Automated Transcript
Sam:
[0:00]
| We can start. We'll do a little bit short because I have a Brandystown Hall is at 21. Go, go, go, go, go, go, go. Here we go. Welcome to Curmudgeon's Corner for Saturday, February 21st, 2026. It is just before 19 UTC, as we are starting to record. I am Sam Mentor and Yvonne Boas here. Hello, Yvonne.
|
Ivan:
[0:49]
| Hello. Hi. How is everybody doing? Is everything great, Sam? Are we great already? Is America great?
|
Sam:
[1:00]
| America is great. It's amazing. It has been made great again.
|
Ivan:
[1:06]
| It's been made great again.
|
Sam:
[1:08]
| Yeah.
|
Ivan:
[1:09]
| Oh, that's wonderful. So are we done?
|
Sam:
[1:13]
| Yep. Thank you. Good show.
|
Ivan:
[1:14]
| All right.
|
Sam:
[1:15]
| Goodbye.
|
Ivan:
[1:16]
| Okay. Put the music on. Okay.
|
Sam:
[1:17]
| Yep. Here we go.
|
Ivan:
[1:20]
| Outro music. Here we go. Okay. We're done.
|
Sam:
[1:22]
| Yeah.
|
Ivan:
[1:22]
| There you go. Yeah, we're done.
|
Sam:
[1:25]
| Okay. Okay. Well, let's stop.
|
Ivan:
[1:26]
| Oh, no. We're not done.
|
Sam:
[1:27]
| No. No. No.
|
Ivan:
[1:29]
| Oh. Oh. Oh, well. Damn.
|
Sam:
[1:32]
| So. So we'll do our usual, a segment of lighter stuff and then more newsy stuff as we go along. We will probably be a bit short today because it's 19 UTC and I got somewhere to be at 21 UTC. My wife's having one of those town hall things that elected officials do and I'm going to go. So anyway, so where do you want to start, Yvonne, with the lighter, frothier beginning of the show stuff? I got a couple.
|
Ivan:
[2:03]
| Lighter let me see did I did I make any note of anything light and frothy, Light and frothy, light and frothy.
|
Sam:
[2:12]
| I mean, if you really want to, you can dive straight into the world going to hell or something. But, you know, we usually leave that to the end of the show.
|
Ivan:
[2:19]
| Because in the interest of time, you know, let's go to your movies. Okay, let's get, you know, let's, yeah, because we have a little bit.
|
Sam:
[2:27]
| Okay, let's bash out the movies. Bash out the movies.
|
Ivan:
[2:30]
| Yes.
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Sam:
[2:31]
| First one, Tuck Everlasting from 2002.
|
Ivan:
[2:36]
| Okay.
|
Sam:
[2:36]
| Have you ever heard of it?
|
Ivan:
[2:38]
| No.
|
Sam:
[2:40]
| Okay, so it's got Alexis Bledel, who is known for Gilmore Girls and other things, and Ben Kingsley, Sissy Spacek, Amy Irving, blah, blah, blah. Anyway, first couple paragraphs of the description. In 1914, 15-year-old Winnie Foster, who is from an upper-class family in the American town of Tree Gap, wants to make her own choices in life. After being told that she will go to a boarding school, she runs off into the forest, where she meets Jesse Tuck, who is drinking from a spring at the foot of a great tree. She is kidnapped by his older brother Miles and brought back to the Tuck's home, where they tell her they will return her as soon as they can trust her. She becomes enamored with their slow and simple way of life and falls in love with Jesse. She learns that, by drinking water from a magic spring around a hundred years ago, the tucks cannot age or be injured, and that they kidnapped her to hide the secret. They tell her that living forever is more painful than it sounds, and they believe giving away the secret of the spring will lead everyone to want to drink from it and worry that it might fall into the wrong hands.", And the movie continues from there. Yvonne seems skeptical.
|
Ivan:
[4:06]
| It doesn't sound like a movie that I would be interested in.
|
Sam:
[4:10]
| It's sort of like a combination between sort of, you know, a romance slash type movie, because there's a love story, blah, blah, blah, with some of these fantasy elements thrown in with obviously these people who can live forever and what that means to life, whatever. you know i i will i will give it a you know i i after one of our more recent reviews i decided that may may maybe i should be like i don't know like a little bit more like there was there was a series of reviews where i get i gave something a thumbs up even though i was wavering on it, and then there was another thing you're.
|
Ivan:
[4:55]
| Wavering usually or mr thumbs sideways.
|
Sam:
[4:58]
| Yeah i know and And then there was another one where I think I gave it a thumb sideways, but I was like, you know, actually, I enjoyed that better than the one I gave a thumbs up to.
|
Ivan:
[5:07]
| So what the hell is wrong with you?
|
Sam:
[5:09]
| I don't know. I'm just inconsistent. I'm horrible. I'm horrible. I will give this one a thumb sideways in the end. I was considering a thumbs up. It's a cute little movie. It was fine. It was good. And this is another thing. Like I should not give a thumbs up to a movie where I say this was fine. That's, that's like thumb sideways material, right?
|
Ivan:
[5:34]
| Yes. I agree. Yeah.
|
Sam:
[5:37]
| It was an entertaining couple of hours. I enjoyed the movie. The, the, the ending like pulled at my heartstrings a little bit, but it was nothing special. It was nothing like super memorable. I think I should leave the thumbs up for the ones that feel like there's something special, But that means almost everything's going to be a thumb sideways. See, that's the problem.
|
Ivan:
[5:58]
| Well... But, so, maybe, I just thought about this, right? Because the problem is that you've got a three.
|
Sam:
[6:06]
| Maybe I should have more. Maybe I should do a five-point scale instead.
|
Ivan:
[6:11]
| The thumbs diagonal. The AAS, which would be an innovative ad. I don't think anybody has, hey, I've got the thumb kind of downward. Or, no, I got the thumb kind of upward, okay? Which this would be.
|
Sam:
[6:28]
| I'm at 35 degrees.
|
Ivan:
[6:31]
| The 35 degree thumb. Yes. So you're at a 35 degree thumb on this movie. Yes.
|
Sam:
[6:38]
| Yeah. I didn't think deeply about that number or anything. 45 would be halfway between up and sideways.
|
Ivan:
[6:45]
| You know, but, but Hey, it could be, you see, but we're talking about degrees. It could be 35, could be 45. Hey, maybe it could be 65 degree. It could be, you know, almost all the way, but you're, you're not all the way. So you, you, this is like, It gives you a lot of varying degrees.
|
Sam:
[7:01]
| A lot of varying degrees.
|
Ivan:
[7:03]
| For grading the movie.
|
Sam:
[7:05]
| Right. Yes. So, which gets you close to, like, you know, the Rotten Tomatoes rating is 61%.
|
Ivan:
[7:13]
| Look at that! You see? It actually matches.
|
Sam:
[7:18]
| Yes. And with an average rating of 6.3 out of 10. Critical Consensus Reads, Though slow-moving, Talk Everlasting raises big issues and explores them with sensitivity. Roger Ebert gave the film two stars out of four, writing that the film is too impressed with its own solemn insights to work up much entertainment value. He further wrote that the film's message was questionable, opining the injunction to live life fully need not come with a time limit. That's why the outcome of the romance is so unsatisfactory. Anyway.
|
Ivan:
[7:58]
| It's so unsatisfactory. That sounds like, it doesn't sound like a great romance when your romance is unsatisfactory.
|
Sam:
[8:06]
| Well, just to be clear.
|
Ivan:
[8:08]
| It's really a very depressing description. Hey, but listen, hey, Sam, how was your last girlfriend? It was unsatisfactory. I don't think that I've ever heard anybody describing their last romantic entanglement as unsatisfactory. And that would be quite weird. If they did.
|
Sam:
[8:29]
| Even if it was bad, that's not the word they use.
|
Ivan:
[8:33]
| No, exactly. That's my point. Yes, that would not be, you know, hey, you were dating Jan. How did that go? Eh, you know, it's unsatisfactory.
|
Sam:
[8:44]
| Well, I will say that the ending, without giving the spoilers away, was somewhat unsatisfactory. I ended up disappointed. It does not end necessarily the way that romance movies typically end. But nevertheless, not a completely shocking ending. But unsatisfactory is kind of a good word for it. But I think actually that was part of the point that they were trying to make with the movie. Anyway, thumbs sideways. Shall I move on? Again, in the interest of time. Okay. Ah, bah, bah, bah, bah, bah, bah, bah. Let's see. Just making sure... Okay, the next movie from 2016, the third movie in the Divergent series, Allegiant.
|
Ivan:
[9:45]
| Allegiant?
|
Sam:
[9:46]
| Allegiant. Oh, boy. I believe I...
|
Ivan:
[9:50]
| That is the stupid Diver... I hate that fucking series.
|
Sam:
[9:55]
| Well, what I was going to say...
|
Ivan:
[9:57]
| It was the most, the whole thing was the most bombastic, overrated fucking movie series ever.
|
Sam:
[10:04]
| Wasn't this one that you said you saw the later ones, but not the first one? Or did you see all three?
|
Ivan:
[10:10]
| No, I think I saw the early one. Oh, no, no. I don't even remember anymore.
|
Sam:
[10:16]
| Because my review— I've got to be honest. This is the third of the series. And my—and I've talked about the other two on the show before. But my fundamental on this one is this is one of the series where each one is worse than the one before.
|
Ivan:
[10:32]
| Okay.
|
Sam:
[10:33]
| Yes, that was— And the first one, I actually quite enjoyed. I liked the first one, A Decent Amit. A Decent Amit? Amit? Amit? A Decent Amit?
|
Ivan:
[10:43]
| Okay.
|
Sam:
[10:43]
| I probably gave it a thumbs up. You know, this one, I mean, you know, if you watch a movie series, I don't know. I'm one of the ones who are like, you got to watch the whole series, right? You got to judge it as a whole, not just individual movies. But like, this is one, and there were supposed to be four. They canceled the fourth one because the third one did badly, you know. Right.
|
Ivan:
[11:10]
| Yeah. Yeah. Because, yeah, they were going to, this thing was supposed to be extended, but it kept.
|
Sam:
[11:16]
| At first there was going to be a fourth movie. Then they were like, no, we'll follow it up with a TV series. And then they're like, you know, nevermind. We're not even going to.
|
Ivan:
[11:23]
| Nevermind. Nobody liked the third one. Fuck this shit. We're done. We're out. Yeah. Basically, that was the conclusion.
|
Sam:
[11:30]
| Essentially. And I've heard good things about the book series, including, you know, all of the books and continuing on even past where the movies went, but I have not read them. But should I give this one a thumbs down? Like, again, in the ways that we were talking about before, I've usually reserved thumbs down for movies that were really like... not just not good, but like, so not good. It was an offensive and you were upset by them. And like, I, I, I feel offended that I wasted my time. That that's not quite the case on this. So like, you know, okay. Uh, what, what's, what's between 90 and 180. Let's, let's call this a 120 or something like, so it's below, below thumbs sideways, but not all the way to thumbs down, you know and again i i liked the first movie the second movie okay this one was just like what are what are you doing exactly and and like part of apparently.
|
Ivan:
[12:38]
| It is the apparently the that was the conclusion of everybody.
|
Sam:
[12:43]
| That went to.
|
Ivan:
[12:43]
| Watch this or most people at.
|
Sam:
[12:45]
| Least and also to me like What made the first movie interesting was that, there were some interesting ideas to be explored. It wasn't just people running around, having adventures, doing action movie and battles and stuff like that. And it seemed like they kind of used up the interesting ideas to talk about in the first movie and maybe a little bit of the second movie. And so by the time they got to the third movie, it was just, oh, okay, there's these factions having a little war and doing these things. And so, you know, they try to do the special effects, they try to do the battles, they try to do the whatever, but without the sort of, without either the interesting ideas or any new interesting character development. And so...
|
Ivan:
[13:43]
| Oh, what would be the fun in that?
|
Sam:
[13:45]
| You know, and look, I fully admit there are some franchises and some movies that are just 100%, unapologetic we are an action movie we don't give a shit about the characters we don't really give a shit about the plot it's just.
|
Ivan:
[14:01]
| We're gonna have a whole bunch of people fighting I will say that this last week I was intrigued at trying to watch the new movie The Running Man okay that was on Paramount Plus I must admit that I didn't really watch the whole thing because I realized after like about the first 45 minutes that it was just a whole repetitive bunch of action sequences that really didn't add to the plot in any way. It was just chases and chases. So I wasn't really... I actually wasn't watching it because I was like wanting to watch it. Somebody had mentioned it, that it was quite different from the original one. And what I understood was that it was actually closer to the original book. And so I actually skipped through most of the middle part of all the just action chasing whatever, just to figure out how it ended and how it was different from the original movie.
|
Sam:
[14:58]
| Okay.
|
Ivan:
[14:59]
| So, but yeah, so yeah. But that's the thing. For somebody that was into, hey, let me watch a whole bunch of action that didn't really add in any way to the plot, this is your movie, I do think.
|
Sam:
[15:16]
| Okay. Running Man. The new one.
|
Ivan:
[15:18]
| Running Man. The new one. Yes.
|
Sam:
[15:20]
| And it is a movie, not a series, right?
|
Ivan:
[15:23]
| It's a movie. It's a movie. I think it was in theaters. It was on Paramount+. Okay.
|
Sam:
[15:28]
| Okay. Yeah. Yeah, so anyway, both of these movies really thumb sideways if I'm just using the three categories. And, you know, like I said, a little bit above thumb sideways for Tuck Everlasting, a little bit below thumb sideways for Divergent. And there we go. They're my movies. You want to go ahead and take a break and then do real stuff?
|
Ivan:
[15:51]
| Yeah. Yep.
|
Sam:
[15:52]
| Okay. So here we go. Breakie, breakie. Break, break, break.
|
Ivan:
[15:58]
| Breakie, breakie.
|
Sam:
[16:48]
| And we're back.
|
Ivan:
[16:51]
| We're back.
|
Sam:
[16:53]
| Okay, so where do you want to start on the newsy stuff that's been happening in the last week?
|
Ivan:
[17:00]
| Oh, what do we talk about? What do we talk about? We'll talk about the thing. With the thing.
|
Sam:
[17:09]
| The thing. Yeah. The thing.
|
Ivan:
[17:11]
| The thing. I'm going to, there is a whole bunch of stuff on the economy, okay? And I thought I wrote down economy. We had, you know, but.
|
Sam:
[17:23]
| Yes, but, but, but.
|
Ivan:
[17:25]
| But to cover something that we didn't talk about the previous week, okay? I'm going to talk about the fact that Tesla has basically decided to punt on making cars.
|
Sam:
[17:35]
| Ah, right, okay.
|
Ivan:
[17:37]
| And that was skipped over.
|
Sam:
[17:39]
| I've sort of looked at, I looked at some of the headlines you guys shared, but not being like the car guy, some of the other folks on the Corrugents Corner Slack are. I didn't look at the details.
|
Ivan:
[17:48]
| First thing that happened.
|
Sam:
[17:48]
| I know they're discontinuing some models, but not everything, right?
|
Ivan:
[17:52]
| No, no, no, but understand the models that are discontinuing. They decided to discontinue the Model S and the Model X. Understand something, the Model S.
|
Sam:
[18:00]
| Yeah, just to be clear, like, so explain this. Like, I have no idea, like, the different letters.
|
Ivan:
[18:05]
| The Model S, the Model S was the first real, I mean, Tesla, before Elon Musk acquired it, and let's understand something, Elon Musk was not the founder of Tesla.
|
Sam:
[18:18]
| Okay?
|
Ivan:
[18:19]
| There's somebody else. By the way, that guy went on to Lucid, okay? Elon Musk acquired Tesla, and they made this Roadster at first, okay?
|
Sam:
[18:26]
| Right.
|
Ivan:
[18:27]
| Which was this little two-seat car that originally used a whole bunch of, like, basically laptop batteries, okay, in order to be powered. They were all tied together. And it was a cool little thing. I saw a few of them around, but it wasn't really practical. But the Model S, okay, is the sedan that we all know. It really was a pioneer in electric vehicles. It really changed the game on what people would expect from an electric car. Because before that, the other cars that you saw was the Nissan Leaf or that little Tesla Roadster that wasn't very useful. They were very niche.
|
Sam:
[19:04]
| They were either really small or were like weird designs.
|
Ivan:
[19:09]
| Small. or weird exactly this was not just the fact that it was a sedan that was practical okay it was fast but it also they introduced with that car supercharging okay which was the biggest problem with all almost all old electric cars charging was slow okay with the model s you got this car that could charge pretty darn quickly, 20, 30 minutes, you got one hell of an amount of charge. And it went from the old car, which all would take hours, okay, in order to be charged. And so the Model S was a major game changer. And then after that, they introduced the Model X, which was with the wing doors, their SUV that they introduced. That also was a game changer In that sense, it had a design that was quirky. The doors, those Falcon doors were a pain in the ass.
|
Ivan:
[20:07]
| They, you know, they fixed that after a while. But they had a tendency to fail at first and whatnot. But it was also very, but those were their two pioneering cars. The thing is that the way Tesla has operated since they launched the Model S and Model X, they spent a lot of money on a whole bunch of other vanity projects. Or, well, they did launch the Model 3. They didn't launch the Model Y. But then after they've launched, but then they went and they launched the Cybertruck. The Cybertruck has been a colossal disaster. Right now, they cut prices across the board on Cybertrucks because they're not selling very well. They've been stuck with inventory because they're not very practical.
|
Ivan:
[20:47]
| As a truck, their cargo space is not good. They're not very good for towing. They don't have very good range. Okay. It just kind of looks... Something that, yeah, little kids look at like, oh, cool, it's a Cybertruck. Yeah, okay, great. But, you know, they will slice your fingers off if you're not careful with them.
|
Sam:
[21:06]
| Alex looks for them and takes pictures of them to mock them whenever he sees them.
|
Ivan:
[21:10]
| Okay, but you see, but they get attention, okay?
|
Sam:
[21:13]
| They get attention.
|
Ivan:
[21:14]
| They get attention.
|
Sam:
[21:15]
| But they get lots of negative attention, too.
|
Ivan:
[21:18]
| Yeah, but they're not practical, okay? They're not useful. They're very expensive. They're way more expensive than they expected them to be. So they spent all the money on that, and, you know, they spent money on developing this new Roadster that they've never launched, and then they, on the robo-taxis and a semi-truck, and the problem is that they never invested any money on developing a proper replacement for the Model S and Model X. Meanwhile, all the competition has been launching a ton of new cars A ton of new cars that are much better built Much better range Much better towing Everything They're better in a lot of ways than the Teslas are right now And so, The reality is that they didn't have any two cars left in there. And I don't know, I guess Elon wants to make robots. So he's canceling them, both of them. And he's saying, well, they don't, we don't sell a lot of them. Look, in the luxury car business, selling 50,000 cars is a lot of revenue. Okay. 50,000 cars a year is this, you know, when you're selling an average price of $70,000.
|
Ivan:
[22:36]
| Okay. How much is it? Oh, come on. Ivan, you could do this math quicker. Uh, it's, oh, God, $3.5 billion in revenue, okay? This is not a small and consequential amount. Plus, usually these cars at that price point tend to be more profitable.
|
Ivan:
[22:59]
| You could command a bigger premium, okay? So that tends to improve your bottom line. The other cars have thinner margins. So I've said, I mean, all of a sudden they're abandoning their two pioneering models with no replacements and saying that he's redirecting that to robots that I don't, I've never seen a real working one.
|
Sam:
[23:25]
| These humanoid robot things that at the demos tend to actually be remote controlled by a human somewhere else.
|
Ivan:
[23:32]
| Exactly. And he's always, he's going to give up a revenue stream in the billions profitable for robots that aren't even close to really being ready for prime time. What the fuck? It's crazy.
|
Sam:
[23:47]
| So now, I understand that switch, but.
|
Ivan:
[23:51]
| Oh, the other thing that they're doing.
|
Sam:
[23:53]
| By the way. What about the cars they are still making?
|
Ivan:
[23:56]
| Well, their sales are tanking of all of those too, because fucking Elon Musk has made the company toxic.
|
Sam:
[24:02]
| Mm-hmm.
|
Ivan:
[24:04]
| He has made himself a toxic brand. Everybody's running away. He's losing market share everywhere. Okay? And, I don't know, now he's talking that they're an AI company, and he's going to merge everything into consolidated, amalgamated Elon industries, I guess.
|
Sam:
[24:24]
| Uh-huh.
|
Ivan:
[24:25]
| AI. And I don't understand. Look, if they're investing so much on AI, FSD being so important, FSD, FSD, FSD. and I'm like but you're gonna stop selling the cars so you can charge for the fucking FSD so what the fuck now by the way there's only a subscription you can't even buy it anymore outright you have to pay Tesla $100 a month every month to use FSD, The robo-taxis that they've designed seem very impractical. Same as the Cybertruck. I don't see that the market for those is going to be very good because they're not very practical. They only can hold two people, very little luggage. And by the way, as far as I know, they still have a lot of bugs to work out on them being autonomous in any reasonable way. And so...
|
Sam:
[25:24]
| So in terms of the robot taxi market, they're way behind like Waymo's and all the others.
|
Ivan:
[25:31]
| Yeah. So I don't understand. I mean, to me, they seem to be Elon lost interest in cars. That's all it seems. That's it. And so somebody said that Tesla right now is a $50 billion car company inside a trillion dollar meme stock. And I think that that is an accurate description right now. By the way, if you look at Tesla's numbers, all the automotive segments, everything related to autos is down. Profitability is down. Look, he shot himself in the foot ridiculously last year with profitability. I mean, he had the influence and access to maintain those damn credits, okay, that the main beneficiary was Tesla, okay? He was getting these, they were all, most of Tesla's automotive profitability was tied to the resale of these tax credits, okay, for fuel efficient vehicles. because they had an excess of them so they could sell them to other manufacturers. Okay, that's the way the law worked.
|
Sam:
[26:42]
| Okay.
|
Ivan:
[26:43]
| He decided to, he himself, advocate for killing them. So the profitability, this cash cow, he torpedoed it himself.
|
Sam:
[26:53]
| He kept saying it would hurt others more than it would hurt him.
|
Ivan:
[26:59]
| Ah, no, no, Sam, no. He was the main beneficiary of those. as a matter of fact all the other manufacturers have wised up in a way to make their operations seem a lot more profitable now for autos as they are as many of the auto automakers i don't know if you saw these announcements of massive losses that they have ascribed to the slowing to the ev market where they wrote down like investments like 20 billion 10 billion i mean all the major automakers announce those write-downs. Here's the one thing that people are not understanding from those write-downs, okay?
|
Ivan:
[27:39]
| By writing down that investment now, it means that every other car sold in the future in the books is going to look way more profitable. OK, because those were costs that they had accumulated that would be charged over the years to the cars that were sold. And so when people looked at the company profitability, they would be like, but, you know, your margin per car is a lot lower by taking the hit now because the market slowed down. Usually the reason why what they do is, hey, I invested 30 billion to build 1 million cars over the next 10 years. OK, and so then you take that money and you depreciate it over that time period over the car sold. OK, but then you say, well, shit, we can't sell 10 million cars. We can only sell 2 million. So that asset is impaired. It's no longer worth what's in the books. It's basically what they're saying, because it was worth $10 billion before, but now it's worth $2 billion. So you mark down that value now, and then what happens is, which I am pretty sure is what's going to happen, sales ramp up again because this was a slowdown really related to all these tax credits ending and a whole bunch of things that happened or whatever. When the sales ramp back up later, your profits are going to look fantastic. Hmm.
|
Sam:
[29:05]
| So, okay.
|
Ivan:
[29:07]
| So all the other automakers are launching a slew of new vehicles. There's so many of them coming out. Rivian just came out with a very competitive R2, which is basically aimed at the Model Y. And it's a lot of people have reviewed it, say that R2 is better than the Model Y in practically every way. And so this is the kind of vehicles that are coming on the market right now competing against Tesla. And so, and by the way, just the fact right now that a lot of people used to begrudgingly buy a Tesla because they wanted an EV, but there weren't that many options.
|
Sam:
[29:43]
| Right.
|
Ivan:
[29:44]
| Now people don't have to do that anymore.
|
Sam:
[29:46]
| They're all over the place. They're all kinds of.
|
Ivan:
[29:47]
| They're all over the place. Yep.
|
Sam:
[29:49]
| Yeah.
|
Ivan:
[29:51]
| So I think that Elon just lost interest in making cars.
|
Sam:
[29:54]
| And a lot of the concerns that people had about range and the charging network and all that kind of stuff are slowly taking care of themselves.
|
Ivan:
[30:04]
| Those are slowly going away.
|
Sam:
[30:06]
| Range is improving. On a full charge, mine goes over 300, which isn't 400, isn't 500, but that's not bad. But listen. And there are chargers everywhere.
|
Ivan:
[30:18]
| How often have you been short on range because your car only goes 300 miles?
|
Sam:
[30:27]
| Not really ever. Like, I think there's one time I can remember where my wife had driven it somewhere in addition to me, and it actually got below 10%. And I'm like, okay, take that thing to a supercharger, get it topped up before, you know, we're not, you know, don't just drink at home and plug it in. Right, right, right. Because I'm going to need it again tomorrow. So charge that thing up. But it was no big deal because we just charged the thing up. Yeah, exactly. But that's the lowest I've ever gotten it. And that has happened like once. Usually.
|
Ivan:
[31:00]
| Look, like we've had, we've had like, because we had a PHEV with the Campo, but since we've had our fully electric BMW i4. You know how many times we've needed to actually stop at a supercharger in order to top up? Like really needed.
|
Sam:
[31:13]
| None.
|
Ivan:
[31:14]
| Zero.
|
Sam:
[31:14]
| Yeah.
|
Ivan:
[31:15]
| None. None.
|
Sam:
[31:16]
| No. And like my my normal behavior at this point is like and just to to set the stage here, I have no I no longer have the commute to work because I don't have a job right now. But I but I am trying to raise 50 million dollars to solve that problem. We'll get to that in a bit. But I, on the other hand, I do have to take my kid back and forth to school, which is actually further than my commute was. So I'm actually averaging over the last 13 weeks, let's just check, 30 miles a day. And that includes a, you know, up to an average of...
|
Ivan:
[32:04]
| Was your commute to, to, to work distance.
|
Sam:
[32:08]
| Let me go back a little further in my history here. Hold on. Let's see. When I was in full commute mode, I averaged 50 miles a day on the car. And that includes the commute and other stuff. Let's see, wait, I'll do, I'll do my, I'm looking at my data from the actual car. Actual commute was 23 miles each way.
|
Ivan:
[32:34]
| 23 miles. So 46 miles. Okay.
|
Sam:
[32:36]
| So 46 miles a day. And then my round trip to my kids.
|
Ivan:
[32:41]
| And how long did it take you one way? 23 miles?
|
Sam:
[32:46]
| Dude, to change it to.
|
Ivan:
[32:47]
| Jesus, you don't know this off the top of your head, for God's sakes. How about how much?
|
Sam:
[32:51]
| It varied dramatically based on traffic.
|
Ivan:
[32:56]
| On average.
|
Sam:
[32:57]
| Okay. On average, just under an hour each way.
|
Ivan:
[33:00]
| Okay. man that's that's a fucked up commute.
|
Sam:
[33:04]
| Now when it was when traffic was good it could be 40 minutes when traffic was bad it could be two hours right.
|
Ivan:
[33:13]
| Okay.
|
Sam:
[33:14]
| So averaging probably like 55 minutes each direction, something like that. But now my round trip to my kid's school, it's 28 miles each direction now. So I'm actually driving slightly more when I go to school, but then there's things like breaks from school. Like this week, this week that just ended, there was no school because it was a school holiday week, whatever, blah, blah, blah. So, so my average has dropped from like almost 50 miles a day to like 30 miles a day on average when you look average over a whole quarter. Anyway, my point is my normal pattern for the week is that I will like on Sunday.
|
Sam:
[34:05]
| Yeah. I'll start out the week fully topped off and I only charged 80%. I have never yet charged my car to a hundred percent because they say it's better for the battery, blah, blah, blah. Only charged to a hundred if you know you're going to need it. So I charged to 80% and I start out the week full and then I plug it in with my trickle charger. I have not got a level. I have not installed a level two yet. Might think about it eventually. I've got an estimate sitting somewhere.
|
Sam:
[34:32]
| But I plug it into the trickle charger every night. And when I'm doing the back and forth to school thing, I don't quite get back up to where I was overnight. But by the end of the school week, I'm down to like 50, 60%. And then over the weekend, it tops back up to 80. You know, it's extremely, the only times I've ever gone down lower are when I have unusual trips. like I've decided to go drive down to Olympia to see my wife down there or I've had to go into Seattle multiple times unexpectedly for you know because I'm in the damn hospital or whatever I don't know it was crazy crap like that and and that's it you know so it it just hasn't been an issue but the point is even with that range has been improving year over year what the manufacturers are able to get. And the charging networks have been improving. So, like, the chances of you getting stranded there are reducing. Now, that's still different, like, if you're in an urban area versus you're in the middle of nowhere somewhere. But, you know, anyway. Anything else about that, Mr. Bo?
|
Ivan:
[35:41]
| No, no, that's it. You know, I mean.
|
Sam:
[35:45]
| Robots, Sam. Robots. You know, look, let's be completely honest, if there was, An affordable, reliable robot without crazy privacy implications that you're scared of that would actually do all your household chores, you know, people would be all over that.
|
Ivan:
[36:08]
| It's like the movie I, Robot. But by the way, but look, I mean, we are going to be overrun with robots, according to Elon. You do understand, right? He said, and I'm quoting from a conference call that he held, where he said that his plan was to sell annually, annually, one billion robots.
|
Sam:
[36:28]
| Right.
|
Ivan:
[36:29]
| One, Sam, one billion robots. Okay? I mean, basically, we're going to be, robots are going to be crawling up our ass.
|
Sam:
[36:38]
| Well, here's the thing. I mean, I think this is telling of Elon's mindset. I mean, what he really.
|
Ivan:
[36:46]
| Oh, is my son? What, that he's insane? Yes!
|
Sam:
[36:49]
| No, that fundamentally what he really wants are slaves.
|
Ivan:
[36:53]
| Oh, well, that too, yes.
|
Sam:
[36:55]
| Yeah, what he really wants are slaves, and robots is the way to do that right now. But of course, if you add in the AI stuff and the fact that they want AGI and they want these things to gain consciousness or whatever, then at a certain point, like, if they succeed, you do have slaves again. And of course, they're going to want their freedom. And of course, you know, you're going to have the robot rebellion that's in every sci-fi novel. And, you know, because humans will be mean to them.
|
Ivan:
[37:22]
| You know, the first guy they're going to want to kill is Elon, which, okay, I'm like, I'm all for it. Okay, so that's good. There you go. Okay, this may not be such a bad outcome in the end. Yes.
|
Sam:
[37:32]
| Yes. Well, you know, anyway. Anyway, if they actually had an affordable one of these that worked, that did not have ethical issues associated with it, Yeah, sign me up for three. But, you know.
|
Ivan:
[37:47]
| I don't know. I still, all I remember is this demo a couple of months ago that they had on the New York Times of this robot that was loading a dishwasher. Which was a very painful thing. exercise in loading a dishwasher. And I assume, I'm pretty sure, that's an early version to give it, you know, five, ten years.
|
Sam:
[38:08]
| They will get better.
|
Ivan:
[38:09]
| That will get a lot better. But right now, where it's, listen, there is no way I would want to put into mass production, Whatever the fuck version of this we have now, because it sucks.
|
Sam:
[38:24]
| Right. Well, this is, and yeah, we're about to move on, but this is the same thing with all the AI stuff we've been talking about, is that there are a lot of things where the problem is pushing it too soon. Like, it may be great at it soon.
|
Ivan:
[38:43]
| But it sucks now. But to be fair, there is a lot of really good shit that there is out there right now with AI as well.
|
Sam:
[38:51]
| This has changed since the first time we were talking about this a year, year and a half ago. Completely different world already.
|
Ivan:
[38:59]
| There's a completely different world.
|
Sam:
[39:00]
| There's a lot of stuff that is good now.
|
Ivan:
[39:02]
| That is good. I mean, seriously. I've been using so much of this stuff for work and for personal stuff. Look, let me tell you something. Like, I just, you know, let me tell you something that I just did. I had this issue with a list of addresses and names that I wanted validated and cleaned up, okay? And look, I am a little bit rusty on my Excel right now. And by the way, I did use the Claude plugin for Excel, which is much better than fucking, you know.
|
Ivan:
[39:38]
| Copilot the way it's implemented, which part of the problem is the way microsoft has implemented copilot to beef it sucks okay it really for it's it's you know it can't like hey powerpoint generate me slides it's generate shit like right now the way it's out it really isn't very good but i had this list and i needed to it had a whole bunch of issues with it and i said hey look this is the list that i've got, You've got these issues with it I want you to fix, fix You know, go through these things And then when it finished the list The one thing it did is, hey, It gave me 195 addresses for owners here at the community. And I'm like, I said, but there's 196 units. And I told it, hey, I need you to go through the list. And by the way, because the unit numbers are not sequential, okay? Go through this list and figure out, based on the logic of the numbering, which unit is missing.
|
Sam:
[40:38]
| Right.
|
Ivan:
[40:38]
| And boop, boop, boop, boop, boop, boop, boop, boop, boop. This is the unit missing. and it was exactly and and that's something that would have taken i did that entire cleanup exercise using that instead of hours and hours which i could have done it concatenated the these eliminated the duplicates double check blah blah blah 20 minutes man right i mean it saved me a day yeah and i'm like i mean this is like this shit when it does it that with that way that does it well, it's fucking addictive.
|
Sam:
[41:12]
| Right. And I've done similar things and you mentioned you alluded to my Robin Letter project. I'll mention it a little bit toward the end of the show. But, This is all, it's me augmented by AI coding, right?
|
Ivan:
[41:33]
| Yeah.
|
Sam:
[41:33]
| And like from the time I started playing with this, like over a year ago to now, the improvement in the tools and how smart they are is dramatic. Like, you know, back, you know, if you go back a year ago when you were doing this kind of stuff, you had to really carefully babysit everything. You had to like ask it for something. You had to check what it did. You had to try over and over and over again to get it right. And it would, it would eventually do it. And, you know, so it was still saving me time over doing it myself, but for professionals who knew what the hell they were doing, it was not saving time because of the error rates that it had and how much babysitting you had to do. at this point i i iterate on on requirements and what i want it to do and all this kind of stuff and then once once i've nailed all that stuff done i basically say okay now do it.
|
Sam:
[42:37]
| And it goes and does it and then you know i do have to do some testing and there's usually a little bit of iteration but it basically gets at 90 on the first try and then it's fixing up that remaining 10%. And you do have to know some things to like, make sure you consider X, make sure you consider Y, don't ignore Z, you know, because otherwise it will. But the dramatic change is stunning just in terms of how much better these things are every few months. It is still improving dramatically.
|
Ivan:
[43:13]
| However- Sam, I was looking at a business, for example, that I was analyzing for a purchase. Okay, just something, you know, and I asked to go and like, By the way, at the top of my head, I actually, because I saw the numbers and I had these conclusions, but I was like, damn it, I had to put a spreadsheet together. I kind of know this. Well, I told it to analyze it and give me its feedback. It pretty much aligned with what I had seen from the numbers, okay, which is great. And it put it together in a presentation, which saved me the time having to do it. But it pretty much validated. I know the information that provided was accurate because on my head, when I look at these numbers and I know, oh yeah, this, this, this. And I, I did the math real quick or whatever, but it helped. It did the analysis. It coincided with what I, what I had looked at, that I had, that I had guesstimated it, it went. And so it validated the, the, the assumptions that I, that I had made it put it together in a, in a presentation format rather easily, but not just that it did something else that I couldn't do very easily, which was analyzing. I said, Hey, can you check there is a rental of a space included?
|
Ivan:
[44:28]
| Analyze the location. Is that location a good location? Okay, number one, compared to the others. And is the rent, compared to other nearby locations, the number, is it reasonable? Is it expensive? Is it cheap? It added that, which that would have taken me way longer to do. Right. It did an analysis of other commercial properties around, gave me the estimated values, compared what this one was at, and showed that it was a good value for that. I mean, I want to take a few hours.
|
Sam:
[45:01]
| Right. And look, here's the thing. I think there is still an issue with people trying to push it into areas where it's not ready yet.
|
Ivan:
[45:14]
| That's the big problem.
|
Sam:
[45:16]
| You know, now.
|
Ivan:
[45:17]
| That's the big problem.
|
Sam:
[45:18]
| Yeah.
|
Ivan:
[45:18]
| Because there was somebody showing a thing where they were talking about that right now, over 50% of AI projects are failing. And it's precisely because of what you just talked about. They don't understand all the work that needs to go into making it successful. They're not training them right, so they're failing miserably. Yes.
|
Sam:
[45:39]
| Well, and you still have examples of just like users doing dumb things. Like it seems like every couple months you get another story of a judge chastising a lawyer for submitting a brief that included made up references that were made up by AI. or there was a report in the last couple weeks of some reddit post who who knows they may be making it up to get attention but some anonymous reddit post of somebody who's saying we're in goddamn trouble because we just realized that we'd been using ai to generate, like financial summary information for our boss for the last six months and we just realized that ai was making up all the numbers okay but but you know you.
|
Ivan:
[46:22]
| See that's the thing but that's but that's their failure. Because for example, when I did that summary on AI, I had already an expectation of what the numbers were supposed to be. And what the AI did was validate that my assumptions were correct. Okay. Because if I look at a number, I mean, the one thing is that you, okay, great. It does facilitate the work, but it doesn't eliminate double checking to make sure that what you do is accurate. I mean, because it will make mistakes. It's the same thing like, for example, I just generated that list. Oh, I gave you a clean list. It has 195 addresses. I'm like, no, there's 196. Where the fuck is the other one?
|
Sam:
[47:01]
| Right.
|
Ivan:
[47:04]
| That's the part where people don't understand that it's a fucking tool. It doesn't totally replace you. You need to... It will help you get shit done fast, but it can help you do errors a lot faster, too.
|
Sam:
[47:19]
| Yeah, absolutely. And so like as people, the people who push too far too fast, I think we've said before, the problem is if you push it out early and it sucks, you're going to destroy your reputation with those sucky results before you get to the good version. And that's not to say the good version might not be a few months down the road, but you want to be careful with that initial rollout. Whereas I think everybody is just so anxious to be out there and first and take advantage of things as quickly as they can that, you know, they're pushing out things that are half-baked.
|
Ivan:
[48:00]
| Right.
|
Sam:
[48:01]
| And it's like, where is that line? Because I understand you don't want to miss the boat. You don't want to miss the bus, the curve, the whatever. You want to be out there. But, yeah, anyway. Now are we ready to take that break?
|
Ivan:
[48:19]
| Let's break it up.
|
Sam:
[48:20]
| Okay, here we go.
|
Ivan:
[49:04]
| Sam was mentioning over the break that I was opening envelopes, okay, and that apparently the sound comes through.
|
Sam:
[49:10]
| Well, so I wasn't going to mention it on the podcast itself because the post-processing will probably get rid of most of that sound.
|
Ivan:
[49:16]
| But the reason is that I do this is because I go look at the fucking mail, Sam, and because, you know, there are important things that still get sent in the fucking mail. So, for example, I just opened this letter, which came in the mail when I was gone last week, where it says, hey, we received an above claim for you before we can process this claim. We need more information determined if you received this medical care before an accident or injury. So this is related to my son. And so they're not going to pay the fucking medical claim unless I fucking go and I call a fucking number, which for some fucking reason, why can't I just fucking answer this online? I got a call Monday through Friday to give him some information that apparently my son was not in a car accident, which is how he broke his arm. So, fuck. But, you see, this claim that they weren't going to pay for his fucking surgery, I guess, or something. Or that apparently we owe another doctor $12.12.
|
Sam:
[50:13]
| Well, that's nice. It's an interesting thing. I'll let you know. I have in the past, like, first of all, we routinely in the past have gotten like our mail returned to the post office because our actual mailbox, it was too full. It had been like over a month since we looked, blah, blah, blah. And, and so I, you know, so at the, at this very moment. using my new to-do list dynamic mechanism that I built for myself, it has only been two weeks and one day since the last time I checked the mailbox.
|
Ivan:
[50:49]
| Well, that's not that bad.
|
Sam:
[50:50]
| But I will add, using this new mechanism, it has also only been four weeks and five days since I've gone through that mail that came in. Whereas I believe, like, you know, I think I've done like about once a month recently. But when I caught up, when I actually caught up on that a little while ago, it was something like 70 weeks since the last time I'd gone through it. And I went through all of it. I dealt with all the stuff. You know, I paid a few things. There were some late fees on some things because I had. No kidding.
|
Ivan:
[51:28]
| Really? There were some late fees? No shit. God, what a surprise.
|
Sam:
[51:38]
| Yes. The one case that was really extensive for the late fees was that when I first got my new car, like last summer.
|
Ivan:
[51:49]
| Fuck. Registration?
|
Sam:
[51:52]
| No, no, no. You know you have these, the things that you put on the windshield for the toll lanes?
|
Ivan:
[52:00]
| Oh, the toll pass. Yeah.
|
Sam:
[52:02]
| Yeah. So I got a new one of those for the new card. It took me a while to get it. But also when I had my, the temporary plates, which was about a month, I ended up having the temporary plates.
|
Ivan:
[52:15]
| Oh boy, they were billing.
|
Sam:
[52:17]
| They were billing by mail.
|
Ivan:
[52:19]
| Oh, fuck.
|
Sam:
[52:21]
| And so basically.
|
Ivan:
[52:23]
| To the temporary plate. Holy shit.
|
Sam:
[52:26]
| Yes. They were billing by mail for the temporary plate. And so it's like, you know, and like the route back and forth to my son's school was like, there's a $15 toll if you do it during rush hour. So I got a bunch of those. And then they were like, yeah, but you have to pay that $15 within like two weeks of getting the mail or something. Or they like, first they put a late fee on. And then if you get a certain amount late, they add a civil penalty on top of it, like basically a ticket for not paying it.
|
Ivan:
[53:03]
| How much was this?
|
Sam:
[53:06]
| Well, each one of those $15 tolls turned into about a $50 toll.
|
Ivan:
[53:13]
| And how many of them were there?
|
Sam:
[53:15]
| A bunch.
|
Ivan:
[53:18]
| I'm going to kill you!
|
Sam:
[53:20]
| I'm going to kill you!
|
Ivan:
[53:23]
| The fuck is wrong with you.
|
Sam:
[53:25]
| Yeah so anyway but i i paid them all, apparently brandy tells me there was a mechanism that i probably could have appealed and got it lowered but i didn't i just paid it, but but it's only been four weeks since the last time i've gone through the mail and two weeks since i've gotten it now that's my mail i've got a whole little mailbox thing in our downstairs hallway with like mailboxes for me, for Brandy, for Amy, for Alex. So when I bring in the mail, I sort it into all the appropriate boxes.
|
Ivan:
[54:02]
| Oh my God.
|
Sam:
[54:03]
| I only look at mine. Brandy's is completely full right now. So I've got, I've got me, I've got Amy, I've got Alex. I've got a separate mailbox for multiple. Like if it has more than one person's name on it, it goes into a separate box.
|
Ivan:
[54:19]
| Don't you open that one. I mean, it's 50-50.
|
Sam:
[54:23]
| No, I put it into the multiple box and then...
|
Ivan:
[54:25]
| Who the fuck opens it then?
|
Sam:
[54:28]
| Well, I have a separate...
|
Ivan:
[54:30]
| You need to set up a meeting to open those?
|
Sam:
[54:33]
| Well, yeah. I have a separate item on my to-do list when that comes up to be like, okay, let's go look through the multiple box. And I've also got one for other. I do look through the other box occasionally. That's for mail that was labeled for either something generic like resident or for or for somebody's name who doesn't live here. And then for Brandy.
|
Ivan:
[54:57]
| I have better go and raise 50 million dollars for this fucking thing like I put down. So what are the items I'm going to do is just to hire you a fucking assistant.
|
Sam:
[55:11]
| Well, and Brandy's is separated, too. We've got Brandy Personal.
|
Ivan:
[55:15]
| Brandy Campaign. For both of you! For all of you! An assistant!
|
Sam:
[55:19]
| Listen, just take care of them! And then I've got an overflow box. So I've got an overflow box for when one of those boxes completely fills and I can't put any more in it. So then things start going into the overflow box.
|
Ivan:
[55:31]
| I should make that a line item on the budget.
|
Sam:
[55:33]
| Just assistant.
|
Ivan:
[55:37]
| $150,000 assistant. There you go. Just take care of them. Just don't, don't, don't. Take care of it. That's it. That's all I'm asking you. Make sure the bills are paid. Make sure everything's fine. Make sure no legal problems. Make sure the IRS is taken care of.
|
Sam:
[55:56]
| Yeah, I did just mail, like, Amy is living in Pennsylvania now. I did just mail her a packet of her mail that still came here. And there was stuff from the IRS in there for her.
|
Ivan:
[56:09]
| Oh, that's great. Oh, that's good. That's cool. Oh, yeah, that's always great to be getting. I always, let me tell you something. There is no mail. I dread more than the damn font and color and style that the IRS uses, which is this black and white format. And the font is just instantly recognizable to me. And I always, when I see it, it's always dreadful. I mean, not that I've gotten like a real, I mean, the last time I got a really bad IRS notice. It was like 20 years ago, and that one was a mistake. They did say that I owed like $60,000 or something, okay, which thank God was a mistake. But I had gotten one about eight or nine years before that I did owe $15,000. That wasn't a mistake. And those were $15,000 unexpected dollars.
|
Sam:
[57:04]
| Right. It's entirely different if it's expected.
|
Ivan:
[57:07]
| Yeah. It was a totally—by the way, this is the worst thing. That was like the last year that I'm pretty sure that I got a tax refund, okay, where I wound up, I was supposed to get a tax refund of a couple of thousand dollars, but because I got assessed those $15,000, they basically kept the tax refund and told me, hey, good news, you applied $3,000 to the $15,000, now you still owe us $12,000. I was not amused.
|
Sam:
[57:37]
| Okay.
|
Ivan:
[57:38]
| All right. Let's move on.
|
Sam:
[57:40]
| So, yes. I was going to bring up a topic, and you just brought up mail, and then we went from there. So, okay. Okay. The actual thing that I was going to bring up for this topic, we had a Supreme Court tariff ruling. Hey! Let me just say, on our prediction show, our immediate prediction, we both agreed on this, was that the Supreme Court would rule against Trump, but they would do so in a way where he still had plenty of other avenues, and so basically it wouldn't disrupt him too much. From what I understand, and I have not read the 160-page ruling, but from what I understand, they were a bit more aggressive than that. in that there are still avenues open for Trump.
|
Ivan:
[58:31]
| As we have been recording. Okay, by the way, Trump is trying to overcome this. And as we have been recording, okay, yesterday, right after the thing, he announced the new 10% tariff that, by the way, the way that the authority is using, it's going to get struck down again. It's just the way he's trying to do it. But by the way, he just boosted it to 15% already.
|
Sam:
[58:54]
| Yes, I saw that. And after, like, the thing is, if it has to go through court again, okay, guess what? That's another year. Yeah. Almost a year.
|
Ivan:
[59:04]
| Well, I don't know.
|
Sam:
[59:05]
| I mean, this took, like, six months this time? Six months?
|
Ivan:
[59:08]
| Yeah. I don't think it's—and here's the thing, because it's related to a court order that already happened. Here's where he gets into a problem. It doesn't take as long this time, because there is a SCOTUS decision that was recently made. And if this goes against that SCOTUS decision, then it gets struck down, and it gets struck down in a way that he doesn't get to keep doing it until it goes back to SCOTUS, specifically if it goes against that decision. So this gets killed even faster because of how SCOTUS wrote the decision.
|
Sam:
[59:43]
| Yeah. Now, SCOTUS let the tariffs stay in place until they decided this time. And what you're basically saying is, next time around, they may not.
|
Ivan:
[59:53]
| No, it's not that they may not. It's that there is already, exactly, it's right. Before, they appealed to let it stay in place until, yes, but here's the reality. They already ruled on it. So there isn't like this going around until we rule on it.
|
Sam:
[1:00:08]
| Well, as you said, they're using a different authority. However, SCOTUS's opinion.
|
Ivan:
[1:00:15]
| The decision specifically stated that he couldn't circumvent it in all of these fucking ways that he's been talking about. That basically you need to go to fucking Congress. Right.
|
Sam:
[1:00:28]
| I mean, that's the bottom line, is that they were wider in this decision than they could have been. They could have very narrowly said, you can't use this one authority, and that's it. They did say that, but in a lot of the commentary that surrounded it, they were more general. They were like, no, tariffs are a power of Congress. Tariffs are a power of Congress. You can't just do this. And so now, as you said, that doesn't stop him from trying. And he's clearly trying. And we'll see what happens. Now, the one thing that did not— The one authority.
|
Ivan:
[1:01:05]
| By the way, wait, wait, hold on a minute, because we're talking about the 15%. The authority that he used right now, here's the bigger problem with the authority he used right now. They specifically say that the tariffs can only last 150 days unless Congress approves it. That's the authority that he used right now. So, this thing is stupid, okay? He can't hold them in place anyway.
|
Sam:
[1:01:28]
| Now, could he let them lapse on day 150 and on day 152 just start them again for a new 150th?
|
Ivan:
[1:01:37]
| How do you think, basically, when SCOTUS already told him that he needs to get tax authority, how do you think that's going to fly? Well, as long as— But given how he got slapped down hard on this, this is a pretty hard slap down on Trump. And he showed that he got slapped down. He was pissed.
|
Sam:
[1:01:59]
| Well, and here's the one thing that Trump did refrain from just saying, well, fuck him, I'm going to keep him going anyway, which is one response he could have made that would have caused even more trouble. But he did not do that.
|
Ivan:
[1:02:17]
| The thing is that he could have attempted to do that. But, you know, what would happen a lot of times, because a lot of these things need to go to shippers or whatever, this would have created utter chaos. Because a lot of people that actually work on having to collect tariffs in order to do that, they would say, fuck, no, I got a court order that says here I can't collect them. What the fuck am I doing? It would utterly create complete chaos if that was his approach.
|
Sam:
[1:02:40]
| Well, like I said, he refrained from doing that. And he could have done that. And yes, it would have caused chaos. But as we have seen over and over again, Trump does chaos.
|
Ivan:
[1:02:54]
| I said, here's, well, here's, hey, bring on the fucking chaos right now. Because you know what? None of this is helping the Republicans. You know, we're less than how many months away now from a midterm? Ten months? And, you know, he is doing everything in his power to make sure that they lose everything. I mean, he is making, he is doing everything in his power to make sure they lose both the Senate and the House. Because, I mean, look, layoffs last month were at the worst level they've been. That's why originally the tariffs, I'd frame more an economy. Layoffs last month, the last couple of months, have been the worst they've been since the Great Recession.
|
Sam:
[1:03:43]
| Okay.
|
Ivan:
[1:03:45]
| Economic growth last quarter was terrible. Okay.
|
Sam:
[1:03:48]
| I thought it was the best ever, Yvonne.
|
Ivan:
[1:03:50]
| Uh-huh.
|
Sam:
[1:03:51]
| Didn't we have a number that said it was the best?
|
Ivan:
[1:03:53]
| 1.5%. And by the way, again, again, that's 1.5% thinking that they massaged the number. I'm pretty sure that that was actually, when it gets adjusted, it's going to get adjusted downward.
|
Sam:
[1:04:04]
| You're still talking jobs.
|
Ivan:
[1:04:05]
| No, no, no, the economy.
|
Sam:
[1:04:06]
| GDP? GDP?
|
Ivan:
[1:04:08]
| Yeah, the 1.5. I guarantee, those numbers always also get revised as well.
|
Sam:
[1:04:12]
| What was the number that we talked about last week that was like, they're saying it was the best in forever?
|
Ivan:
[1:04:18]
| The new jobs. New jobs, which they claim that 150,000 jobs were created. But the reality is that the jobs reports for the last year had been revised down almost every single one, two thirds down. Which brought job creation to, I mean, a minimal number. It's been one of the worst job creation numbers we've had in, I don't, fuck, a long, long time.
|
Sam:
[1:04:43]
| Right.
|
Ivan:
[1:04:44]
| Probably since the Great Recession again. I mean, all these numbers are bad. There was one that I shared in terms of loan delinquencies, late, you know, lates, including even for affluent people that are at distress, have risen to the worst levels that we've seen in many, many years as well. So you've got, I mean, every fucking economic indicator right now sucks, except a couple of things. One is the stock market, okay, all right? The other one is any economic statistic that Trump can manipulate. Now, the stock market, there's a couple of things. Remember something. Most big American companies are global multinationals, not just U.S.-based. The economy outside the U.S. is actually, in many places, doing better than in the U.S..
|
Sam:
[1:05:47]
| Okay?
|
Ivan:
[1:05:48]
| And so stock prices reflect, you know, not just U.S. economic activity. So that influences that. So the stock market is not a good indicator of that, but also, This entire thing is we were talking about AI earlier. If you strip out from the Standard & Poor's index, AI, the gain over the last couple of years, I can't remember the range that I looked at, but I shared it on Slack, went from 72% down to 32%. Basically, two-thirds of the growth in the stock market has been tied to the AI boom, Which means that the rest of the economy is doing like shit.
|
Sam:
[1:06:35]
| Well, still up.
|
Ivan:
[1:06:39]
| Yeah, but it's not doing well.
|
Sam:
[1:06:44]
| Okay.
|
Ivan:
[1:06:45]
| Not, you know.
|
Ivan:
[1:06:50]
| It's up, but it's not, you know. Here is the stat. Over the last three years, the S&P 500 is up 76%. The XAI index is only up 32% the same time period. Okay? So that's like, instead of a 25% return every year, only 10. Now, 10 is a good number, by the way. Don't get me wrong. But it's not that. Plus, we know that that was three years. They didn't publish. I wanted to see if they had like a like a chart of the movement over the three years and I have not seen it I tried to look it up but I didn't see it but, A lot of these companies that are the smaller companies in the index are the ones that are getting hammered by the tariffs, by inflation, by, you know, retail sales in December. That was also another number that came in. They were bad. They were flat. They didn't grow. So the rest of these companies are the ones that are getting hammered by this. This is not good. And, you know, you combine the shitty economy. I mean, you combine the fact that people, you know, listen, you asked, if you did the old Reagan question, are you better off now than you were a year ago? The resounding answer is a fuck no.
|
Ivan:
[1:08:15]
| Every chart shows you that everybody is doing, you know, almost everybody's doing worse.
|
Sam:
[1:08:22]
| This ties to what people have been talking about, about the whole K-shaped economy and all that as well.
|
Ivan:
[1:08:27]
| Yes.
|
Sam:
[1:08:28]
| In terms of how, if you look at the top few percent in terms of wealth and income, they're doing great.
|
Ivan:
[1:08:37]
| Yeah.
|
Sam:
[1:08:38]
| They're doing great. But if you get beyond like the top five to 10 percent, people are struggling. And the further down you go in the economic ranks, the worse people are doing.
|
Ivan:
[1:08:52]
| But listen, even the numbers and the debt distress that I shared, it showed how this is starting to hit higher income people. Exactly. It's been creeping up on that scale. OK, and that's that's the that's the thing that is an impact right now, how that impact is just moving up. And I'm actually looking for it because I actually have to I've ran out. I keep running out of free Bloomberg articles to share and I have to PDF it and share it. So I, but, but there, there's a chart. Here we go. It's, this is credit card. It was related to credit cards and delinquencies and an article. The headline was a little bit misleading because it was talking about, about points, you know, earning and credit cards and so forth and how many people are, are addicted to it. But inside, but inside that in, in, in the article, there was a section over here where they were talking about, about.
|
Ivan:
[1:09:46]
| You know, the faults, okay? And it said, and they were talking about swipe fees and other fees for credit card and how, you know, President Trump had been pushing for lower interest rates for credit cards. And so the thing is that they said that the share of credit card loans that were at least 90 days delinquent rose to 12.7%. The most since the first quarter of 2011, the share of auto loans and serious delinquency climbed 5.2%, just shy of the record reached in 2010. I mean, Sam, this is, these are, I mean, this is post-fucking, you know, massive meltdown crash numbers that we're reaching right now.
|
Sam:
[1:10:33]
| Okay?
|
Ivan:
[1:10:35]
| These completely contradict, you know, what the administration keeps trying to say about the fucking economy, okay? Also, by the way, that article, it talked about the fact that AI hasn't killed any jobs yet. OK, so and that's totally true, that that's just bullshit right now that people are making assumptions that, you know, like I said, adoption is so bad. So but but still, Sam, you can't be say the economy is not thriving when you're reaching those kind of delinquency levels on credit cards and auto loans. OK, people are doing bad. And this administration has been hell-bent on making them do worse. If you look at the chart itself for the delinquencies, which is on page four of it, the massive spike since Trump got elected is insane. It literally, Trump in office and those delinquencies spiked. Why was that? Sam, do you know one of the biggest things that they did that fucked everybody when Trump came in?
|
Sam:
[1:11:39]
| Well, we talked about this last week, school loans.
|
Ivan:
[1:11:42]
| That's right! He fucked everybody with that. That hammered so many people. And so people are pissed, man. I don't, you know, just... And this whole tariff thing... By the way, here's the thing. Somebody mentioned yesterday. Could Trump, given how bad the economy is, could the Republicans take a gift and just have SCOTUS bail them out? But no! Trump is hell-bent on not even just taking a fucking W, okay? Because he sees everything through his lens that makes everything look great. It's all personal.
|
Sam:
[1:12:26]
| It's all about him.
|
Ivan:
[1:12:27]
| It's all about him.
|
Sam:
[1:12:29]
| And anyone going against him is against him, and that's all that matters.
|
Ivan:
[1:12:34]
| But look, given that he is making more money than ever, he is getting richer than ever, how could this be bad? You know, this is great. This is great! I mean, he's, he's, he's, he's making out big time. By the way, I checked the, but anyway, talking about cryptocurrencies crashing as well, you know, because so many, you know, because outside of Bitcoin falling like 40, 50%, you know, all the, all the Donald Trump, all the Trump family tied coins. Okay.
|
Sam:
[1:13:07]
| All of those.
|
Ivan:
[1:13:08]
| I saw a chart recently.
|
Sam:
[1:13:09]
| Okay.
|
Ivan:
[1:13:09]
| They're doing, they're doing.
|
Sam:
[1:13:11]
| Wait.
|
Ivan:
[1:13:12]
| Yeah.
|
Sam:
[1:13:12]
| I can't believe that.
|
Ivan:
[1:13:14]
| They're all down like 95. 95%.
|
Sam:
[1:13:16]
| Oh, man. There goes my life savings.
|
Ivan:
[1:13:20]
| You're fucked. What am I going to tell you? You know, I'm going to have to fucking like shake my ass and do some something. Try at least anyway. 95% Sam. 95 fucking percent. Or more. Some are 99% I saw. They were just wiped out. They just cashed out. Fuck you. Here you go. Here's your shit coin.
|
Sam:
[1:13:50]
| How's DJT?
|
Ivan:
[1:13:52]
| It's also down like near its lows.
|
Sam:
[1:13:56]
| Okay.
|
Ivan:
[1:13:57]
| Under $10. It was at 60 something. It's down to like under $10. So also that one is in the crapper.
|
Sam:
[1:14:04]
| Okay. Any other tariff and or economy stuff to get out before we take one more break? And then I have one more thing I want to make sure to, a couple of more things to note. no no let's.
|
Ivan:
[1:14:14]
| Go let's go because we got we got we got yeah we got to go.
|
Sam:
[1:14:16]
| Yeah i got about 15 minutes before i have to like get in a car so let's go somewhere all right let's go let's go yeah okay break time yeah very very as usual very eloquently i i am the master of eloquence here we go, Okay. That's the whole thing. That's the shortest break we have right now. You enjoyed that?
|
Ivan:
[1:15:01]
| Very good, Sam. Yes, excellent. Okay.
|
Sam:
[1:15:03]
| We have used that one before. It's not like it's a new one, but yes.
|
Ivan:
[1:15:07]
| Well, I mean, I hear it every time and I still laugh anyway.
|
Sam:
[1:15:11]
| Okay, so the one thing I wanted to mention is, I mean, we have one very notable case that's made the news, but just more generally, new investigations that actually are being prompted by the Epstein files. Now, in terms of there actually being consequences and things happening, now, almost all of the consequences that have happened from the things that have been released in the last month or so have been overseas. The latest is, of course, Prince Andrew was just arrested, not for sex trafficking or anything. Wait, wait. Yes?
|
Ivan:
[1:15:48]
| Andrew.
|
Sam:
[1:15:49]
| Yeah, no longer. Andrew Windsor Montbatten, whatever his full name.
|
Ivan:
[1:15:54]
| Whatever, yeah.
|
Sam:
[1:15:55]
| Because he's no longer a prince. Ants.
|
Ivan:
[1:15:57]
| Right.
|
Sam:
[1:15:58]
| Yes. But he was just arrested not for sex trafficking, but for apparently passing confidential information to Epstein. years ago, that he had access to as part of his royal duties. Like economic information of some sort, right, Yvonne? Something like that.
|
Ivan:
[1:16:20]
| But actually, I didn't delve that much into the charge. I know it was something related to some public act of malfeasance, but I actually had not read that that was the specific charge. So that's interesting.
|
Sam:
[1:16:34]
| Yeah, no, I didn't read the details, But I believe it was passing confidential economic-related data to Epstein in advance of its public release was basically what he was doing. Now, of course, the questions that rise off this are like, now why exactly was he sharing that information? Was there some sort of quid pro quo? Was he being blackmailed? What was going on? And we aren't at that stage of things yet. Did he just like, did he just make a habit of passing out information like this to all his friends, you know, or whatever? Anyway, that's the charge that's against him. But also several other people in UK government have been forced to resign based on revelations of their various contacts with Epstein, etc. And this is one of the key questions as this stuff has been released that I've mentioned on this show over and over again is like, look, there are all kinds of crazy accusations in the files. I mean, some of them, I believe some of like some of them, I don't necessarily believe. Like, I believe there's something in there about George H.W. Bush engaging in cannibalism.
|
Sam:
[1:17:45]
| Yeah, I'm not sure I buy that one. But on the other hand, just to be clear, in the UK, if you remember, which prime minister was it? David Cameron or whatever? The story came out about him in college, like having sex with a pig, with a dead pig's head to be specific. And it turned out to be true. He admitted it. Okay? So like, at this point.
|
Ivan:
[1:18:09]
| What the f- Gosh, I must have erased this from my memory banks.
|
Sam:
[1:18:15]
| So it was a college initiation hazing kind of thing. He had to like, they brought a dead pig head and he had to like.
|
Ivan:
[1:18:27]
| No wonder I never joined a fraternity. What the fuck is wrong with these idiots?
|
Sam:
[1:18:32]
| So my point is, like, you would hear that story and be like, there's no fucking way. That's ridiculous. That didn't happen. And it turns out it was true. OK, so this I don't know. But, you know, when I hear the George H.W. Bush cannibalism story, I'm like, come on. Really? but a lot of you know but again the pig the pig happened so, anyway but look but there are a lot of things in there that seem to be plausible but the key is that it looks like most of them were not seriously investigated or at least if they're but.
|
Ivan:
[1:19:17]
| There are also a whole bunch in there that basically corroborate.
|
Sam:
[1:19:22]
| Other things that had been publicly reported that we knew that were.
|
Ivan:
[1:19:28]
| Accusations that all of a sudden got swept under rug or something.
|
Sam:
[1:19:32]
| Or whatever. And I think that's like again, I keep coming back to this. Yes, the underlying crimes are of course horrific, but, It's also a really huge scandal how they weren't taken seriously and they weren't investigated and they were swept under the rug and which of these deserve follow-up investigations, even if statutes of limitation have passed. And one of the things is obviously the DOJ is not going to do jack. We know that. But are there— Actually.
|
Ivan:
[1:20:04]
| My whole thing was like I was wondering when the preemptive pardons were going to be issued.
|
Sam:
[1:20:09]
| That's true for federal crimes. But the other question is, are there things that state and local authorities could be doing?
|
Ivan:
[1:20:16]
| Sure as hell hope so.
|
Sam:
[1:20:17]
| And one of the things that was reported is that this week there is an investigation kicking off in New Mexico. Because there was stuff in the files about accusations of people being killed and buried on a specific piece of property. So they're actually going to go dig up the property and see if they can find some bodies. You know, and maybe maybe the whole thing is bullshit and they find absolutely nothing, but at least they're looking. And I think that's the kind of thing that needs to be kicking off all over the places. OK, the feds aren't going to do it there. Like you said, there may be preemptive pardons. State and local authorities need to step up in places where these accusations are happening. There were accusations in the files about things that happened in Michigan. Start taking a look. you know right you know and and various other ones like wherever there's some other authority that potentially could be involved now again the statute of limitations is going to hurt a lot of things a lot of these crimes in question not all of them some of them have no statute of limitations but, But some of them, you know, they're just going to say, like, yeah, maybe this happened, but it was 30 years ago. There's nothing we can do at this point. So, you know, so you have to have some sort of nexus to either something with no statute of limitation or something current.
|
Sam:
[1:21:47]
| But any investigative authority that potentially could needs to start looking into that. And I think one of the Congress people is also really pushing hard. the Democratic congresspeople, is still looking hard at, okay, let's dig into the financials here.
|
Ivan:
[1:22:03]
| Too. Wait, not the Republicans? No, no, wait, no. Really?
|
Sam:
[1:22:05]
| Well, there are a few Republicans. Just to be clear, there are a few Republicans who've been pushing hard on this, too.
|
Ivan:
[1:22:11]
| There are a few Republicans that have been pushing hard on this.
|
Sam:
[1:22:13]
| Most prominently, Massey, but we've had a few others. Nancy Mace, MTG, before she left. There are a few others. So there have been a handful of Republicans that have been all in on this as well. But the push to look at the financials, too, of like, OK, what exactly was going on with the ins and outs of money into Epstein? And did it make sense from a point of view that was not people trying to pay him off or whatever? um right and actually one of the resignations we have had in the u.s was uh what's her name which company what one of the banks there was an executive at one of the banks who a female executive at one of the banks who has resigned because she was because of her involvement with epstein specific and like amongst other things she was one of only three people epstein called when he was arrested for advice on what to do, which she happily gave.
|
Ivan:
[1:23:15]
| I remember, I see the picture in my head. It was at Goldman Sachs.
|
Sam:
[1:23:18]
| It was Goldman Sachs.
|
Ivan:
[1:23:19]
| It was, yeah, it was a general counsel at Goldman Sachs.
|
Sam:
[1:23:23]
| Right. And so, I don't know. The only thing I'm saying is, I am heartened by the developments over the last couple weeks of actual further investigations being kicked off, of people having things actually happen to them, and that this isn't going away yet, as much as Trump would like it to.
|
Ivan:
[1:23:48]
| But Sam, Trump said he was exonerated.
|
Sam:
[1:23:51]
| Oh, yes.
|
Ivan:
[1:23:52]
| By the files. He's exonerated. What are you talking about? He's been exonerated.
|
Sam:
[1:23:56]
| And frankly, I have— He's exonerated.
|
Ivan:
[1:23:59]
| I think he said he was exonerated thousands of times or something like that.
|
Sam:
[1:24:03]
| Thousands of times. Apparently, his name appears more than anybody else's in the whole thing, other than Epstein himself. You know, it's like millions of occurrences in the redacted stuff. When the Congress people got to look at the unredacted version and search on his name, it was like 1.5 million references or something like that. Now, they could all be innocent, right? But again, this is one of the places where there were more accusations in the Epstein files that get added to all the accusations we'd heard anyway about him over the years, including, yeah, anyway, look, even if nothing touches Trump, this clearly has not been properly investigated and properly prosecuted over the years.
|
Ivan:
[1:24:54]
| The only reason, let me tell you something. The only reason, you're saying it doesn't touch Trump.
|
Sam:
[1:24:58]
| No, I said even if it doesn't touch Trump, there's clearly all kinds of other stuff.
|
Ivan:
[1:25:03]
| No, no, no, no, no, no, no, but let's be clear. The stuff in there about Trump is damning.
|
Sam:
[1:25:09]
| Yeah.
|
Ivan:
[1:25:09]
| There are really serious accusations in there against Trump about rape, other things. because, I mean, you know, that basically document that he was a liar about anything that he said about his relationship with Epstein is all bullshit, okay? Everything that he has said before about it is complete and utter bullshit. That it shows that this thing that him supposedly throw him out of Mar-a-Lago and get him rid of or whatever is also bullshit. All of it, that anything that he has talked about this is a complete lie. And there are serious accusations in there that are documented, that back up things that we had heard publicly from other sources that showed that he had committed rape. But, like you said, this is going to be federally prosecuted.
|
Sam:
[1:26:01]
| As well as overage. Both.
|
Ivan:
[1:26:03]
| Yes.
|
Sam:
[1:26:03]
| Both.
|
Ivan:
[1:26:05]
| But, you know, Pam Bondi's going to get right on that, right?
|
Sam:
[1:26:08]
| Oh, yes. Yes, of course. Yes.
|
Ivan:
[1:26:12]
| I mean, this is like brutally damning against him. I don't, you know.
|
Sam:
[1:26:18]
| But he keeps saying that it's. A few months ago, there was a picture floating around of Pam Bondi, Pam Bondi meeting Donald Trump when she was a teenager. And so it's like, oh, maybe she was one of them. You know, honestly, there's no evidence of that.
|
Ivan:
[1:26:34]
| But, you know, but wait, but would it surprise you?
|
Sam:
[1:26:37]
| No, nothing would surprise anybody at this point. Okay. With that, I think it's time to wrap things up. Do-do-do. Okay.
|
Ivan:
[1:26:48]
| Do-do-do.
|
Sam:
[1:26:49]
| So, first, before I get to my usual stuff, I will mention, you know, Yvonne made a couple references to Robin Ladder. I mentioned last week that I was launching the first Test Robins after recording the show. I did that last Sunday, and I just want to thank everybody who has actually joined and participated and helped me test. As of right now, there are 23 users of the thing in four different Robins, three I created, one that Yvonne created. I'm probably going to launch some additional test Robins tomorrow, maybe before this podcast even gets out with some additional groups with some overlap with the existing ones. But and yeah, so it's working well. I've made a bunch of changes and fixes and updates based on feedback that I've had from people so far. If anybody out there is interested in joining and hasn't already gotten an invite from me and wants one, just contact me. If you go to robinletter.com, there's an email at the bottom. You can use that. Send me a note saying that you'd like to be included. So far, I got two Robins that are my relatives. I've got one Robin that's people who've been active on the Curmudgeon's Corner Slack, but.
|
Sam:
[1:28:02]
| And there's and there's still three outstanding invites for the Curmudgeon's Corner Slack where I sent out an invite but the person hasn't accepted yet but, yeah and I and Yvonne made one of some of our Pittsburgh friends from when we were in college and yeah if you get it but.
|
Ivan:
[1:28:19]
| There's a couple missing I don't have their emails I gotta I didn't have like I didn't have handy Pete.
|
Sam:
[1:28:24]
| Well the other the other thing Yvonne is that you sort of stepped on like one of the test Robins that I was gonna make this coming tomorrow was going to be people who knew me from college. So it's going to be the people you have plus more. So I'll get them in that one anyway. But you can keep the smaller one and add more people to it if you want. But I've got one that's...
|
Ivan:
[1:28:45]
| No, no, no. If you're going to do that, then fine.
|
Sam:
[1:28:47]
| I probably got one with like 10 people at least already.
|
Ivan:
[1:28:50]
| Oh, no, no. Okay, okay.
|
Sam:
[1:28:52]
| So including all the ones you just mentioned. So I'll probably set that up tomorrow. Bro. Yeah, I got one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine. I got nine people on my CMU list, two of which you don't even know, Yvonne, that are people I knew from CMU that you don't.
|
Ivan:
[1:29:10]
| That I never met? I mean, really?
|
Sam:
[1:29:12]
| That you never met? Yeah, they're people that I- Or even.
|
Ivan:
[1:29:14]
| Heard of them?
|
Sam:
[1:29:16]
| Bob K. and Vernon H..
|
Ivan:
[1:29:19]
| Okay. Definitely. I don't. Okay.
|
Sam:
[1:29:21]
| See, these are, these are both people that I knew from before CMU who also went to CMU.
|
Ivan:
[1:29:27]
| Ah, okay. All right.
|
Sam:
[1:29:29]
| So, but anyway, yeah, I'll, I'll, I'll send that out. And, and I got one for, for people from, from a couple of jobs I had before. I, I, I was gonna, I, I want to make one from people I knew from high school too, but so far I have only have one person who's responded to me for that one. And I might send out another notice asking for more people. Because the other thing I noticed, I posted on Facebook yesterday with a, hey, everybody, I launched this new thing. I'm looking for volunteers, blah, blah, blah. And I included the Robin Letter logo. It made the Robin Letter logo real big. But the way Facebook does things these days is it prefers images. So it had the big image of the stupid Robin logo for Robin Letter. and it had like five words from the thing i wrote followed by more dot dot dot so like i might make a new version of the post that's mainly an image and repost it to ask for more people and and i also said you know send me an email because i need an email to invite you if you want it and there are a bunch of people who reacted to that post but didn't send me an email so i'm going to contact them individually and say like did you actually want to anyway but getting distracted it anyway it's going well if you are interested and you're not already in uh toss me a quick email and let me know i'll make sure you get invited to a test robin once you're in you can also make your own uh just like yvonne did okay and now for the regular end of the show.
|
Sam:
[1:30:59]
| Go to curmudgeon-corner.com. You can find all the ways to contact us. You can find our archives. You can find transcripts. You can find all of that kind of stuff. It's great fun. It's amazing. It's good. It's whatever, right? And as well, you can find our link to our Patreon where you can give us cash money at various levels of monthly contribution. We will mention you on the show. We will ring a bell. We will send you a postcard. We will send you a mug, all of that kind of stuff. And importantly, at $2 a month or more, or if you just ask, we will invite you to our Curbudgeons Corner Slack where Yvonne and I and a bunch of people are chatting throughout the week and sharing links and all that kind of stuff. And yeah, so Yvonne, do you have a highlight from the Slack today?
|
Ivan:
[1:31:45]
| Well, I kept, I have been sharing that for some reason, look, I'm not poor. Okay. But I am not Rolls Royce rich. Okay. I don't understand why the fuck the algorithm keeps thinking I'm interested in buying, uh, Bentleys, Rolls Royces, whatever the fuck. So, you know, I keep being shown ads to buy certified pre-owned, uh, uh, vehicles. And these are all, so another listing, I shared one earlier of a Bentley that had like 1,500 miles and it's worth three foot, you know, I don't know, some stupid amount. This week, okay, my feature was 2025 Rolls-Royce Spectre, which is an electric car, okay? By the way, I don't know if you know that Rolls-Royce makes this huge electric coupe, okay? It's, people have reviewed it, say it's incredible, it's lovely, I mean, it's quiet, it's whatever.
|
Ivan:
[1:32:41]
| It's used, Sam, used. The price of the listing, if you looked in, list price, $432,888. Plus, by the way, they do charge on top of that, a $1,199 dealer service charge and a $498 electric filing fee and a license charge of $450. Bringing the total to a very reasonable $434,935. dollars for a used 2025 with 1,648 miles. It does have an electric range of 329 miles, Sam. It's, you know, I, you know, I did say, you know, um, you know, seems very reasonable. I don't know. What do you think? Especially in this economy? I think, you know, this is the kind of purchases I should be looking for.
|
Sam:
[1:33:34]
| I think you need at least three.
|
Ivan:
[1:33:36]
| Oh, three. Oh, so I'm getting a fleet. Oh, okay. I'll get on that right away. I'll make it our corporate fleet.
|
Sam:
[1:33:46]
| Yes.
|
Ivan:
[1:33:46]
| I mean, they're electric at least, so they're, you know, good for the environment in some way.
|
Sam:
[1:33:50]
| In some way.
|
Ivan:
[1:33:51]
| If we keep them for like 15 years or something, probably, yeah.
|
Sam:
[1:33:56]
| That's important. And, you know, use them often.
|
Ivan:
[1:34:00]
| And you, yeah.
|
Sam:
[1:34:01]
| Use them often.
|
Ivan:
[1:34:02]
| So that's it. That's all I got.
|
Sam:
[1:34:04]
| Different colors. You should get different colors.
|
Ivan:
[1:34:06]
| Ah, different colors. Yes, we've got to get different colors, of course, yes.
|
Sam:
[1:34:08]
| None of these bland gray and white colors, too. I want bright, vibrant colors.
|
Ivan:
[1:34:14]
| Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I like this, yeah.
|
Sam:
[1:34:17]
| You know, I'll take mine wrapped. Get a yellow. I'll take mine wrapped with the Abblesmay logo.
|
Ivan:
[1:34:21]
| That sounds like a great idea. You know, I'll have one wrapped with a Robin Letter logo.
|
Sam:
[1:34:28]
| Okay, there you go.
|
Ivan:
[1:34:28]
| And then I'll have another one with the Abblesmay logo.
|
Sam:
[1:34:30]
| Yep.
|
Ivan:
[1:34:31]
| And then I'll have another one with a Weeki of the Day logo.
|
Sam:
[1:34:34]
| And then one with the curmudgeon's corner thing, which is just our faces.
|
Ivan:
[1:34:39]
| Right. Wait, I'm sure people love, I'm sure people love, let's have them picked up at the airport with the car with our faces plastered on it. I'm sure people will love that.
|
Sam:
[1:34:52]
| Yes, exactly.
|
Ivan:
[1:34:53]
| Sounds like a great, I think we got this all worked out. Okay, great. I'll get on that right away.
|
Sam:
[1:34:57]
| Yeah, and I realized I forgot with my Robin Letter spiel to give at least the one sentence what the hell it is. It's an alternative to social media where you can just keep in touch with your friends and, you know, back to what social media was supposed to be. You go in order. You take turns. For more, go to the site, robinletter.com. It'll tell you more. And Yvonne's made me a nice little presentation about it. It's fun. Anyway, that's it. We're out of here. Thank you for everybody. Stay safe. Have fun. Blah, blah, blah. I'm going to hop in the car in just a minute and head to that town hall for my wife. And her seatmate is also going to be there, I think.
|
Ivan:
[1:35:36]
| Start hauling.
|
Sam:
[1:35:37]
| Start hauling.
|
Ivan:
[1:35:38]
| Start hauling.
|
Sam:
[1:35:38]
| Yeah, like, sometimes at these things, I help bring all the food and set it all out. They've got other people helping with that, so I'm just doing this. I'm just showing up and listening.
|
Ivan:
[1:35:49]
| You're just the eye candy, baby.
|
Sam:
[1:35:52]
| I'm the eye candy I'm there for moral support I'm I'm there to listen but I don't have anything I have to do which is a plus like I mean I don't I don't mind helping out when I need to help out but I mean.
|
Ivan:
[1:36:07]
| Well you don't have to do anything it's better.
|
Sam:
[1:36:08]
| Exactly I can just uh I can just go and listen and you know as usual at these things like they're gonna be there are gonna be some people with with with night yeah they're gonna be some friendly people and they're gonna be some hostile people they're like you know why the hell are you doing xyz you're screwing us and blah blah blah and you know because there always are you know it's too.
|
Ivan:
[1:36:31]
| Bad i can't be there to go tell them to go fuck.
|
Sam:
[1:36:32]
| Themselves yeah fuck.
|
Ivan:
[1:36:33]
| You you stupid asshole the fuck out of here.
|
Sam:
[1:36:36]
| You know that's the nature of town halls you get people asking questions about their concerns and some Some people like what you're doing and some people don't like what you're doing and you have that dialogue and it's good. It's the way you keep in touch with what people care about.
|
Ivan:
[1:36:50]
| As long as it's dialogue, it's good. Yeah.
|
Sam:
[1:36:52]
| Yeah. So anyway, that's that. I'm heading out. Thanks, everybody. Here's the outro. Goodbye.
|
Ivan:
[1:36:57]
| Bye.
|
Sam:
[1:37:28]
| Okay, that's it. I'm in. Stop. Later, Yvonne.
|
Ivan:
[1:37:32]
| Stop. Stop. Stop!
| |
|
