right now, so far today, there's been one download from an IP address with a Philadelphia philadelphiapa.fios.verizon.net download of last week's episode.
|
Pete:
[3:06]
| Well, that's clearly David Cornswit, who, as we all know, played Superman and is from Philadelphia. He heard word that you were going to talk about this week, and he was, you know, he got the wrong episode.
|
Ivan:
[3:18]
| All right, well, let's jump in. I remember I got to be somewhere like this afternoon.
|
Sam:
[3:23]
| Okay, okay, okay. Here comes the stuff. Welcome to Curmudgeons Corner for Saturday, August 23rd, 2025. It is a few minutes after 16 UTC as we're starting to record. I am Sam Minter, Yvonne Bo is here, and Peter B. We have a special guest, Peter B. We have a special guest.
|
Ivan:
[4:07]
| Yes.
|
Sam:
[4:08]
| Special guest, special guest.
|
Ivan:
[4:10]
| Special guest, whatever, I don't know.
|
Sam:
[4:11]
| As we have mentioned on the show a few times, Pete had asked us whether he could join us to talk about Superman.
|
Pete:
[4:20]
| Like a younger brother. Did you do it yet? Did you do it yet?
|
Sam:
[4:24]
| Yeah, exactly.
|
Ivan:
[4:25]
| To be fair, listen, to be fair, look, I had planned to see the movie in the theaters, but I, this decrepit old man over here, who's apparently just turned into a decrepit old man, got hurt. And I hurt, I have hurt an abdominal muscle, okay, which I first, I thought was a recurrence of my diverticulitis that I got last year.
|
Sam:
[4:48]
| Just to be clear, as this podcast has aged, getting close to 20 years on this podcast, the percentage of time of the co-hosts complaining about their health issues has increased dramatically.
|
Ivan:
[5:02]
| Oh, I feel right at home here.
|
Pete:
[5:03]
| I'm going to talk about, I'm going to talk about gout. I'm going to talk about bursitis.
|
Ivan:
[5:09]
| Fucking gout. You know, well, thank God I have no gout. I got I got family members that got gout. I had a friend of mine who unfortunately passed away that also had gout. But I'm like, you know, this thing like right now, every other year. Oh, my knee. Oh, my, you know, my my shoulder. Oh, my. And so now somehow I had this bout of dermaticulitis last year. This was a whole mess. I wound up in the hospital for a few days over this. OK, thank God it was only meds that that that that, you know, I only needed meds, no surgery. And then a few like about a month ago, I feel, oh, this hurts down here. Oh, am I getting something? Whatever. And I thought it was just my gastro. And I'm like, I go work out like an idiot. OK, doing a ton of ab exercises. And then I realize, oh, it wasn't my gastro. That muscle there, I must have strained it. And now I've really done it. And so, yeah, I'm in pain again.
|
Sam:
[6:17]
| Yeah. So anyway, we are going to spend our first segment talking about Superman. Right.
|
Ivan:
[6:23]
| So I couldn't go watch it in the theaters. But, but... The moment it came out on Apple TV for purchase, I immediately just purchased the damn thing and watched it.
|
Pete:
[6:35]
| Now, I want to hijack you for a minute here, Sam, because as you know, I have a YouTube channel, Tea Leaps Programming.
|
Sam:
[6:42]
| Oh, yes. We're doing a special, like, joint thing.
|
Pete:
[6:45]
| Normally talks about nerd stuff. Superman qualifies as nerd stuff. So I'm always on the lookout for times when someone else can do the work and I can somehow claim that for myself. So I am going to edit. You graciously agreed to share the video and audio. I am going to edit that and put it on the channel.
|
Ivan:
[7:05]
| You sound like the perfect corporate employee right now.
|
Pete:
[7:08]
| Well, the thing I'm going to do, which could be controversial, is I know you guys talk politics. I normally try to avoid politics.
|
Sam:
[7:15]
| After we do Superman, we'll spend the rest of the show doing news and current events.
|
Pete:
[7:18]
| You guys were so patient with me younger brothering you with, did you watch it yet? Did you watch it yet? Can we talk about it yet? I know that I've kind of deferred in the past, but I will join you on this conversation and hopefully will not curse too much so that I can keep it.
|
Ivan:
[7:34]
| I don't understand why you're worried about the cursing. Look, I mean, exactly like from me, who has apparently probably set a world record this year for uttering the word fuck on this podcast about everything that is fucking going on. But anyway, I digress. Let's go back to him.
|
Sam:
[7:54]
| You know, Pete is trying to do a nice, like, child-friendly YouTube channel, right? Like, your big audience is like the 10-year-olds, right?
|
Pete:
[8:04]
| Actually, according to YouTube analytics, the big audience is, in fact, 60-year-old American guy. So what can I tell you? Who else wants to play old video games but those people?
|
Ivan:
[8:17]
| Apparently, yeah. Well, you know what? I'll tell you who likes to play old video games. My son, 12-year-old, is absolutely fascinated by old video games. As a matter of fact, I got this recently. I got the box here. Hold on. I don't know if I can share this, but there we go. This. I got one of these.
|
Sam:
[8:39]
| Okay. For those who are listening to only audio, it's one of these retro, like, Atari simulators that you, it comes with, like, thousands of games and you attach it with an HDMI to your TV. But it plays like the old Atari.
|
Ivan:
[8:54]
| Yeah. So he is fascinated by the old retro games, like Tempest, Missile Command. I don't know. he likes all the old video games so so there you go.
|
Sam:
[9:05]
| On on my on my tempest console that was finally assembled that my son gave me for christmas like years ago years ago he of course has blown away my high score on tempest for sure of course i think he's beat my centipede score like any one of the games that he has actually consistently tried to play he's he's crushing me so as it should be but you know so go ahead superman so yeah so tell me tell.
|
Pete:
[9:34]
| Me your history with this character what do you go what expectations.
|
Sam:
[9:38]
| Are you going into this so so i had brought up superman in film specifically the wikipedia page so i could reference what i've seen what i haven't but i will start by saying never read the comics okay from a comic book perspective, never done it from i have i have what so let me start with the movies what i've watched and what i haven't then there's like the tv shows as well i haven't brought up that list but i've watched a few of the two tv shows let's see i have not watched i i might have seen like one episode or something of the 1948 superman serial i have not watched the two night the 1950 serial or the 1951 Superman and the Mole.
|
Pete:
[10:25]
| George Reeves.
|
Sam:
[10:26]
| Yeah. I have not seen George Reeves or Kirk Allen, which was the 48 one. Yeah, that's correct. Now, I've seen, I believe, all of the Christopher Reeve movies, all four of them. I will probably agree with most. Well, my take is Superman 2 is my favorite of the bunch. I think that's a fairly common and three and four went downhill really rapid. Okay. I do not believe I have seen the 1980s Supergirl at all. I have not seen Superman Returns. I have not seen the Donner cut of Superman 2.
|
Pete:
[11:08]
| You're not missing anything.
|
Sam:
[11:10]
| I have seen Man of Steel and I hated it. I have not seen any of the other Zack Snyder versions of Superman. I have not seen Batman versus Superman. I have not seen Justice League. I have not seen the Zack Snyder cut of Justice League. I have not seen any of those. And I've seen this one, obviously, and that brings us up to date on those. And like I said, for TV, I watched most of Smallville.
|
Pete:
[11:43]
| Oh, that's a commitment. There's a lot of Smallville.
|
Sam:
[11:46]
| There's a lot. I watched most of it when it was on, like when it was actually on, you know, it was one of the shows that I watched on a regular basis. I can't tell you for sure that I've seen every episode, but I think I've seen most of it. I think, what was the one before Smallville? Lois and Clark? Is that the one? Yeah. I think I saw a lot of that one.
|
Pete:
[12:07]
| Lois and Clark Adventures, yeah.
|
Sam:
[12:09]
| Yeah. Like I should have brought up that list too.
|
Pete:
[12:11]
| But I didn't. I don't think I saw, I don't think I ever watched that. It was a thing when I was in grad school, and I was just too busy, I think, to be watching things then.
|
Sam:
[12:21]
| Right. And I don't think I've seen any of the other TV shows. Well, the cartoon when I was a kid. The Justice League one.
|
Ivan:
[12:31]
| The Justice League one. Or is it? No.
|
Pete:
[12:36]
| No, the Super Friends.
|
Sam:
[12:37]
| Yeah, Super Friends.
|
Pete:
[12:38]
| Do you mean the Super Friends? No, I met Super Friends. Or do you mean like the late 90s?
|
Sam:
[12:42]
| I met Super Friends.
|
Pete:
[12:43]
| Batman, the animated series.
|
Ivan:
[12:45]
| I was trying to figure out which one. I know that the way that I first watched Superman was cartoons on TV. And now I realize which one it was. It was this one that was called the Batman Superman Hour. That's really where I watched Superman.
|
Pete:
[12:59]
| That's pretty good. It's not bad. Even to this day, it's aged well.
|
Ivan:
[13:02]
| Yeah. So that's the one I really watched. I will admit that I went through the entire list right now of Superman movies. I'm pretty sure that the only ones I watch are the Christopher Reeve ones. That's it. I watch Superman 1, 2, 3, and 4. No Supergirl. And I was not one that, I think I did read some comics, but not a lot of them. But I did watch, I liked the Christopher Reeve version of Superman, okay, on film. And I did watch all four of those. But my thing as a child was that Batman Superman hour. I watched that regularly all the time. And that's the one that really, you know, stuck to me that I watched it. But look, I have, I'm, I'm the, I'm the guy, for example, that only saw like the first Jurassic Park.
|
Pete:
[13:57]
| I don't think you have to, I don't think you have to apologize for not.
|
Ivan:
[14:00]
| Oh, no, no, no. I was not apologizing. I'm explaining that I am like the guy who only saw the first Jurassic Park.
|
Pete:
[14:06]
| So you're coming in kind of.
|
Ivan:
[14:09]
| Yeah. I am one of these guys that watched like, oh, I watched whatever. Most of these reboots of almost anything, I'm like, in the 2000s, I stopped watching any of it. I'm like, you know, not Batman, not Superman. I mean, shit, I think I watched like The Dark Knight basically because at my sister's house, somebody put it on TV.
|
Pete:
[14:34]
| I mean, comic book movie fatigue is a thing. I don't think you're alone in that.
|
Ivan:
[14:39]
| Yeah so i i you know i just was not one that that that that watch movies and to be honest as being the curmudgeon i am basically about the only film series that i think i've consistently watched over that entire time span has been bond film series that's it all outside of that i think i've watched every movie in the bond film series dating back to sean connery but, I don't think there is anything else. Oh, and the Mission Impossible series with Tom Cruise.
|
Pete:
[15:13]
| Well, a good sidebar for a future Curmudgeon's Corner episode could be which is the best Bond movie and why is it on Her Majesty's Secret Service?
|
Ivan:
[15:24]
| Oh. Oh.
|
Pete:
[15:27]
| All right. But I'm not going to – having thrown that grenade.
|
Ivan:
[15:29]
| All right. So now that we explained, okay, what our background is, why is it that you felt compelled to talk about this movie? Now, I've seen a lot of comments, and I know there are good reasons to. I'm just wondering, from your perspective, what is it that—because my take is that you really loved this movie.
|
Pete:
[15:48]
| I did. And I was expecting it to be, I mean, not a disaster, but just okay. Okay, so to give a little bit of background, I was a comic book kid. I wasn't a Superman kid. I wasn't a DC Comics kid. My relationship with comic books is my parents went every week in the 1970s to the local, and it wasn't really local, to Flea Market in New Jersey. And they would bring home a pile of comics, which was basically whatever garbage comics they could get for five cents for a stack of them, right? It's a lot cheaper then. And so I read whatever was in that pile. That's what I read. If it was Marvel, I read that. If it was Archie, I read a lot of Archie. If it was Little Lulu, I would read Little Lulu. I was completely nonjudgmental. It had pictures. It had words. I wanted to read it.
|
Ivan:
[16:40]
| You know, I had this a little bit easier. You know, we had a pharmacy back then and they came to the magazine deliveries every week. They had a rack. But here's the great thing. I would grab them. I grabbed all of them. Of course. I read them. I just put them all back.
|
Pete:
[16:55]
| I was going to say the pharmacy is too expensive, but you came up with a light.
|
Sam:
[16:58]
| Well, I'll tell you my one like experience with comic books was when I was. Oh, I don't know. I must have been.
|
Ivan:
[17:07]
| Oh, by the way, they're all in Spanish.
|
Sam:
[17:09]
| Of course.
|
Pete:
[17:09]
| Of course.
|
Sam:
[17:10]
| I was seven, eight, nine. And where my parents worked at the time, there was like a block over. There was one of these little family owned pharmacies. It was a small family owned pharmacy actually had the soda fountain, all that kind of stuff. And one of the things I got to do when I had to sit with my parents at their work, was I would get to go over there, get something from the soda fountain, and get a comic book. Now, just to tell you where I was, I would usually get Casper and Wendy.
|
Pete:
[17:40]
| Absolutely. They were very popular.
|
Ivan:
[17:42]
| Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
|
Sam:
[17:43]
| So that was the comic book I would get. I have no memories of the comic books themselves. I only remember the experience of going to that little pharmacy, getting my drink, getting the comic book. They had a little nook where I could sit and read for a little bit or I could take it. And I remember doing that. I do remember some of the ads from those because one.
|
Pete:
[18:09]
| Charles Atlas.
|
Sam:
[18:11]
| Well, one.
|
Ivan:
[18:12]
| Yes. Oh, my God. The Charles Atlas ads.
|
Sam:
[18:16]
| No, no, no. I will tell the story. I don't know if I've told this on here before. I've told it to Alex and he really enjoys it. And he's made some like he made some chat GPT assisted stories that riffed on this. But specifically, there was one ad I was really excited about, about like a ghost that you could get. Like it was sort of like, you know, fool your friends, get this ghost thing, blah, blah, blah. Oh, yeah. I remember being super excited about it, saving up some money to order this thing, like clipping out the little thing from the comic book. You mailed it in. And back then it was like delivery in like four to six weeks or something.
|
Ivan:
[18:59]
| Yes.
|
Sam:
[19:00]
| Right.
|
Ivan:
[19:00]
| Yes.
|
Sam:
[19:00]
| You know? And so I remember marking up a calendar with like days until the ghost arrives. Right. You know? And then when the thing finally came, right? It was a white balloon with a little square of plastic that you put over it and a string.
|
Pete:
[19:18]
| Right.
|
Sam:
[19:19]
| You know, I forget how much I paid for this thing, but it was such an incredible disappointment.
|
Pete:
[19:25]
| I never sent away for sea monkeys, but I definitely wanted to. I'm sure everyone who did was disappointed.
|
Sam:
[19:32]
| I'm pretty sure we got sea monkeys at some point. I don't know that we sent in mail order, but I remember having sea monkeys. And, yes, they were not what was described in the ads.
|
Pete:
[19:45]
| All right. So.
|
Sam:
[19:46]
| Okay. Back to Superman.
|
Pete:
[19:47]
| Comic books come in. I'm reading whatever I got. But I will say that the weeks when there were DC comics, when there were Superman comics and Legion of Superheroes, were like better weekends than the rest. Because those are a little higher production quality. So I like them quite a lot. But fast forward, I kind of fell out of comic books after basically I kept reading them through college and I kind of stopped because it's an expense. They got more expensive. And I was a big moviegoer. I would see if you name a movie from like 1980 through about 2000, I certainly saw it. Right. I would just again, very I don't know what the word is. I would see whatever was there. I would go.
|
Ivan:
[20:30]
| Well, that was the thing. Undiscriminating.
|
Pete:
[20:32]
| That would be a word. So, of course, I saw all of the Superman movies.
|
Sam:
[20:36]
| It was something to do.
|
Pete:
[20:37]
| Yeah. I did see Man of Steel when it came out in the theater, and I did not like it at that time. And then what happened, the reason that I was actually so excited for Superman 2025 is a couple years ago, I was doing a weekend kind of movie night, virtual movie night, with some of my friends. And this was, of course, COVID-related. And, you know, you kind of go through themes, right? Maybe we're going to watch a bunch of monster movies a few weeks in a row. And at some point we said, well, wouldn't it be fun to watch all of the Superman movies back to back? Not in one session, but, you know, one a week. And so we watched the four. I think we did not watch Superman 4. I think we watched three of the three Reeve movies. We watched Superman Returns and we watched Man of Steel and I was shocked. By my reaction to the movies, and this is, I think, going to be a relevant topic when we talk about Superman 2020. I was shocked because I came out of that and I said, you know what? I didn't like Man of Steel. And it was the best Superman movie of all the ones we just watched.
|
Ivan:
[21:53]
| Wow.
|
Pete:
[21:56]
| Because those early Reeve Superman movies. First of all, Christopher Reeve is incomparable, right? Like, he inhabits the character. So anything I'm saying is not about him as an actor. Those movies, the way they are written.
|
Ivan:
[22:08]
| Cheesy.
|
Pete:
[22:08]
| This is the creepiest thing you will ever. Like Superman is basically written as a stalker and a sex pest. He's looking at women's underwear. He spends half the movie floating outside Lois's apartment waiting for a. It's really creepy. He takes away her memory without consent. Right. By kissing her. I mean, there's like so much wrong with it. And I can remember being in the theater at age, you know, whatever, I'm not going to say my age, but being a little kid and watching Superman do this stuff and just being like, yes, this is how men should treat women. This is correct. This is totally fine. As an adult watching it, I'm like, oh, my Lord, this is awful. And so that made me walk away saying, OK, well, Man of Steel was maybe a little more thoughtful how all this stuff fits together. but none of those despite me saying that Man of Steel was the best of those movies, none of them really captured what I thought about the character and so when I heard that James Gunn was going to be doing a movie I said this is either going to be fantastic or terrible and the guy's track record has me very optimistic that he will get to the core so you were cautious.
|
Ivan:
[23:27]
| You were being cautious going into it you.
|
Pete:
[23:29]
| Were like.
|
Ivan:
[23:30]
| You were like, let me lower my expectations to make sure that I don't go in thinking, I know this guy's good, he's going to do great. And then I go in there and I'm like, oh, my God, what the hell is this term?
|
Pete:
[23:39]
| I was convinced. I was like, there's a 50% chance I'm going to walk out of theater and just be slightly depressed.
|
Ivan:
[23:45]
| Okay.
|
Sam:
[23:46]
| Let me give my thoughts on those earlier movies, the ones I've seen anyway. so like yes super i haven't watched superman one and two recently enough to know if i would have the same reaction as you i mean i think i've now i i'm not even going to speculate when the last time i saw them was i think it's before i've been tracking what i've been watching okay now i have to check. See, you've done this to me. Let's see movies. I'm going to my little superman. Okay, 2025. Boom. Boom. Yeah, no. I've been tracking what I've watched since 2014. And I have not watched the only Superman movies I've seen in that time are Man of Steel and the new 2025 one. So any of the originals before 2014 is the last time I've seen them. So I don't know if i would react the way you just did but you know i i i felt i i still have i have that nostalgic thing for one and two three and four the only thing i can remember is that they sucked you know i mean he's.
|
Ivan:
[25:07]
| Superman three let's be clear about this superman three was ridiculous it.
|
Pete:
[25:12]
| Was a richard pranger movie.
|
Ivan:
[25:13]
| That exactly i mean it was a who the hell thought that the way to do a Superman movie was to fucking put in Richard Pryor. I mean, I'm like, what the hell is this?
|
Pete:
[25:24]
| I'm going to stand for the guy. You know, this is one of the problems when you talk about this movies. Richard Pryor, like, the guy showed up and did his job for that movie.
|
Ivan:
[25:33]
| Oh, oh, totally. I mean, I agree, but it's just the entire thing was just ridiculous, okay?
|
Pete:
[25:39]
| When you learn about the production of these movies, like this and Star Trek, the motion picture like the amounts of cocaine that went into.
|
Ivan:
[25:48]
| The development.
|
Pete:
[25:48]
| Of these pictures that's basically the story is.
|
Ivan:
[25:51]
| You know mario being.
|
Pete:
[25:52]
| Locked in a room.
|
Ivan:
[25:53]
| With cocaine rocked.
|
Pete:
[25:55]
| Off his gourd trying to turn this into a movie at a time.
|
Ivan:
[25:59]
| When there was no.
|
Pete:
[26:00]
| Culture that like the idea the very idea of a good comic book movie was like what's the word that when you like military intelligence what do you call that yeah.
|
Ivan:
[26:09]
| Yeah oxymoron an oxymoron contradiction in terms that's right yeah so um you know here i will say that of those old movies the only one i think that well first of all you know i i wasn't even like thinking about all the ridiculous sexism that that the that the superman who movies had because oh my god it's just you know like the the lex luther's girlfriend in the first movie was just ridiculous, you know, and in the, you know, and in Superman 3, it was just also ridiculous. I mean, I will say that the only one that had a plot that really did, was good out of any of those was two.
|
Pete:
[26:50]
| Mm-hmm.
|
Ivan:
[26:51]
| You know, with, you know, with- I think most people felt that way.
|
Pete:
[26:55]
| Yeah.
|
Ivan:
[26:56]
| With, by the way, just died last week.
|
Sam:
[26:58]
| Yeah.
|
Ivan:
[26:58]
| Yeah. You know, that plot was actually pretty, you know, pretty good out of those three. But still, I mean, yeah. You know, the reality is that it's just like you said. Christopher Reeve did a great job. given material that was honestly shit.
|
Pete:
[27:20]
| Can I take a Terrence Stamp detour?
|
Sam:
[27:22]
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. Go ahead.
|
Pete:
[27:23]
| The best Terrence Stamp story. So Terrence Stamp famously played tough guys in movies. Most of his roles were tough guys. And he starred in the movie, the movie that I remember him best from, called Priscilla Queen of the Desert, where he plays, and if I get this wrong, I apologize. The main characters in the movies were a mix of cross-dressers and transsexuals.
|
Ivan:
[27:46]
| Excellent.
|
Pete:
[27:47]
| And he plays an actual transsexual, someone who identifies as a woman. And the director talked about him being in that role as a tough guy. And he looked somewhat ridiculous, right? He didn't pass, as I think this is what the directors did. But it was very important to him as an actor that he pass. And so, like, word went out among the crew that, like, the most important thing is that if Terrence Stamp said, like, how do I look? People were like, Terrence, you look beautiful. You look so elegant. You look—you're the definition of, you know. It's just a very interesting story.
|
Ivan:
[28:31]
| Yeah. All right.
|
Pete:
[28:32]
| That's my detail.
|
Sam:
[28:33]
| Okay. I did want to say Man of Steel. My thoughts on that, I watched it on one of the streaming services when I was in Toronto with my wife visiting for my sister's wedding a few years back. And we were just like, oh, let's put something on. And that's what we put on.
|
Sam:
[28:55]
| And my overall feeling of it was I just felt bad. Every like, and a big part of it was sort of comparison of the memory of the Christopher Reeve movies, because I felt like it trod some of the same ground. But on every scene that had a direct comparison, I felt like the original movie did it better. Like when the same scene was done, you know, like the spaceship crashes or the scene with, you know, with Clark Kent and his father or the first time he meets Lois or whatever. Whenever the same scene existed in both, I felt the nostalgia for the original movie and felt like the new movie did it worse. I felt like they really played up, you know, the Superman as alien thing in a way that I didn't like, as opposed to the Superman as human, you know, or orphan or whatever. You know, lots of people have complained about how, like, they have a big battle in the city and don't seem to care about collateral damage at all, which, of course, Superman 2025 directly responds to in a number of ways.
|
Sam:
[30:12]
| And and i understand that was some of the setup for superman versus batman too even though i haven't seen that but and and i felt like the the elements they added were all elements that i thought actually detracted like there was more violence there was more there was just the the the battles were really extended and long and i found them boring i i like in in many action movies and superhero movies, I sort of tune out the battle scenes and I'm like looking for the character beats in between. And it felt like this was a movie that really played up the, we're going to do the special effects, which often really, really, really looked CGI and played up the battles, played up the special effects, played up like we're going to have aliens in this and all this kind of stuff. And I felt took away most of the like, The the character and human bits that I found potentially interesting in in in these movies. And so I felt like it just paled in comparison to the first one because it it tried to do the same things, but not as well. And then it added a whole bunch of stuff that I didn't like at all. That's sort of how I felt about that.
|
Pete:
[31:33]
| That gives some really good context and I think sets the table for Superman 2025 pretty well. So Man of Steel, part of, I think, everyone's issue with it, or many people's issue with it, or for the people who like it, it's what they like, is this Zack Snyder aesthetic. The guy has an uncanny ability to put together a composition, a visual composition, that is very, very striking. And you either are bought into that or you're not, right? It has certain attributes, the color grading, this kind of very steel blue cast over the entire film. In terms of writing, though, there's stuff in there that, to me, is not a fit with Superman. That movie, the big conceptual problem with Man of Steel is it's basically smooshing together Man of Steel and Jesus, right? Or Superman and Jesus, excuse me. I mean, the imagery was with the guys.
|
Sam:
[32:29]
| Yes, I remember that. I remember thinking that when it came up, going, what the hell?
|
Pete:
[32:34]
| And Superman is fundamentally a power fantasy by two Jewish kids in pre-war Cleveland, right?
|
Pete:
[32:43]
| Who is about partially what if there's a guy who can't be beat, but also he always does the right thing, right? Now, the Snyder bots are going to flood your comments. This is going to be your most popular episode because they're going to tell me I didn't understand the character. You know, Henry Cavill's Superman does eventually get there in Man of Steel, but there's a lot of hemming and hawing. He doesn't have that kind of innate goodness. There's been a lot of writing changes in comic books lately. since I'd say the year 2000. And I would frankly say that the stuff being written today since 2000 is a lot more interesting. And some of the most interesting attributes of Superman have come out of that. Writer Grant Morrison talks about the magic of Superman is he's like Paul Bunyan, right? He does everything you and me do, but he does it on a grand scale. You know, He didn't literally. Superman brushes his teeth. He grabs a sequoia to do it, right? But fundamentally, he is treated as a human being in those comics. You can connect to him emotionally. And that is what Man of Steel, I think, put this distance between you and Superman.
|
Ivan:
[34:04]
| Well, here's the thing, you know, related to comic book writing post-2002 before. You know, I tend to think that the audience for a lot of these has probably morphed, where before this was written for children. I think that was the main audience and that now this is really written for adults because— Dude.
|
Pete:
[34:24]
| I can't afford comic books. How does a 10-year-old afford them?
|
Ivan:
[34:27]
| Exactly. Right. Yeah. So I think that that's I think that's the biggest change with nuance and things. And with a lot of these, you're talking about the superhero movies like in, you know, in the theaters right now, where the entire audience where they they're positioning these four has completely changed from where they were thinking 30 years ago, 40 years ago.
|
Pete:
[34:51]
| Right. And I think that the written comic books have changed in part because the movies and the knock-on franchises exist. And when you're making a movie, like, what's the gold stake? You would love to be able to make a four-quadrant, what they call a four-quadrant movie that, like, you know, the kids and the adults and grandma, they could all enjoy it. And that's the way you make your audience as big as possible, which is not the only thing an artist would be concerned with, but it certainly is, you know, not something to ignore.
|
Ivan:
[35:19]
| Well, hey, you know, look, what are we kidding here? You know, these are all, you know, this is, they're not, these are not nonprofit, these are not nonprofit organizations, okay? You know, these guys going in there, okay? You know, they're going in and they're trying to figure out, okay, yeah, yeah, yeah, I'm doing my artist thing or whatever, but I'm like, hey, where, where's my $100 million payday? Okay? You know, and I'm not, and I'm not, I'm not begrudging them.
|
Sam:
[35:42]
| And they're looking at international markets as well.
|
Ivan:
[35:44]
| Yes. Oh, totally. And it's a global market versus, used to be a very reduced market. And now global gross well exceeds whatever the heck you do in the U.S. as well. So that's also an important consideration for all of these movies as well.
|
Pete:
[35:58]
| So you asked 20 minutes ago and I kind of failed to answer it. Why was I excited for this movie? I mean, part of it, I think, is the social context of where we are. I wake up every day in, you know, first of all, trying hard to avoid reading the newspapers. Your slack does not help with that, by the way. And, you know, you can just wake up every day and I say to the world, I say, just give me something. Just give me something that isn't going to make me more depressed. And, you know, we can look at Man of Steel as being a kind of a response to the 9-11 era, right? Or soaked in that. I feel like Superman 2025 is and clearly was before it came out was was a response to the moment we're living in where the people with power are the worst people you could possibly imagine. And that's why I needed this movie to be good.
|
Ivan:
[37:00]
| So, right.
|
Pete:
[37:01]
| I don't know if that's the answer you wanted before we've talked about the movie.
|
Ivan:
[37:05]
| No, but let me ask a question. Why, just, you know, cinematically and entertainment wise, what is it that you found that made this movie good? Because you're giving it a thumbs up, okay? You know, doing the reviews. You're giving it two thumbs up. What is it that, why is it that you think that this worked better than most of the other movies we just talked about? which, admittedly, we're dog shit.
|
Pete:
[37:29]
| I'll give you—let me see if I can reduce this down. So we haven't actually talked about the individual plot beats of this movie. It might be spoilers, right?
|
Ivan:
[37:39]
| Yeah, it might be spoilers. Spoilers, and this is a relatively new movie, okay? Usually we don't, like, cover—you know, we're covering movies that were released in 1975 or something, whatever you're— And first and foremost.
|
Pete:
[37:51]
| The writer, in this case, James Gunn, understood the assignment that we go to the movies, you know, well, I go to the movies at least, to connect to characters emotionally. And the center of this movie, right, the thrust of this movie is abstracting away all the superpower stuff. Here's a man. He has a job. He thinks he's doing that job for one reason, because he thinks he's a certain person. He finds out he is not that person. And he finds through the help of the people whom he loves and who loves him, he finds a new reason to keep doing the right thing. That to me is a powerful emotional message. And so there's that. Second, and this is very James Gunn-specific, I think, the side characters he chose to be in this movie, absolutely bull moose loony, right? Like, Green Lantern, okay, yeah, I'll buy Green Lantern. Hawkgirl, okay, maybe.
|
Pete:
[38:58]
| Metamorpho? If you told me that you could have Metamorpho in a movie on screen and it didn't read as, like, people didn't laugh the moment he showed up on screen, I would have said that is not possible. When you put Metamorpho on screen, people are going to laugh because he looks ridiculous. Same Mr. Terrific, not that he's a laughable character, but again, he's so obscure. And so part of it was, okay, I know he can pull this off because he did it with Guardians of the Galaxy.
|
Sam:
[39:28]
| Just to be clear, as a non— comic book dc universe follower i didn't know who most of these people were i mean i'd heard of green lantern i think maybe i would tell you i had known of the existence of hawk girl the rest of these no no no idea.
|
Pete:
[39:51]
| None none yeah and and then the other thing about this movie that really really worked for me just on a mechanical level which is also something people complain about is the pacing there are fights there are set pieces and you know what each i didn't actually time them but like that mr terrific fight which is clearly the best the best fight in the movie the best set piece in the movie i mean if it's 90 seconds i'd be surprised they're fast you do not have the kind of the man of steel problem where you have these 10 15 minute or at least what feels like 10 15 minute slug fests the action happens and then they get back to the important part, which is Clark and Lois sitting in an apartment arguing about the political ramifications of the dumb thing, maybe dumb thing he did. And I think that's very, you know, I think it's a brave choice in a superhero movie. But more than that, I think it's a smart choice because fundamentally, there's not a lot you can do in a fight scene that's surprising. You know what a fight scene is going to happen. You know that at the end, the bad guy is going to fall from a great height and, you know, maybe be impaled on a church spire or something.
|
Sam:
[41:06]
| Yes. I mean, this is the thing that you mentioned as well in terms of like, well, there's the people who like it and then there's the people who don't. I mean, there are some folks who come to a movie like this. Specifically, that's all they want. They would be happy if it was a full two hours of nothing but the fight scenes.
|
Ivan:
[41:26]
| Yeah.
|
Sam:
[41:27]
| Whereas, like I said, the thing that, I get bored during those parts. I'm like twiddling my thumbs and going, okay, when's this part going to be over and we can get back to the real movie? But I feel like I'm probably in the minority.
|
Pete:
[41:42]
| I also appreciated, again, from a purely mechanical standpoint, that the movie treats the entire audience, including the kids watching it, like they're adults. They don't spend 15 minutes explaining who Superman was. We all know who Superman was. If we are certainly in the U.S., everyone knows his story, or at least the outlines. They don't spend time over-explaining anything. In the entire movie, I could think of two instances where they kind of over-explain things. One, the bit where, you know, Mr. Terrific is like, no, no, that recording of your parents, that was real. And then the bit at the end where they kind of hang a lampshade on the Daily Planet explaining how Luther Corp's bad plan or big plan. That's it. I watched the Fantastic Four movie a couple weeks after Superman.
|
Sam:
[42:30]
| Oh, I've not seen it.
|
Pete:
[42:31]
| I've not seen it. I won't spoil it. It was fine. It was an absolutely standard Marvel comic book movie about Marvel's most famous team. Most people, if you don't know who the Fantastic Four is, you need like six seconds to understand them. Right?
|
Ivan:
[42:48]
| Yeah, that's true.
|
Pete:
[42:49]
| Oh, that guy's fire. Oh, they're invisible. They spent the first 10 minutes of that movie, like, recapping their origin. And I'm like, I'm in the, like, oh, come on. Do you really have to be doing this?
|
Ivan:
[43:01]
| You know what? There's one thing. This is one of the few movies that I've watched over time that I did not watch this new movie. But I watched the pre, you know, they had done a Fantastic Four movie. When the hell was it? Like 15 years ago or something like that?
|
Pete:
[43:16]
| They've done, like, a bunch of them, yeah.
|
Ivan:
[43:17]
| You know, I actually liked that movie. And I heard a lot of people criticizing that movie for whatever the hell reason, not liking it. And I thought it was good. I don't know what the problem was with it and why people hated it. But, you know, but go back to the Superman movie. I will say that I, very weird for me, I hadn't watched any of these recent movies. I will say that in the end, I did like it. I think that there was just, there is something in me that I will say that I don't particularly like for whatever reason of watching Superman getting the crap beat out of him.
|
Pete:
[43:54]
| I've heard a lot of people say this.
|
Ivan:
[43:57]
| I don't, that really, I find it, I'm like, ugh, what, wait, wait, wait, wait.
|
Sam:
[44:05]
| Why isn't he just winning?
|
Ivan:
[44:06]
| Exactly. What the hell is this shit? He's getting to beat the crap out of Lex Luthor. Lex Luthor, he's a human. The fuck is he doing this? What bullshit is this? There is that. Okay. I think that I have this visceral negative reaction. But in the end, I do agree that the entire how they pulled everything together plot wise and the human elements of the story in the end, I thought it worked at the end. I don't know if I'm going to say that it's for me. I know it's not the kind of movie that I usually go watch, but it's a movie that I watched and I wound up being entertained and liking in the end.
|
Sam:
[44:49]
| Well, I guess since we're rolling through our ratings, I'm giving this a thumbs up as well. I actually really liked it. Again, it's not, and I'll put this into the category of good, fun movie that you enjoy the time you're there, as opposed to, oh my God, this should win all the awards. This is life-changing, right? It's not that. It's just a good, fun superhero movie.
|
Ivan:
[45:15]
| And then nobody's overreacting like they did.
|
Pete:
[45:18]
| I wouldn't call this high art, you know?
|
Sam:
[45:21]
| Yeah. It's not high art, but the things that I liked out of it. I liked that it had a good sense of humor all the way through. Like, you know, it was, it did not take itself super seriously. You know, you could, you could see, you know, some of the characters were over the top and it was okay that they were over the top. You know, you, you have Guy Gardner, the, the version of Green Lantern that's in here, you know, being an ass, but being an ass in an entertaining way.
|
Pete:
[45:53]
| He stole the show, I think.
|
Ivan:
[45:54]
| Yeah, he was just hilarious.
|
Sam:
[45:57]
| Well, honestly, though, I think most people I heard saying that what stole the show was crypto, the dog, you know.
|
Pete:
[46:05]
| Like there was just I was worried there was going to be too much crypto. And it was it was I thought just the right amount.
|
Ivan:
[46:12]
| I got to admit that to me, to me, I found Mr. Terrific just absolutely hilarious.
|
Sam:
[46:17]
| Yes, people loved Mr. Terrific, too. And this is one of those things, too, like when you come out of this, the responses were not all about Superman. They were about all of the other characters, too, right? Now, in terms of like when I saw it with my wife, my mother, and my son, okay? And I, you know, she's not here to give her thought, but I didn't feel like either one of them were super, super impressed. They were just like, okay, this is a whatever. They both mentioned the dog as a highlight for them. I did think that the dog was one place where he seemed to, I mean, I've seen some behind the scenes stuff. I know the dog was fully CGI, but it was, it felt a little bit too obvious that the dog was fully CGI. It actually felt to me like they could have taken advantage of like using a real dog in a few scenes to like, sort of add a little bit more realism and then, you know, fill in like when it's flying or whatever, use, use CGI or whatever. But the main thing to me is that, yeah, it did—again, we keep coming back to it. It's the emotional resonances rather than the action parts of it. And, you know, it hit me in the right places. And I know some of it is fairly obvious emotional manipulation, but whatever.
|
Pete:
[47:46]
| I really appreciate it that in every fight scene that he's in, Superman is, except for maybe the very final one, Superman is busy protecting something. Even the fight scene with the kaiju, he's trying to figure out, how do I keep this thing that I'm fighting alive? Right. And that to me is a character. They took the time to show that. In fact, James Gunn talks about, like, one of the scenes that got a negative audience reaction was Superman saving the squirrel. And they had taken it out. And he said, no, he has to save the squirrel because you're showing what motivates this character.
|
Sam:
[48:26]
| Yeah. No. And, yeah, I think all of that, I think, worked together nicely. And the emotional and character beats are what makes it. And, you know, and, yeah, of course. Like at, at the end when he's like doing the video scenes with his, watching his, his real parents, the adopted parents. Yeah. I'm starting to choke up even just talking about it now.
|
Pete:
[48:51]
| Absolutely.
|
Sam:
[48:52]
| Absolutely.
|
Pete:
[48:53]
| It is emotional manipulation. For me, the thing was when Lois basically asks him, you know, why are you going to turn yourself in to save the dog? And, again, it's like he doesn't even think about it. The way he's written, he says, yeah, and he's not even really a very good dog, but he's alone and he's probably scared. And that, for me, I'm like, this is a guy who is doing the right things for the right reasons. And, you know, obviously I have to—and now in today's world, I have to go to a work of fiction in order to experience someone with power doing good things. So, you know, maybe that's why the movie means so much to me.
|
Sam:
[49:35]
| Yeah.
|
Ivan:
[49:36]
| Yeah. Yeah. That's depressing.
|
Pete:
[49:41]
| It's been great, folks.
|
Sam:
[49:43]
| Thanks for— Ah, yes. So, anything else? We sort of just gave our final recap after taking a long time to get there, but.
|
Pete:
[49:53]
| I think that's really, I mean, what else is there to say? It's a movie, and we've now done your movie segment. I feel like I've accomplished something by, now the real question will be if I can ever get you to see the movie Tempopo.
|
Sam:
[50:09]
| Tempopo.
|
Pete:
[50:10]
| It's on your list. I know it's on your list.
|
Sam:
[50:13]
| I'm going to add it to the list again.
|
Ivan:
[50:15]
| Yeah, the question is, of course, like, will we see it before we, you know, we are like 90 years old is the question.
|
Pete:
[50:21]
| Well, it's an old movie, so there's no rush.
|
Ivan:
[50:23]
| No, but my thing is that, you know, Sam was discussing his algorithm for doing things recently, which I fucking almost, you know, these algorithms have existed since we were back in college. Okay. All right. And he's changed them.
|
Pete:
[50:38]
| Probably this list has existed since you were back in college.
|
Ivan:
[50:42]
| Not in this form not in this form but yeah but you know it's like this one yeah, that one i think right that is it you do pete the the these kind of algorithmic decisions let the shit happening like me all the sudden being in puerto rico working and you know this is when i had traveling when i had when i was still at the pharmacy this is after i graduated from college pharmacy at traveling you see and you know this is back when i got stacks of mail every day i had a guy that went to the post office oh you're gonna talk about my checks again yes and so so i would go and open the mail and I get something like I had given money to Sam. And I'm like, I wasn't expecting him to pay me back. But he would keep a ledger detailed with however much money he paid me. And he insisted he was going to pay me back in installments. And all of a sudden I would open I would get an envelope from Sam, okay? Wherever he was. Open it. And there was a check for three cents.
|
Pete:
[51:38]
| Right.
|
Ivan:
[51:39]
| And there was a check for three cents because that's about how much his algorithm decided that he could afford to pay me.
|
Pete:
[51:44]
| That is an extremely Sam story.
|
Ivan:
[51:47]
| And at I'm getting a fucking check for three cents, okay? Now, I will say, all those checks got deposited. Now, the reason they got deposited is because back then, because I had a business that generated thousands and thousands of dollars in cash every day, I had somebody that went to the bank every day to make my deposits. And so, therefore, yes, I would take the fucking check, stick it into my deposit thing. I'm like, here, Marcella, here you go. Go to the bank, deposit a fucking three-cent check along with everything else. Otherwise, they probably would have not gone deposited. But yes. So this is what generates this algorithm probably for this list. And who the hell knows when it's going to be viewed. I mean, we may be, you know, in intensive care at some point or whatever. And Sam will text us something. Hey, I watched Tim Popo. I'm like, and I'm like taking my oxygen mask off. Really? Finally?
|
Sam:
[52:41]
| Hey, well, I will say, and I've said this before on the show the last time you brought this up. Two things. One, I did eventually completely pay you off.
|
Ivan:
[52:48]
| He did completely pay me off.
|
Sam:
[52:51]
| And two— Now, however.
|
Ivan:
[52:52]
| By the way, remember that this algorithm also generated a moment when he was getting evicted, and I had to send him a lot more money to stop him from getting evicted because, in a way, he was managing his cash.
|
Sam:
[53:03]
| Did you on that one? Yes!
|
Ivan:
[53:05]
| I had to send you the fucking money to Jersey so you could go and pay him with a fucking, like— Well, here's the thing. Some kind of certified check or something so you could get— Yeah.
|
Sam:
[53:14]
| Well, and I paid for I paid for a lawyer and all that. We took care of it. The thing was, the way I looked at it was there was a seventy five dollar late fee for paying my rent late. So I just paid it every month. And it was just as if it was a $75 more late fee. I would routinely pay one to two weeks late. Just because that's when I got to it by my algorithm.
|
Ivan:
[53:39]
| It started dragging and dragging until they finally said, you know.
|
Sam:
[53:42]
| No, no, no. There was no dragging. I was consistently two weeks late. I was never more than a month late.
|
Ivan:
[53:48]
| They obviously.
|
Sam:
[53:49]
| They didn't care. I was looking at it as like, you get more money every month. Why are you complaining? And they were like, well, but it's not on time. Anyway, so the end result of that.
|
Pete:
[54:02]
| Sam, let me just say, I would absolutely evict you. I would 100%. I'd be like, but it's red. The data's red. You were evicting. It's red because of you.
|
Sam:
[54:17]
| And so the end solution to this was I simply set up automated payments in Quicken that were like a week before it was due or something and that it was taken care of. Because it's not like I didn't have the money in general. I did have the money. I was just consistently paying late.
|
Ivan:
[54:35]
| But sometimes what happened is that your algorithm made you misallocate your cash resources at a moment, so therefore you would pay something else first instead of prioritizing the roof over your head.
|
Sam:
[54:45]
| Well, when you say algorithm.
|
Pete:
[54:48]
| Like I gots to know now. Was this, like, just your heuristics about what you pay, or did you actually, like, write a little program to, like, tell you what the payment is?
|
Sam:
[54:57]
| Well, I did not write—well, this applies to almost everything in my life, Pete, but I generally don't take the time to write it down. But for almost every activity I do, I construct a mental algorithm that is sort of this step, this step, this step, decision point. Here's how you make the decision. This step, this step, this step. And sometimes those are completely deterministic. Very often they involve random numbers as well that I use. Currently I use an app to pick the random numbers. But for instance, if I am doing laundry, I have a defined, I have a laundry round that certain things happen in a certain order. I have to do a certain amount of stuff. I have to do this, I have to do that, I have to do this and that, and then it ends. That particular one has no random factor other than I need to roll a certain thing in order to be doing a laundry round at all.
|
Pete:
[56:00]
| So my weakness as a math student was that I wanted everything to be algorithms, and they give instructions on how to calculate things. And I would reach the end of my algorithm, right? And let's say for the sake of discussion, this is a ridiculous example. Let's say I'm talking about my spending for a month, right? I never really learned... as a child or if they tried to teach me i didn't pay attention how to estimate things, and i never really did a kind of cross check so i do my math of what i spent this month and i end up saying oh i spent 23 or i end up saying oh i spent 622 000 and at no point would i say well is is that a sensible number like do i think that maybe i mean so when you ran these algorithms or maybe you still run them. Do you ever like when you're doing the laundry, like the laundry comes out and it's green? Do you like check to say like, should the laundry be green? Have I, has this algorithm led me to a good place?
|
Sam:
[57:08]
| There are a few elements along that. One, as I'm constructing the algorithms and changing them, one of the things I do think all the time about is if I consistently use this algorithm, what does the steady state end up being? Now, I have never taken the time to actually code up a simulation and do the simulation, but I do think about, like, where will this get to? What will be the steady state? What will be the normal, you know, like, what will be the normalization? And I also occasionally think about, like, okay, using this particular algorithm, will I ever get to a completed state? And often the answer is no. Okay?
|
Ivan:
[57:51]
| I was going to say that. The answer is no.
|
Sam:
[57:55]
| It'll be like, okay, if I do this algorithm, like, for instance, let's just take, you know, a certain example. Like, let's say this is not an active one I'm actually doing. but let's say I had a bookshelf and I decided I was going to change the order in which I'd sorted the books on the bookshelf. So like I'd, before I'd had it by author and now I want it by publication date or something like that. Okay. Let's say I'm going to make that change. I would never say, okay, let's pull all the books off the shelf and then put them back in the right order. But instead, I would say, OK, from now on, whenever I put a book back, I'm going to put it back using the new order. And so you'll have a section of the shelf that's the new order and a section of the shelf that's the old order.
|
Ivan:
[58:45]
| I mean, if he ran a library, OK, you know, can you imagine trying to find a book at this damn library?
|
Sam:
[58:52]
| And then I will occasionally do the mental estimate and say, OK, given that I put one book back every two weeks, it will take approximately 132 years before the book the shelf is completely resorted but that that won't that won't deter me from using this is.
|
Ivan:
[59:13]
| A perfect example of how he manages things yes that's it that is exactly this is.
|
Sam:
[59:17]
| The but but to answer your question your direct question i change these algorithms all the time so for instance, On the laundry example, the very first stage of a laundry round for me is putting away baskets of already clean laundry. Okay? And over time, that had been in different parts of the position, but it is now first because that is required to generate empty baskets that I can then use to put the dirty laundry in. Because we have a problem that various people in the family will run the laundry machines, but people rarely put things away. So we've got like 15 laundry baskets and lines of lined up laundry baskets, okay, of clean laundry that are waiting to be put away.
|
Pete:
[1:00:05]
| I can see that Yvonne is trying to stop himself from flying to your house to put your laundry away.
|
Ivan:
[1:00:11]
| By the way, you realize, well, I wouldn't do this now that he's married, but you know that I've showed up when he was single. And I basically, one time, I just fucking started cleaning the goddamn place. I just said, okay.
|
Sam:
[1:00:22]
| Fuck this. Yes, this has happened. But no, the point was, originally the algorithm was, you know, you put away one basket and then you do the rest of the round. I have found out that because people do laundry outside of my rounds sometimes, that's not enough. So I'm now up to, like, periodically, whenever it's getting further and further behind, I change the number of baskets I have to put away before I do the rest. It's now up to four. I have to put away four baskets of laundry before I do the rest.
|
Pete:
[1:00:53]
| My solution to this problem, by the way, is to throw out 14 of your 15 laundry baskets without telling anyone else in the house.
|
Ivan:
[1:01:03]
| I figured I'm going to solve this problem. We're going to have 40 baskets. Now we don't have, now we'll always have enough baskets. Okay.
|
Sam:
[1:01:12]
| You know, and look, I have definitely thought about this, but knowing our family.
|
Ivan:
[1:01:18]
| What would happen is not. Throwing out the baskets or buying more baskets?
|
Sam:
[1:01:21]
| No, no. Throwing out baskets. Because like the proper, like one proper algorithm here is just only have one and make sure that before you start a new load of laundry, you've always put away everything from the previous load. That would make it nice and balanced.
|
Pete:
[1:01:36]
| I, of course, always do this every single time without fail.
|
Ivan:
[1:01:40]
| Look, I... Listen, Pete, let me just say this. I'm far more practical about this for the last 30 years. Listen, I just pay somebody to do it. Fuck this shit. I got somebody that comes in here twice a week. They take care of it. Everything is filed, sorted, assembled. And by the way, the person I hired... is as anal and actually probably more than me, which is wonderful because, I mean, she will make sure that she uses the right hangers for my clothes.
|
Pete:
[1:02:14]
| Okay. I don't have someone to do my laundry anymore.
|
Ivan:
[1:02:18]
| They fold my underwear.
|
Pete:
[1:02:21]
| For a while, there was a laundromat near where I worked and it was a laundromat run by a little Chinese lady and you could do the laundry there. or you could pay her an extra dollar, drop off your clothes, and she would do it. And the most wonderful part of it was that I would bring a bag of clothes like this.
|
Ivan:
[1:02:39]
| It was all folded right ago.
|
Pete:
[1:02:41]
| I would get back a perfect cube of clothes where the socks were folded to the same size as the jeans. And you just literally, you took the cube, you put it in a drawer, you were done. It was magical. And I have not found anyone like that.
|
Ivan:
[1:02:56]
| Oh, you see, that's what I have with this lady that comes over here like twice a week. Everything, I mean, like everything is just, it's just, we found, I found, I'm like, listen, I pay this person way more than market. Because I just said, I don't, listen, you can't go anywhere. I don't care.
|
Sam:
[1:03:15]
| Okay?
|
Ivan:
[1:03:15]
| I don't want anybody else. You need to be, you need to be here. I don't, I don't care how much, I don't, oh, you know, you need time to go pick up your kids. You get whatever you want.
|
Sam:
[1:03:26]
| Yes. So anyway, to finish off the thought, yes, I am continually adjusting and tweaking the algorithms, but they are for the most part in my head. But they are in my head in a completely rigid and fixed way, other than when I explicitly change them. Like I have to make a decision. There is no such thing for me. And again, this is autism speaking. There is no such thing for me as just like doing the laundry without thinking about each individual step. Each individual step is defined and I do them in a certain order in a certain way each time until I change that.
|
Ivan:
[1:04:06]
| Let me ask a question. Does it now involve checking the pockets?
|
Sam:
[1:04:09]
| No.
|
Ivan:
[1:04:10]
| Okay. So I guess the reason you don't have any more problem with pens is I guess we don't use pens anymore.
|
Sam:
[1:04:16]
| We really don't.
|
Ivan:
[1:04:18]
| Yeah, I figured.
|
Sam:
[1:04:19]
| Like, Yvonne is referring to something that when I first moved into Carnegie Mellon at Hampshire Hall, where Yvonne and I both were, within the first few weeks, I think it was probably within the first few times I did laundry there.
|
Ivan:
[1:04:37]
| And I just met him, like, recently. And I am as anal then as I was now.
|
Sam:
[1:04:41]
| Yeah, there was. Anyway, I did laundry, and there was... a blue pen in with the laundry and all of my clothes came out with blue spots all over them and i i just wore them for the rest of the year like you know.
|
Ivan:
[1:05:02]
| With fucking blue wake all over them yes.
|
Sam:
[1:05:04]
| I did not replace well i mean i gradually over time oh yeah place the clothes but i didn't make it i didn't i didn't go out and say oh i need all new clothes and go do that. I just continued to wear them until they gradually aged out of the cycle. And, you know, and these were permanent stains, permanent blue splotches all over like sweatshirts and things. And I was like, it looks cool. No big deal. It's, it's fine.
|
Ivan:
[1:05:29]
| So anyway, we need a break.
|
Sam:
[1:05:32]
| We finally need this break. And then we will talk news of the day for the rest of the show.
|
Ivan:
[1:05:39]
| You'll cheer Pete up so much when we start talking about this.
|
Sam:
[1:05:43]
| We spent like an hour or something on this stuff.
|
Pete:
[1:05:46]
| I've prepared myself mentally and physically.
|
Ivan:
[1:05:48]
| Okay.
|
Sam:
[1:05:49]
| Okay.
|
Pete:
[1:05:49]
| I'm ready.
|
Sam:
[1:05:50]
| Here we go. We're going to take a break. We'll be back after this. Okay, one more note about movies, just to apologize, because I had said last week that this week we would talk about King Kong vs. Godzilla from 1962 and All About Eve from 1950. Obviously, Superman trumped that. We will deal with them some other week.
|
Ivan:
[1:08:10]
| No pun intended.
|
Pete:
[1:08:12]
| I really like to imagine that All About Eve 420 is in the chat right now complaining that we did Superman instead.
|
Sam:
[1:08:23]
| Exactly. Or, you know, Godzilla's in the chat complaining.
|
Ivan:
[1:08:28]
| Listen, I'm going to try to bring a news topic to try to cheer Pete up about the news.
|
Sam:
[1:08:35]
| Oh, it's going to be the hands.
|
Ivan:
[1:08:37]
| Yes, look, I put it down as, look, is Trump really getting extremely sick? because there are a lot of signs pointing that something is seriously amiss with Trump's health. What do you think, Sam? I know you saw the hands thing. We've seen the ankles swelling. Many people have pointed out that the other day that he was in, I don't know where he was sitting. I think maybe it was in the Oval Office. I think that's where he was sitting.
|
Sam:
[1:09:11]
| Instead of standing like he usually does.
|
Ivan:
[1:09:13]
| He was sitting and he was wearing his hat. And if you looked at his face, something looked really off in his face as well, okay? He really looked like his eyes were really tiny. He looked exhausted. What do you think? You think we're just grasping straws here?
|
Sam:
[1:09:35]
| Look, here's my take. He does not look great for sure. But I think anybody who is jumping to the conclusion that this means he's on death's door are probably reading their own optimism.
|
Ivan:
[1:09:50]
| Well, I'm not saying a death's door yet.
|
Sam:
[1:09:52]
| I mean, look, here's the scenario. He's 79. He has never been a particularly healthy man. He is aging. He is deteriorating. That is all to be expected. Now, it may well be. I've seen dozens of people online at this point speculating, you know, he's got congestive heart failure. The symptoms are getting worse fast. I've seen some people being like, oh, I've had patients like this. I give him months to live, you know. But I've also seen doctors saying that's completely irresponsible to try to be diagnosing that from just what you can see here. And that while certainly some patients deteriorate quickly, some hang on for years and years and years, and it could be other things. And so I feel like, yeah, is it, is it possible that he's got something seriously wrong that's getting worse fast? Absolutely. Is it also possible that this, you know, is just reading a lot into normal human aging and, you know, he'll he'll be around for another 15 years before he dies, you know, or 20 or 30. He's going to be 150 years old. You know, I don't know.
|
Ivan:
[1:11:15]
| Look, here's what the other thing that people have pointed out, which, by the way, I mean, you've got the you've got the hands. Okay. A few people have mentioned that one possibility could be he's getting, he's having to get regular IV treatments for some reason. Which, by the way, could also, if he's getting regular IV treatments.
|
Sam:
[1:11:33]
| It seems perfectly reasonable given what we're seeing. Yeah. The most natural explanation for the patchy look of his, he's getting IV treatments. He's got bruises for the IVs and he's trying to put on the same crap he puts on his face to conceal it and he's doing a bad job.
|
Ivan:
[1:11:47]
| But here's the one thing that that also creates, because that explains why he's getting so swollen, because people have noticed that his fingers have been getting swollen, his ankles have been getting swollen. And that that is also if you're having to get extensive IV, one of the side effects of it is that you'll swell up. OK, I mean, if you're having to get that much in fluid, so you're covering up the hands because you're getting IV. So why the hell are you having to get that many fucking IVs? OK, number one is the question. OK, no, the thing about it is I'm not saying he's dying next week or anything, but I will say this, that for all the talk we had about fucking Biden's health.
|
Sam:
[1:12:26]
| We deserve to have a little bit more about Trump than we have been.
|
Ivan:
[1:12:29]
| Yeah, because he is. He is. All of these things are not pointing out to anything good at all.
|
Sam:
[1:12:35]
| Well, and also just, you know, for the talk we had about Biden specifically, there's also the mental state talk. Oh, my God. You know, like, he's never been great, and he's clearly getting worse in terms of a lot of that, in terms of, like, incidents of, like, him getting confused at events and going off into... stuff that makes no sense and whatever. Like I said, there's always been some of that, but it has been getting worse.
|
Pete:
[1:13:05]
| I mean, what that says is the extent to which what is viewed as important, what reaches the public consciousness, uh, is really, you know, tightly, fairly tightly locked down. And that's rather depressing.
|
Sam:
[1:13:20]
| And the thing is, like, there seemingly was no hesitancy to make that the conversation about Biden for months, months and months and months.
|
Ivan:
[1:13:32]
| I mean, about every tiny thing.
|
Sam:
[1:13:34]
| And I have heard people talking about this. Obviously, you know, outside of the major media, I see lots of people on TikTok. I see lots of people on Blue Sky. I see lots of people wherever in those kinds of informal, less structured places talking about this stuff. I do see it.
|
Pete:
[1:13:54]
| Right. But if they said it on NBC News, tomorrow the DOJ would be investigating them for.
|
Sam:
[1:14:00]
| Yes, exactly.
|
Pete:
[1:14:01]
| To take away their license.
|
Sam:
[1:14:01]
| No, I have. I have seen commentary about it on MSNBC. Yes. ms now soon but fucking but but the i have seen some but even have we lost all.
|
Ivan:
[1:14:14]
| The branding people does nobody know how to do branding anymore what the fuck is going on.
|
Sam:
[1:14:18]
| I mean.
|
Ivan:
[1:14:19]
| Max now we've got ms now who the hell is gonna know what the hell ms now is.
|
Sam:
[1:14:25]
| Yes anyway i i have heard some but it's relatively muted it's certainly not like let's go all in on this and of course part of this like people are actually i see lots of people trying to maintain focus on the epstein stuff as as the more like one of the things that our entire media ecosystem has a really really hard time on is dealing with multiple things on the same time and this is what trump and driven by steve bannon the flood the zone with shit thing because our our whole we're so single focus minded like the the general like attention ecosystem of the united states tends to want to think about one thing at a time and like this is today's not for a very long time.
|
Ivan:
[1:15:17]
| By the way.
|
Sam:
[1:15:17]
| Yes not for a very long time and it'll last a day or two maybe a week on the outside and then we've moved on to something else.
|
Ivan:
[1:15:25]
| Yeah, like, where the fuck are the Epstein files, Sam?
|
Sam:
[1:15:30]
| Yes, I've heard more about that in the last few days. It's done a remarkably good job of sticking around, but even so, that's diminishing. But when you have a universe where every single day, there's like an assault of 30 or 40 things that any one of which would be significant in and of itself, we end up only being able to like, well, which one are we going to think about this week? You know?
|
Ivan:
[1:15:57]
| Um, I, I, I, I, you never, which one, right? Like yesterday, I don't know, I guess, you know. For example, 4.30 p.m., Ghislaine Maxwell says he never saw Trump in any inappropriate setting. Like, well, obviously, any inappropriate setting depends on what you think is appropriate. Hold her? Exactly. What the fuck? You know, talk about saying nothing about nothing, okay? The most lawyerly answers. And she said something else later that was something like, all the answers were the perfect answers that any, you know, your defense attorney would want you to give. Those are all the answers she gave. She said nothing else, okay?
|
Sam:
[1:16:32]
| Well, and by the way, just to be clear, part of that is she has maintained consistently the entire time that she never saw anything inappropriate.
|
Ivan:
[1:16:41]
| Period. That anything inappropriate ever happened. Exactly. So that's what I think.
|
Sam:
[1:16:43]
| Not just Donald Trump. Nothing inappropriate ever happened.
|
Ivan:
[1:16:46]
| Listen, 4.30 p.m., that shit. At 6.12, we get this thing that they want to deport Kilmar Obrego to fucking Uganda now, okay? So that was 6.12, okay? today at, let's see, at 635, Trump is saying that now he's going to investigate the tariffs on furniture. So I guess if, you know, you thought your furniture was not expensive enough, you're in for a surprise. Pete, I suggest that since you're talking about not having enough furniture, I think you better hurry up on acquiring any furniture than you need.
|
Pete:
[1:17:21]
| It's on hold. I went and priced furniture and the tariffs are impacting it. I literally have a room that I'm like, I'm just going to wait until 2030 to, you know, get a couch.
|
Ivan:
[1:17:31]
| There you go. And then, let me see, what else? Oh, then later. Excellent news. We freaking, you know, mob pressured Intel to give up 10% of their stock to the administration. Okay?
|
Pete:
[1:17:50]
| As an Intel stockholder, I legitimately want to know whether this is good or bad for me.
|
Ivan:
[1:17:56]
| I mean, how the hell, you know, do you go and do that? I mean, such a dilutive, you know, so quickly, you know, without what? Without a board? I mean, how the hell? How did this happen so quickly? They just like double. I mean, but but again, you want to talk about all of those moves were just yesterday afternoon. That was yesterday afternoon. Yeah, it's just, I understand why you want to avoid the newspeak. Believe me. It's coming fast. Why the hell?
|
Pete:
[1:18:33]
| I mean, it's ridiculous.
|
Ivan:
[1:18:33]
| I'm taking, look, antacids I got here. I got, I'm fucking taking a combination of goddamn Aleve and Tylenol at the same time. I got to tell you something. The alcohol works better than any of this. I, you know, I, the other day I had, we downed out at all much wine. I realized, fuck, I feel so much better now.
|
Pete:
[1:18:56]
| I mean, it's, you know, it's not a joke. It's how, it's, one of the things that I say is that a lot of the American Revolution and the politics of the 1800s, the early 1800s, is readily explained when you realize that, like, most people were completely south to this, I'm not joking, most of the time.
|
Ivan:
[1:19:19]
| Yeah.
|
Sam:
[1:19:20]
| Yeah.
|
Pete:
[1:19:21]
| Yeah, throughout most of human history, right?
|
Ivan:
[1:19:23]
| Yeah.
|
Sam:
[1:19:24]
| Yes. Well, because, you know, you couldn't get clean water. So, yeah. Alcohol. All the time. But, yeah, look, I think that that's a big part of it is, like, when we say, well... If Biden had done this, they would have gotten all this attention on any one of the things you just mentioned. Well, part of the problem is this like split of attention because there's so much stuff. Another is what Pete brought up earlier. No one's afraid that if they go report on Biden's health or his mental health or he's getting old.
|
Ivan:
[1:20:02]
| Yeah, yeah, yeah.
|
Sam:
[1:20:03]
| That there's going to be retaliatory action that could impact them dramatically. And so like all of, you know, Harris, when she did that interview a couple of weeks ago and was asked, like, has any of this surprised you? Her answer was none of the actions Trump has taken have surprised me. He telegraphed all of this. This is exactly what he said he was going to do. What has surprised me is all of the capitulation.
|
Ivan:
[1:20:32]
| Yes.
|
Pete:
[1:20:32]
| And it's a huge problem because it leads to, you know, when you started talking about Trump's health, my knee-jerk reaction was, well, now it doesn't matter. It would have mattered to talk about his health before he was elected. But now these people are moving so fast to consolidate power such that it doesn't matter what the electoral situation is.
|
Ivan:
[1:21:01]
| What do you – in which sense do you mean? In the sense of like if Trump isn't the standard bearer that, you know, they still get – I think if.
|
Pete:
[1:21:12]
| Trump had dropped dead in, you know, November of 2023, Kamala Harris had a pretty good shot of beating whoever showed up. If we have to go through four more years of this type of government destruction and centralization of authority, I don't know how anyone beats whatever loser they put up. That's what we're looking down the barrel of right now. We're seeing what's going on in Texas with the mid-cycle redistricting. We've heard that Ron DeSantis in Florida is going to jump aboard that train too.
|
Sam:
[1:21:56]
| And like two or three other states are on the way out.
|
Pete:
[1:21:58]
| I think that every move they've been making is essentially moving us closer to, you know, and I feel hysterical for saying it, closer to becoming a police state. And, you know, it's not something I could have imagined myself saying 10 years ago or even five years ago.
|
Sam:
[1:22:17]
| You know, we've mentioned before, like the problem is one of the problems are people are looking for sort of the magic moment where the day before we're a healthy democracy and the day after we're a dictatorship slash police state. It doesn't happen that way. It's a gradual degradation. And we are well underway.
|
Pete:
[1:22:38]
| I mean, what I would say to you is I have multiple people who, over the past 10 years, at various points during this administration, have noped out and left the country. And I can remember thinking to myself, well, that seems like an overreaction. And for all of those people, I'm basically looking back and saying, well, they really saw it was coming much better than I did.
|
Ivan:
[1:23:05]
| Well, I do think that it's a dark period, but I don't know. All these coming cycles, I do think so. But there's one thing about this, that a lot of this related to Trump is related to a cult of personality still. And one thing is that none of the people surrounding in a circle, for whatever reason, have the same weight personality-wise that he does. If he dies, it does take a substantial hit because, remember, people aren't voting for the policies. As a matter of fact, if you look at what they're doing, everybody hates it. They're voting for him. Okay? It's him. Because he's doing it. I mean, every single thing you do, what is your approval on what he's doing to the economy? We hate it. What is your approval on immigration? We hate it. What is your approval on? We hate it. If you put up a guy that doesn't have whatever the fuck these idiots find charismatic about this asshole, okay? It doesn't work is the problem, okay? It doesn't work anywhere nearly as well, okay? You put Ron DeSantis up trying to do the same shit, okay? It doesn't work the same way on an actual level.
|
Pete:
[1:24:22]
| Does the party have control over what's needed to validate and verify and what's the word I'm looking for? To certify the results of the elections. I mean, that's what, you know, what I've learned here is it's not Trump, right? It's the rest of the apparatus that has coalesced around him. And if that apparatus is in charge of deciding who has won the next election, Yvonne, then I'm not sure it matters who runs.
|
Ivan:
[1:24:52]
| I don't know. You know, here's one thing. I am prepared for a dark period, is what I'm thinking. Look, I expect a lot of darkness, a lot of problems, a lot of things. My thing is, and maybe it's my experience with dealing with people like in different places, like I got friends, for example, had to go through military dictatorships in both Brazil and Argentina. I spent a lot of time there. It's the one thing that I found out about all of those at the day end, eventually, during a lifetime. They have a tendency to self-destruct in a certain way. In large part because they tend to, one of the big problems is a lot of the shit that they're doing. It's so much self-dealing that they are causing, they're already causing so many issues for the economy itself, okay, that eventually in a lot of these, the economic issues that they create because of their shitty policies, okay, wind up being the cracks that start like really, you know, breaking them apart.
|
Sam:
[1:25:47]
| I think the problem is when you say, yeah, they end, yeah, they end. But it can be a long time. Like some.
|
Ivan:
[1:25:56]
| It just.
|
Sam:
[1:25:57]
| Yes.
|
Ivan:
[1:25:58]
| Look, listen, it all depends. Sam, but what I'm saying is it depends on what your outlook of a long time is.
|
Sam:
[1:26:06]
| Well, right. OK, the thing is, if you look at these across the world, certainly there are some that have only lasted a few years and they fall apart very quickly. There are others that have gone decades. I'm saying, you know.
|
Ivan:
[1:26:17]
| I'm saying, you know, yes, true. I mean, that that is very true. I mean, Franco, that lasts in Spain about 30 years. You know, that is true. Okay.
|
Sam:
[1:26:25]
| How long have we had the, you know, how long North Korea? You know?
|
Ivan:
[1:26:31]
| Well, yes, longer than that. I mean, you know.
|
Sam:
[1:26:34]
| You know, so, yes, the thing is, if you're lucky, the bad thing lasts for like four years, five years. That's still pretty bad. But if you're unlucky, it might be 50 years.
|
Ivan:
[1:26:49]
| Well, and then the related question. On average, they don't, on average, in a country that was a democracy, they don't last like North Korea.
|
Sam:
[1:26:59]
| But maybe, yeah, I understand.
|
Ivan:
[1:27:01]
| That's what I'm saying. Look, I'm looking, look, I'm trying to look this.
|
Sam:
[1:27:05]
| You're trying to be positive.
|
Ivan:
[1:27:07]
| No, no, I'm not trying to be positive. I'm trying to be realistic, okay, in terms of, okay, what has been the experience of countries that have a federal system and a democracy and how long these kind of periods have lasted. Yeah.
|
Sam:
[1:27:22]
| So what would you say on average, 20 years?
|
Ivan:
[1:27:24]
| 10, 15 years.
|
Sam:
[1:27:27]
| And look, we're talking a generation.
|
Ivan:
[1:27:29]
| Yeah.
|
Sam:
[1:27:30]
| You know, at least.
|
Ivan:
[1:27:32]
| Yeah.
|
Sam:
[1:27:33]
| And so, and what would you say?
|
Ivan:
[1:27:35]
| Don't get me wrong.
|
Sam:
[1:27:36]
| I've been looking at.
|
Ivan:
[1:27:37]
| Listen.
|
Sam:
[1:27:38]
| Look, I want to say one thing.
|
Ivan:
[1:27:40]
| Wait, wait, wait.
|
Sam:
[1:27:41]
| Okay. One important thing. even after you get to the end of that dictatorship and you resume sort of a healthier government for the country to actually recover to be at the level of health that was before is even longer just saying but.
|
Ivan:
[1:28:02]
| Here look what i'm saying is this i am saying that i i think that this is what we're, I am saying that, and also at the same time, it brings me to remind me to get my mother today to get me my grandfather's birth certificate so I can submit my paperwork to get my EU citizenship, which I am also planning on doing at the same time, okay? So, yes, you know.
|
Sam:
[1:28:26]
| I get to- Get the escape rafts going.
|
Ivan:
[1:28:29]
| And then as we've talked about- Wait.
|
Sam:
[1:28:31]
| Wait, importantly, we talked about this on the show. Once you have your EU citizenship, Yvonne, you have to adopt me.
|
Ivan:
[1:28:37]
| Fuck this. Jesus Christ. I guess I'm adopting a lot of people at this point. Okay. Fair enough.
|
Sam:
[1:28:44]
| Okay. Go ahead.
|
Ivan:
[1:28:45]
| No. So anyway, so yeah, I mean, what I'm saying is that it's not a good time to be a citizen in this country right now. It's awful. Well, and just to be clear.
|
Sam:
[1:29:02]
| Even for the MAGA heads who think they are getting what they want.
|
Ivan:
[1:29:07]
| Oh, they're getting fucked. Okay? You know, it's the reason why all this polling on, like, grocery prices and everything, that they are all distraught about the fact that grocery prices are soaring.
|
Pete:
[1:29:18]
| Seemingly less distraught about it than they were last July.
|
Ivan:
[1:29:21]
| No, no, no, no. Not apparently, according to the latest polling data. they find if you see like where they're they're you know satisfaction on these issues okay it is like in the crater like right now they had been like because they went in 2022 they were i mean with good i mean inflation was high they were very upset that started trending down like last year but you know it hadn't been like back to like where it was like pre-covid or whatever but man, ever since trump took, took office where I think they were super optimistic, it's like collapsed. It's like one of his worst rated issues right now at this point. It's that. And, you know, the reality is that I find it so hilarious that these guys, that for the most part, according to the demographics of who voted, are the ones that can least afford it, okay? So many of them still, like, jump up and down saying, yeah, yeah, yeah, you know, whatever. And I'm like, but he's fucking you on every pocketbook issue that you want. I mean, literally this tax bill, okay? The reality is, like research just showed, the biggest money grab from the poor to the rich that this nation has ever done. I mean, literally. We took all money from the poor to give it to the wealthiest 10%.
|
Pete:
[1:30:46]
| It's a cult of personality.
|
Ivan:
[1:30:48]
| Yes. Anyway, we've bounced around a subject, you know, but, you know, because I did start on Trump's health and obviously we went on our tangents as usual. You want to talk about something like more cheap and cheerful, like, you know, like, hey, have you noticed, for example, how Trump really that one of his main targets that they're weaponizing the government against is all the black women that are that are investigating him? And I was specifically.
|
Pete:
[1:31:16]
| It's like black women or mayors. I was going to say, like, they're firing generals. They're firing every black woman in any kind of government position they find.
|
Ivan:
[1:31:27]
| It's got nothing to do with what they're targeting. No, no, no. But you had all these Fed governors they could go after. So who did they go after? The black woman.
|
Sam:
[1:31:35]
| Yes. And the cities he's targeting all have black women mayors, you know, at least so far.
|
Ivan:
[1:31:43]
| Yeah.
|
Sam:
[1:31:45]
| Yeah. I mean, look.
|
Ivan:
[1:31:47]
| Eric Adams handing out wads of cash. OK. To reporters. OK. Yes. And potato chip bags. Which apparently this is some kind of good thing. And I guess he's not worried about getting prosecuted because, you know, whatever. I mean, because he's not going to be.
|
Pete:
[1:32:02]
| Do we know what brand of potato chip bag? I feel like that's relevant to this question.
|
Ivan:
[1:32:06]
| That's a great question. I think one of the reporters did mention what brand of potato chips was. And as a matter of fact, the reporter was like, hey, I don't need a snack. I'm fine. Because he didn't understand. You know, the guy's like going, but I'm not hungry. It's okay. No, no, no, no. Take it anyway. Take it, take it. Then they open the bag. Like, what the fuck is this?
|
Pete:
[1:32:27]
| If it was me, I'd be like, I was really looking forward to getting wise sour cream and onion potato chips. And instead, there's just this money. And that would be how the story broke. I was disappointed.
|
Ivan:
[1:32:40]
| It was kind of. Like, the way that this person broke it, it kind of sounded like this. And they were kind of, like, refusing the snack because they weren't hungry. It's just—and then, oh, and Cuomo—and then you've got Cuomo New York saying—what did he say at a campaign rally? That Trump was going to rally to his side to make him win?
|
Sam:
[1:33:02]
| He said that—I think it was a fundraiser.
|
Ivan:
[1:33:05]
| And a fundraiser.
|
Sam:
[1:33:05]
| Like, he wasn't expecting that to, like, get out. Like he wasn't saying that at like a public event.
|
Pete:
[1:33:12]
| The extent to which people, Mondani, is that his name?
|
Ivan:
[1:33:16]
| Mondani.
|
Pete:
[1:33:17]
| He's completely unhinged this kind of sector of the Democratic Party is hilarious to me. Because like he's the mayor of New York. What's he going to do? Right? Like there's a certain amount of power he's going to have. But people are not reacting rationally to this.
|
Ivan:
[1:33:35]
| Listen, the whole thing, but even still, when you look at the policies that he's saying that he wants to do, it's like, what? He wants to help poor people? He wants to have them earn a living wage?
|
Pete:
[1:33:50]
| I already like the guy. Why are you selling him to me?
|
Ivan:
[1:33:54]
| Exactly. I'm like, this is your problem? This is your big problem, okay? Okay. I don't know. It's all fucking racist. I mean, let's be clear about this. You know, just like it was with Obama. It was all fucking racist. By the way, talk about a little bit of cult of personality. Not that Obama had such a cult of personality, but there is a reason also why we've suffered since Obama, because the candidates that have come afterwards did not have the personal magnetism that Barack Obama had. That's why he was able to win.
|
Pete:
[1:34:27]
| I mean, the two Democratic presidents we've had in the past, what, 25, 30 years, Barack Obama and Bill Clinton, both of whom, you know, yeah, I think it's fair to say.
|
Sam:
[1:34:37]
| You just forgot Biden there. The two presidents we've had.
|
Pete:
[1:34:40]
| Well, you know, that case in point.
|
Ivan:
[1:34:42]
| Biden didn't win on magnetism.
|
Pete:
[1:34:43]
| It's his fault, not mine. Yeah.
|
Ivan:
[1:34:46]
| Biden did not win on magnetism. Let's be clear about this. OK, Biden, Biden was a guy that guys like me who like policy like policy troubleshooters who like fixing shit love because he works like I do. OK, because I've gone to companies and gone to places and whatever, and I have fixed things that have saved companies tens of millions, hundreds of millions of dollars even. Okay. All right. And I don't go around on my LinkedIn or my whatever and like interior going with all these metals saying, look at how I saved the company, the body, blah, blah, blah. I'm like, I'm just doing my job.
|
Pete:
[1:35:27]
| You got a very raw deal.
|
Ivan:
[1:35:30]
| Yeah.
|
Sam:
[1:35:31]
| Anyway, back to your point, though. Charisma matters.
|
Ivan:
[1:35:35]
| Yes. By the way, which is why maybe, and I know that people, a lot of people, although I see a lot of people turning, which is what maybe this whole Newsom thing probably works. And I'll tell you why the hell it also works, because this is something that Trump cannot go against. You know what? Newsom's a handsome looking guy. And this gets under Trump's skin in a way that he can't get around. The other day, they were showing a picture of, like, Newsom in, like, high school. How he was dressed. Very suave. Okay? Versus Vance in high school. And the juxtaposition, I mean, Vance looked like some, like a dweeb. Like he is. Okay? He just looked like a dweeb. Versus, and this, but this kind of shit. Do you know how much under the skin it gets into all these MAGA people, all these women, especially the ones that are doing the MAGA, you know, the Mar-a-Lago look and whatever and all of this shit, you know, it is to them, it's got to be one of the things that probably drives them most crazy.
|
Pete:
[1:36:49]
| Well, I think Newsom is a man without any moral center whatsoever. He has the potential to be in another world. He could be as bad as Trump. In the world we live in, if you gave me a rotting pile of garbage and said, would you like this for president instead of Trump, I'd say rotting pile of garbage.
|
Ivan:
[1:37:08]
| Listen, I would have voted for a corpse.
|
Pete:
[1:37:11]
| Yeah. Didn't Newsom used to date one of the big Trump- No.
|
Ivan:
[1:37:17]
| Newsom was with- I think actually- Kim Goffoil. Goffoil, yeah. You know, yeah, it was- But by the way, have you seen the before and after pictures of- Terrifying. Or with Newsom and now? It's like one of these things that you're just like, what in God's name happened? Okay, all right? It's like they went to like- It's mystifying. They went to a, it's like she went to a lab and got like morphed into some other thing. I mean, I think they have, they must have some thing at the Mar-a-Lago spa where they just go and like fill them up with fillers, lip fillers, whatever, and they come out on the other side of the production line and they look like this.
|
Sam:
[1:38:01]
| Yeah, so I mean, I've said this before, I'll say it again. Some of what Newsom has been doing recently is quite effective. I, I hope somebody else emerges before we get to 2028 who is just as effective. I'm not saying like.
|
Ivan:
[1:38:20]
| I got to tell you something. I don't think. Let me tell you something. Seeing the timidity that everybody else is having about this.
|
Sam:
[1:38:28]
| This is the problem.
|
Pete:
[1:38:29]
| Except Pritzker.
|
Ivan:
[1:38:30]
| Except Pritzker.
|
Sam:
[1:38:32]
| Pritzker and AOC are the other ones that come up all the time.
|
Ivan:
[1:38:35]
| That's it. That's your only three that have had like. And I mean, I would say Bernie, but Bernie's too old.
|
Sam:
[1:38:40]
| Yeah. maybe you get a uh maybe you get a ticket or something yeah uh but but i i think the other thing that i've been saying repeatedly is like being out and doing stuff now is gonna like i'm i'm gonna remember that by the time we get closer to the election it's like the people who show up only after the midterms and start then, my immediate thought is, where the fuck were you?
|
Ivan:
[1:39:11]
| Exactly.
|
Sam:
[1:39:12]
| You know, we needed you back then, you know? And I recognize some of these people aren't in positions where they can do a lot. But when you are completely in the minority and you don't have any levers of power, just being out there speaking and being loud and being angry matters. I mean, you know, hell, people are talking about fucking Jon Stewart just because he's, like, talking about stuff. You know, now, I'm not sure that would be a great choice, and he's repeatedly said he's not interested.
|
Pete:
[1:39:46]
| I'm sure that would be a terrible choice.
|
Ivan:
[1:39:49]
| Yeah, probably not. But you know what? Honestly... Why would that be a terrible choice compared to Trump?
|
Pete:
[1:39:58]
| First of all, he's Jewish. And I don't think America is ready for Jewish president. I say that as a Jewish guy.
|
Ivan:
[1:40:05]
| Yeah, no, I know.
|
Pete:
[1:40:06]
| I don't think it would, don't think it could happen. Second of all, he has a very New York Jewish accent. Three quarters of the country just freaking hates that, you know, and is not going to put up on it. And third of all, I think that it takes, you know, a certain level of bloodthirstiness, of being willing to go for the throat to combat fascists, and I don't think Jon Stewart has that.
|
Sam:
[1:40:35]
| The other thing I've heard criticism of him on is he's got a little bit too much of the pucks on both their houses tendency. Although, frankly, I think that is something that actually resonates with the public right now. It's not like the Democrats are popular right now. They've got their lowest approval ratings ever, you know? So, but anyway, I wasn't seriously suggesting Jon Stewart. My point was just that his name is brought up because he's one of the ones that's being loud now. And I think that is critically important. Like, I know the standard thing and Democrats have this whole like we we play by the way things have always been. We play by the rules. And one of those rules is the presidential election doesn't start until after the midterms.
|
Ivan:
[1:41:24]
| That's bullshit. Well, I got to be honest, but, but I'm sorry, but Newsom is already running.
|
Sam:
[1:41:30]
| Oh, yeah.
|
Ivan:
[1:41:31]
| Like he's running for president.
|
Sam:
[1:41:31]
| I mean, he's fucking campaign commercials. The videos he's putting out.
|
Ivan:
[1:41:35]
| Yeah, yeah, yeah.
|
Sam:
[1:41:36]
| It's like, those are campaign commercials.
|
Ivan:
[1:41:38]
| He's like, fuck this shit. He's already running for president. And by the way, I think that's the right call.
|
Sam:
[1:41:42]
| Yeah. No, I think more people should be. Like, my criticism here, I've never really liked Newsom, but my criticism here is not of Newsom. It's that why the fuck aren't more people doing this?
|
Ivan:
[1:41:56]
| Listen, here's the one thing that people need to get over about this, OK? Listen, Newsom, if you're trying to pick the ideal candidate, OK, all right, of the people that I've seen like in the Democrats like right now, the governors or whatever. You know, look, my favorite is Kamala. here's the one thing that he but the the thing is a even though i know that people say no he's like kind of like trying to be on on on everybody's side look you look at his tracker he's been a democrat consistently he's been mayor of cities his policies for the for the most part have been on the right side of doing things i'm talking about newsom a newsom about newsom okay his policies have been all that's not gonna know that i said that kamala would be my favorite candidate Oh.
|
Sam:
[1:42:41]
| But, okay. And now you're talking about, okay, I got confused. I'm dumb.
|
Ivan:
[1:42:45]
| No, no, no. It's okay. And I talk fast, so that works. But, you know, Newsom has been, for the most part, in the right side of policies. Yeah, he said a couple of things I maybe disagree with, but whatever. He has never been somebody that has been like a Republican that all of a sudden turned a Democrat, say like Michael Bloomberg, for example, or even like that. So in that sense, look, he's been on that side of the ledger consistently for a long time, doing public service for many years. And like somebody pointed out, this guy actually comes from a rich family. If he just wanted to be some rich asshole sitting around somewhere, he could be doing a whole bunch of shit that is, you know, probably, you know, that he could be doing instead of this. You know, and I haven't seen him be doing this for a grift either, like totally, like for most part, like like most other fucking Republicans are doing everything right now as a grift, you know. So so those are the things that I'm like looking at this. And oh, by the way, sorry, but he is the only guy that is going out there actively doing what you need to fucking do.
|
Pete:
[1:43:48]
| All right, Yvonne.
|
Ivan:
[1:43:49]
| How about this?
|
Pete:
[1:43:50]
| All right, Yvonne. One of these guys is president tomorrow. You get to pick. There's no election. You're not thinking about electoral party. You got Newsom or Pritzker? Newsom or Pritzker?
|
Ivan:
[1:44:00]
| I would pick Pritzker.
|
Pete:
[1:44:01]
| Okay. Why?
|
Ivan:
[1:44:03]
| Because I think Pritzker is more thoughtful in policy itself. I think that Pritzker is, in terms of being a policy person and how to implement it and how to do things at the ground level, is more aligned with what I like. It's why I like Biden, for God's sakes. Okay? But right now, my focus is get these assholes off the fucking thing. And he may not be the right person for that right now. So I need somebody that can go and fucking win right now.
|
Pete:
[1:44:35]
| You need a Newsom Pritzker ticket and then Newsom resigns the day after he wins.
|
Sam:
[1:44:43]
| So, nope. But what, Yvonne, what you've said is precisely the way I've been thinking about.
|
Ivan:
[1:44:50]
| The old white guy ticket. Hey, if that's what it takes to win right now.
|
Pete:
[1:44:53]
| Fuck this shit.
|
Ivan:
[1:44:54]
| If that's what it takes.
|
Pete:
[1:44:54]
| I'm sorry. I'm beaten like a dog. I'm just, you know, whatever gets us out of this period.
|
Ivan:
[1:45:00]
| I tried the white woman that I loved. She didn't win. I tried the black woman and she didn't win. They fucking like, you know, they chased off my favorite white guy, okay, that I had to do what the fuck they're doing because they called him old, okay? So yes, like right now, give me an all fucking white guy ticket to go beat these motherfuckers.
|
Sam:
[1:45:18]
| This is what my approach has been the last couple of elections, frankly. Like when I do the election graph stuff and I'm looking at it, I've said, for instance, like last time around, I was, not last time, two times ago, I was a Kamala Harris fan, but then it became clear, looking at the general election polls, that Biden did better against Trump than anybody else.
|
Ivan:
[1:45:43]
| Else! Yes!
|
Sam:
[1:45:44]
| Better than Sanders, better than Buttigieg, better than Harris, better than all of those other people who are running.
|
Ivan:
[1:45:52]
| Yep.
|
Sam:
[1:45:52]
| And so I'm like, you know, Biden might not have been my direct choice as the candidate I preferred that I would love to have as president, but he's got the best shot of winning. And that's the only thing I care about right now. Because, you know, the alternative is so bad. You know, and that's been my thought process the last few elections. And I think it's going to be again.
|
Ivan:
[1:46:19]
| Let me tell you something. In 2020, everybody kept saying that Biden couldn't win. Biden couldn't win the primary. Biden couldn't win the thing. Biden could win. Okay. Everything was supposedly stacked against him and he won. And I will tell you this, that right now I know that everybody's shitting on like whatever Biden shouldn't have stayed. He should have bought out blah, blah, blah. Let me tell you something. The whole fucking thing about how many people couldn't vote for a black woman. Black and a woman. Can I tell you that I really think in retrospect that if Biden is state, he had a still better shot at winning than Kamala?
|
Sam:
[1:46:55]
| Yeah, I don't think so. Like, from my life...
|
Ivan:
[1:46:58]
| Bullshit! No, no, no. I'm going to tell you why. You, again, like everybody here in this country for the last 20 years, underestimate the racism and sexism in this fucking country.
|
Sam:
[1:47:09]
| No, I don't underestimate that at all. I just flat out, like, when Harris took over, her numbers were instantly five to seven points better than Biden.
|
Ivan:
[1:47:23]
| Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And you know what? Yeah. And that's, you know what? This is like the surge that people get when they get, you know, the happiness when they get that toy that all of a sudden they got during Christmas. And then three months later, they don't play with their fucking PlayStation again because they forgot about it. OK. And yes, people got their toy and all of a sudden, yeah, we're excited or whatever. And then three months later, what the fuck happened? Yeah. Yeah.
|
Sam:
[1:47:52]
| Yeah. Now, I can see that. But I think by the time we got to the candidate switch out, Biden was too damaged.
|
Ivan:
[1:48:00]
| Let me tell you something.
|
Sam:
[1:48:01]
| I do not think he would.
|
Ivan:
[1:48:02]
| I'm going to say I'm going to call back and I'm going to say bullshit and I'm going to tell you why. because if it had been a Republican in the same shoes what the fuck would they have done? Do you think they would have Trump would have bowed out?
|
Pete:
[1:48:15]
| They would have propped his corpse up with a stick up his back.
|
Ivan:
[1:48:19]
| And powered through it.
|
Pete:
[1:48:20]
| Yes.
|
Ivan:
[1:48:21]
| And powered through it. Just like Trump did when that stupid fucking Hollywood you know access Hollywood tape came out in October which was going to destroy him when they were trying to pull him out.
|
Sam:
[1:48:36]
| I agree with you entirely that Republicans would have...
|
Ivan:
[1:48:39]
| No, no, no. The people voting for Democrats have a fucking loser mentality. I'm telling you this right now. This is what I was going to say.
|
Sam:
[1:48:48]
| The Democrats would never have rallied behind Biden the way you just described the Republicans. But that's the problem.
|
Ivan:
[1:48:55]
| The problem. But Sam, the problem was that the people in leadership in the Democratic Party that at that moment immediately, what they had to do is, I don't give a shit if we're carrying Biden's corpse to November. We're fucking carrying that fucking corpse to November come hell or hard water. What do they do? turned them on a dime yeah.
|
Pete:
[1:49:19]
| I think it's i think i think in retrospect i think that's correct i i'm not willing to say i don't have the certainty that you have yvonne that that would have turned the turn the game but i think i said you and i talked a lot during that period i think i said it's got nothing to do with who with what horse you're replacing mid-race replacing a horse mid-race is bad.
|
Sam:
[1:49:47]
| Well, I think the key is I'm evaluating with, as of the point that Kamala took over, but Biden was already damaged there. Your counter hypothetical is if the Nancy Pelosi's and George Clooney's of the world had never done what they did.
|
Ivan:
[1:50:04]
| Right.
|
Sam:
[1:50:04]
| And I think that's a different scenario. Yeah, like if there had been unity behind Biden from the beginning.
|
Ivan:
[1:50:12]
| That's an entirely different situation. And that's what I'm talking about. It's that the moment that whatever the hell happened, happened. All of these people needed to like, well, whatever. It is what it is. We're carrying. I don't care if he's a corpse or fucking carrying it. We're carrying him across the finish line. Period. That's it. And these fuckers, what they did is fuck everybody.
|
Sam:
[1:50:35]
| Okay, so enough retrospective. We're running up on time, but any other things on our bullet list we want to make sure to hit? We had the whole Trump-Zelensky thing this week.
|
Ivan:
[1:50:48]
| Well, Trump just said today that apparently he's giving up.
|
Sam:
[1:50:52]
| Oh, was there new stuff this morning?
|
Ivan:
[1:50:54]
| There was something here that says Trump. I saw a headline scroll saying Trump right now is kind of like, you know, giving up Trump, giving up on this thing. That was something. Let me see if I can find the headline.
|
Sam:
[1:51:06]
| He kept saying the next step is getting his trilateral meeting. Yeah. And Trump and Trump. Putin was basically like, yeah, that's not happening. I'm not talking to that guy. What are you talking about? No, he's not a legitimate president of anything.
|
Ivan:
[1:51:20]
| Ah, let's see. He has something today. Russia's noncommittal. There was something that I said that Trump was, I can't find a headliner. And I said that Trump is like kind of tired and just doesn't, you know, he's like giving up on this thing right now.
|
Sam:
[1:51:33]
| I think this is, this is, this is Trump overall. And I think it's Trump more often now, but he wants the quick win.
|
Ivan:
[1:51:43]
| Yes.
|
Sam:
[1:51:44]
| He expected to go to Alaska, shake Putin's hand and have a deal.
|
Pete:
[1:51:47]
| So does giving up mean he's giving up on, I mean, do we continue to send arms to Ukraine? Do we block European attempts to support them? I mean, you know, is he basically losing interest in wandering away?
|
Ivan:
[1:52:00]
| I think he's losing interest right now for a bit.
|
Sam:
[1:52:04]
| Like, if he doesn't get a quick win, then he wants to move on to something else.
|
Ivan:
[1:52:09]
| He's just going to ignore it.
|
Sam:
[1:52:09]
| He said his two weeks thing again. Oh, we'll resolve this in two weeks.
|
Ivan:
[1:52:14]
| I think he's going to do, like, somebody, I can't remember who told me this the first time I heard it. He's going to treat it like a teen pregnancy. He's going to just wish it away.
|
Sam:
[1:52:26]
| The thing is, like, he just likes a teen pregnancy. He wants to wish it away, but there are certain things that keep coming back anyway. Like the Abstein stuff is going to be here. The Ukraine stuff will be there.
|
Pete:
[1:52:41]
| He's going to play in the big game next weekend.
|
Sam:
[1:52:45]
| Yes.
|
Ivan:
[1:52:46]
| Yeah. But it's what happens with a teen pregnancy. You wish it away for a couple of weeks, and then you realize it comes back. And you're like, oh, fuck. Come on. This war's still going on, really. He's still got to go to class.
|
Sam:
[1:53:01]
| He has lived his entire life with the idea that he can sort of warp reality around him. He can say things.
|
Pete:
[1:53:13]
| Pretty good evidence for it, you know?
|
Sam:
[1:53:15]
| Oh, yeah.
|
Ivan:
[1:53:15]
| Yes!
|
Sam:
[1:53:16]
| It's worked. It's worked. But, you know, basically, like, all he has to do is say something. Doesn't matter if it's true. Doesn't matter if it's not. and it either becomes true or it stops mattering. And that he can influence how people think of things even if the reality is different. And as you said, it's worked. It's worked incredibly well for him. For 79 years he's done this. And he's president of the fucking United States. And he's richer than he's ever been.
|
Ivan:
[1:53:49]
| Let me tell you something. I still to this day rue the fact that when i was god i must have been 12 or 13 12 very young my father my father occasionally would take me to new york city okay all right my father used to go loved go to new york city we would be i mean sometimes we'll go and take the morning flight out of san juan to go shopping literally in new york city and then we would come back in the in the night in the night I still remember that one of these times he took me and he specifically wanted to go to Trump Tower. Okay. And I should have, you know, when I saw all the, I still remember this. Okay. When I went there and I wrote that stupid golden escalator. Okay. All right. That they went down. I kind of like my whole thing, man, this thing all seems so tacky.
|
Pete:
[1:54:46]
| I got to, I got to interrupt you right now. I'm saying this, Have you seen what this tasteless motherfucker has done to the White House? I mean, the Oval Office.
|
Ivan:
[1:54:56]
| Oh, my God. It's the worst thing.
|
Sam:
[1:55:02]
| Wait till you see the ballroom.
|
Pete:
[1:55:02]
| And he's tearing down the building and extension.
|
Ivan:
[1:55:05]
| Oh, my God. It is just.
|
Pete:
[1:55:08]
| I want the new president, whoever he is, to do two things. Day one, knock down the White House. Day two, fire everyone associated with ICE and shut the agency down.
|
Ivan:
[1:55:19]
| Oh, yeah.
|
Pete:
[1:55:19]
| For anyone who tells me they're doing that. Maybe you could reverse those and shut the ice on day one.
|
Ivan:
[1:55:27]
| Oh, my God. Listen, by the way, you know what? No, no, no, no, no, no. That is a perfect interruption. Listen, you know what they should do? We should do like an event.
|
Pete:
[1:55:35]
| I'm going to interrupt you one more time. And for those of you on my live stream coming back on my recording, coming back just after I censored that bit, it was really, really great. and you should go to the Curmudgeon's Corner podcast to hear the unedited and unexpurgated version. Please continue.
|
Ivan:
[1:55:52]
| By the way, I do think that there should be some kind of community event where we go over there and we get given jackhammers so we can like fuck. I want to drill up that damn cement that he put on the Rose Garden. And I want everybody, I would pay. I would pay money to go, give me a damn jackhammer. I'll pay $1,000. I'll donate $1,000 to Habitat for Humanity so I can get a jackhammer and be able to frickin' drill part of that cement out.
|
Sam:
[1:56:19]
| Yeah. It's like everything he's been doing. I mean, like, in the grand scheme of importance, redecorating the White House is at the bottom, but in terms of the symbolism of the stuff and that he's just trashing everything, it just shows it all off. And it's that and, like, the shenanigans with Air Force One from the paint scheme to the one he's getting from Qatar or whatever.
|
Ivan:
[1:56:46]
| You know, the good news about all those three fucking planes is that you realize it'll probably be dead and not be able to have flown a single one of them. Between the two ones that we were building before and the Qatari one because there's the idea that they could somehow retrofit one that they got now that already had an interior built that was like whatever and they could retrofit it faster and the other two that they're building is just so stupid.
|
Sam:
[1:57:14]
| Well, one thing that I would find extremely amusing is if they retrofit the Qatari plane. And as part of the retrofit, in order to meet the security requirements, they have to make the interior the same as the other two. And of course, what he liked about the plane is it was all full of this gold shit, like he's doing the White House. That's right. And so he wouldn't get what he wants. I don't know. Anyway, but are we done?
|
Ivan:
[1:57:37]
| Yeah, we're done. We're done.
|
Sam:
[1:57:39]
| Okay.
|
Ivan:
[1:57:40]
| Stick a dick in it. Yeah.
|
Pete:
[1:57:42]
| I think I'm going to have to go watch downstairs and watch Superman two or three more times to recover from all this politics.
|
Sam:
[1:57:50]
| Okay, so before— Wait.
|
Ivan:
[1:57:51]
| Wait, listen. Mission Impossible—if you've not watched Mission Impossible, The Final Reckoning, okay.
|
Sam:
[1:57:57]
| All right?
|
Ivan:
[1:57:58]
| It's available on Apple TV already. I will tell you this. You want a story about—you talked about the same thing about somebody doing the right thing. Watch that.
|
Pete:
[1:58:09]
| Mission Impossible, Final Reckoning. I will check it out.
|
Sam:
[1:58:11]
| Yes. Okay, so before I give the plug to our website and all that kind of stuff, Pete, you want to plug your stuff?
|
Pete:
[1:58:18]
| Sure. It's a YouTube channel called Tea Leaves Programming. And if you just search for the word tea, the word leaves and programming, it should come right up.
|
Sam:
[1:58:27]
| There you go.
|
Pete:
[1:58:28]
| I mostly talk about nerd stuff, video games, retro games, computers, programming, stuff like that. Occasionally accounting, really gripping, gripping stuff.
|
Ivan:
[1:58:38]
| Ooh, accounting. Oh, Jesus, I'm tingling.
|
Pete:
[1:58:43]
| We'd love to have you over there. So come on over. Yeah.
|
Sam:
[1:58:46]
| Okay. And so for my side, curmudgeons-corner.com, you guys know the drill. There's all our archives, links to all the ways to contact us, all that kind of stuff. I still have not linked to TikTok. I did want to mention just briefly that I'm still behind on posting TikTok clips of this show. But this week, one of the TikTok clips that I posted got a strike as a community violation at TikTok for misinformation. And I was going to have it prepared so I could play that clip here again, but I didn't actually get it prepared. The bottom line is, at the end of it, I said something like, I was quoting, I think, I forget who I was quoting. I heard somebody say online that all of this stuff with how Donald Trump is behaving with regard to the Epstein stuff, You know, beforehand, I thought he probably really wasn't involved and hadn't done that stuff, blah, blah, blah. But now, given how he's reacting, I'm starting to think he actually framed Epstein and he's the one who is running the child sex trafficking ring.
|
Ivan:
[2:00:03]
| Oh, so that was stricken. Oh, my God.
|
Sam:
[2:00:06]
| And I'm like, I'm not even appealing it. I'm like, OK, I was quoting somebody else. I was laughing about it.
|
Ivan:
[2:00:12]
| It was your thought and opinion, not a factual statement.
|
Sam:
[2:00:18]
| Yeah, I know. But I look at it and I'm like, okay. But I'm not even going to appeal. I just posted something else. But I've got a strike on me now for a commodity violation. Apparently, if I get more, they can shut me down. You know, whatever. So go to TikTok on the Curmudgeons Corner account. You can see these other clips. I'm slowly catching up. I have not linked to it.
|
Pete:
[2:00:42]
| Do you have any dances yet?
|
Sam:
[2:00:43]
| On our website yet. Oh, since you asked, not on the Curmudgeon's Corner account, but last night, Alex made me do one on my actual, on my Samuel Minter TikTok. Now, interestingly enough, he just sort of put the camera at me and was like, you need to dance or whatever. So, of course, I did something incredibly stupid looking. He found it hilarious. we added the music later so i wasn't dancing to some particular music and it was barely a dance i made like a couple of i stared at the camera for a few seconds and then i made some comical moves, and and then we added music afterwards from one of the trending tick-tock well.
|
Ivan:
[2:01:28]
| I'm not dancing anytime soon because i i'll tell you this that you went to ub40 concert and we actually went to a club over at the Hard Rock like afterwards. I can't dance right now. It hurts. I tried to dance a little bit. I realized at the concert, all of a sudden I sat down, what happened? I'm like, my muscle hurts. I can't dance.
|
Sam:
[2:01:49]
| I'll tell you my dance now has 42 views and two likes. So it needs some love. Go in there. You know, pay attention to it. Share it. You know, all kinds of other stuff.
|
Ivan:
[2:02:03]
| Well, I got our one thing from our Slack to share. Okay, by the way.
|
Sam:
[2:02:08]
| Okay, well, let me finish. I have to say the Patreon bit. Also on curmudgeon-corner.com is a link to our Patreon where you can give us money. Patreon is set up as a great payment.
|
Ivan:
[2:02:20]
| I've heard people send mugs, too.
|
Sam:
[2:02:22]
| Well, I was just saying, Pete here doesn't like Patreon for various reasons, but he has donated a couple times his one-offs.
|
Pete:
[2:02:29]
| I don't like subscriptions.
|
Sam:
[2:02:30]
| Yeah, well, that makes sense. I don't like subscriptions either. You know, and— I fucking subscribe to everything.
|
Ivan:
[2:02:36]
| For God's sakes. I'm like, Jesus Christ, I like him.
|
Sam:
[2:02:38]
| He has donated one-offs a couple of times and gotten a couple mugs.
|
Ivan:
[2:02:42]
| One thing I was telling my wife lately is she was like asking, so what—you know, I know that you read so much right now. What did you do when you were doing it? Look, at my house, we were subscribed to every fucking magazine in the history of mankind. I mean, you know, the stacks, the amount of magazines. I mean, every news magazine you could get. You know, we just had, and in the bathroom, oh, read in the bathroom? In the bathroom door, these massive stacks of magazines, newspapers. There was just always something to read. Well, I was not a fan of Reader's Digest because of a lot of those stuff, whatever. No, no, no. Get me. I want all the fucking magazines all of them I mean we literally subscribe to I can't imagine how much money in like today's dollars we have to be spending on getting all that shit.
|
Sam:
[2:03:28]
| Anyway you can go to our Patreon give us money at various levels we will send you a postcard Yvonne mailed the postcards I.
|
Ivan:
[2:03:35]
| Mailed the postcards yes.
|
Sam:
[2:03:37]
| We will mention you on the show we will ring a bell we will send you a mug and by the way like I have had enough requests now that I am I am going to set it up so that you can just buy a mug.
|
Ivan:
[2:03:50]
| That'd be cool because I might buy an extra mug. Here you go.
|
Sam:
[2:03:53]
| Yeah. Like I actually, I have it set up on Zazzle already. I just have to add the link to the Curmudgeon's Corner site. I'll do it at some point.
|
Ivan:
[2:04:00]
| Cool.
|
Sam:
[2:04:01]
| But anyway, yeah. Bah, bah, bah, bah, bah, bah, bah, bah. Oh, and importantly, at $2 a month or more, or if you just ask us, we will invite you to the Curmudgeon's Corner Slack where Yvonne and I and Pete and a whole bunch of other folks are chatting throughout the week, sharing interesting links, all of that kind of stuff. So, Yvonne, now, what is your prepared link that you want to highlight that is on the Curmudgeon's Corner Slack, but we have not talked about it?
|
Ivan:
[2:04:25]
| Sam shared an excellent thing that I'm trying to see if somebody in the Trump administration, can sell to the president, which is MIT Technology Review, a startup is pitching a mind-uploading service that is 100% fatal.
|
Sam:
[2:04:41]
| Didn't we talk about that last week?
|
Ivan:
[2:04:43]
| No, I don't think no.
|
Pete:
[2:04:45]
| I swear I've seen this sci-fi movie at least three times.
|
Ivan:
[2:04:48]
| Netcom will preserve your brain, but you have to be euthanized first. How about that? Huh?
|
Sam:
[2:04:55]
| I am pretty sure we did mention that last.
|
Ivan:
[2:04:58]
| I don't think so.
|
Sam:
[2:04:59]
| I could be wrong.
|
Ivan:
[2:05:00]
| I looked through it. It doesn't look like it was, you know, or maybe we did. Who knows? But that's the first one.
|
Sam:
[2:05:06]
| It's so good you wanted to mention it again.
|
Ivan:
[2:05:08]
| Indeed. Yes. It could be. I just looked. I was looking through the material we had, and that was the one that popped up to me as the most interesting one at this point, I think, for two weeks in a row. Because, I mean, is anybody really interested right now on, I mean, is it funny that FireWire support is being dropped in the new macOS version. I mean, I know I haven't had a FireWire device in a long time. Okay, that's one. But I'm sure somebody out there is trying to sync their original iPod. But I know mine died.
|
Sam:
[2:05:39]
| Somebody will build a third-party adapter solution thing, box, whatever.
|
Ivan:
[2:05:43]
| There was also, Sam also created, I was complaining that ChatGPT, I tried to have it create a flyer, and it was like whack-a-mole. because every time I asked it to fix something on the flyer, it would fuck up five other things. It was like, it feels like formatting in Microsoft Word sometimes and you're trying to move margins and everything just moves all the wrong directions. But it was worse. I'm like, okay, just add the phone number. And then it got rid of seven. I didn't say get rid of all the other shit. I said, just add the fucking phone number, you stupid AI client. Anyway, you know, by the way, AI helps, but sometimes it's stupid. Okay. I don't know what the hell the thing is. What other thing was in here? Well, you didn't mention that. I don't know.
|
Sam:
[2:06:26]
| I produced the poster in response to that. And ChatGPT got it right on the first shot about your whack-a-mole event.
|
Ivan:
[2:06:34]
| Yes, a whack-a-mole contest. I guess the one last thing that I shared that this one was hilarious is I saw, you know, what I observed as one of these, like, traffic stops of, like, beat-up pickup trucks. Like right now, we seem to be the new, you know, how are we going to catch immigrants? Very simple. If you see a pickup truck and there's a Hispanic-looking guy driving, you're getting pulled over.
|
Pete:
[2:06:58]
| They're just going to park near Home Depot's at 6 a.m. and arrest everybody.
|
Ivan:
[2:07:01]
| No, no, no, no, no, no. But it's just driving around the airport. And what they're doing is, hey, you see around a neighborhood, you know, some guy in a beat-up pickup truck that looks Hispanic? Well, call ICE. You know, they got it. That's a— Hey, racial profiling is making a comeback. I mean, what the hell, man? Listen, we need a misogyny making a comeback. We need racial profiling to make a comeback. You know, I don't know. People dying, you know, without health care, making a comeback, starving people. Hey, war.
|
Sam:
[2:07:31]
| Way to end things on an up note, Yvonne.
|
Ivan:
[2:07:35]
| Positivity. Listen, I'm going to have a drink this afternoon. So I'm getting psyched up for this, like right now.
|
Pete:
[2:07:45]
| Yvonne, Sam, thank you so much for having me on your show. I really appreciate it.
|
Ivan:
[2:07:49]
| We appreciate your participation. if you want to end on an.
|
Sam:
[2:07:53]
| If you want to end on an up note again Yvonne you can you can mention like.
|
Ivan:
[2:07:58]
| I'm gonna say I'm gonna say an up note up note Pete look I'm gonna I think I'm gonna drag Sam next year we're gonna fucking wind up making a pilgrimage to Pittsburgh all.
|
Pete:
[2:08:07]
| Right well look forward to seeing you.
|
Ivan:
[2:08:09]
| I think I'm gonna I think I'm gonna have to drag a few people I think it's it's been long enough you know there's a couple of people there we need to we need to make it up for like you know like when they do reunion shit or whatever.
|
Pete:
[2:08:22]
| We will get all the salads with french fries on them that you can eat.
|
Ivan:
[2:08:25]
| Oh, there you go. Perfect. All right.
|
Sam:
[2:08:27]
| Okay. Okay, we're done. Thank you, everybody. Have a great week. Have fun. Not too much fun. Stay safe. All of that kind of stuff. And we'll be back next week. Well, Yvonne and I will be. Pete will probably not be with us next week.
|
Ivan:
[2:08:44]
| Pete will have some more hammering going on in his place.
|
Sam:
[2:08:46]
| Welcome next time you have something to say or always welcome as a co-host.
|
Pete:
[2:08:50]
| Well, I'll tell you next summer... Supergirl, the movie Supergirl Woman of Tomorrow, which was the best comic book of the past 10 years, is being made into a movie. And I have high hopes. So maybe we'll talk about it then.
|
Ivan:
[2:09:04]
| Which was the movie that Warner Brothers, like, torpedoed? Batgirl.
|
Pete:
[2:09:08]
| I thought it was Supergirl.
|
Ivan:
[2:09:09]
| Oh, it was Batgirl.
|
Pete:
[2:09:11]
| No one's seen it that I know of. But Peter Safran, who is James Gunn's co-CEO, co-studio head of DC Studios, whose judgment I generally trust. he's a pretty reserved guy, said he saw a cut and it was, like, unwatchable. He said it was not selling. So the word on the street was that it had nothing to do with the movie. They just killed it for the tax rebate or whatever.
|
Ivan:
[2:09:38]
| But who knows? But it seems that the movie was really bad, so therefore might as well. If it's going to be a box office bomb, instead of that, why don't we think that?
|
Pete:
[2:09:45]
| For a studio, I had to say that. I mean, you're burning a bridge with whoever worked on that movie to say that. So I got to imagine that he would have looked at it.
|
Sam:
[2:09:53]
| Given recent trends, this is one of those things where they'll say that now, but they'll save it in the vault. And like 20, 25 years from now, they'll pull it out and put something.
|
Pete:
[2:10:03]
| Okay. I got one for you. You guys can cut this out of the podcast if you like. I just got to tell you this story. You mentioned the Donner cut of Superman 2. We watched this in our Superman marathon. And now part of it is the guy's working with a limited amount of footage. But you might remember the subplot in Superman 2 where Clark, Superman, gives up his powers. And he's at a diner somewhere in Canada. And some local drunk tough kicks his butt.
|
Ivan:
[2:10:36]
| Yeah, yeah.
|
Pete:
[2:10:36]
| And then at the end of Superman 2, he shows up at the diner again as Clark and basically beats the guy up. So in Superman 2, the Donner cut. Thank you. They go back to the well from Superman 1, where something bad happens, and Superman turns back time by flying around the wall. They did it again, right?
|
Sam:
[2:10:56]
| Okay.
|
Pete:
[2:10:56]
| So they do that. They've turned back time, resolved everything, and then Superman shows up at the diner and beats the living stuffing out of this guy. Which means that this is a movie where Superman walks into a diner, walks up to a guy who has done nothing wrong to him.
|
Sam:
[2:11:17]
| Yes.
|
Pete:
[2:11:17]
| And just beats him up.
|
Sam:
[2:11:19]
| Right, because he undid.
|
Pete:
[2:11:21]
| Because he undid it. Yeah, I hate that movie.
|
Ivan:
[2:11:23]
| Ah.
|
Pete:
[2:11:24]
| That's why I say don't watch a daughter. All right. Thank you, Sam. I'm going to try it.
|
Sam:
[2:11:27]
| Okay, we're out of here. We're playing the outro now. Goodbye.
|
Pete:
[2:11:33]
| Goodbye.
|
Sam:
[2:11:47]
| Do, do, do, do, do, do, do, do, do, do, do, do, do, do, hold on. Okay, now I'll hit stop for real. Hopefully his is all retained properly. It usually is. I'm going to hit stop. Bye.
|
Ivan:
[2:12:13]
| All right. Stop. Stop. Thank you.
| |
|
