Automated Transcript
Sam:
[0:00]
| Hello, Yvonne.
|
Ivan:
[0:01]
| Hello.
|
Sam:
[0:03]
| Okay. So let me make sure the live stream's all going, going and stuff, stuff. And here we go. That's going. Now we'll check this thing. Boo, boo, boo, boo, boo.
|
Ivan:
[0:18]
| La, la, la. No, it's.
|
Sam:
[0:21]
| Okay. Let's just take this one. And. Ah. Okay. And actually this is here there we go blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah okay ready yvonne ready to go ready to go i'm live here comes the intro, welcome to curmudgeon's corner for saturday november 23rd 2024 it is just after 1830 utc as we're starting to record i'm sam entry von boas here hello yvonne hello 13 30 18 30 Didn't I say 18?
|
Ivan:
[1:24]
| It sounded like 13 for some reason, but okay. Yeah.
|
Sam:
[1:27]
| It's 18.
|
Ivan:
[1:28]
| Okay.
|
Sam:
[1:28]
| It's 18.
|
Ivan:
[1:29]
| I, I, I, my ears are, I, anyway.
|
Sam:
[1:32]
| Need to start getting those little assistant things. You know, you know, the, the Apple has now added.
|
Ivan:
[1:37]
| I know.
|
Sam:
[1:38]
| Earring aid features to the AirPods. And so, you know.
|
Ivan:
[1:41]
| Man, no, I mean, I may need to mow the hair and the ears or something like that. I don't know.
|
Sam:
[1:44]
| There you go. Now, now.
|
Ivan:
[1:45]
| That is one thing that I can't, you know, I, I don't actually get like, like, I, I know people that that that get really bushy in the ear hair thing and i'm one that look i had to start shaving when i was like 12 okay it was ridiculous okay i mean i i got i mean i had a really ridiculous beard but i don't get that much of it but what i do get i do remove i will say i i i i will i will get rid of that hair you're.
|
Sam:
[2:14]
| Talking ear hair.
|
Ivan:
[2:15]
| Yes yes ear hair you know yeah so i i do get rid of that and i'll clean my ears regularly good.
|
Sam:
[2:24]
| For you i guess yep.
|
Ivan:
[2:26]
| Well i mean with proper methodology.
|
Sam:
[2:28]
| You're not just.
|
Ivan:
[2:29]
| Showing proper method yeah yeah no no no with proper method well here's one thing i i realized especially wearing using like because i i use earbuds regularly right uh-huh look i mean you listen if you don't keep your ears clean i've sometimes you know when i haven't cleaned my ears i will pull them out they're like oh gosh that's disgusting i'm like no I, not not which doesn't happen regularly but it's happened where i've been like i mean i've been a little bit remiss on that department and all of a sudden i'm like uh you.
|
Sam:
[3:00]
| Right so now before we get any deeper into details of yvonne's earwax um let me just say agenda wise we'll do our usual we'll do a butt first and then you know we'll have a segment where yvonne picks what we talk about and then we'll have a segment where i pick what we're talking about but i was just mentioning to Yvonne right before the actual start of the show.
|
Ivan:
[3:23]
| We don't have a lot on the list.
|
Sam:
[3:24]
| We're kind of light. Like we had the election. We were burnt out by the election. We did talk about election-related stuff anyway last week. But at this point, it's like one of the topics on my potential list is everybody's – lots of people are backing off from news and stuff. I'm not so much.
|
Ivan:
[3:47]
| But a lot of people. I know a lot of people are. Yeah, I mean, it's like, don't even, you know, I don't want to hear it. Just don't even, you know, mention it. Yeah, I know. That's a topic to discuss. Yeah.
|
Sam:
[4:00]
| Yeah. So I don't know. So you want you want to start a but firsty kind of thing?
|
Ivan:
[4:04]
| Well, here's a but first thing that I will I will I will mention. So my wife and son were supposed to travel today for for a few days to visit family in Bogota because there's no school. But I still had work. And I was like, you know, I'm like, look, I'm going to go over there and I'm going to wind up because I've done this before when I've had work. I'm like, look, I'm going to wind up. You guys go do something. And I got to sit in front of the computer anyway because I got to deal with shit. So this doesn't make any sense. You guys go and I'll stay over here, work, and then I'll pick you guys up back at the airport. But the interesting thing that happened is that the date's approaching and we get news that they were going to stay at her aunt's house where also her aunt.
|
Ivan:
[5:02]
| Her cousin has been living there with his wife for a little bit. They actually have a very big house. So it's not like it's not for money reasons. It's like they, you know, they got married and they have a very big house and they're basically splitting it. My mom is, you know, divorced for a long time. So she's single. So they're like, well, you got one side of the house. I got side of the house. This works, you know, and that way, you know, you know, we're all here and they had pregnant. They had a baby. Okay. Not that long ago, less than a year old. And so my wife was going to stay over there because the house is quite big. And Manu went to the house. And the house is quite nice, to be honest. And Manu was like, no, no, I want to stay at that house. I don't want to stay there. No, no, where are you going to take me? No, you're not going to take me to some tiny apartment. No, no, no, that house is awesome. And the house is pretty cool. So all of a sudden, get a call a couple of days and say, hey, his cousins, my wife's cousin's wife's family had come to visit. They had been on a cruise and apparently they all came back sick. Not sure exactly with what.
|
Sam:
[6:06]
| Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, let, let me express my utter shock that people went on a cruise and all came back sick. This is a place where you are all together in a space for an extended period of time. Yeah. Yeah. And, and, and people came home sick. Like, I am shocked beyond belief that this might have happened.
|
Ivan:
[6:32]
| Yeah. And so they came back. A whole bunch of them came back sick. And the baby got sick. Okay. So they took the baby. And the baby got really badly sick. So they took him to the hospital. When they tested the baby, he came back positive for both the flu and COVID.
|
Sam:
[6:49]
| Nice. Together.
|
Ivan:
[6:50]
| Together.
|
Sam:
[6:52]
| Excellent.
|
Ivan:
[6:53]
| So, well, OK, so my wife's like, well, I guess we can't stay there. And then she she talking to her friend, which they were originally going to stay at her place. She's got the flu. And I'm like, OK, so then, well, how about you're going to stay at your aunt's house and her other aunt? OK, she doesn't have the flu, but her daughter is at the hospital and they don't know why she is feeling ill and they're not sure why. And so it was just like.
|
Sam:
[7:26]
| Everyone's sick or everyone else.
|
Ivan:
[7:28]
| Everyone is sick. And so the thing is, Manu was really, really, really, really, really, really excited about, you know, getting on, you know, he loves airplanes, but go get on the damn plane. And well, I had to break the news to him yesterday that I'm not going to be able to go today. So you know but i did what i what i did is like i i said look one thing is i'm telling him not to go on a plane and have no plan b is terrible because that's that's the thing that i've noticed with him that it's like you will get very upset if you're just telling him well it's canceled we got no no you know no plan b so then he will be very upset so i went i said no no no Look, and my wife's like, look, I can't just tell him I'm not going. I got to figure out what plan B is. I don't know yet what plan B is. So I sat down last night. I'm trying to look at what the plan Bs are. And the one that I finally settled on was, OK, look, let me look at the calendar. Because we had planned already on a trip during the holidays. So I was like, well, we can't move this airplane trip to the holidays. Actually, we haven't been, amazingly enough, Sam, we haven't been to Disney since June.
|
Sam:
[8:43]
| OK. I was about to say, let me guess, you're going to Disney?
|
Ivan:
[8:48]
| No, no, no.
|
Sam:
[8:49]
| I'm like, no, he's not going to mention he's going to Disney.
|
Ivan:
[8:51]
| No, no, no.
|
Sam:
[8:52]
| He goes to Disney all the time.
|
Ivan:
[8:53]
| No, no, no. But we haven't been to Disney since June, so we had already booked that for the holidays. That was already booked. And I'm like, well, we're not going to fly to Orlando, okay? All right? That makes no sense, okay? You know, so then I looked. I'm like, okay, but that was going to be after Christmas, okay? We're going to go for New Year's? No, no, no, no, no, no. What I did is I rebooked the airline tickets for them to go before Christmas, like to go from the 19th through the 23rd, because this is going to be a short trip anyway, for them to go over there and to go before Christmas to hang out for a few days. Then you come back, we spend Christmas here, and then we'll go.
|
Sam:
[9:35]
| So wait, where are you sending them for a few days?
|
Ivan:
[9:37]
| They're going to go back. They're going to go to Bogota because my wife had wanted to visit, but I changed the dates towards December 19 instead of flying now. I was able to find tickets, This stupid trip every time. This is the second time I've rebooked it. The tickets don't have penalties. However, the thing is that if there's a fair difference, you have to pay it.
|
Sam:
[9:59]
| Okay.
|
Ivan:
[10:00]
| Every time I've rebooked it, the price has gone up. And because that's a very busy time, I wound up having to pay a whole bunch of more money. I wound up paying more than the price that I originally paid for the tickets. For them to be able to fly on those damn days. And I'm like, you gotta be shitting me. This stupid trip, every fucking time they were supposed to go in September, something happened. Okay, we pushed it for Thanksgiving. Now, this weekend, everybody gets sick. No, we gotta push it again. And I'm like, damn it, back then I paid, I don't know how much money because the fare was higher because it was a busier time period. And now that one is even busier than this one. And so therefore, right now, basically the price of these tickets has doubled. Right. It's doubled since I originally bought the damn things.
|
Sam:
[11:05]
| Beautiful, beautiful.
|
Ivan:
[11:07]
| Like, I was like, what? Actually, no, wait, what am I talking? No, not doubled. No, no, more. It's more, it's tripled. Okay okay so anyway i i i this trip is i really hope they fly this time but are.
|
Sam:
[11:25]
| They doing anything else this week to.
|
Ivan:
[11:28]
| Substitute school are.
|
Sam:
[11:31]
| They just staying home or they are they gonna like fill.
|
Ivan:
[11:34]
| That week with.
|
Sam:
[11:35]
| Some sort of activity.
|
Ivan:
[11:36]
| We haven't figured that out yet okay but the thing is that yeah there's no school and so i don't know i don't know what the hell we're gonna do now, okay you know i i don't know well manu you know the the biggest thing was the flying on the plane right we're gonna get him to you know at least he knows that he's gonna fly on the plane on the 19th and when i told him that we changed the dates and everybody was sick he was like oh okay so i just gotta wait more days yeah it's fine and so he's like okay cool no problem so he's you know he took that he took that uh because i came up with a plan he took it well because when my wife at first, tried to tell him that we're not going. She started first with strategy. Oh, we're just not going to tell him that? Oh my god, that kid was breaking up in tears. I mean, he was just... I'm like, okay, okay. Wait, wait, wait, wait. I'm like, wait, wait, wait. Let me try to figure something out. Okay? Because the poor kid was just gonna... He was gonna cry like oh my god he was he was ready to explode crying so i i had to uh, sort something out so what are we going to do the next couple of days i don't know there's no school i don't know stay.
|
Sam:
[12:55]
| Home and watch tv and play video games that's fine right.
|
Ivan:
[12:57]
| That's that that's basically what what i've got on on the agenda now here's one thing that this doesn't convenience me i had planned to do a number a certain to take care of a certain number of things like the next couple of days because there were going to be a way and.
|
Sam:
[13:11]
| That'll be hard.
|
Ivan:
[13:12]
| And now all of a sudden, well, I'm going to have to still, well, one of them involves me getting, going to, to get a, a chest CT scan.
|
Sam:
[13:21]
| Oh, that's fun. Yeah.
|
Ivan:
[13:22]
| Yeah. Woo. Yeah. I know. It's like exciting. Yeah. I scheduled all this exciting stuff to do while they were gone. Yeah. No, it like I'm getting a chest CT and shit like that, whatever. And I'm like, okay, well at least, you know, I don't have to worry about other stuff. I've got like right now, because I was in the hospital last month because some other tests or whatever i have like right now scheduled three different medical tests over the next month, that's exciting i got one that involves me you know drinking this barium thing in order to get contrast ct they tell me it tastes terrible i've never had to do that before you.
|
Sam:
[14:01]
| Know we clearly live up to our curmudgeons title when we talk about our our health issues and maladies.
|
Ivan:
[14:07]
| Well this is the kind of shit here's the thing this is the kind of shit that happens as you know as we are getting into our curmudgeonly years and i gotta tell you something it's gonna get worse i'm sure yeah you know there was like i still always remember this the scene from uh city slickers with uh billy crystal where he went he go they had brought him in you know there's one of these days a career day i guess and he was supposed to talk to the to the little kids about, his work or whatever and his work was boring and there was this one line, you know, he was talking about getting old and he said you know, as we grow old, one thing has happened, it's like, you know, we go and get sent to the hospital and we get an, operation, but in order not to make it sound so bad, we call it a procedure, You know, so, you know, well, you know, that, that's where to step with. We are at that. We are at the procedure step right now.
|
Sam:
[14:59]
| I understand. So is it my turn?
|
Ivan:
[15:02]
| Yes, it's your turn.
|
Sam:
[15:03]
| Okay. Now I'll, I'll just say this upfront. Like I've got, I know we have sort of the butt first and then the more newsy things, but honestly, most of the things on my list at this point are, and this ties to what we were saying about people being sick of news. I'm still like religiously following news, but most of the things I have on my list are not particularly newsy so here's a spider story yeah yes yeah.
|
Ivan:
[15:31]
| I i see that there i i don't remember talking about the spider.
|
Sam:
[15:34]
| Story i i have not said anything to you guys on the slack about the spider story it is it is not it is not something i saw in the news it is something that happened to me so uh people.
|
Ivan:
[15:44]
| Ditching x for blue sky.
|
Sam:
[15:45]
| Blue sky that's another.
|
Ivan:
[15:47]
| One i i i i have to admit that for just because i'm just i mean how many fucking apps do i really want to be.
|
Sam:
[15:55]
| Okay okay let's let's i i am going to pick for my butt first here all right i'm gonna do the spider story.
|
Ivan:
[16:01]
| Okay the spider.
|
Sam:
[16:03]
| Story because i feel like this is spider so here's the thing and i know me and my family will appall certain people by this, But we are kindly to the wildlife, including spiders, okay? We basically leave the bee.
|
Ivan:
[16:24]
| No, no, no, no, no, no, no. Okay, I am somewhat kindly to the wildlife, but I got some lines.
|
Sam:
[16:34]
| So spiders in particular are good. They are helpful creatures.
|
Ivan:
[16:39]
| No, no. They're good outside.
|
Sam:
[16:42]
| Inside not in here unless you've got like poisonous spiders or something which we really don't have in this area i.
|
Ivan:
[16:48]
| Know how do i know how the hell do you know what do you got a little fucking decoder card.
|
Sam:
[16:54]
| Well so the thing is like yes in in this part of the world like spiders that are dangerous to humans are rare we don't live in australia it would be in a different story in australia okay but spiders that are how do.
|
Ivan:
[17:10]
| You know some asshole didn't bring one like you know from Australia, as far as you know. You know, the Everglades right now is overrun with pythons.
|
Sam:
[17:18]
| Yes.
|
Ivan:
[17:18]
| They're not native here because a whole bunch of assholes fucking like, oh, well, I bought a python and had it home. Well, oh shit, it was such a bad idea to have a python at home. Let me just dump it in the Everglades. And they multiply worse than rabbits.
|
Sam:
[17:31]
| So anyway, the point of this is there are a variety of places in our living spaces where we cohabitate with the spiders and are fine with them. Like we intentionally don't mess with them. We let them be. So I am looking in the corner of my office. There are webs right there. Okay? And I'm like, that's fine. They can be there. There's like some webs in the – there's a spider that lives in my shower. And, you know, I leave it alone. It leaves me alone. There's no worries there. But – because, you know, they're nice little creatures. They are our friends. You know?
|
Ivan:
[18:10]
| They can be my friend outside.
|
Sam:
[18:13]
| Now, my daughter is scared of spiders. But, you know, in my spaces and whatever, I, I'm not going to interfere with the spiders and they're not going to interfere with me. So more specifically, there was one particular spider that for the last, I don't know how many months, but definitely months was living in my car. Okay.
|
Ivan:
[18:42]
| Oh, fuck this. The hell with that shit. Oh, my God.
|
Sam:
[18:48]
| So let me know.
|
Ivan:
[18:50]
| No, I mean, listen, fuck it. The car. Fuck you. No, no, no, no, no. I'm like, even like, you know, it's in the corner over there in the office. I'm like, whatever. I'm like, I am probably like, OK, in the fucking car. No way. No.
|
Sam:
[19:06]
| So like, look, it would it usually lived around the around the driver's seat, you know, in that general area. So like while I was driving, I would see it like on the mirror and stuff. Sometimes it would like come down in front of my face. There was one time recently where it was on the headrest and Alex was like, be really careful. Don't put your head back because you might squish the spider. And so, you know, for months and months, like Alex and I would pay attention to where the spider was. We'd talk to the spider. We'd say hello to the spider. we'd be like if the spider was in a dangerous place we'd make sure we paid attention and whatever and so like again the spider was our friend, Okay. Now you'll notice I have used the past tense because something horrible happened.
|
Ivan:
[19:56]
| You crushed it accidentally.
|
Sam:
[19:58]
| I did not crush it. I was, I was picking up some fast food for Alex at a McDonald's.
|
Ivan:
[20:07]
| Yeah.
|
Sam:
[20:08]
| And you know, it is one of these curbside pickup things. So like, okay. The, the, you know, you, you pull up to the spot and they come out and bring you your food. I rolled down the window. The guy starts handing me my food and then he's like, oh, you have a spider.
|
Ivan:
[20:24]
| Boom.
|
Sam:
[20:25]
| Exactly. Like he smacked the spider and, and I was like stunned. I was like.
|
Ivan:
[20:36]
| That's the normal reaction.
|
Sam:
[20:38]
| I, I, I was not. And he's like, oh, don't worry. I got it for you. And and meanwhile like i i wanted i wanted to scream no but it was too late he'd already smacked the spider so i just and.
|
Ivan:
[20:56]
| I and i'm guessing at some point you realized oh shit that's the normal thing to do i.
|
Sam:
[21:01]
| Can't no he was actually.
|
Ivan:
[21:03]
| He was actually trying to be nice but did you realize that that was the opposite.
|
Sam:
[21:09]
| So like yeah i i i you froze i froze i wanted to say something but i froze yeah he and he sort of was like you know you want a napkin it sort of fell down and i'm like no no and to myself i'm thinking god damn it you've done enough, asshole but like i.
|
Ivan:
[21:30]
| Said nothing he was but he i know he he would okay let's be clear he was i i know it was a mistake but because for 99.999 percent of the people that would have been a nice thing to do he did what he thought would have been unfortunately i.
|
Sam:
[21:51]
| Hear you like so i just sort of was like nope nope i'm good and i closed the window he went back in i sat there in the car and cried for several minutes before.
|
Ivan:
[22:03]
| By the way i do understand i i understand so i i will say that i i look i'm not like that with spiders but you know we get like uh and.
|
Sam:
[22:14]
| Then i had to break the news to alex because he cared.
|
Ivan:
[22:16]
| About spider too we get these little we get these geckos like around that are actually harmless and they're actually good especially because they had a lot of cockroaches they actually they they will they will they will eat the cockroaches yes so the little geckos i'm actually fine and that's what the spiders do.
|
Sam:
[22:32]
| Too they they eat other bugs.
|
Ivan:
[22:34]
| Yeah but but you know i i don't like the fucking spiders anyway but but you know i don't like the fucking cobwebs i don't like walking into the fucking cobwebs that they that they do and then I get them all, anyway, no, no, no, no, they're, they're too, too, but the geckos are harmless, they don't build webs, they don't leave shit, they don't do whatever it needs, so, so, you know, like, I think a lot of people are scared of them, too, but I'm, like, usually, like, we find one, we're, like, you know, we'll try to leave it alone, or, you know, because I know that they can't be inside all the, all the time, I'll try to, like, you know, grab it, and, like, get it outside so it could be, you know, that way because they want water and they need, they need to be outside. Okay. Also, they can't just be stuck inside all the time. Yeah. So I, I mean, I accidentally once like with a door, it got in, it got wedged in the door jam. Man, close the door. Flatten the poor gecko. I was very upset when that happened. So, so I understand why you were like, I was like, it's been a couple of weeks now.
|
Sam:
[23:40]
| So I'm able to laugh and joke about this a little bit now, but like for like a couple days, I was like, every time I thought about it, I was upset. You know, I'm like, I should have done something. I could have like, I don't know.
|
Ivan:
[23:54]
| You know, this reminds me. There's a movie that I actually I have to look to to watch this movie again, because I looked up that it does have a lot of good reviews, but it's not a very. As a matter of fact, I know I just looked up the box office it had was one hundred thousand dollars. That's how little play it got. It's a movie with Kevin Bacon. It was called The Big Picture. Okay.
|
Sam:
[24:16]
| Okay.
|
Ivan:
[24:16]
| So The Big Picture was a movie about Kevin Bacon being a promising new kid from film school that all of a sudden got hired and they gave him a contract to do a movie in Hollywood. But then he wanted to do a black and white movie like the old school and whatever. And then, you know, he started sitting down with all these people at the commercial Hollywood studio and it wind up turning into some movie with bikini girls on a beach and pop music and, you know, just just some generic thing that had nothing to do with the with the art, right, art, art, art, artistic type of movie he wanted to make. So one day he's sitting at a bar this is why this reminds me of you he's sitting at a bar and he's watching they have a tv and they have an older tube tv i don't know if you've ever noticed some older tv sometimes like that and i've seen this before i mean sometimes yeah a little off and.
|
Sam:
[25:14]
| You smack them to get them.
|
Ivan:
[25:15]
| Yeah and and sometimes like for example you smack them and sometimes they would be in black and white and smack them and come into color okay so he had been wanting to do the movie in black and white and he's sitting there and the tv is showing this movie that looks in black and white and so the bartender sees this and is annoyed by it and smacks the tv and it puts it and i think it was a colorized version of a black and white movie that's what it was and so the movie is showing him black and white he's like oh look at this movie in the original black and white and the bartender smacks the tv and it goes into color he's like wow that's much better and he's like, asshole. You don't understand. So that's kind of like what happened to you. This guy thought, oh yeah, I'm doing you a favor. I'm like going to put it in color and like, you know, so he killed the spider. But unfortunately, uh, no, it's, uh, no.
|
Sam:
[26:03]
| Well, and my, my wife, one of the things she did, one of the things she said to try to make me feel better, which you'll love is like, well, maybe if you're really lucky before it was killed, it laid eggs and then you'll have lots of little baby spiders in a little while so far it's been it's been like three weeks no no sign of no sign of baby spiders no sign of baby spiders yet no side sign of a replacement spider of any sort you know so i don't know but yeah so it's still sad but yeah i thought you would appreciate that story and my general attitude towards spiders in the house i.
|
Ivan:
[26:45]
| I i do appreciate how I do.
|
Sam:
[26:47]
| Not.
|
Ivan:
[26:49]
| I am not in the camp of like the attitude you guys have against the spiders. However, I do totally empathize with the fact that, you know, you had been protecting this damn spider for so long. And then all of a sudden somebody trying to be nice.
|
Sam:
[27:07]
| Now I will say, I will say a few days before the spider went away. We did find another creature in the car that we did help outside there was a snail there was a snail in the car yeah okay and and we're like the spider clearly was thriving in the car it was fine it was doing yeah but not the snail the snail was like the snail is just going to die if it stays here so we very carefully we looked up the proper instructions because like if you just yank a snail off somewhere, you can injure it through the process of trying to pull it off. So we properly looked up the instructions of how to get it to gently let go. And we got the snail to let go. And we took the snail and we put it out into the yard and blah, blah, blah, you know, in a place that hopefully it'll be fine. But yeah, so the snail was not allowed to live there. You know, the rats who have a couple of times destroyed the interior of the car and other electronics, they are not welcome. Now, I still like would prefer not to kill the little creature. But, you know, if you've done thousands of dollars of damage to my car, I have a little bit less sympathy for you than to the spider.
|
Ivan:
[28:27]
| You know, I am also trying to be careful with snails. I will tell you that the one thing that always like, oh, my God, just breaks my heart is that sometimes we have a lot of snails around. And look, if I see one walking around, I'll try to avoid it, make sure I don't hurt it or whatever.
|
Sam:
[28:40]
| Right.
|
Ivan:
[28:40]
| But I will tell you the one that always like just that it's happened to me a couple of times and always like that, that, that hits me stepping on a snail accidentally.
|
Sam:
[28:50]
| Yeah.
|
Ivan:
[28:50]
| Ah, fuck. A couple of, you know, they're just, you know, not doing anything bad. And all of a sudden I just walked along. I didn't see it.
|
Sam:
[28:59]
| A couple of years ago a couple of years ago we were out with my wife and the person she hired as a campaign manager this was several campaigns ago and we were putting up signs and blah blah and we were putting up one like big sign that required like you know it wasn't just the little signs you stick in with wires like yeah big wood frame several feet across blah blah blah, and you know while we were doing this you know near where we were setting up the sign, my wife brandy notices a snail on the ground and she tells the campaign manager oh watch out watch out we're gonna we're you know whatever and then like not less than 15 seconds later he steps on it directly and crushes it yeah and it's like oh come on she just told you to watch out yeah but maybe she.
|
Ivan:
[29:49]
| Didn't see or didn't see where I was. So you're like, sometimes you're like, I listen, I've had, she should watch out, watch out. We're all of a sudden you're looking, you didn't see it. And then you move and you're like, ow. Yeah. So yeah. Yeah. Anyway. All right. So, okay. Okay.
|
Sam:
[30:05]
| So shall we, shall we take a break? And then I don't know, maybe, maybe instead of like a you segment and me segment, we just keep alternating. I don't know, whatever. We'll figure it out. But next here, here comes our break. It's the ray lynch one here you go if it works let's try again click hold on hold on computer buffering i don't know what it's doing here we go let me try again, okay we are back yvonne so why don't you pick next let me guess you want to talk 100 all about donald trump's cabinet picks and how all that's gone and matt gates and no names matt right no no no this is not your pick no.
|
Ivan:
[32:50]
| I'm gonna actually what i'm gonna talk about is more specifically around the business the business reaction to to the trump election like what i've noticed is there is quite a lot of enthusiasm in the business community related to to the election there's been some ceos that have been heard saying certain things and and and look.
|
Sam:
[33:16]
| Well let me ask some of the appointments for example before you get deeper like it seemed just looking at it like i don't pay as much attention to this stuff as you do But it kind of seemed to me like immediately after the election, like the stock market had a big pop. Everything was going up. It seemed like everybody was super excited about exactly what you're talking about. Like this means regulations are dead. We can go full steam ahead and nobody's going to bug us, blah, blah, blah. And then that sort of started going in the opposite direction.
|
Ivan:
[33:48]
| Well, listen, there's two things. what the markets are, how the markets are moving, which is one reaction versus what executives think that they can do strategically. Okay.
|
Sam:
[33:59]
| Okay.
|
Ivan:
[33:59]
| Because one of the big concerns that came up when first the stock market did that massive move up, the biggest issue that economists and investors have had with the Trump administration is that almost every proposal that they have had on the table is inflationary.
|
Sam:
[34:19]
| Right.
|
Ivan:
[34:19]
| And so one of the key drivers in terms of Fed policy to cut rates is, hey, inflation is coming down, so we can cut rates. But one of the key indicators for mortgage rates, well, the key indicator for mortgage rates to be precise is a 10-year bond. And yields on the 10-year bond as soon as the election was over have been going the wrong way. Way in terms of rates coming down, which is why mortgage rates have, even though with already a three quarter point cut by the Fed, mortgage rates haven't budged.
|
Sam:
[34:58]
| Okay.
|
Ivan:
[34:59]
| They're not going down. And so lending costs are not going down. And so the market, the money itself is telling you that for whatever the hell Trump spoke about inflation and all this shit. The analysis by, I would say, about 80% of the economists of anything that Trump has talked about policy-wise tells you that none of that is actually very good for the economy.
|
Ivan:
[35:31]
| I mean, there isn't, I, the tariffs, not good for the economy. The illegal immigrants thing, not so good for the economy. But in specifically those two because those two are his the ones that he has been talking about the loudest right and and and then the other issue tax cuts right look the united states already has the lowest tax burden of any of the developed nation okay and all these people are complaining about the budget deficits okay which you know under biden once again have started to come down as they have over Democrats during all the last administrations. But look, if you do a whole bunch of tax cuts, you're going to drive up the deficit, which by the way means usually they'll drive up interest rates. And so you've got, you know, people are hearing the rhetoric, but yet when you, everything that you're proposing is that way.
|
Ivan:
[36:34]
| But that's not really helpful towards the stated goals that that you have set out and so but but here's the for here's a flip side okay here's the other thing okay for example you know for all this talk about man of the people you know certainly quite a lot of picks that are definitely like all wall street billionaire types especially the treasury guy who's a hedge fund manager that each is named. So these picks are not, how do I say, consumer-friendly, okay? Or, for example, the issue with, on another side, why businesses are salivating in terms of, okay, great, now we've got a Department of Justice that is in our side. And what does the other side mean? They won't block mergers.
|
Ivan:
[37:29]
| They won't try to keep, you know, certain regulatory actions in terms of companies. So that will reduce that. But one of the reasons why this administration and the Justice Department has been reviewing businesses and business combinations and concentrations of certain power in certain companies is because all of those are inflationary. It stifles competition. And so therefore it winds up with, you know, the consumers wind up being the losers in the end. Right. And so if you get a department that like right now, for example, I know airline airlines were salivating at this because there have been several alliances and mergers that had been blocked by the Justice Department of this administration. Okay. American Airlines had tried to do a combination with JetBlue for an alliance that got blocked. It was a merger between Spirit and JetBlue that got blocked.
|
Ivan:
[38:37]
| There's just been a number of those that have happened. And so all of a sudden, airline executives are like, oh, wait, you know what? Yeah. That's all going out the window. The hell with that shit. Now we can do whatever the fuck we want, but that's going to wind up being leading to higher prices. It's not, it's not going to, that's not cutting prices for anybody. Okay. In any way. So that's, so, you know.
|
Sam:
[39:03]
| There's also an uncertainty factor. Like one of the things that people were talking about after the election in the stock market and such was, you know, you can expect to pop almost no matter what the result is because you're replacing uncertain.
|
Ivan:
[39:14]
| Replacing uncertainty, correct.
|
Sam:
[39:16]
| However, with Donald Trump, there's still lots of uncertainty because he's just a chaos agent, right? Like even you mentioned the tariffs, right? There's still lots of debate here. I'm like, okay, well, but what is he actually going to do? Like, because yes, he's saying all these crazy things with huge numbers about tariffs on absolutely everybody in the world. But is he actually just going to do it? Or is it a negotiating gambit where he's going to try to use the threat of that as leverage in some way? And then he's not actually going to do it. He's going to extract concessions out of person A or B or C in exchange. And so we have no idea what's really going to happen. And or, you know, he's going to want to do this. And people who actually know what the hell is going on about the economy are going to be like, no, don't do that. And some people still think he'll listen to that kind of thing. Although I think there's lots of evidence that he won't, but you know, because, because as we said, like his, his whole thing is like, he was frustrated by the first term in terms of people telling him no, and he doesn't want that this time.
|
Ivan:
[40:33]
| Well, one thing about that is that I don't know what he, well, we still don't exactly know yet what the hell he'll do. I'll say one thing, though. Look, the main driver for Trump, what is it?
|
Sam:
[40:47]
| Number one. Number one has to be whatever benefits himself personally.
|
Ivan:
[40:52]
| Correct. That's right. So one thing that we've established that because of our new how we are right now, in terms of presidential immunity, no giving giving a shit about emoluments, money, whatever. You got a sitting president that has a publicly traded company out there that people could just inflate the value of that fucking company in order to basically make them richer at their whim. So right now, there is an entire gaggle.
|
Sam:
[41:28]
| Just along those lines specifically, one person was commenting, when you're looking at the whole tariff thing, don't look at the headline of the tariff. Look at what the exceptions are.
|
Ivan:
[41:41]
| Correct.
|
Sam:
[41:41]
| Because that's where the gifts are being given up.
|
Ivan:
[41:44]
| Ah, ah, because right now, for example, there is an entire, entire gaggle of people lining up right now and meeting with him to just go and like get their damn exemptions. OK, all right. Oh, but, you know, wait, you know, everybody is lining up to influence him. And right now, one thing that we know, the spigots are open to basically pay off this man in any way possible.
|
Sam:
[42:15]
| Right.
|
Ivan:
[42:16]
| There is no fucking, this is the first president that we are ever really getting in history. That can be bought openly.
|
Sam:
[42:29]
| I mean, just as a simple example to make it concrete, you know, you could be like, hey, so you don't want the price of iPhones to double overnight? What are you going to give me? Right. Right. And, you know, you got to see if you're like Tim Cook or something, you have to, like, have that conversation. It's not an option to ignore it.
|
Ivan:
[42:55]
| That's right. so.
|
Sam:
[42:56]
| It's like what what is the trade-off that.
|
Ivan:
[43:00]
| Who's gonna impeach him who's gonna prosecute him who's gonna go after him yeah nobody's gonna do a damn thing he can go right now openly and ask for as much fucking money to do anything that he wants and there is absolutely no stopping him in any way, shape, or form.
|
Sam:
[43:22]
| Right. That's the bottom line. And as you said, there's so many sort of open venues. You can buy goddamn truth social stock. Right now during this transition period, the Trump transition has completely refused to sign any of the documents about transparency in the transition process. And so there's all kinds of things you can donate to to help with the inauguration or whatever that are completely unmonitored, unregulated, whatever. And because he's not cooperating with any of that stuff and who's going to make him?
|
Ivan:
[44:02]
| Nobody.
|
Sam:
[44:03]
| And, and, and like he had to sell the damn hotel, but there's plenty of other venues.
|
Ivan:
[44:10]
| Well, he had to sell. Sam, Sam, he made a killing.
|
Sam:
[44:15]
| Oh, I know. I know. I know. Cause it was bought for way more than it was.
|
Ivan:
[44:18]
| I mean, the hotel was already shortly after the guys that bought it were in trouble financially.
|
Sam:
[44:24]
| Okay.
|
Ivan:
[44:24]
| With a fucking hotel. I mean, he completely.
|
Sam:
[44:26]
| We're talking about the Washington DC.
|
Ivan:
[44:28]
| Yeah. Exactly. I mean, he made a killing in that hotel is crazy. It was so overpaid. It's like that house that some Russian bought overpaid in Palm Beach that they bought for 20 million. They gave him a hundred million dollars for.
|
Sam:
[44:45]
| Yes.
|
Ivan:
[44:46]
| I mean, all you got to do is say, oh, oh, there's a resort up in Scotland. Oh, so, oh, we'll give you two billion dollars for it.
|
Sam:
[44:56]
| Or even absent that, I mean, you know, he can, he can ramp up the prices for just people to stay there and they can book rooms.
|
Ivan:
[45:06]
| Well, that's what they were doing at the hotel.
|
Sam:
[45:08]
| That's what they were doing at the hotel. And, you know, and in his last presidency, like doubled or tripled the price of a membership at Mar-a-Lago. You're sure he's going to do that again.
|
Ivan:
[45:17]
| Oh yeah, totally. And, uh, and, and, and at the hotel, listen, there was, listen, There was certain countries had been blocking and buying blocks of rooms that remained empty.
|
Sam:
[45:31]
| Yes.
|
Ivan:
[45:32]
| Just, you know, oh, we'll take a couple of floors.
|
Sam:
[45:36]
| Yes. And this is one of those things, one of many things that once the Biden administration came in, they decided not to pursue aggressively. Where, you know, but oh, well, water under the bridge.
|
Ivan:
[45:51]
| You know so now one thing also there is in terms of, Policy predictability, right?
|
Sam:
[45:59]
| Yes.
|
Ivan:
[46:00]
| The problem with this is also that this makes whatever the fuck policy is going to do also very unpredictable. Because, hey, if somebody offers you a billion dollars to do this, but then the other guy offers you three billion to do the other thing, then all of a sudden you'll wind up flip-flopping in two seconds and fuck the other guy.
|
Sam:
[46:20]
| An actual example from the last couple of years. Well, two actual examples, actually. Now he wasn't president, but he was running for president and he did one eighties on his position of a tick tock ban and B crypto both directly in response to money flowing into his campaign.
|
Ivan:
[46:41]
| Exactly. Absolutely.
|
Sam:
[46:43]
| And like 180 degree change in his position on both of those. So it's not even subtle. It's not a slight adjustment. It's a, you know, this is bad. Like in TikTok, he was like all four banning TikTok. Suddenly a major investor in TikTok was donating to campaign. Oh no, let's leave TikTok alone.
|
Ivan:
[47:03]
| TikTok is great. Oh no, no, no, great.
|
Sam:
[47:05]
| And same thing with crypto. He was on the record talking about how crypto was a scam and it should be regulated and blah, blah, blah. The crypto bros came in and full fledged support, including Elon Musk. And now he's all about crypto. He's starting his own damn crypto. You know, his family is. So yeah. So I think that is part of the unpredictability as well, for sure. It's like, yeah. And the other way of putting it and is that even when like most of it is, you know, when people talk about him being transactional, a lot of it is certainly like the personally transactional, like do it, do something for me. But even when it's not, it's still transactional in terms of like he doesn't care from some sort of ideological position. So like even when he's talking about things like how NATO sucks or whatever if all the European countries in NATO want to just.
|
Ivan:
[48:01]
| Pay some more.
|
Sam:
[48:03]
| Buy him off he would suddenly be happy with nato.
|
Ivan:
[48:06]
| Nato's great you know it's awesome.
|
Sam:
[48:10]
| It's just 100 like.
|
Ivan:
[48:12]
| Get the european get the you get the defense companies you know all of them you know that that would be like that that would be i would say you know defense companies have not had problems in the past that bribing like officials okay let's be clear all right not Not exactly, not exactly off their game. So what the hell, man? I mean, come on, you know, the biggest payday.
|
Sam:
[48:35]
| Yeah, this is also something he was known for last time around in term and with varying levels of success. But he kept wanting to, for instance, for making deals like he didn't want to deal with the EU. He wanted to deal with each of the countries individually. And he kept trying to push them in that direction. And for the most part, they sort of stuck together and said, no, no, we're negotiating as a bloc. But that's clearly his direction. He wants everything as a one-on-one, person-to-person, let's make a deal. Let's make a handshake deal. You do this for me, I'll do that for you. There's no sort of thought of, hey, there's this abstract long-term goal where we have a mutual benefit, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. He doesn't believe in that at all. it's all about like how how can we make a deal that i get something out of you and he does not care about a mutually beneficial deal by the way he would much rather it be a deal where you get screwed but like so.
|
Ivan:
[49:38]
| So my point is that this is why businesses are salivating at this administration and they have been openly salivating about it because they pretty much figure yeah whatever the fuck we want from this damn administration. All we got to do, if we put up enough money, we'll get whatever the fuck we want. Oh, yeah. Yeah, 100%. So, you know, and by the way, the thing about it is, how does that help the little guy, Sam? Yeah, you got any idea? Do you think that helps the little guy?
|
Sam:
[50:11]
| Oh, no.
|
Ivan:
[50:11]
| You think that helps them with the price of eggs?
|
Sam:
[50:16]
| Yes, the price of eggs. Yeah, that'll be coming right down immediately. Not that it wasn't already down, by the way. But yeah, I'm sure it'll fix that problem immediately.
|
Ivan:
[50:26]
| Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So it's just, you know, it's just one of these things where you get this guy who is showing up in his, has his jet with his name on it, with golden toilets and shit, and telling, and he convinces the average Joe that he is there for the little guy. And I'm just like, are you fucking kidding me? Oh, I don't know. I mean, but, but there is there, I see, I was thinking about this today in terms of like the people that Trump admires. Right.
|
Ivan:
[51:06]
| And I remember remembering like when my, when I went to Moscow a few years back and I realized that, you know, that this is one of the guys that he admires the most, which is, which is Putin and how, how that works there. Right. Which for whatever reason, look, Putin does have a lot of support with the people. It's not just that he isn't just there where 80% of the people hate him and he's just there by force. I mean even though he has crushed all the opposition okay the reality is that he does have a lot of support a lot of people there see that after the collapse of the soviet union and the country was a disaster and a mess hyperinflation blah blah blah he's brought stability okay all right and he's brought russia back to be you know a proud country respected that whatever all this bullshit okay honor ah yes and and you know i i still remember because.
|
Ivan:
[52:12]
| Vladimir the way that he's run the country is that he has these business favorites that sometimes you know when they fall out of favor with them he'll fucking throw them in jail and you know whatever but he he is the one that really picks the winners and losers in the economy and who you know all these people that have money and one of the things that that that struck me about Moscow was, I mean, the wealth displayed was, you know, it was very prominent. It was a very, very... You saw wealth being flaunted in a very open way. And I think that the funny thing is that they're in Moscow now, but you go into the smaller villages and other places, whatever, that are in Russia, many of them are struggling and they can't afford even the basics, okay?
|
Sam:
[53:09]
| Right.
|
Ivan:
[53:09]
| But for whatever reason, I think that the people in those small towns see Moscow and see it wealthy. And it's like, oh, look, you see how we are big and proud of whatever. And I sometimes wind up thinking that a whole bunch of people that are voting for Trump, they kind of think the same thing. They see the wealthy guy and whatever. And he comes into, you know, kind of bumfuck whatever town that he goes to. And these people look at him as like, look, these America, that's the America I want. It's like, that's who I want to be. And so it's, you know, because they want to be like him.
|
Sam:
[53:45]
| Right.
|
Ivan:
[53:46]
| They literally want to be like him. And, you know, it's like why Berlusconi stayed in power in Italy for so many years. This guy, you know, it's, he follows, he wants, that's what he wants. He wants and he's gotten a lot of adulation by a whole bunch of people that are living shit life. And they think for some reason that voting for him is going to rub off on them in some fucking way. I don't understand why, but, you know, but that that's just seems to be what it is. So anyway, so bottom line, businesses are flat out super excited about this administration. And everybody is getting their trucks of money ready to go in order to pay them off.
|
Sam:
[54:43]
| Okay, before we take a break and move on to something from me, just one last question on this. Given you've got all of these, you know, big wigs and major companies and stuff, like, trying to figure out the right angle to make all kinds of money off this, what's the right angle as a fairly small, like, person here? If you just pour lots of money into SPY and did the S&P 500 index or something, are we going to see all the big companies make money and the stock market go crazy? What's the deal? Like, surely there must be some angle.
|
Ivan:
[55:18]
| I am not sure yet what the angle is on this right now. And one of the...
|
Sam:
[55:25]
| Apparently, crypto has been doing really well the last couple of weeks.
|
Ivan:
[55:28]
| Well, one thing is short term, short term trends, which, you know, the stock market and other things have been going off short term. I'm trying to think more over.
|
Sam:
[55:36]
| What's what's the four or five year play.
|
Ivan:
[55:39]
| Yeah. And I got to be honest, I think until the you see what the economic plan is going to be and how they're going to do it, I just don't know. I think the one thing like like you mentioned, it's very unpredictable and it really depends who gets into his pocket or not. Here's a here's an example of something. All right. I know he he has been barking.
|
Ivan:
[55:57]
| And talking about and even Elon Musk has been saying, oh, let's get rid of the incentives for energy. Let's get rid of the seventy five hundred.
|
Sam:
[56:06]
| Listen, for EV cars.
|
Ivan:
[56:07]
| Yeah, for EV cars. I know that Elon says that, but I guarantee you that the moment he finishes that if he listens to a CFO, a Tesla, he's got to be saying, are you out of your fucking mind? More than half our profits come from that fucking damn incentive. What the fuck are you doing? Why are you saying this? And by the way, I don't put it past Elon to be saying that publicly just to get like publicity and then go and turn around. Oh, no. But now we're because the only eligible car makers are Tesla. You know what I'm saying?
|
Sam:
[56:41]
| He'll work the exemption.
|
Ivan:
[56:43]
| Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. You know, so come on, I'm like, man, I don't know, no, you know, I see the populist thing that he's saying, but I don't see anybody in their right mind that would go and sacrifice more than 50% of their profits and boost competitiveness of his competitors overseas for, for any good logical reason that I can think of.
|
Sam:
[57:11]
| Right.
|
Ivan:
[57:12]
| I don't. I mean, it's I mean, now now Elon has done incredibly dumb shit that loses money already. I mean, because this will forget about his net worth, like whatever the fuck it is right now. The reality is that the profits at the companies that he has been running, you know, the two the the two public, you know, the one that was Twitter. Yeah, it is. Revenue is down 90 percent. He's well, that's OK. Yeah, but Tesla, Tesla, Tesla is, is growth has been obliterated. Okay. They're losing market share and their growth has been obliterated. Okay. They're not growing and they don't seem to be able to figure out a way to grow right now. Okay. And so, and by the way, SpaceX lives on fucking government money.
|
Sam:
[57:57]
| Right. Well, look, look, here's, here's the thing on some of this. Like for instance, you, you, you mentioned the Twitter slash X one. There's been lots of commentary at this point that hey it's clear at this point like he didn't expect like it to necessarily do great he just wanted a mouthpiece and he wanted to have something that he could use to influence politics and he got exactly what he wanted out of it i i will.
|
Ivan:
[58:24]
| Say this i think he wanted the mouthpiece but i don't think he thought he was gonna lose listen he tried to back out.
|
Sam:
[58:30]
| Yes.
|
Ivan:
[58:31]
| Don't tell me this shit. He tried to back out. He wound up backing into this because he wound up having to fork over to $40 billion. But let's be clear. He tried to back out.
|
Sam:
[58:44]
| Right.
|
Ivan:
[58:44]
| Well, and like, tell me about the 4D chess bullshit, whatever, because he desperately wanted to back out. It was only because the court forced them to buy it that he wound up owning it.
|
Sam:
[58:55]
| Right but i guess the question is like at this point does he care at this point it's like a rounding error.
|
Ivan:
[59:01]
| At this point well at this point i mean he's written i mean he's written it off i mean basically is everybody's written it off i mean he's he's he's lost the money it cost him 40 billion dollars so he's getting so now he's getting the worth of it from this but not yet but my point is it's a business move i mean my point is it's a right you also.
|
Sam:
[59:22]
| Mentioned spacex though i mean and this is why he's sucking up to donald trump too right like.
|
Ivan:
[59:26]
| Right but but my point is that you can't i mean listen those government subsidies are fucking critical for the profitability of his company yeah.
|
Sam:
[59:35]
| Yeah no but my point though is like he's he's got this doge thing that has been set up for him to recommend government cuts he's not going to recommend cutting spacex he's going to recommend cutting blue.
|
Ivan:
[59:48]
| Origin keep spacex well but sam But he's been openly saying to completely kill the EV credit. I mean, which I know the company that that worst gets hurt by that is Tesla.
|
Sam:
[1:00:04]
| Yeah, but but but because you're OK.
|
Ivan:
[1:00:07]
| So because think about this, right? You want to talk about stupid strategy, right? OK. All right. So Donald says, well, fuck it. Drill, drill, drill, baby oil burning car, you know, gas gas burning cars or whatever. Does Tesla have any gasoline cars no right who has the fucking gasoline cars, GM for all his fucking competitors okay so go you know he thinks well I'm gonna hurt them no you're not if you get rid of the regulations and you do that fuck you're bailing them out from starting to build the fucking EVs that have been losing money say oh fuck that I'll just build more you know built more gas-closing cars and fuck you! I mean, that is one of the things that I am just like.
|
Sam:
[1:00:58]
| I mean, literally like one possibility here is he's like, I'm rich enough. I don't give a fuck anymore. I'm going to do what I like. I really don't believe in government subsidies. I'm going to want to say kill all of them, even if it hurts my bottom line.
|
Ivan:
[1:01:18]
| Here's the problem with this, right? Okay. Tesla's valuation is hyperinflated, okay? So if you collapse the profits, there's no way it can stay up there. I mean, you're doing everything actively to try to see how much does it take to finally fucking pop that bubble, okay? And here's the other thing, okay, that's also important. At some point right elon must right now getting so rich right now with how the stocks have moved whatever because of how close he's to trump how long is it until donald trump says well why the why the fuck am i making this guy rich this should be my money but yeah because remember what he did with the people at uh at at whatchamacallit the truth social he basically tried to screw them all you know he's like fuck you you guys don't deserve any of this money it's mine how long does it take for him to say that.
|
Sam:
[1:02:14]
| Well, and also, yes, absolutely.
|
Ivan:
[1:02:17]
| I made you that money. That's not you.
|
Sam:
[1:02:20]
| No, absolutely about the money, but also about the attention. If you remember, there have been multiple situations over the years where somebody who works for Donald Trump has started getting all the attention for whatever reason, and they get the knife in the back immediately.
|
Ivan:
[1:02:37]
| Yeah.
|
Sam:
[1:02:37]
| Because you're distracting. And already, Trump was at Mar-a-Lago joking about how he couldn't get rid of elon and you know he's just he's like he's following me everywhere and he won't leave so okay break all.
|
Ivan:
[1:02:55]
| Right yep break.
|
Sam:
[1:02:56]
| Okay and when we come back i don't know i'll figure out something to talk about back after you see i had.
|
Ivan:
[1:03:04]
| Something to talk about.
|
Sam:
[1:03:05]
| Oh yeah you did so like yeah we'll do a normal like you you your your segment and then my segment and then we'll be out so here we go blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah.
|
Ivan:
[1:03:16]
| Blah blah blah blah.
|
Sam:
[1:03:17]
| Except i once again have to stop and start this thing hold on brip brip brip.
|
Sam:
[1:04:13]
| Okay, we're back. And since I teased it a little bit in a beginning segment, and we almost started to talk about it, but didn't quite, I think I'll do the disconnecting from news thing. Because I know on our Curmudgeon's Corner Slack, several people have talked about how they are so discouraged and stressed out or whatever that they are actively avoiding news that they used to pay attention to. And that includes you, I believe, Yvonne.
|
Sam:
[1:04:47]
| And also, there have been reports about cable news channels, like ratings dropping in half since the election, you know, and now honestly, there's, there's a couple of different things there. One, it may be, there's a certain portion of it. I'm sure that's like people like, you know, I'm just burnt out. I don't want to talk about news right now, but also just to keep in mind that always happens after elections, elections are one of the big sources of ratings for the, News organizations in general, TV, print, print, who does print anymore? But like, there's still print. I know there's still some print, but like, you know, the traditional media, New York Times, Washington Post, blah, blah, blah. All of these things traditionally see a drop after elections, but maybe it's more than that this time. There seems to be a lot of people, especially on the left, who are just like, hey, you know, I really invested myself into this for the last few years.
|
Sam:
[1:05:52]
| We lost, I can't, I don't want to pay attention to whatever nonsense Donald Trump is doing. I need to take care of me and my family and, and not think about this for a while. I'll tell you, I'm still, I'm an addict to this stuff. So I've still got like news feeds everywhere around me all the time. I'm checking that kind I'm not avoiding it. But even so, in run-up to the election, I had the four up, four news channels, live feed, almost always in the background, just to see, was there some new development I should pay attention to? I would have it muted or whatever, but it was always there. I haven't had that up since the election. I have all my other sources, but I've watched less live than I did before. I still have sort of, it's my default, my default rotations of podcasts I listen to are just, you know, news shows. But I definitely have heard a lot of people talking about that pullback.
|
Ivan:
[1:06:57]
| Look, I will say from me personally, and this started a few weeks before the election. You know, I'm one that likes it. Bloomberg in the mornings. I always watch it in the morning. I've talked about this here. I have not watched them in about a month.
|
Sam:
[1:07:23]
| Wow.
|
Ivan:
[1:07:25]
| And I've tried a couple of times and I can't do it. The problem is that every time they talk about Trump, it's very triggering. And I realize that I start getting really pissed off. And I just don't want to, I'm like, okay, I don't want to fucking listen to this. I don't want to, I don't want to listen. The other day I tried to watch again and, and I was like, it was because Nvidia had talked to, you know, come out with earnings. I was hoping, well, let me don't talk about earnings, but then they had some guy from the fucking previous Trump administration on talking about what they did when they came to office in 2016. And the thing is that, as usual with these people, they twist everything and lie about everything. And I'm like, he was talking about, well, we came in in 2016 because we had to fix the economy. I mean, he started off with this shit, okay? And how important it was for us to cut the taxes in order to alleviate the burden. Again, this country has the lowest tax burden of any fucking developed nation.
|
Sam:
[1:08:31]
| Right.
|
Ivan:
[1:08:32]
| I mean, every time these guys talk about sky-high taxes, I am like, what the fuck are you talking about? It's just, you know, it's another made-up straw man. And so I hear this and I hear that, and I just, like I said, I can't watch this. I can't, I can't, I can't, I can't watch. And the problem is that, of course, they're bringing some of these people in from the Trump circle because they're trying to understand what the fuck he's going to be doing, whatever. And I'm like, you know what? I don't fucking care. And why do I not fucking care? Because it's all going to be chaos. It's all bullshit. All of these people are going to be speculating one thing or another. We just talked about it earlier. It's transactional. It's going to be whatever the fuck, you know, he thinks is going to be gainful at that moment. He has no convictions. You know, other than, hey, let me burnish my image. Let me make myself money. Those are the only fucking convictions. Let me be a crook. And let me do it the crooked way, not the right way. I just want to do it like in some transactional way where I'm like, you know. And the transactional part is important for him because it's like, I win, you lose. Because he thinks that every transaction he's going to get. That's the thing. I beat you on the transaction.
|
Sam:
[1:09:50]
| Right. Like I said in the last segment, he's not looking for a win-win.
|
Ivan:
[1:09:55]
| No, that doesn't exist. In his world, it's a zero-sum game.
|
Sam:
[1:09:58]
| Right. And in terms of like a media drop-off, you also have like the whole, there was a Morning Joe fluffle because Joe and Mika from Morning Joe on MSNBC.
|
Ivan:
[1:10:11]
| By the way, same reason why they went down there is because, you know what? And I actually understand why because I'm like, well, if we're going to be finding out what the fuck is going on, we got to be talking to these people. We can't act like they don't exist. He's going to be the fucking president.
|
Sam:
[1:10:25]
| Right. The whole thing there was people are really upset that like they've spent the last four years, actually more than four years, practically since the moment he was elected eight years ago, talking about how bad Donald Trump is. Now, people in part gave them some credit for getting him elected in the first place. But and then they sort of are like, well, he won. We're going to go talk to him. You know, we're going to do this. Some people have talked about that they may have been like afraid to some degree of not doing that.
|
Ivan:
[1:10:58]
| And I understand that, too.
|
Sam:
[1:11:01]
| And you're right. Like the whole media ecosystem. The reality is, and there are probably a few exceptions here and there, but like the whole commercial media ecosystem, at least, has a very heavy incentive to make sure you have connections to whoever is in power.
|
Ivan:
[1:11:22]
| To know what the fuck is going on.
|
Sam:
[1:11:24]
| Yeah, to know what is fucking on, to know what is going on, to have the inside sources and scoops so that you get the news story and not somebody else.
|
Ivan:
[1:11:37]
| Right.
|
Sam:
[1:11:37]
| You know, people complained all along about, what was it, Maggie Haberman at the New York Times and how she was like all cozy with Donald Trump. You know, you're going to.
|
Ivan:
[1:11:46]
| Well, that's how she was able to report and all that shit.
|
Sam:
[1:11:49]
| Right. And Woodward, for that matter, all of these folks. You know and and you're of course you're gonna see all the same stuff again and and people complain about normalization but at the same time for like maybe somebody like maybe non-profits like pro publica can get away with it but like all of your corporate owned media it's like no you you have to be like you have to take them seriously you have to like oh yes this is the secretary of the treasury let's talk about what they're doing but listen.
|
Ivan:
[1:12:21]
| Even if you're npr If you're going to be reporting on Treasury policy and you're not going to interview the Secretary of Treasury that Trump nominates, how are you going to do your job?
|
Sam:
[1:12:32]
| Well, NPR is a different story. They rely a lot on government funding as well.
|
Ivan:
[1:12:36]
| Not a lot.
|
Sam:
[1:12:38]
| Some, some, some. Yeah, they've got.
|
Ivan:
[1:12:40]
| Yeah, a lot. It's a 3% of the budget. Not exactly really, you know.
|
Sam:
[1:12:45]
| They're still not eager to get rid of that 3%, though, if you know what I mean.
|
Ivan:
[1:12:48]
| Yeah, but still. I mean, but okay. Okay, but say whoever, okay?
|
Sam:
[1:12:53]
| Yes, yeah.
|
Ivan:
[1:12:53]
| Look, if you really want to report on what's going on and you're not going to talk to any of them, even though they are going to be in charge, I don't know how you do your job. Now, the flip side, but the flip side is, do I really want to know what the fuck is going on in my new detail right now? No. What I'm doing is like right now, listen, it's not like I am totally disconnected. I know what's going on, but I've just really limited how much I consume every day of it.
|
Sam:
[1:13:19]
| Right.
|
Ivan:
[1:13:19]
| Okay. So, yeah, I am reading it, and I know what the hell is going on. I just shut off. You know, one thing, and this is something that I was pretty good about in the past, and I must admit that I have been remiss. And this reminded me of this, what happened with Trump. I used to very much limit my notifications regularly of what the hell I got notified about. And the thing is, with so many apps and so many things that I subscribe to, that number of notifications about shit going on had multiplied. And I was like, very, for years, very like, no, I don't want these notifications. No, I don't want these notifications. No, I don't want these notifications. When I go and sit down to check. I'll check, but the number of notifications I got, it's not like I didn't get any, but I significantly limited it, okay, in order to make sure that I wasn't bombarded with shit all the time. And I had let that get out of hand. And so what I did was I did not cut off myself from completely from news, but I definitely.
|
Sam:
[1:14:22]
| Limited- Turned off a lot of them.
|
Ivan:
[1:14:24]
| Turned off a lot of notifications from a lot of stuff because I'm like, look, I don't want to, I don't need to be notified about every fucking thing.
|
Sam:
[1:14:30]
| You'll find out eventually. You don't need to know the second it happens.
|
Ivan:
[1:14:33]
| Exactly.
|
Sam:
[1:14:34]
| You know, like the important things will find you. You'll see them in a once a day scan. You don't have to be interrupted in real time to know that, you know, Donald Trump's latest appointment to I could be irritated.
|
Ivan:
[1:14:46]
| Like at one time, like at seven o'clock, you know, like later, whatever, about all this stuff. instead of constantly being irritated all day long about all this shit. You know what I'm saying? That's it. That's all I'm trying to do. I'm just not trying to be like, you know, because there is, you know, people are like, oh, we're trying to normalize this. And I keep going back, look. No, that's not what it is. The problem is that right now, I can have all the outrage in the world that you want me to have right now. And what is it going to do? Is it going to change anything? Is it going to do one bit of a difference? As a matter of fact, I think that there is an argument for the fact that in the past, we did do all the protesting, all the outrage that we want, and probably emboldened Trump to do more because he got, it was kind of like, he fed off the attention.
|
Sam:
[1:15:36]
| Yeah. All attention is good attention.
|
Ivan:
[1:15:38]
| All attention is good attention. So if you, if you actually don't pay, if you're not outraged about every fucking thing he does every day, it probably motivates him not to do it. It probably either. You might, you know, you're not feeding all, you're not feeding him that.
|
Sam:
[1:15:54]
| Right you know and i've seen a lot of and i've seen a lot of people online with that kind of attitude too of like look yeah i i'm cutting out trumpies for my life but at the same time like if they're trumpies that are trying to get me aggravated i'm just like i hope you get everything you want out of this and just walking away leaving it at that you know yeah there's no And I wanted to mention, this reminded me, we did have a piece of feedback that I'll share here. Actually, there was more than one person who has told me explicitly about this podcast that, for instance, they could not bring themselves to listen to our election night episode.
|
Ivan:
[1:16:39]
| Yeah, I know.
|
Sam:
[1:16:40]
| Here's one, and this is from our loyal listener, Matt. I was talking to him about some other stuff, but he says, As an aside, I started listening to the podcast episode from election night during a walk I was taking last week. Since, of course, I knew the end result and my walk was supposed to be for relaxing and de-stressing, I actually had to stop the podcast about 15 minutes into it. I was just getting so upset all over again, almost like a PTSD episode.
|
Ivan:
[1:17:10]
| Yeah.
|
Sam:
[1:17:11]
| I just couldn't go through living through all that again. And he goes on to say, the election definitely hit me and his wife, but actually had a much more significant effect on my two older daughters. They've been really engaged both before and after the election. Dinner conversation frequently turned into political commentary, which has been kind of cool to be able to talk with the kids about that kind of adult stuff. But on the other hand, the first few days after the election were bad for them. They started ditching people on socials, blocking people, and started getting vocal with their friends and acquaintances about not wanting to spend time with someone who can blindly be ignorant of reality and or blindly do what their uninformed parents do. And he finally says, and I kid you not, a lot of the times his wife will turn to me and ask, did Sam say anything about that? What does he and Yvonne think about blah? So anyway, a little bit of feedback.
|
Ivan:
[1:18:09]
| Well, by the way, well, one thing I will say, man—, You're really, really, really impressed with the level of smarts of your daughters. Okay, let me tell you. I'm like, that's, man, I'm proud of those girls.
|
Sam:
[1:18:23]
| Age 21 and 18, by the way.
|
Ivan:
[1:18:24]
| Be proud of those girls. They're fantastic. I'll tell you what. That's great. I love that. You know, I really love that. And well, you know, I get it. Listen, I get it, man. I mean, it's like I said, you know, you talk about, yeah, listening to that podcast triggering. The same thing with me what i mean i i can't i i could listen the the regular news program that i watch in the morning which is mostly business focused even just some stray mentions of what the fuck is going on had me going so bad that i'm like i basically i don't watch it anymore i am now watching get up on espn one of the great things i will say about about that that espn And, you know, for better or worse, and I know that it impacted certain certain people negatively. And I follow some of those people outside of ESPN. But look, a few years ago, CEO of ESPN said during the Trump administration, and they had a whole bunch of skirmishes with them, said, OK, listen, people, we are not talking about anything politics on this fucking network. Not one fucking thing. Nothing. They don't exist. We're not talking about it. Not one word. It's like that shit doesn't happen we are people come here and honestly they're coming here because they don't want to be listening to that shit.
|
Ivan:
[1:19:46]
| So we're not we're going to act like it doesn't exist we're talking about sports that's it so when you turn it to ESPN it's like the day after the election it's like the election didn't happen nothing not even a stray mention nothing not one and you know what i realized i like this i don't want to hear about it let's just talk endlessly about the benching of daniel jones and the new york giants who the fuck gives it which is one of the most inane stories ever and like completely insignificant and you know what at least because we're talking about bullshit it doesn't remind me anything about this fucking election, Great.
|
Sam:
[1:20:27]
| Right. And, and look, even here, I mean, we've, we've been talking about avoiding politics, which is still politics. We've been talking about economics, but we did not specifically talk about all the ins and outs of what was happening with Matt Gaetz and all of the other, and, and, and, and, and like my list of things to talk about was the damn spider was about blue sky was about, hey, should I be thinking about upgrading my iPhone? It's a little bit old right now. You know, I've got a thing that I may still mention before we close it out about more use of AI. Like I was doing some, Alex wants me to do game programming and I was doing a bunch of AI stuff last night and I was really excited about it last night actually. And the stupid AI screwed me at one point and caused me a lot of extra work. And so there was that I, I, I, I, I'm revising my resume. I, I used AI to help with that and their pros and cons to that. And, you know, but the point is not those things. I don't want to talk about necessarily any of those things right now, but like bullet point, bullet point, bullet point, bullet point. Like I was putting down things this week that were not related to news and stuff.
|
Ivan:
[1:21:46]
| AI. Speaking of AI, I got my, I got recently got Manu a new, new, new MacBook pro. okay and so you know as we dive.
|
Sam:
[1:21:55]
| Into the tangent go ahead.
|
Ivan:
[1:21:56]
| Well yeah no well well yeah it's so the one thing is that you know i actually i was playing around with it i you know i don't the map comes with a chess program yep yeah i hadn't played chess in like forever and i'm like okay well and the one thing is that i had it like reading out the the moves okay and so manu liked hearing the moves read out, I've never been a good chess player, but let me tell you something. And, but it used to be like the old, old programs. If you set it at the dumbest setting, I could at least like occasionally win a match against the computer.
|
Sam:
[1:22:29]
| Okay. All right.
|
Ivan:
[1:22:30]
| Dude, I have not been even remotely close, even at the dumbest fucking setting at beating this damn computer.
|
Sam:
[1:22:40]
| And it's so, so let me, let me tell you one of the things like, I also have never been good at chess although i wish i was and always every once in a while i would like try playing, if you go looking for chess programs now one of the things to explicitly look out for now is their dumb levels especially if you're people like me like get one that specifically has really really really dumb levels because the one thing is remember you know i i attended some of the Kasparov deep blue matches where like one of my first dates with my goddamn wife was attending one of those blue matches. But like the second round, I think with her and I had done some a few years earlier with the.
|
Ivan:
[1:23:22]
| I'm pretty sure that the stupid computer at the dumb level, I got a smart at the fucking smart at fucking deep blue.
|
Sam:
[1:23:29]
| Well, what I was going to say, not necessarily the dumb level there, but every single iPhone chess game, has levels at this point that can beat the world champion. The current world champion today cannot beat the highest levels on a program that runs on your phone.
|
Ivan:
[1:23:46]
| Exactly. It's ridiculous. It's fucking ridiculous. And so, yeah, I can't set that damn thing to a dumb enough level where I can win one fucking game.
|
Sam:
[1:23:56]
| Well, just to be clear, there are chess programs you can get that are dumber.
|
Ivan:
[1:24:00]
| Well, I said that. No, no, no. I know, but that one, I can't set it dumb enough for me to win.
|
Sam:
[1:24:05]
| Yeah.
|
Ivan:
[1:24:06]
| It's fucking ridiculous.
|
Sam:
[1:24:08]
| To be fair, Yvonne, it probably has to be pretty dumb for you to beat it. But, you know.
|
Ivan:
[1:24:12]
| I agree. I'm not arguing that.
|
Sam:
[1:24:16]
| But, I mean, literally, some of the programs have levels that just make random moves. Completely random moves.
|
Ivan:
[1:24:23]
| Well, here's the thing. But that's what a lot of average humans would do.
|
Sam:
[1:24:28]
| Yeah.
|
Ivan:
[1:24:29]
| Okay? And that's the problem. I can't set this one. This one will always do a fucking smart move. You know, it's not going to do a stupid move. Even at the dollar, it's going to do a fucking smart move. It won't make a fucking mistake. Humans, especially the average player, will make some dumb mistake. Not notice that you put a piece in jeopardy and like, ah, fuck. You know, shit. Yeah. So, but yeah, so I cannot, I have not been able to beat that computer. Not even, I've got like, maybe like 25, 30 moves deep, but no, no, still can't win. Doesn't matter. No.
|
Sam:
[1:25:04]
| Right. So my, my point, my point was just, even as we're thinking about topics for the show, the shift towards non newsy topics has been real. Like at least this week, like here's, I expect at a certain point, like there's the temptation to do that right now. At a certain point, it will once again become unavoidable because Trump will actually be in office. He will actually be doing damaging things.
|
Ivan:
[1:25:32]
| We still got a couple of months to go. we.
|
Sam:
[1:25:34]
| Still got a couple of months to go so we.
|
Ivan:
[1:25:36]
| We can talk about other stuff and you know i mean there will be a lot of dumb stuff i mean i can i you know one dumb thing that i didn't mention i was going to mention earlier go ahead you did you did touch on it a little bit uh about how they weren't signed they didn't want to sign any of the ndas or anything whatever look here here's the idiotic thing you know they're already starting off from from just some of what doing one of the dumbest things that you could do during the transition.
|
Sam:
[1:26:03]
| Which is not talk to the people who are there now.
|
Ivan:
[1:26:05]
| Yeah, exactly. I mean, that doesn't help them at all. They think that somehow, whoa, we're doing a, I heard a word, we're doing a hostile takeover. Well, listen, clown. You know, you're like trying to take over an aircraft carrier that you've never run before. And you're trying, you're saying that you don't want any of the people running it to tell you where the fuck stuff is. You know what? You're going to be, you, I mean, Maybe these people have run ships before, but, you know, you're going to be just, you're making it far more difficult to probably get control of it faster. What they're doing is counter to their goal.
|
Sam:
[1:26:44]
| Well, also, just to be just.
|
Ivan:
[1:26:46]
| You want to, you want them to show you where everything is just to be clear.
|
Sam:
[1:26:51]
| Just to be clear. Their explicit plan also includes on day one going in and firing all kinds of people. So it's not only they're not going to talk to them now, the supposedly career people who are not political, they're going to go in and at least the plan, we'll see if they actually do it, is to decimate that group right when they first start. So they're going to damage that even further when they get in. Now their take on that is all those people will just be there to stop us from doing what we want to do anyway so they're you know there's no point in talking to them there's no point in keeping them we're just going to immediately get rid of it and we'll do what we want to do.
|
Ivan:
[1:27:37]
| I i now i'm pretty sure that that will happen at some agencies and certain things but i'll tell you one thing i'm, As much as I loathe Marco Rubio, probably won't do that. And like the guy that they named at Treasury probably won't do that. But I'm sure that at certain agencies, they will. But again, the problem is that you're going to get rid of everybody that knows where anything is.
|
Sam:
[1:28:02]
| Well, remember, whatever the hell you're going to do. For many of these agencies, the explicit goal is to cripple the agency and make sure it can't do anything.
|
Ivan:
[1:28:14]
| And that, okay. And I'm not sure how that's going to help them accomplish anything, but okay.
|
Sam:
[1:28:20]
| Well, it'll accomplish crippling the agency and keeping it from doing anything. You know, it's one thing if you want the agency to do something different than it does today. But if you want it to stop working, then it's much easier to break things than to fix them.
|
Ivan:
[1:28:37]
| It really depends on how agencies are structured or what they do, right? Okay. Because let me give you an example. OK, somebody was talking about what CEOs do on a day to day basis. Right. And how some companies can can operate without a CEO being there. One of the things is that stuff like down when you've got a agency that has 100000 employees and departments and agencies and sub offices and whatever, whatnot. Right. Well, everybody's just doing their job every day. They're not getting instructions from from the from the from the chief executive or like whatever in order to do their job on a daily basis. OK, they need to probably receive most of the time, you know, they need to receive instructions in order for something to change. OK, and, you know, and so and this reminds me of the experience I had with when Carly Fiorina came into to HP where she had the same mindset. OK, she didn't understand why things didn't change. And I'm like, well, you got 150,000 employees. And if you want to change, it has to percolate all the way down to like the people that are actually doing the work. And if you don't really, and any change like that takes time because there's 150,000 employees. So if you basically cut off all communication to, to management, I've had, I've been in situations where my boss has been non-existent. What are you going to do every day? Well, if they happen to fire you over there, whatever, it's just going to keep doing whatever the hell you were doing before.
|
Sam:
[1:30:06]
| Right.
|
Ivan:
[1:30:07]
| And so I, I, I don't, I don't understand this, this entire thinking that they've got. Okay. It's just really it may change like strategy in the long run well they're not going to get some stuff or whatever whatnot but it's very difficult to you know you're not getting people to stop every day unless you're just going to fire everybody at the you know just everybody all the way down just fire everybody shut down the department right so I and then you know it's.
|
Ivan:
[1:30:39]
| There is a lot of in this what I see naivety and wish casting rather than any smart, methodical way of how to execute this. Because I've always thought that the first thing that you do is that if you want to take over something and be effective at changing what it is, you probably can find some allies in that group. Okay? And some people that are willing to share the information. So you talk to them, you figure out who your allies are, they'll tell you where the fuck everything is and then you start you start you know doing whatever the fuck it is and then you start firing people if you're going in if you're going in and not even like do that it's going to make whatever the hell you're going to try to do a hell of a lot a lot harder but but look we're expecting a mess and i expect a mess and i expect a broad mess from a lot of places which is why i don't know what the fuck is going to happen, i just don't know and i think that that's the uncertainty that the markets and everybody is having right now after the first little boost of whatever went out there it's just like who the fuck knows what they're gonna do right and.
|
Sam:
[1:31:50]
| And there's yeah but i think the spectrum goes from oh my god really really like country destroying bad to, bad along the same lines as the first term, which was still pretty bad. To be clear, there are lots of people minimizing how bad the first term was, but it was pretty damn bad. But you've got that whole spectrum. I don't think there's any possibility that it's better than the first term was.
|
Ivan:
[1:32:19]
| No, no. I'll tell you an example, for example, of things that got really bad, like people just applying for a visa to come to the US, people that you would never turn away okay you know people who even they want to come in right they decimated that process so bad that some people in places were raiding years to get appointments that normally took you know got got handled pretty quickly and so it's that kind of stuff where you're even impeding the shit that you want like to happen, So, I don't know. Okay. We'll just, all right, well, we're done. Let's get the fuck out of here.
|
Sam:
[1:33:01]
| Let's wrap this sucker up.
|
Ivan:
[1:33:03]
| Yeah.
|
Sam:
[1:33:04]
| One other thing I am going to say out loud here that I mentioned in passing, I was updating my resume. And by the way on the ai part of that the only warning is you know ai can be useful for things like shortening and blah blah blah and re reflow this in another way reformat blah blah blah but you gotta watch that shit like a hawk because like you know i i was working on updating it and making sure like it included the last few years of stuff i had done and and and shortening it and like blah blah blah get get getting rid of some of the really old stuff blah blah blah but like stupid thing kept trying to add completely made up shit that doesn't exist, it's like and i i had to i have to make sure to go through you.
|
Ivan:
[1:33:53]
| Weren't a president and ceo of this company for seven years sam you didn't know this ai knows.
|
Sam:
[1:33:59]
| Not quite that bad but i had to like over and over and over again every time like i would ask it for something simple like you know hey this is too long can we shorten it whatever you know and and but i had to go over every single line line by line reading every fucking word because it would be like it would change it into something unrecognizable and i'm like i didn't do that what are you what are you talking about like i can can you listen i.
|
Ivan:
[1:34:27]
| I i i told i i mentioned i think earlier that i had tried to get ai to help me write a letter okay.
|
Sam:
[1:34:33]
| Specifically and.
|
Ivan:
[1:34:34]
| The thing is that when it when i i asked it to check the letter that i wrote and the one thing that i i wound up almost taking every edit out because it didn't sound like me anymore. It made it sound like some generic person talking. It took language that I normally would use, which I sometimes use very, idiosyncratic you know yes exactly things that are just that sound like me took them all out and sounded like some bland fucking like thing and i'm like no that's that's that's you took out my me-isms and made it sound like totally bland no that's not what i want yeah.
|
Sam:
[1:35:10]
| No absolutely but like i and and you know that i was just concerned about accuracy i was concerned about two things One, don't say shit that's not true. Okay. Number one. And two, it has to be recognizable so that like, if somebody asks me about this bullet point, I know what the hell it was talking about. And so, cause like, even if it like, sometimes it was reworded to such a generic way that I'm like, okay, maybe, but I don't even remember. Like, so anyway, the point is like these tools can be helpful sometimes in some scenarios.
|
Ivan:
[1:35:49]
| But you got to be careful.
|
Sam:
[1:35:51]
| You have to be super, don't like never, ever, ever just take the output of one of these things and send it sight unseen. You have to check every damn line, every word, make sure it's what you actually want to be saying. And that, frankly, in some cases, that means you'd be better off just not using it at all and just writing the stuff.
|
Ivan:
[1:36:18]
| So the resume was inaccurate when it said you were an expert in bondage and BDS and other things? You're like, wait, what? What? What?
|
Sam:
[1:36:30]
| Yeah. But yet, it was fine when it said I was an astronaut.
|
Ivan:
[1:36:37]
| That's good.
|
Sam:
[1:36:38]
| That's just yeah that's part of my record part of my history you know you.
|
Ivan:
[1:36:43]
| Know they say that you were part of the first first group to land on mars or something like.
|
Sam:
[1:36:48]
| I was gonna say it said i was on the challenger but that would be something yeah anyway no so the thing i wanted to say is i'm not going to get into details of how or why i am still at my current position but I am actively paying attention and looking at alternatives and blah, blah, blah. So just for any of you out there, If you have any leads for me, contact me. If you're already a LinkedIn contact, LinkedIn is completely up to date. That resume I talked about has an HTML version at ablesmay.com slash resume. Take a look. Basically, I'm a program manager slash product manager kind of thing with a specialty in sort of anti-abuse content related stuff. So if anybody's got any leads, ping me. We'll give all the contacts and yeah i mean i'm exploring let's put it that way i'm exploring i'm looking for options and so if anybody's got any leads let me know especially if you're a fan of this show i'd love to hear from you anyway but yeah um okay with that one.
|
Ivan:
[1:38:01]
| More thing one more so so i got my.
|
Sam:
[1:38:03]
| Oh you got one more thing go go well i.
|
Ivan:
[1:38:06]
| Got that well i have the thing from our Slack.
|
Sam:
[1:38:08]
| Okay, well, then let me do the website. So yeah, go to curmudgeons-corner.com. You'll find all the ways to contact us. You will find our archives. You will find links to our YouTube where we live stream these things. We had one person in and out on today's show. Thank you, whoever that was. Oh, that was me. That was you. Okay, well, thank you, Yvonne.
|
Ivan:
[1:38:33]
| Well, I was just trying to see if anybody commented on anything on the thing.
|
Sam:
[1:38:37]
| Well, I appreciate you watching the show, Yvonne.
|
Ivan:
[1:38:41]
| Watching ourselves? Oh, yeah. You're welcome.
|
Sam:
[1:38:43]
| Yeah. So anyway, I have seen these get some views after the fact as well. So I appreciate that. There are links to all that kind of stuff on the website on curmudgeons-corner.com. I have not linked to TikTok yet, but I am posting stuff on TikTok. We have gotten actually a decent amount of engagement on the TikTok. Like, you know, basically, like if you look at the views of, I posted four clips from last week's show. Okay. Let me, let me check where we are right now. Last week's show at the moment. Had 38 downloads of the audio podcast, of the, of the audio podcast, the regular way, the tick talk, each one of the four clips that I posted had more than 700 views.
|
Ivan:
[1:39:37]
| Wow.
|
Sam:
[1:39:38]
| Now, now, if you look at the stats, most of those views were only one second long, but you know, Hey, but we, we, we got, we got a few likes, we got a few comments. There was one person specifically complaining about my audio quality last week and i admit it there well there was a problem i it was a real problem my my audio was blown out i tried to fix it a little bit in post but i couldn't really fix it completely so it sounded just my my voice was not great on last week's show and in fact i'm for next week i will have a new one of these the pro The problem was, unlike Yvonne, I listen to myself in the headphones. And the port where I can plug the headphones in on my Yeti mic is broken. So I have ordered a new mic. This week, I am using my wife's mic instead that's sitting on my desk. But I ordered a new one for me. It's the new model they have. So it's got some upgrades i could have gone with a completely different brand but i didn't anyway that doesn't matter but the point was there's lots of engagement there was a commentary there have been people going back and forth etc like lots of likes from people i don't recognize now has it translated into actual listeners on the main show no i can't see that yet we don't know we don't know we've had.
|
Ivan:
[1:41:04]
| A drop off also from here here's the thing i don't know i'm sure we've had a mix of people coming in and out, especially because we had a lot of people that, after the election, just don't want to listen to this shit right now.
|
Sam:
[1:41:15]
| Yeah. But you know, the thing is... The Riverside, which we use to record, automatically generates these clips. It generates like a dozen of them. And I watch them and most of them suck. And I pick a couple ones that suck a little bit less and I post them. It's not much work. So I figure, why not? And if some of those people like the clips and eventually listen to the whole podcast, great. If not, oh, well, didn't cost that much in terms of time or anything. Anyway, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. One of the links on curmudgeon-corner.com is a link to our Patreon, where you can give us money at various levels. We will mention you on the show. We'll send you a postcard. We'll send you a mug, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And very importantly, at $2 a month or more, or if you just ask, we will invite you to the Curmudgeon's Corner Slack where Yvonne and I and a bunch of listeners are hanging out, sharing links and chatting throughout the week. And Yvonne has a highlight of something from the Slack that we have not talked about on the show.
|
Ivan:
[1:42:14]
| There were all these power outages in Washington State. I was talking about generating electricity and whatnot or whatever. And I was like, I was looking around and there was somebody that, that is posting like, and they're trying to get this thing like funded and built. Powering your home with a fridge sized nuclear reactor. So you get this, this little like mini nuke in your house that, that is the size of a fridge that, you know, that can power your house.
|
Sam:
[1:42:45]
| Well, and look, these are, it may be a little while out yet till you can really do this in a way that makes sense at the household level, but this is very much being talked about at the corporate level right now. Yes. We're sort of powering data centers or other places where instead of your regular grid connection, you basically get a, you know, a standard shipping container size. And I'm talking about the big ones they put on trucks or trains or boats. You know, you get one of those that's a self-contained nuclear reactor and you just plug it in and you power your thing, you know?
|
Ivan:
[1:43:22]
| And it'll work for 30 years or something, whatever, something very long amount of time.
|
Sam:
[1:43:26]
| And, you know, people's immediate reaction to anything nuclear is, oh, my God, safety. Is it going to explode like a bomb? Is there going to be nuclear waste? Is there this? Is there that? Honestly, a lot of those issues that were bigger issues like 40 years ago, the technology has improved a lot.
|
Ivan:
[1:43:49]
| Yeah.
|
Sam:
[1:43:50]
| They're a lot less concerning today than they were and are traded off against everything else. Like you know against the the big changes of course everybody is much more aware of the damage that burning carbon costs right you know so it's not like you can say like nuke you know people always had the oh my god the nuclear stuff is dangerous without really considering the danger of the old of yeah of the carbon base sources which has actually caused a huge amount of damage over the years. And so, you know, I've said for a long time, you know, the, the, The decline in nuclear was actually one of the biggest mistakes that was made over the last 50 years.
|
Ivan:
[1:44:34]
| Oh, I agree.
|
Sam:
[1:44:35]
| I agree.
|
Ivan:
[1:44:36]
| I mean, nuclear had problems that needed to be addressed. What we needed to do was address the problems, not have nuclear decline, period. And look, there is a reason. We had some very big disasters between the really big ones because Three Mile Island didn't, although it was a disaster. in terms of nuclear radiation.
|
Sam:
[1:44:58]
| But in terms of Chernobyl and the one in...
|
Ivan:
[1:45:00]
| But Chernobyl and Fukushima. Fukushima, yeah. I mean, those were, you know, really terrible disasters. But at the same time, look, instead of, like, just ditching it, one of the things is that those two reactors that those three we're talking about were extremely ordered designs. There's so much newer technology that addresses the reasons why those were risky and cause a problem that instead of like, you know, we need to look at that again and, and, and adopt some of that. If we really want to accelerate our move towards, you know, carbon neutrality. I mean, there's just, you know, because Ivan.
|
Sam:
[1:45:37]
| Ivan back to the current news, we've elected somebody. It's all about drill, baby drill. All of these alternative sources are bullshit. No more solar, no more electric, no more wind. All of those are bullshit. No more nuclear. Hey, he might like nuclear a little bit, but you know, but basically. Drill baby drill yeah sure okay anyway line up sign up to get the personal nuke for your home yes um you know and and if they take too long to build it you know you can i'm sure you can look up a guide online and just make it yourself.
|
Ivan:
[1:46:11]
| Yeah.
|
Sam:
[1:46:12]
| Yeah.
|
Ivan:
[1:46:12]
| I like that movie Manhattan project.
|
Sam:
[1:46:14]
| Really? I don't know. I didn't have never seen that. I have to look that up too.
|
Ivan:
[1:46:18]
| But, uh, wait, is it, is it called a Manhattan? Wait, wait, hold on, hold on, hold on.
|
Sam:
[1:46:22]
| There was a guy that like got in trouble, like for, like a high school science project actually did get like 99% of the way to.
|
Ivan:
[1:46:31]
| Well, this was, uh, this was, uh, a movie about that. Yeah. A high school prodigy built an atomic bomb with stolen plutonium to win the 45th national science fair. An explosive nuclear weapons lab yeah the movie is called the manhattan project with john lithgow and a couple of other people that are oh.
|
Sam:
[1:46:49]
| I've added it to my list but but there there was a real life case of that as well they did not actually have stolen plutonium but they they built like a breeder reactor in their garage or whatever and you know eventually they look at listen at.
|
Ivan:
[1:47:04]
| Code listen i i recently you know found out recently for some reason and i think this may be part of a reason why my ex-employer kodak has not been able to sell that one of their buildings.
|
Sam:
[1:47:15]
| Uh there's.
|
Ivan:
[1:47:16]
| A nuclear reactor somewhere in a fucking kodak building.
|
Sam:
[1:47:19]
| Yeah in rochester if you remember and here we are on a tangent again one of the important like little stories about the manhattan project is that kodak was unintentionally very involved because the secret nuclear tests were messing up film because they were exposing film. And Kodak actually had to do a variety of things to make film that was less sensitive to what was happening in the Nevada tests and also keeps secret all of the stuff that was going on here because it's just their... They were sensitive to what was happening. So even when they weren't like officially brought into the loop, it was like, oh, look, something's happening. Right. And there's a whole story. I don't remember the details. There's some YouTube videos about it. you can go look it up about Kodak's involvement in the Manhattan project and how this, the, the, the photo sensitivity of film in terms of detecting radiation from tests was a big deal and they had to deal with it anyway.
|
Ivan:
[1:48:37]
| Yeah, I can believe that. Yeah. So, all right.
|
Sam:
[1:48:39]
| I think, I think we're done.
|
Ivan:
[1:48:40]
| We're done.
|
Sam:
[1:48:41]
| Okay. Thanks everybody for joining us once again, you know, all the stuff stay safe. I got, I, you know, they'll probably complain to me about sound again. Cause I've got like a little bit of echo going. Wow. Sound good.
|
Ivan:
[1:48:55]
| You sound good on my end.
|
Sam:
[1:48:57]
| So, well, no, I hear myself coming back through you. I don't know. Anyway, whatever, whatever. Stay safe. Have a good week. We'll see you next time. Goodbye.
|
Ivan:
[1:49:10]
| Bye.
|
Sam:
[1:49:43]
| Okay there it goes i'm gonna hit stop later yvonne bye Thank you.
| |
|
