Sam:
[0:00]
| I can't hear you. Hold on.
|
Ivan:
[0:02]
| I can hear you.
|
Sam:
[0:04]
| Ah, that's why. Hello. Hello.
|
Ivan:
[0:08]
| Can you hear me now?
|
Sam:
[0:10]
| Yes, I can hear you now.
|
Ivan:
[0:12]
| I can hear you now. You're over there watching some program about kids not having to cross the border four times to go to school.
|
Sam:
[0:19]
| Yeah, yeah. It was a CGP gray clip on TikTok. His YouTube's great. You should check it out.
|
Ivan:
[0:27]
| I have seen some. something from him.
|
Sam:
[0:31]
| Okay. Yeah, I had no idea you were there. Okay. And then all of a sudden, I'm like, wait a second, the live stream just came up. Okay. Let's get everything toasted.
|
Ivan:
[0:41]
| Toasted. Okay. All right. Well, that's one.
|
Sam:
[0:43]
| Toasted. Toasted. Here we go. Here we go. Welcome to Curmudgeons Corner for Sunday, January 4th, 2026. Welcome to another Curmudgeons Corner. This is Sam Minter and Yvonne Boas here with us. Hello, Yvonne.
|
Ivan:
[1:25]
| Hello. This year already feels way too long.
|
Sam:
[1:30]
| It's only been four days.
|
Ivan:
[1:32]
| It's only been four days!
|
Sam:
[1:34]
| Not even the full fourth day yet.
|
Ivan:
[1:36]
| No!
|
Sam:
[1:37]
| Anyway, this is another of our special shows. This is our review of our 2025 predictions. Now, we did have at least one significant news event since last week's show. We went into Venezuela and took Maduro, and there's undoubtedly lots to talk about that. We've got a big review show to do, though, Yvonne. Do you want to say anything about Venezuela before we move on, or can we save that till next week? I mean, there may be more developments by next week, too.
|
Ivan:
[2:16]
| Here's the one weird thing about this whole Venezuela thing, okay? Right? Or maybe it's not weird. I guess it's actually expected. I believe that when I spoke about this on the show, sometime well before this happened right now, My main concern was, it's not that Maduro isn't an illegal dictator that I think should be removed. There has been a massive exodus of people. Look, I know people that have died under Maduro, okay? People that have had to go into exile because being persecuted by Maduro, okay? This isn't some kind of abstract thing that it is for most people in the United States that are talking a lot about it and have no clue, okay? Oh, well, there is this duly elected person. The entire elections in Venezuela have been a fraud for 20 years, okay? They have, I mean, independent observers have said this repeatedly, that the elections have been a sham, all of them, okay? So don't tell me this thing, that there is some lawful government. He illegally took power.
|
Ivan:
[3:32]
| Chavez took it first, transferred to him, and he's kept it. And they have systematically done a campaign of terror against the population, jailed the opposition, murdered them, incited murder against people, persecuted them, and left people to die.
|
Ivan:
[3:53]
| Repeatedly that the the number the the diaspora of venezuelans that has occurred over the last 15 years is crazy okay you there has been no country that's experienced such a mass migration in the americas especially one that was as developed as venezuela in the last you know in history and so quickly. So, but my problems at the beginning was, well, if Trump is doing this, he's not doing it for any good reasons and probably has no plan other than some vague thing about we're going to be rich.
|
Sam:
[4:32]
| Well, and I'll add, and we had a discussion on the curmudgeon's course slack about this. There's also process issues. I mean, there's like.
|
Ivan:
[4:42]
| Donald, whether or not even the international ones or not, the U.S. processes. Yes.
|
Sam:
[4:51]
| Whether or not you agree with the ultimate goal. And I think there's, you know, there's multiple issues. There's there's whether you think, you know, it would be better if Maduro was gone. There's, do you think the U.S. should intervene in making sure Maduro is gone? And then there's the process. These are all independent questions, right? Then there's the question of what's the right way to do it and what's legal and what's not. And it's fairly clear that, you know, although I did see some legal analysis saying there is some debate even here, But Donald Trump did not follow any of the processes you would expect to be followed to do this kind of stuff. Yes, 100%. He didn't go to Congress. He didn't build public support domestically. He didn't do Jack.
|
Ivan:
[5:43]
| I mean, what's the justification? How did he justify this for Americans? Okay?
|
Sam:
[5:49]
| Well, that's changed every 10 seconds.
|
Ivan:
[5:51]
| Yeah, but let me be clear. I've always said, what the— Listen, everybody—, It keeps making this too complicated. Trump is transactional, okay? As we all know. The transaction is super simple. Damn it. I shared with you. You guys don't understand. Trump Doral is in Doral. Doral is the biggest fucking community of the Venezuelan diaspora. A lot of those people have money. A lot of those people were members of the Trump fucking country club. God damn it.
|
Sam:
[6:29]
| Uh-huh. Yeah.
|
Ivan:
[6:30]
| This is transactional with those people that probably promised them riches, things, whatever. Hey, get us our country back and we'll make you rich. That's it. I guarantee you. There is nothing else.
|
Sam:
[6:49]
| Right. Yeah. As usual, he's pushing the personal stuff you talked about. He's pushing oil. There's this. There's that. And the oil people don't even.
|
Ivan:
[6:58]
| Well, the oil part is.
|
Sam:
[7:00]
| He's like having to like coerce the oil companies to like participate in this because they don't really want to anyway.
|
Ivan:
[7:05]
| The problem with the oil, OK, is that, you know, Venezuela had infrastructure and a very capable oil workforce that had been there up until the sometime in the 2000s. Decades of investment.
|
Ivan:
[7:25]
| A vertically integrated extraction, refining, distribution with Citgo in the United States as well. part of that, that generated quite a lot of money. And by the way, it was also the most efficient per employee oil company in the world back before Hugo Chavez took over, okay? And Hugo Chavez destroyed that, okay? Because what he, you know, the first thing that he did when he came in is that he decided that he wanted the company to, well, I want to do all these programs. You need to give me more money. You need to give me more money. And he was demanding so much money. Okay. You're, you're, you're making us take money away from the investment that we regularly do to maintain production. Okay. We can't, you can't, you can't extract that much money from the company without destroying its future ability to produce oil, okay? You know, these facilities need continuous reinvestment. And he kept doing that, and then he said, all you people aren't loyal, and then he fired all the oil employees, okay?
|
Ivan:
[8:44]
| And so for a while, as it happens with these organizations, oh, you see, I fired all the people, so everything's fine. Well, everything started breaking down over years as the lack of maintenance, the lack of knowledge, the lack of investment took its toll on oil production, where oil production now in Venezuela, even though reserves are still there, is down over 80, 90 percent.
|
Ivan:
[9:05]
| 80, 90 percent. They have lost 80 to 90 percent of their oil producing capacity. This is because of all the disinvestment and all the refineries and everything. There was an article in the New York Times the last couple of years that showed the environmental devastation in Venezuela from the lack of attention that has been paid to all these facilities that have just completely broken down, exploded, started leaking. just are non-functional and have just created environmental devastation wherever they are located, okay? Because they've just been left to rot.
|
Sam:
[9:47]
| So anyway, I want to make sure...
|
Ivan:
[9:49]
| So an oil company, okay, the point is you go, oh, Exxon, go down there and invest and you're looking at this rusting hulk of shit, okay? And wait, before I pull anything, I got to invest how much money? And by the way, this isn't light sweet crude oil, which is the easy one, It's bunker oil, so I have to have the refineries, and you guys destroyed the fucking refineries. Venezuela used to make all their own gasoline. You could buy gasoline in Venezuela 20 years ago at four cents a gallon, okay? Right now, they have to import gasoline.
|
Sam:
[10:22]
| So, anyway, we've got multiple things here. We've got, okay, we got the guy, we pulled him out, which apparently, like, look, Everything else equal, the fact that we were able to go in, swoop in, grab the president and out with apparently minimal casualties, even on the Venezuelan side, they're reporting 40 dead, which is not nothing, but it is a lot less than it could be.
|
Ivan:
[10:51]
| Um and and by the way why do you i'm telling you the reason it happened is because the support for maduro is so low that none of those people that were there yes he had this entire security apparatus or whatever but when push came to shove they're like yeah fuck him take him.
|
Sam:
[11:08]
| Well well there's at least some reports going around and i think there's a lot of reporting that hasn't been fully verified yet, you know, but there's some reporting that the U.S. was in back-channel conversations through Dubai with the VP about, hey, I'm actually better than Maduro. Let's get rid of him and you can deal with me instead, you know, this kind of stuff. Yeah. So there's, but again, okay.
|
Ivan:
[11:36]
| But again, my point is that there was nobody, everybody, nobody there had the level of loyalty, to go and just, you know, start a shooting over defending Maduro. Okay. So your VP, who, by the way, they said is the main person, like, supporter of him, basically is like, oh, yeah, sure, I'll do it. Yeah, yeah, yeah, get rid of him.
|
Sam:
[12:03]
| Anyway, anyway, we've got several different distinct issues, I think, here. One is... Is it good to get rid of Maduro? Two, is how Donald Trump did this appropriate? And then number three, which you brought up earlier, is there a plan going forward? Because it already seems like no.
|
Ivan:
[12:26]
| There's no plan. And that was the whole fucking problem. I always said from the beginning, because if you were going to do this, the right approach, which is like the approach that happened in Panama, was that very quickly we had an interim government and we set up a free election. And that's it. OK.
|
Sam:
[12:43]
| But here's the thing. Even facts on the ground versus what Donald Trump is saying versus the justification they gave are all different at this point.
|
Ivan:
[12:53]
| Right.
|
Sam:
[12:53]
| The official justification is we're going in. This is a criminal arrest. The whole military aspect was just to support the arrest. The FBI is going in. They're arresting him for drug charges.
|
Ivan:
[13:05]
| Listen, there had been ample evidence for a long time before for this that Maduro had used the military in Venezuela to traffic drugs in order to enrich himself.
|
Sam:
[13:19]
| Fine. But that justification lends towards we're in and out. We grabbed him and then we're done. We have nothing to do with anything else whatsoever. Meanwhile, Donald Trump is talking about regime change. And we're going to run the country. Rubio is going to be in charge or whatever. And I mean, wait.
|
Ivan:
[13:39]
| He said that he said, wait, wait, wait, he did say that. No, he didn't say that.
|
Sam:
[13:44]
| You you said that. I thought I thought you were channeling.
|
Ivan:
[13:47]
| No, no, no, no, no. I that was just on my bingo card that I made up this bingo card. And I thought Rubio won't be in charge of Venezuela.
|
Sam:
[13:56]
| I thought you had actually heard him say that. No, what I can verify that he said was that there will be sort of a committee of the important people. When he was asked who will be in charge, he gestured around to the people in the room. So that was Rubio, Hegseth, a few other people from the cabinet and military. So basically he was like, it's us, us here in this room. We're the ones who are going to be in charge. But meanwhile, on the ground...
|
Ivan:
[14:31]
| We're doing nothing. I mean, that's what I'm saying. I don't understand.
|
Sam:
[14:34]
| In order to impose something like that, you can't just go in, grab the president, and leave because the VP is ostensibly in charge now. There's the person who actually, quote unquote, won the previous rigged election who was an opposition figure who reportedly got a significant landslide, actually.
|
Ivan:
[14:58]
| Yes.
|
Sam:
[14:59]
| And then we've got that lady who won the Nobel Peace Prize, who's also in the contention.
|
Ivan:
[15:03]
| That was Weidol, who all reports say that he did—I mean, there was a lot of data that showed that he won the election in a landslide, yes.
|
Sam:
[15:12]
| But anyway, the facts on the ground are not us occupying Venezuela. So all of this talk about all of these things we intend to do there, where the hell is that coming from, unless there's a lot more coming up?
|
Ivan:
[15:26]
| I know where they're coming from, Sam.
|
Sam:
[15:28]
| And what Hegseth said— Wait, wait.
|
Ivan:
[15:30]
| No, I know where they're coming from.
|
Sam:
[15:32]
| Yes.
|
Ivan:
[15:32]
| Out of his ass.
|
Sam:
[15:34]
| Yes, yes. Well, and— I mean.
|
Ivan:
[15:37]
| Am I wrong?
|
Sam:
[15:38]
| No, you're not wrong, but I think there's at least some question of whether, you know, whether he's just making shit up or whether he's actually delusional. You know, and whether there's a delta between— I mean.
|
Ivan:
[15:53]
| I think that right now it's very difficult to discern the difference between those two.
|
Sam:
[15:59]
| Yes, is he lying or is he delusional? We don't know.
|
Ivan:
[16:02]
| Who the hell knows? Who the hell knows? Right.
|
Sam:
[16:05]
| Right. So, and how this plays out ends up being very different if we really are done or whether there's more coming.
|
Ivan:
[16:14]
| Listen, if we don't want a repeat of Iraq, I will say the one thing, okay?
|
Sam:
[16:19]
| Yes.
|
Ivan:
[16:19]
| That leaving the current government in charge, Is one way of ensuring that we don't have the kind of collapse that led to a lot more bloodshed, like in Iraq, where we went and we created this vacuum that created just.
|
Sam:
[16:37]
| If you actually work with this, this government and try to coerce them into, oh, OK, a year from now, you'll have real elections.
|
Ivan:
[16:43]
| You'll be right. You're going to have a independent monitor, you know, election that is free and fair. We're going to give you this timeline. You're going to do this and whatever. and, you know, you're going to do those actions, then OK. But that I mean that that but but but but the point is that they didn't seem to have that planned already. They went in and did this without without this already structured.
|
Sam:
[17:09]
| According to what Trump said in his news conference, this VP had told Rubio that she'd be cooperative. Of course, then she immediately gave a speech saying, no, no, absolutely not. But of course, she has to. Right.
|
Ivan:
[17:23]
| Right. So who knows what's really going on? Right. Who knows what's really going on? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
|
Sam:
[17:28]
| Okay. We should move on and do our actual show for today. So let me introduce and then we'll take a break and then we'll get into it. Basically, if you listened to last week's show, you heard us do our predictions for 2026. A year and a week ago, we did our predictions for 2025. There were five sections, politics, international, economy, technology, and hodgepodge. So we are going to, when we come back, we are going to review the predictions we made a year ago. I spent about, I don't know, five hours or so going over last week's show over the last, I started last night, finished this morning.
|
Ivan:
[18:08]
| Okay, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. Oh my God. Oh my God. Oh my God. I gotta pull out my bingo card And cross it off Washington Post front cover Rubio takes on his most challenging role yet Viceroy Of Venezuela, Yes Shit.
|
Sam:
[18:30]
| You know, he should just move there into the presidential palace.
|
Ivan:
[18:35]
| Yes.
|
Sam:
[18:36]
| You know, so, yeah. He can do that and be secretary of state here at the same time, right?
|
Ivan:
[18:41]
| I thought that I was, like, really stretching it by saying, let me put, you know, somebody said, hey, make a 2026 bingo card, all sorts of crazy stuff. So I got Putin dying and, you know, Ukraine at peace. I don't know, whatever. And I said, you know what? Rubio's in charge of Venezuela. Fuck it. I just wrote that like three days ago and boom! I didn't even get to...
|
Sam:
[19:05]
| Anyway Anyway we are going to have after this we're going to take a break and then we'll come back and we'll do one segment for each of these we will go over all of the predictions we made. I listened to the show carefully. I wrote down every prediction that either Yvonne or I made for most of them I tried to do a preliminary fact check so that I know whether we were right or wrong. For some of them, Yvonne and I will have to discuss to make a final determination. But that's basically the plan. And, you know, last week's show, yeah, the prediction show is usually the longest of the year. This is usually like the second longest of the year. So let's get to it. We're going to take the first break and then we'll come back and talk about our politics predictions for 2025 and see how we did. How do you think we did, Yvonne? I think we did good.
|
Ivan:
[19:57]
| I have no idea Okay.
|
Sam:
[19:59]
| Here we go Break, break, break, I will mention that he has been posting on that channel again. There was a new video posted just yesterday. It's an almost one hour long video, most of which is the camera pointed at the wall of his room with nobody visible. But you can hear him and his grandmother talking.
|
Ivan:
[20:58]
| Well, that's riveting.
|
Sam:
[21:00]
| As they work on a story.
|
Ivan:
[21:03]
| Are we going to nominate this for like some kind of like gold?
|
Sam:
[21:08]
| Globe or academy a webby.
|
Ivan:
[21:10]
| A webby best short film uh you know unscripted short film i don't know something.
|
Sam:
[21:18]
| I don't know it's that episode's long enough i'm not sure it qualifies as a short i mean it's not a full it's not feature length i think you have to be over an hour for that and it's like 54 minutes or something okay so.
|
Ivan:
[21:30]
| It quite you know it's a short film.
|
Sam:
[21:32]
| I guess so yeah Although when I think about short films, I'm usually thinking like 20 minutes or something.
|
Ivan:
[21:39]
| 15, 20 minutes.
|
Sam:
[21:40]
| Yeah.
|
Ivan:
[21:41]
| It's under an hour.
|
Sam:
[21:42]
| Okay. Let's get started. And I'm trying to figure out like the right place to put all my windows so I can see everything I need to see.
|
Ivan:
[21:50]
| Can I just mention again on the affordability? Well, two quick things before we go.
|
Sam:
[21:55]
| Yes, yes.
|
Ivan:
[21:55]
| Number one is on the affordability crisis right now. My last coffee order, my coffee that used to be $12 a pound came in at $23 per pack. Okay. All right.
|
Sam:
[22:05]
| Okay.
|
Ivan:
[22:05]
| So much for that thing. So that's one thing. The second thing is that I don't remember anymore. So let's move on.
|
Sam:
[22:15]
| That was very profound, Yvonne. Thank you for interjecting that.
|
Ivan:
[22:19]
| I know that I usually have, you know, very profound things. Oh, no, no. The polymarkets thing.
|
Sam:
[22:27]
| Oh, yes, yes.
|
Ivan:
[22:28]
| You didn't see somebody went and like made a killing in polymarkets on the Venezuela invasion?
|
Sam:
[22:33]
| You posted that on our curmudgeon's corner slack like 12 hours after I did. But yes, go ahead.
|
Ivan:
[22:37]
| Well, no, that somebody did. Well, I didn't see that you put it. That somebody went and did it.
|
Sam:
[22:44]
| They put in a whole bunch of money on Venezuela-related issues a few hours before it happened.
|
Ivan:
[22:50]
| Now, here's the one thing. On that bet, man, it could have been almost anybody. You could have been a military guy for all, you know. I mean, hey, you know, you're one of the soldiers. You're going to send to Venezuela. You're like, well, fuck this. Polymarket, boom. I'm putting in money and we're invading Venezuela. Boom.
|
Sam:
[23:08]
| Yeah. It could have been anybody. You're right. The number of people who knew, quote unquote, knew something more definitive than the general public was in the thousands.
|
Ivan:
[23:20]
| It was in the thousands. Yeah. So, yeah.
|
Sam:
[23:23]
| So, we can't just automatically point this to Hegseth or something.
|
Ivan:
[23:28]
| Right. Which I have falling off a carrier drunk during 2026, and I would like to see if that happens.
|
Sam:
[23:33]
| On your bingo card?
|
Ivan:
[23:34]
| Yeah.
|
Sam:
[23:35]
| Okay.
|
Ivan:
[23:35]
| That would be cool.
|
Sam:
[23:37]
| It would be interesting. can we get started yes.
|
Ivan:
[23:42]
| Let's get started.
|
Sam:
[23:42]
| Okay our first prediction last year was about elon musk and how he would end his time as advisor to the president we both agreed well, actually this is slightly different your prediction was just that he would not last the year as an advisor you were correct.
|
Ivan:
[24:10]
| That was correct.
|
Sam:
[24:11]
| Okay i was more specific i had several bits on this one was that musk would not be fired by tweet and i was right i mean there was a there was a tweet battle but they had a little going away for him party for him in the oval office they had some other stuff going on they they had pre-announced the date before it actually happened for for his official end date right um so i'm counting myself as right and i will say that rather than a formal firing i also said it would just sort of become more and more clear that trump had stopped paying attention to musk and i think even before he officially left that was already starting to happen but what do you think should i should i count that for me or no.
|
Ivan:
[25:01]
| Yeah.
|
Sam:
[25:02]
| Okay. I counted as yes.
|
Ivan:
[25:03]
| Yeah, yeah, yeah.
|
Sam:
[25:04]
| Yeah. And then I said Musk will be gone by the end of June as a meaningful advisor. His farewell in the Oval Office that I mentioned was May 30th. His tweet about Trump being in the Epstein files was June 5th. So I think I did good on timing. I said before the end of June and May.
|
Ivan:
[25:24]
| Yeah, yeah, yeah.
|
Sam:
[25:24]
| Yes on that. Then, next up, we both agreed that there would be no legislation passed to privatize the U.S. Postal Service. And we were correct.
|
Ivan:
[25:36]
| Okay, good.
|
Sam:
[25:38]
| Okay, next up, you said that the Trump inauguration crowd size would be bigger than 2016. Were you right, Yvonne?
|
Ivan:
[25:49]
| I don't know. Was I?
|
Sam:
[25:51]
| No, because they moved it inside and it was an invited crowd only because of weather.
|
Ivan:
[25:58]
| Oh, because of the weather. That's right.
|
Sam:
[26:00]
| Right.
|
Ivan:
[26:01]
| Oh, wow.
|
Sam:
[26:01]
| So you were wrong. Meanwhile, I did predict that it would be smaller than 2016 and I was right. Although I did not like give the, it was be because of weather and all that.
|
Ivan:
[26:10]
| Right.
|
Sam:
[26:11]
| It was smaller.
|
Ivan:
[26:11]
| Well, I was wrong.
|
Sam:
[26:14]
| I further said that clump.
|
Ivan:
[26:16]
| Clump, clump, I further claim Donald clump. Yes.
|
Sam:
[26:25]
| I said that Donald Trump will claim it was bigger though. And in fact, not only that, but claim that it was the biggest ever.
|
Ivan:
[26:34]
| He did.
|
Sam:
[26:35]
| No, he didn't. He did neither of those things because it was inside and stuff. So I got both of those wrong.
|
Ivan:
[26:41]
| Oh God. Oh, well.
|
Sam:
[26:42]
| Okay. Next, we both said there would be no recess appointments for the cabinet, that Donald Trump would not need to do that. There were, in fact, no recess appointments. They were all regular appointments for the cabinet. So we were both right on that. We both agreed that there would be a full cabinet in place by October 1st. That was a date that Bruce gave us. We both said that was plenty of time. We were both correct. In fact, the last cabinet position to be filled was March 10th. You have a guess as to which cabinet position was last?
|
Ivan:
[27:21]
| Health secretary?
|
Sam:
[27:22]
| No, labor.
|
Ivan:
[27:24]
| Labor.
|
Sam:
[27:25]
| Health was somewhere in the middle.
|
Ivan:
[27:27]
| Okay.
|
Sam:
[27:28]
| Okay. And then we both confidently agreed that there was absolutely no question whatsoever that there would be some cabinet turnover by the end of the year. In fact, all 21 members of Donald Trump's cabinet were confirmed and have been there ever since and are still there.
|
Ivan:
[27:51]
| I'd say that's one of the more shocking developments. this year, the fact that there's been no turnover in the cabinet because that was a regular of the first term.
|
Sam:
[28:03]
| Well, cause I think the difference is this year he 100% went for loyalty. Whereas last time around, he got a whole bunch of people that other folks were telling him were experts or were good or had, you know, knew about the space or whatever. And he didn't like any of those people because they kept telling him no.
|
Ivan:
[28:23]
| So he hired a cabinet of yes, men. And because the cabinet is a cabinet of yes, men and women, they, you know, they're all still there. Okay.
|
Sam:
[28:33]
| Yeah. So we were both wrong on that one. We both agreed that there would be no January 6th type drama before the inauguration. We were correct.
|
Ivan:
[28:44]
| So a bunch of Democrats that didn't go and like invade the Capitol.
|
Sam:
[28:48]
| No, nothing like that. And I also went further and said there won't even be the kind of drama we had in 2016, where there were some objections at the January 6th ceremonies that were instantly overridden. We didn't even have that, I don't think. So I'm counting myself right on that. We also both agreed, because there was a little bit of chatter that maybe Biden would be creative with this, but no mini-Harris presidency between Biden and Trump.
|
Ivan:
[29:17]
| Okay.
|
Sam:
[29:19]
| A few folks were toying around with the idea, it was really half a joke, that Biden could resign like a one week early, let Harris be president for a week so that, you know, Trump wouldn't be 47, we'd have a woman president for at least a little bit, you know, et cetera, et cetera. No, that did not happen. So we were both correct. I further predicted that Biden would indeed attend the inauguration and hand it over. I was right. we both agreed that trump would still be president at the end of the year we were correct, You further predicted to go along with that, that Trump will not die. You got that right.
|
Ivan:
[29:58]
| I went, wow, I went.
|
Sam:
[30:00]
| I will say you hedged your bets and later in the show, you predicted that he will die. So, you know.
|
Ivan:
[30:07]
| Oh, so I played both sides. Okay.
|
Sam:
[30:10]
| You played both sides. But for this segment, you predicted he would not.
|
Ivan:
[30:16]
| Okay, great. Good job, Ivan.
|
Sam:
[30:18]
| We both said that there would be at least one additional assassination attempt on Trump. Not that has been publicized. Not in this year. I did look up, there were, I believe, three security incidents. including one where they found like what looked like a hideout that had a view of somewhere that Trump was scheduled to be, but they didn't find a person. They didn't find a gun. They didn't actually like, you know, whatever. So, but there were, there were security incidents, but there were no flat out assassination attempts.
|
Ivan:
[30:58]
| Okay.
|
Sam:
[31:00]
| Okay. So we were both wrong on that one. next up we both agreed that the sentencing in the new york case would be delayed past 2025 because they would delay it until after his term yeah we were wait no.
|
Ivan:
[31:18]
| No we were wrong yeah sentencing was was passed.
|
Sam:
[31:21]
| They sentencing was handed down on january 10th it was basically nothing but it was handed down i had said the new york case would not be dismissed because there was some talk of it just being dismissed. I was right. It was not dismissed. Next up, you know, I will stop here for a second. We have gone through a whole bunch of these so far, and basically there's been no discussion yet, which is unusual for us. Oftentimes when we go through these, at least some of these prompt some discussion on who's right, who's wrong, what happened, what didn't, you know, but no, so far these have been pretty straightforward. Next up, we both agreed that the Trump administration would openly investigate their opponents or the press. We were both correct. They absolutely did. Then we split on whether or not there would actually be indictments of those folks that were investigated. You said yes. I said no. You were right. There were actual indictments resulting from these investigations this year. We had, you know, the Letitia James one, we had the Comey one. Now, those indictments haven't gone very far.
|
Ivan:
[32:35]
| But they were indictments.
|
Sam:
[32:37]
| But they were, in fact, indicted. Okay, next up. We both predicted that there would be no direct U.S. military involvement in places the U.S. was not already involved in 2024. We were wrong.
|
Ivan:
[32:53]
| Where did we go that wasn't on the bingo?
|
Sam:
[32:56]
| Well, if nothing else, Venezuela. Yeah, but wait, wait.
|
Ivan:
[33:01]
| Wait.
|
Sam:
[33:01]
| No, no, the actual thing at the end that we said was in January, but we attacked some docks the last week of December.
|
Ivan:
[33:10]
| That's true. Okay. Yeah.
|
Sam:
[33:12]
| And someone posted the other day a list of countries Trump has bombed. And it apparently, the 2025 number for the number of separate countries the U.S. has bombed was greater in 2025 than in any other year in the history of the country.
|
Ivan:
[33:36]
| Wow. Damn.
|
Sam:
[33:38]
| Because we had Nigeria. That was new, too, by the way. We bombed Nigeria.
|
Ivan:
[33:42]
| Nigeria was, yeah, I know. I was like, we're trying to remember which place.
|
Sam:
[33:45]
| But yeah, Nigeria. We bombed Nigeria, Yemen, Syria, Iran, Venezuela. I'm missing a couple. There were like seven or eight total.
|
Ivan:
[33:55]
| Yeah, we're doing great.
|
Sam:
[33:56]
| Somalia. Did I say Somalia? I think we've done that as well.
|
Ivan:
[33:59]
| No, no, we didn't say Somalia, but yeah, fuck it.
|
Sam:
[34:02]
| So, like, if I had the list handy, I'd read it. But, like, those are just off the top of my head. Anyway, so we were both wrong on that one. We both agreed that there would be no invasion of Panama. We were correct. We both agreed there would be no invasion of Greenland. We were correct.
|
Ivan:
[34:21]
| We were both correct.
|
Sam:
[34:23]
| We both agreed that the Trump tax cuts would be extended. We were both correct. I, however, was stupid and became more specific and said that would happen in the first hundred days. It did not.
|
Ivan:
[34:37]
| It did not.
|
Sam:
[34:38]
| The extension of the tax cuts apparently was part of the big, beautiful bill, which I believe was July. Then that was it for presidency, and we started talking about, well, I guess the last couple might have been Congress. We're now on Congress. We split on how many speakers of the House there would be in 2025. You said two, and I said three. How many were there, Yvonne?
|
Ivan:
[35:03]
| One.
|
Sam:
[35:04]
| One. We were both wrong. we split on whether it's stunning.
|
Ivan:
[35:09]
| How Mike Johnson is still holding on.
|
Sam:
[35:11]
| Yeah we split on whether or not he would even win the January speaker vote you said he would I said he would not you were obviously right I was wrong, we split on how many ballots it would take to pick a speaker in January I said I said 5 to 10 you said 2 to 10 how many ballots was it Yvonne? one it was one, So, yeah, we were both wrong on that one. We both, however, agreed that Republicans would keep the House all year long. And in fact, they did.
|
Ivan:
[35:47]
| They did? Okay.
|
Sam:
[35:49]
| They did.
|
Ivan:
[35:51]
| Yeah. They have been razor thin.
|
Sam:
[35:54]
| But they have. Then we both agreed that there would be at least one issue where Republicans in Congress would break from Trump in significant numbers. Were we correct, Yvonne?
|
Ivan:
[36:08]
| Oh, yes.
|
Sam:
[36:09]
| And what issue would that be, Yvonne?
|
Ivan:
[36:11]
| The Epstein file, Sam.
|
Sam:
[36:13]
| Indeed, we were both right. And I furthermore predicted that once it was clear he was losing, Trump would back down. And he did, in fact, do that.
|
Ivan:
[36:24]
| Yes, he did.
|
Sam:
[36:25]
| At the very end, he was like, okay, fine, pass the damn thing. So I was right on that. We both, however, made the prediction that Trump will never admit defeat about anything. Were we right, Yvonne?
|
Ivan:
[36:40]
| Oh, come on. Of course.
|
Sam:
[36:43]
| Of course.
|
Ivan:
[36:45]
| I mean, that's a feature. I mean, come on.
|
Sam:
[36:51]
| Okay, next up. We both agreed with the statement, Dodge will be a complete failure. Were we correct, Yvonne?
|
Ivan:
[37:00]
| Fuck fucking at 100, 200% correct.
|
Sam:
[37:04]
| Okay. Now, you furthermore said that the mode that this would work in is they would come up with a bunch of things to cut, but those cuts would not actually happen because Congress wouldn't go along with them. Is that how it played out, Yvonne? Not exactly.
|
Ivan:
[37:22]
| No, not exactly.
|
Sam:
[37:23]
| No. I'm counting you as wrong in that because what Dodge did was they actually did go in and shut crap down, even though they had no legal authority.
|
Ivan:
[37:32]
| Even though they have no legal authority, yes, that's correct.
|
Sam:
[37:34]
| Right, which goes along with me saying Dodge will find ways to claim victory without actually having done much. What would you say out of that one?
|
Ivan:
[37:42]
| Oh, fuck. Yes. Yeah.
|
Sam:
[37:45]
| I further said at best things would be held to current levels not actually decrease. I was right on that as well. We've seen charts multiple times throughout the year of total federal spending.
|
Ivan:
[37:59]
| Is a deficit down?
|
Sam:
[38:02]
| Wait, wait, wait. That's a separate question. We'll get to that in a second.
|
Ivan:
[38:05]
| No, no, no. I'm like, well, I know it's a separate question, but in this case, did they cut spending, Sam?
|
Sam:
[38:11]
| That's an entirely different question than the deficit question. So let me answer the spending question.
|
Ivan:
[38:17]
| Did the total spend of the U.S. federal government with Dodge go down?
|
Sam:
[38:22]
| No, it did not go down. In fact, it was the highest ever again. And if you look at the chart throughout the year, it was higher every single day of the year than previous years.
|
Ivan:
[38:33]
| What a shocking development, Sam. Sam, what a shocking, stunning, Sam, I'm stunned.
|
Sam:
[38:42]
| Yes. Okay, next up, though, you specifically predicted that they would not cut VA health, because that's one of the things that had been mentioned. I think they did. They fired a whole bunch of people from VA.
|
Ivan:
[38:55]
| Yes, they did. They did a bunch of stuff.
|
Sam:
[38:56]
| So we'll count you as wrong on that one. I said they will find over a billion dollars to cut. like because we went back like there was a we said billion not trillion we were saying that there was a small amount they would never reach the the trillions or whatever that they targeted but we said they would find over a billion but it would be compensated by increases elsewhere i was right on that right yeah.
|
Ivan:
[39:22]
| That's 100 correct yes.
|
Sam:
[39:23]
| Yes i also said they will find scapegoat programs republicans don't like and get rid of them totally correct i was right i said but Simultaneously, they'll increase funding for things like defense and SpaceX.
|
Ivan:
[39:38]
| That's totally correct.
|
Sam:
[39:40]
| Yes. Okay. We both agreed that there would be more tax cuts.
|
Ivan:
[39:47]
| So 100% true on that one.
|
Sam:
[39:49]
| We both agreed that there would be no net spending cuts.
|
Ivan:
[39:54]
| It's 100% true on that one, too.
|
Sam:
[39:57]
| Okay, we split on SCOTUS openings. You said there would be no SCOTUS openings. I said there would be. There were none this year. So you were right. I was wrong.
|
Ivan:
[40:07]
| Once again.
|
Sam:
[40:09]
| Okay, now the budget deficit. We both predicted the budget deficit would be up.
|
Ivan:
[40:16]
| Let me ask a question. What did Trump say he was going to do with the deficit when he came into office?
|
Sam:
[40:21]
| Well, he was going to kill it completely and we'd have surpluses, right?
|
Ivan:
[40:25]
| Isn't that what he always says? I mean, is that what he said? Hang on.
|
Sam:
[40:28]
| I don't remember.
|
Ivan:
[40:29]
| I'm going to check to see.
|
Sam:
[40:32]
| He promised that the first term, I think.
|
Ivan:
[40:36]
| I'm going to check what he promised for this time. All right. Let's see. Checking, checking, checking. Let's see. Let me see what answer I come on. All he said was that he would slash the federal budget deficit, that he would reduce spending and boost revenue. So, yeah. So, he was vague. He didn't do that. But that was, like you mentioned, that, like, the deficit to zero thing was a first campaign promise.
|
Sam:
[41:09]
| First term.
|
Ivan:
[41:09]
| Yeah, first term.
|
Sam:
[41:10]
| Okay, so here's what actually happened. Fiscal year 2024, deficit was $1.82 trillion. Fiscal year 2025, deficit was $1.78. The deficit was actually down. We were both wrong.
|
Ivan:
[41:26]
| The deficit was actually down. Huh.
|
Sam:
[41:28]
| Slightly. Just slightly. But it was down.
|
Ivan:
[41:31]
| Okay. Actually, you could, you know what? That was actually the tariffs.
|
Sam:
[41:39]
| Yeah, it probably was.
|
Ivan:
[41:41]
| Yeah, because it was $200 billion in tariff revenue. So if you add that in there, yeah, the deficit would have been higher. But that was straight up the tariff revenue.
|
Sam:
[41:53]
| We both agreed that the debt limit would be increased. Was it increased, Yvonne? Yes. Not only increased, but increased by the biggest amount ever in the history of the debt limit. Just saying. Okay. I, however, said this will happen with Democrats plus a few Republicans, because that's how it had usually played out in the past. I believe that was not how it happened. This was increased as part of the big, beautiful bill, which was all the Republicans and a few Democrats.
|
Ivan:
[42:23]
| Right.
|
Sam:
[42:24]
| Or most Republicans and a few Democrats.
|
Ivan:
[42:27]
| Right.
|
Sam:
[42:28]
| Okay. We split on government shutdown. You said there would be one. I said there would not be one.
|
Ivan:
[42:36]
| Sam, were you right?
|
Sam:
[42:38]
| I was not right.
|
Ivan:
[42:40]
| Right.
|
Sam:
[42:42]
| However, you decided to be more specific in two ways.
|
Ivan:
[42:46]
| Oh, God.
|
Sam:
[42:48]
| One, you said the government shutdown would happen the first time they got to a limit that they had to deal with.
|
Ivan:
[42:55]
| No, it was not the first time.
|
Sam:
[42:57]
| They kicked the can down the road several times. It was later in the year. Yeah. You also predicted the shutdown would be brief. It was the longest ever.
|
Ivan:
[43:06]
| It was the longest ever.
|
Sam:
[43:08]
| So you were wrong on both of those two.
|
Ivan:
[43:10]
| Jesus Christ, those extra two predictions. I completely self-sabotaged myself on that one.
|
Sam:
[43:19]
| Okay, next up is one we might want to discuss a little bit to determine. The question was whether there would be state versus federal conflict on the ground in a way similar to the civil rights movement in the 1960s, where the feds sent out National Guard, federal troops, whatever, to enforce federal decisions over states, except obviously sort of in reverse. You had said, no, that will remain entirely in the courts. And I said there would be such conflict on the ground. The question is, does what happened count? Because we did have Trump send federalized National Guard and other troops into various cities. But is it sufficient to count as this? Because we also didn't have the states really. It's not like we had state forces battling federal forces, you know. Does this count?
|
Ivan:
[44:28]
| I think it counts because the reality is that there was conflict with local officials, even though they didn't go and, like, send out, like, In most cases, like, you know, police to go and, like, battle, like, federal troops. So, I'd say the answer is yes.
|
Sam:
[44:46]
| Okay. So, I was right. You were wrong.
|
Ivan:
[44:48]
| Yeah.
|
Sam:
[44:49]
| You furthermore specifically said no federal troops on the ground. There were federal troops on the ground.
|
Ivan:
[44:53]
| Oh, God. There were a lot of federal troops on the ground.
|
Sam:
[44:56]
| Yes. And I said he would nationalize the Guard. So, I was right. At least part of the Guard. Yeah. Not all of it, obviously. Okay, next up is we split on whether the gross number of illegal border crossings would go up or down this year. Did it go up or down?
|
Ivan:
[45:18]
| Down, I think.
|
Sam:
[45:19]
| It went down, which means I was right and you were wrong. You predicted it would go up. Now, this is one, I think I know the answer to this, but I will fully admit to not having a verified source of it. So total immigration, so legal and illegal, to the U.S. would go down. We both predicted it would go down. Did it go down this year? Yes. That's what I thought. I didn't bother verifying it, but basically because no one wants to come here anymore because we're being damn hostile to anybody who comes.
|
Ivan:
[45:54]
| Let me eat. Let me fact check that a little bit. It's not, I, this, this last weekend that I was in Disney.
|
Sam:
[46:03]
| I was surprised at the number of international. Whenever you say nobody, it obviously, it's never nobody.
|
Ivan:
[46:07]
| I was surprised by the number of international visitors that were at Disney. Okay. From, from many countries. I mean, a lot of Asian visitors specifically that I saw, Latin American as well. Well, I was surprised by the number of international visitors.
|
Sam:
[46:26]
| Yeah, obviously I was being hyperbolic saying nobody wants to come here.
|
Ivan:
[46:28]
| No, no, no.
|
Sam:
[46:28]
| It's down, but it's like down 10% or something. It's not down like 50.
|
Ivan:
[46:32]
| It is down substantially. It's more specific for certain countries, which, you know, like Canadian visits are significantly down.
|
Sam:
[46:44]
| I wonder why. Did we piss off Canada in some way? Yeah, just a tad.
|
Ivan:
[46:49]
| Just a little bit. But one thing is that international students at U.S. universities, the total number didn't really go down that much either, even with all the different actions and things that happened in the first few months of the administration.
|
Sam:
[47:09]
| Okay. Next up, we split on deportations. I said they'd be up. You said they would not be up. They are up. They are up. They are up. Yes. I didn't get end-of-year numbers, but as of June, we were already almost at the 2024 numbers.
|
Ivan:
[47:27]
| They were at double the pace that they had been before.
|
Sam:
[47:31]
| So I was right. You were wrong on that one. We both agreed, however, that there would be plenty of what we called show deportations, where they were just making examples of certain people and making sure it was on video and talking about them a lot. There were quite a few of those.
|
Ivan:
[47:48]
| There were quite a few of those. I mean, specifically the one that got all this, press coverage recently for the 60 Minutes thing, the ones that we sent to that terrorist prison And El Salvador was, yeah, El Salvador. I mean, yeah, it's Seacott. I mean, that was like.
|
Sam:
[48:08]
| Well, and we have had all that attention on that guy in Maryland. I mean, he's still in the country. Well, he was out and then back, and then they're still trying to get rid of him. Abrego Garcia, was it? Yeah. Anyway, yes.
|
Ivan:
[48:22]
| But the courts firmly ruled in his favor that the whole thing was illegal.
|
Sam:
[48:28]
| Oh, yeah, but they're trying under other grounds.
|
Ivan:
[48:30]
| I know. It's still in court right now. I know, but.
|
Sam:
[48:33]
| The courts— They're fighting over which country to send him to now, as opposed to— And one of the latest things is he's actually agreed to go to one country that has said there and would be happy to take him.
|
Ivan:
[48:47]
| They don't want to send him there.
|
Sam:
[48:48]
| They want to send him there. They want to send him somewhere else.
|
Ivan:
[48:53]
| Which is one of the reasons why the court went and was ruled against the federal government, because there is no legal basis for that. It's just to be... assholes. That's it.
|
Sam:
[49:07]
| Pretty much. Anyway, that was the last question of the politics section.
|
Ivan:
[49:13]
| By the way, the deportation numbers that I was able to pull out, what the numbers are, full fiscal year 2024 was $271,000, okay, under Biden. Estimate for full fiscal year 2025 is $605,000.
|
Sam:
[49:30]
| Right. Most definitely up. Yeah. Okay, so here's how we did. I made 49 predictions, of which 34 were correct. That's 69.4%.
|
Ivan:
[49:44]
| Nice.
|
Sam:
[49:45]
| You made 41 predictions, of which 25 were correct. That's 61.0%.
|
Ivan:
[49:53]
| So, Sam, you're in the lead.
|
Sam:
[49:55]
| I'm in the lead. Our combined number was 90 predictions, of which 59 were correct. That's 65.6%. I will also compare us to 2024. Our combined number again this year was 65.6%. I think we're better. Last year, our combined number was 41.3.
|
Ivan:
[50:13]
| Yeah, we're way better.
|
Sam:
[50:16]
| We absolutely bombed last year.
|
Ivan:
[50:19]
| Oh, my God. It was so bad.
|
Sam:
[50:22]
| It was so bad. Yeah, so we got 2024, like, completely wrong.
|
Ivan:
[50:26]
| We so fucked up 2024.
|
Sam:
[50:30]
| Okay. With that, it is time to take a break. When we come back, it will be time for International. And so here is another breaky break break break break break thing. Here we go. Okay, moving on to international. We started out about whether or not there'd be a ceasefire in Ukraine. You said no, I said yes. There was no ceasefire in Ukraine.
|
Ivan:
[51:18]
| There was no ceasefire in Ukraine, yeah.
|
Sam:
[51:21]
| So you were correct, I was wrong. You furthermore said there would, however, be lots of posturing and negotiation.
|
Ivan:
[51:29]
| Gee, Sam, was that right?
|
Sam:
[51:32]
| Yes, you were right. We both further said there'd be no signed peace deal, which is separate from, of course, a ceasefire. We were both correct on that. I further said Ukraine would be struggling with the fact that they got less support from Trump than from Biden. That's kind of subjective. What would you say?
|
Ivan:
[51:56]
| I'd say they're about the same shape as they were before. I don't think anything really materially changed.
|
Sam:
[52:01]
| So, no?
|
Ivan:
[52:03]
| Yeah, no.
|
Sam:
[52:06]
| I almost want to fight you on that, but not quite, because Trump has provided less aid. The situation on the ground has been a stalemate for two years.
|
Ivan:
[52:17]
| Exactly. Did the situation materially change? Because the thing, they would be struggling because of that. Did the situation on the ground materially change because of that? The answer is no.
|
Sam:
[52:26]
| Okay. I also said Ukraine would not be completely defeated. I was right. Then there was a question of whether or not there would still be a Ukrainian presence in Kursk at the end of the year. So I looked this up.
|
Ivan:
[52:43]
| I think the answer is no.
|
Sam:
[52:45]
| The answer is yes, but just barely. Okay. They retreated from almost all of the territory they had occupied in Kursk like in April or May. Okay. But there are apparently a handful of small, little, tiny pockets where they are still across the border as of at least November. That was the latest data I can find.
|
Ivan:
[53:10]
| All right. Well.
|
Sam:
[53:11]
| So we split on that. You were actually right. I was wrong. You said there would still be a presence in Kursk.
|
Ivan:
[53:17]
| There you go. Okay.
|
Sam:
[53:19]
| The next question was, would Russia increase its percentage of control in Ukraine year over year? We both agreed that they would. We are both correct. They gained 0.8% of Ukrainian territory over the course of 2025.
|
Ivan:
[53:38]
| What was the number again?
|
Sam:
[53:40]
| 0.8%.
|
Ivan:
[53:42]
| Wow. I guess it's a gain.
|
Sam:
[53:46]
| I think that's more of a gain than they had in 2024, actually. So they did accelerate a little bit.
|
Ivan:
[53:53]
| But it's just, you know, we're calling it, I mean, it's like, hey, I made a massive return on my investments this year of 0.8%.
|
Sam:
[54:03]
| Yes. And by the way, the cost of that 0.8% in lives lost, people injured, equipment, and of course, cash is huge.
|
Ivan:
[54:18]
| It's ridiculous.
|
Sam:
[54:19]
| Yes. Okay, we both agreed there would be no coup in Europe. Was there any coups in Europe?
|
Ivan:
[54:26]
| I don't recall any coups in Europe.
|
Sam:
[54:28]
| Okay. We also both agreed that there would be no additional right-wing takeovers of governments in Europe in 2025. Were they right? I think we were right.
|
Ivan:
[54:43]
| I think we were right. Yeah. As a matter of fact, as anything, they actually shifted, you know, some, they made some gains.
|
Sam:
[54:51]
| The next couple questions are about gains without changes in government.
|
Ivan:
[54:56]
| Yeah.
|
Sam:
[54:56]
| This was just me. I said in France, we'd end up with a more conservative coalition at the end of the year than at the beginning. I don't think we did. There was a lot of chaos in France. They changed prime ministers that one resigned and then was immediately reappointed. There was craziness in France. But I think in the end, we sort of ended up at the same place as where we started. Does that sound right to you? I spent a little bit of time on Wikipedia trying to figure this out, but I clearly did not know enough about French politics to have a lot of certainty here.
|
Ivan:
[55:30]
| Well, I mean either.
|
Sam:
[55:32]
| So I'm going to say no.
|
Ivan:
[55:35]
| OK.
|
Sam:
[55:37]
| However, I did predict there'd be a more conservative coalition in Germany, not like the far right people take over, but it was more conservative than the beginning of the year. The conservatives did have some election success earlier in the year, and I believe they're actually the ones that formed a government. So I was right on that one. We both agreed that Russia would not invade any more countries in 2025.
|
Ivan:
[56:05]
| Yeah, Russia did not invade any more countries that I'm aware of, right?
|
Sam:
[56:08]
| We are both correct. Then we split on whether Russia would still have a presence in Syria. You said no, I said yes. Do you know the answer to this one, Yvonne?
|
Ivan:
[56:21]
| I think the answer is no, right?
|
Sam:
[56:23]
| No, Russia is still in Syria. They are. have bases in Syria. They've been in negotiation with the new government in Syria, who would probably prefer they leave, but so far they are still in their bases in Syria and they have not been kicked out. And we both predicted there would still be U.S. troops in Syria. There are, in fact, still U.S. troops in Syria. In fact, there were news reports as recently as mid-December of U.S. troops killed in Syria. So, yeah, we were both right on that one. Now, this next one, you had said there would be a new dictatorship in Syria. I'm going to count you as wrong on that one. because the government in Syria has not changed over the course of 2025. They did go from a transitional government to another transitional government, but it's the same guy. It's that same, you know, and so I'll say no new dictatorship. I said that the government in Syria would not be a tolerant, multicultural, friendly government. I'm going back and forth on that one because they've sort of tried to be.
|
Ivan:
[57:45]
| But haven't— Relative to the other stuff? I mean, shit, the answer's kind of like— Well, they are more tolerant than many others in the area.
|
Sam:
[58:00]
| They are. Now, there have been some issues with their treatment of certain minorities— Yeah.
|
Ivan:
[58:09]
| Yeah, yeah. But every country has issues with treatments of certain minorities.
|
Sam:
[58:12]
| Yes, obviously, including us.
|
Ivan:
[58:15]
| Yes.
|
Sam:
[58:17]
| But, yeah, just in general, they have been, I don't know, I'm going to count myself wrong.
|
Ivan:
[58:26]
| Yeah.
|
Sam:
[58:27]
| Yeah, they're not perfect. But as governments in that region go, they're not anywhere near the worst.
|
Ivan:
[58:35]
| That's right. That is absolutely right.
|
Sam:
[58:40]
| I also predicted that the Syrian government would not be in control of the whole country. I was correct. The Syrian civil war continues just with a different set of players.
|
Ivan:
[58:51]
| Essentially.
|
Sam:
[58:52]
| We both agreed that there would be no democratically elected government in Syria yet. We're both correct. It's still some sort of transitional temporary government, blah, blah, blah. Theoretically, they are saying all the right things about they want to move beyond that, but they haven't yet.
|
Ivan:
[59:13]
| Okay.
|
Sam:
[59:13]
| Okay. We both were fairly sure that Benjamin Netanyahu would no longer be Prime Minister of Israel by the end of the year.
|
Ivan:
[59:22]
| We're pretty fucking wrong.
|
Sam:
[59:25]
| We were indeed wrong.
|
Ivan:
[59:27]
| I mean, a guy's a cockroach.
|
Sam:
[59:31]
| We both agreed there would be a ceasefire in gaza by the end of the year there was yeah.
|
Ivan:
[59:36]
| There was yeah.
|
Sam:
[59:37]
| I furthermore said that the ceasefire would basically be on israel's terms that's.
|
Ivan:
[59:44]
| Pretty much correct yes.
|
Sam:
[59:46]
| So i was right i will take this moment to note that as i was putting together these notes i was being very sloppy and typing quickly and not paying attention to typos so for instance what it actually says on my little spreadsheet is si rassi fire not ceasefire a si rassi fire well okay yeah it's a si rassi fire, we both agree we both agreed no full withdrawal from gaza we were both correct.
|
Ivan:
[1:00:17]
| We're both correct.
|
Sam:
[1:00:18]
| We both agreed no saudi recognition of israel we were both correct Correct. We both agreed that the war in Yemen would continue. We were both correct. We both agreed there would be no Western country that fully normalized relationships with Iran. We were correct. No Western normalization. We both agreed there would be no widespread Mideast war. Like the conflict wouldn't spread and become like, you know, a massive war involving many countries. I mean, I guess you can count, like, this is a no. Like, there were, you know, at various points, Lebanon was involved, Israel was involved, Iran, Jordan was involved in some ways. We got, you know, but there was no, we were talking about like a massive multi-country war going on, and that never happened. So we were both correct on that. We split on whether Trump would reopen talks with North Korea. You thought he would. I thought he would not. What happened, Yvonne?
|
Ivan:
[1:01:26]
| We haven't talked to North Korea, right?
|
Sam:
[1:01:28]
| No. Which means I was right and you were wrong.
|
Ivan:
[1:01:32]
| Oh, well. I figured he would. I mean, he liked the guy so much. I figured that he was, you know, going to go over there and, you know, would be chummy again.
|
Sam:
[1:01:43]
| Next up, you specifically predicted that North Korea, however, would make trouble again over the course of the year. Now, just last week we were talking about this. Apparently they did a few things, but nobody's paying any attention.
|
Ivan:
[1:01:56]
| So, yeah. So the answer is no, I guess. Because nobody—I mean, it's not enough that anybody even noticed.
|
Sam:
[1:02:04]
| Right. Like, they apparently have been trying to make trouble, but failing.
|
Ivan:
[1:02:10]
| Yeah.
|
Sam:
[1:02:11]
| Because nobody's paid any attention or cared.
|
Ivan:
[1:02:14]
| Right.
|
Sam:
[1:02:14]
| At least publicly. It hasn't been a big thing in the news. Okay, now, The next one, Ed had asked us a very specific question, and then we ended up sort of answering something else, I think. So I will point out that Ed had asked specifically about whether ASML, which is a semiconductor company based out of Europe, I think, would break ground in the U.S. That apparently did happen, but we did not actually answer his question. We answered a slightly related question about whether or not there'd be a big new U.S. push into domestic semiconductor production. I don't think there was, Yvonne. What would be your answer to that?
|
Ivan:
[1:03:02]
| There wasn't. I mean, there wasn't.
|
Sam:
[1:03:06]
| There might be like little things opening here and there like what.
|
Ivan:
[1:03:09]
| Yeah, but if anything, we wound up with a situation where stuff that Biden had, you know, had pushed was actually, you know, kind of short-circuited by this administration.
|
Sam:
[1:03:22]
| Okay. So we were both right. Next up, and this is a judge, you know, I'm going to ask you to judge yourself on this one. You said relations with China will improve.
|
Ivan:
[1:03:34]
| No.
|
Sam:
[1:03:36]
| Okay. I will count you as wrong in that. I said the relationship with China will be a mixed bag and specifically Trump will be less willing to confront them on defense, but more willing to confront them on trade.
|
Ivan:
[1:03:51]
| Yes.
|
Sam:
[1:03:52]
| Yes on all three? Okay.
|
Ivan:
[1:03:54]
| Yeah, I mean, he was willing. Yeah, he was definitely willing to challenge them more on trade, but not on other stuff.
|
Sam:
[1:04:00]
| Yep. Okay. Excellent. Next up, we both agreed that China would not invade Taiwan. we were china.
|
Ivan:
[1:04:08]
| Has not invaded taiwan as far as i'm.
|
Sam:
[1:04:11]
| Next up would gdp in argentina be up.
|
Ivan:
[1:04:18]
| I think the answer is yes.
|
Sam:
[1:04:20]
| Yes, it was. So you predicted that it would be, and it was indeed.
|
Ivan:
[1:04:26]
| Okay.
|
Sam:
[1:04:28]
| Next up, you'd said, however, that even though it would be up 2024 to 2025, it would not be back up to the levels before— What's the president's name? M-something. How do you pronounce his name? What does he—, I mean, the current president— He's the libertarian president of Argentina.
|
Ivan:
[1:04:50]
| Oh, what's his name now? Yeah. Milet.
|
Sam:
[1:04:54]
| Did I say it?
|
Ivan:
[1:04:54]
| Milet. Milet. Milet. Milet.
|
Sam:
[1:04:56]
| Anyway, you said GDP would not be back up to levels from before Milet. I looked this up. It appears that GDP is at new highs. So you were wrong.
|
Ivan:
[1:05:08]
| Okay.
|
Sam:
[1:05:09]
| And to be clear, this was GDP absolute, not GDP growth. GDP growth is not at new highs. but absolute level of GDP is at new highs for 2025 from what I found. You can check me if you want. I was looking at worldometers.
|
Ivan:
[1:05:29]
| The estimate, yes. By the IMF, yes. It is higher. By a little bit, but yes.
|
Sam:
[1:05:39]
| A little bit.
|
Ivan:
[1:05:39]
| It is higher. But it is higher. Well, one of the things, you know, the thing is that this is, we're measuring it in dollars. And the currency has been incredibly overvalued, making the purchasing power of the peso right now, like, really crazy overvalued. And so, yeah, so that's why it's it's showing that way.
|
Sam:
[1:06:01]
| OK, next up, we both agreed that the U.S. would not annex Panama or any part of Panama like the canal. We were both correct.
|
Ivan:
[1:06:11]
| I think we're both correct.
|
Sam:
[1:06:13]
| Now, I said more so than that. Trump will, however, try to extract something from Panama in exchange for not taking over the canal. He forgot about Panama. Yeah, I think there was some talk about that back, like, in December when we made this prediction show, but it basically disappeared.
|
Ivan:
[1:06:34]
| Yeah, he's completely forgotten about it.
|
Sam:
[1:06:36]
| So I'll say no, he didn't really. I mean, maybe something behind the scenes happened, but basically Panama stopped being talked about.
|
Ivan:
[1:06:44]
| The only thing that I remember was something about... Well, well, okay, now, there was one thing that happened, okay? Hang on. Let me double check. Let me double check, but I think that there was... Let me let me let me see if I OK. I'm looking this up. Hang on. I think there was a deal. There had been a push for a deal to take China out of management of ports in in Panama that was done by Hutchison. OK, and they did push them through that. But I don't think the deal actually happened. As a matter of fact, there's an article here.
|
Sam:
[1:07:36]
| The prediction was Trump will try to extract something.
|
Ivan:
[1:07:41]
| OK, so the answer is yes. Yes. What they were trying to do was that they were demanding that Hong Kong-based Hutchinson cease managing the ports and move those operations to U.S. investors because the ports are strategic here in the U.S. they they have been still negotiating that as a matter of wall street journal reported on that that they're still working on that as of december 14th of the year and that started way earlier in the year so the answer is yes they have been pushing for that.
|
Sam:
[1:08:18]
| Okay next question no non-peaceful transitions of power in the americas now venezuela was 2026 so it does not count.
|
Ivan:
[1:08:32]
| That I don't think.
|
Sam:
[1:08:33]
| There were any others. No. Were there? I'm not forgetting any.
|
Ivan:
[1:08:37]
| I mean, not that the, that, that, that, that non-peaceful, that the U.S. was involved or just in general?
|
Sam:
[1:08:44]
| Just in general. In the Americas, non-peaceful transfer of power. Like, as far as I know, every, every transfer of power was sort of regularly scheduled according to the rules, blah, blah, blah.
|
Ivan:
[1:08:59]
| Let me double check. I thought I was thinking about Ecuador, maybe. There were some impeachments.
|
Sam:
[1:09:07]
| Well, even an impeachment would be peaceful.
|
Ivan:
[1:09:10]
| True. Yeah, everything went normal. Okay.
|
Sam:
[1:09:14]
| Okay. We were both correct then. Now, you know, if the weather had cooperated with Donald Trump, we would have been wrong.
|
Ivan:
[1:09:22]
| We would have been wrong.
|
Sam:
[1:09:23]
| Because he wanted to do the Venezuela thing on Christmas Day. But A, the Nigeria thing took precedence, which got done on Christmas Day instead. And then they had to wait for good weather.
|
Ivan:
[1:09:34]
| Such lovely holiday presents that we get from our president.
|
Sam:
[1:09:39]
| Okay, next up, we both agreed that Canada would not be the 51st state.
|
Ivan:
[1:09:45]
| I think that we are correct.
|
Sam:
[1:09:48]
| We both agreed that Trump would not invade Mexico. We were right.
|
Ivan:
[1:09:52]
| I think we're accurate on that one.
|
Sam:
[1:09:54]
| We both agreed that Trump would not invade Canada.
|
Ivan:
[1:09:57]
| No, we didn't invade Canada, yeah.
|
Sam:
[1:10:00]
| We both agreed that we would not buy Greenland.
|
Ivan:
[1:10:04]
| We haven't bought Greenland.
|
Sam:
[1:10:06]
| We both agreed that Trump would not trade Puerto Rico for Greenland.
|
Ivan:
[1:10:11]
| Unfortunately, Trump has not traded Puerto Rico for Greenland. I'm sad to report.
|
Sam:
[1:10:16]
| We both agreed that there would be no new war between UN member states. I believe we were correct. And we specified it had to be between UN member states to sort of take off the table, like internal conflicts and... And, uh, hang on.
|
Ivan:
[1:10:33]
| Hang on.
|
Sam:
[1:10:34]
| Okay. And, and it had to be new in 2025.
|
Ivan:
[1:10:37]
| Not a civil war.
|
Sam:
[1:10:38]
| Not a civil war. Now we did have all these wars that Trump stopped. Were any of those new in 2025? And then he stopped them. I don't think any of them were full. I mean, even when they were like border skirmishes and stuff.
|
Ivan:
[1:10:53]
| So we had the India-Pakistan armed conflict. Okay. So we had that. But was it a war?
|
Sam:
[1:11:00]
| I mean, I guess.
|
Ivan:
[1:11:02]
| It was three days.
|
Sam:
[1:11:03]
| So is that a yes? There was a new war?
|
Ivan:
[1:11:06]
| There was a Thailand-Cambodia border war that happened during July 2025.
|
Sam:
[1:11:13]
| Okay.
|
Ivan:
[1:11:14]
| I mean, Iran and Israel did fucking shoot at each other for.
|
Sam:
[1:11:19]
| Yeah. I guess that there's fuzziness in here in terms of how severe something has to be to be a full war.
|
Ivan:
[1:11:25]
| I mean, I guess, yeah, exactly. I mean, what is.
|
Sam:
[1:11:28]
| I mean, is it like a war or something? Like, did we just have a war with Venezuela or not?
|
Ivan:
[1:11:32]
| Well, okay, here's the thing. These were all short skirmishes.
|
Sam:
[1:11:38]
| Right.
|
Ivan:
[1:11:39]
| Right?
|
Sam:
[1:11:40]
| I mean, I have to say. Do they count?
|
Ivan:
[1:11:41]
| I don't, I mean, I think that, I mean, where's, you know, you know, what is a reasonable amount of time for a conflict to become a war?
|
Sam:
[1:11:55]
| I mean, back in the old days, you'd say, was there a formal declaration of war? But nobody does that anymore.
|
Ivan:
[1:12:01]
| Right. We don't have that. We don't have that. So.
|
Sam:
[1:12:04]
| I mean, like Ukraine and Russia clearly counted. Right. That's a war.
|
Ivan:
[1:12:08]
| Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. That's a war. That's a war.
|
Sam:
[1:12:11]
| You know, and I'd say, and, you know, it's not a member state, but Israel-Gaza, that was a war.
|
Ivan:
[1:12:19]
| That was a war. That was a war. It was the length of time that was a war.
|
Sam:
[1:12:24]
| So would you count these or not?
|
Ivan:
[1:12:26]
| They were too short.
|
Sam:
[1:12:28]
| Okay. So we'll say, yes.
|
Ivan:
[1:12:30]
| There was no war. Yeah, they were too short. They were just too short.
|
Sam:
[1:12:36]
| Yes, no new war. We also said there would be no new civil wars that would be significant enough that we would pay attention to them on the show. There were all kinds of civil wars across the world going on, but I don't think we spent a significant amount of time talking about any.
|
Ivan:
[1:12:54]
| That's true. Did we spend a lot of time talking about? No, even though there are.
|
Sam:
[1:12:59]
| Like a whole segment.
|
Ivan:
[1:13:00]
| We mentioned Sudan. That was a whole bunch of. Exactly. I was going to say Sudan.
|
Sam:
[1:13:04]
| Yeah, we've mentioned it, but we we've never like if you add up all the times we talked about.
|
Ivan:
[1:13:09]
| We don't know enough about it.
|
Sam:
[1:13:10]
| Fucking year.
|
Ivan:
[1:13:11]
| Yeah, we don't know enough about it. I agree. We don't know enough about it. We just don't. That's that's that's on us. But, you know.
|
Sam:
[1:13:20]
| OK, so, yes, we were right about that. And that is the end of the international section. OK, ready for the stats, Yvonne? I made 40 predictions, of which 34 were correct. That's 85.0%. You made 34 predictions, of which 27 were correct. That's 79.4%.
|
Ivan:
[1:13:47]
| We're pretty good on international.
|
Sam:
[1:13:49]
| So collectively, 74 predictions, 61 correct. That's 82.4%. And if we compare to last year, 79.5% last year. So we're up on this category as well.
|
Ivan:
[1:14:04]
| We improved again.
|
Sam:
[1:14:07]
| Okay. So time for another break. And then we will come back and do economy slash business. And as usual, by the way, each one of these tends to be shorter than the one before as we go through this. So you're past the bulk of it already. So, here we go!
|
Sam:
[1:15:27]
| Okay, here we are. And actually, this section is really short. So, for some reason, we did not do a lot of economy stuff last time around. Okay, first up, we both predicted that mergers would ramp up under Trump. Were we correct?
|
Ivan:
[1:15:43]
| I think the answer is yes, but I got to look up data on it. Hold on.
|
Sam:
[1:15:48]
| I found a number of articles talking about how mergers were up, and there was lots of merger activity with people excited about the regulatory environment being more lenient. But I'll let you confirm it. Did you confirm it?
|
Ivan:
[1:16:05]
| I'm looking. I'm trying to search. Hang on. The answer, yes. Confirm. Yes.
|
Sam:
[1:16:13]
| Yes. Okay. you predicted and for some reason i didn't but no 2025 recession were you correct yeah.
|
Ivan:
[1:16:22]
| There's no recession in 2025 as far as we know.
|
Sam:
[1:16:26]
| Now we gave we both agreed on a sort of wishy-washy prediction about antitrust yeah uh the prediction was basically that some antitrust efforts would be canceled, but Trump will also keep some of them because of Trump's transactional approach for everything. Basically, if he liked you, he would stop going after you. If he didn't like you, he would sick them on you and do all the antitrust stuff he could. Is that correct? Is that how it played out?
|
Ivan:
[1:17:01]
| We couldn't have been more accurate if we fucking had a damn Nostradamus on our team.
|
Sam:
[1:17:07]
| Ha ha. Okay. Next up, tariffs. We both agreed that the overriding theme of tariffs would be similar. That regardless of anything else, in the end, they would all be transactional. You know, Trump would, you know, tariff or not tariff based on how much he liked you.
|
Ivan:
[1:17:29]
| No. Were we right, Sam?
|
Sam:
[1:17:33]
| I believe we were.
|
Ivan:
[1:17:36]
| I mean, we couldn't have, again, we couldn't have been more accurate. We had a fucking, you know, damn.
|
Sam:
[1:17:42]
| Now, there were announcements of sort of these global values and all this kind of stuff.
|
Ivan:
[1:17:48]
| Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
|
Sam:
[1:17:49]
| But then they all got adjusted based on this kind of stuff.
|
Ivan:
[1:17:52]
| And then you showed up with a fucking, like, custom Rolex and on the desk and, you know, a gold orb. And all of a sudden, your tariffs got reduced.
|
Sam:
[1:18:03]
| Right. Okay, next one. You're going to have to judge yourself on this one, too. You said there would not be enough tariffs so the average consumer would notice the difference.
|
Ivan:
[1:18:21]
| I think I'm wrong. The average consumer has been bitching to all hell about the affordability right now and prices soaring. And they can't put their thumb on exactly why, because of the delayed effect.
|
Sam:
[1:18:38]
| Right.
|
Ivan:
[1:18:39]
| I mean, like I mentioned about my coffee today.
|
Sam:
[1:18:42]
| Yes.
|
Ivan:
[1:18:43]
| It's double. I mean, I've been buying that shit for a long time. I mean, it's doubled in price.
|
Sam:
[1:18:51]
| Mm-hmm. Okay. Yeah. We could debate whether or not knowing that it's because of tariffs matters to this question. But I think the average consumer has noticed an effect of the tariffs.
|
Ivan:
[1:19:07]
| They have noticed that.
|
Sam:
[1:19:09]
| They know that's what it is.
|
Ivan:
[1:19:10]
| Right. They can't afford shit.
|
Sam:
[1:19:14]
| Okay. Next up, we both agreed that there would be no significant impact from the tariffs on reshoring manufacturing.
|
Ivan:
[1:19:24]
| That's been 100%. Yes. Look at the employment figures. Yes. The only thing that propped up the economy in the second half was AI investment. If it wasn't for AI investment, we would have been in a recession. Straight up. That's it.
|
Sam:
[1:19:41]
| Next up are a whole bunch of up and downs for various values. We both agreed that inflation would be up. Now, typically, we use the November number for this and compare November to November. November 2024 was 2.7%. November 2025 was 2.7%.
|
Ivan:
[1:20:03]
| Well, let me pull up a comparison over here.
|
Sam:
[1:20:07]
| So that means inflation is not up.
|
Ivan:
[1:20:10]
| Let me see. Hold on.
|
Sam:
[1:20:12]
| I have 2.7% for both Novembers from my source.
|
Ivan:
[1:20:17]
| Okay, if we go for a full calendar year.
|
Sam:
[1:20:20]
| Yeah.
|
Ivan:
[1:20:21]
| Okay, or at least the dates that we have so far.
|
Sam:
[1:20:25]
| We have never done that before. We've always just compared the November number to the November number. Now, we didn't specify, so I guess you could argue to try to do a full year number instead.
|
Ivan:
[1:20:36]
| You see, the thing is that it, because remember that we had this problems with like the data reporting, okay?
|
Sam:
[1:20:45]
| Uh-huh.
|
Ivan:
[1:20:46]
| The number for last November, what did you say it was?
|
Sam:
[1:20:50]
| 2.7.
|
Ivan:
[1:20:52]
| 2.7.
|
Sam:
[1:20:53]
| I'll send you, I'll text you the link that I used. Here's the site I used for this. As Yvonne looks.
|
Ivan:
[1:21:05]
| 2.7. You see, the problem that we've got is that if you look at that chart specifically, what happened?
|
Sam:
[1:21:16]
| And I'm, again, looking at usinflationcalculator.com. Yes, go ahead.
|
Ivan:
[1:21:21]
| What happened with this chart, Sam?
|
Sam:
[1:21:23]
| Well, we've got a missing October number.
|
Ivan:
[1:21:25]
| That's right.
|
Sam:
[1:21:26]
| But we're looking at November. And we have a November number. And they're equal, which since we both said it would be up, I'm counting us both as wrong.
|
Ivan:
[1:21:38]
| I mean, if we go by the...
|
Sam:
[1:21:40]
| Now, if you look at full year, we're still wrong. Like, if you look at every single month...
|
Ivan:
[1:21:45]
| Actually, the problem is it depends on what data you use to fill out the data that's missing. Okay.
|
Sam:
[1:21:50]
| Oh, yes.
|
Ivan:
[1:21:51]
| And I have some people that estimate, based on what they believe happened in October, it actually was higher if you punch that number in. so.
|
Sam:
[1:22:02]
| Well but again like if you look month to month.
|
Ivan:
[1:22:05]
| Can i just say something i'm sorry i based on what happened with the data reporting with the fucking federal government we can't just don't believe anything anymore now we don't have the data to actually accurately do this stupid question, they they fucking went and like sabotaged the data reporting it's not comparable apples to apples anymore so.
|
Sam:
[1:22:30]
| I still lean to saying we got it wrong do you want to actually.
|
Ivan:
[1:22:33]
| Disqualify this i'm disqualifying this question okay.
|
Sam:
[1:22:38]
| I'll disqualify the question so it just doesn't count next.
|
Ivan:
[1:22:43]
| If i go by the way i pulled up there is somewhere here let me see what this is no they don't have the seasonally adjusted number either. No, because the data is missing. Yeah. Yeah, no, I'm disqualifying the question. I mean, there is a number there. There's a chart further down which shows you seasonally adjusted inflation that goes monthly that shows you the thing instead of like the annual inflation rate. Okay. Which is what you were looking at. We're looking at the top. And look at what happens in October or November. There's no number reported.
|
Sam:
[1:23:16]
| Right.
|
Ivan:
[1:23:17]
| Which that would be actually, But we have no number. We have no number. This fucking administration has broken everything.
|
Sam:
[1:23:30]
| Okay. Well, the next one is also one that relies on government numbers, which is unemployment. We both agreed that it would be up. The BLS number, again, comparing November to November, goes from 4.2 in 2024 to 4.4 in 2025. So, yes, up, just barely.
|
Ivan:
[1:23:49]
| It's up, and even if you go with the private number data from other people, it confirms that the number is up. This one, there is corroboration that unemployment is up. So, yeah.
|
Sam:
[1:24:04]
| Okay, next up, we both agreed that Apple stock would be up for the year.
|
Ivan:
[1:24:10]
| That we were right.
|
Sam:
[1:24:11]
| We were right. We both agreed the Dow would be up for the year. We were right.
|
Ivan:
[1:24:17]
| We were right.
|
Sam:
[1:24:19]
| You predicted Bitcoin would be up, but I predicted Bitcoin would be down. I was right. You were wrong.
|
Ivan:
[1:24:25]
| Okay.
|
Sam:
[1:24:26]
| It's fairly flat, but it was down a little bit.
|
Ivan:
[1:24:29]
| It was down. It was down. It was down. Just a little bit. For the whole year.
|
Sam:
[1:24:33]
| Next up, eggs. We both agreed the price of eggs would be up. No. The price of eggs are down significantly. Down quite a bit from the end of last year. And then we split also on West Texas Intermediate Oil. You said it would be down. I said it would be up. It is very much down. So you were right. I was wrong. And we are already at the end of the economic section.
|
Ivan:
[1:25:05]
| Okay.
|
Sam:
[1:25:05]
| I made 10 predictions of which I got eight correct. That's 80%. You made 12 predictions of which you got nine correct. That's 75%. So combined, 22 predictions, 17 right. That's 77.3%. Last year, we were at 61.5. so third category in a row we beat last year there you go and third category in a row i did better than you.
|
Ivan:
[1:25:35]
| Sam has been kicking my asses here.
|
Sam:
[1:25:40]
| Yeah i i i'm i'm amazing i'm incredible that is the way things go incredible nostra samus nostra samus yes there you go okay let's take another break, even though it was short. And when we come back, it'll be time for technology. Here we go. Okay. And it's time to continue with technology. And I said each one gets shorter than one before, but economy was really short. We're back up to a bit larger numbers here. So first up, Yvonne, this is your area of expertise, so you're going to need to look this up. We're talking about the percent of total sales in the U.S. of electric and hybrid 2024 versus 2025.
|
Ivan:
[1:28:11]
| It was up.
|
Sam:
[1:28:12]
| Okay.
|
Ivan:
[1:28:13]
| I don't remember, but the numbers were significantly up.
|
Sam:
[1:28:17]
| Significantly up. Because you'd basically said it would be plus or minus 1%, so basically flat. And I'd said it would be down.
|
Ivan:
[1:28:24]
| And now they were way up.
|
Sam:
[1:28:26]
| So we're both wrong.
|
Ivan:
[1:28:28]
| Yeah. Yeah, they were way up. I mean, you pull up the chart to confirm, but yeah, they were way up. Remember, because the expiration of the incentives, there was a massive tailwind.
|
Sam:
[1:28:41]
| Lots of people trying to get in under the line.
|
Ivan:
[1:28:43]
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay. Let me pull it up, but I know that I had looked it up recently because I knew this would come up.
|
Sam:
[1:28:52]
| Well, we made a new prediction on it last week, so.
|
Ivan:
[1:28:55]
| Yes. Here we go. Let's see. Yeah, they were up 11.7%.
|
Sam:
[1:29:03]
| Okay. I don't think it makes a difference for this, but was this pure electric only or electric plus hybrid or what?
|
Ivan:
[1:29:10]
| I was looking at pure electric, like, right now.
|
Sam:
[1:29:15]
| Okay, next up was U.S. gas consumption, gasoline consumption in the U.S. You had said it would be basically flat, plus or minus 1%, 2025 versus 2024. I said it would be up. The best, I looked briefly for this, it looked like it was down more like 3%. And I was comparing same month to same month. I didn't have a full year number. so i was like comparing october to october or something because that's the most recent month i had.
|
Ivan:
[1:29:45]
| Do you have a different info well let's see let's let's let's try look let's, it the estimate that is from s&p global flat to slight increase it is like basically flat.
|
Sam:
[1:30:05]
| Is it within one percent that's how you define.
|
Ivan:
[1:30:07]
| Yeah yeah yeah it was like 8.94 million barrels a day versus 8.95 million barrels a day.
|
Sam:
[1:30:14]
| Okay so you you were right oh wait you said slightly up.
|
Ivan:
[1:30:18]
| It's flat to slight increase yeah.
|
Sam:
[1:30:20]
| 8.94 okay so we were both right because i said up and you said flat so but i i did find an october to october number that was like down for october or something like that but i'll go with your number there.
|
Ivan:
[1:30:34]
| There's there's a there's a you know they're they're, It's just, you know, it's about, it's about flattish.
|
Sam:
[1:30:45]
| Okay.
|
Ivan:
[1:30:45]
| I mean, it's, yeah.
|
Sam:
[1:30:47]
| Now.
|
Ivan:
[1:30:48]
| But flattish to little bits. And this is from S&P Global, basically, the one that I had in AAA.
|
Sam:
[1:30:56]
| Okay. Excellent. Okay. Good. We were both right then. Next up, the next few questions are about Tesla specifically. You started out with a vague high level, and then we both got a little bit more specific. So the vague high level was you said Tesla will be doing worse in 2025 than 2024.
|
Ivan:
[1:31:16]
| I mean, in terms of metrics, but I'm specifying metrics. I guess I meant car sales. The answer is car sales. They're down.
|
Sam:
[1:31:23]
| Okay. Then I will count you as right on that one.
|
Ivan:
[1:31:27]
| Yeah.
|
Sam:
[1:31:27]
| Then you, then you did get more specific. You said Tesla revenue and profits would both be down.
|
Ivan:
[1:31:33]
| That's correct.
|
Sam:
[1:31:35]
| Okay. Then I said Tesla's stock would be down, and I was wrong.
|
Ivan:
[1:31:39]
| Oh, God, you were wrong.
|
Sam:
[1:31:41]
| Because, of course, those things shouldn't relate in any way, right? No. Like the financial performance versus stock performance. There's no reason those would be correlated.
|
Ivan:
[1:31:50]
| There's no reason those should be related. What are you talking about? What kind of sick person are you? Come on. No.
|
Sam:
[1:31:57]
| Okay. You then predicted that Biden's clean energy incentives would not be reversed.
|
Ivan:
[1:32:05]
| Well, I was wrong on that one.
|
Sam:
[1:32:07]
| You made the argument that a whole bunch of red states benefit from them a lot, so there'd be congressional resistance to any rollback.
|
Ivan:
[1:32:15]
| And actually, there has been congressional resistance from those states, but not enough to stop it from happening. And I expect that—here's the other thing that I expected. I mean, Elon Musk is benefiting greatly from these, but he decided to completely shoot himself on the foot on this.
|
Sam:
[1:32:32]
| Mm-hmm.
|
Ivan:
[1:32:34]
| But it's one that baffles me to this day. I don't understand why.
|
Sam:
[1:32:41]
| Okay, next up. Global carbon burned, we both agreed, would not go down this year. We were correct. It did not go down. It continues to increase on a global level. I further predicted that the global CO2 level, so not the amount burned, but the amount actually in the air would continue to go up. And yes, of course it did. We both agreed that the percentage of global energy use from non-carbon sources would increase. It did.
|
Ivan:
[1:33:15]
| It did.
|
Sam:
[1:33:16]
| We both agreed that there would be an increase in the percentage of global power from nuclear power, specifically year over year. Now, I could not find 2025 data out yet, but 2024 was slightly up from 2023, so I was going to count us both right.
|
Ivan:
[1:33:40]
| Let's see if I can find anything. Let's see what we got. The World Nuclear Association.
|
Sam:
[1:33:50]
| I think I may have been on their site earlier today as well.
|
Ivan:
[1:33:53]
| It says like a modest increase, like about 2%.
|
Sam:
[1:33:58]
| Percent of global? Because I found a percent increase of an absolute number, not of a percentage.
|
Ivan:
[1:34:04]
| Global, absolute, yeah. Absolute production globally, a slight increase of 2%.
|
Sam:
[1:34:08]
| Yeah, so, but we weren't talking about absolute, we were talking about a percentage of global. So, you'd have to do the math on that. I still gave us yes on both.
|
Ivan:
[1:34:18]
| Okay, all right.
|
Sam:
[1:34:20]
| Because the hard number I could find on percentage was a year out of date, but it was still up slightly. And indicators like this for 2025 are like, okay, the absolute number was up. Whether or not the percentage is up depends on whether that increased faster or slower than the overall number, but I'll give it to us.
|
Ivan:
[1:34:42]
| Okay.
|
Sam:
[1:34:42]
| Okay, next up, was whether there'd be a successful reuse of Starship or Super Heavy by SpaceX.
|
Ivan:
[1:34:53]
| Was there?
|
Sam:
[1:34:55]
| Now, what I found was a reference that Super Heavy was reused in May, but it had, quote-unquote, a hard splashdown. So does it count as successful?
|
Ivan:
[1:35:09]
| No, no, that wasn't a successful reuse.
|
Sam:
[1:35:12]
| Well, it successfully boosted whatever it was supposed to boost to orbit.
|
Ivan:
[1:35:16]
| Yeah, but— Or whatever it was supposed to do. Well, I'm sorry, but also the recovery is part of the damn thing. You're like saying, hey, I dropped the kid off at school. Hey, I successfully drove to school. I dropped the kid off at school. Yeah, but you came back with no car!
|
Sam:
[1:35:30]
| Well, I successfully dropped the kid off.
|
Ivan:
[1:35:33]
| It was not a successful trip.
|
Sam:
[1:35:35]
| Okay, now, and to be fair, I found the references to May. I could not verify whether they tried again after me. Do you want to see if you can find something real quick?
|
Ivan:
[1:35:46]
| No, no, we're, we're, you know, no, okay.
|
Sam:
[1:35:49]
| No successful reuse. I'm sure if we got that wrong, Bruce will yell at us.
|
Ivan:
[1:35:53]
| Yes, we'll get a yell. We'll get a courage.
|
Sam:
[1:35:55]
| And he will probably tell us that it was a successful reuse because it did launch the thing it was supposed to launch.
|
Ivan:
[1:36:00]
| I don't agree to successful reuse. I mean, it doesn't include like, you know, completing the damn.
|
Sam:
[1:36:06]
| I mean, it didn't blow up on the pad. They just, like, it had a hard landing.
|
Ivan:
[1:36:11]
| Hey, I didn't die!
|
Sam:
[1:36:13]
| Don't, yeah, yeah, okay.
|
Ivan:
[1:36:16]
| Fine.
|
Sam:
[1:36:18]
| We both agreed no major.
|
Ivan:
[1:36:20]
| My success metric is a little bit higher.
|
Sam:
[1:36:23]
| Okay, we both agreed no major new human spaceflight developments in 2025.
|
Ivan:
[1:36:30]
| We didn't have any, right? Or did we?
|
Sam:
[1:36:32]
| I think we were right.
|
Ivan:
[1:36:33]
| Okay.
|
Sam:
[1:36:34]
| You predicted no major self-driving developments in 2025.
|
Ivan:
[1:36:39]
| We didn't have any. Basically status quo.
|
Sam:
[1:36:42]
| So I'll count you as right on that. But you specifically also called out they still can't reliably do unproductive left turns. Now, I saw some articles from late in the year saying there specifically had been significant improvements in Tesla full self-driving doing unpredicted left turns, unproductive left turns.
|
Ivan:
[1:37:05]
| Yeah, but not unpredicted. Once again, this is like, you know, yeah, it improved. Yeah, but that's like same shit as we've had. Significant breakthrough. Okay. Yeah, it's been improving, but it's not there yet.
|
Sam:
[1:37:17]
| Well, no, this prediction was they still can't reliably do unprotected left turns. Can they reliably do unprotected left turns now?
|
Ivan:
[1:37:27]
| Okay. I, I, I, I, you know what? I don't know if that's the case. Okay. Check it. Ugh. Ugh. All right. The answer is no.
|
Sam:
[1:37:42]
| No, they still can't do them?
|
Ivan:
[1:37:44]
| No, they're not reliably in all conditions.
|
Sam:
[1:37:47]
| Okay, so I'm going to count you as correct.
|
Ivan:
[1:37:50]
| So it's improved, but it still can't do it reliably in all conditions.
|
Sam:
[1:37:55]
| Okay, next up, social media. You made a general prediction, and then I was more specific. your prediction was that x would still be bigger than the other competitor social media platforms now i broke it down and made separate predictions for threads mastodon and blue sky but you just made a general one against the competition so how would you because we talked last week towards the end of the year yeah threads exceeded x on monthly active users so does that mean you are wrong on this one?
|
Ivan:
[1:38:33]
| I may be. Let me see. All right, let's see. I would say because it's not a trend. It was only like one month that X was still bigger because it was only one month. You know, we did have a month where that metric did exceed, but I don't know if reliably they are.
|
Sam:
[1:38:53]
| So you want to count yourself as right.
|
Ivan:
[1:38:56]
| Yeah.
|
Sam:
[1:38:56]
| X is still bigger. Okay.
|
Ivan:
[1:38:58]
| Yeah.
|
Sam:
[1:38:58]
| Well, in that case, I will make a clean sleep on the clean sleep. Clean sleep sounds good.
|
Ivan:
[1:39:05]
| That sounds nice.
|
Sam:
[1:39:08]
| Okay, no, I separately said X is bigger than Threads, X is bigger than Mastodon, X is bigger than Blue Sky, so I should say yes on all three.
|
Ivan:
[1:39:15]
| Yes.
|
Sam:
[1:39:15]
| I got all three right. I did, however, say X will continue to decline, and that was also true.
|
Ivan:
[1:39:22]
| That's correct, yes. It did decline, but it didn't, yeah.
|
Sam:
[1:39:26]
| Okay. And this all hinges on us saying that, yes, Threads did have a good month, but we're not quite ready to say that it's bigger than X.
|
Ivan:
[1:39:35]
| Correct, yes.
|
Sam:
[1:39:36]
| Okay. Okay. then tick tock we both agreed that there would be no tick tock ban at any point in 2025 we.
|
Ivan:
[1:39:46]
| Were definitely right on that one.
|
Sam:
[1:39:47]
| No we were not they were shut down for 24 hours on january 19th right.
|
Ivan:
[1:39:54]
| They were shut down for 24 hours i forgot about that, huh yeah.
|
Sam:
[1:40:00]
| And then uh so we were both wrong on that one i specifically had predicted that scotus would be the ones to rescue tiktok they were not it.
|
Ivan:
[1:40:12]
| Was donald trump.
|
Sam:
[1:40:13]
| It was donald j trump and in fact when tiktok turned themselves back on they had a message thank you donald j trump So, which, which by the way, happened before he was officially inaugurated. He basically promised he was not going to do anything about this ban and there and them and Apple and Google and everybody else were like, oh, okay, then we'll, we'll turn you back on. We'll believe you. Okay, I did have a conditional one, though, which said if it is banned, it will come back. So I'm counting myself right for that one.
|
Ivan:
[1:40:49]
| Well, yeah, that's right. I mean, yeah.
|
Sam:
[1:40:51]
| Okay, we both agreed there would be no other major social media shutdowns. I think we were right on that one.
|
Ivan:
[1:40:58]
| I think that's right.
|
Sam:
[1:41:01]
| Okay, we both agreed. And in fact, you made a recommendation based on this prediction. You said that Donald J. Trump, the stock, DJT stock, would be up year over year, and you recommended that this is the smart play for investment during the Trump administration. How did DJT stock do over the course of the year, Yvonne?
|
Ivan:
[1:41:30]
| You pulled up the chart. I'm 90, 90, 90. I was wrong. I haven't even pulled up the chart. I know I was wrong. And it, let's see, during the year, holy fuck, So in, let's see, pull up one year, on January, the stock peaked at $42.9 a share on January 13th, right before the inauguration. Right now, it's at 13.7. So down like 75%.
|
Sam:
[1:42:10]
| Did I make a mistake putting my entire life savings in this, Yvonne?
|
Ivan:
[1:42:13]
| Yeah, that was probably a bad idea.
|
Sam:
[1:42:15]
| Oh, man. Okay, we were both wrong. Then we talked about Truth Social as a social media site, and we talked about it for a couple minutes, but the summary was that it remains just a cesspool for MAGA and no one else uses it.
|
Ivan:
[1:42:32]
| Basically, that's what it still is. Nothing's changed. I mean, Truth Social should be renamed the Trump Official Communications Authority.
|
Sam:
[1:42:47]
| It's where he gets to do his 200 truth posts when he goes and does 200 of these at 3 in the morning when he can't sleep. That's what it's for. Okay, next up. We both agreed, and I counted this as one prediction, but we were talking about whether or not x would introduce an email app or some sort of cash app we both agreed they would not did they haven't.
|
Ivan:
[1:43:23]
| Introduced shit as far as i know.
|
Sam:
[1:43:25]
| Okay they.
|
Ivan:
[1:43:26]
| Even lost their ceo i don't even know who's in charge of the damn company anymore.
|
Sam:
[1:43:29]
| Wait that that lady's gone yeah oh yeah exactly it.
|
Ivan:
[1:43:37]
| Was that yeah she's gone i don't even.
|
Sam:
[1:43:39]
| Know who's.
|
Ivan:
[1:43:39]
| In charging a company anymore.
|
Sam:
[1:43:40]
| Okay well uh let me see who.
|
Ivan:
[1:43:44]
| Replaced uh at uh x.
|
Sam:
[1:43:51]
| Oh by the way last week we had talked about whether or not the the tiktok takeover was complete and you said yes it was it just happened i saw somewhere else that it's actually later this month oh okay like like the 28th or something.
|
Ivan:
[1:44:08]
| Okay. I guess that what they announced was formally that they announced a specific date it was closing. Okay. All right.
|
Sam:
[1:44:14]
| All right. It apparently has not actually closed yet. It will later this, later this month. I forget the exact date.
|
Ivan:
[1:44:21]
| Okay. Linda Iaccarino left her role in July, 2025, and Elon did not publicly announce a successor for the role. So there's no boss.
|
Sam:
[1:44:33]
| Well, presumably it's him.
|
Ivan:
[1:44:36]
| I think, remember how they kind of merged XAI and X?
|
Sam:
[1:44:44]
| Right.
|
Ivan:
[1:44:45]
| I think if I remember that the guy that was running XAI and I kind of has like as a responsibility of X.
|
Sam:
[1:44:54]
| Grok's just running everything.
|
Ivan:
[1:44:55]
| Right.
|
Sam:
[1:44:56]
| Grok's in charge.
|
Ivan:
[1:44:57]
| So everything should be fine.
|
Sam:
[1:45:00]
| Okay. I did have a conditional here that if they did launch something, it would not be a success and nobody would use it. But it was a conditional, so it doesn't count.
|
Ivan:
[1:45:07]
| It doesn't count.
|
Sam:
[1:45:09]
| Okay. Then we both agreed that Apple would not launch glucose monitoring on the watches.
|
Ivan:
[1:45:16]
| We were correct, as far as I know.
|
Sam:
[1:45:18]
| You were correct. We both agreed that the AI bubble would not pop in 2025. That's correct. I believe we were correct.
|
Ivan:
[1:45:27]
| Yeah.
|
Sam:
[1:45:27]
| If anything, things have still accelerated over the course of 2025. Yeah. We both agreed, however, that there would not be any AGI in 2025, you know, artificial general intelligence. I think we were right.
|
Ivan:
[1:45:43]
| Yeah.
|
Sam:
[1:45:45]
| Now, this one's debatable because we said one thing on last week's show, but we can argue it again now. We disagreed on whether or not there would be a major incident blamed on AI this year. And we debated a little bit on what would count. I said it would be an issue with definable harm that we would talk about. We said that it wasn't enough that people were committing suicide because they were talking to the AIs because people committed suicide anyway. We said it wasn't enough that Teslas were running over people in the streets because people run over people in the streets anyway. So the question is, what counts? Now, last week on the show, we said that the fact that an AI apparently came up with those initial tariffs levels counted for this. Do we want to count it again today?
|
Ivan:
[1:46:39]
| Yes, I agree.
|
Sam:
[1:46:41]
| Okay, so you were wrong. I was right because you said there would be no major incident and I said there would be.
|
Ivan:
[1:46:46]
| Yeah. No, no, no. It definitely counts as a major incident. Yeah.
|
Sam:
[1:46:50]
| But were the tariffs really blamed on the AI? Or were they blamed on Donald Trump?
|
Ivan:
[1:46:58]
| No, they went... Listen, Donald Trump said, give me reciprocal tariffs. And they went, they used the AI to calculate them, and then we created a fucking... international massive incident based on calculations done by an AI agent that were pulled out of its ass.
|
Sam:
[1:47:17]
| Okay. Okay. Guess what? We're done with technology.
|
Ivan:
[1:47:22]
| Okay.
|
Sam:
[1:47:23]
| I made 24 predictions of which 17 were correct. That's 70.8%. You made 22 predictions of which 15 were.
|
Sam:
[1:47:36]
| Correct that's 68.2 percent you're still yet another category i've beat you yeah consistently beating me our combined number 46 predictions 32 right that's 69.6 percent and again comparing to 2024 we had 65.6 percent so up again up again up in every category so far, And we've only got one category left. Dun, dun, dun. Okay. So that last category is hodgepodge, but we're going to take a break first. And just so you guys all know the way it's going to work, we're going to do the hodgepodge category, then we'll take one final break, then we'll come back with overall numbers for the whole year, and then we'll be done.
|
Sam:
[1:48:25]
| Okay, here we go.
|
Ivan:
[1:49:39]
| No blue thing.
|
Sam:
[1:50:23]
| You usually find music. Okay, so we are back. The first item is one to debate whether it should count at all or not. So we made a prediction about whether or not Jimmy Carter would survive 2025. He, of course, died essentially right after we recorded the prediction show, but still in 2024. So we said he would not survive 2025. Is this question moot and doesn't count at all?
|
Ivan:
[1:50:58]
| I think it's moot and doesn't count at all. I mean, we didn't enter 2025 alive.
|
Sam:
[1:51:03]
| Okay. Because you have your Fidel prediction, and he's still dead. He's still dead. Like, Jimmy Carter's still dead.
|
Ivan:
[1:51:11]
| Okay, if we use Fidel as a threshold.
|
Sam:
[1:51:14]
| What we said was, will not survive. Which is different than you predicting Fidel is still dead.
|
Ivan:
[1:51:20]
| I mean... Hmm. Okay. Damn. Damn. I don't know. What do you think? What are your thoughts?
|
Sam:
[1:51:31]
| I think it should probably be moot. Okay. Because surviving the year implies that at some point in the year, he was still alive.
|
Ivan:
[1:51:39]
| He was alive. Right.
|
Sam:
[1:51:42]
| Now, if we had just said, Jimmy Carter will still be alive at the end of 2025, I would count that.
|
Ivan:
[1:51:52]
| Right. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
|
Sam:
[1:51:53]
| Or that he was still dead.
|
Ivan:
[1:51:55]
| Yeah, but we said, yeah.
|
Sam:
[1:51:57]
| We said he will not survive. We didn't say he will be dead.
|
Ivan:
[1:52:02]
| Right.
|
Sam:
[1:52:03]
| There's a difference. So I'm just taking this off. This question does not count.
|
Ivan:
[1:52:08]
| Okay.
|
Sam:
[1:52:09]
| We both agreed that he'd be dead, though.
|
Ivan:
[1:52:12]
| Okay.
|
Sam:
[1:52:13]
| But he started the year dead, so we'll not count this. Okay, next up, we both agreed that the polio vaccine would not lose approval for the U.S. because of RFK Jr. He did not pull the approval. He's done all kinds of things to mess with vaccine schedules, but he did not actually pull the approval. So we were both right. Now, this next one was a question from our listener, Ed, about a very specific thing about whether or not dengue fever would be eliminated for a certain number of square mile area due to a specific technique regarding using, like, treated mosquitoes or something.
|
Ivan:
[1:52:58]
| Yeah, they've been doing that, like, experimenting with that, yes.
|
Sam:
[1:53:02]
| Yeah. Now, I could not find specific information about this on 2025.
|
Ivan:
[1:53:08]
| I haven't seen, I haven't heard that anybody used that anywhere.
|
Sam:
[1:53:13]
| Like, I looked for this and I found some general information about dengue fever trends, but nothing specifically about trials with this technique. Now, I could have missed it. We both predicted that they would not only try it, but be successful at the trials. So I'm ready to call ourselves wrong.
|
Ivan:
[1:53:35]
| I'm searching to see. According to ABC, there was a plan in Australia to release the mosquitoes aimed at reducing dengue risk. But it was paused and withdrawn after public backlash and regulatory reviews. So there was an attempt to do it. Yeah, there was an attempt to do it, but apparently it did not go through.
|
Sam:
[1:54:03]
| Okay, next question was whether or not bird flu would make the jump to human-to-human transmission. We both said it would. I do not believe that happened. There have been bird-to-human transmission, but I don't think there's been human-to-human.
|
Ivan:
[1:54:22]
| Oh, yeah, no, there hasn't been human-to-human, yeah, that's correct.
|
Sam:
[1:54:26]
| So we were both wrong.
|
Ivan:
[1:54:28]
| Yeah.
|
Sam:
[1:54:29]
| I also predicted there would be a bird flu epidemic, but not a pandemic. I don't think there was either. No, there wasn't. There were a handful of cases, but not a pandemic.
|
Ivan:
[1:54:37]
| No, we hadn't either. No.
|
Sam:
[1:54:38]
| Okay. Okay, next up was the Super Bowl. First of all, Yvonne, who won? Oh, my God.
|
Ivan:
[1:54:45]
| Philadelphia.
|
Sam:
[1:54:47]
| Okay. Do you remember who you said would win?
|
Ivan:
[1:54:50]
| I probably said Kansas City.
|
Sam:
[1:54:52]
| You did. Do you remember who I said would win?
|
Ivan:
[1:54:55]
| No.
|
Sam:
[1:54:56]
| The bears bills oh the buffalo bills.
|
Ivan:
[1:54:59]
| Okay all right we're both wrong there you go.
|
Sam:
[1:55:01]
| Okay so good job us um okay next up are a couple questions that alex had added first up i predicted that abel fnaf web edition would not be canceled i was correct it was not canceled okay, I predicted that Abelsmay, that's me, would not die.
|
Ivan:
[1:55:26]
| Yeah, I think we're right on that one. Yes.
|
Sam:
[1:55:29]
| Unless you're a very good clone. I have something to reveal. I am, in fact, a zombie. I have been dead for years.
|
Ivan:
[1:55:39]
| Well, you're doing great. But it didn't... Wait, but it's been for years. So that means you didn't die in 2025.
|
Sam:
[1:55:47]
| You're right. That's right. I died earlier.
|
Ivan:
[1:55:49]
| Yikes.
|
Sam:
[1:55:50]
| Okay. Well, anyway, Abel Smae did not die. You also agreed that Abel Smae would not die. Thank you, Yvonne.
|
Ivan:
[1:55:56]
| You're welcome.
|
Sam:
[1:55:58]
| We were both correct. Then a second Abel FNAF web version. Abel FNAF web version will not be canceled for real. I was right on that one as well. It is not canceled. However, I predicted that Abel FNAF web edition would be released, and it has not been. so I was wrong on that one.
|
Ivan:
[1:56:21]
| Okay.
|
Sam:
[1:56:22]
| Next, we have a couple of traditional Yvonne predictions. You predicted that Fidel Castro would stay dead. Did he stay dead?
|
Ivan:
[1:56:30]
| Yes.
|
Sam:
[1:56:32]
| Okay. Next, you predicted pain.
|
Ivan:
[1:56:36]
| I mean, I think that I've never been more accurate.
|
Sam:
[1:56:42]
| There you go. Next up, U.S. hurricane landfalls. I predicted three, you predicted six. How many were there, Yvonne?
|
Ivan:
[1:56:53]
| Zero.
|
Sam:
[1:56:54]
| There were zero. We were both wrong. Next, we both agreed that 2025 would be the hottest year ever.
|
Ivan:
[1:57:04]
| Was it? Of course it was.
|
Sam:
[1:57:06]
| No, it was not. It looks, the numbers are still preliminary, but it looks like it's going to come in second or third.
|
Ivan:
[1:57:13]
| Oh, wow. Okay.
|
Sam:
[1:57:15]
| So we were both wrong on that one.
|
Ivan:
[1:57:19]
| Okay.
|
Sam:
[1:57:19]
| You know, every year it's in, like, the top three, basically.
|
Ivan:
[1:57:26]
| But, well, I'm glad we're wrong.
|
Sam:
[1:57:30]
| I'm glad we're wrong, too. But, yeah, and so, again, still preliminary. Could be two. Could be three. But definitely not one.
|
Ivan:
[1:57:40]
| Okay.
|
Sam:
[1:57:40]
| Okay. We both predicted the best movie Oscar. You said Conclave. I said Wicked. Do you know what it actually was?
|
Ivan:
[1:57:51]
| I have no idea. Who won?
|
Sam:
[1:57:53]
| Onora.
|
Ivan:
[1:57:54]
| Yeah, whatever. Like, Jesus, like we would have no idea. Fuck.
|
Sam:
[1:57:59]
| Yeah, no, we were both wrong. Next was a prediction of where the average number of weekly, the trend line, where the trend line would be for curmudgeons corner seven day downloads at the end of the year. We both predicted it would be between 40 and 60, which is where it normally is almost all of the time.
|
Ivan:
[1:58:23]
| And?
|
Sam:
[1:58:24]
| It was less than that.
|
Ivan:
[1:58:26]
| It was less?
|
Sam:
[1:58:27]
| Over the last few weeks, it had been in that range most of the year. It has dropped below that in the last few weeks. I blame it for our non-standard publication schedule. we've had the last few weeks where we've released on all kinds of weird days instead of sort of like when we usually do. So our numbers have gone down. Like, just as an example, we put two episodes out only like three days apart.
|
Sam:
[1:58:59]
| And so even if somebody downloaded both of those, they count once for that period of time, for that seven-day period. And then we've gone a couple times waiting longer than seven days. And now this time we're going to be shorter. Anyway, it's been a weird schedule and it's been holidays. I mean, we always have holidays and it doesn't usually dip this far, but it dipped pretty low because of our—and again, I'm blaming our weird schedule. It could be something else. People could just hate us now.
|
Sam:
[1:59:28]
| Although it has started to pop back up in the last few days so anyway we were both wrong on that one, i predicted you made no prediction on this where the trend line for wiki of the day downloads would be combining all three of the wiki of the day podcasts i predicted it would be between 125 and 175 per seven day period at the end of the year i was wrong it's up at 240 so let's go look at that so and once again a lot more people apparently download my completely automated podcast that like i put no effort into on a daily basis than this one that i spend many hours on but you know whatever well it's a much simpler shorter download simpler shorter three minutes it's less of an investment than like a multi-hour current events podcast you know yeah so so anyway okay we're We split on whether Taylor Swift and Travis Kelsey would get engaged.
|
Ivan:
[2:00:32]
| What did you say? Wait, they did. So what did you say?
|
Sam:
[2:00:36]
| You said they would not. I said they would.
|
Ivan:
[2:00:39]
| So you were wrong and I was right. Ha ha ha!
|
Sam:
[2:00:42]
| Okay, next up, and I previewed this earlier, because earlier in the show, in the politics section, you said Trump would not die. Here in Hodgepodge, you say Trump will die. So last time you were right, this time you were wrong.
|
Ivan:
[2:00:58]
| So I basically just canceled myself out. Great.
|
Sam:
[2:01:01]
| You canceled yourself out. So you were wrong this time. You also predicted that King Charles would die.
|
Ivan:
[2:01:07]
| Well, King Charles is not dead.
|
Sam:
[2:01:09]
| King Charles is not dead.
|
Ivan:
[2:01:10]
| I'm like, I mean, I'm not helping any, you know, this is, you know, me predicting people will die is a surefire way for them to live longer.
|
Sam:
[2:01:24]
| So now on last week's show, I predicted that Dick Van Dyke will die in 2026. But last year, I predicted he would live through 2025. And I was right.
|
Ivan:
[2:01:38]
| Ah, there you go.
|
Sam:
[2:01:40]
| However, I predicted that David Attenborough and Alan Greenspan would die, and they did not. So I got those two wrong. You—those were the old people, like, that were, you know—but then you—both of us predicted one younger person who would die this year. You predicted Jared Kushner would die.
|
Ivan:
[2:02:02]
| Yeah. Like I said, this doesn't help me, you know, yeah, no, Cusher's not dead.
|
Sam:
[2:02:11]
| I predicted Matt Gaetz would die.
|
Ivan:
[2:02:14]
| Well, neither of them are dead.
|
Sam:
[2:02:17]
| No, which is a shame because I didn't get to test my conditional, which was if Matt Gaetz did die, he would die high on cocaine in the arms of a hooker.
|
Ivan:
[2:02:28]
| That would have been quite a, you know, quite a win for you. Yes, and everybody else.
|
Sam:
[2:02:35]
| Okay. We are now at the end of the hodgepodge section. Can you tell, just by having gone through that, how well or not we did?
|
Ivan:
[2:02:46]
| I don't think we did do well. I don't think we did well in the hodgepodge. I think we really screwed ourselves in the hodgepodge.
|
Sam:
[2:02:54]
| I made 20 predictions, of which I got six. That is 30%. You made 14 predictions, of which you got 4 correct.
|
Ivan:
[2:03:09]
| Oh, God.
|
Sam:
[2:03:11]
| That is 28.6%.
|
Ivan:
[2:03:14]
| How hard?
|
Sam:
[2:03:16]
| So collectively, that's 34 predictions, of which we got 10 correct. That is 29.4% in the Hodgepodge.
|
Ivan:
[2:03:25]
| How did we do versus last year?
|
Sam:
[2:03:26]
| Well, last year at Hodgepodge, we got 41.9%. Jesus Christ. Every other category we did better this year, Hodgepodge, we were already low last year, and we fell even further through the floor. So, yeah. So that's that. And that's the end of the section. so we're going to take one more quick break and then we'll come back with the totals for everything together and then we'll say goodbye so here we go.
|
Sam:
[2:04:54]
| Okay, we are back. First off, I just want to mention that even though we did so much worse on HodgePodge this time around than last year, I still beat you.
|
Ivan:
[2:05:07]
| Yes, you did.
|
Sam:
[2:05:09]
| So I did better than you in all five categories this year.
|
Ivan:
[2:05:13]
| You did a clean sweep on all the categories.
|
Sam:
[2:05:16]
| I did. Yeah, because I'm just that good. Okay, overall, I made 143 predictions, of which 99 were correct. Just one short of that 100 mark, but that's 69.2%. You made 123 predictions, of which you got 80 correct. That is 65%.
|
Ivan:
[2:05:41]
| Okay, okay.
|
Sam:
[2:05:43]
| So our overall number, 266 predictions, 179 correct, that's 67.29%, compared to 52.40 last year. So significantly better than last year, just comparing to... Years going back even further. I'm just searching back. 2020. Whoa, this is good. This is good. 2018. 2017. Oh. I only have records in this spreadsheet going back to. Okay, here we go. This is the best we've done since 2016 when we got 73%.
|
Ivan:
[2:06:36]
| Damn, there you go.
|
Sam:
[2:06:38]
| So it may have not seemed great, but we actually did better with our 2025 predictions than 2024, 2023, 2022, 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018, or 2017. Damn. Have to go back all the way to 2016 to get better. So we did pretty good in 2016, 73%.
|
Ivan:
[2:07:01]
| You know, I noticed there's a weird thing.
|
Sam:
[2:07:04]
| Yeah.
|
Ivan:
[2:07:05]
| I mean, wait, 2016 was the year.
|
Sam:
[2:07:09]
| No, that was the year.
|
Ivan:
[2:07:10]
| It was the election year.
|
Sam:
[2:07:12]
| Yeah. Even though we both predicted Hillary would be president. Right. I think.
|
Ivan:
[2:07:19]
| Yeah.
|
Sam:
[2:07:20]
| Let me make sure. Did we both predict Hillary would be president?
|
Ivan:
[2:07:23]
| Yes, yes, yes. Yes. Well, we did predict Trump was going to be president. That's for sure.
|
Sam:
[2:07:30]
| Our categories were all different. Here we go. Trump wins. Trump wins. Super Tuesday. Blah, blah, blah. Clinton. Yes, we both agreed that Clinton would win the presidency.
|
Ivan:
[2:07:42]
| Yeah.
|
Sam:
[2:07:43]
| So.
|
Ivan:
[2:07:43]
| That was our biggest.
|
Sam:
[2:07:45]
| We were wrong about that one. But we were right about a lot of other things that year.
|
Ivan:
[2:07:49]
| Right about everything else except. Just a little teeny weasy.
|
Sam:
[2:07:55]
| So I guess I got to be happy. Best in like almost 10 years.
|
Ivan:
[2:07:59]
| Yeah. Yeah, I'd say that's pretty damn good.
|
Sam:
[2:08:03]
| Okay. Well, that's it for the show. You guys know curmudgeons-corner.com. We'll be back to doing normal shows next week, assuming nothing crazy happens. And it'll be longer than normal because for this week we recorded on a Sunday. So it'll be almost two weeks until the next episode is out.
|
Ivan:
[2:08:25]
| Is that the way this is working?
|
Sam:
[2:08:27]
| Yes, yes. We went over this last week. We record one episode every Sunday through Saturday week.
|
Ivan:
[2:08:35]
| Right, so that means...
|
Sam:
[2:08:37]
| So we're already done for the week of the 4th through the 10th. So chances are we won't record again until like the 15th or 16th.
|
Sam:
[2:08:50]
| So unless we want to shift back to doing it earlier in the week instead of later in the week. But, you know, anyway, but yeah, so we'll be back to a normal show next time. And yeah, go to curmudgeoncypherandcorner.com. You can look at all our archives. You can actually listen to the prediction show that we just talked about if you want to. It was the last show recorded in 2024, December 27th. You know, you can go look at the, there's an archive section, click 2024, scroll down, find it, blah, blah, blah. I just listened to it. It was very exciting. It was a wonderful show. You guys should go back, listen to it. You can go back and listen to our 2016 prediction show too. That would have been the last one we recorded in 2015. It's all on the website. That's what the website's for. Listen to all these old episodes. Anyway, you can also find there all the ways to contact us, transcripts, all that kind of stuff. And of course, a link to our Patreon, where you can give us money at various levels. We will mention you on the show, we will ring a bell, we will send you a postcard, we will send you a mug, or importantly, at $2 a month or more, or if you just ask us, we will invite you to our curmudgeon's corner Slack.
|
Sam:
[2:10:04]
| Where a bunch of us hang out and share links, talk about the news, talk about other things all through the week. It's lots of fun. The more the merrier. Please join us. We had one new person join this last week, but they haven't said anything yet. So I don't know, you know, but maybe they're lurking.
|
Ivan:
[2:10:23]
| Yes, probably.
|
Sam:
[2:10:25]
| So welcome, Monica, if you're also listening to the show.
|
Ivan:
[2:10:30]
| Of course, we're saying it at the end, you know, at the end, And, you know, tail ends of a really long.
|
Sam:
[2:10:35]
| More boring show where we're just listing a whole bunch of things. But anyway. Yeah. So did you want to highlight something from the Slack?
|
Ivan:
[2:10:47]
| Well, I did mention, because I don't think I mentioned this earlier, that as I was driving to Orlando last week, navigation on Google Maps suggested that I make a detour. Okay. And the detour suggested that I go through 5.6 miles of unpaved road.
|
Sam:
[2:11:07]
| Excellent.
|
Ivan:
[2:11:09]
| In order to get to Orlando 23 minutes slower. Not sure, really. And I looked up, I double-checked.
|
Sam:
[2:11:16]
| Was it Roy?
|
Ivan:
[2:11:18]
| No, it's not Roy. Roy is north of Orlando.
|
Sam:
[2:11:22]
| For anybody who doesn't know, Yvonne and I did a trip together in the car. You can find it on ablesmay.com slash trip.
|
Ivan:
[2:11:33]
| Right.
|
Sam:
[2:11:34]
| I make sure I'm giving you correct information. Ablesmay.com slash trip. It is labeled as the non-random predecessor GPS trip where we did back roads from New Jersey to Miami Beach using a GPS in 1998.
|
Ivan:
[2:11:54]
| Okay, let's be clear. This is in 1998. We used a Garmin GPS receiver hooked up with a laptop. We also tried and we couldn't get to work. We were going to get with my cell phone a data connection to see if we could upload. We had a Connectix Quick Cam to see if we could connect it. But the adapter that we got for the phone when we got there was the wrong. They sent us the wrong damn adapter for the phone. So we couldn't make that part work. But there are digital pictures there with what is a terrible camera for today's standards. But there was a digital camera back then and stuff. and we avoided any highways, Toll routes. The whole purpose of the trip was to make it all the way down by avoiding all major highways through there. And it was a very interesting trip. We got a lot of things. And one of the things that happened is an incident that happened with this so-called city of Roy, which it routed us through, which looked, wow, look at this mapped out city. And it was like swampland that somebody just mowed through and marked some streets somehow. And we almost got stuck in the mud. I did go and like find Roy on the map. I did see that they added some major roads around again, but it is still pretty much swampland with a whole bunch of unpaved roads. There are more houses there, but it's still pretty much the same.
|
Sam:
[2:13:23]
| Excellent. I presume you've bought property there.
|
Ivan:
[2:13:26]
| Yes, of course.
|
Sam:
[2:13:28]
| Okay. That your story?
|
Ivan:
[2:13:31]
| Yes.
|
Sam:
[2:13:32]
| Okay. Well, I think we're done. So thank you, everybody, for joining us again. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Have a great week. Hope you had a good set of holidays, spent some time with the family, all that kind of stuff. And we'll talk to you next time. Goodbye. Say goodbye, Yvonne.
|
Ivan:
[2:13:52]
| Bye.
|
Sam:
[2:14:22]
| Thank you. Okay, that's it. Thank you, Yvonne. We'll see you another time.
|
Ivan:
[2:14:28]
| All right. Bye. Thank you.
|
